Issue 02 | The Refraction

A fender bender in a grocery store parking lot will light up a 911 board. Five calls, eight calls, callers practically forming a line. But one time we didn't get a call about an overturned semi on the NJ Turnpike until several minutes after it occurred because everyone thought someone else had called it in. Literally a single call for an overturned tractor-trailer on one of the busiest roads in the country that blocked all three lanes.

Conversely, uninvolved parties would routinely call about fender benders along the side of local streets or in parking lots. These callers would often say that they weren't sure if someone had called already, and they were often apologetic about calling 911 for a crash.

I saw this happen more than a few times at the 911 center, and we often joked about it. Sometimes for these major incidents we'd only get one call. At first it sounds backwards until you put yourself in the callers' vehicles.

The driver passing an overturned semi is one of several dozen other drivers on the road, many of them thinking, "Surely, somebody has called this in, not to mention DOT cameras and other technology." The responsibility divides by every car in sight until nobody is holding enough of it to act. Meanwhile, traffic continues to back up.

This phenomenon has a name, and the name has an origin story most of us learned wrong. In 1964 a young woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment in Queens, and The New York Times reported that 38 of her neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing. The story horrified the country, entered every textbook, gave us the phrase bystander effect, and stayed compelling enough that Malcolm Gladwell was still building on it in his bestseller The Tipping Point decades later.

The problem is that the story is wrong. When researchers went back through the trial record decades later, they found no evidence of 38 watching witnesses. Nobody saw the attack from start to finish. Most of the people who heard something thought it was a verbal dispute in a time when domestic violence was not treated as a police matter. At least two people did call the police, and a neighbor even ran downstairs and held Kitty in her arms as she died. The parable of the 38 silent witnesses was itself a reporting failure, which is its own kind of lesson for a profession that runs on incident reports.

But the myth did real work. It sent two psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latané, looking for what actually keeps people from acting in a crowd, and the mechanism they proved is genuine. In one 1968 experiment, subjects listened as another participant appeared to have a seizure. When a subject believed they were the only one who could hear it, the vast majority of them went for help. When they believed four others could hear the same thing, only about a third did. Nothing about the emergency changed, only the assumption that someone else would handle it.

On the highway, there's even more going on. A driver passing a fresh wreck at speed is braking, steering, and scanning, and by the time the adrenaline settles they are three miles past the scene. A surprising number of people talk themselves out of calling because they don't want to tie up the line.

Here is what that thinking gets wrong, and I say this as the guy who managed the room. Dispatchers would rather take fifty duplicate calls on a major wreck than zero. However, the real lesson here is that call count isn't a severity gauge.

Eight people will phone in a bent bumper while the worst wreck on the highway comes in as a single ring, so anyone reading volume as severity has the map upside down. What each additional call actually buys is detail. The exact mile marker, how many vehicles are involved, and whether the driver is out of the cab are all pertinent details that the first caller is sometimes too emotional to provide. Emotions don't just affect the callers, though.

An excited dispatcher hearing all those lines ringing while dispatching "the big one" can create additional problems. Research on dispatch priming has shown that what a dispatcher passes to responding officers, and how it sounds, shapes what those officers expect to find before they arrive. In a 2020 study in Police Quarterly, the active-duty officers who got an en-route radio update that a subject had a gun went on to shoot an unarmed man holding a cell phone 62 percent of the time, more than double the 28 percent who fired with no weapon information at all, and more than ten times the 6 percent who were correctly told the object was a phone. Urgency travels the same way information does. A dispatcher with adrenaline in their voice sends responders in hot, and a responder who arrives hot can escalate an encounter a calm voice would have kept routine. The room doesn't just receive the picture of an incident. It manufactures the picture, in both directions.

The same physics runs through every facility you manage. A suspicious bag in a packed lobby. A propped stairwell door in a busy garage. A guy working car door handles in front of thirty people leaving a game. The more witnesses an incident has, the more certain each one becomes that someone else has reported it. "See something, say something" fails hardest exactly where the something is most visible.

You can't train the public out of a cognitive bias, but you can build your program to assume it. First, teach your people and your tenants the operating assumption that nobody else has called. Not as a slogan, but as the literal default. Second, make duplicate reports welcome, and mean it. The command center never sighs at the fourth report of the same door, because the alternative culture is the one where the fourth person stays quiet, and eventually the first three do too. Count your duplicates and read them as detail, not noise, and never read your report count as a severity meter. Third, train the radio voice, because the urgency your dispatcher transmits becomes the posture your officers arrive with, and a calm transmission is escalation control, not a nicety.

Nobody calls 911 about Godzilla, because when the emergency is that impossible to miss, every witness assumes someone else already has. So when you pass the overturned semi and every instinct says someone has called, be the call. You won't be clogging the line. You might be the only one.

When a visitor asks for directions, often the security officer simply points and gives a Nintendo cheat code of lefts, rights, ups, and downs. When possible, escort your visitors to conduct a mini-tour of your facility.

I'm not saying to abandon a mandatory post. A fixed access point or alarm panel stays staffed, but rovers are often available and can assist with an escort.

Escorting seems simple, but it has massive upside. The visitor remembers the building as the place where security was friendly and helpful. The officer covers ground and might pass a stairwell or a propped door the periodic tour wouldn't have discovered for another hour. Finally, it's just good opsec. A patrol that runs the same loop at the same times is one a bad actor can clock and work around, and unpredictable movement is a lot harder to plan against.

The cost is nothing, just a post instruction rather than a purchase. The ROI is immediate, since the first escort that walks an officer past something they'd otherwise have missed pays for the habit. And if an incident ever lands you in an after action review, a log full of guest escorts shows an engaged program, where a log of a static post shows officers who stood and pointed.

Now for the metrics. Capture escort rate, which tells you how often a direction request becomes a walk rather than a point, and not just whether the escort was completed, but a way to determine the issues that originated from those escorts through reporting.

The largest security operation in the country just started, and it runs through July 19.

The World Cup opened June 11 and does not end until the final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. The scale is hard to overstate. 104 matches across 16 host cities, with an estimated 50,000 police and security personnel committed across the tournament. Philadelphia's fan festival is open every single day of the run, including the days no match is played anywhere near it.

If your facility sits in or near a host region, you are inside that footprint whether or not you care about soccer. Officers and details are committed for five straight weeks. Mutual aid is thinner than the org chart says it is. Transit surges on match days, and every bar and retail corridor with a screen becomes a small mass gathering at kickoff, which on this side of the Atlantic can mean ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

So this week, put the match calendar for your region on your shift calendar through July 19, and ask your police liaison how response looks in your district during match windows. Better to learn the answer in June than during an incident in July.

dictated by Ricky Portezzo, Senior Security Supervisor in Center City, Philadelphia

Slow night. The chatty guy never showed, Donna says he had a thing with his daughter, so the bullpen is safe from him till Friday at least.

Oh, you'll love this. Mikey's new genius idea is that when somebody asks you where something is, we gotta walk them the whole way. I told him Mikey I'm not a damn tour guide, I been sending people to the elevators since before you could drive. He says walk them. Fine.

So tonight some DoorDash kid was bringing in tacos for someone working late in Admin and instead of just sending him through like a normal person I walk him over. Babysitting, like I said. Except on the way back I come up the east stairs, the ones we checked at shift start, and there is a door chocked open with one of those orange wedges. Wide open. Anybody could have walked into the admin area and then we never would have heard the end of it!

Told the SOC and wrote it up.

So the walking thing. I'm not gonna stand here and say Mikey was right out loud, but I found a door tonight I never would have found from my post.

Ramp by the garage is slick again, cone is out. Have a good one!

Escort your security program to easy and compliant policies.

SCC Spectrum Security Almanacs. www.gsoc911.com/products