Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: The Navy Yard shootings in Washington, D.C. The Boston Marathon bombings. Hurricane Sandy. These are major cases and catastrophic events when the FBI wants to hear from you. So, the FBI is implementing an easy way for the public to quickly provide tips and other information to agents and analysts.

I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau, and this is FBI, This Week. The FBI Public Access Line, or PAL, will take calls, faxes, e-mails, and more out of the Bureau’s 56 field offices and centralize them. Bureau employees with specific training to gather as much information as possible staff the line around the clock. Jeffrey Lindsey is the chief of the Public Access Line Unit of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division...

Jeffrey Lindsey: When a member of the public calls…they can rest assured that on the other end is going to be an FBI employee who's fully trained and experienced in taking calls from the public, making sure that information gets handled in a confidential manner, and gets sent to the investigative or analytical entity that needs that information.

Halpern: PAL will allow agents and analysts to focus solely on their investigative and intelligence duties.

Lindsey: It helps us capture the information in a better way. Not only does it provide the FBI efficiency, it also helps streamline our investigative and analytical process.

Halpern: Half of the field offices already have PAL capability and the remaining ones will be on-boarded in the future. When you want to reach out to the FBI, just call your local field office.