Interagency Board for Equipment Standard

Protective Shields Standards: Addressing the Needs and Requirements of United States Public Safety Offices Interagency Board for Equipment Standard

Publisher Marketing: The InterAgency Board for Equipment Standardization and Interoperability (IAB) is a collaborative panel of emergency preparedness and response practitioners, federal employees, and subject matter experts representing a wide array of technical expertise. The IAB facilitates the exchange of knowledge and ideas to improve national preparedness and promote interoperability and compatibility among local, state, and federal response communities. One of the missions of the IAB is to advocate for and assist with the development and implementation of performance criteria, standards, test protocols, and technical, operating, and training requirements for all-hazards incident response equipment. In 2013, the IAB identified a need for one or more new standards to define performance requirements and test methods for protective shields used by United States (U. S.) public safety officers, including tactical and patrol law enforcement, bomb squads, corrections, fire fighters, and emergency medical services (EMS). These officers purchase and carry hand-held ballistic and riot shields to be used in the course of their duties and need to have confidence that these shields will perform as expected, which is the purpose for standards. As an initial step in the development of such standards, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) requested that the IAB determine the current needs and requirements of public safety practitioners for protective shields and a develop a path forward for the development of standards. The IAB convened a group of practitioners1 and subject matter experts to perform this work, and this report will be used as a starting point for development of new standards. End user perspectives and other data were collected via practitioner discussions, a simple survey (See Appendix A) to the IAB membership and other practitioners having experience with shields, and a detailed questionnaire (See Appendix B) to a subset of those who responded to the survey.