L.O.G. 163 Preventing School Shootings with Adam Blanton

All right, well, good morning, Greg, and good morning to our guest, Adam Blanton. Adam, thank you so much for jumping on with us today to talk about everything that we're going to jump into. It's good having you on the show finally.

Yeah, absolutely. Make-A-Wish reached out to you guys. I'm glad you see that he's still accepting those. So we have a sponsor for today's show: the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Well, in addition to that, first of all, everybody that's on the call, you have to know that this has been what, probably 18 months coming? So thankfully, our schedules all meshed, and it's great to have Adam on. The only initial question I have, Brian, for Adam is, "How is our dear friend Brandon?" And tell him, please, from us that we loved him in Dune. He was great.

Absolutely, I will let him know.

Yeah, he's doing well, still living our Penn & Teller routine where he, you know how much he has to say, right? Just said he talks and talks and talks.

That's so funny. For those of you who don't know, he looks exactly like Oscar Isaac, and he's Silent Sam. He never says a word. In fact, I don't think we've ever heard him say anything. So he's the strong, silent type, much like Marren and I, where I never get a word in edgewise.

That's right, exactly, exactly.

So for everyone, I know I kind of briefly introduced Adam at the beginning, but we trained him and some of his folks in Wayne County, Indiana. He had us out a while back, and it was actually really cool. I think you're one of the first organizations that heard a podcast, reached out to us, and then hired us. I think you guys might have been like the first to do that in terms of all the people that we work with. So it was really cool. We're like, "Hey, that's awesome."

So we appreciate that. I know you've been listening for a while, and you've been in law enforcement for a while there in Indiana. And like I said, we trained a bunch of folks and even kind of were able to get out there during COVID and elections, and a lot going on, and we still made it happen, which was really cool.

So we've been in touch ever since, and I know you've been involved, and the reason why we have you on the show today is you've been involved locally and then kind of with state, federal agencies doing threat assessment, threat modeling stuff, and doing part of the — I know National Threat Evaluation Reporting Program. I want to get some of this stuff right, I have it in my notes, so correct me if I get an acronym wrong or something. Usually, Greg is the one that does that, but sometimes he's on it when I'm off.

But you've been doing a lot of this, especially with school safety and everything. You kind of reached out because of a recent podcast that, "Hey, I'd love to come on and talk about what we're doing here. We're seeing some success with this. You guys talked about a lot of the problems that a lot of school districts and folks are facing. Here's what we're doing." So you threw out an email, and I went, "Well, let's just get you on to explain this," because that's better than me trying to tell anyone else about what's going on. So kind of start wherever you think you need to start, tell us about what you guys have been doing with threat modeling and how it's working and how you got involved with it.

Yeah, absolutely. So for us, the big thing, it really, your guys' program was a catalyst for us, really looking into that H.B.R.A.N. (Human Behavioral Recognition and Assessment of Nuance), just the baseline, the anomaly, doing all those things. And it kind of, in a law enforcement sense, was like, "Man, there's so much that's missing from this." We talk about an interdiction and different kinds of things like that, but it's how do we really build this in? How do we really use it?

So we kind of started on this quest. I sit on a K-12 (Kindergarten through 12th grade) school safety commission here in the county that I'm in, and one of the things that we constantly see is these kind of questions of, "Hey, what am I supposed to do? I've got this behavior, I've got this concerning whatever it may be." And it's really kind of left us on the "no stone unturned" kind of mission.

And throughout that, what we've been able to do is, I was able to become a Task Force Officer with the FBI. I'm a master trainer for the Department of Homeland Security's National Threat Evaluation Reporting Program. And doing that, I was really able to start networking and looking at what kind of teams and things that they have out there.

The real catalyst for Indiana is that recently we're seeing, in order to get what they call a secured school grant — which is really a match grant — it's the government's way of saying, "Hey, we're going to give you this money so you can put cameras in, vinyl wrap your doors, whatever it may be, but you're going to have to give us some proof in the pudding. You're going to have to have some assessments done. You're going to have to start having these things done that shows that you're really using the money."

I mean, we live in a litigious society. So after the Ethan Crumbley thing up there in Oxford, we know that we're probably going to see an unprecedented settlement at the minimum for the liability for that duty, like you guys covered really in number 158. So as far as that goes, that really kind of led to this creation, and there's so much stuff out there. Yeah, there's so much stuff out there, so no one, it's kind of like, I don't know, it's almost drinking from a firehose.

So what we did is we kind of started reaching out and putting different things together. And the process that we do is we have a team. So our team is comprised of SROs from a school.

(School Resource Officers, for those of you who don't — I forget, like Brian said earlier with all those abbreviations and acronyms.) Yeah, I guess I'm guilty of it too.

Yeah, we all are. I do it all the time. But I appreciate you stopping. I have to stop Greg or myself sometimes and explain them, but yeah, please, I appreciate it.

Yeah, we speak in codes, I forget sometimes. But yeah, so we have School Resource Officers in all of our schools, and we partner with them. One of the other things that we do is we have prosecution, so if it's a K-12 issue, a juvenile issue, there's a certain set of prosecutors who handle that. So we get them on board. Probation, we have them on board. School administrators. We even go as far as having some members of clergy involved. You know, they have, whether maybe it's a private or a chartered school, you have to do that. So we understand that you have to have many fingers, right, or many hands make light work. And then we also interact with our social services, like DCS (Department of Children's Services) kind of wrap-around services. And then ultimately, our mental health. So the idea for us is to kind of have a 360 of whatever is going on.

When someone is — we have a behavior, someone on the team — we certify all of ours through the Department of Homeland Security. Since we're master trainers, it's really easy for us to do. That way, everybody's kind of on the same kind of topic idea, I know what to do in terms of paperwork. And when that happens, and once we have what we call an initial triage, we kind of go through things. And then those allow us to have partners to look at.

I don't want to run away with this too much, because I want you to be able to ask what's important or what you guys want to get to. But I really liken this to the fact that it's really going to pain me to say it, and I think Greg will feel this as well, but the fire service has kicked our ass in terms of prevention. And I hate to say that as a police officer, right? Because they're just rivalry there. And any of those firefighters out there listening are going, "Yeah, I told you we did it."

But they really did. So what do we have in fire service? We have fire code. You can't move a door, you can't put an outlet in, you can't do this, and it's become common vernacular, like it's in the lexicon of anyone and everyone who does anything. Whether you know it or not, the first question you ask is, "Well, is the Fire Marshal going to say something to me if I move this?" And then another thing, we teach "Stop, Drop, and Roll" to preschoolers. We get in this hinge that we say, "Oh, we can't talk about run, hide, and fight. We can't talk about this, yada, yada, because it's so impressionable." We talk about kids spontaneously bursting into flames and how to put it out. So what they've done is they've really created this culture of prevention. This is law enforcement's chance to start to do the same thing.

That's amazing.

No, Brian, I want to — let's go. Go ahead, Adam. I've got a whole bunch of stuff that I've written that's going to be unconventional based on the notes that you sent and based on me knowing you. So I'll start backwards and move forwards, but I also want to make sure that you tell everybody, you didn't just fall into this. You've been a copper for a good long time. You've had a lot of different experiences, so please make sure you tell us about that.

But I want to start unconventionally again with a question that came up in no particular order when Brian and I were talking to a group of certified school psychologists and a Ph.D. in school psychology that teaches at the graduate level. And they all said the same thing. We always ask, "Hey, what keeps you up at night? What are those common threads?" And every one of them shared with us an experience that when they went to talk to a teacher, the teacher said, "That kid, that kid right over there, is the most likely to blank."

Well, we talked about with them that a lot of this information that you use, whether in a BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) or in the VTAC (Violence Threat Assessment & Containment) or with the U.S. DHS (Department of Homeland Security) National Threat Evaluation Reporting Program, is stuff that's readily available. It's right out there, it's just you couldn't see it without the special glasses. Is that a fair assessment? And if so, what are the special glasses?

Absolutely, absolutely. That's a great, great, great analogy there. So what we use and what we call our special glasses, and really any of this, is what we call Pathway to Violence. And it's been around since 2003. It's a Westin and Calhoun model, is what it's called. But again, what it does is, it really sets up something that we can have a tangible list to watch, to kind of see what way things are going.

And I'll talk a little bit about that Pathway to Violence. The first thing that we look for in this Pathway to Violence is, it's six steps, the sixth step being an attack, right? So bang for all of those The Human Behavior Podcast listeners who understand that "Left of Bang" concept. But again, attack is the last one, so we'll start.

Number one, grievance. We look for a grievance. And when we say a grievance, we're not really looking for, "Oh, I don't want to go to work today." I'm going to be honest with you, I had a grievance today. I've probably had 15 of them, and I've only been up for three hours, right? We're not talking about that type of grievance. What we're looking for really is that this grievance that won't let go. "Oh, this person's out to get me." It almost consumes them. Something has been slighted against them, something is going on with them.

And we talk about this all the time, and we kind of get it wrong in the sense that we look and say, "Oh, well, these people are typically victims of bullying." And there is empirical data out there that says that that's true, but it's not always the case. Yeah, it's not always the case, because ask yourself this: another thing you guys have talked about in the past is narcissism, right? So take it from a narcissist. I would tell you that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris — Eric Harris probably more so than Klebold — was a classic narcissist.

Yeah, I mean, beyond, I mean it was, it was probably above and beyond. So and, no, you hit that point, so let's hit it right now real quick. Because you talk about, people talk about people who are bullied or whatever. So whether it comes to, it's like a lot of that type of behavior where you've been a victim of something. So if you were a victim of bullying, they say you're more likely to bully someone else. Well, that's not always true. The same thing with sexual assault. Like, most people who commit, like, let's say, child sexual assault were also preyed upon when they were kids. But not all of them. Meaning, that's not necessarily going to happen. Just because you're a victim doesn't mean you are going to be a perpetrator. It actually can go the opposite way.

So we — it can. The reason why I want to bring that up too is because you've mentioned it, is that it's often seen as like a red flag or something that's considered, and it can be, but only when coupled with a whole bunch of other things. In and of itself, it may be completely meaningless. So I just want to hit that real quick.

Absolutely. And to bounce off that really fast, so I was a nurse before I was a police officer. I spent many years as a medical-surgical and pediatric nurse. I tell people all the time, when you do this, when you get the sniffles, it doesn't necessarily mean you're dying, right? It's just, it's not until all of a sudden you have the sniffles, you can't see, your ears are clogged, your chest is congested, this is going on, that you go, "Oh, you know what, I probably am pretty sick. It's not just allergies, it's something else." Or we can get as severe as we want, that obviously is a pretty easy one. So I tell people all the time, in that sense, you don't go to the doctor because you have sniffles. So one thing in and of itself isn't necessarily a big deal. It's when you start to compile those symptoms. When you start to go, "Oh, all of a sudden my activities of daily living are becoming more difficult because of these ailments that I have, I probably need to go to the doctor."

So I tell people to think about it in that sense, when we talk about any one of these six things, and I'll kind of get to that a little bit as we go through it. But when I say that kind of narcissistic thing about a bully is a bully is... So you can say that I've been bullied. I've worked probably at this point 65 cases, and I have, maybe 90% of them have said something about being bullied, yet I would tell you maybe 10% of those were substantiated. In the sense that a lot of these individuals that I dealt with had that classic narcissism to where they felt that they were mistreated. They felt that they were... Because they're so important, they're so powerful, they're this great, great person. Look at Elliot Rodger. Again, he was slighted because a girl wouldn't talk to him. They never take for instance that maybe they're the, pardon my sweet [  ], that they're the [  ] problem.

Yeah. So if you consider those sort of things, you, you, you just said something really important. I want everyone to make sure you're clear on. You said, "Someone who feels like they felt like they were slighted." That's very, very different. Because you may look at a situation and go, "Well, nothing happened to this person." If they feel like something happened to them, it happened. If they felt like they were slighted, if they felt like, then it, then it's real to them. And I think that's an important distinction: understanding if someone felt slighted, not if they actually were. So please continue.

Yeah, absolutely. So we really hit that grievance. So the next thing that we look for is that ideation or fixation, violent fixation, whatever it may be. That's where you start to hear things like, it's a singular cause that they focus on, or a singular person, or a singular event that has done them wrong or traumatized them, in which they're going to have some retribution in the form of violence, right? It's normal to say, "You know what, I didn't like the way I was treated at that restaurant," and you tell everybody on your Yelp reviews like, "I'm going to give them a one star," but not go like, "Hey, you know what, I was treated so bad that I'm going to go in there and shoot the place up." That'll obviously teach them. So we look at that kind of violent ideation, that violent fixation with that. It goes above and beyond just giving the recommendation like, "Hey Greg, don't go to that restaurant, get coffee again."

So we kind of get into that. The next thing that we really want to get into is research and planning. This can be a variety of things. So when we talk about research and planning, one thing you guys did an awesome job of, when you talked about like New Jersey vs. T.L.O. and all of the things that the school can do. What do we give our kids now? I don't know a school in this world that's not giving out an iPad, a Surface Pro. I mean, even inner-city schools that don't have money, they're getting the grants to do those, right? So again, that is school property that can be dumped at any point in time.

So what we look at with that is with research and planning is, what are they looking up? Ethan Crumbley for instance, the kid was looking up guns so much to the point that ad blockers on his phone came up and asked him if he needed mental health. So he was looking at something, I mean, to the point of— and I can promise you, not to say too much bad things about myself, my ad blockers know a lot about me, but they don't know that.

So you've never once had them ask to give you help. And you have some weird hobbies. Most of us don't call those hobbies. But go ahead.

That's why I have to say that. So exactly. But again, we look into those things and we say, "Hey, what is... What are they looking into? Are they all of a sudden, you look at Cruz in Marjory Stoneman Douglas, super fascinated with white supremacy, Nazism, the SS (Schutzstaffel), those sort of things." Again, what are they really looking into? What are they planning?

I don't want to say every, that's bad, so I'll strike that from the record, please. But one of the things that you see so often is that most of these kids, most of these individuals who are doing this, are looking up someone else. They either say, "Hey, Klebold, yes, we're heroes." We're looking into them. That's everyone. That's international too. Klebold, Paris. We're doing that with Steinhäuser in Germany. They're building the video games like that. That's a classic. They'll reach out and try and talk to those people sometimes, especially now on social media where you can kind of do that, or write a letter to the prison.

Yep. That's, that's, that's such a far step beyond, because if you right now did a forensic on my computer and Google search, you'd be like, "I mean, because that's what we do, right? We would be hooked up at the airport all the time." That's appropriate in the context for what we do for a job, for a living, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And briefly, briefly what Brian touched on, Adam, because you're on a roll and we get that, but there's certain things that we have to clarify so the people get the laser-focused message. What you're talking about is the difference in intent. For example, trying to buy Shelly a gun for our anniversary, I've looked up, you know, "best handguns for home defense" or whatever. And then, "is it a 9 millimeter or a .45?" Well, just by that profile alone, that would set me aside. But the intent would be where I not only purchase the gun and ammunition, but also take photos of the school and then reach out with a letter to people that have done it before and ask them tips. Those demonstrate intent.

So we want to make sure that what you're talking about, the, and I think the key issue that you hit on, and it's thanks to your history as a nurse, triage, triage, is assignment of urgency. That's what you're looking for. What you're trying to do is not say that, "Hey, we have the sheer weight of evidence," or, "There's so much empirical evidence." What you're saying is, "Hey, listen, if all these cases I looked at, these three or four pre-event indications always lead to a violent act," that's huge to me. Because the concept of psychological profiling has never been empirically better to prove it. And a lot of people claim that they've been... Our program, you know how much work has gone on in our program, and it is vetted, okay? So when you get a vetted program, you want to stick with it. But no vetted program says, "Here's the nine things that you have to have." They say, "Here's the recipe." And that's what you're giving us right now. You're giving us a recipe. I can go and I can go with Kraft or Sysco or City Market to give me the foods that I can put in there. I can modify pepper for a pepper. You see what I'm saying? But folks that are listening, Adam is spot on by giving you the idea of what the elements and lead up to there.

There's always those certain common ones too, which we do like. If that's the problem, if you're saying, "Well, give me the five things," it's like, "Okay, well here's a few that we've seen in every single case." But at that point, one, you might not see that, it might be too late, or two, there's too many other confounding variables in there. And the, but like you said, there's always those. They always — not always, but in the cases of them, some, most of them have reached out, some, or researched some specific shooter of this couple. Like, there's a few things that are always present, but also what sucks is just because that's present in someone doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to shoot up a school or something. So, but it's significantly, just so significant, you have to look at significant.

Right. Yes.

Right. Yes, yeah.

And the thing that, and that's such a great point, and that's the reason that these things are so wonderful to have, a podcast with you guys, to really be able to point those things out and the experience that you have. Because again, most of this is kind of predicated on exactly what you guys would do, exactly what Greg wrote about, exactly what Greg is a founding father in. So one of the things that we talk about when we talk about that research and planning is, are these things an anomaly? Are they odd? Do you have a kid who's never used a gun, who's never had a shotgun, and all of a sudden they're asking about it? Those sort of things.

I, it was 2007, I believe, when we had Virginia Tech. The shooter in that instance, and I won't butcher his name, but even so, even then in his manifesto that he wrote, there was homage to Klebold and Harris. So if you don't think these guys are studying to say, "Hey, where did this person go wrong? What did this person do that I like? What did this person not do?" you're dead wrong.

And his outfit even when he picked out or mimicked some of the style of clothing that Klebold and Harris wore, trying to do his version of it, it was called the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, like, but because it was like an elbow, but it was like even like a fishing vest. It was even like, but it was cognitively close enough.

Absolutely, exactly, exactly, exactly. And we live in this society today where, I hate to say this, I have a sophomore in high school. I have an eight-year-old in second grade, and then I have a kindergartner. They live in the world today where talking about shooting up a school is common vernacular. I hate to say it, it is. They say it. So you can't just look at this and say, "Oh, a kid spouted off and said something stupid to get the attention that they wanted to get," or whatever else it is. That's that singular incident. And you can't bake a cake with just the eggs. You have to have...

Exactly.

Right. And to that point, again, Adam, folks, Adam, aka call sign "Breeder," makes a great point on this one. Listen, you have to have a body of work that you can point to. Every kid looks up Hitler. Every kid fascinates over Nazis taking over such a large swath of the world in something that was called a world war. Why? Because we're fascinated by how certain tribes work and get it done. But then when we start doing the research and we look at the human rights and the abuses and the murders and everything, we get turned off by that. Not so with the grievance collector. Not so with the person that looks and says, "Yeah, that's just like what happened to me," and associates with it.

So you're talking about evidence, artifacts that we tend to show the reasonable conclusion that this boy or girl in your classroom right now is somehow different. And you know what? Sometimes it can be accounted for that it's anxiety or stress or medications they're on or a mental issue that they're having at that age. But the best thing to do, and you said it earlier, you even involve social services, is we can identify them early enough to get them help. Because remember what we do is just what Adam does, folks. We talk about danger and opportunity. That's what Adam is telling you: an opportunity to invest in that human early enough in the system so we can identify them, not to put them in a cage somewhere, but to say, "Hey, listen, get them, you need help. I'm here to help you."

What helped you? Yeah.

Exactly.

So I love where you're going, Adam. Please tell us more.

Yeah, absolutely. So there, I do want to hit on that cage part, and I'll do that afterwards because I want to make sure that I finished giving you guys those.

Yeah, certainly.

But there is some more as far as wrap-around services and how we go about doing that in the management aspect. So we get to that research and planning, we start to look in that. Then we get into what we would call preparation. James Eagan Holmes, your Aurora, Colorado shooter, took months going to the range, stockpiling ammunition, gas masks, the whole nine yards. Was beginning to write his manifesto. Had even went, if we want to talk about prevention, and we can get to that point, but I want to make sure I get the steps out, the glasses out for you guys to see. But you want to talk about preparation. And again, it was there, it was seen. And not only was it seen, he was 100% preventable. And I know that that's not a nice way to say it, but it was. If people had the glasses, if people looked at the things, if they did the anomalies, the dangerous opportunities, and looked at the things that you guys teach and you guys have wrote the book on, that was preventable. We say even the FBI will tell you that 96% of targeted violence is preventable. The only reason that they won't go a step further and say the extra four percent is some of them killed themselves before they ever got to figure out what the reason was, whether they left a manifesto or not.

So yeah, we're looking at that preparation. So we kind of get into there. The last thing that we really are starting to look into is probing and breaching. And this is something that it can be a variety of things. I liken it to this: you guys talked about vape pens. So again, is it something that's going to bring the world down? Yeah, probably not. If from a law enforcement or from what you guys do and teach and preventing death and dismemberment, I hate to say, but it's low on our radar.

The thing of it is is that you start to get these kids who exhibit these other signs and symptoms, and all of a sudden they're bringing stuff in that they shouldn't. Maybe it was a small pocket knife. Okay, one, I live in a rural area, so it's somewhat normal to think, "Hey, this kid was working on the farm this morning, he forgot." That's one symptom. That's the congestion, not everything else. That's the eggs, not everything else I need for the cake. So again, you can look at this fairly easily and say, "Okay, this is, this was a mistake, this was a simple issue."

But what about that kid who you look in that classroom, again, "This kid kind of scares me," and you see him pushing the boundaries? That's really what probing and breaching is. James Eagan Holmes, refer back to him, went to like 15 different movie theaters before he decided on the one that he wanted. He would bring stuff in, sit longer, buy extra tickets — all things to see how long he got noticed, to gauge response times. That's really what we're looking at with this. That's what that probing and breaching really is. And then last but not least is the attack.

Now, we say that's a six-step sign. We give this to people with a pathway to violence as an indicator for them to use this in the sense that also, or I want you to also remember, this isn't linear. So you can have a grievance and you can have some research and planning, and maybe some probing and breaching, but they don't necessarily have that ideation yet. Or maybe they have the ideation and the grievance and they've done some research and planning, but they haven't begun to prepare. Our goal and our job, what we want to see is, where are they at on this pathway to violence? And the closer to attack they're getting, obviously the more danger, opportunity. Maybe at this point, the thing we're asking ourselves is, "This kid got access to guns?" And I hate to say, but in 2022, access to guns is more readily available than just what dad and mom's got in their safe. Yes.

So you look at that and you say to yourself, "Man, what's the only thing that's missing for this recipe to be a hit?" Well, it's to have this, it's to have that. So that's really where we go when we start looking at things where we say exigency. We don't make it hard, it's low, medium, or high. Medium is one of those things where we're saying, "Hey, look, we're just missing a couple things." Low is something that we look at and say, "This could be something weird, but there's not enough here for me to really think that this is going somewhere. This could be a mental issue, this could be an outcry for attention, this could be a lot of different things." And that's where we'll start to get our partners involved. Or high, we look at things and go, "Oh my God, this person has got one, two, three, four, five. They are ready to rock and roll. The only thing that's missing right now is the day they wake up to say, 'Let's do it.'"

So that's really the tool that we use to do that. And I don't want to take too long on that, but we consider this an SPJ, a Standardized Professional Judgment. They make tools out there, and there's company names, and if you want to get company names and stuff like that, you can contact me or Brian or Greg at a later point in time to go through them. But there's things called actuarial tools, and they're really kind of a "color by numbers" if you will. You score so high or you do so many things, and they say, "Okay, well this is evidence of this." I don't think that those are a bad thing. I think those are a good thing, but we live in shades of gray.

Yeah, we don't, we don't live in black and white. And that's anytime those things come up, my immediate reaction is to roll the eyes and, "Okay, how do you, how do you know that it's just not an actuarial table full of [ __ ]?" I mean, right? Because bad information going in means bad information coming out. Now I get it, it's a tool, it's a starting point, it's something for someone to use, but everything, the things you talked about before this with this six-step kind of, at least I have some big buckets that I can throw stuff in and see where it fits, right? When you want to get into an actuarial table type scenario, you need to have really, really good information and really, really high-level subject matter experts using that data, inputting that data, and interpreting that data because otherwise it can go wrong or just be completely useless. That, that's like a caveat I always say when I hear stuff like that. But I know you kind of addressed that too, it's like, "Look, it's something, but it's present in a lot of places."

So I would say this to Brian's, "Don't get burned at the first touch, do your research." So what we have is we have Adam as a Threat Assessment and Threat Management (TATM) team leader, but at a level where he develops those teams in your area. So folks, if you haven't seen it yet, the correlation between the seven-step terrorist planning cycle and the six steps that are here, my writing is still around and it's still fully being utilized, which is great. But listen, the correlation here is that the training that Brian and I bring with Arcadia is completely laser-focused on identifying pre-event indications of human behavior that are incongruent and therefore anomalous.

What now you have is a TATM expert that can come to your agency and show you how to set that up and utilize a task force mentality. So what do you need for a task force? Well, when you're doing an OSA (Organized Crime Strike Force Act, possibly) death or a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case, you can't do it within your agency. Cops have to call SWAT teams for certain things. Well, who does the SWAT team call when it's bigger than they can handle? The beauty of the TATM, and the beauty of using the model that Adam just told you about, is he and the groups that he works with can help you as an organization set it up. But it's not enough. It has to work with the linkage to the communication, to the linkage to the information. No intelligence can be fostered without proper information. That's what Brian just told us.

So I see here part of the 360 model, and tell me if I'm wrong, Adam, if I'm chewing at the wrong thing here. I'm seeing that the training that we provide and the guidance and architecture that you provide comes out as a perfect marriage for any organization, no matter how much money they may have.

Absolutely. And the best thing about this is, it, you don't need a ton of money to do this, and you can kind of pick and choose. I'll also go on this: if this is something that you are interested in doing, there are grants out there to bring Arcadia in to teach.

Exactly. There are, but people don't know it, because again, they haven't seen those glasses, Adam. And one of the reasons you're on the show is that you talk about these things as if, "Hey, it's really easy to..." It's never easy working with a task force. It's never easy to get your school district to take a look at this and have your administration go, "Okay, we want to do more." But folks, Adam's an expert at getting those people in the room. So if you don't know how to get started, that's another reason for the podcast. Reach out to Adam. Adam's done it. He skinned his knees. They know what it takes.

Same thing with us. We get frustrated, Adam, we get frustrated because school systems adopt a wait-and-see policy. Wait a minute, you, you can get this funded, you can do this for nothing. And now my concern is, and you brought it up too, and it's kind of where we think it's going with the, because of the Oxford school township shooting, and what we think is going to come out of that. You sounds like your prediction is much what Greg and I think, that there's going to be some large settlement, there's going to be a huge payout.

Absolutely. Which is, I understand that that's how we deal with things. That's how you get... I'm not bashing that we have that system, it's much better than in other countries where they just could start killing each other. Exactly. So at least we have something.

My problem is now schools are going to do what? It's all going to be about that actuarial table of risk management and insurance policies, and all the money and funding is going to go to protecting them if this were to happen to them, rather than from the litigation.

Well, that's what I'm saying, protecting them from litigation if something has occurred, rather than just, "Why don't we invest all this money into doing stuff?"

And I know some of that's changing, especially you've got a lot of folks out there, parents are much more organized. But I would say out of different school shootings over the last like 10 years, there's a lot more concerted effort for legislation, for funding, for grants, for raising money to prevent this stuff and to come up with... So the problem is, we're all, it's like we're finally all just starting to deal with this issue. I mean, I, I really in the last few years, and it's taken the parents of victims, for the most part, to be the ones running through Congress, pounding on presidents' doors, raising money, talking about it. We've had some on before too, and which is a good thing. So now we're going forward.

But I do want to hit up one of the things you talk about is this, and what this is, seems to me the biggest issue, which is what we specifically address too, is that intervention. Okay, when do I say something? What am I supposed to say? Because you talked about, you had this like low, medium, high kind of category here. Well, how do I determine that? What do I do? And if this goes literally to the conversation we had yesterday — it won't be coming out for I think another month or so — but we, those Texas school psychologists that we talked to, and just like Greg brought at the beginning, where they said a teacher will come and say, "Hey, this is the person," or, "I think this is what I see." And a lot of times people are scared to intervene. Denial sets in, confirmation bias. Well, because realistically, how, how likely is it that today someone kid from your school is going to walk in and shoot up the place? Realistically, that's statistically, it's almost...

Exactly.

It's almost not going to happen. So because of that, and because people want to be good and think they don't want to hurt someone, they're scared to intervene. And what my thing is always, what, what's the problem? You intervene and have a kid has to talk to a school psychologist. Well, what, what is, what's the negative that's going to come out of that? I mean, you get what I'm saying? So what do you see is that intervention strategy, or how do we get people to do that, or what's the issue right there that you see on the ground?

No, absolutely. And I'm going to zig back just a little bit, where Greg talked about that seven-step and things like that. And I want to address that this is tried and true stuff. This is predicated on that work that Greg, that's been around for a long time. This is the best of that, it's finally come down the funnel and people are dealing with it.

Totally agree, Adam. Yes.

And what we have seen is that we were using this to catch terrorists before they did things for a long time. And somebody said, "My God, what are we going to do?" That's really why you see nowadays, even with the FBI, or anybody else, they codify school threats as domestic terrorism. And it has a JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force) aspect that it goes down because of that reason. So, think about it in that sense, this isn't just some out of nowhere new problem. We've been using this kind of behavior that you guys teach and show. We've been using it for generations, it's just now getting put in there.

So I want to get into that the most important aspect of it, and that's what you guys talked about is the management aspect. And you have to kind of talk about the beginning and identifying and all that, so that way you can kind of get to the end. But the management aspect is the biggest part of it. As law enforcement, I'll be the first person to come on here and say, we have failed miserably in that aspect of management. What we traditionally have done is, you call us if you've done something that codifies as an offense that we can arrest you for. Then we arrest you, we punt the ball and say, "Hey, guess what, your problem is no more." And that's not the case. That's just not what works.

So let's go back to the point where we talked about with Brian, and we said, "Hey, how do we get people to report?" One of the huge things that we do when we do safety audits, go into schools, talk to anybody, is develop something super easy. And all that is, is every school has a webpage. I don't care if it's a WordPress page that they made themselves or if it's something fancy they paid a lot of money for. Put a button. Put a button on there that doesn't just say, "Report a bully," "Report suspicious behavior," report something that, and go in there and put that in there. It's anonymous. "Hey, is there something that you've seen that's concerning? Is there some kind of student behavior that's concerning?" Do that. Right? That's the big thing. Is how do we increase the number of individuals who come out there and say... Data shows us that 86, 87 percent of the time, two or more people knew. Two or more people.

And I would add to that, it's probably somebody that knew the person very closely, a family member. All right. So, right. So we always say it, nobody knows a copper better than a copper. Nobody knows a marine better than a marine. Right? And those are hugely important to the folks listening right now.

Absolutely. You've probably seen it, and you probably sat on that information, and a case can't be made without the piece of information that you're holding. No, and we get into this all the time. And that's kind of that "see something, say something" there. Look, what happened? What does that mean? What does that mean? So like, I see all kinds of stuff. Am I supposed to tell you that it's raining outside right now? It doesn't do me any good. So, but again, the idea behind that is that anything and everything can be important. You don't decide if you see something that makes your stomach kind of turn or makes you say it, tell somebody. Don't worry about whether or not it's this confirmation bias or we have some other biases that exist where we go, "Oh, we don't want to do that." I hate to say it, even in the world that we live in today in 2022, we still like to mind our own business for the most part. I know that's probably hard to say for some people, but we do. How many times do you go somewhere and you go, "Ah, that's not really a big deal."

I'll give you an instance, just to put this in context, because I do think that schools have come a long way recently. I've seen, has said, 99.7% of school history going forward is safe. It's 0.03%, or 0.3% that exists in school shootings. The problem is is that minimal, yes, but it was 100% preventable. And 0.3%.

Yeah, that's it.

Let me throw one at you. Oh, that's perfect. That's the perfect exclamation point to everything you've said so far. So Brian and I, one of the things that our Arcadia does obviously, is a threat assessment by looking at vulnerability. And remember, folks, vulnerable people draw in threats like a magnet, like a blood-soaked rag to a werewolf, right? And the idea here is that you got to take a look at the big picture.

So a company back east hires us, and we charge a lot for the service because we do a lot. And after an exhaustive amount of research, there were two things that came up. One is that an item that was commonly used at this business was left out in the open, and that item was dangerous on its face. And the idea is, in a situation of workplace violence, many times a person will say another thing, and they'll look for that weapon close to him in the environment. So he said, "Simply accounting for that and having a process where you have to lock it in a drawer or turn it in at the end of the day or something, even a little smaller." You said, "Just put it in the drawer."

Exactly.

So now we gave all of those. Okay, from a scale. The second one was, "Look, you still have folks that smoke, and they're blocking open security doors." So we took the photos, and we showed where the ash cans were, and we showed where the cameras were. And we said, "If they have access, they can hurt you." Now, on this entire, you know, phone book — if anybody remembers what a phone book is — a sized document that we produce for those folks, "Here's the seven or eight things you can do immediately with no money that are going to make you safer and harder to kill." And you know what they told us? "Thanks. Yeah, yeah, it was good. We're glad we had the assessment done. But you know what? We don't want to put our people out, and that seems like a big thing that's going to be really inconvenient." Well, then you know what, reap the whirlwind, kiss my ass. Because you can tell, look, dude, Adam, we still have people that die from drowning. Do you understand that if you learn how to swim, you've got less of the chance of drowning? That that type of mentality is pervasive. So if you think that people are going to glam onto what Adam's saying, and Wayne County's school districts are going to be overwhelmed with calls for this service, no. Because right now there's somebody sitting there that's a mom or a dad or a school administrator that's saying, "This is too hard."

So I challenge you, it's not that hard. You've got to get it. And that goes into the intervention type strategies. I mean, what, what's in this? So you talk about the different models and the different organization that you guys have, and how you kind of, you break some of this down. Well, how does the application work? Like, how do we get people to do that? Because that, that's the biggest thing. Organizations to go, like, you could be sitting there together in the teachers' lounge having lunch and go, "Hey, anyone notice anything with Billy this week?" "Oh, hey, as a matter of fact..." And then the person that goes, "Wait a minute, he, I also saw this." That 30-second, 90-second conversation can prevent the most catastrophic thing that you will ever experience in your life that will ravage your community. And that's what I mean by like, that's what we're talking about. I, Adam, and me and Greg, we need to be the experts with the notepads and the tables and the glasses and the special way to do things. But everyone else out there, you don't have to be at that level. Common folk, average folks, how does that intervention work? Or how do you see it apply where in this model of what you guys are doing, where does that come into play?

So what we do is, again, we go back to those easy buttons. Making them out there, making it accessible for people to put stuff in there. They may not use it. As a matter of fact, most time we see people are still hesitant to even use that, right? But I go back to this: so another thing that we always do, training. We do training, we do education for every year, a school teacher, before they go back to school, gets a 40-hour videos, "Death by Video," where they've got to watch some check boxes. I don't care what state you're in, it's going to be similar, if not more hours. That's the perfect time to have something where you go, "Hey, let's have a training on targeted violence. Let's have someone come in and talk to us about when and what we can report."

You have to educate it. Here's why. If we look at the culture and society that we live in today, right? Okay, if somebody is weird, say me and Greg for instance, because I want to make sure I give you a weird instance. We're sitting, we're sitting at your local school out in front of the door, just hamming it up. How long until someone comes out and asks us what's going on, or how long until someone calls and says, "Hey, there's a problem," right? Because we've beat it into your head, "Hey, messing with kids, this is strange," right? Only people that belong here should be here, right? Absolutely.

Now let me juxtapose that with this. Go to Walmart, and me and Greg talk. How long do you think somebody calls?

Yeah, no one's even going to...

Exactly, exactly, right? That's the reason that we see, in fact, right now with schools, a large percentage of our shootings are commerce shootings, place of business shooting, workplace violence. Exactly, right? With that at school.

So that's the first thing that we do. Put the button out there, make access easy to people, and educate them and say, "Look, don't worry about if this is a problem or not. Don't worry about if you're wrong. Tell us what you see, and you can do it anonymously. Just do your part," because your part is the crucial thing that gets the internal combustion engine started and moving. Without your intervention, cops can't do anything. None of these task forces can do.

No.

And so our system really predicates off...

That's great. I think that's great. You, you have to do that, you have to be able to tell us, you have to give us something. Look, I live in a community that's not that big, right? Our county is probably 67 to 70 thousand people. There's maybe 150, 200 cops. You couldn't see all that, right? But 70 thousand people can. Seventy-seven thousand sets of eyes is a lot. So just to say something...

Yeah. So we also teach them about those biases, and we tell people, because I honestly believe that the forefront of prevention is education. It is. It just absolutely. I can't believe otherwise. So we really get a school system to buy in and say, "Hey, look," or whether it's a school system, it may be a place of business, we go into those as well, and we teach those employees, "Look, when you see something, don't worry about it. You're not getting someone in trouble. This isn't anything like... This is just information. We're not here to blackball a kid for the rest of their life. We're not here."

The big thing that you get from schools is this: "We don't know when we can tell you something legally because we say, 'Well, we're bound by the guidelines of FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).'" You can do anything, you can search a kid in school. This is...

Right. You have a great point. You have more leeway in a school than a police officer does looking at someone on the street.

Absolutely. So we get what we get all the time is, we'll get with FERPA. They're uncomfortable, they don't know what to do. I worked in nursing, right? So HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is another one. Yeah, we'll see people say, "Well, we don't want to say anything with HIPAA. We don't want to do this, we don't want to do that." Here's the thing: every single thing you look at, whether it's HIPAA, whether it's FERPA, whether it's Title IX (Educational Amendments of 1972), any of these things that are these governing bodies, they all have one exception, and that's a public safety exception.

Exactly.

So even if you're a therapist sitting out there and let's go back to the Tarasoff case, right, a duty to warn, do those things. So let's talk about that. And I get that as a therapist, it is, it's huge to have your information, this relationship with your clients and not want to say too many things or going there. But even in HIPAA, it specifically says that even a therapist's notes can be shared if there is a danger to what they believe could be a danger to someone else or others.

The problem that we see all the time is that they deal with these people all the time, they live in the trenches. So how many terrible things do they hear? They've been recording stuff all day long. The fact of the matter is is that you can't have, you can't have that mindset where you go, "I just don't know what to report," or "I hear this all the time." It can't be that way. So we have to talk about those sort of things. So again, I know that's kind of a long-winded, I'm going to get into really...

Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I love that. But let me throw a couple ideas out there for the folks that are taking notes, because Adam, you brought up some great ones. Firehosing. And we're all firehosing because we get an hour to change your world, right? Number one, I'm always the oddest, quirkiest person everywhere we go, so that doesn't make me a danger. In my case, I might be certified as a danger, but there's other people that are in your school that are friends of your kids that are odd and quirky and inventive and make up stories and are very artistic, and that doesn't mean they're anything but a kid trying to find out who they are. Okay? They're not going to pop hot on your radar if you take a look for artifacts and evidence to support a reasonable conclusion.

Next thing, I am so sick and tired of hearing, "Listen, we don't want to give the kids any new ideas. That's why we're opposed to your training." First of all, psychologically, sociologically, physiologically unfounded. It's an urban legend that's counterproductive, it's actually limiting and hamstringing the stuff that we do.

And finally, and I'll shut up and let you guys talk, the Good Samaritan exception is alive and well. And people go, "Listen, that doesn't apply here." It applies here because of a thing called the United States Constitution and all the decisions of SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has over and over and over said if you're doing this for the right reason, and you're not trying to be vindictive or get revenge or hurt somebody in some way to gain an advantage, that the information you provide, and listen, without information you can't... Look, you can go out and make a fabric jack with a whole bunch of [ __ ] you throw together, and it's not going to look like Kiev to help the Ukraine. What you're going to have to do is a little research and figure out from that information which you build. So a copper cannot act, they can't come to your school, a School Resource Officer can't act unless they have a complainant. Now, there's on-view, a copper can see things and say, "Hey, it's a misdemeanor, a felony committed in my presence," but they're not everywhere. Adam was talking about 75,000 pairs of eyes, and that can help find a lost child or help prevent violence. That's what we have to get the message across. It's not this onerous thing where we want to tattoo a kid for life with a problem.

Yeah, and almost every kid grows out of this. Every kid grows out of this on their own. Simply just getting them to the point of out of high school, you've solved so many issues. There's a great chance they're going to be a normal, contributing member of society and go on about their life. Whatever they accomplish, they accomplish. Sure, it might not be the kid that's going to be the next astronaut or whatever, but it doesn't matter, that's not the goal here. So, so the idea too with some of this is, is that that intervention stuff is, we hear that all the time. Still, no matter how much we talk about, how many people are out there talking about, how many parents of victims are going like, "Look, you just gotta, you just gotta have a conversation." This, this be, and part of it is because societally, people feel like they're going to get attacked if they say anything, or they're going to be painted in this corner and seen as that. And it's like, "So f'ing what?" The crowd of people that are going to come after you for that, they're going to, tomorrow, when something else happens, they're going to go after that.

So as we look at it, there's this, the school one is, these are kids, they're [ __ ] children, man. They have the mind of a child, which means they can be directed and pointed in a different direction. And Adam, I'll share, we had a kid at our, we do those courses every semester at for three days at Liberty University.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we had a kid in one of them, a kid, a young adult. He's in his 20s, going to school there. But he was kind of a little odd, and we're like, "Okay, this is a little odd," but we get a lot of people all the time, right? And then we had at the other table, Adam, because there was like two or three big, jacked SWAT cops that had been on the road for like 15 years, were just like, had like muscles everywhere, and they were like super nice guys. And so this is like 20 minutes before start time of day one, or half hour before, they're there early. And we're like, "Hey, we're going to wait until whatever time to get started. You guys can talk, hang out, do whatever you need to do." And so that kid, the oddball, sitting by himself, gets up, walks over and sits right down in front of those two police officers and goes, "Hey, I'm..." So they're both like kind of like, "What, what are you doing?" It was so funny.

So we talked to this kid a little bit and used that odd, seemed a little strange, sure. And sure enough, we talked to him and he's like, "Look, man, when you guys are talking about the school shooting and all this stuff," he's like, "Look, this was me." And we're like, "Go on, what do you mean?" He goes, "I was literally that kid, tormented in my mom's basement, thought the whole world was against me, all this stuff. I was going down that path. I was looking into all this, and I was angry and this." And he really, now he did something that's very difficult, especially at that age, to do, is he made a choice on his own to go, "Wait a minute, this is going in the wrong direction." He goes, "I need to learn how to get out of the shell." And so he literally told us, like, "I started by going to the mall and I would see an old lady at the food court and I'd sit down and say, 'Excuse me, ma'am, do you mind if I talk to you for a few minutes?'" Like, and that got him out socially to be able to talk to people. And he built himself up. And then he eventually joined the military, and it was helping out with mental health stuff with military/veteran mental health programs. And like, I mean, but he is that person, and he changed his life. Now, to do it on your own, that's, that's so powerful and unbelievable. That's rare.

But the point I'm making is, he was going down that path. So if some kid is going down that path, you can redirect them like this. They're not, they're not 40 years old doing this, and that's their life. Like, they're 14 or 15. Dude, you know how I'm confused at the age of 38 every day. So I think back to when I was 14, 15, I'm just like, "Man, that was really stupid, and I had no idea what I was doing." So and that's the point, and that kind of goes into when they talk about it, I know it's classified as like a terrorist event or something, where we're like, "Classify this stuff as terrorism." I understand why people do that. It's to help maybe use resources, allocate funds, have a better understanding of what it is. But having a terrorist living next door to me planning attack on U.S. soil is very different than the kid in high school lives next to me who's having a lot of hard problems, and he doesn't have a lot of help at home, and maybe doesn't have a good mentor in his life. Like, that's a bit of two completely different things to deal with. And I think if we approach it like that is, the earlier you intervene on someone, the one, the less likely there's going to be some sort of negative blowback because it's at a smaller scale, right? The less likely something negative is going to happen, but also the easier it is to get that person some help.

Yeah, and I would add to that, Brian, I would say, spot on. And what Brian's trying to say is if we classify all school shootings as acts of domestic terrorism, it somehow makes a person afraid of speaking up because they don't want to get branded a terrorist. So now that we've got that vampire out in the light of day, we can burn it up, right? The second part of that is that, yeah, you have to reinforce in everybody's mind that all kids go through this. Every single kid has thought about killing a teacher or killing themselves or, you know, "I want to do over, and the only way that I could do that, oh my gosh, I was so embarrassed, I just want to die." Those are normal. Our functions, our human functions, we go through those things. And guess what? That's because our brain is still forming, we're still balancing those electrochemical neurotransmitters, we're not sure where we're going. Now, if you stay in that funk and you start driving towards those things by painting your room black and buying a gun and starting a hit list in your community, that's a different thing. So the intervention is like at the key tipping point. No, no Malcolm Gladwell shout out, but at the key tipping point where you could still do something. Because if you don't, you're going to get to the threshold of inevitability where that person's going to act out. Now, they may act out by cutting or killing themselves or harming an animal or doing something else like that, but it's still a game that you can play early on. Much later, much harder to solve. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, absolutely. So really fast, like I said, I'll just our management...

Take your time. You've got all the time in the world, buddy.

We have to build into, kind of how and why we do some of things. And you said, I mean, it's hard to do this in a short period of time, but right. So our management is this: first and foremost, we have a team. We do education, we have a team in place. Once there's a team in place and there's education that's been done, they start to feel comfortable because there's someone to go to. Like if you don't have a designated person to go to in the office or the school or wherever it is, you kind of just hold on to stuff because you don't want to be that guy who asked a girl that asked the question and you're like, "I really do get it."

So you have a team, and when they have the team and the education, now all of a sudden there's something that almost makes it symbiotic. They have somebody to go talk to. So when we get these threats, we start to get this information, whether it's online, whether it's, however we get it, we begin to triage it. And we begin to look at those signs and symptoms and say, "Hey, look, do we have a lot of ingredients? Do we not have a lot of ingredients?" When we do an assessment in law enforcement, we're doing an assessment based off of a safety kind of checklist that we've got created. And there's also a therapist that is doing the exact same thing as us, working alongside of us. They're going to talk to the kid. Again, a school with us, with school rules and regulations, they have more, honestly, they have more power than the U.S. government out of school. So absolutely, if it's in your policies and procedures at the school and your governing board signs off on it, guess what? You can do whatever you want to do. You can call that kid in to talk to him, you can do whatever you need to do. So you can make, you can make them mandatory. You, every week you're going to have to come in and do this. You can, you school, like you just said, any law enforcement...

Yes, anywhere in the United States. And Ethan Crumbley had the gun in his bag in a room with his parents and the teachers and the superintendent. Absolutely. And nobody did what they should have done and said, "Hey, we're going to open your bag," right? Because of exactly what Adam's talking about: that apathetic attitude that, "Listen, I'm not going to be the only one that speaks up. I don't know where to go." You can solve that with one phone call, folks. This is something you could do today in having your team training it. Having, what do we see all too often? We watch SROs that schools are asking them to go and watch lunchrooms. That's not what they do. Like, they need to be trained in stuff like this to handle these kind of behaviors. When we see something, right? You know what? We need to pat this kid down. We're going to check this kid out. Yeah, maybe I can't interview this kid criminally or asking these kind of questions because I have these obligations for the Fourth Amendment and things like that that exist. But the school can. The school board can.

Yeah, exactly, right?

And they can search your locker and your bag. Exactly. I love that. I love where you're going.

Absolutely. So what we do is our School Resource Officers are trained in this. So once a school administrator has got something going on and it's come to them, they're calling us, and then we're calling the therapist. So we use a therapist here in town, we have a partnership and connection with them, right? And what we do is we go forward and we go through it. We go through a law enforcement side of it, and we say, "Hey, look, this is what we're seeing. We think that there's, whether there's access to weapons, there's not access to weapons, it's low, medium, or high." We do that based off of, and I know Brian said something earlier about, "Well, how do we, how do you codify it as low, medium, or high?"

The more signs and symptoms, the more urgent it is. The less signs... just like triage.

Exactly, exactly.

A level of urgency will be created if the right information is given to the right person and added to the right body of work. We would all agree with that. It's just finding that right body of work. That's why you're on the show, Adam.

It is, exactly. And so then what we do is, once we're done, we look over at our therapist and we say, "Here's what we have. What do you have?" Okay, so we talked about FERPA, HIPAA, all those sort of things. Obviously, if we're involved, there's a danger to the student body or the student or public. So we're now able to change that. Law enforcement goes, "Oh, we can't really change information because it's law enforcement sensitive." Well, CR423 is what governs law enforcement data, intel collection, gathering, and disseminating. And it specifically says it's on a need-to-know basis. When I'm dealing with something with the school therapist, they now become need-to-know, so I can share with them as well.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks for that.

So we talk back and forth and they say, "Hey, look, I see what you're having. I see what you've got." And then this determination is made: "Is this something that is a mental concern? Is this something that maybe this kid's not getting the services they need at home? Mentally, they're okay. By, you know, we in law enforcement, our job is the safety and security. Are they safety and security okay? Maybe then we're going to kick it out to our, get our DCS person, get our wrap-around services to try to get this kid the stuff that they need at home."

Maybe they go, "You know what, there is some stuff here that we're seeing. Maybe they don't meet inpatient therapy, they meet, they need to come on an outpatient basis." One thing in America we have right now is zero beds in inpatient mental health facilities. Yeah, but everything's done outpatient. So we look at them and ask, "Hey, what do you think?" "Yes, we think that they do this, we need to do outpatient therapy," whatever else. Give them the option. At that point in time, the parents and the students can sit there and sign an agreement or go and work with these therapists, and they can be modeled and followed and whatever else. It's also a condition of the school, just like you said earlier. And I know Brian kind of pointed out, "You're going to go to this meeting or you're not going to come back to school." You can do that.

Yes.

So to say, "Hey, you're not coming back here," that's fine. You're going to follow along with this and you can have some rigidity in that. So, and then if the parents go, "Hey, no, we're not doing it, and you can kick us out of school, that's fine." At that point in time, that's when we get with our prosecutor and we say, "Hey, look, here's what we have. This is a statement that's been made." In Indiana, we have something called intimidation. Essentially, it's a threat, it's making some sort of violent threat, whatever it may be. Or there's some other things, I don't know.

I'm sorry, real quick on that. There, it's a, it's some, some law where you can, if it rises to a level what they define as intimidation, you can be prosecuted for, I'm assuming some type of misdemeanor, or if it's with a firearm, it's a felony or a deadly weapon. How about that?

So, and again, maybe it's something else. I mean, maybe it's something as silly as like disorderly conduct or something else to that effect. We will go with and say once the decision has been made, we report it either way. Once a decision has been made that, "Hey, we're not going to go to therapy, this is not something we're going to do." Okay, there's two ways that I can make you do something in the United States of America, both of which have a judge's order. One is a mental health evaluation that they're going to say you're going for 72 hours, or I can prosecute you, adjudicate you, and say, "Guess what, not part of probation or your term is you're going to go through this mental health facility." Right? That's how we do it. So we don't want to lock anyone up in a cage, right? This job isn't to go, and that's, and that's another thing, therapists don't want to work with us most of the time because they're like, "Well, law enforcement answers, just arrest it and walk away." No, that doesn't fix the problem, right? You don't manage anything.

So our thing is that we lean on them first and foremost. And if they go, "Hey, you know what, there's really nothing mental here that he's going to benefit from, she's going to benefit from. The parents, whether they're going to be cooperative or not, it's not going to work. We need to do something." So you get all these coppers out here who are listening to us and they're going, "There's no way my prosecutor's going to take this case. No way they're going to." Well, if the prosecutor is on your team, they're trained and understand that you're not sending this [ __ ] case to them on intimidation or whatever else just because you got a hair up your ass one day. You're sending it because this is the management strategy that is only going to work to prevent this kid or individual from doing what they are. They go, "Okay, I'll go ahead and prosecute that," because then they tell that judge, "This is why we're doing it."

And the offside, the offside of contempt of cop. What you're saying is there's a lot of coppers out there, younger coppers that are listening to us. Listen, you can piss off the judicial system by filling it full of those disorderlies and all that stuff just because somebody pissed you off and you wanted to show, "Hey, I'm the cop." And that's going to do nothing to engender you with your prosecutor, Assistant D.A. But I would also say, Adam, that what's unspoken here is if you go to a D.A. and you have a strong case, even if it's circumstantial, because almost all cases are solved on it, and they decide not to prosecute, document the [ __ ] out of that so you can come back later if something goes wrong and say, "This is what's going on." Because Adam is not telling you that you want to go out there and lock people up. Adam is talking about, you can't arrest yourself out of this situation. So don't go that route because it's just going to fail.

And I would call to all of our memories, and folks, listen, I know we're at the hour mark right now, but listen to this: two times outside of Houston, Texas, within a couple of months, people barricaded with guns and shot at care providers that came over to mow their lawns because their lawns were too long. So if you think that a situation can't spill out of control, and one of those had fatal consequences, your inaction, your failure to do something could be the catalyst for an event to occur. That's how serious this is. That's why, that's why Adam is on, and we're saying, "Take your time, it's that important."

Absolutely.

And so what, yeah, so you guys have this framework, is it, is this unique to your area because of your work with these other teams and agencies that you kind of were able to come up with part of this? Because I know part of it is what's come down from state and federal guidelines and different law enforcement and different big-brained Ph.D. folks who think, "Hey, this is how," but proportion of everything we can talk about is your input into this and how it's going to be done. So is this something unique to you guys in Wayne County? Have you seen it spread across the state of Indiana? Where else in the country have you seen something similar?

To have a multi-faceted team the way that we do here in Wayne County, that's unique. To have as many partners on board.

Because that's what it sounded like to me, with when you're talking about these different elements involved. I was going, "This is different than anything I've heard," because it took a lot of hard work too.

I agree. And that's what I was getting ready to say is, our model is probably one of the more difficult models to obtain. And that's because you have to go out there, put the legwork in, and you have to go find it and say, "Hey, be a part of our team." The thing of it is is that there's someone out there, no matter where you go, who's wanting to give back to this cause. You've just got to find that person. And again, a lot of that comes through that information. Again, I said it earlier, a therapist, their big thing is, "Man, if I work with the police and tell them something, they're just going to arrest this guy. My life's going to, our client privilege is gone, they're not going to talk, they're not going to watch it," right?

And that's why, that's why I preface that with saying, "Look, an arrest isn't our number one focus. It's really our last resort." And when you look at an arrest, what we, what we call it here in Wayne County, and the way that we kind of sell that is that an arrest is a means — a mandatory means — to bring services to an involuntary person, right?

And it's rare. And it's rare, right? So Adam, your program is nationally recognized, that's a fact. The other thing is you recently spoke, I can't remember what the association was, and it wasn't the International Association Chiefs of Police. Where did you speak recently?

The National Sheriffs' Association.

Yeah, it's a National Sheriffs' Association, which is sort of the same thing, but the difference between cops and sheriffs, right? So would you, if people contacted you, come to speak at their organization, would you help give them fundamental access to the architecture that you did? That's a huge thing, Brian, is that Adam...

Yeah, absolutely. I'd go a step further than that and tell you that in the state of Indiana — and I talked to him before I did this, so I had that permission — but our Sheriff, Sheriff Randy Retter, would talk to any administrator that exists out there from the position of a sheriff and say why he has done this. Again, he's the first in the state of Indiana to have a team like this, and we believe that throughout the nation, we're in a minority as the number one team exists like this. So he can talk more in depth about some of the costs associated with, and really what from a strategic, proper standpoint, why do you think certain things exist?

Again, anytime you reach out to me, you're reaching out to my strong, silent partner, Brandon Croft. And then as far as case management, Sergeant Kyle Weatherly is an individual that we use. And so the way that our system works, and much like a lot of other police officers, is they go, "Well, where the hell is this going to go?" Like, where is it? Well, our case manager is trained in this, he's certified in this. And he and Sergeant Weatherly understand everything that's going on with this. So a lot of guys on our office, they kind of know what's going on, but we haven't had the time to specifically train each and every patrolman on the ground. So we have a case manager who's trained in this, he vets cases as they come in, information reports as they come in, and says, "Hey, you know what, this might be one that we need to do," and turns it on. So that's great. From any aspect in the law enforcement side, we have you covered, and I'd be happy to help out.

No, and I appreciate that, because one of the things I hear, because Greg and I get to work in small, medium, large agencies all over the world, different places. And someone will go, "Well, yeah, that's great, whatever Wayne County, Indiana. Hey, we're so-and-so school district, we have more kids in our school system than they have people in their county." And I go, "Okay, yeah, that's great. You also have a budget that's ten times the Wayne County budget, so f*** you." Like, but the idea is, you, there's different ways to do it. Yes, can Wayne County probably move a little bit faster than a larger organization? Sure, yeah. But they also, you also have a hell of a lot less resources and a lot less funding than some of these major places. Like, you go to the big cities, their budget and you're like, "I'm sorry, what? Like, holy crap." Now, there's more bureaucracy inside that, but that also means you can allocate. They have the ability to go, "Okay, hey, we can't do it with our people, but we can pay someone to build that for us. We can hire you or whoever to come in and do that and implement that." So it's all within the art of the possible.

Oh, absolutely.

And stop thinking that there's a magic pill. Just because you have a School Resource Officer (SRO) at your school does not make your school safer. Is that person trained? How are they trained? How are they experienced? Does the school support him? Does the Sheriff's Office and the local police support him? What are the resources that person has available to him? We keep thinking that there's a thing that's going to solve this, and it's a "think." And your mindset today, and what you shared with us today, is a "think." It's a process, just like our training is a process. But we're laser-focused on this element. What you're talking about is putting together other assets that are easily, that are more easily garnered than you think. Without that phone call, they're already there, and somebody's already using them.

Exactly, exactly.

No, I like it. Yeah.

So, and that's really the way that we do it. I mean, obviously, compulsion is not something that we want to do to anybody. But if we have to do that, that's what we have to do. I mean, you guys said it, I think in episode 158, where you specifically said, "Look, the bigger the number, who are we saving here?" We may have to say, "Man, we're going to have to go via an arrest or there's some element of compulsion." But how many are we saving? And you go back to the SROs and things like that, you got, there was an SRO at Oxford. I'm not saying that they did anything wrong, there was nothing. And there was an SRO in Omaha. And that's where it comes down to the fact, is it has to be that, it has to be that team. There has to be attainment, there has to be the training.

And that's the point. Because you can't stick a person there and say, "Hey, you're, you're now, this is now your responsibility." It's like, "Oh, okay, one, I can't be everywhere at once. Two, I don't see everything." Like, that's such an unreasonable expectation of a human.

Exactly, right? And that's the reason I say it's coming. So there's, so last little bit of tidbits. There's 13 states that have codified in law that have to have a threat assessment team. Generally, they're super ambiguous and doesn't really say what it needs to be. So there's only 13 out of 50 that have that. Another thing to look in or to consider is that we live in a litigious society. So Title IX already has written in Title IX recommendations for schools that receive Title IX funds that they are recommended by the federal government to have a BIT team, a Behavioral Intervention Team, is what they call it. I don't know, like I said, I've not been in the federal government or politics really too long in my life, but I can tell you one thing, if the federal government starts uses the word "recommend," it's going to be mandated very [ __ ] soon.

Yeah. Yeah, you can guarantee that.

Yeah. And if you start your own program, if you start your own program, you can put your own people in it and get it, and you control the message. Or it's coming down like, when that stuff becomes federally mandated, when, when they fed, with federal mandate stuff like that, what do they usually have to do? They have to provide funding or grants or resources for that. So if you already have your program, you go, "Yeah, we already fit that, boom, you're front of the line for any resources that you need too." And that's all about getting ahead of it.

And that kind of speaks to, you know, you brought up the analogy, we use it too, with the fire department. And I know cops never like saying good things about firemen, vice versa, and it's, or my favorite, "Oh, here comes America's heroes." That's right. So they saved a lot of basements. But the point of that is is because it's been, I'm using that one because it's part of the law, it's in building code. So there's so much involved, especially me out here, like, I live in Southern California, biggest threat to everything is fire. So there's so much code built into everything that you do, that there are far less structure fires out here than there are in big cities like Chicago or New York or something like that. Why? Because they learned and they made everything out here was like, "Nope, we're so concerned about fire." But I mean, down to the dimensions of doorways and where the exits are and how they're marked, there's so much there that's already built in that you don't even see. Why is this any different? Now, it's going to take time to get there, but...

Brian, do all of your firemen in California practice on live fires, or do they do any sort of prevention? My thing is, there's still a school that's spending their hard-earned dollars on "at bang" thinking, and people are running around with pellet guns inside of their school. Yeah, have at it. But that's not stopping the problem. That's not even addressing the problem.

Not at all.

That, that, that is the wrong direction. But you're not going to listen to me. Here's Adam. Listen to Adam. Listen to Brian. Listen to any of the other podcasts. That's the wrong way to spend your, you want to spend your funds, spend them on a program like this. And we, Brian, I'll go on record saying we fully endorse the Wayne County model. It's been well thought out and well researched and well implemented.

Well, yeah, and then after you reached out with everything that you were doing, I was like, "Okay, well, this is new." And so I, and I love it. And the beauty of this, if you are, it's sometimes it's easier to do this in a smaller area where, yeah, you don't have the resources, but you got a lot of people who live there, and a lot of people that care, and a lot of people. Okay, so you, and like you just said, yeah, does it take some time and some work and some effort? Yeah, but once you, once you set it up, like, it's on, man. Like, no, no, no. Now all you got to do is you got to build it, and then it's running. One, once that operating system is running.

Exactly, Brian, there's 15,000 police agencies out there in the United States. I'm not going to separate the numbers into cops and sheriff's office. But I will tell you this, there's many more smaller agencies than there are larger agencies. So an insurgency that Adam Blanton and his folks started in Wayne County, and your incredible sheriff endorsing it all the way and getting you out there, folks, this is how it starts. This is how it grows. This is how all of Brian's STDs started and grew into what they are today. I mean, we need to say that doctors refer to it as "the perfect storm of the narrative."

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. No, man.

Well, Adam, we really appreciate you coming on here, man. One, do you, are you good with me putting like your email in some of the episode details, or I can just have everyone go through us and ours?

Yeah, I actually, I got an email that's a personal email that'll come right to me. It won't hit a spam filter, and you can, okay, I'll give that, and I'll post it. You can say it now if you want, but I'll post it in the details as well. Yeah, it's ablanton2326@gmail.com.

And I want to throw this at you too, I want to throw it at you. Let's collaborate on something again this year. This will be three years, three years running that we've said, "Hey, we're going to set something in the headlights and go do it." We've accomplished two of those. So let's plan something for this year and go and knock it out of the park.

We're ready. I'd love to. And for all the guys and gals out there listening, this is it. What you guys are doing, what you guys are doing across the country, what Arcadia is doing, what you have wrote in the books for a long time, this is the model. This is, that's where it comes from. This is, all these people who are listening to the things that you guys talk about and say and do, and make them a little bit harder to kill, this is the concept of what we're doing right here.

I, one, I appreciate that. And the bigger thing too is, you were listening to us for a while, we came and trained your folks, and then you went forward and used that and went, "Okay, knowing what I know now with this problem set, here's what we're going to get to." Like, that's to us is exactly what we, that's our end goal. That's it. Because we always say, "Hey, this training is up to you." And you're the perfect example of what we mean by that. You go, "Okay, I get where you're, I see where you're getting that." Yeah, in your agency, and you're the one to catch now. It's so cool. It's possible through the right type of training.

We're humbled, and this is a love-love relationship that's going to go on for a long time because it's the right thing, historical values, and we're talking about all of the different stuff. Good idea, stick around to quote my dear friend Brian Marren. Good idea, stick around. And this is one of them.

That's right, absolutely. We appreciate Adam, thanks so much. Thanks everyone for listening. And again, if you enjoyed the episode, please just share it with your friends. Check out more stuff on Patreon that we have and send us suggestions. But don't forget that training changes behavior.