The Mumbai attacks of 11/26/08 were one of the worst terror incidents in India. In the modern world, the security of citizens depend upon the success of anti-terrorist operations by security forces in all major countries around the world, not just India. This proposal focuses on a critical operational unit in successful anti-terror response - the police control room. These attacks provide a unique and time-limited opportunity to examine and understand the information processing performed by information first responders under conditions that are far from equilibrium.
Intellectual merit Though critical to emergency response, little is known about the information processing limitations of trained informational first responders and their supporting technology during a severe, novel and unexpected disaster. Early findings suggest that exposure to terrorist attacks impairs memory performance and raises anxiety levels. This study will inform theory about the emergence of information processing limitations in such situations. The simultaneous terrorist operations at multiple sites in this incident provide an opportunity to understand the consequences of multiple streams of information on information processing in these situations.
Unlike the 9/11 attacks in the US, the 11/26 attacks were an ongoing, drawn out event with the situation unfolding in real time, creating unique decision-making challenges. Further, this proposal looks at information processing within police control rooms in developing countries, an under-studied area with implications for security for US citizens. The project will be completed in collaboration with police research organizations in India. Structural equation modeling will be used to analyze paths and causal relationships from the data. Analysis of variance and covariance, and t-tests would be used.
Broader impact The broader impact of the research will be to improve society's ability to understand the impact of extreme stress and time pressure on the dimensions of performance of informational first responders. This will help in the development of organizational and technical support systems for processing front-line information to improve our ability to withstand terror attacks and other forms of severe, unexpected disasters.
In the modern globalized world, the security of U.S. citizens depends upon the success of anti-terrorist operations by security forces in all major countries around the world. This proposal focused on a critical operational unit in successful anti-terror response – the police control room. The effectiveness of the police control room was studied from various angles. One of the papers (Chakraborty, Agrawal and Rao 2011), used protection motivation theory as the foundation to create a survey and administered it to the police involved in the terrorist attacks. We found negative moderating effects of information processing barriers on the effects of protection motivation on adaptive behavior. We also found that decision support systems positively influenced mitigating behavior of the officers. To develop a model for effectively responding to such terrorist incidents, which involve co-ordination among a large number of government and private agencies, we used activity theory as a framework to develop a model for emergency response (Shankar, Agrawal and Rao 2011). Another study looked at the impact of an emerging phenomenon in the terrorism space – citizenship participation through social media such as Twitter. By analyzing tweets following the Mumbai blasts, we found that terrorists used information garnered from tweets and mainstream media to maintain a high level of situation awareness during the attacks. We also found that content ambiguity had a high impact on rumor spreading over the social media (Oh, Agrawal and Rao 2010; Oh, Agrawal and Rao 2011). This study was led by a doctoral student, Onook Oh, who is now at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. The funding was also used to introduce undergraduate students to research and data analysis. One of the students developed a computer application to gather relevant tweets in a format that was usable for further analysis. The effort was presented as a student paper at an IEEE sponsored conference (Whitelaw, Agrawal, H.R. and Oh 2011). References Chakraborty, R., M. Agrawal and H. R. Rao (2011). Adaptive Behavior and Information Processing in Law Enforcement during extreme events– a study of the Mumbai Terrorist Response. Roode Dewald IFIP conference, Blacksburg, VA. Oh, O., M. Agrawal and H. R. Rao (2010). Anxiety and Rumor: Exploratory Analysis of Twitter Posts during the Mumbai Terrorist Attack. The Political and Social Impact of Rumors. G. Dalziel. Singapore, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. Oh, O., M. Agrawal and H. R. Rao (2011). "Information control and terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai terrorist attack through twitter." Information Systems Frontiers 13(1): 33-43. Shankar, D., M. Agrawal and H. R. Rao (2011). Emergency response to Mumbai terror attacks: An activity theory analysis. Cyber Security, Cyber Crime and Cyber Forensics: Applications and Perspectives. R. Santanam, M. Sethumadhavan and M. Virendra, IGI Publishing. Whitelaw, C., M. Agrawal, R. H.R. and O. Oh (2011). Using social media to study social phenomena. 2011 Wireless Telecommunications Symposium (WTS 2011), New York, NY, IEEE.
