Written by F. Xavier Garcia Lora, Alejandro Delgado Diez and Josep Jordi Guerrero Nievas
In the current global context where extremism, hate crimes and threats to religious freedom are significantly increasing, the protection of places of worship has become a strategic priority. The response to this challenge must be multifactorial and systemic: it is necessary to build a collaborative and coordinated network between various security forces, emergency services, public or private institutions and organizations, and empower both the civil and religious community to participate in the defense of the fundamental right that represents being able to have faith and to practice it in a place of worship. This framework requires a dynamic transversality that is presented as an essential tool to guarantee safe, protected and fully integrated worship environments within the urban and social fabric.
Defending the right to worship and ensuring the security of religious spaces is not the sole responsibility of police forces. This joint approach allows for improved response capacity to an incident and also to anticipate risks through early detection and prevention.
In the specific case of the Spirit project , the Barcelona City Council and the Guàrdia Urbana have been able to incorporate new knowledge and new visions through interaction with the police forces and religious communities that have participated in the project workshops and with the main partners of the Spirit Consortium . An exercise of institutional and social empathy has been carried out that has contributed to providing a better service to citizens as a result of this listening and institutional knowledge.
Having participated in the creation of the risk assessment tool has forced us to catch up on both the operational and legislative levels. In addition, we have had to update the analysis methods and indicators, adapting them to the 21st century. Expanding them to the new interconnected global context and including new perspectives in the study of security.
Multi-agency concept for emergency management.
Places of worship, as we have seen throughout the project, can only be safe if the approach with which we defend them is joint. Religious communities, police forces, fire brigades, emergency medical services, social assistance services and, ultimately, citizens themselves must have tools at their disposal to gather the information, knowledge and technical preparation necessary to defend places of worship and to enjoy them safely.
Most emergency plans in our public safety systems provide for the coordinated participation of multiple agencies when the plans are put into action due to a major incident, but, in general, prior practice is scarce and mutual knowledge among first responders is superficial, at least in the environment that is most familiar to us.
The concept of emergency management must become global in the sense that the agencies that will participate when they are declared must have efficient means to approximate ways of working and generate synergies of mutual trust that go beyond simple material competence and the attribution of specific roles in emergency plans. On the other hand, in many cases we security and emergency services forget a key factor when facing an incident: the community we serve. Religious communities, in particular, must be able to play a role in managing the emergency when it affects them. In Barcelona, the Spirit project has given us the opportunity to verify that the centers of worship in our city have the necessary interest in security to be able to move towards a participatory model that has as its pillars trust, knowledge of resources and response models.
We must admit that, as far as the Barcelona City Police are concerned, the Spirit project has also allowed us to remember that places of worship are vulnerable targets for terrorist attacks, the defense of which depends on several factors. We highlight four that we have worked on throughout the project:
- Maintaining an informed community and communicate permanently with public security services.
- Creating the appropriate level of risk awareness. Risk is permanent and must be incorporated into the planning of mass religious events, which already take into account the anthropogenic risks inherent in large gatherings, but also in the day-to-day life of religious communities.
- Maintaining high levels of technical knowledge and training to provide a good response to emergencies by all agencies, but also by the religious communities themselves. Mutual knowledge and active participation in drills and exercises is one of the keys to a coordinated response to real emergencies.
- Generating a culture of crime prevention through design (recognizing, however, the difficulties that this discipline presents in centers of worship that may be cultural heritage and that, therefore, can hardly withstand modifications or adaptations to become safer) and in risk prevention, based on complete knowledge of the infrastructures of centers of worship.
We cannot forget, however, that the daily life of places of worship does not allow their daily use for the training of security forces and bodies or other agencies. In Barcelona, we made an exception and took on the challenge of putting into practice a drill in a 14th-century church, the Basilica dels Sants Just i Pastor, in which firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and the City Police participated. It was magnificent, and we learned some invaluable lessons, especially seeing how the religious community itself became aware of the possibilities offered by mutual collaboration and understanding. Of course, we will try to repeat the experience, but we must be aware that our churches, synagogues and mosques must continue to be places of retreat and personal reflection, in which privacy and security must be the predominant notes. Furthermore, as we have already said, their undeniable heritage value in many cases does not recommend the practice of exercises that involve the use of intrusive techniques.
In this sense, Spirit shows a truly interesting path to continue bringing together different interests: the purely technical and the community ones.
Virtual training systems: a new dimension in multi-agency coordination
Effective protection of places of worship not only requires collaboration between different security agents and religious communities, but also advanced technological tools that facilitate this coordination. In this sense, virtual training systems, such as the SPIRIT platform, represent a qualitative leap in the training of the different actors involved.
The SPIRIT platform, developed within the framework of the European project of the same name, offers an advanced simulation environment that will allow the recreation of risk scenarios in places of worship with a high degree of realism. This virtual environment enables the different police forces, emergency services and representatives of religious communities to train together in situations that would be difficult or impossible to recreate in traditional physical exercises , with a high degree of realism.
The foundations that Spirit has installed allow us to see that the future benefits of these virtual training systems are multiple:
- Integration of capabilities and skills : The platform will enable professionals with different roles and skills (police, firefighters, healthcare personnel, managers of religious spaces) to work together in the same scenario, learning to coordinate effectively and understand the needs and protocols of other actors.
- Simulation of multiple scenarios : It will allow simulating various types of incidents (from terrorist threats to natural disaster emergencies) in different types of places of worship (churches, mosques, synagogues), adapting the training to the architectural and functional particularities of each space.
- Safe and controlled learning : It will facilitate training in high-risk situations without jeopardizing the safety of participants or interfering with the daily activity of places of worship.
- Objective performance evaluation : Virtual systems will allow participants’ performance to be analyzed in detail, identifying areas for improvement and good practices that can be shared.
- Resource optimization : It will reduce the need to mobilize large material and human resources to carry out in-person drills, allowing the frequency and variety of training to be increased.
The Barcelona City Police, within the framework of the SPIRIT project, has actively participated in the development and validation of these virtual training systems, contributing its experience in urban security and the management of public spaces. Experience has shown that these systems will not only improve individual capabilities, but will also significantly strengthen communication and coordination between the different actors involved in the security of places of worship.
Looking to the future, these virtual training platforms are presented as an essential way to implement and constantly improve the coordinated actions of all agencies involved in the security of religious spaces, adapting to new threats and incorporating international best practices in an agile and efficient manner.
It is also true, however, that the platform needs in-depth development to adapt to the needs of religious communities and security and emergency agencies, but the fact that its original conception includes the multi-agency perspective is, in our opinion, one of the strongest points of this project, which should not be abandoned in any case in future developments.
SPIRIT 