Beware of the Sheep

I rely on God to bring the monthly blog/newsletter subjects to me each month.  Sometimes it’s not until the last minute that happens.  This one I have been sitting on for a couple of weeks but still waited until now to put it together.  With the shooting that happened this weekend at the church in Texas, it just adds to what I wanted this month’s subject to be.

There is a lot of “noise” going on around this weekends events and I pretty much wait at least 72 hours before I really dig in or venture any kind of comment.  Fortunately, we have a video from the live feed that was streaming at the time the killer acted and the responder took him out.  But there is a lot that happened in that video that shows how untrained and unprepared they were right from the beginning.  This is why our seminars are for not just the security teams of the church, but for ushers, greeters, children’s workers, staff, etc.  Security must be a total team concept.  We can and have been asked and are adjusting our seminar schedule in order to be able to answer questions and to give a preventative perspective on the events.
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So, what do I mean by “Beware of the Sheep”?  Let me start with a story from my own church that happened early on in the establishment of our security team and then I will tell you of the lessons learned.  We had a medical incident that was happening outside the auditorium and near the front door area of the church.  We were handling it as we had been trained to at that point.  We had a man come up to us and identify himself as a doctor and wanted to help.  We let him know that whatever it was, that it was minor and thanked him but we had it under control.  This same man then went up the side ramp that led to the stage and handed the pastor a note in the middle of his message that stated that there was a medical emergency in the entry way and that the family member needed to come out.

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Ok, so let’s look at the lessons that we learned.  First off, we were a pretty small team at the time with a very large footprint of a property to cover. 

1. The man was NOT a medical professional.  We found out later that he was a psychologist that had lost his license to practice.  A change that we have made is that we now ask what kind of PRACTICING MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL ARE YOU?  For liability reasons we don’t let anyone besides a true medical professional touch our patients and EMS is usually already on the way.  I have actually turned nurses away from an incident because we already had two and a Dr. helping me with a heart attack patient during the service.  That nurse was very mad but remember that it is your scene and that you are in charge of the scene.  I did turn over the care of the patient to the Dr. and followed his lead on what needed to be done, but the scene was mine..
2. Now we have what we call our “No Fly Zone”.  It is that area from the first pew to the steps of the stage.  We have people in the auditorium and one that is near the front to ensure that nobody enters that area.  If they do, we use discernment as to what their intent is and that is usually easy to do by their eyes and body language.  They may be going there to kneel and pray and we need to be sensitive of that.  They may be going there to worship outside the pew and honestly it is outside the norm for our church and we have told people that they can do that as long as they don’t approach the stairs.
3. We have processes in place now if we need to let anyone on stage know if there is an emergency.  An upcoming podcast deals with this a bit.  We can talk to the worship team directly to their in-ear monitors from the production booth.  Our pastors know that it will be a staff member or a known security member that will approach if ABSOLUTELY necessary.  Anyone else and we are stopping them, and the pastors are moving away so that we can do our job.

I have a friend that is a security director and he told me a story last week that goes to the mindset of the sheep and of our society in general.  People don’t like to be told they can’t do something and that is what he experienced here.  This director had planned this training months ago, notified local law enforcement of the training that he was going to do in case people saw it and reported it.  He reserved the building for an early morning training that would end about noon.  Put signs up on all the doors around the building that were bold and bright red notifying people that training was taking place and the building was closed for their safety.  Communication to ministries and staff went out weeks prior to the training.  So, now here is what the sheep did.

1. There was one scenario that they were doing, and it stared in the parking lot with a man about to enter the building with an AR 15 that was made safe for the training.  Someone pulled into the parking lot and stopped next to him asking what room a particular addiction recovery meeting was happening.  Totally oblivious to the fact that there was a man in the parking lot with an AR 15 walking toward the building whom he did not know.
2. During a simulated force on force training was taking place, the director looked down a hallway near the main entrance and noticed a woman that was getting things ready for the weekend services.  He approached her and let her know that it was not safe for her to be there and that the building would be available at noon.  She refused to be told that she could not be there.  Upon further conversations about whether she saw the signage or the electronic communication….
3. She not only saw them but stated that she had removed the signs on one of the doors and unlocked them so that the group that was waiting outside in the cold could come in out of the cold and start their meeting.  Needless to say, the director was extremely frustrated with these actions.

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Now, it doesn’t matter if it is a real-world situation or a training situation, we have to beware of the sheep.  We never know what or how they are going to act.  In another upcoming podcast I talk with a children’s director that points out that she has heard that in an emergency situation that a parent will revert to a 5th grade mentality.  We also see in the video of this weekends shooting that there was a variety of actions from the sheep and even those that may have been the Sheepdog but lacked the training and were actually putting the sheep in danger.  Watch them as the video ends.  As a Sheepdog called to the protection of the flock, sometimes the sheep need to see our teeth to know that we are serious about their protection when they step outside the boundaries that are there for their safety.