Showing posts with label Michigan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michigan. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2012
U of M Child Porn Case: A Study in Crisis Communication
In a story that made everyone's blood run cold, a resident physician specializing in pediatrics at the University of Michigan was arrested in December after investigators found child pornography on his computer. If that wasn't bad enough for you, it now turns out that another doctor found child pornography on a thumb drive at the hospital last May, determined to whom it most likely belonged, and reported it to her superiors, who assured her it was being dealt with according to protocol. It wasn't reported to the police until November.
So, let's get the righteous indignation out of the way first. If you're thinking, "Penn State," you're not alone. There seems to be a complete inability or unwillingness in certain circles to recognize that you report this sort of thing not because you are absolutely sure who did it or to whom, but because you want the police to try to make sure they don't do it to anybody again. Child porn is not a victimless crime. Not reporting it because you're not completely sure whose it is is like not reporting a burglary because you didn't see the burglar.
One of the huge mistakes leaders and organizations tend to make at moments like this is to think solely about what information they want to transmit, without thinking about what the recipient needs to hear. In this instance, the University could have issued a statement that said, "We were not required to report this under Michigan law. We followed procedures. We are now reviewing our procedures to see if they need to be revised." All of that would be true, and it would only serve to make people more angry.
But Michigan did something different. They appear to have recognized that, in addition to factual information, the public needs to know that the University knows this was wrong. Today, the CEO of the University of Michigan Health System wrote a blog post addressed to employees. In part, she wrote:
Early findings have identified significant problems with how initial reporting of these allegations was handled. . . . In situations like this when there are mistakes in how such a situation was handled, human nature makes us want to quickly identify and resolve the problem. However, jumping to quick conclusions and making assumptions with partial information isn’t the answer. That’s why the University is engaged in a comprehensive review into what went wrong in this particular case. This review and taking appropriate action are top priorities. . . . We will make improvements to prevent this from happening again.This is crisis communication done right. It doesn't make excuses. It doesn't say we were right and the public is wrong. It doesn't try to downplay the significance of the problem. It takes responsibility and gives a plan for future action. It includes both what they want to say and what we need to hear.
I can't excuse this situation, and neither can the University of Michigan. It makes me nervous that someone suspected of having child pornography was treating children, in the hospital my family uses, for 6 months after the suspicion first occurred. But let me tell you, I'd rather bring my kids to a hospital that knows that was a mistake and is working to fix it than to one that doesn't.
Go blue.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Suicide Among Our Finest
The story unfolded in the local media, posted on my Facebook page this afternoon. A major street was closed due to police activity. Police were investigating a possible suicide. A note had been found and the family called police. Officers on the scene were seen wiping their eyes. And finally, the news that the Chief of Police at Eastern Michigan University killed himself today.
This man was well known in the law enforcement community. In addition to the Eastern police force, he had been an officer in Ann Arbor for many years and quite recently did a brief stint at University of Michigan as their police chief. It's likely that most if not all of the responders to this scene knew him personally. My heart goes out to them.
The suicide rate among police officers is, depending upon whom you ask, either higher or lower than in the general population. A study in 2006 found that while the suicide rate for law enforcement was 52% higher than the general population, if you controlled for race, gender and age it was actually 26% lower than the general population. The discrepancy is caused by the fact that police officers are very disproportionately white males between 25 and 55, and that demographic has a suicide rate about twice the population average.
Not surprisingly, most cops who kill themselves do so with a firearm. Most civilians in that demographic do too. That's why men are so much more likely to kill themselves than women -- the method of choice is almost always lethal. Suicide is most common in groups with easy access to lethal weapons, cultural bias against asking for help and a lack of severe cultural bias against suicide. That last factor is what differentiates black males from white males.
Men don't like to ask for help. Cops really don't like to ask for help. So do a favor tonight, would you? If you know and love a cop, ask them how they're doing. If they're fine, fine. At least you've told them you're willing to have the conversation.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call, 24 hours, 7 days a week: 1-800-273-TALK (veterans press 1 at the prompt). Help is available. You just need to ask.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Why Terrorism is Like Mosquitoes
There's an old wives' tail that goes something like this: Male mosquitoes buzz, but don't bite. Females bite, but don't buzz. So it's when you don't hear anything that you should worry.*
I was reminded of this yesterday, when news broke of the failed plot, allegedly by Iran, to recruit members of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Syrian ambassador to the United States by bombing an undetermined location in Washington, DC. The media has been making the obvious comparisons to a spy novel or Hollywood script.
The plot seems amateurish. The evil Iranians we all fear can certainly do better than this, can't they? In the Middle East, the story has been met with outright disbelief.
In the sage of another highly publicized failed plot, the "underwear bomber" pled guilty in Detroit today. Apparently what he wanted more than anything was the chance to make a public statement about why he did it, and so he did.
Both of these plots should, from one perspective, terrify me. Not only do I live in the Detroit area, I've taken Flight 253 from Amsterdam. I have family in Washington, DC. These plots represent plots against people and places I care about.
And yet, I'm not terrified. To me, these plots seem like the male mosquitoes. They're the ones that we notice, but not the ones that are dangerous. They make the noise, but they don't bite.
I'm not worried about these. If this is the best the terrorists can come up with, I think we're OK. What scares me isn't the ones we know about. It's the ones we don't. Remember, it's the silent, female mosquitoes that bite.
* Like many pieces of "common knowledge," this turns out not to be true. While it is only the females that bite, the buzz is the sound of beating wings and comes from both males and females.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Try Explaining This One to Your Kids
There was a car bombing in Monroe, Michigan on Tuesday.
How many of you just went back and read that again to make sure you had read it correctly? I sure did when I saw the headline. Monroe, Michigan, population 20,700 and change, had a car bombing. A local lawyer, aged 42, and his sons, 11 and 13, were driving to football practice around 5:30 when a pipe bomb placed under the passenger seat went off, injuring all three of them. The boys are still in the hospital. The dad has been released.
At moments like this, I usually flip automatically into what I like to call "Law and Order" mode. Who are the most likely suspects? I'm thinking someone on the other side of a case. Turns out this guy handled divorces, so that makes it even juicier. Someone got screwed in a divorce, decides to kill the lawyer. We haven't even finished the opening credits, and the Quarterback has solved the case.
Of course, if this were a "Law and Order" episode, the very fact that the case was solved so quickly would indicate with certainty that we've got the wrong guy. There's a whole 40 minutes of TV to fill, after all, so it's either that or some big constitutional issue in how I conducted the investigation.
But I digress, which is easy to do, because this story just doesn't seem real. This is not something that happens in real life. I've written often about how trauma messes up our ideas of what is likely vs. what is possible. But this wasn't even on my possible list. There are places in the world where this happens. Southeast Michigan is not one of them.
The Catholic school that the boys attend held a prayer service for them yesterday. There are also excerpts from a letter from the Principal to parents, and it looks like he did a pretty good job. But this raises the question, how exactly would you explain this to one of the boys' classmates in such a way that was honest but didn't scare them? This is not one of the many types of horrible events that I have a fairly stock way of explaining to kids -- and remember, that's allegedly one of my areas of expertise.
So let's go with general rules of thumb:
Tell the truth, the whole truth, but not all the details unless asked: Your friend is in the hospital. He got very hurt in an accident, but it looks like he's going to be OK.
If they're going to hear it anyway, let them hear it from you: There was an explosion in the car he and his dad and brother were riding in. The police think someone put an explosive device under one of the seats.
Separate what is known from what is not known, and that people are working on it: The police are investigating and they've even called investigators from the federal government. They don't know who did this or why, but they have some good leads and they're trying their best to find out.
Normalize the feeling, educate about the probabilities: This is a pretty scary thing. And one of the reasons it's so scary and such a big deal is because it's incredibly unusual. I've never heard of something like this happening. So even though it really scares me, I also know it's really unlikely to happen again.
Is this going to be enough to make them feel completely safe? No. It probably doesn't make you feel completely safe either. But you have to start somewhere, and then just live with the fact that it's going to feel scary for a while, and it will get better.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Dawn Fital -- A Victim Who Doesn't Fit the Profile
Last week, word filtered out through what is left of the media here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that police were looking for a woman from Pittsfield Township named Dawn Fital. Pittsfield is the township just southeast of Ann Arbor, between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Like many areas around here, the homicide rate is incredibly tiny. The Michigan State Police searchable database for 2006 (the most recent year included) shows that there were no homicides. In 2009 (the most recent year for county-wide statistics) there were 9 homicides in the entire county.
At any rate, Dawn Fital went missing on Monday from the apartment she shared with her boyfriend and ex-husband. Police in Indiana picked up her boyfriend on Tuesday after he was spotted digging a hole behind a bank, and he apparently told him he had killed his girlfriend. Her body was found on Thursday in a pond near where the boyfriend was arrested. He has been charged with open murder.
Over the four days between when this story first hit the news on Wednesday and the arraignment on Saturday, there were approximately 12 stories in our local news outlet about it. As much as I'd like to tell you that that's because we are all so stunned that anyone would be killed in our neck of the woods, and while that is not completely irrelevant, I think it is incomplete.
Dawn Fital, a White woman, was allegedly murdered in her own home by someone she lived with, a White man. She was not a criminal, a drug dealer, or a gang banger (and yes, we do have those in Washtenaw County as well). She was not African-American, and she was not male. She was not "supposed" to be a homicide victim around here.
But think about that for a moment. Because if Dawn Fital was not "supposed" to be murdered, that implies that someone else was. The fact that Fital does not meet the typical statistical profile of a homicide victim may be notable, but it should not make her death more important than that of any other person. Everyone who is murdered has a family and friends. Everyone is a human being.
The thing that strikes me -- or perhaps triggers me -- about Dawn Fital's death is that I can count on one hand the number of female homicide victims in Washtenaw County in the 9 years I have lived here. Every one of them was a victim of domestic violence. So in that sense, I guess Fital does fit the profile. The problem is the existence of the profile, and a society that in any way condones a pattern where Black men are disposable as victims of violence in general, and women are disposable as victims of violence by their partners.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Hang Onto Your Parcheesi Boards: Tornadoes Here and There
which says, "Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown is a wonder. Boom, boom, boom, Mr. Brown makes thunder." Parcheesi
warnings are for tornadoes. These come from something I'm relatively sure my sister made up (although she will correct me if I'm wrong). Right before Hurricane Bob was due to hit New England in the early 1990's, she said, "Hang onto your Parcheesi boards. It's gonna blow."Last weekend, we had a major family event on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, all of the out of town guests were invited for brunch, and a bunch of them stayed throughout the day. There were 14 people at my house. About midday, we learned that our area was under a tornado watch. This is not such a big deal in Southeast Michigan. It happens pretty frequently, and doesn't usually progress to a tornado warning. Even when it does, however, we don't get too upset. While tornadoes are not unheard of in this neck of the woods, the number of warnings far outstrips the number of actual tornadoes, so we have a plan and a safe room in the basement, but we try to keep things fairly calm. My husband and I discussed the fact that our usual safe room won't hold 14 people, and decided that the room next to it is almost as safe and we would use that if necessary.
A little after 5 PM on Sunday, a Parcheesi warning was issued for our county. We are on the eastern end, so we knew we had some time. I calmly invited our guests to join us in our luxurious basement, bring something to do, and carry down a chair if they preferred not to sit on the floor. At my sister-in-law's request, we brought down a guitar, and for the next hour we all sat around, noses in computers and cell phones, while my mom, my daughter and I passed the guitar around and led the group in various folk songs. A good time was had by all.
When it was over and everyone had posted about it on Facebook, I was somewhat taken aback by the comments we got from friends and family elsewhere. "Was it scary?" "That's disturbing." "How horrible." My sister-in-law praised my calmness, and said she was handling the panic, quietly, for all of us. I explained that I preferred to save my panic for when a tornado actually hits our house.
The bulk of these visiting relations are from Massachusetts, where I grew up. In the 17 years I lived there full time, I can remember no more than three tornado warnings. We would go down to the basement and wait it out, and I remember distinctly one time asking schoolmates what they had done during a warning and them saying things like, "We just hung out and hoped a tornado didn't come." They had no plan at all.
Last night, however, the central and western parts of Massachusetts were slammed by tornadoes, causing major damage in 19 or 20 towns. At least four people died. My family, living as they do in the eastern part of the state, just got a spectacular lightning show.
Meanwhile, in Missouri last week, reports indicate that a lot of people didn't take cover during the Tornado that hit Joplin until they could see the tornado bearing down on them. The sirens go off so often around there, people don't always pay attention anymore.
This is the difficulty of disaster warning systems. You want a system that people will pay attention to and that warns of any disaster that is actually going to hit. But these two goals can be at odds. Any system that catches all the tornadoes that actually hit will also catch a lot of storms that could produce tornadoes but don't. And as long as that's the case, people in areas where those storms are fairly common will not see a tornado warning as being sufficient reason to take cover. Meanwhile, people in areas where such a thing is very unusual will take it seriously, but won't have a plan because they generally don't need one. Locations like ours, in fact, are in some ways ideal. We get enough warnings that we have a plan, but not so many that we don't take it seriously.
You've heard me say many times in this space that we live our lives by
what is likely, not what is possible. We take risks all day long based on the probability that something bad will happen to us, how bad that thing would be, and how disruptive it is to our lives to not take those risks. If a tornado hits near you, it's easy to say, in hindsight, you should have taken cover. It's not as easy to say, for someone else, that taking cover every time the warning goes out is always the absolute right thing to do. It is always the safe thing to do, but "right" depends on how much of a pain it is and how likely the tornado is to actually hit where you are, so everyone will come to his or her own conclusions.
In my household, however, when the siren goes off or the warning comes onto the radio or TV, we'll continue to hold onto our Parcheesis boards. Thanks for asking.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Now that Japan Has Your Attention, Let's Talk Preparedness
Depending on where you live, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan may or may not seem like something that can happen to you. Here in Michigan, our chances of an 8.9 earthquake are pretty low. Even a tsunami on Lake Michigan wouldn't reach my house. But a nuclear reactor accident? Before today I didn't even know where the nearest nuclear power plant to my house was (it's about 40 miles). Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, chemical spills . . . there are a lot of reasons why you might, someday, need to either evacuate your house or shelter in place.
FEMA has been on us for years to get ready. Most of us aren't. At a recent meeting of CISM providers, the FEMA director asked for a show of hands of how many people had an emergency bag for evacuations. Less than half of us raised our hands. Then he asked how many had a plan for evacuating their family. In a room of 800 people, I was one of two.
Make no mistake about it. When the time comes to leave your house, you will not necessarily have any time to get ready. Depending on what the disaster is, you might have a day and you might have less than 5 minutes. That's not the time to be thinking about this for the first time.
So, let's get practical. Here is a list of things you can do, roughly in order of the ease of doing them. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it take into consideration every possible catastrophe that could befall you. But it's a start. Find something on this list you haven't done yet, and do it.
- Talk. Seriously. Have a conversation with the other people in your house and make the following decisions:
- Where would you meet in the event of an evacuation at a time you weren't together. Pick someplace out of the immediate area.
- Where would you meet if that place was also evacuating.
- Who are two people outside your area who you will call in an emergency if you can't reach each other, so they can relay messages to the others when they call.
- If you have children and you have to evacuate during the school day, who is responsible for picking them up (if possible -- they may have to go with school personnel, keep in mind).
- If your children are home alone, where should they go? Who is a safe person who is nearby who can help them?
- Find out what the official evacuation route or procedure is, if there is one, for the catastrophe most likely to happen in your area.
- Educate yourself about that catastrophe. Find out what the dos and don'ts of surviving it are. Do this even if you think you already know. Conventional wisdom may well be wrong.
- Make sure you have a battery operated radio
and a flashlight
, and that everyone in the house knows how to use them. Also make sure everyone in the house knows where in the house is safest in the event of an earthquake or tornado, if applicable.
- Make a list of the medications everyone in the house takes, both so you can grab them on your way out and so you can tell people at the shelter if you don't have your meds.
- Make sure you keep 3 days worth of food in your house at all times. It doesn't have to be 3 days of great food, but don't let your cupboards get bare.
- Stock up on clean water. You should have one gallon per person per day for 3 days. If you have a chest freezer, you can stick a gallon or two in the freezer, which will also save electricity.
- Create a bag with the things you would need if absolutely everything else in the world were destroyed. This probably includes medications, vital documents, a first aide kit, and at least a little non-perishable food. Put a list in the bag of anything that isn't in there that you need to remember (e.g. your child's asthma nebulizer).
Sunday, January 30, 2011
We Stand with Egyptians, but Egyptian-Americans? Not so much.
Imagine, if you will, that an American, motivated by hatred of, let's say, Roman Catholics, drove to New York City and parked a car full of explosives outside St. Patrick's Cathedral during a funeral, only to be caught by the FBI on a tip from a bar employee who had heard the man ranting about Catholics earlier. Surely this would be a big story. It wouldn't take more than a day for it to hit the news, and we'd be hearing major coverage.
Now let's substitute a few facts. Instead of Catholics, let's insert Muslims. Instead of New York, let's move to Dearborn, Michigan
-- the Detroit suburb with the highest concentration of Arab-Americans in the United States. Now the plot can't be against St. Patrick's, of course, so we'll move it to the Islamic Center of America -- the largest mosque in the Detroit metropolitan area. The rest of the facts are the same. What kind of press coverage do you expect?I hope your expectations aren't very high, because this actually happened on Monday. It didn't hit the media even locally until this morning, six days after the arrest and four days after the man was arraigned. It took the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) releasing a press statement to get anyone's attention. It's not the top story in Michigan news even now that it has gotten some coverage.
I find this particularly poignant given that Americans have been watching round-the-clock coverage of the unrest in Egypt this week. My Facebook page has lit up with postings asking me to sign various petitions asking our government to stand with the people of Egypt. I'd like to suggest that we might like to stand with Americans of Egyptian extraction as well. The situations are not the same, certainly. But I can imagine nothing more dehumanizing than being the target of a mass murder plot, foiled at the last moment, and it not even registering as a blip on anyone's radar screen.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
When You Say All the Right Things, and You're Wrong
On the route home from the school where I work and my daughter attends, there has been, for many years, an old, somewhat dilapidated house. It's not a terribly residential neighborhood, and the house neither added nor subtracted much from the area. It was just there. Then, towards the end of May, we drove past and the house that was "just there" wasn't there anymore. Where it had been was a pile of debris, obviously the physical materials that had made up the house.
My daughter gasped when she saw it. "Look, Mom! That house just collapsed!!" I was quick to respond. I assured her that the house didn't just collapse, that it had certainly been demolished to make room for something else and we just happened by in between the demolition and the removal of the debris. "That's good," she replied, "because a house just falling over like that would be pretty scary."
As the days went by, we drove past the spot every day. Soon yellow caution tape went up around the debris pile, but the debris itself didn't move. If we had, indeed, just happened along in between the demolition and the cleanup, clearly we had had ample opportunity. After about a week, a story appeared on our local news website. The headline read:
Vacant house on North Main Street collapses; cleanup awaits city permitAs it turns out, the house was indeed slated for demolition, and the owner had applied for a demolition permit. However, before one was issued, according to the owner, the house collapsed.
It just collapsed.
Not only was I wrong when I told my daughter it hadn't just collapsed (and she will tell you this was hardly the first time I was ever wrong!), but I had reassured her by making her believe something that, as it turns out, wasn't true. This is a big no-no when you're talking to kids who are worried about something. You never lie or hide the truth when they ask a question, because they need to know they can trust you. But, inadvertently, I had told her something that wasn't true. It wasn't a lie, it was a mistake. But it shook the basis of why she wasn't supposed to worry about houses collapsing nonetheless.
Even though it was unintentional, I actually did bring this problem upon myself. When we talked about it initially, I didn't say that a controlled demolition was "my best guess" or "probably" or "most likely" what happened. I said it "certainly" was what happened. I spoke in absolutes about something I didn't actually have the facts about. That's another big no-no. And now we see why.
So what could I do? First, I thanked my lucky stars that this wasn't something that my daughter was really distressed about, so the damage was minimal to none. Second, I acknowledged that I had been wrong. I said,
I know I said that the house didn't collapse, but now we found out that it did. It had been empty for a long time and was in very bad condition, and in fact the owner was getting ready to tear it down. So yes, it 'just collapsed,' but it didn't happen all of a sudden out of the blue.That was good enough for her. And it is some version of what I should have said in the first place. Mistakes
happen, and while it's best to avoid them, it's second best to admit them. Believe it or not, that preserves kids' trust in adults, because they know we're doing our best. For more about talking to kids about traumatic events, check out last week's post about the murder of two kids in Texas, and this list of tips from my website.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Recovering from the Traumatic Death of a Child
A two-year-old child died in my township this week. A relative was watching the boy and several other children with another adult when he disappeared. They called 911, then called back to say they had found him -- in the swimming pool
. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.Generally speaking, when people react to a story like this, they go in one of two directions. The first is what I'll call the "safety first" direction. People take this opportunity to remind others (or themselves) to keep a close eye on little ones around water. The extreme form of this is blame -- how could someone have a pool outside and not be watching it or the kids around it? The second, and perhaps more compassionate, response is what I'll call the "I can't even imagine it" response. This takes the form of "How awful," "How sad," and the perhaps most honest, "I don't think I'd ever get over it" responses.
While the latter response is more compassionate, and therefore maybe less actively harmful, it actually isn't all that helpful, either. "I don't think I'd ever get over it" is not what a parent needs to hear in what is, for obvious reason, their darkest moment. It's somewhat like going to the doctor and telling her about this terrible stomach pain you have and her responding, "Yep, sucks to be you!!" Sympathy and empathy are nice, but they don't solve much. This may seem a little harsh on my part, and if so, I apologize. It is absolutely true that people don't know what to say at moments like this, and I can hardly blame them for that.
I was recently asked to expound on why we, as a society, don't more fully embrace early trauma response for mental health care. Why isn't it part of what automatically happens, as first aid and calling 911 are for early intervention in physical trauma? The answer to this is complex. It has a lot to do with how we view medical care and mental health in general, and the stigmas we still attach to these topics. But I also think you can trace the lack of early care for traumatized people directly to people saying, "I don't think I'd ever get over it."
If you honestly don't believe you could ever recover from a traumatic incident, then there is no purpose to early trauma intervention. The fact that we as a society do not envision recovery from critical incidents means that we don't set up systems to help that recovery happen. We expect people to fall into two categories -- those who are unaffected by trauma (and we think way too many people "should" be in this category) and those who will be permanently debilitated by it. In physical trauma, we imagine there are those who will be seriously injured, recover and, while perhaps not be the same as before, be in reasonably good shape. We have no vision of this middle group when it comes to mental health.
There are two things I find myself saying the most often to people following critical incidents. The first is some form of "what you are feeling is typical and you are not crazy." The second is, "you will not always feel as awful as you do right now." Can I imagine coping with the traumatic death of a toddler child? No, I can't. Do I know exactly how I would recover from it? No, I don't. The key distinction, however, is that I know that somehow I would. It would be awful. It would be painful. And I would survive. So will these parents. Someone needs to tell them that.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Big Story of the Weekend (no, not that one)
This weekend someone packed a bunch of explosive and flammable material into an SUV and parked it in Times Square in New York. The investigation of this is the number one most popular story on Google News today, and I am not going to blog about it. President Obama gave the commencement speech at the University of Michigan here in Ann Arbor, and I'm not blogging about that either. Thousands of gallons of oil are threatening the Gulf Coast, and I probably will blog about that tomorrow. Massachusetts is still without drinking water, and I blogged about that yesterday. You probably knew about all of these things (perhaps not the U of M
story, but you would if you lived here).Early this morning, Detroit police officers responding to shots fired in a vacant apartment were ambushed. Four were wounded, one was killed. Officer Brian Huff became the first line of duty death in the Detroit Police Department
since 2004. The national press barely covered it. The Ann Arbor press, 40 minutes from Detroit, didn't cover it at all. Neither did the Michigan-wide public radio affiliate.Certainly a lot more people are affected by the Massachusetts water situation and the oil spill in the Gulf. The President speaking in town is pretty rare. The bomb in Times Square affected a lot of people directly, and scares a lot of people vicariously. All of these things are important.
In a typical year, there are less than 70 police officers nationwide that are killed by suspects. Michigan has had two this year, but had none last year. This isn't terribly common. It may not affect as many people as some of the other stories, but those it does impact are affected much more severely. Frequent Quarterbackers may recall that there is a whole Critical Incident Stress Management course just on responding to the 5 most serious types of incidents. Not only is death in the line of duty one of those, but there is actually an additional course just on that.
So why did Officer Huff's death and his colleagues' shootings get so little attention? I think there are two reasons. First, there was a lot of news affecting a lot of people this weekend, which meant that this story had to more actively compete for coverage. Second, Detroit has a lousy reputation for high crime. In other words, people think that this sort of thing is about par for the course in Detroit. This is especially ironic since, although Detroit's crime rate is high, its rate of line of duty deaths for police officers isn't. By any objective standard, this ought to be a big story. We just don't make those judgments by objective standards.
There is no community in this country for which a police officer shot in the line of duty feels normal. The Detroit press is covering this story closely. It's the rest of us, outside (but not all that far outside) of Detroit that are turning a blind eye. We think "those people" in "that city" expect this sort of thing. Unfortunately, we think wrong.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Mama Bears Comment on a School Fight
On Tuesday, a sixth grader at Heritage Elementary School in Saline, Michigan
, south of Ann Arbor, was rushed to the hospital after a fight on the playground. He was unconscious and having convulsions. It appears that he was pushed from behind and possibly kicked by two or three other students while other children watched.This story hit the news this morning, and I've already had it emailed to me by more than one parent. People are upset by the story, and they are also upset by the comments they see posted by readers of the story. These comments can be divided into a few major categories:
Category 1: What is the world coming to?
This behavior is beocming [sic] an everyday event. What has happened to our children? They are violent and seem to have little respect for life. The bigger question is, why are grade schoolers beating another child to a point that a child is put into a hospital? What are they thinking? What are their parents doing? Who is teaching humanity?Category 2: It's no different than it always was.
NEWSFLASH- Children fight on playgrounds! Please where did you people grow up. Saline grad here k-12, and a playground fight is not really news. I've seen a student knocked out before and plenty of fights. As children age it tapers off- more fights in younger grades but they don't knock each other out. There is no one to blame -its called growing up, and its the same in every public school.Category 3: It's the school's fault.
What has the school done to protect him? How come there was no teacher in sight? Maybe the first punishment was not strong enough to show the previous and current attackers that the school is serious about protecting students in school and that their acts would not be tolerated at all. All these questions need to be answered by the School principle [sic], obviously he/she failed to have any adequate planning in protecting the kids at school. The previous punishment failed to send a clear message to all students about bullying other fellow students at school that it will not be tolerated under any circumstances. This should not be brushed easily aside, we need answers and responsible people to provide education and safety for our kids in Michigan schools. Unless this is properly addressed, it will most likely be repeated.
None of these commenters, as far as I can tell, have any more information about the incident than the sketchy details from the news article, but they all are making assumptions about what happened before, during and/or after this incident. Some of the parents who are emailing me, furthermore, want to know what we are "doing about this" at our school, in a different town and a different district. Why is this eliciting these reactions?
This story has all the makings of a triggering event -- one with which people have strong emotional associations. It took place in a setting that almost everyone has experience with -- a school playground. For we Ann Arborites, it took place not too far away. It involves school violence which, on some level, we all also had experience with.
Perhaps most importantly, this incident not only involves children, but it involves children in a setting where their parents are particularly powerless. We can watch our kids at the mall or the grocery store or our own yard, but when we drop them off at school we have to trust that they are going to be OK. When something happens that indicates that kids are not safe at school, we parents become like mama bears protecting their cubs. Don't mess with us.
The categories of comments on the news article indicate where people's anxieties and biases -- about the world, their children and schools -- already were before they read the article. If you firmly believed that school personnel were somewhat incompetent yesterday, then when you read about this today you saw evidence of that. If you believed that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, here's your proof. And if you yourself were a fighter and turned out OK, or if you deal with the fact that you can't protect your kids at school by telling yourself you don't have to, you'll say that kids will be kids.
Who knows what the backstory on this incident is. Did the child have an undiagnosed medical condition? How long did the fight last? Who was the aggressor, and what previous problems have they had? I know from having my own school incidents covered in the press that there is always, no matter what, some side of the story that does not make the paper and which I think is very important to understanding the whole picture. In the end, however, these comments aren't about the whole picture and they're barely about this incident. They're about the people who write them, and we can tell a lot about the authors just by reading them.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Does Ann Arbor Have a Fire Bug?
Overnight last night, there were three fires in Ann Arbor. All began outside student housing. All are under investigation. The most serious, which began on the porch of a rental house, sent three people to the hospital. One, Eastern Michigan University senior Renden LeMaster, subsequently died. To put this in some perspective, during 2006 (the most recent statistics I could find), the Ann Arbor Fire Department responded to 322 fire calls, less than one a day, and many of these were for situations that did not require them to put out a fire (e.g. burnt toast). So three is a lot, and someoned dying is a very big deal.
There are two pieces of context that are important in understanding how people are thinking about this. The first is that yesterday afternoon and evening the National Weather Service had issued a Fire Weather Watch for southeast Michigan. The weather was unseasonably warm and dry with high wind, meaning that conditions were ripe for fires to start and for small fires to become big ones. The other is that about 50 miles away in the city of Flint, as I wrote earlier this week, there have been about 40 arson fires in the last three weeks.
Either one of these two factors could stand alone and swing how we feel about the fires last night. If there was the weather alert and no situation in Flint, people might be thinking this was a string of terrible accidents exacerbated by the weather. If there were a firebug in Flint and no weather alert, we might be sure this was arson. As it is, we have both of those things, so you might expect people to reflect a balance in their thinking.
If that's what you expected, you would be wrong. The news coverage has made no mention of the weather alert at all. It has been fairly restrained, on the other hand, in pointing to arson. However, all of the news stories mention that the fires are "under investigation" and that one of them -- not the house fire, but one in which the fire started with a car that had not been driven in a few days -- is considered suspicious. A commenter posted something about the fires in Flint almost as soon as the first story about last night's fires in Ann Arbor went up. The University of Michigan has issued a crime bulletin which, paradoxically, describes "several fires" as being "under investigation," but then tells community members to make sure their cigarettes are fully extinguished.
So, why isn't there more balance in people's thinking? In the hours after an incident, balance is not what we're wired for. We are wired to consider the worst. This is a survival instinct. When something awful happens, we don't want to miss something that might point out that there is more danger ahead, so we are skittish. If someone has been shot, every car backfiring or door slamming sounds like a shot. If there has been a car accident, every driver seems a little erratic. And if there has been a fire, every fire might be arson. Add in the media's natural tendency to go for the sensational, and we don't have a prayer of having any sense of perspective on this.
It's entirely possible these were all arson fires. It's much more likely that one or two were and the other(s) were accidental. It is very unlikely that there is a new serial firebug in Ann Arbor, as there is in Flint, although of course time will tell. It's a good time to remember to check smoke detectors and escape routes, but it's also a good time to remember that while a rash of arson fires affecting us personally is possible, it still isn't likely.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Arson and Layoffs in Flint
On March 24, the city of Flint, Michigan announced that it would be laying off 23 firefighters and 46 police officers the next day. Within minutes of the press conference, an arson fire broke out in a vacant building. In the nine days since, there have been nearly 40 such fires, including five last night alone. Three firefighters have been injured. Flint has asked for mutual aid, a system under which cities and towns agree to help each other in an emergency, from other county fire departments. Now those departments are starting to cancel their mutual aid agreements because they, too, are stretched thin.
No one knows for sure who is starting the fires. Many have speculated that they are a protest against the layoffs. Some have gone further and accused firefighters of setting them. The head of the firefighter's union has said he is truly insulted by that accusation, and that he does not believe the layoffs and the fires are connected at all. It is always possible that this is a horrible coincidence.
Layoffs can be very distressing to people in any profession. In a profession, like firefighting, where colleagues are closely knit, it is especially difficult. Unless you know or are a firefighter, it's difficult to imagine how much these men and women rely on each other and bond together. Layoffs represent a separation of one or members of, essentially, the family. It's a grotesque understatement to say that that is bad for morale.
On the other hand, you might expect that firefighters don't mind a string of fires. After all, putting out fires is what they do. Most firefighters will tell you, however, that while they like their work and are glad to be able to help the community, they don't actually want there to be a lot of fires. Like most emergency workers, they like being able to make a difference, but they wish they didn't have to. What's more, every fire represents a danger to the firefighters who respond. Any fire could become dangerous or even lethal. In that sense, every one of the arson fires in Flint is an intentional assault on the fire department.
In addition to the double-whammy of layoffs and the fires, we now have other departments saying that they will not come to Flint to help. I'm certainly not in a position to criticize those decisions -- every city has to do what makes sense for their people and their community. To the Flint fire department, however, this just adds insult to injury. People who go through critical incidents often feel helpless. The sense of not being able to do anything is horrible. Asking for help and not getting it greatly complicates the situation. Imagine someone who is assaulted in broad daylight while passersby ignore it. Their reaction may have as much to do with being ignored as with the assault. Now the Flint firefighters are being assaulted repeatedly, and neighboring cities are saying they will no longer help.
I don't know who's setting the fires in Flint, or what their motivation is. I will say that if they are motivated by support for the firefighters and protest of the layoffs, their actions are truly counter productive. They have taken a situation that would be hard under the best of circumstances, and escalated it severely. With friends like this, the firefighters in Flint sure don't need enemies.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The Hutaree Go for the Brass Ring
On Sunday, I wrote about the Hutaree, a Christian extremist militia that had been raided by the FBI. At the time I wrote, we already knew that this group, which is headquartered in my "neck of the woods" was allegedly crazy and violent, and I wrote about how "out there" had become "right here." Yesterday's court appearances added yet another layer. It turns out they were, allegedly, plotting to kill a police officer, then wait for the funeral and use IEDs against the funeral procession.
This takes this story to a whole different level. Those of you who read the Quarterback regularly know that death in the line of duty is one of the "big five." These are the incidents that get a whole separate class to learn about when you're going through CISM training. These are the ones you want your very best responders. (The other four, in case you were wondering, are suicide of a colleague, mass disaster, multiple critical incidents in rapid succession and long delay between incident and response.)
Death in the line of duty is an emotionally messy situation for cops and their families. It brings up all kinds of issues around blame and anger, personal identification with the victim, fear for your own safety, and many more, all in an organizational culture that does not encourage people to talk to each other or to professionals about their feelings. Add to this the already high suicide rate among law enforcement and the fact that all of these people are armed, and it's pretty complicated.
But this situation doesn't just contemplate a line of duty death. It then, had it been successful, adds the attack on the funeral procession. That means, effectively, that these folks were plotting serial line of duty deaths for police officers and their loved ones. Imagine how messy that could have been.
For me, there's another complicating factor. While I don't spend a whole lot of time in law enforcement funeral processions, you may recall that just a few weeks ago my daughter and I stopped near our house to pay respects to one coming through our township. Because that was so recent, the picture I create in my mind when I imagine IEDs at a law enforcement funeral procession is of that morning, that street near my house, and me and my daughter. Now, it's personal.
I don't generally think of myself as the center of the universe. I also don't imagine it is anyone's idea of a good way to become famous to be covered in my blog. But I have to note that, if you did want to make sure I covered you, plotting an attack on a police officer followed by an attack on the funeral procession in southeast Michigan would pretty much guarantee it. So, in that sense, congratulations to the Hutaree. You grabbed the Quarterback's brass ring.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
The Michigan Hutaree FBI Raids
FBI agents conducted raids in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan this weekend, arresting several members of a Christian militia group called the Hutaree. The details of what exactly the raids had to do with and how many people have actually been arrested are somewhat sketchy, but the Detroit News is reporting that it relates to threats made against Muslim organizations. The group is based in Adrian, MI, about 50 miles from my house.
The existence of militia groups in Michigan is not by any means a secret. The "Michigan Militia" got some attention nationally in the 1990's when it was erroneously linked to Timothy McVeigh following the Oklahoma City bombings. Soon after I moved to southeast Michigan someone joked that I had moved into the heart of militia country -- Ann Arbor. While Ann Arbor isn't, rural southeast Michigan might be. It's one of those things we know about and don't spend a lot of time worrying about. There are towns not far from here that I find downright scary, and a handful of those my friends who are people of color will not drive through. Hate groups and militias are not synonymous, but they do intersect.
I had never, however, heard of the Hutaree until late last week, when our local news outlet reported about a local township calling upon militia members to help with missing person searches. In that article, the Hutaree were put right next to the Michigan Militia, seemingly as the next county over's equivalent organization. Today the press coverage is very different, with the head of the Michigan Militia disavowing connection between the two groups and calling the Hutaree a "cult."
Why does this matter? Probably it doesn't. There are people out there who resort to violence to support their political and religious views, and we knew that already. What has changed is simply the emphasis. Now these people "out there" are pretty much right here. If I were a purely rational being, this would change nothing in my outlook on the world. But humans are not purely rational. When we imagine "out there" we actually mean "out there in lots of places that aren't here." So news like this actually shifts our world view and raises our mental estimation of the likelihood of these people affecting our own lives.
There's a house not too far from mine which, if you look at a satelite picture, looks for all the world like an armed compound. I happen to know it's a local farmer with some junked trucks, but I didn't always. We used to joke that the area was the militia headquarters for our little neighborhood. It was funny before. Today, it doesn't feel so funny anymore.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Mom's on the Roof and We Can't Get Her Down
Tomorrow night, the Superintendent of the Ann Arbor Public Schools, where I am a school Principal, will make budget recommendations for next year to the Board of Education. Next year's budget is about $20 million in the red, and so the recommendations will involve substantial cuts. In a school district, where 85-90% of the budget is spent on people, $20 million is a lot of jobs.
There's an old joke my family likes to tell that goes something like this:
A man is on vacation and his brother is taking care of his cat. The man calls his brother to check in and asks, "How is the cat?" The brother says, "The cat's dead." The man is distraught. He says, "You can't just tell me like that. You have to ease me into it. The first day, you tell me the cat's on the roof and you can't get her down. The second day, you tell me the cat fell and she's in a coma. Then on the third day you can tell me the cat died." The brother apologizes profusely. Then the man says, "It's ok. Don't worry about it. How's mom?" The brother responds, "Mom's on the roof and we can't get her down."
It's only a joke, and perhaps (depending upon your sense of humor) not that funny of one. At the same time, however, it illustrates an important point, and one I've been trying to keep in mind as our district goes through this painful process: Whenever possible, people should have warning of bad news. That doesn't mean we need to artificially prolong the sharing of news, as the man in the joke would have us do. But it does mean that, when we can see that something bad is possibly looming, it's a kind gesture to let those affected know.
This is the same principle that lies behind doing inoculation training for critical incidents. Inoculation training is simply giving people some exposure to what a crisis might be like, what they might experience, and what they can expect. The principle is that people will be more resistant to stress and more resilient from it if, when the crisis happens, this is not the first time they've considered its possibility. That's why train engineers are prepared for crashes, and that's why our district is using grant money to have me walk every school's staff through how a crisis in their school would unfold.
Which brings us back to the budget. We have known since November that big cuts were on the horizon. I have tried hard to talk candidly with my staff about what those cuts might entail, particularly with our less senior staff whose jobs might be on the line. We have taken a "we're all in this together" approach to talking about it, even though we know that we won't all bear the burden equally. I've tried to answer as many "what if" questions as I know the answers to, and I've tried to acknowledge the stress that the uncertainty is causing for everyone.
Tomorrow night, when the Superintendent makes his recommendations, there may well be bad news for a lot of people. I hope I am correct in saying that there will not be anything that is a brand new surprise to my staff, however. That doesn't make everything OK, but with any luck it will make it just a little bit easier.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Paying Our Respects
On Tuesday, Jackson, Michigan, police officer James Bonneau, 26, was shot and killed by a drunken suspect whom he was approaching to discuss a domestic disturbance earlier in the day. The suspect was killed in the shootout. Bonneau is a native of Canton, Michigan, about 55 miles east of Jackson, and was buried today in his hometown.
To get from Jackson to Canton, most folks wind up driving down Ford Road in Superior Township, Michigan, which is the main road nearest to my house. That's how it happened that about 7:45 this morning, my daughter and I turned onto Ford Road on the way to school and came face to face with the longest line of emergency vehicles, all with their lights flashing, that either of us had ever seen. My daughter gasped, thinking that something really awful must have happened to require such a huge response. It took me a moment, but I soon remembered an alert I had received from the Sheriff's Department warning of traffic disruptions later in the morning, and I figured that this was a caravan of first responders driving to Officer Bonneau's funeral.
The portion of Ford Road we were on is technically a "divided highway." That means that, by law, we did not have to pull over to the side for emergency vehicles traveling in the other direction. But continuing to drive did not seem like the right thing to do, so I pulled over and said, "I think we'll pay our respects." I explained that an officer had died in the line of duty, and she gasped again. It has been more than a year since Michigan lost one of its finest.
The entire procession probably took three or four minutes. That may not seem like a lot, but consider how many cars can pass a given point in that span of time. This was a very long procession. I started reading off the Police Departments from the sides of the cars: Jackson, Concord, Jackson County Sherriff, Spring Arbor, Grass Lake . . . There were two tour buses interspersed among the police cars, presumably carrying mourners who were not bringing a squad car. I told my daughter, "These guys put their life out there on the line every day, really for us. I just think we can wait a minute or two."
We watched a little bit longer, and then I turned off the ignition and both of us got out of the car to stand at the side of the road so our gesture of respect could be more visible to the people in the procession. I wished I was wearing a hat so I could take it off. I thought I saw one officer look out the window of his cruiser and nod in our direction. The procession ended with two cars and an engine from the Jackson fire department.
The procession we saw was not anywhere near all of the departments who sent representatives to Officer Bonneau's service today. In addition to departments from throughout Michigan, departments from Ohio were also present to show solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Jackson and to honor one of their own.
Today was a hard day to be a Jackson cop. It was a hard day to be a Michigan cop, and maybe, particularly if you were representing your department at the service, a hard day to be any kind of cop at all. I hope that, for at least one or two of the mourners, the sight of a woman and an 11 year-old girl standing by the side of the road lent some measure of support.
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Meet the Quarterback
- Naomi Zikmund-Fisher
- is a clinical social worker, former school Principal and a Crisis Consultant for schools and community organizations. You can learn more about her at www.SchoolCrisisConsultant.com
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