Baseline Violence Assessment

Angry Iranian Female Shooter Shoots Three YouTube Staff Members in San Bruno, California Active Shooter Attack

Posted on April 4, 2018 12:28 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

RISKAlert Report Updated: April 3, 2018

Nasim Aghdam , a 39-year old YouTube user who was angry after access to her self-produced YouTube videos was reduced, drove 470 miles from Menifee in southern California to YouTube headquarters in northern California and shot three staff members with a handgun at the YouTube campus and then turned the gun on herself, inflicting a fatal injury.

Aghdam’s father, Ismail Aghdam said he had called the police, warning that she hated YouTube, and that he was afraid that she might be headed up to their headquarters after she went missing from her home.

She started shooting in a courtyard area and it appears she killed herself as law enforcement arrived on the scene. She was one of a handful of female shooters, and passionate about veganism and animal rights issues, and used her YouTube channel to spread her message. She ranted online against the company’s new policies and accused them of censoring her videos and reducing their views.

She had complained on her website that “new close-minded youtube employees” had “filtered my channels” starting
in 2016, causing the number of views on her videos to drop. She posted a screenshot of her YouTube page showing that one video had received 366,591 views.

YouTube staff members were terrorized by the random shootings, and were searched before
being allowed to go to their cars and leave the offices. It was the first major Workplace Violence
incident in a major Silicon Valley company and should encourage other companies to add more
security controls to their campuses.

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. A Workplace Violence Incident can happen anywhere and anytime! Be Ready.

Lack of access controls (metal detectors) allowed a killer to enter the YouTube campus with a
gun and shoot three staff members, injuring one critically. Simple, inexpensive metal detectors
could have eliminated this vulnerability.
Police did not respond quickly enough when they were called and alerted IN ADVANCE that the
shooter might be heading to the YouTube campus. She might have been apprehended on route
during the six plus hour drive to San Bruno.

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For more information and more great content: write to: caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com
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ATTORNEY SHOOTS HIS TWO FELLOW ATTORNEYS AT PROMINENT LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA LAW FIRM’S HOLIDAY PARTY Updated: Jan. 8, 2018

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

ATTORNEY SHOOTING IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA – SHOOTER HITS TWO FELLOW
ATTORNEYS AT PROMINENT CELEBRITY LAW FIRM’S HOLIDAY PARTY

Updated: Jan. 9, 2018

The Long Beach, Calif. Police Department named John Alexander Mendoza, 58, of Redondo Beach, Calif., as the man who shot his two colleagues, one died at the scene, and other was injured at the scene, on Friday afternoon, January 5, 2018.

Attorneys at the Perona, Langer, Beck, Serbin, Mendoza and Harrison firm in the Long Beach neighborhood of Bixby Knolls, were attending the firm’s holiday party, when Mendoza entered the offices shooting.

Major A. Langer, the firm’s Managing Partner, 75, was killed and Ronald Beck, 64, was wounded in what police called a workplace violence incident. After shooting Langer and Beck, Mendoza turned the gun on himself. The shooting occurred during a holiday party at the firm when others were present.

Mendoza had apparently been fired earlier in the day, but returned to the firm’s party. On a report of an active shooter, Long Beach police officers swarmed to the office building. Believing an active shooter was still at work, police formed a small team and quickly went into the office looking for the gunman and any victims, according to a police source briefed on the incident. As they scoured the building, police reportedly came upon multiple groups of screaming and crying workers still hiding or trying to flee, but eventually confirmed the gunman was dead.

The firm has eleven offices in southern California and represented clients including Motley Crue, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

Mendoza had worked at Perona Langer Beck for 10 years, said Michael Waks, a lawyer who also has offices in the same building where Perona Langer Beck is located in Long Beach. Mendoza specialized in workers compensation cases.

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62-Year Old Bumblebee Tuna Worker Killed in Oven with Six Tons of Canned Tuna

Posted on May 28, 2015 9:19 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

RISK Alert Report #710 – May 27, 2015

The Los Angeles District Attorney announced felony charges Monday against
Bumblebee Tuna’s San Diego Plant, alleging that a worker, Jose Melena,
entered a thirty-five foot cylindrical oven that sterilizes cans of tuna. Melena’s
co-workers closed the door and started the oven. The oven temperature rose to
270 degrees in the next two hours, and when the doors were opened, they found
the severely burned remains of Jose Melena.

According to District Attorney Jackie Lacey, “We take worker safety very seriously”,
according to a published statement. “Our goal is to enhance the criminal of workplace
safety violations. Although the Bumble Bee investigation began in 2012, this case
represents our commitment to protecting workers from illegal – and, potentially,
deadly – on-the-job practices.”

Two plant employees, former Safety Manager Saul Florez, 42, of Whittier,
California, and the current Director of Plant Operations Angel Rodriguez, 63, of
Riverside, California, with three felony counts each of an Cal-OSHA (State of
California ) violation causing death.

Both men face arraignment on May 27 at the Foltz Criminal Justice Center in
downtown Los Angeles. If convicted, the individuals could serve three years in
state prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Bumble Bee faces a maximum fine
of $1.5 million.

Lessons Learned:

1. Strong safety controls should be put in place to protect workers in High Risk
Occupations.

2. Employees should make sure that all employees are aware of the
company’s safety and security rules to prevent incidents like this.

RISKAlert® is a publication of Risk & Security LLC

To subscribe to RISKAlerts® – write to: info@riskandsecurityllc.com

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New Active Shooter App Announced on October 20, 2013

Posted on October 19, 2013 12:27 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Active Shooter app released to reduce likelihood of an Active Shooter Incident.

Active Shooter incidents have increased both in the number of incidents, as well as the number of people killed and injured in the last five years. As an aspect of workplace violence, the active shooter has become 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 injuries were annually during this time.

The latest figures show that high-risk organizations like hospitals, schools, malls, universities, military installations and even hair salons have experienced an active shooter incident and are likely to have a dramatically increased risk for experiencing an active shooter incident in the future.

Risk & Security LLC has released a new web-based app, Active Shooter Risk-Pro©, which offers an easy to use risk assessment program that assesses your organizational risk of an active shooter incident, as well as recommending solutions to prevent an incident from occuring in the future.

In additional to using the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Guidelines on Active Shooter Response, the OSHA standard 3148 (Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care, the FBI and Secret Service Guidelines on Active Shooter Incidents, 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!. Active Shooter Risk-Pro© is built to be affordable and simple to use.

The web 2.0 program, includes newly compiled, updated threat databases, new active shooter incident analysis metrics, and automated web-surveys based on the DHS Guidelines..

The new program gives human services and security professionals a quick and easy way to conduct a active shooter, or general workplace violence that will recommend that will pass an audit!

The Risk-Pro© model has been used for easy software applications by the Department of Defense and over hundreds of organizations, hospitals, 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 assessment. It develops specialized programs and applications which are easy to use, affordable and which help organizations assess their risk, the likelihood of becoing a target, and which recommend cost-effective solutions.

Risk & Security offers full service consulting on critical risk assessments including HIPAA Risk Analysis, Facilities Security Assessments, Hospital Security Assessments, Workplace Violence, Active Shooter Incident Assessment, Environment of Care and more. Risk & Security partners with security companies around the world to provide state-of-the-art security expertise to analyze risk and recommend cost-effective security controls justified by return on investment metrics.

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.

Contact Information:

Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, CHS III

Email: caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

Phone: 301-346-9055

Twitter: www.twitter.com/riskalert

DOD-OIG Report on Security Weaknesses at the Navy Yard

Posted on October 18, 2013 10:11 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

The recently released 56-page report by the Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General found that the Navy Access Control System did not adequately control the risks to the Washington DC Navy Yard and other sites under their control.

NCACS did not effectively mitigate access control risks associated with contractor installation access. This occurred because Commander,
Navy Installations Command (CNJC) officials attempted to reduce access control costs.

As a result, 52 convicted felons received routine, unauthorized installation access, placing military personnel, dependents, civilians, and
installations at an increased security risk.

Additionally, the CNIC N3 Antiterrorism office (N3AT) misrepresented NCACS costs. This occurred because CNIC N3AT did not perform
a comprehensive business case analysis and issued policy that prevented transparent cost accounting of NCACS. As a result, the Navy
cannot account for actual NCACS costs, and DoD Components located on Navy installations may be inadvertently absorbing NCACS costs
.
Furthermore, CNIC N3AT officials and the Naval District Washington Chief Information Officer circumvented competitive contracting
requirements to implement NCACS. This occurred because CNIC N3AT did not have contracting authority. As a result, CNIC N3AT
spent over $1.1 million in disallowable costs and lacked oversight of, and diminished legal recourse against, the NCACS service provider.

You can read the entire report at: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2013-134.pdf

Courtesy Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton at Risk and Security LLC

caroline@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.

Has it Been Only Two Weeks since the Navy Yard Shootings?

Posted on October 2, 2013 4:07 pm by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

When i wrote my blog about the Shootings at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16th, I got some nasty notes about “Why did you have to write about this so soon after it happened?”

Well – I guess the fact that after about 15 days, no one can even remember the incident (8 people shot to death); the name of the shooter (Aaron Alexis), or much of the details. It seems that people have decided that it was a mentally distributed person, so couldn’t have been prevented. This is completely wrong.

One of the issues that security directors have is how to make their organization aware of the active shooter threat without terrifying them. How do you get a large group of people out of the “It can’t happen here” mindset? One of the main ways to bring an issue back home is by using the incident as a security awareness notice.

Write a “Lessons Learned” email and send it to everyone in the organization. Follow it up with a purse and wallet card with reminders on what to do when faced with an Active Shooter situation.

Keep everyone informed on what happens after the incident – how the injured are doing, and more importantly, what changes the organization has made to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Try doing a simple threat-risk assessment to illustrate to management what the chances of having an active shooter incident actually are, based on the industry, the region, and the number of problems/complaints that employees have expressed in the past.

Don’t let anyone forget that this can happen to any organization, no matter how well funded, or how secure they think they are. Remember, if it could happen in a DOD military facility – it could happen to YOU!

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.

Why Workplace Violence is Always a Catastrophe

Posted on March 13, 2013 10:12 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

Workplace violence incidents are one of the most damaging events that can happen to any organization. The good news is that workplace violence is one of the few threats that companies can actually prevent before it happens.

Unlike earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, war, and explosions, workplace violent incidents can be prevented if the organization makes a commitment to educate their employees, and give them the knowledge they need to address a potential problem with a co-worker before it gets to an explosive level, for example, making the active shooter drills part of the security program.

In many ways, workplace violence is worse than other kinds of violent incidents because it always involves a major violation of trust, and it also has a malicious component, where the perpetrator is deliberating focusing on violence against a fellow human that they know personally and may have directly worked with, sometimes for year.

According to OSHA, 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 are reported every year.

As well as the violation of trust and the violence itself, the incidents usually terrorize both the victims and other employees, especially those who know violent individual and are left to wonder how they failed to recognize the danger signs.

Some organizations report that employees, even those who weren’t hurt in an incident, exhibit PTSD-type symptoms following an incident. And the company’s reputation is often damaged, just from the publicity of the event.

One of the main controls that protect against a violent incident, is doing a Workplace Violence Assessment. This specialized risk assessment involves interviewing employees at all levels of the organization, looking at the OSHA guidelines, such as those detailed in OSHA 3148, (www.osha.gov/Publications//osha3148.pdf).

The assessment also includes making sure that every violent, or threatening incident gets reported in a standardized way, that all the incidents are tracked, and that there is a de-escalation process that can be easily followed to prevent someone from getting to a violent stage.

There are new programs available that automate the Workplace Violence Assessment process and make it into a simple and standardized
project. To review a standardized, data-based, Violence Assessment Report, go to: www.riskandsecurityllc.com/.

The Active Shooter Threat and Why We Need to Stay Situationally Aware

Posted on March 3, 2013 9:23 am by Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton Comment

2012 will be remembered as the Year of the Active Shooter, where terrible tragedies across our country refocused people on issues surrounding gun control. In many ways, it’s that old argument about whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

In many schools and hospital, it could be argued that the needs of the many to be safe, and NOT TO GET SHOT, outweigh the needs of the few – to possess assault rifles and high capacity magazines, which allow them to kill a large number of people with almost no effort.

No matter what side of the debate you fall on, the debate has certainly brought the debate back from and center.

And along the way, it took the Active Shooter threat from a phrase that only a few security people knew about, into a phrase that was trending on the web and Twitter.

The Department of Homeland Security made a variety of resources available to deal with the Active Shooter Threat (many can be found at http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness) with tools includes a video, and booklet.

Whether you are an elementary school, like Newtown, a movie theatre, like Aurora, a regional mall, mountain resort or anything else, the number one way to counter the Active Shooter threat is to increase security awareness of the staff.

I have had teachers tell me “my job is only to teach, I shouldn’t have to be responsible for security, too”.

Unfortunately, everyone has to be responsible for good security, or we are all at risk. And again, there’s the trade-off (aka, the risk calculation):

Measure the inconvenience of having to keep your eyes open and be willing to report any suspicious behavior VS. being a casualty of a mass shooting, or having someone you know killed.

Looks like a pretty easy calculation to me:

Small Amount of Effort (no cost) = Big Increase in Security !!

Make sure you friends, family and staff are aware of the Active Shooter Threat!