EP 06: Restarting the Law Enforcement Conversation
In this extended episode all about law enforcement, we spend time with a number of police leaders ready to hit the reset button and create positive, new interaction between sworn officers and the public. But with so much tension in the air lately, what can actually be changed? What can police and the greater public learn from one another to create harmony? During a recent panel discussion arranged by the North Carolina League of Municipalities at the request of the state's Legislative Black Caucus, things got frank and clear, and we'll hear plenty of it here. Later, we'll check in on another challenge -- the search for best-practices with police body-cameras. We'll also learn from an expert about psychological reactions to active shooter situations and how a little bit of forethought can go a long way. And have you ever been a little nervous about meeting a stranger to complete a transaction for goods arranged online? We hear from one police department that's implemented a pretty simple solution. Tons of takeaways and ponderings on this episode. Show notes: Video of the full panel discussion featured - https://youtu.be/Dhidnbk1tcM Southern City magazine past issues - http://www.nclm.org/programs-services/publications/southern-city/Pages/default.aspx
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Transcript
On this episode of Municipal Equation. We know that local law enforcement agencies across the state are open to and welcome discussion about how to strengthen trust between law enforcement and the community that they serve. So it is important to have this type of dialogue, but also to see if we can arrive at some tangible proposals that we might take back to the legislature, to our districts, and to those whom are sworn to serve.
Restarting the conversation between police and the public. We know the controversies. What can we do about them? But that's not all. Today's topic in the classroom
was about workplace violence, and we also, took it to the next level, and that is how to respond to an active shooter threat. Cops and public safety officials give us plenty of interesting news you can use.
And we'll check-in on the topic of best practices with police body cameras.
The technology they're bringing to the table is is so far advanced from where it was even a year ago that it'll be amazing to see what they've got five or ten years from now now in terms of body worn cameras. My name is Ben Brown, and that's all in this extended edition of Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities,
episode six.
To Abor, I will protect. A word remindful of the days when knights wore armor to defend their walled cities against invaders. Today, there are no walled cities, but the word Duibor is still a living word for the guardians of your city, the men of the Detroit Police Department. Here are men experienced in every phase of police work, men familiar with the workings of the law, men who are proud of their heritage.
Well, not just men, obviously. The Detroit Police Department in particular is where Davidson, North Carolina police chief Jeanne Miller got her start in the early nineteen seventies.
I got involved in law enforcement, because I grew up in the sixties and the early seventies when I was watching on the 06:00 news on one of only three television stations that we what was going on with the civil rights protests and how civil rights protesters were being treated and what was happening with the Vietnam War protests.
After she went away to college, she said her father told her that if she really wanted to make a difference, to get inside.
He didn't know what inside meant. And if you know that inside for me meant getting with the Detroit Police Department, I think he would have understood that.
She got sworn in in 1973, making for a long trajectory through virtually every dynamic of law enforcement you can think of, the high points and the low points. She says every profession is gonna have them. Policing, of course, is particularly sensitive.
This is an honorable profession. We have bad doctors. We have bad lawyers. We have bad politicians. We could be better. And and I would like to see more of this kind of conversation.
This didn't start out as an extended episode. At first, the focus was just gonna be on police technology, like body cameras, and on some of the recent active shooter situations that, time and time again, have people wondering what they themselves would be doing and how they would react if they were caught in such a nightmare. News you can use and so on. And that will be part of this episode. But just recently, the North Carolina Legislative Black Caucus asked the League of Municipalities, which is a nonprofit that represents cities and towns across the state, to facilitate new discussion about the shaky trust between the public and local law enforcement agencies. Clearly, you know what I'm talking about. On TV and online, we've seen plenty of videos of tragic encounters between police and members of the public that lead to protests, prosecutions, questions about what really happened. Regardless of what really happened or to what degree the officer's actions were legitimate incident to incident, everyone like this feeds the national dialogue about police training, sensitivity, and generally how they should be doing their jobs better. This forum, frankly, acknowledged every bit of that, and it ended up reshaping what this episode would be about. The panel included four law enforcement representatives in front of a packed room of peers, journalists, and importantly, state legislators who got plenty of material to shape the conversation at a law making level.
This is an honorable profession. This is an honorable profession.
Chief Miller was one of the panelists along with Garner, North Carolina police chief Brandon Zutima, Hoke County, North Carolina sheriff Hubert Petterkin, and law enforcement training expert John Gregory. We have all seen the news reports and read about these tragic encounters between law enforcement and the public. This is the moderator, Jacksonville, North Carolina mayor pro tem, Michael Lazara. From a policy perspective,
by that, I mean, what can actually be changed with public policy that are focusing on training standards and agency policies, the most effective means of curbing these situations? Is that the only way that we can curb these situations, or are there dangers in putting too much focus on these areas? Chief Miller. I think if you look at the, Ferguson
and Michael Brown shooting, one of the things that come out of the that came out of the DOJ report on that shooting was that Ferguson and not just Ferguson, but the entire Saint Louis region depended on traffic enforcement for revenue. You had police officers that were being pushed to do more traffic enforcement to create revenue.
This comes off subtle, but it's a start to a conversation about tension and points of origin that law enforcement agencies are recognizing. Again, this is a small example, but it pulls at a thread. Chief Miller pointed to state laws about equipment on personal vehicles and annual inspections that they require. Just talking about North Carolina laws alone, if your vehicle doesn't pass inspection, you're not getting your car registered, which is a requirement for operating the vehicle. If you operate it without registration, police can give you a citation. But what happens
if the person that's driving that vehicle is a single mother who has a couple of kids and she's working maybe one or one and a half or two jobs? What happens if she's a woman of color? And and and how do we work that out? And what if the person to sponsor is a white officer? What does that look like? What does that mean? I I don't have any answers. I'm just raising it as an issue because I thought a lot about the Ferguson report. Communities decided that they would use traffic ticket revenue to keep themselves afloat. But it created this tremendous disparity and and a tremendous dislike between the police department and the communities they were serving. Mhmm. And and that only came out after you started to pull all of these apart. I know that we have intended consequences, but we need to be looking at what are the unintended consequences and what does that mean for us, and especially if it if we're talking about the criminal justice system and your law enforcement agency.
Sheriff Peterkin said the difference in public perception has to start at the top of the agency. If you as a leader
does not set the example that you wanna be kind or you wanna follow the rules and regulations and the policies and procedures, if you don't take that exam, then your deputies are not gonna do it or police officers are not gonna do it in the field.
Chief Zudama said it goes beyond the context of the badge. This is not a law enforcement
only issue. This is a societal and community issue that needs to be discussed in forums like this and with other people. Part of that absolutely falls on us. We need to do a better job of educating the community that we serve, not just in terms of what we do, but why we do it. And not from the standpoint of expecting a group hug afterwards, but because they deserve to know why we do that. They may disagree, but they at least deserve to know why we do that. And if we are more effective at that, we are going to be more transparent or rebuild the trust that needs to be built within our communities. And with that, when that default in a community is trust, you don't end up with situations typically like we see in some communities around the country, where the default is to riot or the default is to do other things without having information and knowledge. We have to build that trust back or continue to build on what we have with our communities. We need to have that discussion, and we need to help people understand, again, how they should behave when they encounter the police. We need to behave the right way, but we also need to help citizens understand how to behave and how to interact with law enforcement to avoid some of these difficulties.
State senator Floyd McKissick, a member of the Black Caucus, said that he thinks it needs to be a two way street between police and the public. We're both given the way of sensitivity and understanding.
How perhaps you can enlighten people as to conduct that an officer might feel is inappropriate or in fact beginning to incite an officer that they could perhaps become more engaged in, because I think that's part of the equation as well. How do we get kids to understand growing up? How do we get adults to understand that are already up in the community that is kind of a a two way street? We've gotta get the officers as engaged as possible, as well trained as possible, but understanding that if they do get pulled out here and that blue light's on, maybe the first reaction shouldn't be to get out of the car and start walking toward the officer, or engaging in conduct that might suggest that they're going for a weapon, or engaging in conduct that an officer might feel as being threatening, but which perhaps is completely, totally innocent conduct that they feel as a citizen is the right thing to do. So how do we get engaged with that two way street to get citizens enlightened? And at the same time, we're gonna get law enforcement as engaged as we can in terms of viewing this problem holistically.
For the officer's part, police agencies hope to expand focus on de escalation training to soften tense issues, but it doesn't make it easy, says chief Zoutamus. So I agree that de escalation is absolutely a critical component of what we do. It's
important that you don't train on it one time. You train on it over and over and over again to build that muscle memory. And that's what we need to do, in that area with all of our folks is continue to remind them that that is an option. But I agree that there is some potential danger in that as well, and that we need to remember that we are asking women, sometimes 21, 22 year olds with maybe no life experience, that have completed six hundred and sixteen hours of training. And at 02:00 in the morning, they're potentially alone on a traffic stop and someone steps out that may or may not have a gun. And we ask them in a millisecond to make a decision. So I absolutely support the concept of de escalation, but we need to do it intelligently to make sure that we don't put police officers in a
The panel also discussed that adding hours of new training to the police curriculum, while important, also impacts the immediate resources of the police agency. Most of them across the country are pretty small, just a handful of officers. If two of them are away at training, as important as that training might be, the agency is down on force, said chief Miller.
So where's the training emphasis going to be? In the North Carolina Criminal Justice Standards Commission mandates, as part of its in service annual training, that officers qualify on their firearm. What it does mandate is making is decision making. So when we're training, we put a lot of emphasis on firearm because it's it's high liability. But we don't put emphasis on decision making where we force officers into a position of choosing something else, choosing pepper spray, choosing an Azkaban, choosing their taser. We don't put them in that position.
Chief Zoutama. The challenge is not only how do we get what's current and what needs to be into these academies, but at some point, what do we give up, if anything? We know we're talking about wanting fairing and impartial policing. We're wanting list of bias training. We're wanting, other things added into it, but either what you give up or at what point
can we find a balance there. So this is just a smidgen of the conversation going on nationally. What's right? What's appropriate? What balances can we find to improve the law enforcement dynamic for officers and for the general public? And there's another place where they intersect, the hiring process. Every law enforcement officer was a civilian at some point, but the tension on the law enforcement community might also impact who they're able to draw to the applicant pool. It's absolutely an issue. We need to expand the applicant pool,
because we can't, I don't believe, change our hiring practices. We can't change our standards. The public doesn't want that. We don't want that. They want the white people doing this incredibly difficult job. But we need to enhance our applicant rules so that we can then hire a good, diverse workforce as representative of the community we serve. We struggle to find minority and female candidates, particularly
minority and female candidates that are qualified. Zutama says within the context of people who are qualified, the job might not come off so desirable.
You know, I I tell people, here's my sales pitch. And we do okay in terms of I've been salary. So my sales pitch is I want to offer you maybe $38,000 a year to come and work twelve hour shifts nights weekends, holidays. I want you to have to wear a bulletproof vest all the time because people are crazy. I want you to have to sometimes go from doing nothing in a day to two seconds later, be involved in a pursuit or a fight for your life. And not only now, today, we all know that we, respectfully, are the folks that run towards the danger when others run away. But we've always understood that. And we went into that not happy about it, but you knew that. But now you also have to warn your candidates if you're truthful, that not only you have to be concerned about potentially giving your life to protect the left of another, but you have to be careful at the gas pumps because there's people signing and murdering police officers.
Pardon my question. Who the hell is gonna do that?
It's incredibly difficult task to ask someone to do. We have a long way to go in terms of selling this profession. Now there's a lot to be sold. I try to talk about maybe different states, with our folks because I believe not every day, but a lot of days you can go home knowing that you made a difference for someone. Maybe it's a power officer, maybe it's someone in the community. So there are many different states. We need to highlight those. We need to settle the positive. We need to do a better job of interacting with the community and seeking that support. I think over the past two months, I can't tell you the number of meals that have been delivered and cookies that have been delivered, the snacks that have been delivered. So the community, the majority of the community does support us, but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily willing to do what we're asking each other and willing to do. I don't know. I I don't have the answer today. I'm not sure what it means. Sheriff Peterkin says it generally means that the police who are on the job
really do care about being there. We, right now, have an opportunity to be proactive, to calm it down, and to reassure the state of North Carolina that this is okay for them to be in law enforcement, to stay in law enforcement. And then when you look at this, I'm just gonna put a great plan. $38,000 for your life out here now. But I will say the advantage that we have is most people that get in this business today, and you can tell me from all, are people who really want to be in law enforcement. They they got passion for this. It was just it was children that wanna be in this business. So I think what we're doing today,
All panel members agreed on the value of getting out of the office, getting out of the police cruiser, and holding real conversations like this with the public, with policy makers, so everyone can feel better about working towards solutions. Chief Miller.
And and I would like to see more of this kind of conversation. Does it mean that there are fewer of us in the room and that we're able to maybe tackle even more difficult questions and more difficult situations if there are fewer of us and we're sitting across the table from each other? I think that is an important part of all of this, that we have to be speaking. We have to be communicating. We have to be talking to each other face to face, and not from days to audience, but across a cup of coffee, a cross lunch, and and really and we need to the police officers need to do that in their communities. We need to do it at this level as well.
I'll post a video link to the entire panel discussion with this episode at soundcloud.com/municipalequation. Another clear challenge on law enforcement right now is the best way to integrate new technology. Tech is a plus. It can make everything easier, at least in concept. When it's put in practice, questions come up. And when it has to do with policing, like we've already discussed, it's especially sensitive. Body cameras are not exactly new technology, but the public conversation about them is loud as ever as state lawmakers and local police agencies try to determine the best practices and the real point of using the technology. This isn't gonna be much about transparency or public record even though that's a huge component. I'll point out that the North Carolina General Assembly recently passed a law that doesn't deem police video as public record. It provides a legal framework for how individuals can access footage. What we'll be talking about here are the remaining questions that police agencies have about body cameras and best practices and where it's all going.
This is something that a lot of parties are studying. We have evolved so rapidly in the last ten years or so in technology
in every field, but certainly in law enforcement as well. This is North Carolina state representative John Faircloth who began a law enforcement career with the Greensboro Police Department in 1961.
And, compared to the the fly flashlight that I had, that's all the technology we had when I was out on the street.
Literally, we did not even have portable radios of any kind. Fast forward, at the same police department, sergeant Justin Flint today oversees the use of body cameras.
We've had, body worn cameras for, approximately three years now. We're we're coming to the end of our first full three year contract with a vendor for body worn cameras. The, initial reason for implementation was, just to provide, an additional tool to, bridge some of the gap between the the organization and the community, have that, third party perspective, the the objective eye, so to speak, that wasn't taking anybody's side and could just point out this is, you know, clearly the interaction that took place.
And, how did the officers take to using body cameras? Was there any resistance, any skepticism? Did they get did the officers get the hang of it pretty quickly or or what?
I think there's probably two different answers there. One is, yes. They they got the hang of it pretty quick. The technology itself is not that complicated, and the officers picked up how to use it very easily. I think that the resistance wasn't to the body worn cameras necessarily or to, the idea of being videoed on duty so much as some of it was just hesitation to change. Our agency didn't have a full blown in car camera program like some other agencies just due to funding throughout the years. So a lot of the officers just hadn't had to have a video, of every interaction they had with the citizens. So it was something new, something that was changed. And I think that a lot of them now that we've had them for several years,
don't know a a style of policing without the camera there. It's just what they've become accustomed to. Flint said one of the early questions about the cameras and footage was something that the recent state law ended up addressing. How long do you store the footage? Who gets to see it? How do you handle requests from the media? As mentioned, there's now a legal framework for pursuing footage. It's not automatically public record.
So that's one thing. The other thing is that came about were obviously, just financial concerns. You know, the the initial funding of the equipment themselves seemed expensive, but that turned out to be probably the cheaper part of body worn cameras. Over the the little over three years that that we've been collecting videos from body worn cameras, we've realized that long term storage is probably the most expensive part of a body worn camera program. Right. Right. And finding a way to manage that data and have a retention schedule that allows you to keep what you need to in compliance with state and federal laws, but also allow you to purge video that you've kept for a certain amount of time that's proven to have no value. Nobody's requested it. It's not attached to an investigation. And that way, you can reduce long term storage cost. That's been a juggling act as of yet.
So how do you store the footage? Is it on a cloud or, and do you keep it high resolution? If so, was that part of what makes it so burdensome to file away given the file size? Or how how does that work?
We actually do use cloud storage, but that is, based on the vendor we went for our cameras. They offer a cloud storage solution for their product. There's some other vendors out there that will offer on-site storage. You've got your own servers. They'll have the cameras upload or download to your servers and your police department. The vendor we chose had cloud storage. It seemed good for us. It's redundant. It's backed up and it's not necessarily subjective to an equipment failure within our organization. So, we do use cloud storage and the video is saved and it's full resolution that it was captured in. But as far as the specs, whether it's high resolution or not, I honestly don't have the answers on that. That would be because we can view the video from the cloud with the vendor's proprietary software that's web based, or we can download it to attach it to criminal and administrative investigations. But we don't alter it, and I don't ever look at the properties of it to see what kind of bit rate it is. I just know that after three years, we we get a good grasp of, well, if we're deploying this many cameras on a daily basis, this is about how much video we store each month. And we had to kinda base our retention schedule and our our contracts, for storage on that amount of use.
Managing the footage is kind of complex according to a lot of police chiefs, and really knowing exactly what the best practices are with body cameras is kind of difficult considering we're still sort of in the shallow end of their adoption. When an officer uses a body camera, there's some degree of judgment call involved, like when that officer turns the camera on or off. What if that officer forgets? What if the incident seems to be over and the officer turns the camera off, but then something else dramatic happens that now is not part of the footage? These are questions that police agencies say they know quite well. So the formation of best practices will perhaps be shaped by time and things won't be perfect and that has to be in the public's expectation. For the meantime, there are some good best practice resources out there, like from the Federal Bureau of Justice Assistance.
So in talking more about best practices, you mentioned, you know, when to turn the camera on, when to turn the camera off. What resources exist right now? You you had talked about consulting with the School of Government, which is part of the University of North Carolina. What other
resources exist right now as the technology and the practice has evolved with regard to establishing best practices? As far as establishing new policies, there are a lot of tools out there. The BJA, who offers some grant funding for body worn camera program, has what they call a body worn camera policy toolkit, kind of a how to starter's guide that they'll let you look at. There's other programs out there, from different organizations that support law enforcement that have their best practices, tips, and tools kind of information they'll provide you. And a lot of what we've seen since we were early into this is other agencies have contacted us and as well as additional agencies and said, hey. Can we have a copy of your your current policy or anything that you started with and you've changed since then? And it's really a matter of looking at what other agencies inside our state have been doing and what's been successful for them, taking that kind of in combination with some of these starter kits and toolkits that are offered by organizations like the BJA, that does allow for kind of a best practice look at it. We can say, okay, well, this is what four of our neighboring cities are doing. It's been successful for them for over a year. This is what the federal government that provides grant funding suggests. And actually, we have, on multiple occasions, spoken with the ACLU and tried to get a non police perspective on it, a citizen's perspective, so to speak. What are the privacy concerns of the person on the other side of the camera lens, not what are the privacy concerns of the officer. But if I'm in your house videoing your young children that are walking by because I'm there for some call for service, you know, what are your concerns about this, and how can our policy, help protect your privacy? So we've reached out to all those different people and have kind of worked through what we're on our third version of a policy now. We put it together back in February 2016. And it's changed to where we're recording more stuff than we used to as opposed to just certain types of calls that are known to be controversial. We're recording all of our interactions with the citizens that are for a law enforcement purpose.
In Greensboro, where do the officers wear the body cameras? Is it on their chest? Is it on their shoulder? Is it on, sunglasses?
Or what's the standard there? Based on the brand of camera that we currently deploy, there are three mounting options that we permit the officer to use. One is mounted to, sunglasses, on their head, obviously, and then the other is a headband for nighttime use when you don't need the sunglasses. And the third option is a collar mount on the uniform that kind of looks like a bolt coming out the side of your neck. It's just a magnet mount that folds underneath the collar of the uniform shirt. So all three of the options are above the shoulders options, head height options. The the two options that mount directly to the head do give you a little more footage with, left and right panning where the officer's eyes and head turn, the camera turns. Whereas the collar mount, obviously, you're you're limited to to full body movements, gross motor skills instead of fine motor skills kind of thing. But those are our current three options. There's other products out there that are single piece camera systems instead of multi piece camera systems that are designed to be body mounted, and those actually have a lot of benefits to those. We're nearing the end of our contract, as I mentioned earlier, with our current vendor, and we're looking towards some of the single piece units to do a test and evaluation phase and see if those would benefit us any better than than the multi piece head mounted camera systems.
So the Greensboro Police Department has had body cameras for years at this point. The policy has been updated a few times. That's surely the case with other police agencies that have used body cameras. So as policies evolve and technology evolves,
where do you think this is all headed? What do you think is the future of the body worn camera? I will say your guess is as good as mine on that when we talk the technology side of body worn cameras. We're we are looking at some some newer cameras, when we enter into another contract multiyear contract with another vendor. And, the the technology they're bringing to the table is is so far advanced from where it was even a year ago that it'll be amazing to see what they've got five or ten years from now in terms of body worn cameras. But as far as the philosophy of them, I think you'll continue to see their implementation. Right now, they're not mandated for any particular agency because it would be an unfunded mandate. Nobody, whether it's the state or the federal government, has enough money to to put them on 100% of every officer in in our nation. But they are the the benefits of them has been recognized, and there is some grant funding out there for agencies that can't afford them. And for ones that that can or starting to try to get their foot in their door like we did and and buy them, you know, even if you can't buy them for everybody, buy a portion of them and have different officers wearing them so three officers might share the same camera so that those officers all have a camera on while they're on duty. I think where we're headed to is is we'd like to be able to fund it to where every officer has their own camera. That would be an improvement for us. But the philosophy is probably you're going to see that growth across the nation of more agencies wearing the cameras and hopefully, more agencies allowing people who are captured on camera and have a concern about the police action to view the video as well as the officer. Maybe use it in a in a mediation session between the officer and the citizen that has agreed to to watch the video, and then both parties discuss their side of it, what they were thinking, maybe why they reacted the way they did, and and see if they can come to a better understanding of each other's actions. Because a lot of the times, disagreements don't actually mean that any one party was wrong. It's a simple misunderstanding of the motivation of the actions. And so I think the cameras will will play a much bigger role in in mediation type settings.
Any advice for a police agency that is considering adopting body worn cameras but hasn't really, pulled the trigger yet, so to speak?
No. Everything we've talked about, I I would sum up in a a well rounded thing. I'd say get up with other agencies, take a look at their policies, not only their current policies, but maybe policies they've had and then changed, and ask them why they changed. Why did you take this part out or add this part in? And understand how they got where they got in the years that they've been in in the body worn camera business and try to, avoid those pitfalls as you implement your new program. In terms of equipment, it's it's just a matter of finding a a nice balance between what your budget will allow you to purchase and the features that you your you and your agency and your citizens expect these body worn cameras to have. If you can if you can balance the the technology needs against the the cost to, purchase the cameras, you're liable to wind up with a a very well rounded product that serves both the department and the the citizens they serve very well for years to come.
This conversation was recorded shortly before the North Carolina law passed. A couple things to update. Sergeant Flint mentioned the importance of the body camera video in mediation where the officer involved and the person depicted in the footage can view it and see what really happened. While it's true that the law does set out a legal framework for public access to the footage, the law does grant the head of the police agency involved to disclose the recording to people directly involved with the incident, and it sets out a standard for the retention of the footage too. Again, this is just the North Carolina law. Things vary state to state. The law also requires that each law enforcement agency that uses body cameras or dashboard cameras have a policy about their usage. It doesn't define specifically what the policy should be. Okay. This next segment is one that I first recorded earlier this year and then rerecorded and then recorded again because new things kept coming up that updated the story. I'm talking about active shooter situations, which have been a sad part of the news cycle and led to any array of debates about cause and effect. But for this episode, I want to step into the active shooter situation and explore what matters most in the very moment. In effect, this became a reality for thousands of people recently who were shopping at Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh, North Carolina. That's the city where I work. It made national news that a gunman was at large inside the mall. People heard gunshots and they either scattered, they ran outside, they hid inside stores. What makes it so curious at the time of this recording is that police found no evidence of an active shooter. No bullet holes, no shell casings, no injuries except for those sustained when people were fleeing the mall. But the human reaction is important and that's the focus here. Alright. So imagine it's just any old day at the office. You're sipping coffee at your desk. You can hear random bits of conversation among coworkers. You're typing up a report for the manager. Everything's normal. And then Okay. So the way I set this up, it's obvious to you, the listener, that we've just heard the first terrifying moments of an active shooter situation. But if you were that office worker not expecting anything out of the ordinary, how would you react? What would you do? Run? Hide? Would you even be able to identify what you just heard as gunshots?
To the uninitiated, it's not that simple. You can't believe this is really even happening. Okay? That's where it goes to helplessness and you become the faking sheep. Tom Anderson is the public safety risk management consultant for the North Carolina League of Municipalities. If there's no planning preparation, if there's no forethought that this can really happen and this is what I'm gonna do to prevent it, panic kicks in. That leads to disbelief.
The incidents in Aurora, Colorado, Newtown, Connecticut, Blacksburg, Virginia, San Bernardino, California, Orlando, Florida, and others have received heaps of media attention and caused heightened awareness of active shooter incidents. The Department of Homeland Security in 2012 produced a video to educate everyday people in how to handle the unthinkable.
Always try and escape or evacuate even when others insist on staying. Encourage others to leave with you, but don't let them slow you down with indecision.
So generally, there are three types of human responses to crises, fight, flight, or freeze. And that last one is what really needs attention.
And typically with that freezing reflux, that is, a lot of times due to lack of training, lack of preparation,
lack of forethought that this type of event can occur, and the person really just does not know how to respond. Because shooters in these situations are more interested in taking lives than they are in taking hostages, that freeze response is the most vulnerable.
The best way to counter that is again having a plan and actually training that plan and repetition is key. And and really just training the basics and that that's part of equipping your employees and and developing that survival mindset.
According to the FBI, there were 160 active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013, meaning the number has grown since then. It resulted in more than a thousand casualties and four hundred and eighty six deaths. Again, that number has grown.
This is a a burgeoning ever increasing threat. And again, that it can happen in any town and city. And, you can never just totally eliminate these types of threats, but you can definitely minimize the consequences if steps are taken before the event takes place.
The hierarchy of action for individuals caught in a situation like this is as follows. Run, try to escape and don't waste any time gathering valuables, just run away and escape. Anderson reminds that gunmen like this generally plan to take lives quickly and aren't interested in hostages, so escape if you can and call 911. If you can't, then hide, whether it's to keep cover or buy time. Run into an office, lock and barricade the door, turn off the light, and silence your cell phone. If that fails, then officials say the last resort is to fight with whatever means is around you. Chairs, books, staplers, fire extinguishers, anything. Last resort. None of this is meant to strike fear. These active shooter situations thankfully aren't happening daily, but just in case, it's good to have given it some thought and planning.
Planning and preparation and training is so crucial to minimizing the the the impact of such a threat.
And it's not just potential mass casualty situations to keep in mind. Workplace violence can take many forms and sometimes focuses on just one person. Homicides are currently the fourth leading cause of fatal occupational injuries in The United States. In 2014, there were four thousand six hundred and seventy nine fatal workplace injuries and more than four hundred were workplace homicides. The triggers could be any kind of stressor. Layoffs, lack of promotion or advancement, bad relationships spilling into the workplace, and so on. Anderson encourages everyone to be cognizant of things like unusual behavior in an employee, attendance problems, strange turns of mood, or changes in hygiene. There could be signs of something wrong. And if the employee does have a flare up, Anderson during a recent talk on the subject had some advice. Be kind.
Use please and thank yous. I would give just an overabundance of respect. Whether you really feel it, doesn't matter. Just be a good actor right then and there and try to deescalate.
Meanwhile, someone can call the police.
This threat is real and that it can really this this can really happen in any town, in any city, across the country. And planning and preparation and training is so crucial to minimizing the the the impact of such a threat.
So that was kind of heavy and really kind of everything on this episode is pen on the heavy side. So I wanna leave you with something that a lot of police agencies across the country are doing right now that I think is pretty cool. It's a simple idea, but it could really alleviate a lot of anxiety and avert easily executed modern crimes. Let's look at the scenario. Someone browses an online commerce site akin to Craigslist and finds a desired piece of merchandise, arranges an in person meetup with the seller to pay for it, and then becomes the victim of robbery, assault, or worse. Now a quick question. What if that buyer, pretend it's you, had requested that meetup take place at the local police station? It's not a would be criminal's first choice of venue for an ambush, clearly, and that's information that police departments like that of Burlington, North Carolina are putting to good use. The Burlington Police Department got a big cheer from the public when it opened a quote unquote transaction zone right there at the police department this past May. So I caught up with the police chief, Jeff Smythe, to learn how it works. I've seen it in a few other places around the country, but it's it it hasn't picked up like I think it probably should because it just makes all the sense in the world. But, for people listening, what is a transaction zone? Could you define that for us?
For us, a transaction zone is a place where we've predesignated and invited folks to come so that they can, exchange goods and or currency. So if you've used the Internet, you're using, any number of, software systems to connect with another person, and you're gonna go buy a car or you're gonna sell a stereo, and you're a little leery about the other person's character or credibility, you might meet, in our case, in front of the police station. So you agree to come to our transaction zone, and you know that you're at a police station and you know that there's some video surveillance around and there's likely to be a police officer coming or going from the building, and that then provides a fairly safe place, where, respectful and honorable people would make that exchange of of goods and currency.
Is this something you have to make an appointment for or is it self-service?
It's self-service. So we've got a couple of parking spots on the side of the building identified, and they're available, you know, twenty four hours a day. You could do it in in the middle of the night if you wanted, although most people don't, you know, sell their stereo in the middle of the night. But you certainly could do that. But, yeah, twenty four hours a day, no appointment, take advantage of the service.
So just to get some context and reality, could could you talk about the kind of crime or victimization that's known to have happened when strangers meet to exchange property and money?
Yeah. We had, literally an armed robbery related to this in in Burlington just a month or two ago. A young man was selling a very nice pair of maybe high top tennis shoes, whatever they were, and they met at a local box store, you know, off the freeway. And, three individuals in the car wanted to to see the shoes, and they pulled out a gun ultimately and, and robbed this kid. So that's probably the the most extreme version of, you know, some of the criminal activities. So, you might be getting counterfeit bills that you don't have a chance to look at. You might be extorted in some way. It might be a snatch and grab where they just grab your property and run away with it. Anything in a, you know, a range of possibilities. And so we're hopeful that we'll, you know, prevent and diminish the the likelihood of crime, because folks are able to come here to the police department and and engage in those transactions.
Was this something that was developed in house or was this something that was requested by the community? Could you explain that part of it? It was a little of both, actually. So,
I I think somebody in the community saw this happening somewhere else and pushed that to us and said, can we do it? And I I think over a period of a month or two, I'm gonna say three or four people saw and then suggested this idea to us, and we very quickly ratified that as a as a great idea. The implementation for us was a little bit delayed. We're in an RFP to obtain a new camera system for our building, and I didn't wanna put the signs up and then have the cameras not work or, you know, not really be, viable yet. So I responded to those three or four people that it's, it was under advice, and we were working on it. So we got our camera system in and fully established, tested it, made sure that everything's working appropriately,
and then just, in the last couple of weeks, we put our signs up. So even with these transaction zones in place, I'm sure you still have some additional safety tips for people making transactions so they can do it in the safest possible way. Could you could you maybe offer a few suggestions?
Sure. You know, the first is just trust your instincts. If something doesn't sound right, it's probably not right. If the deal's too good to be true, maybe it's not really a good deal. So trust your instincts is my first recommendation to folks all the time. It's great to bring a friend. So, you know, you've got somebody else there to just keep an eye on things and keep an eye on you. Do a little bit of checking on the person. A lot of the the Internet services offer an ability to give somebody a score or a rating, and so you should check that. And if a person has questionable entries, they're probably there for a reason as well. And then if you need to involve the police, you're welcome to do that. So if there's if you get there and there's some very suspicious criteria or something going on, pick up the phone and call the police. Or if you're here at our building in our transaction zone, simply suggest that they move into the lobby with you to complete the transaction, and we'll be happy to supervise it. Chief Smythe, is there anything else you'd like to say? I I think we've covered this, pretty well, but I might have left something out. No. I don't think so. You know, we appreciate the ideas that the public brings forward. It's great to work in a community where where people are free and comfortable to do that. And we wish people the best. I think, you know, bartering and exchange and and Internet sales are a great way to make sure that people get good value for their products and and we support that, and that's good for folks and good for the economy. So, we're proud and happy to support that.
We'll leave it at that. I hope it's been worthwhile, and I'll point out that a lot of this content in this episode has appeared in print, or is going to appear in print, in Southern City Magazine. That's the bimonthly from the North Carolina League of Municipalities, and you can find it online at nclm.org. Again, this was an extended episode. We covered a lot. Obviously, we could spend hours talking about any of these topics, but the main idea, as always, is to create a dialogue. So let me know what you think. Any ideas to supplement what we've talked about? Is your municipality doing something interesting in this field? There's always something like that out there, and that's what I'd like to share with everybody else. So get up with me on Twitter at muniequation or send me an email at bbrownnclm dot org. Again, NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities. My name is Ben Brown. Thanks for listening, and keep in touch.
