Every year a lot of organizations, including airports receive phone calls, containing unspecific bomb threats. Most commonly the calls are not associated with the placement of either real or false bombs. That is why it is possible to state that the aim of the vast majority of such calls deals with one’s willingness to disrupt business and cause the evacuation of those, being inside the buildings. However, ignoring phone bomb threats is not allowed due to the fact that a failure to react to a threat may cost the lives of thousands people. The following procedure is suggested for a person, who received a bomb threat via the phone.
First of all, it is crucial for an employee to remain calm. He/she shall keep a person, informing about the bomb threat on the line as long as it is possible. It is important to inform employees that they should not hang on the phone even after the caller stopped communicating. Secondly, an employee has to listen to a person as carefully as possible and ask him/her questions to receive all available information. The possible questions are as follows:
Who are you?
Who informed you that the bomb is at the airport?
What is the exact location of the bomb?
When will the bomb explode? Is it a specific time for that?
What kind of bomb is it? (e.g., general-purpose bomb, petrol bomb, cluster bomb, thermometric bomb etc.)
How does the bomb look like?
What can cause an explosion?
What happens if the bomb explodes?
Were you a person, who placed the bomb?
Thirdly, if a phone provides an opportunity to identify a phone number of a caller, a person, answering the call shall immediately write down the number.
Fourthly, it is ideal if a person, who speaks to an informer, has a chance to send a note to a colleague or notify security service or police before the call terminated. It can help the security service and police identify an informer successfully and in quicker terms. If it is not possible to make a notification during the call, an employee shall notify his/her supervisor at once, as well as property management and security. The property manager shall thereafter contact the Chief Searcher, while a security team member needs to notify the Director of Security and all the Security Officers, employed at the Tinsel Town Airport. Then, local police officers will also be notified and assist Security Service of the Airport to proceed with investigating the threat.
During the call or immediately after its commencement an employee, who received a call, needs to fill a so-called “bomb threat call form” or “bomb threat checklist”.
Apart from containing open-ended questions, the form can also contain questions that have multiple options. The open-ended questions can include the follows:
Can you suggest, where the caller was located (e.g., a noisy place, at the street, at home etc.)
Do you think that the call was made from a mobile or a stationary phone?
Was the caller male or female?
Can you suggest how old the caller was?
Did the voice sound familiar to you?
As for the “multiple choice” questions, three examples can be included.
Firstly, it is essential to be able to characterize the voice of a caller. It can have accent, be slow or quick, loud or silent, slurred, nasal or cracking, as well as express some emotions, such as anger, excitement, ignorance, fear, bitterness etc. Furthermore, a person, who spoke to an informer, can hear whether he/she was coughing, clearing his/her throat or breathing deeply. It can also happen that an informer’s voice has very specific features, such as stutter.
The second important source of information that is to be described in detail deals with background noises. They can include other people’s speaking, kitchen noises, cries of a baby, street noises, music, office facilities, noises, produced by animals etc.
Finally, it is important to be able to single out the specific characteristics of a language, spoken, such as
Message being read aloud
Well-spoken
Irrationality
Using filthy language etc.
After a person, who responded to a call, accurately fills in the “bomb threat call form”, he/she shall bring the form to the Security Office of the Tinsel Town Airport and submit it to a staff member. The initial recipient of the call shall secure his/her availability for the interviews that may be conducted by police representatives or Security Service of the airport.
