 and welcome to Security Matters. I am your host, Keisha King, and today we're gonna have a really good conversation about security in our schools and other important places. As you know, we had several mass shootings, the most recent in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where a disgruntled employee went in after resigning and shot and killed several of his colleagues. We're gonna talk about now, Safe Defend, a company who is able to help us in reducing the amount of casualties and protect ourselves by getting information to police officers faster. Joining us today, Safe Defend, and our friend Doug, welcome to Security Matters, Doug. Thank you for having me, Keisha. It really is an exciting opportunity and I appreciate you letting us come on today. It's totally my pleasure. I believe in solutions and being solution-oriented. And so while we have had much discussion about mass shootings in our schools and other places of business, I'd love to be more about the results and try and find ways that we can prevent the number of casualties. And it seems as if Safe Defend can help us do that. Before we start talking about them, why don't you tell us about your background? Well, Keisha, I was a police officer for 20 years. I retired as a captain. I ran one of the police academies here in the Midwest for three and a half years. I've trained over 15,000 civilians on how to respond to active shooter situations and I've trained about 700 police officers on what to do in the situation. What was interesting is Safe Defend was a company that was actually founded by a friend of mine. He was a principal at an elementary school and after Sandy Hook in 2012, he started looking at the way we respond to these and he realized that the two biggest aspects were the law enforcement wasn't getting notified in time and we weren't getting our lockdowns done quickly enough. And so he looked at sort of the principles of how do we do that quicker? And obviously, alarm systems is one of the ways it's gonna work. And so he developed an alarm system that can be placed in schools that will notify teachers and staff, notify building occupants and notify police where they're needed within that building. I love it. In a nutshell, faster response is what you're saying. Yes. Yeah. And that's so necessary. Well, one of the things that I look at is I have actually, unfortunately, I had an opportunity when I was in law enforcement, I was a police sergeant and I did respond on an active shooter situation. And by the time we got there, it was in a manufacturing plant. It was a terminated employee that walked out to his car and came back in with a gun. By the time we got there and we did our darnedest to get there as quickly as we could, it was about five minutes of our response time. The perpetrator was gone. Fortunately, nobody was injured in that incident. He did shoot 18 rounds before leaving. But that was one of those situations where somebody actually had to pick up and dial 911. What was interesting is that if there was ever a fire in that building, they wouldn't have to do that. All they'd have to do is just pull on alarm and immediately fire would know where they're needed and would respond. What's interesting is I don't understand in schools why we still think that 911 is the best plan or to try and use two-way radios and things like that. We need to just have our teachers activate an alarm, put that building on lockdown and know that police are responding. It's interesting that you say active and alarmed and that they need to go into lockdown. We have a lot of lockdown drills as it is. And yet there still isn't enough information about where the incident is happening. We just know that we need to get protection or go into the safe corner in our classroom. So we're not fully aware of what's happening and where we have codes that we have to follow. Can you talk to me for a little bit about how safe defend works and how the response time would be quicker for everyone involved? So what we do at Safe Defend is we use just very simple technology. We use text messaging, we use emails to make sure that we alert staff, alert law enforcement. Most 911 centers have text to 911. And so we're able to just piggyback right on that and send a text message right to dispatch. What would happen is that in the event of a crisis all we need a teacher to do is to just reach up and they would have each of these boxes in the classroom. We would have things like this device here in the hallways and then we have siren strobes. Can you demonstrate how that works for us? Certainly and so in a crisis all we need the teacher to do is to just put their finger on that box and then they've activated the system. Oh wow. The system would go off and what it's doing is it would text an email alert, the text here to from text an email alert to going out and what it's providing them is information specific down to like the classroom, the address of the building, the classroom, hallway information if you have blue or color coded hallways, things like that. And then inside the box we have stuff for teachers to assist them help mitigate casualties with trauma response, help them protect the classroom. If the perpetrator was trying to break through the door, things like that. But the most important thing is that law enforcement is notified within seconds where they need to be specifically within that building. And that's the thing that's gonna save lives when we start talking about what's happened in past incidents. Right. So now once a teacher puts their fingerprint on the safety fan box, tons of information is released. But how does the machine know where the incident is happening? It's based upon what information? Because a fingerprint, yeah, please explain. Each of the boxes is coded to the classroom itself. So if this was classroom 201, it would give the name of the high school, the address of the high school, any hallway information say Southeast hallway or Southeast corner of the building. And then it would say room 201. Now the important thing for that is that law enforcement, once they come in, they know specifically where to go. And a lot of dispatch centers have copies of maps. So they'll be able to direct the officers to where, say the cafeteria is where the shop is or the art classroom, things like that. So dispatch can pull up maps within their center and tell the officers where to go within the building. But more importantly is the teachers and staff, they know exactly where they are in relation to that threat. So if they're on the entire opposite side of a campus or if they're in another building, then they can change the way they respond. If I'm in the same hallway as that threat, I know that I'm just gonna go on lockdown, I'm not gonna leave my classroom, I'm getting my kids into the safer corner, turning my lights off, blocking the window, and I'm gonna protect the classroom and the threshold. But if I'm on the other side of that building, maybe I take my kids to the exits and we head out and we start moving away from the building itself and so that we're moving away from the threat. So it provides a lot of information immediately. Okay, that indeed it does. So now this machine is able to contact dispatch for 911 and then- And we can also directly link, we have, so our system is installed in about 12 different states. We have over 150 schools that we're involved in. And we coordinate with their SROs or their local police chiefs or the police departments. And a lot of supervisors or commanders, they have department-issued phones. So we just take their text phone number and we can send that text directly to them. They can then just start directing their officers where they need to go down to the room number you're needed in room 212. And that's what we're starting, we're needing to do is to cut through all the layers of information of the confusion of two-way traffic, radio, people calling up to the front office, trying to figure out what's going on because everybody starts calling in 911 and they say we've got a problem at the high school. But like at Parkland, that was a 45-acre campus, people didn't know where on the campus to go. Exactly, and I wanna talk about that a little bit more with what happened at Parkland, but I want to get a little bit of clarity because what you're saying is this machine is going to let the police know immediately where we are or where the incident is happening based upon the fact that a teacher's fingerprint goes on the machine first and it identifies the room, et cetera. However, how will they know that there's an active shooter? Is there a separate code for active shooters? Or is there something like a special code or something to distinguish between a fire alarm versus an active shooter or a bomb threat or tsunami threat? How will we know what type of emergency that we are faced with? So our system is designed only to deal with hostile intruders so we don't address any of the other threats. There's already fire regulation codes and then there's standards for things like tsunamis and hurricanes and so those alarms are separate and then the responses are separate. So our system is exclusive for the hostile intruder, but in the actual text it'll say active shooter lockdown and what was so important is that we understand that the training comes in where we tell the teachers this is for the type of situation where you have an armed perpetrator who's armed in the building or somebody that's actively hostile towards students and staff and that we need to get the building unlocked out immediately. So the moment that this is activated, you're gonna get what we call a global response and what I mean by that is you're gonna get every law enforcement agency from counties and local police and government entities and security guards that are in that area that are gonna start responding and so when this goes off this is because there is an armed student or an armed perpetrator adult in that building and tend to harm the students in there. So it's only used for that specific purpose. Okay, I got it. So this is specific to that, which is very necessary and I'm grateful that it is, but this sounds like an entirely different type of training that teachers will have to go through. Who provides this training? Who's responsible for that? Well, it is one of the trainings that we do, but it's really not different than anything like the run hide fight or Alice or some of these other trainings. In a lot of these situations, the number one thing we need to know is we need to know that the building needs to be unlocked down and that you need to clear the hallways. And so that's why we have the siren strokes that go off in the hallways so students know to find the closest classroom, not try and get back to their science class or math class, but to get into the closest room. And so what we're doing is, is we're providing information. Number one is there's a threat in the building. So seek shelter or safety. And then the next thing we're doing is following it up with a text message that then tells them where the threat is so that the teacher and staff can make a decision. Do I stay barricaded or do I attempt to run based on what's going on? And then the last thing we do is that we have them a way that they can counter the threat that if someone, you know, provide them with tools like a tactical flashlight and other objects that they can use to prevent people from getting into the classroom. If it happened where the perpetrator was trying to get into a specific classroom. That's what happened in Sandy's class. So who has access to this text message? Is it teachers only? Will students have access? What about their parents? All right, so we definitely won't do parents. And I know that a lot of parents would love to know there's the last thing we need right here is 800 parents flocking to the school before law enforcement gets there. So it's gonna be staff and student, or sorry, staff and faculty, all the adults in the building and then law enforcement is gonna get those texts and dispatch will get those texts. Same thing with the emails that follows up with the same type of information it'll be provided to those people. So that's that first tier of information. The other thing that we do is we also will broadcast this out to say this principles. So if it happened at the high school, we also send texts and emails out to the staff, the administrative staff at the other schools, because they need to go on lockdown. If you have a threat at your high school, every emergency service in the community is gonna be headed to that school. There's nobody to protect the other schools. And we've seen situations where students have talked about creating diversions. So if something's happened at one of your high school, every school in the community goes like locked down because of the potential that all the resources are being used up. And so that's the type of stuff for that. So it's a pre-determined list. These are the people we're putting on that list, law enforcement, whomever they get on that list. The school makes that determination who they want on the list and then they would just get that information in a threat. All right, so it's almost time for us to take a break but I wanna make this point that teachers then have a little bit more power because they'll be able to determine an incident is taking place on the opposite side of campus, for example, and they get to determine where they go. For example, they can run out away from harm's way. With that power though, also comes another aspect of responsibility that I wanna talk to you about when we come back. Because I'm thinking about, or I'm also hearing you say teachers as medics, they will have a responsibility to help in a medical way. So we're gonna talk about that a little bit and then we're gonna talk about Mr. Peterson who got into a little bit of trouble while making a decision for himself in an incident that happened during a shooting at a school. So you are watching Security Matters. I am your host, Keisha King, and we'll be right back after this break. Hi, Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power, Hawaii. With Think Tech, Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch, for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay, and aloha. And... Aloha. I'm Lauren Pair, a host here at Think Tech, Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha, and welcome back to Security Matters. I am your host, Keisha King, and right now we are speaking with Doug from Safe Defend, and we are speaking with him about protecting our youth while they are in school, if in fact they are faced with an active shooter. Safe Defend will help with a quicker response time from medical and police personnel who can get there and come to the rescue as we so desire for them to do. Welcome back, Doug. Thanks for having me, back, Keisha. Indeed. So the last thing we touched on was teachers as medics. Now, I say that tongue-in-cheek because you all actually provide some basic training and tools for teachers to stop the bleed. King, talk to me about that a little bit. Sure. What I think I wanted to touch on right before break, you did say it does empower teachers, and it really does because within the classroom, all the teacher has to do is put their finger down on the box and that's what activates the system. But then they can get into that safer corner, then they can start to work on the light. So it takes one second to make sure that everybody in the building knows that there's a threat and that law enforcement's en route. It's the same principle with the fire alarm. All I have to do is pull down the fire alarm and I know fire department's en route and I know everybody in the building knows that there's a threat. That's what we've done is just taken that. The reason we use the fingerprint is for the security of it to prevent accidental or malicious discharges. If a student puts their finger down on there, it's not gonna do anything, it won't go off. It'll actually read the fact. We get a notification that there's what we call a failure to read, meaning it'll indicate to us that someone was trying to, we call them curiosity touches and that's just when the students are like, what would happen if I put my finger on there? When it comes to the trauma, this is part of the whole federal stop the bleed program, the Department of Homeland Security has come up with this program. We've been doing this for about five years, the DHS program I think came out at the end of 2017, but it's just saying that in a crisis situation, we are overloading EMS resources because they can't get enough ambulances there to deal with say five or 10 casualties immediately. Eventually they will, but in the worst case scenario, you've got casualties that are losing blood and that hemorrhaging is what's going to kill them. And so there's basic stuff that being done just with pressure points, with things like tourniquets and then with some hemostatic agents or gauze pads that can be applied just to slow that down. It's all of this borders on the combat life support which came out of the military and what they realized for battlefield dressings and how the first person there just needed to take the first aid kit, bandage a guy up and keep moving and then the medic would come up behind but it bought enough time that it was actually called life extending measures. And we know in those scenarios in the heat of the moment, all of those seconds matter and that's what we want to do. We want to get in there and we want to save a life. We don't want to lose anyone. Certainly teachers do not want to lose a student and I think that with the proper training they can save a life. However, I think there is also that risk that what if they did all they can and they lose a life. I think that is something that probably every teacher would dread the thought of. So that is something that still needs to be considered and I think that the main point is to not have an active shooter on campus in the first place so that we wouldn't have to be faced with that responsibility or challenge. But moving on, I like the idea of everything that you've said thus far. Tell us about where safe defend is now and how it's working there. So we like to say we have 100% deterrence because in all the schools we've put it into we haven't had any incidents. The biggest thing is that the parents feel a lot better. It is interesting that it's a different time. You're talking about your experience with your teachers and your students and I'm sorry even your children. They kind of grew up in an age where doing a safety or a crisis drill isn't that traumatizing but the parents actually are the ones that really worry about this sort of stuff. But the students handle it. So we just have to understand that this is where we're at and that by doing these drills and practicing how to get into the safer corner we can do enough. Where we're at, we have actually, so we are in government buildings so similar to what they had in Virgin Beach. We have city halls that have our system in. We have manufacturing plants. We have nursing facilities, hospitals. We have business offices that do this. Under OSHA there's a general duty to warn clause so there is actually a requirement that employers be able to notify their employees of a recognized hazard and workplace violence is one of the ones that most employers miss out on and it actually ends up having quite a lot of liability. If you run a business and there's a threat inside your business and you have no way of notifying your employees to seek cover shelter you could be held liable. And those are the type of things. You know, I don't, sorry to cut you off but that is a huge challenge especially for small business owners because you cannot think of all the different ways to really find or to communicate with your employees that there is a safety hazard. Right, and the biggest thing though is that if there was a fire or a chemical spill or a weather related emergency most of us have these procedures in place that this is what we're gonna do and this is where we'll go. This is where we'll seek shelter. This is where our rally point will be if there's a fire and we have to evacuate the building. A lot of buildings just even the smallest five to 10 person in business has that but they ignore the workplace violence stuff and that's what they need to do is to develop these sort of procedures to just maybe take one room and say, all right this is the room where we would barricade in this is how we lock the door from the inside but if you're gonna be in an internal room you need to make sure that either there's a phone in there or your cell phone work. So walk into that supply room and make sure you can call 911 from in there and use that as your safety room. Just basic things like that will actually help employers. That's true, that's true. It's so sad that we now have to have several discussions about workplace violence and the repercussions that we face if we have a plan in place or if we don't could be fatal. I wanna switch gears just a little bit and talk about Mr. Peterson who has found himself in a little bit of trouble because of his actions during an active shooter situation in a school. Can you talk to us about that and your thoughts? So I'm very disappointed from the law enforcement perspective of the actions of Officer Peterson I wanna say that outright knowing that he stood in that same place for about 40 minutes I think according to the video is just devastating to think that he had an opportunity to save some of those lives. What's interesting is on the number of charges that he had is that by the time he got there there were already 24 people that had been shot which is actually kind of devastating to think how quickly was he was there in under two minutes. He didn't go in but he didn't really have the ability to impact those first 24 lives because that's how quick of the ambush happened. He's really being tasked with the idea that if he had taken action he could have made a very big difference on the third floor. In order to understand a little bit let me run through what happened in Parkland. There was a lot of failures because they focused on perimeter security. Again about 88% of school shooters even in workplace shooters even higher they're intimate with the building they're either domestic partners the disgruntled employees or in the case of schools 88% of them are students. So they're already inside the building that's what we saw in the Colorado shooting really very early is a security guard was protecting the perimeter and the students just walked right past and let the guns hit and did the damage. But what was interesting is that the shooter in Parkland shot the 24 people but he went up to the second floor I'm sorry when he was shooting people on the first floor the dust and the gunpowder set off the fire alarm so the people on the third floor couldn't hear the gunfire so they heard the fire alarm and they came out in the hallways but the people on the second floor they heard the gunfire first then the fire alarm went off they knew not to evacuate. So when the perpetrator went up to the second floor he was actually he could be seen looking into windows but all the teachers have their students over in the safer corners with their lights out and the windows block and nobody got injured on that second floor because it was successful. He then the shooter got up to the third floor and did his damage and that's what that's where Peterson had the opportunity to intervene. The bigger thing though is there was a lawsuit from a bunch of the parents in the gut dismissed in 2018 and the federal judge ruled that the under the 14th amendment there was you know as much as you want to say it but police and staff had no duty to actually protect those students which is very interesting to see how this is gonna go from a civil crime standpoint it was dismissed but now they're gonna charge them criminally so I'm sure they know what they're doing I think it does send the right message and that is if you are tasked with protecting those students you are part of that layer of security you can't really opt out and the results can be catastrophic if you do. Right, you know and I think isn't that their motto protect and defend and safety protect and serve protect and serve is the only law protect and serve and yet they failed in that particular case and had the opportunity to make a difference and didn't so tough case for everyone involved tough decision that he had to face and I'm happy not to be in his shoes but I'm hoping that they all know what they're doing and that justice will be served appropriately for all matters. It's tough, very, very tough. I have a question though. Go ahead. Well the one thing that you want to cover is the number one thing that I tell teachers all the time and this comes down to every business is to be able to have a door that locks the Department of Education recommends that if students are in the classroom the door should be locked because if that door is locked all I have to do is get my kids into that safer corner. That's so important. You also need to understand how to use your PA system at Parkland they had this four digit code they had to type in but it didn't work in the hallways it had all this. So if your PA system is being used to put the building on lockdown understand that you need to have speakers in hallways because it might happen in transition time but teachers need to understand I need to know what how do I use, you know how do I call the front office where is that sort of thing? All that they have to think those things ahead of time because in a crisis they're not going to do it. The number one thing they need to do is keep that door locked though. Keep the door locked. You know, you bring up another point though that I wanted to kind of touch on is the volume. You mentioned that in the case at Peterson or Parkland that they couldn't hear the gunshots over the fire alarm. So it's safe to defend loud enough to get louder than the actual gunshots or the fire alarm or what have you. Right, so the safe defense system we really thought through a lot of things. One of the things that our system does is as it goes off for two minutes and then it goes silent and we do that on purpose it's about enough time that any teacher that might be in band or gym class or have a movie going on they're going to hear the fire alarm the students are going to hear it but then we let it go silent because everybody already at this point knows that there's a threat law enforcement's en route but we want police when they show up to not to be able to listen to gunfire we want teachers to be able to hear threats of violence in the hallways getting closer or coming, you know farther away. We want to hear direction from law enforcement. We want teachers to be able to use their cell phones in the classroom. So our system actually does go silent that doesn't mean the threat's over but yes it can be heard over a fire alarm it's about this depending on where it's at but the most important thing that we tell people if the active shooter alarm goes off and then the fire alarm goes off without sort of heat and smoke and fire you might consider what your options are because fire alarms have been used unfortunately to draw students out of classrooms in the past and so it's one of the things that absent the other indicators of a fire maybe you don't evacuate so quickly if you think there's a threat in the building. Right and so and it appears as though SafeDefend also has lights on it which will help if it goes silent I suppose. Correct? Right, the lights will keep flashing and that sort of stuff. So what we've understood at SafeDefend is where we're failing is that we're focusing so much on access control, we're focusing on external security, surveillance cameras, two-way radios and all these things that we've been using I was involved in when I was in junior high my school district had a shooting and the response back in 1983 was to put school resource officers, two-way radios, cameras and locked the doors and after Parkland we're recommending the same thing and so at some point we have to say wait a second why isn't this working? You know the response to a fire is never to say let's put a fireman and walk through the hallways with a fire extinguisher and hope that he can put it out in time. We need to start doing empowering teachers to say what do we need to do? We need police to the exact location as quickly as possible. SafeDefend does that. We need the system on lockdown immediate or sorry the school on lockdown our SafeDefend system does that and we need teachers to be able to respond in the classroom if they have an injured student that is bleeding and law enforcement can't get some time we need them to be able to help that student extend their life long enough for emergency services to get to them. All of those things SafeDefend does. With the teacher. Thank you so much. You know I love the sound of empowering our teachers with actual solutions and it sounds like SafeDefend is a viable solution that we can use to help save lives in the event of an active shooter. We've been speaking today with Doug Parisi right here on Security Matters. I've been your host, Keisha King. Doug, thank you and thanks SafeDefend and thank you for watching Security Matters. We'll see you next time. Aloha.