SGSecure to shift focus from raising terror awareness to preparedness
Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam. TODAY file photo
SINGAPORE — A year after its launch, the national SGSecure movement is shifting gears, from raising public awareness of the threat of terror attacks to raising the level of “preparedness” among the population.
This is in tandem with outreach efforts that are being extended to businesses, where there would be “a big push in workplaces” in the year ahead, Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said yesterday.
The SGSecure movement, which aims to train and mobilise people to help prevent and deal with a terror attack, is also getting a new tagline: “Be Prepared, Our Response Matters”.
When it was launched on Sept 24 last year by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the tagline was: “Not If, But When. Our Response Matters.”
Giving an update on the efforts so far, Mr Shanmugam said that while the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had “some success” in raising awareness, there is “some way to go” in ramping up preparedness, in getting people to “take ownership and prepare themselves”.
“I think a lot of people are not mentally tuned to preparedness,” he added, while speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an award ceremony to recognise the work of more than 400 officers from the Home Team.
He said that more than 220,000 households have been reached since the initiative started. The “big target” for the MHA will be to reach “one million households, every household”, as agencies under the Home Team — which include the police, the Singapore Civil Defence Force, and the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority of Singapore — continue to drive the movement.
Since last September, police and civil defence officers, together with grassroots volunteers, had knocked on 400,000 doors to try to engage the public on SGSecure, he said.
Close to a million devices have been equipped with the SGSecure mobile application in a year. The app allows the authorities to send important alerts to members of the public during major incidents, and lets the public send information to the police via text, pictures or videos should they encounter anything suspicious.
Within the year, the Home Team had also worked with the People’s Association to conduct 36 Emergency Preparedness Days in as many constituencies, where grassroots leaders and residents learn how to administer first aid, perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) or use the automated external defibrillator.
This activity will be extended to 53 other constituencies to cover the whole of Singapore in the next one-and-a-half months.
By 2019, the MHA also expects all constituencies to have undergone the Crisis Response Exercise, which simulates possible events in the community in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. There have been 14 such exercises so far.
In schools, a storybook titled “When Tim Knows the Drill” has been a reading material for Primary 3 students since March, and students from more than 160 secondary schools have learnt about terror threats through assembly talks and mobile exhibitions conducted by the Home Team.
For the business sector, a new SGSecure at Workplaces programme was announced on Tuesday, which will see the Manpower Ministry, unions and employers team up with industry associations from five key industries to strengthen the vigilance and resilience of workplaces, and to train workers to respond to a crisis. WONG PEI TING
