Sarajevo, 21 October 2013 – One of the priorities of Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies of BiH is setting up a fully functioning Operations Centre. This structure is to pull together 24/7 center, VIP, national and international assignments of the Directorate and maintain a direct communication link with the operations’ centers at all levels of policing.
To present them with the Dutch model of organization, the Twinning Project “Support to the Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies” organized a study visit to the Netherlands from 14 to 18 October 2013 for Directorate's officials.
The comprehensive programme provided an insight into the functioning of various emergency response structures in the Netherlands, such as the Regional Crisis and Operational Centers, Security Intelligence Centre, as well as rather new structure within the Netherlands security system Counter-Terrorism Center. During this visit, the Directorate’s delegation was briefed in detail on the crisis response after a plane crash and the preparation of a large scale event like the upcoming Nuclear Summit in the Netherlands to be attended by 58 world leaders.
“The key goal of all these structures is to optimise quality and speed of response in crisis. To that end, they are constantly improving process of collecting relevant information from both official and open sources, analysing and coordinating various services such as police, fire-fighters, medical emergency, etc,” said Pim Cappelle, Resident Twinning Adviser.
The main issues this visit pointed to pertain to the relevance of timely information, and properly organised and coordinated response to the crisis involving all relevant services, depending on the scope of it. The relevance of timely intelligence exchange was also underlined.
“These are the three areas where further substantial efforts are needed to be made in BiH. Given the Directorate coordination role within the existing police structure in BiH and it being the single point of contact for international information exchange, I am glad we were able to present them with how is this segment of work organised and managed in one of the EU countries,” added Cappelle.
The study visit was hosted in scope of the Twinning Project “Support to the Directorate for Coordination of Police Bodies”, which aims at the development of Directorates’ capacities to gather, share, manage, and analyse security related information of relevance for BiH and fully functioning mechanisms for continued cooperation with relevant police and other bodies.