The Defuse Podcast - The Art and Science or Feeling Safer
Defuse / Diːˈfjuːz/ Verb: To Make A Situation Less Tense Or Dangerous.
Join me in listening to this informative podcast that delves into the critical issues facing private and corporate clients.
Each episode features global experts sharing their insights on preventing and resolving problematic behaviors and security issues that cause harm.
The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including stalking, protective security, intelligence, psychological profiling, crisis management, risk management, communications, reputational management, workplace violence, public relations, and more.
Don't miss out on this valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding and addressing these critical issues. Tune in today!
The Defuse Podcast - The Art and Science or Feeling Safer
Right of Bang – Post Incident Lessons with Dr. Gene Deisinger
Right of Bang – Preparing for the next critical incident with Gene Deisinger Ph.D.
How many times have we heard organisations tell us that they will learn the lessons from an incident? If like me, you have been involved in these post incident reviews you may also have shared my frustration of how rarely the lessons are implement and therefore lack confidence in preventing the challenges being repeated.
When a traumatic incident occurs, its impact is experienced far wider than those immediately involved. Organisations, communities, health services and law enforcement and others can become overwhelmed and surprised by the response to a critical incident.
Dr. Deisinger discusses his experience in conducting root cause analysis to understand what happened leading up to the event how to prevent this happening again whilst identifying the likely issues to anticipate post event that may create challenges such as;
- The hypervigilance created by an event that causes an increase in reporting
- The management of funeral and memorial services and the associated pressures of dignitaries attending, distribution of gifts and money being contributed
- The costs of absenteeism and trauma to staff
- The over reliance of the response capability and the need for proactive creation of teams.
- Outsiders seeking to exploit the opportunities they identify for their own benefit.
- The destabilization of the wider vulnerable community.
Bio:
Dr. Gene Deisinger is President of Deisinger Consulting, LLC, specializing in operational psychology, protective intelligence, and behavioural threat assessment & management for an international base of clients in business, education, healthcare, government, military, law enforcement, non-profit organizations, and security & protective operations.
Dr. Deisinger helps clients develop, implement, and operate comprehensive, holistic & collaborative programs to prevent & mitigate harm, sustain continuity of operations, and enhance the safety & well-being of the organization and its members.
In June 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed Dr. Deisinger to serve as a subject matter expert on the Critical Incident Review Team regarding the mass casualty incident at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX.
Since 2021, Dr. Deisinger has served as a founding member and subject matter expert for the Mass Violence Advisory Initiative, a joint project of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance.
Since February 2015, Dr. Deisinger has been retained as the Threat Management Consultant for the Virginia Center for School & Campus Safety. Dr. Deisinger provides threat management training and consultation for schools, campuses, and government & law enforcement agencies across Virginia.
Until his retirement in December 2014, Dr. Deisinger served as Deputy Chief of Police & Director of Threat Management Services for Virginia Tech, positions to which he had been recruited following the 2007 mass casualty incident at that campus.
As executive officer for the Virginia Tech Police Department, Dr. Deisinger provided leadership for law enforcement operations to support a safe and secure campus environment and directed the university’s multi-disciplinary threat management functions across its global facilities.
Dr. Deisinger earned his doctorate in psychology from Iowa State University. He is a licensed psychologist, a certified health service provider in psychology, and, until his retirement, a certified law enforcement officer.
Welcome to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Grindel, ceo Jean Dysinger, who has a, I think quite unique history, jean and I have just been talking about it and we've interacted several times at the European Threat Assessment Conference and elsewhere Hugely, hugely experienced professional in two disciplines that work together beautifully. And what we're going to do on this podcast is, as we often do, we talk about the preventative measures and how do we not get ourselves into a problem. What we're going to do now to this today is talk about what Gene's called right of bang. So how do we manage the after effects of an incident and how do we learn the lessons we talk about and we often hear? I know, when I was in the police, we often used to say, oh well, lessons will be learned. I'm not always convinced they are. And so how do we learn those lessons and how do we then implement them into other organizations and other environments and share that knowledge so that actually we can prevent further incidents?
Speaker 2:So, Jean you, jean, you've got, as we've just talked, a pretty unique CV, but through operational practice You've got a PhD. So clearly you're an academic but you're an operational guy. You always have been, and you started off, as I've understood, more recently as a psychologist before moving into law enforcement. Can you just kind of talk us through how that evolution occurred.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. So yes, my background is in clinical and forensic psychology and so I've been a clinic director in a campus setting and then had a community practice, frankly, primarily serving emergency services personnel and post-incident debriefing, trauma work, family relations, et cetera, and a lot of pre-employment evaluations or special unit evaluations for law enforcement services, and so that was kind of my connection to law enforcement agencies in the area that I worked. I was a consultant to several local, state and federal law enforcement agencies on how mental health issues intersected with criminal behavior and terrorism etc. And so that was the general connection that evolved over my early years as a mental health professional. I was blessed to work with a very progressive police chief at the university where I was primarily employed. He'd come to us from a municipal area and our sister institution, the University of Iowa, had suffered a mass casualty incident back in November of 1991. And it catalyzed us to look at how we not only learned the lessons from that, because I so agree with you, I question how much we actually learned the lessons. But I would go even a step further. I think even when we learn the lessons, we fail to apply them effectively, and so we were determined not to make that error, frankly, and to learn from that incident and others.
Speaker 3:And I was tasked with developing and implementing a threat management program and this was before I got into law enforcement and as a certified officer in any sworn role. And, frankly, that chief of police co-opted me into doing that. That was not my intent, opted me into doing that. That was not my intent. But when the chief of police calls you into his office on Friday afternoon and says, hey, I've got a great opportunity for you. You start at the State Police Academy in six weeks. You probably want to get in better shape. I frankly thought that was just about the stupidest thing that I'd ever heard in my life. It was not my intended career trajectory, but he was an incredibly brilliant fellow and he was right on point.
Speaker 3:And that although I have to tell you that I went to the police academy the second oldest in my class, having completed my PhD and served in clinical roles and I worked in community settings, community crisis response, hostage crisis negotiation, support for law enforcement, et cetera. So I was familiar from the outside with what law enforcement did. But I remember going to the academy fill up and saying, oh my God, what am I going to do here. I don't know anything about this stuff. And then I'd sit in classes like wait a minute. I've been teaching this in graduate school in psychology. We just use different terminology for it. Now, that wasn't true for everything, of course, and certainly not the more operational dual issues, but how to de-escalate volatile situations. I've been teaching that to therapists for years, right. So it kind of highlighted for me that there was a tremendous amount of overlap in what I already knew, what I was learning as a police officer, and then how to build on that intersection, and I found that incredibly invigorating.
Speaker 3:As you might guess, it's one thing for a shrink, a psychologist or psychologist, to offer a perspective, particularly when it's uninvited. It's another when a fellow law enforcement officer who just happens to also be a shrink offers a perspective. I wish it weren't this way with fellow law enforcement officer who just happens to also be a shrink offers a perspective. I wish it weren't this way with my law enforcement colleagues, because we sometimes think we're the only ones with the answers around operational perspectives. But it did help my credibility because I walked the streets and I wasn't just a police officer in name. I walked a beat, I did patrol. It wasn't a major part of my duties. Don't get me wrong I served more in an investigative capacity, but I'd been there and done that, and so it's really been a fascinating experience over the years and led to opportunities that I never envisioned back in the early 1990s, when we were starting our threat management process, and when you probably more than you wanted to know?
Speaker 2:not at all. No, I mean, I think it's it's. It's it's so insightful and I you know genuinely we having been a policeman myself for 30 years we all think we're amateur psychologists in the police because we're doing so much of that work, if you like, but that doesn't mean we that work if you like, but that doesn't mean we're getting it right and that doesn't mean we really understand the psychology of people or necessarily get it right. And I think, I think certainly in the UK we we use psychologists in some areas. I think we could do it a great deal more and we could do a lot more behavioral science within law enforcement.
Speaker 2:Not necessarily we cover that very well at the more serious levels of terrorism and serious crime, but I even think at the lower levels, in terms of improving interview skills and all those types of things, I think we could use that more. So I'm a big fan of that and I was very fortunate in my career to work with some really great forensic psychologists. What's changed then in that last what is it 30 years that you first kind of transitioned from being a psychologist into a law enforcement professional? You've gone through that. We're now 20, 30 years later. Have things changed in what that picture looks like of how we manage threats?
Speaker 3:It has in quite a few ways, at least in the United States. I've seen some pretty remarkable changes in the years that I've been involved in this. The other thing I said there's been changes for me. There was things I understood about mental health and emotional distress and well-being as a clinician, working within a clinic and then learning to take that into the community alongside police officers before I was a police officer and then doing that out on the street or in investigations as a police officer or a detective and having to operationalize those academic concepts. I think many of my colleagues have a great academic or clinical understanding but psychosis looks a bit different when it's raw in the field versus when it's in a controlled environment, right, and so it was very helpful for me to get more of that direct exposure with people in experiencing acute and severe mental illness. So, as a clinician, that informed my understanding of the dynamics, so that was helpful to me, I think. I think it broadened my perspective, informed my understanding of the dynamics, so that was helpful to me, I think. I think it broadened my perspective and my understanding. I think we went in the field where in the early 1990s I was quite unique in terms of being one of the mental health professionals. Law enforcement could call in the middle of the night and not just get a perspective from on the phone but come to the scene and support and so again to get that real world observation of what the subject's behavior was, how we might intercede with it, et cetera. I certainly wasn't the only one doing that in the United States, but there weren't a lot of us and I was the only one doing it on a consistent basis in the whole state of Iowa where I worked at the time. That's. That's changed dramatically, particularly in the last few years since the tragedy involving the death of George Floyd and other persons who, in addition to their acute behavior, may have been living with severe mental illness. Law enforcement in the United States has really been challenged to get better about how we respond to emotional crises and that. So we've seen this proliferation of either increased training for law enforcement officers, the crisis intervention officer approach in the United States has become quite common. So an intensive course for police officers about how to recognize signs of mental illness, referral systems and networks and de-escalation et cetera, which frankly greatly reduces injuries to police officers, to the subjects in emotional distress, decreases liability. So, chiefs of police and sheriffs end up loving that because it's a better approach. But we've also seen much more collaboration between law enforcement and mental health and social services workers.
Speaker 3:When I got into this, there was a huge schism. I mean, I had a senior law enforcement officer before I was a police officer. Look around the room and say enforcement officer before I was a police officer, look around the room and say why are all the shrinks here? These are police issues and you know we're talking about substance abuse and acute mental health. But it was only focused on the criminality of the behavior which, as you know, doesn't solve everything to put somebody in jail and run them through the criminal justice system, particularly where substance abuse or severe mental illness are a contributory factor. And so we were looking at a broader solution and they just couldn't get it.
Speaker 3:You don't run into that a lot in the United States anymore. Now I think we've got over 18,000 law enforcement agencies across our nation. So I'm not suggesting that all take that view, but it's much more common now than what it's been in the past, which I'm glad to see On both sides not only law enforcement understanding where the better nexus is with social services and psychological services, but mental health clinicians recognizing it's coppers that are sitting with that individual responding to them at two o'clock in the morning when all the social services are closed. I mean, for years I said law enforcement officers are our only 24-7 emotional crisis responders and in most communities that was true, not so much in Kingmore. So a lot of changes, right? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think it's an interesting one because I think certainly there's been some recent developments in the UK which have almost challenged that perspective in terms of because of the financial cutbacks, etc. And the default position tends to be the police will deal with this, tends to be the police will deal with this. And actually some of the police chiefs and the commissioner and the Metropolitan Police has come out quite verbally and said you know, we're not here to deal with all the mental health issues. We can't, we're not qualified to do that, and so that requires some significant financial investment as well, from whether it's central or local government, to make sure that officers are properly trained in those areas that they can be trained in. But also the other resources are available 24 7 when they're required. Certainly in the uk, the prisons are now full. The health service doesn't have the capacity it once did.
Speaker 2:So we're going to have to be thinking creatively about how we deal with people who are in crisis. Um, because we don't want them to go on to commit horrendous offences, because, of course, it destroys their lives and the lives of the victims and families that are involved. So we have to be thinking a way of how do we resolve this crisis. So, you know, when we come to some of the lessons, then, in terms of let's go right of bang and think you know how? I mean that's a great term, isn't it? Because everyone thinks, left of bang, get there before the issue kicks off, that you know, we all know that term. But you've you know beautifully kind of transitioned that to okay, well, let's assume something has happened, because we're never going to get it right all the time. So where do we start to unpick then the lessons of how we, how we can do better?
Speaker 3:well, I think, uh, I'd probably arrogantly suggest um, at least the general way that I did. Sure, um, I was certainly looking at antecedent issues when those incidents had occurred around the country, frankly around the world, looking at what we could learn about the perpetrator's escalation and behavior, about the organization of the community's capabilities or gaps in capabilities that kind of allowed the behavior to escalate. So certainly I was paying attention to that. I mean, we use that to build our program in the first place. But I also started noticing that there were residual effects and after the effects, when there were critical incidents and it didn't have to be a mass violence, even just the murder of a co-worker I'm saying that as if it's a lesser thing the murder of a co-worker, a single victimization, can be devastating to a workplace, to a community. It can compromise a sense of safety and security, trust in the organization, et cetera, in a variety of ways. So I started noticing some repeat patterns in that and so that drew my attention to it and I've been kind of logging my observations over time.
Speaker 3:As you know, I had the privilege of working at Virginia Tech in the aftermath of that incident. There that institution in particular was experiencing some of the things that I had observed in other places that had suffered critical incidents, including mass casualty incidents and being just a couple of things. Others from around the country that were activated by the 2007 perpetrators behavior and saw what was possible and came to Virginia Tech to try to do it, to gain their own notoriety at a place that already was drawing hyper attention. I mean, we were under intense scrutiny for the first five years, in particular after that incident. Scrutiny for the first five years, in particular after that incident. The impact on the community and the sense of over-perceiving threat were so convinced that, because we'd experienced the worst-case scenario, lightning could never strike twice. Now that may not have as much relevance for you. I know you get a lot of rain in the UK and we get that in the eastern United States as well, but I grew up in the upper Midwest and we have horrendous thunder and lightning storms and I heard a colleague say well, you know lightning doesn't strike the same place twice and I said most assuredly it does, and with alacrity. And the fact that we've had a critical incident, a lightning strike, does not mean we're insured against another one. In fact, it will draw lightning among a subset of the community and we're preparing for that.
Speaker 3:So it kind of my thinking on this broadened and culminated following the mass shooting at Fort Hood, and that occurred on Thursday November 5th, and one of the members of the chief of staff of the Army his staff was a Virginia Tech alum and reached out to colleagues in leadership at Virginia Tech and said you all have been through this, Can you help us? And so, Philip, on Friday morning I had one of the most surreal moments of my career with being part of about 20 of the leadership of Virginia Tech on a video call, like we're doing today, with the chief of staff of the United States Army and 20 of their staff and two majors choppered down from the Pentagon to be with us in the room. And I was the least senior person in the room at Virginia Tech, but I was tasked with giving a post-incident briefing and I outlined several things that I thought that they should monitor for. So that was on Friday morning. On Monday morning I had a rather frantic call from a member of the deputy chief of staff who said Dr Dysinger, of the 10 things you briefed us on last Friday, seven have already occurred. We need help. How soon can you get here, and so I had to run that through. My commander said you know, go, do whatever the Army needs. And so just a few days after that I ended up on the ground at Fort Hood advising the US Army on insider threat force protection and sharing with them some more about those thoughts. And so I thought maybe I ought to systematize that a little bit more if I were advising major organizations about that.
Speaker 3:As you know, I had opportunity to present some of those ideas at the European Threat Conference with Jeff Cunio, who's formerly of the FBI in the United States, a highly regarded colleague I've had the pleasure of working with for many years, and Jeff helped flesh that out.
Speaker 3:And so we think it's important to look beyond the bang, and the left of bang concept has been around a long time, but I think it really developed a cachet following Patrick Van Horn's publication of his book Left of Bang, which if you're familiar with it you know it looks at more acute pre-incident changes in behavior or circumstances to help guard the safety of our troops in combat situations or in theater. But I think there's generalizability in the concepts that Patrick and colleagues talked about. So we said let's look beyond the bang by all means let's do what we can to stop the bang. We're a free society I think we still are. We can't prevent everything. Bad things are still going to happen and there's this ripple effect. So let's try to get ahead of that by looking down the road. And so that was the concept that Jeff and I have presented on a few times here in the States, and we're blessed to do it in Paris.
Speaker 2:So, before we move on to what those kind of lessons are, how do you do that without creating a blame culture?
Speaker 3:how do you look right of back?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when you're reviewing and looking at okay, here's an incident, these are the things we need to be careful of and we need to be looking. It seems to me that what often happens when we're looking at a post-incident review is they're actually trying to identify who can be blamed for this, who dropped the ball here? Because we need to blame somebody. That's clearly not what you're doing. You're clearly not trying to apportion blame. You're trying to identify lessons. But how do you do one without the other? How do you make sure or protect that you're not finding blame, apportioning blame when you're doing a review of that nature?
Speaker 3:You know, philip, after reading your Monday morning newsletter and seeing your insight and your challenging thoughts, I should have expected I'd get a challenging question from you. What a great question indeed For years one. I don't think we can fully eliminate that some people may not feel blamed or some organizations may not feel blamed, but I don't think that that should be the primary focus and I think sometimes there's a leap to blame, an assumption of failure, when circumstances were simply beyond the scope, scale and ability of anybody or any organization. I've argued for a long time that one of our big failures in the United States is, in regard to critical incidents of violence, particularly mass casualty incidents, because of the horrific effect they have not only on that community but nationwide, that we should take an approach more similar to what our National Traffic Safety Board does following an air crash or a plane crash. And it's a root cause analysis what happened? What not just happened during the incident but in the lead up aircraft maintenance gaps, equipment decrease in equipment integrity, pilot error, pilot being overwhelmed with multiple equipment failures, et cetera. And yes, people might be held accountable, organizations might be held accountable if there's large failures to apply the training, to apply the lessons learned. But that's not the focus. The focus is how do we prevent this happening again? And I don't think we do that in the United States.
Speaker 3:Most of the after action reviews have a very strong flavor of who can we hold responsible, who do we blame for this? And again, I'm not against holding people responsible. That's one way that we learn right. But that focus on blame and punishment, I think, makes it actually harder for these things to change. Because if you're watching that from the outside and you think, well there, but for the grace of God may go, I, I don't want to be in that position. Maybe I'll just stay out of this. I don't think that helps us. I think that we can accept, when there's glaring errors and omissions, that accountability makes sense. But some things we attribute to persons, personal failures, are really systems failures, and let's focus on correcting the system really systems failures, and let's focus on correcting the system.
Speaker 3:And again, I don't think we do that. So that's been our approach. Let's do a root cause analysis. Let's see where we can bolster areas that nobody's doing anything wrong. It's just not addressing the gaps that we've identified. We're not building the skill sets that are needed to prevent, deter, respond to this sort of incident or this sort of situation, and so it's to build strength, it's to empower, it's to foster resilience, frankly, and but it is. It's a subtle difference, I think, and I'm not willing to suggest that nobody involved in that feels blamed or like the responsibilities laid at their feet. I know I've been an operational commander during a critical incident and we did an after action report and I received critiques of some of the decisions or ways I communicated decisions and it's not pleasant. But you know what? They weren't wrong and I learned that I needed to just deal with my sense of blame and and some shame in the decision. Some I knew better, um, and some I was just overwhelmed by decisions. But so the review wasn't wrong. It helped me be a better operational commander.
Speaker 2:Um, I think we need to be willing to tolerate that I think the the aircraft analogy is is a great analogy because, of course, they're very good at self-reporting near misses as well, and we need to get into that habit of being able to do that reporting near misses, so that we can actually learn those lessons before something happens and therefore we can become preventative in that context. So OK, so what are the kind of common themes then that you identified of after action lessons?
Speaker 3:Well, there's a few things, and some have a fairly direct relationship to threat assessment and management and some are more peripheral, they're secondary or tertiary effects, and so if we think about critical incidents, I mean there's a variety of collateral issues that result from that. You know, absenteeism maybe I don't want to be present at work anymore these sorts of things can happen. The expenses involved, I mean those can be huge for an organization. The five-year cost there was an objective audit of the cost, the dollar cost for the Virginia Tech tragedy At five years it was $48 million, yeah, and it was closer to $60 million at the 10-year area. That one's a looser estimate because it wasn't tracked as specifically as this independent audit. But $48 million over five years for an institution of 30, well, at that time about 27,000 students, 6,000 employees, that's a pretty significant budget element, right, and so that's a huge cost. We could have done a lot preventatively in safety and security with $48 million over the preceding five years, right. So there's that sort of thing. The psychological and emotional toll, the funerals or memorial services or recognition of survivors are all reminders of the loss, the impact and also the lapses and perceived lapses in security that contributed to this, which can raise the ire and blame of the members of the organization or members of the community. So those are some general things.
Speaker 3:More specifically, there's a few things that have jumped out After there's been a critical incident and my general observation is, the greater the magnitude of the incident, the more pronounced these effects are. One of them is on hypervigilance. It's kind of like we saw in the States after 9-11. Now we realize, even though we knew in some sense that airliners could be used as missiles, there was a much greater sense of that risk and you know, people saw that opportunity at about every flight that they got on in the months and years after 9-11. Well, the effect of that is a significant increase in reporting of concerns and if organizations aren't ready for that, then the organization, members of the community sees that organization or law enforcement as non-responsive to their concerns, which weakens trust in systems and disengagement from reporting. So you can get this spike and then it's like, well, nobody really cares, so let's not do it anymore. So we need to be prepared for that.
Speaker 3:Along with that, human beings tend to stereotype and overgeneralize based on general characteristics of perpetrators, tend to stereotype and overgeneralize based on general characteristics of perpetrators. The community, stereotypes and the overgeneralized risk in regard to other people who might pose a risk. And so now you get members of the community who have a superficial resemblance in their behavior, their background, their physicality to the identified perpetrator or perpetrators and they're unduly victimized or harassed. And so we want to anticipate that. We've seen that markedly, you know, during COVID at least in the United States, with significant hate directed toward persons of Asian ancestry. Certainly since October 7th we've seen that directed toward persons of the Jewish faith or of Palestinian descent. So I think we need to anticipate that better.
Speaker 3:We also see outsiders trying to exploit those tragedies to support their own narratives. In the United States, this is why we should outlaw guns and, conversely, this is why we should have more guns right. And so the community ends up feeling well, nobody really cares about us, we're just being used as a pawn and some people get very angry about that. There's a thing that I didn't think about a whole lot because I saw it as such a good thing, but the positive attention and altruism that comes forth at Virginia Tech we were blessed by that from around the world Just cascades of support and mementos, mourners, that would come.
Speaker 3:Well. Now you've been in policing, have been in policing a long time. Now you've got a large scale event you've got to provide security for and you're the same police officers that the day before, maybe earlier that morning, were responding to that critical incident. And now you've got to provide security for those that are coming to demonstrate their respect and you're grateful for that. But you're exhausted. You just want some time to recover and recoup.
Speaker 3:One of the things that surprised me in particular across a variety of incidents it's not unusual for people to send or to leave mementos and if we don't properly show respect for those and how we manage those, then people get very angry and think they're being disrespected. And we've had to ask people escalate in their behavior because I sent you 5,000 teddy bears and you didn't distribute them. Well, people didn't want them. It was a nice gesture but it just didn't meet the needs. And a dear friend of mine is Christina Anderson, who survived the shooting at Virginia Tech. She was shot multiple times while in a classroom at Norris Hall and I've done presentations with her on this and she says you know, afterwards I got dozens of blankets and she says I know it comes from the heart, but I don't need any more frigging blankets. Send money. I've got to pay for medical expenses. I've got a future to look forward, that I've been set back by months and I don't want to be crass, but I don't need your damn blankets.
Speaker 2:And does that also apply in terms of people sort of you know, sending cards and letters and expecting a response?
Speaker 3:Some do and get angry that they don't get that. And about what memorials are made. I mean there was huge consternation at Virginia Tech about what memorials are made. I mean there was huge consternation at Virginia Tech about what memorials should be there. Did it only honor those who were killed? What about those who survived their injuries? Who was even considered a survivor? Was it just if you were shot? Was it if you were seriously injured jumping out of the second floor of Norris Hall? What if you were only quote unquote psychologically traumatized? What if the perpetrator didn't get into your room but you heard your classmates and fellow faculty being killed down the hall?
Speaker 3:Those are issues that some organizations really haven't thought through how they treat survivors or who they even consider survivors. You know we've seen a lot of issues and incidents. When there's some sort of settlement to these victims and survivors, how is that equitably distributed across them? And you know it's like well, you had three bullet wounds wounds, so you've got this. You only had two. And don't get me wrong, it's a hard, uh hard thing. And I'm not remember the name of the movie, but there was what I thought was a very powerful movie about the individual who was charged with accrual distribution of funds to the survivors of 9 11 and trying to create a formula that adequately valued humanity and life. I'm glad I never had his job what a phenomenal thing. But I don't think we do a good job of articulating an equitable way to disperse those funds and that creates grievances for people.
Speaker 3:Dignitary visits an area that you know probably quite well. Let's be positive in this and assume that that's well-intentioned. It still means that those same police and security forces that were involved in the critical incident now have to divert energy away from the investigation, away from the security of the incident location to, depending on the level of the dignitary, to support the protective operations. For that. That's an incredible burden. It's a distraction for some community members, some of whom think they're just being used and exploited, whether they are or not. So there's a whole host of these things that on the surface again, let's be generous in our perception, particularly in the dignitary visits, is well-intentioned, but that doesn't mean it's always experienced that way and I don't think that we're necessarily prepared for that. I'll pause there.
Speaker 2:Yeah I think there's some really interesting elements to that, isn't there? Because they're not things that you necessarily naturally think about. When there's been a devastating incident, you know your, your natural response probably is is to look in different areas. Um, and yet you know simple things such as how do you manage? I mean, you know, we had the sort of I'm not going to make the same equation, but when Princess Diana died, there became these memorials which were kind of created by the public, which you know were mountains of flowers and teddy bears and cards and other things. But someone's got to do something with those and manage them, Otherwise they sit there and rot and then it's disrespectful and you know you have to have so. So all those things you're talking about actually are the things that we need to be thinking about, because that actually does happen. We see that whenever there's a a critical incident or a serious issue where the public creates these memorials with best of intentions but we don't think about, actually, all those flowers are going to rot, so what do we do with them? So those are really interesting points and they're points that I think, if we don't do them properly and we don't understand them, as you suggested, create grievances and create lack of trust and create questions about funding and what are you doing with the money, and allegations of corruption and all sorts of things. And so I think that's such an interesting. Those are such interesting points and I've heard these obviously before because I was present, thankfully, at your presentation in the European Threat Assessment Conference. But listening to them again, it's the, it kind of resonates. I'm just kind of visualizing other incidents and, um, you know, the idea that certain communities, uh, are going to be marginalized or picked on.
Speaker 2:I can tell you what actually is an amusing story is the day after seven seven happened in the UK when we had the London bombings I came out of Scotland Yard and got onto an underground train and we went one stop and the train stopped and these two Asian gentlemen Asian in the UK would be Southern Asian, so Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi got onto the tube, both wearing rucksacks, and they sat next to where I was and everyone on the tube got off and one of them looked at me and said is it you or is it us? And I said I think it's possibly you, but I'm prepared to take the blame. And he said are you getting off? I said no, no, I'm going to take my chances because it's going to happen. I'd rather be right next to you and we had a lovely chat going on, but it was that instant response to they must be terrorists or we're going to assume that they're terrorists. And actually there were just two young guys at university who just happened to be carrying a rucksack.
Speaker 2:I get the fear, I get it, I understand that, but we're almost again looking for someone to blame, aren't we? In terms of? It's so easy for us, as humans, to give labels and to label people as you're from that community, so therefore you must be all the same, um, but actually that's simply not the case, because these are unique individuals that create unique scenarios, that that have very specific grievances or issues or desires to cause them to do what they do. That must be very difficult when you know we're talking. You mentioned sort of Israeli or Pakistani or Jewish or Pakistani community, Palestinian communities rather dispersed across the entire country.
Speaker 2:We're not talking about just one area on an international scale. I was talking to some colleagues from a Jewish organisation last week and they're experiencing the same thing, but conversely, they're saying actually, what we've also seen is the community coming together and people who didn't realise they were from the same community coming together. But these are all really interesting things, aren't they? That we don't necessarily because they don't fit within security or they don't fit within human resources or whoever. So who takes ownership of these issues? How do we define, how do we work out post-incident? Who owns this problem?
Speaker 3:Well, that's a great question and one of the things that I think has been incredibly powerful for us as we've implemented multidisciplinary approaches in threat assessment and management. I mean, part of that process isn't that the team does everything, but it knows its partners in the organization or in the community so well that it helps bring to their attention issues that that entity might not otherwise be aware of and say, hey, I think that you're a partner in this and we're noticing this and da-da-da-da-da-da right, and so it might be for employees that are impacted within an organization and the threat assessment team or security or observing these things or anticipating them, the HR partners on the team might be tasked with using their organizational resources to help create those buffers for the development of the problem, to provide that safety net and support. Some of that's from within an organization, Some of that is broader community. Some of that we might need in the US state or national level partners that have the resources to do it.
Speaker 3:But I think once we get used to working and maximizing the power of a multidisciplinary process, we've got those connections or we've got the connection to the people or roles that have the connection to what we need, and it's just it's looking forward, and part of our group's approach to threat assessment is considering precipitating events, those critical stressors or changes that haven't happened yet but could affect a subject of concern, a target or the environment, the community as a whole. So for me, this is just a natural aspect of looking forward to those potential precipitating events. Now, how do we prevent and minimize and mitigate to the extent that we can? And because we don't have a crystal ball, how do we prepare and develop contingencies to address those should they arise, Because not all of them will all?
Speaker 2:the time and develop contingencies to address those should they arise, because not all of them will all the time. So that means we need to build those multidisciplinary teams and build those relationships before something happens. Because I sort of see in the UK we've kind of I'll kind of be slightly controversial and say we seem to have abandoned, shall we say, community-based policing. Resources are down, let's suck away the community policing and do other things. But actually it's the community that solve crimes. I've been on murder inquiries, terrorism inquiries, everything. It's the community that tell us information that solve them. But they only do that if they trust us and we've got relationships and we can't go there just when it suits us to ask them to help us. We have to be there all the time supporting them and building that trust.
Speaker 2:And so this goes towards the point you're making around the multi-disciplinary approach, including the community, because they're part of that outer team, if you like. We have to build that before something happens. We can't wait for it to happen. So when we're going into organizations and we're trying to get HR and security and legal and all these organizations to work together, these are the arguments that this is why we do it now. We do it now because, if something happens, we're going to need to be a team.
Speaker 3:Well, absolutely, and I'll look to your ancestor in the British policing, sir Robert Peel. Right, and I'm not going to get the quote exactly right, but the police are the people and the people are the police, and to me that speaks all to, and for years I've said that threat assessment and management is not what we do for our organization or community, it's what we do with. It is a partnership, and that engagement one. If you don't have that engagement, you don't have trust and you're unlikely to be able to do effective work anyway. And so you need that engagement, and I'm relying on the community to help me continue to monitor situations.
Speaker 3:I don't have this magical computer set that allows me to know everything about Philip, our subject of concern over the next three years. I need to be engaged with the people that are connected to Philip, that are part of his natural world and that don't want to see him make choices that cause him harm or a detriment to his own well-being or certainly that of others, and so, certainly, the more proactively we can do that. Management teams isn't the only way to do that. I mean there's a lot of organizations that don't have threat assessment and management teams but do have crisis management teams that could serve that same function. When a critical incident does happen, it probably doesn't put them in a well, it doesn't put them in a proactive position, but as we look at beyond the bang, they can still be looking at these things and develop the partnerships and engagement to try to anticipate, prevent, where possible, mitigate and lessen the effects if it does occur. I don't think we've built that in effectively to crisis management.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and is timing a key issue in terms of how quickly we can implement and put the plan into place?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it very much is. I mean, one of the other major observations that I had is for persons that have minimal coping skills in the community. I'm not talking about subjects of concern for violence, but people with minimal coping skills or living with serious mental health issues can be acutely destabilized by a critical incident, not because they're intending to do violence that's an unlikely scenario. It has happened, but it's unlikely scenario. It has happened, but it's unlikely. But their own well-being is a detriment which then scares the devil out of the people around them, given what they've just seen. That they think is caused by mental illness. And that can happen almost as soon as news breaks of the incident, and so we have to be prepared for that right away.
Speaker 3:I mean, the organizations I've worked with, both as an employee and as a whole, weren't at risk. But the greater the magnitude of the incident or the closer it hits the home I know a victim or I had just been standing at that metro stop just minutes before then they become impacted by it and destabilized. Now again, I'm primarily worried about that in terms of their well-being and the fears that raises in others when they're around a destabilized individual. Not that I think all of those people are dangerous, because my experience has been, very few of them are, but that happens almost immediately.
Speaker 2:And so that hypervigilance that you refer to earlier on, you know that then feeds off that, because if they are hyper vigilant and they're seeing somebody who is in crisis, themselves, connected or otherwise to the, to the incident, they will necessarily they might perceive that to be an additional threat. And then so all of a sudden you're getting in lots of reports of other incidents or potential incidents, diluting your resources, because you're going to have to go and deal with those and identify whether there is an issue, and even if there isn't, specifically you're going to have to manage that issue. So then how does the communication strategy fit in? Where does that place sit around, this value of time and resources and communication?
Speaker 3:Well, it's critical throughout all of this. I mean, we talked earlier about those people who start generalizing and stereotyping. And here's where it's critical for not only community or organizational leaders, but mid-level leaders and, frankly, all of us, but particularly those people that are in visible positions, to manifest respect, to not buy into this blame culture, to to encourage reaching out and embracing other members of the community. Yes, let's be vigilant about potential hostile actions, but let's also come together as a community. All too often our leadership again focuses on that blame and this is why or turns it into a political or a socio-political issue. In the United States, typically it's about firearms and Second Amendment rights, and that's. I'm not saying those are unimportant, but that's not what the community needs most at that point. And so a communication strategy that you know, not just messaging, but a leader who is calm, who is focused, who is showing respect, who is embracing members of the community, who there are known, known risk factors associated with the two gentlemen that you were on the tube with. That you were on the tube with, I'm sure that you were probably hyper alert, at least for a moment, about what other behaviors beyond the rucksacks that might indicate a more acute threat, and so we can do that, and if there's the absence of those, then let's embrace our sisters and brothers, because we know how difficult and painful and frightening it is for them, and so I think that needs to be part of the communications strategy. Some about what to our mental health professionals and social service professionals have been great of what to anticipate when you've been exposed to trauma and there is no one response. But here's some things you might start to notice in your own behavior. Here's ways of dealing with that as it occurs. It's not proactive, but it's more acutely responsive to the individual's needs. It's helpful when we engage in that messaging before the crisis.
Speaker 3:Bad things happen. It could be a person walking across the street struck by a car. So let's talk about these things again more proactively of how we support each other. So a communication strategy is very important to it. I think the after action reviews that show that as one of the weaknesses of Virginia Tech, of almost a risk averse communication strategy, that didn't show as much empathy. And yet I know the leadership. They care a great deal about the community, or cared about, but it wasn't coming across and we've seen that in other incidents. The leaders who are very empathic, but the lawyers are advising them. You know, don't say anything that could be construed as an apology.
Speaker 2:And it's like well, well, where's the humanity here and do you think people are? You know, in the kind of the kind of blame and litigious communities we live in now or the environments we live in, people are scared of saying the wrong thing. You know, apologies. But also they don't have all the facts. And yet sometimes we're scared of saying we just don't know right now. And yet we've got to, we've got to say we just don't know right now in a way that doesn't escalate fear, it doesn't sort of say we're not in control, we just don't know all the facts just yet.
Speaker 2:So I think people respond to that honesty around rather than just blanking the conversation. We're not going to share any information, and you know, we know, we both know that there are reasons why that happens. But I think the bit you mentioned there about what to expect in your own and others' behaviour around trauma, how you're going to respond, how you may be, I think that's a really interesting one actually, because I don't I'm trying to think about whether I've heard that before and whether I've ever been in incidents where that's been talked about. And I remember when we got attacked in Parliament. I was one of the detectives on that the senior detective on that.
Speaker 2:When we were attacked and a colleague was killed, we did have that conversation, but not for a few days afterwards and I know that myself and others certainly experienced some trauma from that and I think that's a really interesting one as a public, a more wider public statement, because you know you don't have to be involved in Virginia Tech to have been affected by Virginia Tech. You know the fact you've got kids at school can create that fear for you. So that's a really interesting, really interesting point about explaining the sorts of emotions you may be feeling over the next few days or the sorts of behaviors you may be seeing amongst your kids or your families or others. That's really interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and your co-workers, sure. The other aspect that can be very rapid is other people in the community, or well outside the community, who become fixated on your event or the perpetrator, and they may exhibit identification if we use Malloy's warning behaviors typology. So they begin to fixate on that. They've already got their own unresolved grievances and are considering at least, or have a willingness to use, violence. They're looking for a path forward and now here's a model. Right, the region, or, frankly, around the world anymore, begins to identify with the grievances, with the tactics, with the notoriety or attention that was received.
Speaker 3:On december 8, 2011, one of my officers at virginia tech was assassinated in the line of duty. He was conducting a traffic stop at the time and a person unrelated to that uh, approached him from behind while he was issuing the summons and killed him. And so that was on a Thursday afternoon at 12.25 pm, as I was sitting in my office at police headquarters and I responded on scene to the incident the next morning at 08.30,. A subject had traveled five and a half hours from eastern Virginia, the Hampton Roads area, all the way to Virginia Tech in southwest Virginia, because he was so fixated not only on that incident but the 2007 incident and a catastrophic incident in 2009 where a woman was beheaded at Virginia Tech. And he went to each of those places and his mannerism was very bizarre and he ended up in the space where the beheading had occurred and just causing significant panic. And I was actually the first officer on scene to deal with him and he initially tried to tell me he was writing a book about tragedy impacting.
Speaker 3:This is a guy that can barely put two coherent thoughts together. Not that I haven't read books like that, but that was not a credible story to me. He was just soaking in the aura of every place that Virginia attacked where violence had occurred, from where my officer was murdered and spontaneous memorial there, to Norris Hall to to the Graduate Life Center at Virginia Tech. He hadn't committed a crime at Virginia Tech, but he was on probation and parole and was not supposed to leave his community without notifying his officer. So we're very gracious people in southwest Virginia where I worked at the time. We provided him housing at the local jail until his parole officer could direct him back to Eastern Virginia, but he was just absolutely fixated and activated to foster his identification. He hadn't accumulated weapons yet. I'm not 100% convinced he would have engaged in violence, but he was certainly building toward it. And that's less than 20 hours post-incident and he'd already been driving for five and a half hours and he'd been on campus two hours before we encountered him.
Speaker 2:Can I ask you about a different subject which we're seeing over here in the UK and Europe and I wonder whether you're seeing it in the US which is this concept of when there's an incident of these, we get these armchair detectives, we call them, who come out of the woodwork. Some of them are former cops who may or may not have left organizations under various clouds, etc. Others are just conspiracy merchants or we call them armchair detectives. Is that something else that was identified in or has been identified subsequently, perhaps, as something to be aware of and something you're going to have to manage as something to be aware?
Speaker 3:of and something you're going to have to manage. Yeah, and that's one of the other pieces that we brief on in particular are those conspiracy theorists that show up to disprove this was a false flag operation, this didn't really happen, etc. And we've seen that in the United States occur at a variety of different incidents. Probably the most notable in terms of public attention was post Sandy Hook, and you've got a number of people one of whom was held financially liable for his commentary on it number of other people who would literally show up and knock on parents of deceased children's doors and essentially say, philip, prove to me you ever had a son in that classroom and how and when. Of course, like get away from me, then you know.
Speaker 3:Raising the iron, some threatening behavior we had some of that in the aftermath of Virginia Tech that are critiquing every bit of video and saying, see, the police did this here.
Speaker 3:They wouldn't have done that. Well, they don't know, they've either never been police officers or they're so poorly informed and, again, don't have all the facts. But then that undermines credibility of your community for those that are hearing that and think, well gosh, this guy's a former police officer, he would know about this, and so I think that is another huge issue. It's not a threat management issue directly, but when it undermines credibility or the conspiracy aspect is so much that people engage in defensive violence, right, and I sure as heck don't want to have to address or to arrest a survivor's father or a victim's father yeah, because they're defending the rest of this family from somebody that is saying you never had a kid that died, yeah Right, never had a kid that died, yeah right. And so to be attentive to those issues that family members of victims um can come under that scrutiny and that confrontation, and to caution them about not overreacting and to not engage yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a.
Speaker 2:it's a phenomenon that we've seen in the last. I suppose we've seen it more the last couple of years and we've got in the last I suppose we've seen it more in the last couple of years and we've got a couple of incidents running in the UK and Europe at the moment where that's become part of the commentary by the local law enforcement to say you know, we're getting these people coming in, these armchair detectives and these apparent experts what have you who are interfering in the investigation. They are misleading the investigation, they are misleading witnesses and I think that's again something that we need to be mindful of when we are looking at. An instance occurred that we are going to see these people.
Speaker 2:Some of them are ill-informed but potentially well-meaning. Others are, I think, going down the infamy route of trying to build their own Instagram platforms and whatever else they've got, and and they're doing it for, quite frankly, malicious capitalist reasons rather than anything else. But it discredits the investigation because people start questioning well, are the police telling us everything now? Um and so? I think that's another issue, and I guess that builds into the communication strategy around tackling that head on sometimes and actually saying these are the facts. Please don't listen to these other people. You know this is important that you get it from me, and that's why I think that comms piece is so important.
Speaker 3:Well, and to that end, the comms piece is absolutely important. But that comms piece is more effective if you've already established yourself as a trustworthy source beforehand. We say in a variety of areas the midst of a crisis is a lousy time to be exchanging business cards for the first time. The midst of a crisis is a lousy time to be trying to communicate trust for the first time. And one of the things that helped me and before I worked at Virginia Tech, I worked as deputy chief and public information officer for another campus and we had suffered the death of a student. It was an investigation showed it to be an accidental death by drowning.
Speaker 3:Elsewhere in the United States there's been these drownings of young college-age men under suspicious circumstances and this group of so-called investigators and some of them do have a significant investigative background and academics coming to the community a year post-incident and offering their hypotheses that this was part of a serial killer.
Speaker 3:Victims and the police had failed in that and they led a reporter around to different aspects of the crime scene or the victim's route of travel, et cetera. And you know one place in particular. They said well, we found this particular graffiti that is associated with this serial killer. Well, I've got photographs of that space from the morning we recovered the victim's body and those markings weren't present then, and so I don't know how they got there and I'm not suggesting those people put them there, but they weren't there at the time of the victim's death and so, but it's stuff like that that I think, if I hadn't had a trusting relationship with our community, that it would have made it harder to sell that this is baloney and this is what happened. And you know, let's not further victimize a family who've lost a son due to a horrific, unfortunate accident. Let's not make it worse for them, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think that's the kind of yeah, that's that sort of you know, the medical perspective of you know, do no harm. That's got to be our position really. But listen, we're coming towards the end, gene. We've spent, you know, a good period of your time talking about this. It's been so interesting and I think it's really, you know, raised lots of really interesting points and I'm sure people who are listening will be thinking actually we need to get things in place because we never know when something's going to happen, and it doesn't need to be, as you pointed out.
Speaker 2:It doesn't need to be a mass casualty event or something of that nature. It could be, you know, you've got an illness that flies through the organisation and all of a sudden you're decimated of your workforce and you can't do X, ys. It can be anything. That can be a flu through a school. It can be anything. We've seen that with COVID, how that managed. So if you were to finish with saying, okay, here's my sort of I don't know three or five top tips, what would they look like?
Speaker 3:Preincident engagement and trust building with your community. When I think about threat assessment team, I would want not just my law enforcement or security colleagues doing that, but all the members of the team, so that they have trust and respect in the different areas of the organization, the community, that they trust. I'm not an expert in communication, particularly during crisis. I'm informed about it, but I'm not a subject matter expert. But I know subject matter experts, and so let's build our connection with them proactively. That was something that we started doing at my original employer, iowa State University, back in the late 1990s. Also, I found that our internal university relations news staff knew about developing crises in the institution because they were already crafting messaging about it, and so we got them to share that information with us and then that led to building a relationship of trust and then we could inform their messaging and they could inform ours. I think that that was very important, very important, I think, if there is a critical incident, that root cause analysis, like the National Traffic Safety Board in the United States that they use, and looking at what were our capabilities, are they robust, are they appropriate to the environment that we're in, the circumstances and the acute nature that we're in and what this incident might have caused, the circumstances and the acute nature that we're in and what this incident might have caused, not just in terms of threat assessment but other areas of safety, security, employee well-being, et cetera and do an honest appraisal of those.
Speaker 3:And no, we can't always, we don't always have the resources for everything to be as perfect as we would like. That doesn't mean we can't do anything, and if it's a half step better tomorrow than what it was yesterday, that's improvement. I'd like it to be a mile down the road. I haven't always worked for organizations or consulted organizations where that's feasible. That doesn't mean we can't do anything. We don't have to be powerless. So, off the top of my head, those are a few things.
Speaker 2:And if, Gene, if people want to get hold of you, want to get in touch with you and communicate with you, how do they do that?
Speaker 3:Well, there's a few ways I'm on LinkedIn. I don't choose to be very active on social media. I don't have the panache and the made-for-video face like you do, philip, so I don't look that distinguished, but I am active on LinkedIn. G Deisinger at De at dicingerconsultingcom is my email. That's probably the best way to get a hold of me and I welcome the opportunity to support any of the listeners where our perspectives or approach could be helpful.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, we'll make sure that we add all those details to the show notes so that anyone who wants to get in touch with you knows where your consultancy is and what have you, gene, it just leaves me to say thank you so much for spending your time with me Hugely interesting, hugely informative, from someone who's actually been there when it's actually happened and has had to manage the consequences of these dreadful acts and dreadful incidents. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and, um great, as always, to speak with you philip, I'm tremendously honored to be asked.
Speaker 3:uh, I in truth, your, uh, your newsletter is what I look forward to, and the great thing about the time difference between you and I is, uh, it's in my inbox when I get up in the morning and I can take my coffee and enjoy the wisdom of Philip. So I always appreciate that and just very grateful for this opportunity to visit with you Wonderful.
Speaker 2:Thank you once again.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Rendell, ceo and founder of Diffuse. Please rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platforms.
