 Welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studio. We've got another exciting episode of Security Matters for you today. This is going to be very interesting. We call this the future of safer communities and stick around because I believe you'll learn today that prevention of some of these atrocities, some of these tragedies that are happening in our neighborhoods, in our communities can be prevented. And we're going to talk about why. We're going to talk about that with Rick Shaw. He's with us today. He's the CEO and founder of Awareity. He is also the author of a recently published book, The First Preventer's Playbook, as opposed to First Responders, which is sort of right of boom. If you hear right of boom and left of boom, this is a book about getting left of the incident, getting ahead of the incident and preventing it before it occurs. Rick, I really appreciate you taking the time today to join us. I finished the book this morning myself. Absolutely, practically applicable ways to get engaged with prevention. I love it. I was like, wow, we need to start this not only in my company but in the broader security community in Hawaii as a beginning and then just let it grow out. Thanks again for joining us today. Rick, I'd like to usually start with me letting my audience kind of learn a little bit more about you. I know you've been around this game for quite a while, but maybe for those who don't know you, just kind of share your background as much as you'd like to share and kind of bring us up to the present. Sure, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity to share. So yeah, I'm kind of a prevention geek. It kind of goes all the way back to sixth grade. Actually, I wrote about a little bit in the book too, but there was this girl that was special needs and kids with bullier and teaser. And I kind of stepped in and got some friends to step in and teacher to step in. And we made life a whole lot better for this girl because she was having seizures and things. So I kind of learned at an early age about prevention. And then later on in life, I had a daughter in school, not in Columbine, but Columbine happened. And so it really got my attention. And so I really started looking into prevention as far as not just violence, but even cyber. I used to, even before Awarety, I started a company called CorpNet Security. We did a lot of white hat hacking, the good guy hackers. And again, looking for holes and gaps that we can close down to prevent the bad guys from getting in. So that's my background. I had CorpNet turned into Awarety. Been doing research for the last 20 plus years, really looking into as many different failed preventions, if you will, but incidents and tragedies and atrocities, like you mentioned, really looking into those and trying to figure out, was it preventable? And if it was, why wasn't it prevented? And it basically helped me to identify what I call the profile of a failed prevention. And where a lot of the research seems to focus on the profile of the shooter, the mass shooter or the school shooter or the workplace violence. And again, that's good research, but my focus was really different in really looking into that profile of the failed prevention. So that's kind of what the book's all about. That's what we're all about here. And we really try to help organizations to connect the dots, as I like to say, we can talk more about that, but connecting the dots and trying to see that bigger picture so we can get involved earlier, like you said, left of boom. Yeah, it's super important and it's great work. I did it, did you finally have to just lay it out for people in a book? Cause you've been at it for a while. Did it, what inspired the writing? Were there too many non-believers or was it just overwhelmingly complex at the larger scale? Cause it seems really straightforward and maybe it's just the way you laid it out. And I'm a pretty simple guy. So it appealed to me like immediately. So thanks for making it palatable. Yeah, yeah, no, I appreciate that too. But it is complex. It is no doubt or it can be, but there's definitely a lot of non-believers. When I do speaking a lot of times, I would ask the audience, how many people thought like Columbine or Sandy Hook or Parkland or something like that and not just schools, but mass shootings in another place as well. But how many are asking to raise their hand? I'd say, how many think this was preventable? And they'd be two or three hands go up. Wow. And that's about it. And usually those two or three people had read the post incident report. And that's, I had been doing the same thing. So when I'm doing all the research is like, wow, this is preventable. And this was, this is how, and a lot of, a lot of done. And then I would go to these sessions and see that people were not doing the research. They didn't have time, you know, lots of reasons why. So I thought, yeah, I need to, I need to share this research with people, but make it easy. So they don't have to spend 20 years like I spent 20 years, you know, going through all this stuff. But even like you said, I think what 90 minutes to read the book or so, you know, I mean, and now they can kind of get caught up. Yeah, I mean, I, it gives you hope because you've made, you've made prevention probable. Like in other words, this is, if we do these things, we have a very high probability of intercepting an incident before it occurs. Let's talk a little bit about the red flags that are generated. You mentioned it a little bit and you know, the research tends to show that all of these incidences are nearly all of them. There are red flags that other people encounter, people in the community, maybe it's law enforcement, maybe it's a school official, people encounter the red flags, but they don't put them together over time and follow someone to the point at which they go, you know, active with some, and start some sort of an incident that ends up tragic. Is this a, how would you say it's almost 100%? Would you say that it's really rare for someone to just go crazy one day when they've never been crazy, you know, and do something really outlandish based on your research? Absolutely, yeah. Most, and most of the other studies too, when they're looking at the profile of the individual, say the same thing. They're like, nobody just snaps. There's always the escalation. A lot of people use the term escalation. Okay. So there's a lot of, and I use the term at-risk individuals. What I mean by that is someone who has a grievance, somebody who is looking for revenge, they lost their job or they've been bullied or, you know, whatever the case. And unfortunately today in our environment, you know, with COVID and things like that, number of stressors have soared and so have the number of at-risk individuals. And so the problem is even worse today than it was before, but back to the red flags is, yeah, there's almost always people, the term leakage is another term that people sometimes might hear or might use. They're leaking their behavior. So like when they're going through this escalation, going from a grievance to where they start wanting revenge and then they start sort of planning or having ideations really first, then they start having ideations. They make comments or they might put stuff on social media or they tell a friend, they tell a family member, they tell a classmate or a colleague or something. So they leak these things out over time. Sometimes that time can be years, sometimes it can be months, sometimes it can be weeks, but still plenty of time to intervene and disrupt. And so these red flags can be comments, they can be pictures, they can be like pictures of guns or pictures of what drawings of what they might do to someone or thinking about doing to someone. But that's all part of that escalation where they're just basically heading towards that point where they're getting close to that attack. Then they start planning and they start preparing and those kinds of things too, because especially if it's a shooting, they go out and get a gun, they go out and practice, they get maybe their bulletproof vest, they get ammunition. I mean, they do a lot of planning so we can stop those. But it's not just the shootings. I wanna make sure that people understand that it's also like suicides because right now suicides are really have increased a lot because of like work from home, school from home, things like that, but same thing with suicides is a lot of times people leak out some of these different feelings, their depression and things they're dealing with. So whether it's suicide or whether it's shootings or whether it's workplace violence, there's things that sort of boil, come to a boiling point over a period of time. Yeah, I wrote a little paper on LinkedIn and I've spent quite a while back now, but it's MMI Brothers Keeper. And I wondered in our proposed in that paper that when someone expresses to you that they're having these problems, we, it's really incumbent upon us to take that on. And we may not be counselors and we may not, but we need to see that they get some help. They're expressing this for a reason and the reason can become tragic. So, I think part of that is that maybe people are afraid, I know you talk in the book a little bit about the, people are afraid to use certain types of help lines to report things because they don't wanna be called a snitch, that type of idea. Is that a prevalent problem? Like just in the broader, in the workplace community and the school community, I know with kids, it's a big thing, like, oh gosh, you never wanna be a snitch. And maybe that lack of anonymity really is preventing a lot of the reporting that would help these people that are at risk. Great point. And it is a big problem snitching is a big problem. And it's not just for kids. A lot of adults don't wanna, they might not call it snitching, they might wanna say I just don't wanna get involved. I wanna put my job on the line. I mean, it's the same idea, just a different description, I guess. But yeah, it's a big problem because people do see things. And there's really, I'm gonna oversimplify because there's more reasons than the two I'm gonna mention. One of the reasons is snitching, like you said, they just don't wanna come forward. They don't wanna get involved. They don't want someone to retaliate against them. They don't, you know, there's lots of reasons why they don't come forward. There's also reasons like maybe they don't wanna go to a law enforcement website to make the report. Okay, that it's just not, they just don't, some people just don't trust law enforcement websites. It's sad, but it's a gap that's gotten wider and wider. So there's those kinds of things. And then there's the other part of it, and we can drill down further. But the other part of it too is, is there's probably all of us have had an experience where we've told someone, whether it's a friend, we've called the police, we've told our boss, we've told principal if we were in school or whatever, we've told someone, or even told like law enforcement. And then our perception is, is nothing happened. And so the next time we see something, we don't always, it's like, well, they didn't do anything last time. Why would I tell them this time? So there's kind of the two sides of it there where some don't want to because of snitching, some don't want to just because, hey, I told them before and they didn't do anything, but both of those are really bad. Because we need those, like you said, we need those red flags, we need those concerning behaviors. And a lot of times, and this has happened a lot of times in the manifestos, and a lot of people I know, probably don't sit around and read manifestos, but I do, a lot of times in these manifestos, if they do leave one, they'll say that they were actually trying to get caught. I mean, they wished someone had stopped them. They're trying to get help. They're struggling, but when nobody comes forward finally to help them, they're like, well, I'll just carry this thing out then and then they go through with it. So, you know, that's another sad thing that, again, the research sort of uncovered for me. It was like, dang, you know, a lot of these guys didn't even want to do what they did. They just didn't get the help they wanted. Yeah, it's like there's an inability for them to communicate or to connect with someone that listens to their grievance. And so it becomes, you will listen to me by some crazy, you know, some action that they take out on many people or whatever it may be. It's a, yeah, I don't know if that's, maybe something we can even begin to address earlier in schools, you know, to teach communication, to teach empathy. A lot of these things that are kind of circulating back through the corporate world today and hiring an HR practicism of listening to other people, you know, really listening and engaging with their story and understanding that we all have pain and not being embarrassed by the things that scare us or whatever it may be, right? I mean, it's just part of the human condition. Well, that kind of leads to another part of the whole incident reporting piece of the red flags and that is that they get so scattered. You know, and I talked about that in the book too, it's just that, unfortunately, we keep adding more and more and more incident reporting options. I mean, there's like this flawed thinking or just, you know, I don't know what exactly why, but we keep thinking, well, if we give people more and more ways to tell us this stuff, you know, these concerning behaviors and stuff, that's a good thing. Well, it sort of is, but yet if you have, you know, pieces of the puzzle that are scattered all over the place, in other words, like we saw with Parkland, for example, and there's a map you can throw up or a timeline you can throw up on the screen if you've got it handy, but in the post incident report, there were all these puzzle pieces all over the place, but they were, you know, some went to see something, say something at the federal level, some were at the local law enforcement level, some were at the student level, some were at the administration level, some were at friends and family level, they were just scattered all over the place. So if you go to the next little silo slide there that's coming up, you'll, what we found was is, no, not that one, I'm sorry, the one with the circles. There you go. That one is, shows how these pieces of the puzzle, they had all these pieces of the puzzle out there, but they were scattered, and they were scattered across, you know, hundreds, if you will, of different sources, instant reporting, people, departments, systems, locations, you know, police hadn't been to his office, to that shooter's house over 30 times, but the school didn't know that. Wow. So it's those kinds of scattered things that we need to have then a smart funnel type of approach, which is that other picture, but the funnel that brings all these sources together. And that's really one of the, probably the biggest things I see over and over and over over the last 20 years is that everything's scattered. It's just that we got to, you know, we need better ways to bring it together. Okay, well, that's a good spot, I think to take a break, because I want to come back and talk about how we're going to build these safer communities in the future. Stick around, we got a one minute break, we'll be right back with Rick Shaw. Hey, Alaha, welcome back to Security Matters, we're talking with Rick Shaw about the future of safer communities, his new book, The First Preventer Playbook. I highly recommend you get your hands on this and get started with it. We're building into how you go about building a community of helpers, of first preventers, but we were just talking before we went to break about the disparate reporting mechanisms, incidents, let's call them red flags, prior to an incident about people are getting sent into all these different catchment systems, let's call them that. And those systems don't talk all the time and they don't talk very well. So Rick, what's your research sort of indicate there? There are literally probably hundreds of these types of catchment systems for red flags that just don't talk. Yeah, they don't. And it's, they are basically almost every single, one of them is a silo. And that's the sad thing is, is that, and that's the fact, we do a lot of research with kids and surveys and we find out that when they report bullying, this is 10, 20,000 kids now we've done survey with only about 18% of the time do things get better. Wow. Usually that's because they've told a trusted adult and then ended up in that, not blaming trusted adults, it's just they only have that one piece of the puzzle, they don't see everything else out there so they can connect the dots and see the bigger picture. But that's exactly what we're seeing, whether it's bullying like I just described or some of these mass shooters or these workplace violence incidents or suicide or the human trafficking drug abuse. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. It's the same kind of thing with all of them. And you're right. It's just that a text line may not connect with the hotline, which doesn't connect with an app, which doesn't connect with the verbal, someone telling someone and things like that. And so we need that, like we were talking about funnel, we need a smart funnel approach that not only collects it all, but then gets it to the right team members because the right team members or like suicide team is gonna be probably different than a person who's threatening weapons. Okay? So not only we have to collect it, then we have to route it. So that's why I call it a smart funnel because it's gonna collect it and then route it and share it with the right people, the right team members and the right resources. And like you and I were talking, those could be subject matter experts, those could be law enforcement, those could be legal, they could be behavioral, mental health, those kinds of individuals too, because what we find is most communities have those resources, maybe not all organizations have those resources, but communities do or states do or whatever, the resources are out there, it's just they're not being connected very well. Yeah, and it looks like a fairly, not daunting effort, but to get everyone together, to understand the value of the working together, what information can they share? It could definitely be a full-time job for several people once it gets to the community level, obviously. So we do need some funding behind some of these efforts, but a lot of these folks are doing these jobs already, like school counselors, for example, probably have files on incidents or potential incidents that are at risk, students that have been brought to them, obviously law enforcement has, people that have been reported for at, and a lot of this information I feel like is, maybe those organizations protect that, like they feel like there's a safety or a security confidentiality sort of wrapper on that information, but if that person's escalating their behavior or they're getting further along, there's an idea of duty of care out there that maybe allows them to share this information. Could you talk about that a little bit, because it's brought up in the book, and I don't know if everybody understands, you know, when it's kind of incumbent upon them to share this information about a potential problem or potential at-risk individual. Yeah, duty of care, duty to report, things like that, absolutely correct. The duty of safety for organizations provide a safe environment, things like that, but some of the biggest barriers are FERPA and HIPAA. Okay. And that confidentiality you're talking about. So people are hesitant, I'm not picking on anybody here when I, because I'm not trying to single anybody out, but like counselors you mentioned, I mean, sometimes counselors have information and they don't want to share it, but it's just because they don't have the right tools because they don't really want to put it into a student information system because they could make the kids record for, all of school. So they don't want to put it in there or they don't think they can share it. So having again, this secure community approach with this funnel that feeds into this community platform, what that does is it helps you take advantage of the rules of HIPAA that you can share it. You just got to share it in a secure way and only share it with team members. Same thing with FERPA or the education environment. So it's actually something they can do. You just got to have the right tools to do it. But that's a misunderstanding that I see a lot out there. And so I'm not thinking I can't share it or I shouldn't share it, but that's not correct. They really need to share it. Yeah, we've mentioned with Parkland where law enforcement had been there 30 times. There's no reason they could have shared that but they didn't have a funnel and a plat secure, you know, community-wide platform to share that with their community-wide team. Yeah, so that information just doesn't get connected, right? Let's talk about how do we build it out? So let's start with just a small example of a subdivision or a small community. I don't know on the mainland how like Thousand Oaks California, I don't know how big that is actually, but in Hawaii, we've got like ever beach, we've got Waipahu, we've got smaller communities of probably, you know, 1,000 households or 500 households. There's a local school and a local high school, middle school. How do we start with that? How do we get the book in their hands and then sort of engage them to put together a team that can then grow? You know, if you could grow those in each community, ultimately you could connect them with city-wide resources and statewide resources, things like that. Yeah, great question. And that's one of the things that in the book too, it talks about Serpe County, if you remember those. Yeah. We've got a whole county in Nebraska doing this to where they've got multiple school districts, multiple police departments. That's the bigger end, but I just wanted to share that because it can be big or it can be, we've got small rural schools in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska, and not just Nebraska out there, but I'm just using two examples that in Nebraska that they, you know, both ends of the spectrum, if you will, where they have just a small little town and they're using it to connect the dots in their small and leverage their resources that they don't have like in a school or a house of worship or something along those lines, but they do have the resources in the community or at least in the state. So yeah, so they can ramp this up. Like you said, it's really just getting together that community team, I use that word loosely. I mean, it could be a threat assessment team, a risk team, safety team, care team, whatever they call themselves, but the idea is getting together these team members and then having a, it's part strategy and part tools, but to start putting in your strategies and your tools to say, how are we gonna collect all this information, route it to the right people so we can start taking more immediate actions that left of boom you were talking about, you know, the weeks and months ahead of time versus waiting until we have to scramble our first responders to respond to a situation. So it's not hard, it really isn't. I mean, the book helps, but you know, certainly we're all about helping people so they can contact us obviously, but we wanna help people see that that strategy and those tools are not that hard, they're not that expensive and they just, they help them leverage all their resources. They currently have, it's just they're not connected together so they can, you know, they're not reusable. Yeah, I've definitely heard from, more you probably read more in the paper and things I get here locally in Hawaii about the lack of resources, right? The schools aren't funded and the behavioral health systems are overwhelmed and the homeless on the street are being kicked out of behavioral health centers and all these types of things. Are there grant resources? Are there federal funds available maybe that we can bring into a state or into a community from the state? Have you seen examples of that where we could fund people to sort of do some of this work? Great question. And actually we've had multiple entities, schools, communities, whatever businesses even to go out and use grants and those could be public safety grants, those could be DHS like Department of Homeland Security grants, they could be law enforcement grants. There's all kinds of different grants that we've currently utilized to get things started. And then like even SARPE started with grants but now it's paid for because they see the value of it. So they use the grants to get started. Another thing we're seeing that I'm really excited about is getting so like, you know, we see how businesses now are really trying to pull together whether it's for economic reasons, you know, they need business, we need to recover, right? But we can't have unsafe conditions for businesses to recover and not just businesses, schools and everything else, but now businesses are taking a proactive role in basically joining together and basically more like a foundation or like a Chamber of Commerce, you know, I'm working with certain different Chamber of Commerce right now where they're starting to bring the businesses together to basically stand this thing up and get it going. And that's exciting too because that way we're not waiting for a grant. We're not waiting for a law. We're not waiting for first responders, you know, and things like that. I mean, first responders are busy enough. We don't wanna put this on them too. So that was one of the whole ideas behind we gotta have offense and defense, first preventors and first responders bring that together, but the businesses, the foundations, they can do that. Yeah, for sure. I'm gonna propose that we work with the Chamber here and that we obviously we've got a large hospitality community in Hawaii that's interested in protecting its guests. So there's a good path forward that I'm gonna put my safety director on that and see if we can't get some momentum going here. Rick, I really appreciate your time today. Any closing thoughts? We've got a minute or so left just to share with the audience. My advice to them is to get moving, get started today. But what would you share from your perspective? Well, there's, I would just say it's action. You're right, they gotta take action because they're, I don't have it with me, but sometimes when I'm talking to people, I'll hand them a recipe for like chocolate chip cookies or a recipe for chocolate cake. And they look at me like, dude, are you crazy? And I'm like, you know, what we're doing is we're doing that a lot of times with our guidelines and our recommendations and our reports, these are all recipes. Now they're good, we gotta have them, but you gotta get the tools to go make the, you know, make the cake or make the cookies. That's what's missing is we don't always have the tools in these communities to make it, to bring the ingredients together and make what we want, which is a safer community or a, you know, for a friendlier community, a united community, those kinds of things, but we can do that, but it takes action. And that's what we wanna help them with. Awesome, it takes action folks, get to it out there. Rick, I wanna get you back in here a year or so after we get out of COVID and we'll see how we're doing on the recovery phase of this of our country and see what you've seen with the research after that point. Thanks again for joining us today so much, I truly appreciate your time. Aloha and aloha everybody out there, take care. We'll see you next week. Thank you.