My Letter to Security

At my day job I was recently forced to sit through an hour long safety presentation about what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building. Afterwards they asked us to provide feedback and oh boy did I have some. I sent them the following letter. Specific references to my workplace and department have been removed.

I attended the “Shelter in Place” presentation, which was mandatory for everyone in my department. I believe this presentation is wildly irresponsible and detrimental to the well-being of the collective mental health of the employees here. Additionally it is a massive waste of time and resources.

The only pertinent information contained within the presentation is as follows: in the event of an active shooter, if you can, you should try to evacuate the building and if not, you should hide. That’s good information to have and it could very easily be addressed in a single sentence during the regular safety orientation, which is also an hour long. Giving this presentation equal time to the standard safety orientation, suggests that this topic is equally important, which it is not and I’ll get to why in a minute.

Pardon this brief digression, but it’s necessary to the point I’m making—and it won’t take anywhere near an hour. It’s no stretch to say the actual point of terrorism, is to terrorize. Having violent images repeated through the media is the real goal of terrorist actions and ultimately how they have the real effect on the people beyond the actual victims. The recent shootings in Ottawa and Paris have echoed endlessly through the news media and have indisputably had an effect on the public consciousness.

So, people are already on high alert and now employees are forced to sit through a mandatory presentation about the possibility of us being shot at work. This isn’t handled as though it’s some low probability event—which it is, EXTREMELY low—it’s instead offered up with an open-ended, “if this happens.” Then it’s backed with hard data like “these situations last from 2 to 5 minutes.” And now this seems like less of an “if this happens” and more of a “when this happens.” We even watched an eight minute video of a simulated active shooter situation in an office building, just in case you can’t picture how awful a situation like this would be. This video concludes with a worst case scenario where, if you can’t run or hide, you may be called upon to fight using “improvised weapons.” Then this awful possibility is left to fester in the imaginations of all 700 employees of an entire department.

What’s even worse, the presentation includes repeated assertions that a shooter in building would most likely not be a terrorist, but a disgruntled employee. Then we’re told we should all keep an eye out for coworkers who may be behaving strangely—these could be people suffering from depression, going through a divorce or having money problems—then we’re told we should be reporting our observations to corporate security.

The suggestion this leaves employees with is that if a coworker seems depressed or upset—the time when the coworker would need to be shown compassion the most—it’s now incumbent on them to report this to security to prevent the coworker from becoming a threat to their personal safety. Congratulations you’ve just introduced McCarthyism to the workplace. Except that instead of reporting people for having communist leanings, you’ve asked employees to report on each other for depression and personal issues. It’s not as though depression isn’t already stigmatized, you’ve now just subjected the entire department to the implication that depressed people are a security threat.

With the recent drop in the price of oil, depression or money problems could be coming for pretty much anybody. And if you don’t think this presentation will lead to finger pointing and internal witch hunts, then you must not think the presentation is very effective and I guess you can discontinue it.

Maybe this would be all be worth it, if this scenario was remotely likely. However, it is not. As I mentioned earlier, the likelihood of an event like this happening is extremely low. According to Stats Canada, the murder rate has been steadily declining since the 1990’s. In fact, in 2013 it was at the lowest it had been since 1966. Statistically, our employees are less likely to be the victims of murder today than any other period in the last half century. And that’s all murder. Not even the improbable random mass shooting situation this presentation proposes, which is even less likely and has never happened in Calgary.

If the likelihood of the situation is not a factor in the topic choice, perhaps we should hold mandatory financial planning session about what you should do if you win the lottery? Since that actually has a precedent in Calgary—and Lotto 649 has two more draws every week.

If employee safety is the real concern, then that time should have been devoted to a mandatory session on safe driving practices, since it is far more likely that employees will die in a car accident. And sure, not every employee drives to work or even owns a car, but—to borrow a scare phrase from the training session—one day they might.

Or even better, would be a presentation on the dangers of heart disease and stroke, since statistically that is what the majority of employees will die of. Especially true, because working at a desk contributes to a sedentary life style, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Do you know what else is a risk factor for heart disease? Stress. And if the suggestion that you’re going to be gunned down at work—coming directly from corporate security itself—doesn’t make you feel it, maybe the possibility that your fellow employees are reporting you to them, will.

The very reason this presentation was probably suggested as a good idea is something known as the “mean world syndrome” where society seems more violent than it is, due to repeated media coverage of violent images. I suggest that you read about that and the “availability heuristic” so you’ll understand why the human mind conflates the probability of these extremely low probability events.

With active shooter scenarios already prominent in the media, this presentation is basically an official endorsement of the possibility of the scenario happening here. In fact, the instructor I had literally said the words, “this is real” and when speaking from a position of authority, the message has a greater effect on people. Corporate security’s job is to keep employees safe and importantly, to make them feel safe. If corporate security is going to spend its time terrifying employees, the least they could do is not throw those same employees under the bus for any personal issues they might be going through.

Here are the helpful presentation-style bullet points on why this presentation has no business being taught ever again. This presentation:

dramatically overestimates the probability of an event like this occurring

scares employees by making events like this seem more probable

forces employees to view their coworkers as potential threats

vilifies the depressed, the divorced and the destitute

encourages a witch hunt mentality amongst coworkers

I’m sure this presentation was given with only the best of intentions, but to update an old saying, the road to hell is paved with bad presentations.