Automating Threat Assessments

MAN AT SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICE STABS HIS MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER IN WORKPLACE VIOLENCE INCIDENT BEFORE BEING SHOT TO DEATH BY FEDERAL SECURITY OFFICER

Posted on July 10, 2018 3:28 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

RISKAlert Report Updated: July 9, 2018 McComb, Mississippi

MAN AT SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICE STABS HIS MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER IN WORKPLACE
VIOLENCE INCIDENT BEFORE BEING SHOT TO DEATH BY FEDERAL SECURITY OFFICER

A 21-year-old Mississippi man, Branen Carter, went into the McComb, MS, Social Security Administration office with his mother and grandmother, and then he stabbed his mother and grandmother in the lobby before he was shot to death by a federal FPS (Federal Protective Service) security officer.

The incident happened at 11 am, and the facility was put on lockdown after the incident. Large numbers of law enforcement officers responded to the one-story brick building on the edge of McComb, which is about 100 miles south of Jackson.

Carter’s mother, Lee Anna Turnage, and grandmother, Ann Carter, were in stable condition at Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center, after what was reported as a family fight that turned violent.

Mississippi court records show Branen Carter was indicted in Marion County in December 2016, when he was 20, on two felony charges — one count of statutory rape and one count of sexual battery of a child between the ages of 14 and 16. He pleaded guilty in May 2017 after the two felony charges were reduced to misdemeanors (WHY?), and he was given two six-month suspended sentences, which means he did not have to serve jail time. The attorney who represented him was out of the office Monday and could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Director of Communications for the Federal Protective Service, Robert Sperling, said that the FPS agency has a long history of using armed security guards at federal agencies it oversees. “It’s a cornerstone. We have officers in social security offices and most federal agencies across the country, such as the IRS,” Sperling said.

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. Workplace Violence can happen anywhere, and family disputes often spill over into
public workplaces. This attack happened in the lobby of the federal agency.

The FPS did an excellent job of countering the threat and probably saved the
lives of both women.

THANKS FOR READING THE RISKAlert Report©

For more information and a free subscription: write to: caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com
We provide the best Active Shooter and Facility Risk Assessments & Training Programs.

Find out more at www.riskandsecurityllc.com .

#Stabbing #WorkplaceViolence

Angry Florida Man Steals Hospital’s Ambulance and Drives Home After Waiting Two hours in the Hospital’s Emergency Department

Posted on March 15, 2018 10:35 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

RISKAlert Report Updated: March 14, 2018

Ambulance thief, Danny Lee Konieczny, 60, was drunk and suicidal when First Responders picked him
up after a neighbor called 911. He was transported to The Villages Regional Hospital, where
he waited two hours in the Emergency Department without seeing a doctor.

Frustrated and angry, he decided to steal the ambulance to drive the 5.7 miles to his home,
according to the arrest affidavit! He walked outside and stole a Sumter EMS Ambulance, which was
owned by Rural/Metro and equipped with a GPS tracking device. Rural/Metro personnel were able
to see the theft of the ambulance on a live feed and so deputies followed the GPS to Konieczny’s home.

The suspect had parked the ambulance in the neighbor’s
driveway, and then hid in the trunk of his car, where
officers found him and arrested him. Konieczny is now
facing a felony charge of grand theft of a motor vehicle
following the arrest by Lake County Sheriff’s deputies.

“He was upset because he was just put in the hallway
to wait and was not being seen at the hospital,” the
deputy wrote in the arrest report. The ambulance was
recovered intact and returned to Rural/Metro.

LESSONS LEARNED:

Ambulance theft is relatively common but easy to prevent. Experts recommend
making sure to turn off the engine and lock all ambulance doors.
There are keypad systems that can be installed to prevent someone from driving away in
an ambulance, when the engine has been left running.

THANKS FOR READING THE RISKAlert Report©

For more information and more great content: write to: caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

We provide the best Active Shooter and CMS Facility Risk Assessments,
Active Shooter and Security- Safety and Compliance training.

www.riskandsecurityllc.com or www.caroline-hamilton.com

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Stolen Ambulance

After Action report on LAX Shooting Recommends Risk Assessments

Posted on March 19, 2014 1:26 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

The Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) released the long-anticipated After
Action Analysis on the LAX Active Shooter Incident in 2013.

The 83-page report was written by an independent consultant who analyzed
all aspects of the Shooting incident and includes a list of “Major Observations
and Recommendations.” The recommendations are “to provide focus for
LAWA’s efforts toward continuous improvement in it’s security and emergency
preparedness programs.

These areas were highlighted in the report as “7 priority observations that merit
special consideration.

Recommendation 1.1: Evolve the LAX Security Program to reflect a more
integrated assessment of security risk and provide for the ongoing development
and management of mitigation measures.

Recommendation 1.2: Based on the RISK ASSESSMENT and updated security
plan, consider the focus and structure of security functions to determine whether
realignment and integration are needed.

Recommendation 1.3: With the benefit of recent vulnerability and risk assessments,
take a risk-based approach to evaluating current security programs and explore
intelligent use of technology.”

Once again, doing frequent Security Risk Assessments and managing the security
program and enhancements to follow the recommendations of the Risk Assess-
ment are the first recommendations in the After Action Analysis of an Active
Shooter Incident.

In my experience, in most organizations, Facility Security Risk Assessments are
not conducted correctly, are not reported to senior management, and not used as a
tool to ADJUST AND FOCUS the security program based on RISK.

Why aren’t security risk assessments done more often?

1. People don’t have the right expertise to do a full risk assessment.

2. Security managers view Security Risk Assessments are too difficult
to undertake.

3. Law enforcement personnel still do not understand the concept of risk
assessments and instead, tend to rely on checklists of controls or
security elements, rather than integrating all the information to
create a true Risk-Based model for security.

The solution to this problem is to use affordable, easy to use software tools, like
the Risk-Pro Application for Facilties Security Assessment and their Risk-Pro
Application for Active Shooter Incident to simplify the process of doing more
frequent risk assessments and using them as a management tool to focus
security so it will be able to recommend the security enhancements that are
needed, and not only how MUCH to spend, but actually dictate the order
of necessary controls.

Far from being a boring, intellectual exercise, well done security risk
assessments can dramatically reduce the possibility of an active shooter
event, and also mitigate the many negative consequences that come
from such disruptive incidents.

RiskAlert Incident Report #473 – Hospital Admin Killed at Home

Posted on January 6, 2014 12:43 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

RiskAlert INCIDENT REPORT 473 – ACTIVE SHOOTER 12-27-2013

Oschner Hospital Administrator Shot to Death in his Home in Active Shooter Spree

Dateline: December 27, 2013 pm

A Louisiana man attacked his former in-laws, his current wife, and the Administrator of a hospital
where he’d worked, killing three and wounding three others before killing himself, authorities said.

The shooter, Ben Freeman, 38, was found late Thursday night in his car along a highway,
dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The shootings happened at four locations in two parishes about 45 miles southwest of New Orleans
on Thursday. The first report came about 6:40 p.m., when Lafourche Parish Councilman Louis Phillip
Gouaux, who was shot in the throat, called 911 from his home in Lockport, Houma, La.

The suspect, Ben Freeman, 38, was the ex-husband of Gouaux’s daughter Jeanne, Lafourche Parish
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Brennan Matherne said in a news release.

Gouaux’s wife, Susan “Pixie” Gouaux, was dead when deputies arrived. Louis Phillip Gouaux and his
daughter, Andrea Gouaux, were injured and taken to Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans.
Both were in critical but stable condition, Matherne said.

About 20 minutes later in Raceland, Ochsner St. Anne General Hospital Administrator Milton Bourgeois
was shot and killed at close range at his home. His wife, Ann Bourgeois, was shot in the leg, and taken
to the New Orleans hospital, where she was listed in stable condition. Raceland police said Bourgeois
was shot at close range and his wife was shot in the leg.

Freeman had been employed at three area hospitals over the last few years, including Oschner St. Anne Hospital, where Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre said he had been a registered nurse before he was fired in 2011. All three hospitals were put on lockdown for a while Thursday.

Freeman’s wife, Denise Taylor Freeman, was found dead in the couple’s home in Houma in Terrebonne Parish. Matherne said her cause of death was not immediately known.

RISKAlert is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurityllc.com.

What’s Your Active Shooter Risk? How to Assess the Threat!

Posted on October 15, 2013 4:54 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Just the idea of an Active Shooter in your organization, whether you’re a military base, like Fort Hood, and the Washington Navy Yard, or a school like Sandy Hook, a beauty shop, a cracker factory in Philadelphia, a retail mall, a movie theatre, a grocery store parking lot, or a hundred other places, is a terrifying thought.

I lived about 3 miles from one of the shooting sites, a gas station, used by the Beltway Snipers back in October, 2002. They killed ten people, totally at random, and critically injured three others. Both of the snipers were sentenced, and John Muhammad was killed by lethal injection in 2009.

If you lived in the DC area, do you remember how scary it was just to pump gas into your car, people were huddled against the side of their cars in the gas stations, and hidden by their shopping carts at the local Home Depots.

The fear of the Active Shooter comes from the seeming randomness of the action, which means there’s no way to prevent it, unless you give up, stay home, and hide under the bed all day.

But there are things you can do. Instead of thinking of an Active Shooter incident as a totally unique situation, it’s really a form a Workplace Violence, Gas Station Violence, Parking Lot Violence and other related forms of random violence. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has identified quite a few steps you can take to keep yourself safer if you are in the vicinity of an active shooter (http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness).

Most of the shooters are mentally ill. Normal individuals do not enjoy planning and killing strangers, and it is usually a last ditch effort, with the suicide of the shooter as the grand finale. Their actions can sometimes be identified early, and the police can be alerted, or the Human Resources group at work, or even the local Sheriff can intervene before it gets to the actual shooting.

Signs that someone is having trouble negotiating their life, especially if that someone is a gun fanatic, with their living room full of AK-47 assault weapons and hollow point bullets, is not hard to spot, because these individuals often leave lots of warning signs, like:

Irrational Posts on Facebook or inappropriate tweets.
Threats made against friends and family.
A dropoff in personal hygiene, as the person gets more obsessed.
Problems negotiating their personal life.
Demonstrating signs of isolation and groundless paranoia

Organizations can protect themselves from an potential active shooter through a combination of specific controls that include elements like access control, continuous monitoring of cameras, employee awareness and training programs, clear cut evaluation routes, regular active shooter drills, and hardening of facilities, to name a few.

One of the best preventive measures is to conduct an Active Shooter Risk Assessment, which is similar to other security analyses, except that it is focused on a particular set of threats related to an Active Shooter Incident. As part of my annual Threat Trend Reports, I’ll be releasing a new set of threat data about the Active Shooter, to help organizations calculate their risk of
having such an incident. For example, did you know that the number of active shooter incidents has jumped from 1 in 2002
to 21 incidents in 2010?

Locations have changed, too, and we found that

About 25% of active shooter incidents occur in schools,
About 25% in retail locations, and
About 37% in workplaces.

In future blogs, we’ll be looking at each element of the active shooter incident, and providing more information to keep
your organization safe.

Oklahoma Tornado, Boston Bombing, Young Soldier Killed – It’s time to do a Security Risk Assessment!

Posted on May 24, 2013 2:18 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

More Tornado victims will be buried this week. Including many children who died at their schools because the school district didn’t spend the extra $3000 to have a storm cellar/safe room available.

One month ago, we watched as victims of the Boston Marathon Bombings were buried.

Yesterday, we watched an Islamic Jihadist savagely kill a young British soldier with knives.

What other events do we have to witness before we start taking security assessments seriously? How many more grieving parents do we have to watch crying on TV and, in my opinion, the casualities did not need to be so high and the aftermath so catastrophic.

If you group all these disasters together, you can that at the root of each one, is the feeling that, “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”….. Britain, for example, has tolerated mosques preaching hate, thinking that nothing like the knife attack could happen in civilized London.

In Moore, Oklahoma, people thought, “we already had a major tornado, so IT CAN’T HAPPEN AGAIN”! Well, surprise – it happened again. While forecasters cannot dictate the exact path of a tornado, they can get close, and with just fifteen minutes advance warning, there is time to get everyone into storm cellars, safe rooms and underground shelters. BUT IF THERE IS NO SHELTER AT A SCHOOL…….

Many obvious solutions-controls-safeguards were missed in these recent tragedies because proper, formal security risk assessments weren’t done effectively. If they had been done, perhaps the London police could have picked up someone who touted murder and hate.

If a risk assessment had been done in Moore, OK, maybe the high risk of a tornado would have allowed the schools to all add the safe rooms they needed, and in Boston, the older brother Boston bomber, should have been in jail already for his participation in a previous murder – or at least actively monitored based on his facebook postings.

The clues are all there, and, looking backwards, you can see the pieces that SHOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH TO PROMOTE some kind of action to either:

1. Eliminate the threat or,

2. Reduce the severity of a potential threat in case it occurred.

Security risk assessments gather the numbers and the information organizations need to make better choices about how to protect people’s lives, facilities, and organizations. I hope these events will prompt more Security Directors to take an objective and unbiased look at their own organizations, and the controls they have in place, before you end up on CNN!

Why the FBI and DHS Need Google’s Help to Track Potential Terrorists

Posted on April 24, 2013 9:39 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

The Boston Marathon bombings were bad enough. The loss of life was terrible, but the runners and their families who lost legs and feet because they wanted to give their Dad a hug at the finish line were worse.

One week later, we all watch with trepidation as the first bomber is killed and the second captured bleeding in a boat in Watertown.

THE MOST TERRIBLE NEWS OF ALL IS THAT IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN PREVENTED!! This is EXACTLY the situation that DHS was supposed to catch. This is EXACTLY why the agencies were ORDERED to share information, and still these guys can tweet all they want, show violent Islamic videos on their web sites and call for Jihad and NOBODY NOTICES!!

This is made even more incomprehensible because the U.S. government was ALERTED BY THE RUSSIANS that one of them was DANGEROUS.

What do we need to do to get these agencies to start paying attention to these potential terrorists? DO WE NEED TO MAKE THEM WEAR A RED SHIRT?

If the IRS can keep track of every American and in 2 minutes call up their entire history of taxes, and the Department of Labor can calculate your benefit rates in less than 1 minute, and Social Security keep track of all your information – why can’t DHS and the FBI keep a contact database current?

Why can’t they have a person who scans these web sites and Facebook sites for Jihadist pages and then cross-references them with the site’s owner? Why can’t a trip to a violent region of the world trigger a PING, as I heard one congressman call it.

Every company in the world has a simple Contact database on their own customers and suppliers that gives them years of data. WHY CAN’T WE BE PROTECTED FROM THESE TERRORiSTS.

This one wasn’t hiding in the shadows – he was ON SOCIAL MEDIA! He wasn’t locked up in a cabin – he was traveling internationally, his brother was getting a scholarship. And they did this FOR YEARS!!

This intelligence failure is just exactly like 9/11 all over again. These agencies are so procedural that they cannot connect the dots. Ok – they’re human. But we have super computers that CAN connect the dots and do profiles and create alerts…

Maybe we should call Google and get some help. We obviously need it.

New App does a Workplace Violence Baseline Assessment

Posted on March 13, 2013 10:21 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

New Workplace Violence Prevention App helps companies do an OSHA Violence Baseline Assessment

DATELINE: Boca Raton, Florida, March 12, 2013

Workplace Violence in US companies is a problem that is getting worse. Workplace violence is a serious recognized occupational hazard, ranking among the top four causes of death in workplaces during the past 15 years. More than 3,000 people died from workplace homicide between 2006 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Additional BLS data indicate that an average of more than 15,000 nonfatal workplace injury cases was reported annually during this time.

The latest figures show that high-risk organizations like hospitals, behavioral health treatment, home health workers and late night retail establishments are at a dramatically increased risk for experiencing a violent incident at work.

OSHA, and over thirty state government regs recommend that companies do an annual Workplace Violence Basement Assessment, but these are time-consuming and difficult to manage.

To solve the problem, Risk & Security LLC has released a new web-based app, Workplace Violence Risk-Pro©, which makes security directors into Risk Professionals!

OSHA standard 3148 (Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care &

Social Service Workers)and the new OSHA Inspection Directive, Enforcement Procedures for Investigating or Inspecting Incidents of Workplace Violence, from September, 2011, are both included in the new, easy-to-use application.

The program has been tested on some of the largest organizations in the US, and runs on a laptop, PC or tablet, and even on a smartphone!. Workplace Violence Risk-Pro© is built to be affordable and simple to use.

The web 2.0 program, includes newly compiled, updated threat databases, and automated web-surveys based on the exact OSHA Directives.

The new program gives human services and security professionals a quick and easy way to conduct a workplace violence baseline assessment that will pass an audit!

The Risk-Pro© model has been used for easy software applications with the Department of Defense and over hundreds of organizations, hospitals, maritime organizatons, and local, state and federal government agencies.

About Risk & Security LLC

Risk & Security LLC is a security risk assessment and risk analysis company with over 30 years of combined expertise in security risk. It specializes in consulting on risk assessment projects and global application development of risk solutions. Risk & Security partners with security companies around the world to provide state-of-the-art security expertise to analyze risk and recommend cost-effective countermeasures.

The team of risk and security experts is led Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, who has created more than 40 software programs, and conducted more than 200 specialized security risk assessments in a variety of environments, including companies in the United States and around the world, including in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa and Qatar.

What Churches Need to Know About Security Risk Assessment!

Posted on February 23, 2013 11:39 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

the problems that churches face has changed since the 1950s. Churches were considered “safe”, but the Sikh temple shootings in Wisconsin, shootings in Colorado Springs Churches, and the burning of black churches, have changed the security posture of churches.

Take a look at violence in churches today. In 2008, the FBI recorded 23,547 crimes attributed to location code for “Church/ Synagogue/Temple”. Deaths from church attacks rose 36% in 2012 according to the January 30, 2013 edition of Christianity Today. Guns were used in nearly 60 percent of all “deadly force incidents” at churches since 1999 according to Carl Chinn who has been tracking these incidents.

Arson incidents are so widespread that the Dept. of Justice has a National Church Arson Task Force, and “Arson at churches has been a problem for a long time,” said Patrick Moreland, an executive with the Wisconsin-based Church Mutual Insurance Co., which insures 63,000 houses of worship.

No church leader, or church member wants their place of worship to become a crime scene, as the country watches it unfold on CNN. And there’s a pro-active way to analyze a church’s security profile

And determine:

How Likely the Church is to have a Violence Incident
What Other Churches in the area are experiencing
What the Threat Level is in your Geographic Area
Exactly What Controls You Need to Add to Stay Safe

A Security Risk Assessment is a quick, easy to use model that can take streams of data and information and use these actual events to produce a simple report that can track the threat levels, and match these to potential and existing controls to see how existing controls can be implemented, what new controls need to be added, and how to do it all in a cost-effective way.

One of the key points of a security risk assessment is that it measures solutions in terms of COST-EFFECTIVENESS. No one wants to over-spend on something and not have enough money left for a critical security element.

Out in the field, we often find that controls are not effectively implemented, or they are not 100% implemented, and if there’s even a 10% gap, it’s just like the control never existed at all.

And you don’t need to be an expert to perform a security risk assessment on your church, school, temple or summer camp. There are new automated software applications, like Church Facilities Risk-Pro, similar to the app on your iphone, that will do the assessment for you, showing you the data you need, and even writing and formatting the reports for you.

The Control Reports become a blueprint for improving security and can become part of a 3-year plan that will protect the physical facility, the congregation, and the entire community.

Data-Driven Security: The Best Way to Improve Security for Anything, Anywhere

Posted on February 5, 2013 3:44 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

How can you improve your security program? Are we talking about a seaport? A church? A manufacturing facility? A gas pipeline? An office building? Corporate Headquarters? Zoo? Hospital? Bank? Clinic? City Hall? Harbor? Stadium? Government Agency?

It doesn’t matter what you need to protect — if you decide it is a critical asset, it needs good, continually improving security, and
an on-going assessment program is the fastest, easiest way to get it.

If wonderful, dedicated you, (as the security pro), don’t know what’s working and what’s not, how can you improve the overall program, unless you wait for an “precipitating event”, like a THEFT, like an ASSAULT, like a FLOOD, or a HURRICANE, or a POWER LOSS, and then you immediately start working on that and making sure THAT particular disaster doesn’t happen again!
Meanwhile, everything else is slowly losing energy due to lack of constant attention.

And so let’s say you are the Super Bowl, and the power went out! Terrible. Inexcusable. And you’re busy getting a 2nd or 3rd backup generator to make sure THAT POWER LOSS never happens again.

This problem with this model – fixing what’s broken and ‘learning from experience’ is that it’s always a day late. You’re always chasing after something that already happened.

Instead, you can set up a program so that you use to continually evaluate the current condition, assess the risk, and then improve the security controls, based on THAT RISK ASSESSMENT.

Tony Robbins used to call it CANI –

Constant And Never-ending Improvement. You can accomplish this by setting up regular assessments and then adjusting or tweeking the security controls to adjust to the new, or more aggressive threats.

“Regular” assessments can be monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, bi-annually, whatever schedule suits you and the organization. The idea is that by continually reassessing your last improvement,and changing the threats and risk level,
you can create a dynamic, data-driven security program that improves the security profile dramatically, without having to
suffer through another triggering event!

The concept of CANI – Constant And Never-ending Improvement can breathe life into your security program, you can use it to improve your health, your fitness level, your guitar playing, your _______________________.

You fill in the rest!