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Excerpt From The Feb. 2009 Detonator Article (Volume 36, Number 1)
In early December 2008, ATF and the FBI took steps to support state and local law enforcement efforts to uniformly report explosives and arson related incidents. ATF Assistant Director William Hoover and FBI Executive Assistant Director Steven Tidwell met and agreed that both agencies would fully support efforts by the National Bomb Squad Commanders Advisory Board (NBSCAB) to encourage incident reporting by the Nation’s bomb squads. A letter addressed to NBSCAB was prepared and signed by EAD Tidwell and AD Hoover. In addition to expressing their agencies’ support for NBSCAB efforts on incident reporting, Hoover and Tidwell also stated that both ATF and FBI recognized and endorsed BATS as the sole explosives incident database, and both agencies endorsed its use to document and report explosives-related incidents in this country.
Accurate explosives incident reporting is important to ALL of us. The timely documentation of explosives-related incidents in a comprehensive database, accessible by bomb technicians and investigators on a national level, is first and foremost, a matter of officer safety. Intelligence on devices and incidents is just as crucial to Bomb Technician safety as any other safety requirements. That intelligence comes from comprehensive incident reporting. We can take our lead in this area from the military EOD community, which has always based their reporting mandates on Force Protection. When a bomb technician encounters a device, manufactured, transported and/or delivered by an unknown assailant(s), he/she typically feels compelled to share the necessary information with other bomb technicians who could possibly face a similar device involving the same assailant(s). The most efficient method of accomplishing this information sharing activity on a large scale is by entering the data into a single system to which we all have access.