 All right, everyone, welcome back. So we are going to be getting into our first panel discussion. This one is about navigating First Amendment audits. We have as moderator today, Kara Sheetz. Thank you, Kara. And she's joined today by two panelists, Bill Cole. He's with Berkeley Public and then Anne Tran. She's with San Jose Public. Thank you very much. Everybody, I wanted to start with a quick show of hands. We're talking about First Amendment audits. And who here is familiar with what a First Amendment audit is? Just raise your hand. Many folks, wonderful. So First Amendment audits, just to summarize, are individuals' attempts to catch government employees violating their First Amendment rights by inciting them to deny their constitutional right to film or photograph in a public space, such as a library. So just another show of hands. Who here feels prepared to encounter a First Amendment auditor? Some of you, but not all of you. So Bill and Anne have both had experience with First Amendment auditors firsthand from different sides of the experience. So I just want to ask you guys first to start off. What is it that First Amendment auditors are trying to accomplish? Yeah, Bill, why don't you go ahead and start? I'll go first. They're trying to get a rise out of you more than anything. They would really like for you to react to them emotionally, tell them to leave, tell them all the stuff that they can't do, and then call the police. I would recommend not doing any of that. Sometimes the police will be necessary. And I think Anne can speak to that better. But really, they're trying to provoke some sort of outsized reaction from you as a public employee. And what they would really like to do is get your security staff, if you have any, all riled up. And we'll see evidence of that soon. I think the only thing that I would add to that is that sometimes they test your patients a lot, not only yours, but also the patients of the patrons or the children in the room. And that's our biggest concern at San Jose Public. And I hope that we could have a discussion on what's the best way, because I don't think there is really a single best way to respond. And I think the auditors have different personalities, too. So what was your experience, Bill, with a First Amendment auditor? It was a hoot. So I managed the Central Library at Berkeley Public, which is a large urban location. And should I just show a clip? Let me show a clip. I've got a couple of clips. That's not the one that I want. How about this one? Here we go. So to set the scene, this individual, George, we're tight now. He came in filming. He walked in filming with his stick and his phone on there and immediately provoked an altercation with another patron. And then he wanted security to respond to that altercation, because they were going to fight, and they said spicy words at each other. And really, he wanted security to call the cops on this other patron. Watch me, what? You watched me, what? You said you were here yesterday for the same guy, even though this is my first time in Berkeley, California? That's a lie. So we're going to have to find out, what is this guy doing? What is this guy doing? I want you to get a good picture. Yeah? Hey, Bill. You got a good picture? You got a good picture? You can do that. Yeah. So it's part of your policy to identify, man. Allied Universal? Is that it? He's taking pictures. He's taking pictures. Yep. He's taking pictures. Okay. Yeah. He's taking pictures. He actually can't. He can't? Yeah. No, it's a public space, and he has the right to do it. Well, they're already calling the police. Yeah. Okay. Hi. Hi. I'm Bill. Hi, Bill. I'm George. George. Nice to meet you. I'm the Central Library Services Manager. Is that it? Perfect. Yeah, first things first, I walked in peacefully, and my, watch me what? So there were some falsehoods in George's statements there. He didn't walk in peacefully. He walked in antagonistically. And he also was not live streaming this. He was representing that he was live streaming it, and that people in the chat were giving him feedback. Not true. He claimed that somebody in the chat had looked up allied securities policy. Also not true, because their policy is that the guards don't have to give their names. And then we'll get into, like, who has to identify themselves in what way. But so there were some challenges in that interaction because staff wasn't quite sure what he could and couldn't do and how they were supposed to respond to that. So security was a little bit at sea. Our staff person, Sam, was a little bit at sea, but he stayed nice and calm, which I thought was good. And I don't know, at one point in there, there was somebody in the, there's a voice in the background that said, is Bill there? Because they called me, and then I came out, which I thought was an excellent response to, I'm not sure what to do here. So then I went out there and faked it. And I think that's enough video for now. I can, yeah. That's good enough for video, I think. Yeah, so how does policy come into play when a First Amendment auditor walks into a library? I would say for us in San Jose, the thing that we reckon with is that we've explained to our staff that we are a limited public forum. And for us, consent is part of our policy. So we have a behavioral policy that advises against, or that limits the ability for anyone to photograph and film without consent. And structurally, how we enforce that policy is through suspensions and things like that. So for our staff, the advice is explicitly tell the First Amendment auditor, I do not consent to being photographed and filmed. And that usually is a more antagonistic way of greeting them. And that pretty much sets the first trigger as to how we either escalate or de-escalate depending on who we're dealing with and which auditor comes through our doors. But it's structured around the behavioral policy and we have a privacy policy too that is central around consent. So can you clarify, was that a pre-existing policy or was it a reaction to First Amendment audits? Luckily it was pre-existing. So it's been in place since we had surveillance cameras put in and it really helped us frame around, you know, filming and protecting our patrons' privacy and in the things that they view in our spaces. And so for libraries that don't have this explicitly written into their patron conduct policies or their behavior policies, maybe Bill, you can speak to this. At what point does the First Amendment right of an auditor cross the line with library behavior policy or a patron conduct policy? Sure. So this might come as a surprise to some of you but luckily we do things a little differently. And we actually do have a policy that people can't film in the library but there is some question as to the legality of that policy and probably a lot of you are in a situation that is similar to that where it's stated in your policy you have to have permission to film but the city of Berkeley does not really support that. They say you're in a public space, it's a limited public forum. We cannot really support a rule that's not legal and the same is true with the whole filming children or taking pictures of children thing. It's like they're at the park. You could take a picture of them. So we're in this gray area and probably a lot of you are too where it's in the policy, we can't really enforce it and now what do we do? And what we do is react rather than have a really great plan stated ahead of time. So what we didn't see in the video and I'll share a link to the whole thing if you want to go through the whole gory details of all of my interaction with George. But I sort of placated him a little bit, tried to get him a library card unsuccessfully and then highlighted some of the architectural features of the building because that was his stated interest. Also not true. And then he went one way and I ran through the rest of the building and went to every public service point that we have and talked to the staff at each spot and let them know that he was coming and what was within their realm of sort of response. And to kind of get to I think what you were getting at, Kara, is we have an obligation to tell them who we are. So I told people if you ask you what your name is tell them your name. You can just give them your first name and that's fine. If he wants contact information you give him the main line, 6100. He can call and go through our phone tree. Won't that be fun? And then you can offer him library service and if he sticks his camera in your face and makes you uncomfortable you can walk away. So the dividing line for us is once staff goes into a staff only space George can't follow. And I made it very clear to staff I don't care if you abandon the desk. If you don't want to be part of that interaction if you go in the back of house maybe let somebody know that would be helpful because then I can go out there and manage George. But you don't have to like sit there and suffer through that. So I think, I don't know, I feel like that's a good course of action to give staff an out without breaking the law. Right, so then it would be advisable if it hasn't happened already in your libraries to very clearly mark employee only areas. Is that something that you guys have both undertaken in your systems? Yeah, we already pretty much had that for the most part. And then Anne, I know that your situation is a little bit different at San Jose Public Library in that you have this pre-existing no-film policy as well as you guys have your own security in-house. How does that sort of assist or hinder when dealing with First Amendment auditors? So for our system, we were fortunate enough to have a hybrid model. I know that not every system can have a hybrid model, but we were able to basically split our security coverage for the branches that have high, severe, high-risk incidents. We place contract security most of the days at those branches, and then we also have in-house capacity. So we hire senior security officers, and we train them through our standard operating procedure, let them learn and train with PD on all of our behavior policies and enforcements, and then they split up the same geographical division, if you will, with San Jose PD's beat map. So they have that integration with San Jose Police Department, and the contract security helps in some ways as a deterrence, if you know. It's a visible deterrence, and then our in-house security would often complement their security posture with enforcing suspensions, asking people to leave and coordinating that notification to PD and being there for our staff if PD decides to show up and take reports and those kinds of things. And it's a strange model, but it's helped us a lot in terms of triage, preventative, and then being able to ensure that we have that coverage and that knowledge in-house, so that as contract security experiences high rates of turnover, our in-house security can then train and brief them for the new oncoming batch. And so, Bill, have you ever had to call the police on the patron? It's in general. Yeah. And I imagine a lot of you here have experienced that in some capacity. With First Amendment audits, though, I think it's safe to say that the goal is not to have to involve police or security and that we want frontline staff to be empowered and prepared to sort of disempower this auditor by what? What would you guys say is the best approach to dealing with an auditor? Killing them with kindness? That's what worked for me in my George situation, where I acted like I was excited for him to be there. We talked about some of the features of the library. I directed him to some of the cool architectural aspects of the building because that's, again, what he said. He acted like, first time in Berkeley, thought the building looked cool, which it does from the outside. And he wanted to check out the architecture. He was at City Hall the day before. So it wasn't his first time in Berkeley. And that kind of gets to a point that it was unfortunate that City Hall didn't let us know that he had hit them already because four warrants is four armed. And I think we might have been better prepared for that interaction had we known. And so I would urge those of you who are in a position to interact with your larger municipality to have that conversation ahead of time. Hey, if they hit one of us, that would be more of us. So we should all kind of be, you know, working from the same playbook and have a similar approach. And, yeah, so the scampering around the building and prepping staff ahead of time was, I thought, beneficial, but didn't need to happen if we had been a little bit more prepared. I like Berkeley. We told our staff some, we operated a little bit differently when we were first notified of a First Amendment audit. It was not a peaceful tour of the building. It was actually more contentious. The person came in, asked for, you know, support with making a library card and then proceeded to accuse our staff of discriminating against their disability. And then it got more contentious as he started following female staff around with the camera, started going up to patrons with the camera and then calling them names and then filming the inside of our staff room. So unfortunately we did have to call our security team and police. And luckily for us, we were able to have a very frank conversation with our city attorney's office and the police department. And basically, you know, it's one thing to let them not get a rile out of you. It's another thing for junior staff clerks, especially the ones that work on the weekends, to have to deal with this constant borderline harassment behavior from our, the First Amendment auditor that showed up in our branches. And we gave them guidance that they can leave the library, let them or leave the floor, go into the back room and notify the branch manager and call our security team so that we can go in and take that pressure off the staff. Luckily for us, we have a municipal code that enforces trespassing a little bit more strictly and we got agreement from the district attorney's office that should things escalate, it never really starts with, it never stops with just filming, right? It's, it's harassing staff following them, continuing to fill them, badger them and test their patience and this is what children are running around watching and it just creates this uncomfortable environment for everyone. And so, unfortunately, we did have to call police twice and police officers did show up and the conversation shifted from can this person come back to the library? What suspension, you know, protocol are we following here and we've advised our staff that it's trespassing because we've asked them to stop and they wouldn't. But it also, we had to do a training with our staff and what clear things needs to be related to the operator, the 911 operator when they call. Is this person following you is the camera up in your face? Like, these are the things that the officers need to know ahead of time so that they can respond appropriately. And so, it's a different take than, you know, the peaceful resolution that Berkeley's been able to do with, you know, their first amendment auditor but it really just depends on who shows up at your branch and we've been unfortunate enough to experience like the more aggressive ones and when we when the videos show up on YouTube, we actually had a librarian get to the point where he followed the staff outside gave or followed the auditor outside and read out his number and his name and he made he made the video made some rounds, you know, through whatever channels the first amendment auditors share and we started getting threats and calls and we had to work internally and as far as security team to field all of those and relay that to police because our librarian was African-American and we started fielding a lot of racist and very mean, scary comments because they knew who to call so I just want to jump in here we do have rules in Berkeley and they're like some of what you were talking about and is where we would start to draw lines, okay, you're following a staff person or another patron around in the library now you're interfering with their comfort or safety and we have a rule for that and we will enforce that so had that occurred that's where we would have started to get into our rules of use policy and enforcing that he didn't do that with us but in like a different scenario we would have had a different approach for sure also I made perhaps a grave error in handing him my business card which he then filmed so I have called my office with some really colorful language and racist commentary about our security guards and that was awesome I didn't bring those audio clips for you because I don't think you want to hear them but yeah, that's certainly an issue I actually I don't really care, I find them somewhat amusing because they're just so off base and ridiculous but yeah, the harassment aspect they know where we work they could just show up again and that's a concern so that's where it kind of starts to gray the line with behavior policy that's where the First Amendment rights are sort of sunsetting in a way and harassing behavior is now in violation of your policy so in terms of preparing staff and preparing your system for something like this it sounds like having a really clear understanding of your policies not just your local institution policies but local laws in regards to harassing behavior you know and did you have to coordinate with the city attorney at all in dealing with the harassing behavior of the auditor? Yes, and part of that is that when we call police depending on the officer some know the trespass policy at SJ Public very well, some don't and then it also helps us have this conversation about like what happens when it goes beyond trespassing what if this person goes back when we suspend somebody from the one branch, they're suspended from all 25 of our branches how do we keep that consistent and that notification across the system how do we enforce that and we really rely on the core memory of our in-house security officers to do that but in terms of enforcing it the duration of how long they are suspended works in our favor because once our staff makes that justification then we can say it's not only trespassing it's harassment, it's verbal abuse of our staff it's you know police has been able to uphold assault and battery just because of the proximity of the camera to our staff's faces so those things help it helps us reinforce and usually it takes the wind out of the person for a while but internally like we have to constantly reiterate the training and our staff really benefit from training on what they should say to the operator because sometimes things come off as not as bad and sometimes it's really bad and police to show up and it's not that bad so it's a constant marriage between training police working with our district attorney and upholding the municipal codes that apply so it starts with trespassing but there's other penal codes for assault, battery stalking defining harassment and we rely on the police departments training to their officers when they show up that these are the things that would apply so that they won't have to ask our librarians what penal codes do you think applies here yeah don't ever call the police and say there's a guy filming in the library they're not really going to respond to that if you call them and say there's a person here who is in violation of our rules he's harassing people he's making people feel unsafe now you get a response from PD but filming is not going to get a rise out of them probably and I think no? we're nearing the end of our time because we want to have time for questions from you all but just to sort of summarize Bill I want to bring it back to your comment about having the main line to hand out to people especially in light of the fact that one of their their go to seems to be once they come in and film they're posting their videos wherever they're posting them and then there's continuing harassment from others so as civic employees we give our names but you don't have to give your direct line you can just give the general line do you have any other summary advice for folks about preparing staff especially frontline staff I would say keep it really simple think like two or three things that they can remember this is how I should respond and get a manager or an administrator involved as quickly as possible when you have one of those even if the person is just walking around filming and not violating other aspects of your rules of use probably your manager and or other administrator wants to know that that person's in the building and would like to come out and help to manage the situation and the only thing I would add is ask your staff to not follow that person outside yeah don't ever do that good advice that's a good rule okay so I think we have time for questions if anyone has any questions hi there so my question is actually around your volunteers that are in the library at the same time that an admin auditor comes through how have you prepped or trained your volunteers in their response also in the space we for us we rely on our security team to do touch point training so every time that there is a call for you know a theater disturbance our security tries to get there in time and then we do tradings with the branch manager so this is you know these are the talking points that we want our staff to relay including volunteers we don't separate the volunteers from the staff they're included in part of how we think around policy enforcement so we do those touch point training usually I have my security team follow up within a day at that branch and do that kind of scenario based training if you will at the branch so that our junior staff knows what to do that includes the volunteers yeah so the rebooted post pandemic Berkeley public library volunteer program coming soon watch the space but I think that our direction in general for volunteers is if you encounter an interaction in the stacks or out in the wild that you don't feel prepared for uncomfortable with refer that to the staff you know take it back to the desk like divert them back to people who have been trained because you know sometimes the volunteers are really just there to kind of you know pull your router or shelf stuff or what have you and you wouldn't want to rely on them to be the responder to that sort of situation thank y'all for being here this morning and for sharing there we go thanks guys have you found any kind of formal or informal ways to support staff who have had kind of a traumatic encounter with these auditors to kind of help them feel safe in the library again or you know how to manage dealing with trolls who have their contact information at work or things like that yeah my approach to the trolls has been sharing these these voicemails with my coworkers and having a sort of a laugh about it but that's not really you know what the staff needs I've only done this once and probably has better information about the sort of aftermath because I kind of picked this off so that staff didn't get traumatized I would say I mean for our system we rely on our operations unit relies on the public services of the librarians and their division managers to support us right so we always have that continuous feedback loop and so when there is a traumatic incident not just first amendment auditors assault in our libraries those kinds of things I rely on my counterparts and the division managers in public services to work with the branch managers and really follow up with staff on what employee assistance benefits would be available to the staff we notify our HR department and basically say like these are all the resources that you can get help don't rush back and we work with each staff on an individual basis to make sure that by the time that they get back to the branch they're comfortable and if not we have continuous check-ins and then really luckily for our security team our staff find a lot of comfort and how often they visit and how often they check in and we started off the year with 2.5 full-time employees were going to 10 so the idea is that by the time that 6 months from now turns around we would have 10 fully trained fully integrated in-house security staff that can spend at least 2 hours at a branch working with the staff being part of the team and really knowing the community and I think that like incident response and aftermath one of the things that staff seems to really appreciate is having an opportunity to share with their co-workers I think this would be a perfect sort of conversation for a staff meeting like a small team meeting and you could have multiple small team meetings where you talk about here's what happened here's how it went here's how we could do that differently next time or like nailed it maybe ideally that would be great and then I know that staff feels safer in this space when they feel supported by other staff so there's kind of a rallying point there I think that would be a good approach so our city attorney has given us a little bit of guidance on how to handle these First Amendment audits in regards to the California state laws protecting patron privacy so for instance reference transactions that might be being filmed where displays of what they're checking out is popping up what have you guys done or what advice have your city attorney has given you in that regard a lot of the same lines for us it's really we use the patron privacy the state's patron privacy guidance or regulations as what is consent and what is not right so if that person goes up to a patron who's reading a book and films and that patron says yeah you can film me then obviously we're not going to tell our staff to follow this person around unless you know there's other people out there that says I don't consent and so we advise our staff to have that conversation up front with each other and then if that person goes through we tell our staff to just notify the branch manager so that they can help us the district attorney the district attorney's office basically said it's more enforceable to to make that justification for trespassing and we have a muni code in San Jose that is a little bit more strict than you know trespass violations and that's what you get down to the enforcement side it's what we tell our staff that you know that person is suspended will follow that route and it's usually around how to keep this person from coming back to the branch unfortunately but we have a re-entry process where we can reintegrate them later we haven't gotten really any more guidance than kind of what I already shared with staff which is if you ask for your name you have to give it if you ask for contact information you have to give it and then you don't have to stay there and continue to engage with that behavior yeah so we didn't get a ton of additional information from our city manager but we did get that so we sort of supplemented that with our responses I would like more clarity on the law and policy and how they interact to my understanding a person can't be trespassed from public property unless they are doing something illegal something that is against policy maybe not so much also what is the expectation of privacy in public I mean we have people watching porn on computers in our libraries where children abound and so however you may feel about first amendment auditors however anybody may feel about them is what they are doing legal do they have the right to film in public do they need a person's consent does the person have the right to expect privacy or expect not to be filmed you can't trespass a person's eyes so I think we need to know what the legal parameters are and have a uniform policy our mission statement says that we are dedicated to providing access to information, education and the joy of reading I'm sure their statement is something like they want to provide access and make sure everybody's first amendment rights are enforced and are respected I just feel like it doesn't have to be antagonistic and we need to know exactly what what policies are what the laws are and what people can and cannot do and that's what's going to help us to face the public with good information and be good citizens yeah I agree with that and I think that that's the reason that we have had to take sort of a light touch approach and that's why we weren't once once we clarified what he couldn't do in my interaction he wandered around the library for a good 20 minutes maybe longer filming the whole time and we didn't stop him from doing that because that was his right honestly I don't think George is a very good first amendment auditor he didn't do a great job he could have gotten a lot more of a rise out of us by doing things like filming people or filming them reading a book where it gets a little blurry there right he did go around behind the staff service point which is not a great design of a service point but that's a different conversation and he was filming over their shoulders to their computer screens now potentially if part of the patron information had been on there we would want to curtail that and have a right to film that which is why we need to work on that service point right so well I would say if I could just jump in I think you really hit the nail on the head with your comment that's exactly it that's the essence of what we're getting at is that you need to know your local policy you need to know the law for the state of California and for your ordinance for your city that's exactly what a First Amendment auditor can and cannot do I mean generally speaking they do have a right to film and photograph in a public space and all of us as the public not as staff you do not have a reasonable expectation to privacy in a public space however you as a public citizen can say I do not consent to being filmed and that's between you and the First Amendment auditor we shouldn't be stepping into that interaction as staff we don't have that reasonable right to privacy in the workplace and that's why we can be filmed but our patrons have the right to ask not to be yeah they have the right to ask not to be we need a mic this is what I'm saying I think we need clarification because if they they can ask somebody not to film them we all have that right to ask somebody but it doesn't mean it doesn't mean the person has to stop filming them now they may not be able to use it commercially but then maybe they can just stick it on the internet on YouTube but how we feel about it is not really that relevant the point right we need to know what the laws are because I wouldn't like somebody just coming up and filming me walk away if I could if I'm on the job I'm just going to keep doing my job and try not to get them upset but do they have the right to keep doing that they're in a public place that they pay taxes for and I believe they do but I'm not sure I really think we need some serious advice on it I think the what we've been telling our staff to is that like you imagine having a conversation explaining the laws and policies that are in place to somebody that is either antagonizing or just asking for that constant attention feedback so we've advised our staff to like just print out the policies that we have this is the behavior policy this is the media policy that pertains to the city of San Jose and then we also asked them to post no filming without consent and really that consent piece is what anchors our response or lack of thereof and it helps curtail it to some extent but you're right we don't have clearly stated California or federal policies around filming and the definition of public spaces if I were to tell a clerk to define that a 19 year old who this may be their first job it would be an impossible ask for them and that's really where the de-escalation tactics that we rely on our in-house security team comes in because the conversation doesn't really involve consent anymore it's just you know you're creating an unwelcoming environment the staff can't do their job right there's a policy and I think there's a penal code on preventing public employees from conducting their job and so those are things that we train our system on is just can you demonstrate that this is preventing you from conducting your job is this person making you fearful that's where the de-escalation from our security team usually happens but if we have an antagonistic person that continues the badger then the enforcement side is really around consent for us but yeah we ran into the same issues with talking to our city attorneys on what's applicable and it's even more frustrating when we leave it to our staff to like define what you know penal codes should apply and what shouldn't and our best way is that we basically sent out a training in FAQ and like we make sure that it's at the branches so when they do get badgered or when a first amendment auditor shows up everything is in writing that just cuts down the interaction sometimes thank you for all your questions or answers sometimes people they think unintentionally or maybe with intention are falling into this bracket and I'm thinking more specifically with youth a lot of youth come in to the libraries and antagonize other or try to provoke or you know for YouTube content for TikTok content for fun and I'm just wondering if you can speak a little bit on your experience in those situations perhaps and how you might or or yeah how you might address items with youth if that's even come up with you or if that's something that you know is looking to be addressed and then also someone just came up in my ear a few minutes ago and mentioned that they would like to see a training video made to widely distribute to help people and clarify some of these answers I think the question about the sort of youth I don't know the sort of TikTok of the library we would lean into our rules of use in general like if you are causing a disturbance in the library and you know in trying to capture your viral video then we're going to cut you off there or if you're interfering with staff or harassing staff in some way again we have rules about that so that's not okay it's not about the filming it's about the other behavior that you're exhibiting in conducting that filming and yeah I think a training video would be pretty good I do want to share I just stumbled across this the Michigan Library Association if you go to their site they have some really great information specifically about First Amendment auditors sort of do's and don'ts including a really helpful illustrated reaction to an auditor that went wrong and then that same reaction with it going right so I would suggest you guys search that up I took the time to go back and look at some of George's other videos and he got some pretty spicy reactions from different people so actually watching those other videos could help you feel prepared for your interaction with him well thank you so much and they kindly are sharing their contact information so if you have more specific questions please do reach out there we go if you want to see the full interaction with George our good friend you can do it here but thank you we're going to take lunch now so please be back around one o'clock thank you