Planning for crises tops WIR workshop advice
A County Board's relationship with its sheriff is paramount in planning for an active shooter
Idyllic Jackson, Wyo. seemed far from the crises that WIR conference workshops addressed, but the setting reinforced that it’s never too early to plan.
“We’ve spent billions of dollars in infrastructure to mitigate risk of fire deaths, but we haven’t done that preparation for mass violence,” said Darry Stacy, a Cleveland County, Okla. commissioner. “But when you prepare for these things, there are transferrable skills.”
Stacy acknowledged that violence capable of causing mass casualties was unlikely in his rural home county, but by the same token it would transform the area.
“When an incident like that does occur, it can absolutely define your entire community, your government, your time in office,” he said, after Teton County Emergency Management Coordinator Rich Ochs, pointed out that Columbine High School in Colorado and Sandy Hook, Conn. were not household names before their mass shootings.
To prepare, a sheriff needs good risk management skills, common sense and the ability to get along with other elected officials.
“One of the things that drives me nuts is when a sheriff says he doesn’t get along with his commissioners,” said Teton County Sheriff Jim Whalen. “You gotta work through that. It’s too important and too big to have personalities and things get in the way of protecting the people of your community.”
He added that it was crucial for county government to have personnel policies to reflect the possibility of tension among employees, which could escalate into violence.
Stacy said there is an imbalance in preparation for an active shooter situation.
“We’ve done a great job of training law enforcement for something like this. What we haven’t done is train our citizens,” he said. Stacy, a retired SWAT commander, is a principal in the Centurion Consulting Group, which trains civilians to react in active shooter situations.
Porter Novelli communications consultant Anthony LaFauce put crisis communications in a somewhat cynical perspective in another workshop.
“You need to face that everything you do, every word that you say is going to be put into the adversarial news cycle meant to sell ads,” he said.
He put crisis communications in the context of overall crisis management and hammered home that planning ahead, training a variety of people to speak in an official capacity and internally framing events properly are all crucial to good crisis communications.
As is setting appropriate expectations.
“No matter how well you’re prepared (for a crisis), it won’t go that well,” he said. “Something will go wrong, someone will be on vacation, but the way you handle your crisis will affect what you’re able to do later on, when it’s time to fix the problem.”
Having a checklist that helps determine if something is a crisis can guide a response and help prevent overkill.
Selecting designated spokesmen and spokeswomen is important, but so is getting basic media training to anyone who may be called upon to serve in that capacity.
“Face it, a lot of you people won’t be there when a train derails,” LaFauce said. “It’s going to probably be an emergency worker, a deputy, a police officer, and they probably don’t care about the statement they make as much as doing their job and making sure people are safe.”
And, when traditional media can be circumvented to get a message directly to people, be sure digital media is accurate and ready to push out publically.
In another workshop, NACo Research Director Emilia Istrate presented post-recession analysis of Western county economies. In the West, as nationally, only 55 percent of county economies had recovered, based on GDP, by 2015, but only 7 percent of Western county economies had recovered on all four indicators that were measured.
