Reposted from The New Yorker

Long before the burglar Vjeran Tomic became the talk of Paris, he honed his skills in a graveyard. Père Lachaise, the city’s largest cemetery, is a Gothic maze of tombstones, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, that covers more than a hundred acres. Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde are among those buried there. Tomic recalled that in the nineteen-eighties, when he was an adolescent, the cemetery attracted hippie tourists, who flocked to the grave of Jim Morrison, and also drug dealers and gang members. Tomic was drawn by the tombstones. In one of twenty letters, written in careful cursive French, that he sent me during the past year and a half, he told me, “Observing them gave me the desire to touch them—to climb up to their peaks.” Tomic and his friends turned the cemetery into a parkour playground, leaping from the roof of one mausoleum to the next, daring one another to take ever-bolder risks.

Tomic avoided his family’s apartment, which was a few blocks south of the cemetery, because he had a tense relationship with his parents, both of whom were Bosnian immigrants. He was born in Paris in 1968, but the following year his mother became seriously ill, and his father, a car mechanic, sent Vjeran to live with his grandmother, in the Ottoman town of Mostar, in Bosnia. By the age of six, he told me, he had developed what he calls “a devious tendency,” adding, “I was showing some unhealthy intelligence.” He tormented his cousins by putting thorns in their shoes. They often played along the banks of the Neretva River, and Tomic became adept at scaling Mostar’s stone bridges; on reaching the top, he would leap into the water below.

At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level. He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old. (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic’s plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, “It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything.”

He returned to Paris when he was eleven, speaking almost no French and barely knowing his parents. He resented them for uprooting him from Bosnia. In his words, his mother and father “lived in the apocalypse,” fighting constantly.

Despite the turmoil at home, Tomic said, he did well in school, and was a fine athlete. As a teen-ager, he developed a keen interest in drawing, and in his spare time he walked, alone, through the streets of Paris. One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. It was the Musée de l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Tomic went inside. The museum is best known for its Monet murals of water lilies, but Tomic was enraptured by Renoir’s glowing renderings of happy childhoods: kids playing with figurines, practicing the piano, snuggling with mothers. As Tomic saw it, Renoir had used his paintbrush to create a “parallel universe”—an enchanted version of the grim Parisian life he had known. “Renoir has a way of seeing life from a magical realm,” Tomic wrote to me. “It’s as if he even came from this place.” It thrilled him to be “within a hand’s reach” of such spellbinding images.

On returning home, Tomic recalled, he told his mother about his transporting experience at the museum, and said that he wanted to paint—“that it was my passion, that other jobs weren’t worth anything, that they were wastes of time.” Fearing his father’s opinion, he entrusted her to “transmit the message” to him. His father soon approached him and declared that painting was a hobby, not a real job. He pressed Tomic to work at his garage, but Tomic resisted, and eventually “thought about fleeing.”

Tomic and his friends had begun hanging out at Père Lachaise, and when they found an abandoned warehouse nearby they began squatting there. Tomic went to school only intermittently, and he and the other boys supported themselves by stealing pieces of glassware from a local factory and then selling them at a flea market by the Porte de Montreuil. They also began climbing the high walls on the periphery of the cemetery, which allowed them to break into adjoining apartment buildings.

In time, Tomic began robbing apartments in more affluent neighborhoods. His climbing skills continued to improve, and by the age of sixteen he could scale the façade of a multistory building with relative ease. In his letters to me, Tomic described his burglaries in oddly mystical terms, suggesting that his actions were compelled by invisible forces. (He used the French word tractent, which means “towed.”) He described canvassing neighborhoods before choosing his target: “I have to be in harmony with certain places, where I feel good. And then, at that moment, I see—like images from a movie—the places where I have walked in the past week, and some places attract me, and something is waiting for me in the end.”

One night, he had a vivid dream in which he stole five paintings from a museum. He took it as a portent. As he wrote to me, “I knew that someday I would do something great.”

Tomic generally worked alone, scaling walls, leaping between rooftops, and picking locks. Once inside an apartment, he looked first for jewelry, because it was valuable and easy to sell. A burglary that took less than two hours often yielded enough cash to support him for six months on the French Riviera. In his letters, he recounted robbing various Parisian luminaries, including the French-Caribbean singer Henri Salvador and the Egyptian royal family. (He boasted to me that he stole “gold buttons” and some of “Lawrence of Arabia’s medals” from the Egyptians.)

Tomic often returned to an apartment many times without taking anything, in order to find the most expensive-looking items. He adopted this strategy when robbing the apartment of the designer Philippe Starck, in 2004. Starck recently told me, “I never knew anything about my burglar, but I’ve always had respect for his style—an admiration for his temerity—and a sort of intimate affection for him after I discovered that he’d been practically living with us in the apartment for a few days, spending his time sawing into my poor, small safety box without even disturbing us. It was very much a Gentleman Burglar situation, Arsène Lupin style.” (Lupin, the quintessential debonair thief, was invented by the French novelist Maurice Leblanc, in 1905.) Starck went on, “The only shadow was that the only thing he stole was my daughter’s jewelry—her only heritage from her deceased mother.”

Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl,” Tomic wrote. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones,” Tomic wrote to me. “But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.”

Tomic was exaggerating—his impulsiveness sometimes led him to make poor choices. One day, he ran out of gas while driving through the suburbs of Paris, and discovered that he’d left his wallet at home. “I had a toy handgun on me,” he recalled, and so he held up a bakery for two hundred francs. He filled his tank, but a witness at the bakery reported his license-plate number to the police, and he was arrested. He spent a year in jail.

Starck may be excessively romantic in calling Tomic a Gentleman Burglar. Tomic, who is tall and blunt-featured, with close-cropped dark hair, has been convicted of at least a dozen crimes—among them selling drugs, aggravated robbery, theft with violence, issuing a death threat, and illegal possession of a weapon. A friend of Tomic’s described him as “brutal and a little wild.” At the same time, she said, he had a charming range of passions: “He is into aesthetics, classical music, nature, animals, epicurean pleasures—wine, cheese. He is very out there in his style, even his clothing.” (Tomic favors G-Star pants, New Balance sneakers, cashmere ski hats, and Lacoste underwear.) She said that Tomic was “like a poet,” noting that “he talks about the moon.” He had maintained his habit of wandering around Paris on foot, modelling himself on Arthur Rimbaud.

Above all, Tomic loved fine art. His friend told me that he appreciated Matissef or “his joyful and dancing color palette,” Klimt for “his sensuality,” and Renoir for “the sweetness that emerges from his portraits of children.” She observed, “The Impressionist art feeds the poetry that is in him.”

Many of the luxurious apartments that Tomic broke into had valuable paintings, but he tried to resist taking them, knowing that they would be difficult to unload. “To sell them was dangerous, and I didn’t have reliable sources abroad in order to flog them to collectors or receivers,” he told me. Occasionally, though, the allure of the art proved overwhelming, and Tomic took what he found—including, he says, works by Degas and Signac. “A decent amount passed through my home,” he wrote. He hid some pieces in a cellar, “and some stayed with me for a long time, on the wall, and it’s in these cases that I fell in love.”

This might sound like braggadocio, but Tomic did make off with some masterpieces. In the fall of 2000, in an episode that subsequently made the papers in France, he used a crossbow with ropes and carabiners to sneak into an apartment while its occupants were asleep and stole two Renoirs, a Derain, an Utrillo, a Braque, and various other works—a haul worth more than a million euros.

In May, 2010, Tomic was walking near the Seine when he came upon a large Art Deco building. Looking through a window, he noticed a Cubist painting hanging on the wall. Tomic later learned that the building was the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, known as the MAM. But it was the style of the window, rather than the Cubist painting, that caught Tomic’s interest. He glanced up: there were cameras on the roof. Tomic walked up to one of the building’s other windows, which was blocked from the security cameras by a parapet. Studying the window’s metal frame, he became convinced that it was the same type that, years earlier, he had disassembled, screw by screw, in a heist. He took out a pocket knife, chipped away at the paint on the frame, and examined the screws that were embedded in the metal. He could easily break in, he decided. It astounded him that nobody had considered this vulnerability. “This made me realize that luck and my past experience were at a rendezvous,” he wrote. “I even asked myself if I was not in another dimension at that time.”

A few days later, Tomic went to the MAM as a visitor. It occupies the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, which was built for the International Exposition of 1937. The museum started amassing its collection in 1953, when the city of Paris donated more than five hundred paintings once owned by a man named Maurice Girardin; Janet Flanner, writing in this magazine, later described Girardin as “an eccentric Paris dentist who had little money but such a gift for scenting talent among still unappreciated important artists that he had been able, starting in 1913, to buy their paintings at the low prices he could afford.”

Tomic looked around the galleries with a mixture of pleasure and unease. “Certain paintings can provoke me like an emotional shock,” he told me. A friend of his compared him to a “shaman,” and added, “A work of art emits a vibration, a palpable energy, and Vjeran is able to connect to it.” When I asked Tomic about this assessment, he agreed, observing, “I love to touch antique objects, and I sense a great past—of generations and generations—that I think are a part of the works.” He said that he avoided thinking about art in scholarly terms, and noted, “Sincerely, I have never read a single work about painting or art in my entire life.”

Inside the museum, Tomic noticed that although the motion detectors were meant to flicker from green to red whenever anyone passed by, several of them appeared to be stuck on green. The discovery delighted Tomic, who has described robbery as, ultimately, an act of imagination. He wrote to me, “I sometimes think for a while, then as if by magic—but without the magic wand—I have the formula to overcome an obstacle.”

In the 1962 film “Dr. No,” James Bond, played by Sean Connery, passes through the lair of a wealthy villain and notices a portrait of the Duke of Wellington, by Goya, on the wall. The painting had been stolen, the previous year, from the National Gallery in London. The scene helped to cement a popular misconception that stolen masterpieces are often bought and secretly held by wealthy, reclusive collectors. In fact, this almost never happens. Unlike jewelry, which can be recut, or antiquities, which may never have been photographed, famous paintings are almost impossible to resell—even at ten per cent of their value, a common rate on the black market. Some criminals try to collect ransom for museum paintings based on their insurance value, but that’s a risky proposition, particularly given that many publicly owned works aren’t insured. Charles Hill, a former head of the art-and-antiques squad at New Scotland Yard, told me that most museum thieves nevertheless “go for the big-ticket items,” adding, “It’s foolhardy, it’s stupid, it’s pig-shit ignorant.”

The typical art thief has no idea who will buy his loot. But, by the time Tomic began thinking about robbing the MAM, he had established a steady business relationship with a sponsor: Jean Michel Corvez, a white-haired man in his fifties who owned several businesses in France, including a health-care-data company and a small gallery in the Bastille neighborhood. Tomic told me that he met Corvez in 2004, through another thief. “Our relationship was more than fine, although it wasn’t quite a friendship,” he wrote to me. “We believed in each other, and he wasn’t evil—but I later realized that he was dangerous and that he was unable to predict danger.”

According to Tomic, in the span of several years he sold Corvez roughly ninety thousand euros’ worth of contraband, including jewelry, gold, and a painting by Johan Jongkind, a Dutch seascape artist. Knowing that Tomic frequently broke into rich people’s apartments, Corvez gave him a list of artists favored by his clients, among them Basquiat, Chagall, Klimt, Léger, Modigliani, Monet, Pissarro, and Warhol. Corvez gave Tomic the nickname l’Araignée—the Spider—and urged him to remain in good shape. He often chastised Tomic for eating poorly, Tomic recalled, adding, “Corvez wanted me to work out, so that I could climb without any problem.”

Soon after visiting the MAM, Tomic went to see Corvez at his gallery. Corvez reminded him that he would love to have a Léger, and one of the paintings at the museum was Léger’s “Still Life with Candlestick,” a depiction of a domestic interior, from 1922. When the painting had last been on loan to another museum, it had been insured for four million euros, and its market price was likely much higher than that. Corvez offered Tomic forty thousand dollars. “I hesitated,” Tomic told me. “But my mouth spoke, and then I couldn’t help but act.” He spent the next several days making plans for the robbery.

On May 14, 2010, in the early hours of the morning, Tomic walked up to a window that faced an esplanade where skateboarders congregated during the day. At around 3 a.m., he saw a guard briefly patrol the galleries, then walk off. Tomic was carrying a piece of dark cloth, and he hung it like a curtain on the outside of the window, to give himself cover. Then he got to work on the window. It took him six nights to finish the job. First, he dabbed the window frame with paint-stripping acid, exposing the head of each screw. Then, after applying another solution, to eliminate rust, he removed the screws and filled the holes with brown modelling clay that matched the color of the window frame. It was a painstaking process, and Tomic didn’t rush.

A few hours before dawn on May 20th, Tomic returned to the site, in a hooded sweatshirt, with two suction cups, and silently pulled out the window. There was a lock holding a grate in place; using bolt cutters, he broke the lock. He entered the museum briefly, avoiding the few working motion detectors. Then he left and retreated to the banks of the Seine, where he waited for fifteen minutes, to insure that he hadn’t set off a silent alarm.

When Tomic went back inside, he spotted the Léger painting, took it off the wall, and maneuvered it out of its frame. He now had an object Corvez prized, but, standing in the museum in the dim light and the silence, he began staring at Matisse’s “Pastoral.” A Fauvist canvas from 1905, it depicts three pale nudes resting while a fourth figure, rendered in bronze tones, plays a flute. “I saw a deep, vivid landscape,” he recalled. “And the little devil playing his flute out of nowhere, as if by magic, as if he were the guardian of this environment.” He took it off the wall.

Then he noticed Modigliani’s “Woman with a Fan,” a portrait of the artist’s muse and obsession, Lunia Czechowska. Tomic fixated on the image, which depicted Czechowska in a yellow dress, her eyes a cloudy white. “The woman in the picture was worthy of a living being, ready to dance a tango,” he wrote to me. “It could have almost been reality.” He stole the Modigliani, too.

Hill described Tomic’s state of mind in the gallery as a kind of mania. “The paradox of great paintings is that they are inanimate objects that have lives of their own,” he said. “And they tend to mesmerize those who look at them. For some viewers, they then take leave of their senses.” Tomic, he said, was in some ways little different from “the buyer at a Sotheby’s auction who gets carried away and ends up bidding ten times what he intended to pay.”

Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a sixth: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” But, Tomic recalled, “when I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.”

It took two trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for five minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken.

Tomic headed back, but within a minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head,” Tomic told me.

Tomic had planned to meet with Corvez later that morning, on the fourth level of an underground parking garage in Bastille. He spent much of the intervening hours gazing at the paintings in his car, especially the Matisse. “I had fallen in love,” he recalled to me. When Corvez arrived at the garage, in a rented Porsche Cayenne, and realized that Tomic had not one but five stolen paintings, he was more unnerved than pleased. “He was afraid of me,” Tomic recalled. Nevertheless, Corvez accepted the Léger, as agreed, and also took the Modigliani, on consignment. Tomic didn’t want to part with the three other paintings, and asked Corvez to store them on his behalf, even though he worried about what might happen to the Matisse. He recalled saying to Corvez, “You could get hit by a car—whose door will I knock on to recover my goods?” The mood turned tense. “We were not far from thinking that all could end badly,” Tomic wrote.

By the end of the day, newspapers around the world were reporting on the heist. The stolen works were estimated to be worth more than seventy million dollars, making the theft the biggest of its kind since 1990, when two thieves, disguised as police officers, stole thirteen art works, collectively valued at roughly half a billion dollars, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. (They have yet to be recovered.)

The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, declared, “I want everything to be done to recover these masterpieces.” France’s élite armed-robbery unit, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, launched an investigation and soon found a witness: Goran Radosavuevic, a skateboarder. He told police that, a few days before the robbery, he’d seen a suspicious character on the esplanade outside the museum: a white man, six feet two, weighing about two hundred pounds, with a muscular build, an oval face, and a square jaw. He observed, “I really got the impression that he was at work. He was not there to look at the skaters and seemed really to be observing the side of the wall with the windows of the museum.” Police records noted that the removed window screws had been laid out neatly in a corner of the museum, underlining the “cold-bloodedness” of the operation. The five paintings were among the most important in the museum’s collection, suggesting to investigators that the thief had “a sophisticated knowledge of the works”—or, at least, a good eye.

After the robbery, Tomic went to meet Corvez at the gallery to collect his payment. Tomic was deeply worried, even paranoid, that police officers were following him. “I knew that a great hunt was going to start,” he wrote me. Corvez gave him a shoebox stuffed with forty thousand euros, in small bills. Tomic left and hailed a taxi. He told me that he didn’t dare take the Métro, because he feared the security cameras. As the taxi navigated the twisting streets of Bastille, the radio buzzed with news of the heist. Tomic eventually arrived at the apartment of a woman he trusted. He taped his stash to the underside of a chair. Fearing that he would be discovered at his own apartment, he asked to spend the night.

Tomic initially characterized this woman to me as an “acquaintance,” but in a subsequent letter he explained that she was a sex worker who gave him “free passes” from time to time. She was not his “concubine,” he assured me; they were confidants who helped each other out. The woman, an immigrant, had experienced “problems with other girls” working the same territory and, according to Tomic, had spent time in jail. Tomic had agreed to keep an eye on her as she reclaimed a spot on her old corner, on Avenue Foch. One evening, she brought him home, fed him, and let him stay overnight. It became an occasional ritual.

Tomic, by his own admission, is not suited to intimacy: “I am a thief. I roam in beautiful neighborhoods. I see what I have to do, but I stay out of people’s private lives.” This woman, however, grew close to him, he said, adding, “She asked me to do her favors a few times, like to fix her car, change a tire.” Tomic never fully let his guard down, though. Most of his arrests occurred when someone betrayed him, and Tomic sometimes wondered if she was a police informant.

Six months after the MAM robbery, the police had only a few leads in the case, but they were conducting a separate investigation, based on an anonymous tip about a thief and his fence, and the informant provided Tomic’s name. On October 1, 2010, they eavesdropped on a phone conversation in which Tomic ranted, “The cops! The fucking cops think it was me who did the museum, I swear! . . . They’re assholes, it’s crazy! They can’t understand that the paintings were sold and that they’re pissing me off!”

The police compared a photograph of Tomic with the description given by the skateboarder, and concluded that they had a likely match. On December 7th, they followed Tomic to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses one of the largest modern-art museums in Europe, and observed him studying the emergency exits. A day later, they surveilled him as he bought two suction cups, glue, and a pair of construction gloves. In a letter, Tomic told me that he had indeed been intending to rob the Pompidou but had intuited that the authorities were on his trail. “It was definitely a project that would need to wait its turn,” he told me.

On December 10th, detectives phoned Tomic and the call was sent to voice mail. His greeting was astonishingly brazen, as if he were in a manic state. “If you want to buy paintings or works of art, or exceptional jewelry, do not hesitate to contact me,” he said. “Among the many paintings, there are five that are extremely expensive.”

It’s not clear why Tomic wasn’t immediately arrested. Charles Hill told me that he found it hard to contain his frustration at the inaction of the French police, which he attributed to smug complacency—a feeling, common to those investigating art thefts, that the work will ultimately be recovered. (In fact, several experts told me, only about ten per cent of stolen art ever resurfaces.) But Derek Fincham, a professor at South Texas College of Law, who specializes in the illicit trade in cultural property, suggested a potential justification for the delay: the French police might not have wanted to spook Tomic and “inadvertently push the paintings further underground.” Fincham explained, “A painting that is cut from its frame and rolled up is easy to move. It could be put in a bank vault or buried in a field, or even destroyed.” Such fears are warranted. In 2001, when the police arrested Stéphane Breitwieser—a French thief who stole two hundred and thirty-nine works of art from more than a hundred museums and galleries—his mother shredded many of the paintings and ground them up in a garbage disposal.

On the wiretap, Tomic had promised to get revenge on anyone who followed him too closely. He said, “I’m gonna dig up the guns and, on my mother’s head, you’ll see—the first one who comes near me will get a bullet in the head.”

As the months passed, Tomic grew increasingly suspicious of Corvez. He tried calling him, but discovered that his number was no longer in service. One day, they ran into each other at the Gare de Lyon. Corvez looked “totally white” and “freaky,” Tomic recalled, as if he were “going to pass out,” and stalled when Tomic asked him about the status of the paintings. “He gave me no guarantees,” Tomic told me. “It was fishy, ​​fishy, ​​fishy.”

Tomic surreptitiously taped a subsequent conversation with Corvez, in order to have proof of his involvement in the crime. On the recording, Tomic asks him about the Léger, and Corvez tells him that it has already been sold, and that the police investigation “prevents me from sleeping at night.” In fact, as Tomic eventually learned, Corvez still had the Léger. A client had paid him eighty thousand euros for it and taken it home. Two days later, apparently rattled by the media attention surrounding the theft, he returned the painting to Corvez, without asking for his money back.

Corvez did find a buyer for the Modigliani: Yonathan Birn, a thirty-three-year-old watchmaker with an art-history degree from the Sorbonne. Birn had a small shop in the Marais. Several months after the theft, Corvez showed Birn the Modigliani, which he described as “extraordinary” but “of dubious origin.” Birn was delighted by the portrait, and eventually agreed to buy it from Corvez. It is unclear if Birn understood that the Modigliani had been stolen from the MAM, but he handled the painting with great secrecy, persuading an employee at a Crédit du Nord bank to let him place it, off the books, in a safety-deposit vault.

Corvez eventually made arrangements to store the four other paintings at the shop where Birn sold and repaired his watches, which had a sophisticated alarm system. Birn and Corvez hid the canvases behind an armoire.

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Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance

When you think of workplace violence, you may envision a disgruntled ex-employee returning to their former office with a gun.

But that’s just one scenario. The full spectrum of workplace violence encompasses four main threats, going beyond current and former employees. Active shooting situations, physical violence, threats, intimidation and harassment all constitute workplace violence.

While workplace violence may happen at any business, it’s not entirely arbitrary. There are factors you can look for and address, though not every company is in jeopardy of experiencing every type of violence. Risk assessment should be specific to your circumstances.

For instance, healthcare has the greatest incidence of violence than any industry, so if you work in a health-related field, you may need to take extra precautions. Similarly, if your company uses cash registers, such as a bank, convenience store or gas station, you face a higher likelihood of getting robbed.

When you recognize what risks you face, you can prepare proactively to prevent greater catastrophes. Here’s a rundown of the four main types of workplace violence and strategies for approaching them that will help your employees stay safe.

1.    Violence as a result of crime
Example: A shooting during a bank robbery 
Mitigate your risks: 

• Install a remote-controlled alarm system.
• Review emergency and security procedures with your employees. 
• Check the local crime rate to stay abreast of threats to your area. 

2.    Violence by clients or customers
Example: An angry customer threatening to hurt an employee 
Mitigate your risks: 

• Walk the property regularly to detect damages. A building in disrepair, with broken windows or missing lights, becomes an easier target for unlawful entry.
• Focus customer service on understanding upset customers and where they are coming from. A sympathetic ear could diffuse a tense situation.

3.    Violence by a co-worker or former employee
Example: An employee becoming violent after a performance review
Mitigate your risks: 

• Improve job screening procedures, such as asking about active restraining orders.
• Put in place a company-wide weapons policy.

4.    Violence by domestic and intimate partners 
Example: An abusive boyfriend showing up at work
Mitigate your risks: 

• Discourage personal visits at the office, decreasing the interplay between work and home.
• Limit entry points to just one or two main doors. 

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Reposted from The News Tribune

A sand sculpture in the lobby of Honolulu’s Grand Hawaiian Hotel was defaced earlier this week at the hands of a teenage vandal.

Video released Thursday by the Honolulu Police Department shows the vandal attacking the sculpture with her bare hands and various objects just after 11 p.m. Monday, as another person looks on — apparently capturing video of the destruction on her phone, according to police.

“Both females then fled in an unknown direction,” police wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.

Police have identified a teen Hawaii resident as the suspect, but she was not named, HawaiiNewsNow reports.

Jill Harris, an owner of Sandsational Sand Sculptures, said her partner Thomas Koet is on the island and started fixing the damage Thursday, KHON2 reported. The damage has been covered up with a lei, according to the TV station.

“It’s amazing how much effort you know probably went into it and how little it took to destroy it,” visitor Jim Bruce said, according to KHON2.

The footage of the vandalism that police released shows the teen straddling a clear partition separating the sculpture from a walkway, using her bare hands and what appears to be a pillow to deface the art. She also throws other objects at the sculpture.

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Reposted from The New York Times

Law enforcement officials have sounded the alarm for months: Homegrown terrorism, including by white supremacists, is now as big a threat as terrorism from abroad. But the mass shooting in El Paso last weekend, the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern history, has made it glaringly clear how poorly prepared the country is to fight it.

The United States spent nearly 20 years intensely focused on threats from Islamic extremists. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, rerouted the machinery of government to fight against threats of violence from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But those attacks have waned in recent years, replaced by violence from white supremacists — an increasingly internet-driven phenomenon of lone wolves, not groups, that will prove immensely difficult to combat.

On Monday, President Trump pledged to give federal law enforcement authorities “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism. The motive for the second attack of the weekend, in Dayton, Ohio, remains unknown. But even before the shootings, which left at least 31 people dead, officials said that preventing attacks from white supremacists and nationalists would require adopting the same type of broad and aggressive approach used to battle international extremism.

“We need to catch them and incarcerate them before they act on their plans,” Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, said in an email interview. “We need to be proactive by identifying and disrupting potential terrorists before they strike, and we can accomplish that by monitoring terrorist propaganda and communications.”

Under current federal law, that is difficult. Federal officials have broad powers to disrupt foreign terrorist plots, given to them as part of the Patriot Act passed after the 2001 attacks. They can take preventive action, for example, by wiretapping or using an undercover online persona to talk to people anonymously in chat rooms to search for jihadis.

But domestically, federal officials have far fewer options. A federal statute defines domestic terrorism but carries no penalties. The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, makes stopping terrorist acts committed by Americans before they happen more challenging. No government agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organizations. And individuals who are considered domestic terrorists are charged under laws governing hate crimes, guns and conspiracy, not terrorism.

“It’s a big blank spot,” said Mary McCord, a former top national security prosecutor who has drafted a proposed statute to criminalize domestic terrorism not covered by existing laws. This would include criminalizing the stockpiling of weapons intended to be used in a domestic terrorist attack.

The issue is urgent. Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, the year of Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And the attack in El Paso and an April shooting in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., alone have claimed as many lives as all extremist homicides “of any stripe” in 2018, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

The F.B.I. field office in Phoenix recently issued a report that said conspiracy theories — often with racial overtones and fueled by dissemination online — had become a growing national security threat. The existence of the F.B.I. document was first reported by Yahoo News.

Mr. Rosenstein said that law enforcement needs to model its domestic terrorism response after the international counterterrorism efforts undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“In the same way that honorable members of mosques report people who express violent designs, so, too, should people report violent white nationalists to the police,” he said.

The First Amendment’s protection of citizens’ rights to engage in hateful speech makes it difficult to track down attacks before they happen.

“From the perspective of the courts, white supremacy is a hateful but protected form of speech,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University. “What courts resist are efforts to classify whole movements as violent as a result of the actions of some of its members.”

The problem touches every aspect of American life — politics, civil liberties and business — and involves complicated new questions around the issue of technology. How much will technology and communications companies, including the big social media platforms, be willing to share information about domestic customers with law enforcement agencies? On the internet, white nationalists can align with other radicals, become inspired and find the resources they need to act alone — a process that has also helped foreign extremists become terrorists.

Perhaps most important, a new focus on white-supremacist violence would test whether Americans are as accepting of aggressive law enforcement tactics when the targets aren’t Muslims, but white Americans.

“If they did the same thing that they did with the Muslims, they’d say every white guy is a potential terrorist,” said Martin R. Stolar, a New York civil rights lawyer. “You can’t do that with white people. The blowback would be outrageous.”

The rise in the white supremacist threat has paralleled an increasing racialization and divisiveness in the nation’s immigration debate. Mr. Trump has used ethnonationalist language that his opponents argue is arousing political extremists. Even in past years, some political leaders have been slow to recognize the existence of domestic terrorism: After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newt Gingrich, at the time the speaker of the House, refused to hold hearings on white nationalist terrorism.

In the years since, the nature of white supremacism has changed. It used to be that white supremacists, for the most part, operated in groups, often living in the same area, said Brian H. Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The chapters had some control over the timing and choice of targets. He cited as examples Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan and local Nazi skinhead groups.

“The top-down hierarchies of the past have been increasingly supplanted by a more democratized and a geographically dispersed set of erratic do-it-yourselfers,” he said. “Now, so-called lone wolves are turbocharged by a fragmented and hate-filled dark web which has become a modern-day, virtual neo-Nazi boot camp available 24-7 anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”

Examples of these kinds of actors are the attackers in the Poway synagogue shooting, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall and now, according to the authorities, El Paso.

While these men often act alone, the F.B.I. says that technology has allowed American terrorists to plug into a global community of terrorists who espouse similarly hateful ideologies. Domestic terrorists are increasingly citing terrorists overseas in their killings. In his manifesto, the suspected El Paso gunman said that he agreed with the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The suspect in New Zealand said in the manifesto he is believed to have written that he had been inspired by Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent and the author of “Anatomy of Terror,” said he had been struck by how much white supremacists resemble the jihadis he spent so many years fighting.

“There is a striking resemblance between jihadists and white supremacists, and it goes way beyond just utilizing social media in order to spread ideology,” he said.

Both use violence to reshape society in their own image. Both use recruitment videos that emphasize a lifestyle of “purity,” militancy and physical fitness. Jihadis share beheading videos, while right-wing extremists share the live stream of the attack in New Zealand. He said Ukraine was now a global gathering place for white supremacists, much as Afghanistan was for jihadis in the 1980s.

“This is becoming a global network in so many different ways, just like we’ve seen with the jihadis before them,” he said.

Federal investigators have also found white supremacist elements flourishing in prisons. In March, federal prosecutors in Alaska announced that an investigation had resulted in charges against 18 members and associates of a white supremacist gang known as the 1488s. In May, a federal grand jury indicted members of an Aryan Knights prison gang that had operated in Idaho.

The indictment in the Alaska case described the 1488s as a gang with dozens of members operating in Alaska and elsewhere.

David Neiwert, who has long reported on extremism in the Northwest and has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he sees the threat of the Northwest’s racist groups returning to levels of the 1980s, when neo-Nazi elements around the country had moved into the Northwest in a bid to create a white ethnostate. In the 1990s and 2000s, those groups lost much of their power and subsided.

Mr. Neiwert said people with extremist sympathies were now organizing online and attaching themselves to groups that aren’t as explicit about white supremacist notions.

“Local agencies in particular should be better equipped,” Mr. Neiwert said. “On the other hand, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department could probably do a better job of equipping local law enforcement.”

As the international terrorism threat evolved to include more lone actors, radicalized online rather than in terrorist cells abroad, the F.B.I. sought to enlist technology companies in its efforts to combat the threat. But companies have been slow to respond — and have been shielded, in part, by the First Amendment.

“It’s been a very long few years of getting platform companies to understand the role that digital media plays in spreading hate speech, harassment and incitement to violence,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “Generally, a piece of content is only reviewed if someone else has flagged it first.”

Under intense criticism for their delayed reaction to disinformation and hateful content after the 2016 presidential election, technology companies have started to take a more proactive approach to disinformation and hate speech. In most cases, spokeswomen for Google and Facebook said the companies report white supremacist content only when it poses an imminent threat to life, or when they are complying with valid legal requests.

In May, Facebook evicted seven of its most controversial users, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, and Laura Loomer, a far-right activist.

But critics say that is not enough. “White supremacy, at least at Facebook, was seen as a political ideology that one could hold,” said Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and the author of a forthcoming book on white supremacy. “It’s only recently that they’ve said they recognize white supremacy as an ideology of violence.”

Ms. Daniels said there was an important lesson in what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur, after he was banned from using Twitter and Facebook.

“Milo has ceded from view since that happened. I really think that’s an argument in favor of this strategy,” she said. “He lost a book deal. He’s bankrupt. It showed ‘deplatforming’ is a useful tool and we need to find more ways to adopt it in the U.S.”

Ms. Daniels and others say the companies’ own algorithms for deciding what constitutes far-right extremist content are insufficient in tackling the threat. Often they rely on users, and in many cases names and content that percolate in the media, to decide what content and accounts should be taken down.

“We’ve reached this position where these companies have scaled beyond their capacity for safety. We don’t know what the next steps should be,” Ms. Daniels said. “We’re in a pretty significant bind now that we have a very large tech industry we all depend on, and we don’t feel we can trust them to keep us safe.”

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Reposted from Securitas Security Services, USA, Inc.

Situational awareness is a human experience defined as knowing and understanding what is happening around you, predicting how it will change with time, and being unified with the dynamics of your environment. We practice situational awareness every day—when crossing the street, driving our cars, and making dinner in our kitchens. Situational awareness is knowing what is going on around you and staying vigilant to any changes or threats. By becoming more aware and observant in the workplace, all employees can help maintain a safe environment and improve the safety of everyone around them.

Establish a Situational Baseline

The first step to situational awareness is to establish a situational baseline. Make it a daily habit to look around and actively process your surroundings. Ongoing monitoring of daily activities can help establish what is “normal” for your workplace. Observe what the typical state of the workplace is. Who are the people you usually see? What do they look like? What are they doing? What are the sounds you often hear? Note any changes and decide what action to take. Identifying your situational baseline requires ongoing maintenance and consideration. This is something all employees should practice every day. Remember, baselines not only change with a change in environment, they can also change with time of day or even the weather.

Be Aware of Those Around You

Become familiar with the people in your workplace. If you see someone out of place or acting suspiciously, take the time to assess the situation and decide what action to take. Certain kinds of activities in the workplace can indicate suspicious activity, especially when they occur at or near high-profile places where large numbers of people gather.

Trust Your Instincts

If something “feels” wrong, or out of place, don’t dismiss it. “Gut feelings” can be a very useful to help alert you to a threat. Part of situational awareness involves being mindful of your subconscious and conscious environments. Take the time to assess the situation and decide on an action. If you are unsure, contact your supervisor or other personnel to help you.

Staying Aware

Awareness is a choice. One has to choose to pay attention. Routine tasks often become just that: routine. Maintaining operative situational awareness requires real effort. Take time to focus on your responsibilities and your surroundings, even those that are most familiar. Additionally, try to avoid things that lock your focus, such as your cellphone. Things that lock your focus prevent you from maintaining active awareness. By making situational awareness part of your workday, you can reduce risks and help improve the safety of your work environment.

Be Prepared

Education is key. Learn what to do in the event of an emergency before there is one. Maintaining your sense of situational awareness can improve your decision-making under pressure and you will be better prepared to respond. Make sure you understand the plans of action for different circumstances in your workplace for yourself and others. Lack of knowledge is not an excuse for poor job performance. All employees should educate themselves about any potential hazards that their environment or actions can pose to themselves or others. Ensure that you are up-to-date with the systems, processes, and procedures of your work environment, and that you feel confident about what to do in any situation.

All employees are encouraged to practice situational awareness, by being alert to their surroundings at all times, and to use their experience, training, and skills to assess their workplace environment on an on-going basis. Situational awareness adds value to the workplace by cultivating enhanced preparedness, essential new knowledge, and enhanced response safety.

AN INFORMATIONAL GUIDE FOR SECURITY CLIENTS

Suspicious Behaviors
Watch for behavior that doesn’t fit. Suspicious behavior can include:

• unauthorized monitoring or surveillance of the workplace
• unusual items or improper acquisition of supplies (like access or ID cards)
• persons who do not appear to belong in or near the workplace
• suspicious questioning about your workplace or personnel
• behavior that indicates a dry run of suspicious activity
• unauthorized attempts to test security procedures

USE THE SLAM TECHNIQUE

Stop
Observe your surroundings and become aware of what is going on around you.

Look
Pay attention to what you see and notice whether anything appears out of the ordinary or out of place. Take note and report anything that looks unsafe or unusual to your supervisors.

Assess
If you think you have identified a potential threat, decide what action to take. Report anything that looks unsafe or unusual to your supervisors.

Manage
If you feel unsafe at any time, stop. Tell your coworkers and immediately report to your supervisor. If you have solutions that would help improve the safety of yourself and others in your workplace, alert your supervisor.

For more information on this and other security related topics, visit the Securitas Safety Awareness Knowledge Center at:
http://www.securitasinc.com/en/knowledge-center/security-and-safety-awareness-tips

Reposted from the Evening Standard

The six-year-old boy who was allegedly thrown from a viewing platform at Tate Modern has suffered brain injuries, broken arms and legs, and a fractured spine, a court heard today. 

The youngster, a French national who was visiting London with his family, plunged around 100ft in the horror fall on Sunday afternoon while visiting the world-famous gallery with his parents. 

Prosecutor Sian Morgan told the court the boy survived the fall after landing on a fifth floor roof, but has suffered a “deep bleed to the brain”. 

“He suffered very serious injuries and is currently in hospital”, she said. “He has injuries to his brain, and fractures to his spine, legs and arms”. 

A 17-year-old, who cannot be named due to his age, appeared at Bromley Youth Court accused of attempted murder this morning. 

He was sporting a bruised right eye as he stood in the dock in a grey tracksuit to confirm his name, age, address, and British nationality. 

“This is an incident which took place on August 4, the complainant is a six-year-old boy who was visiting the Tate Modern gallery with his parents”, said Ms Morgan. 

“They were on the tenth floor viewing platform, looking over the side, and enjoying the view.

“The six-year-old started to walk a couple of feet away from his parents.”

She said the teenager is accused of picking up the boy and throwing him over the edge of the viewing platform “extremely swiftly and in one movement”. 

The boy was airlifted to hospital as staff locked down the gallery, and police arrived to detain the suspect. 

Olga Malehevska, who was on the viewing platform with her four-year-old son when the incident took place, described it  as “absolutely terrifying”.

Appealing for witnesses, Detective Chief Inspector John Massey said: “It would have been incredibly distressing to watch, and it may be that you left Tate Modern very quickly after. If you have not yet spoken to us about what you saw, please contact us without delay.”

Witnesses reported in the aftermath seeing the boy’s distraught mother calling out “my son, my son” and desperately trying to climb over the barrier after him, before being restrained. 

Scotland Yard said there was nothing to suggest the victim and the teenager accused of carrying out the attack were known to each other. 

The youth from northwest London, has not yet entered a plea to the charge of attempted murder. A formal plea hearing has been scheduled for August 22. 

He was remanded into a youth detention by magistrates David Armitage and Esther Amanang, until a hearing at the Old Bailey on Thursday to consider bail. 

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Reposted from Yahoo!

The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a previously unpublicized document obtained by Yahoo News.

The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.

The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).

“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.” The FBI does not specify which political leaders or which cover-ups it was referring to.

President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”

This recent intelligence bulletin comes as the FBI is facing pressure to explain who it considers an extremist, and how the government prosecutes domestic terrorists. In recent weeks the FBI director has addressed domestic terrorism multiple times but did not publicly mention this new conspiracy theorist threat.

The FBI is already under fire for its approach to domestic extremism. In a contentious hearing last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced criticism from Democrats who said the bureau was not focusing enough on white supremacist violence. “The term ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist’ is not included in your statement to the committee when you talk about threats to America,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said. “There is a reference to racism, which I think probably was meant to include that, but nothing more specific.”

Wray told lawmakers the FBI had done away with separate categories for black identity extremists and white supremacists, and said the bureau was instead now focusing on “racially motivated” violence. But he added, “I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”

The FBI had faced mounting criticism for the term “black identity extremists,” after its use was revealed by Foreign Policy magazine in 2017. Critics pointed out that the term was an FBI invention based solely on race, since no group or even any specific individuals actually identify as black identity extremists.

In May, Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, told Congress the bureau now “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism,” a term the bureau uses to classify both pro-choice and anti-abortion extremists.

The new focus on conspiracy theorists appears to fall under the broader category of anti-government extremism. “This is the first FBI product examining the threat from conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists and provides a baseline for future intelligence products,” the document states.

The new category is different in that it focuses not on racial motivations, but on violence based specifically on beliefs that, in the words of the FBI document, “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”

The FBI acknowledges conspiracy theory-driven violence is not new, but says it’s gotten worse with advances in technology combined with an increasingly partisan political landscape in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. “The advent of the Internet and social media has enabled promoters of conspiracy theories to produce and share greater volumes of material via online platforms that larger audiences of consumers can quickly and easily access,” the document says.

The bulletin says it is intended to provide guidance and “inform discussions within law enforcement as they relate to potentially harmful conspiracy theories and domestic extremism.”

The FBI Phoenix field office referred Yahoo News to the bureau’s national press office, which provided a written statement.

“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, the FBI routinely shares information with our law enforcement partners in order to assist in protecting the communities they serve,” the FBI said.

In its statement, the FBI also said it can “never initiate an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity. As with all of our investigations, the FBI can never monitor a website or a social media platform without probable cause.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which has also been involved in monitoring domestic extremism, did not return or acknowledge emails and phone requests for comment.

While not all conspiracy theories are deadly, those identified in the FBI’s 15-page report led to either attempted or successfully carried-out violent attacks. For example, the Pizzagate conspiracy led a 28-year-old man to invade a Washington, D.C., restaurant to rescue the children he believed were being kept there, and fire an assault-style weapon inside.

The FBI document also cites an unnamed California man who was arrested on Dec. 19, 2018, after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car. The man allegedly was planning “blow up a satanic temple monument” in the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Ill., to “make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who were dismantling society,” the document says.

Historian David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr. who has worked extensively with FBI archives, raised doubts to Yahoo News about the memo. He says the FBI’s default assumption is that violence is motivated by ideological beliefs rather than mental illness. “The guy who shot up the pizza place in D.C.: Do we think of him as a right-wing activist, or insane?” Garrow asked.

Garrow was similarly critical of the FBI’s use of the term “black identity extremists” and related attempts to ascribe incidents like the 2016 shooting of six police officers in Baton Rouge, La., to black radicalism. He said the shooter, Gavin Long, had a history of mental health problems. “The bureau’s presumption — the mindset — is to see ideological motives where most of the rest of us see individual nuttiness,” he said.

Identifying conspiracy theories as a threat could be a political lightning rod, since President Trump has been accused of promulgating some of them, with his frequent references to a deep state and his praise in 2015 for Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy site InfoWars. While the FBI intelligence bulletin does not mention Jones or InfoWars by name, it does mention some of the conspiracy theories frequently associated with the far-right radio host, in particular the concept of the New World Order.

Jones claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 children were killed, was a hoax, a false flag operation intended as a pretext for the government to seize or outlaw firearms. The families of a number of victims have sued Jones for defamation, saying his conspiracy-mongering contributed to death threats and online abuse they have received.

While Trump has never endorsed Sandy Hook denialism, he was almost up until the 2016 election the most high-profile promoter of the birther conspiracy that claimed former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He later dropped his claim, and deflected criticism by pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton. He said her campaign had given birth to the conspiracy, and Trump “finished it.”

There is no evidence that Clinton started the birther conspiracy.

Joe Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, whose work on conspiracy theories is cited in the intelligence bulletin, said there’s no data suggesting conspiracy theories are any more widespread now than in the past. “There is absolutely no evidence that people are more conspiratorial now,” says Uscinski, after Yahoo News described the bulletin to him. “They may be, but there is not strong evidence showing this.”

It’s not that people are becoming more conspiratorial, says Uscinski, but conspiracies are simply getting more media attention.

“We are looking back at the past with very rosy hindsight to forget our beliefs, pre-internet, in JFK [assassination] conspiracy theories and Red scares. My gosh, we have conspiracy theories about the king [of England] written into the Declaration of Independence,” he said, referencing claims that the king was planning to establish tyranny over the American colonies.

It’s not that conspiracy theorists are growing in number, Uscinski argues, but that media coverage of those conspiracies has grown. “For most of the last 50 years, 60 to 80 percent of the country believe in some form of JFK conspiracy theory,” he said. “They’re obviously not all extremist.”

Conspiracy theories, including Russia’s role in creating and promoting them, attracted widespread attention during the 2016 presidential election when they crossed over from Internet chat groups to mainstream news coverage. Yahoo News’s "Conspiracyland" podcast recently revealed that Russia’s foreign intelligence service was the origin of a hoax report that tied the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, to Hillary Clinton.

Washington police believe that Rich was killed in a botched robbery, and there is no proof that his murder had any political connections.

Among the violent conspiracy theories cited in the May FBI document is one involving a man who thought Transportation Security Administration agents were part of a New World Order. Another focused on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government-funded facility in Alaska that has been linked to everything from death beams to mind control. The two men arrested in connection with HAARP were “stockpiling weapons, ammunition and other tactical gear in preparation to attack” the facility, believing it was being used “to control the weather and prevent humans from talking to God.”

Nate Snyder, who served as a Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official during the Obama administration, said that the FBI appears to be applying the same radicalization analysis it employs against foreign terrorism, like the Islamic State group, which has recruited followers in the United States.

“The domestic violent extremists cited in the bulletin are using the same playbook that groups like ISIS and al-Qaida have used to inspire, recruit and carry out attacks,” said Snyder, after reviewing a copy of the bulletin provided by Yahoo News. “You put out a bulletin and say this is the content they’re looking at — and it’s some guy saying he’s a religious cleric or philosopher — and then you look at the content, videos on YouTube, etc., that they are pushing and show how people in the U.S. might be radicalized by that content.”

Though the FBI document focuses on ideological motivations, FBI Director Wray, in his testimony last week, asserted that the FBI is concerned only with violence, not people’s beliefs. The FBI doesn’t “investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant,” he told lawmakers. “We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we are all over it. ... In the first three quarters of this year, we've had more domestic terrorism arrests than the prior year, and it's about the same number of arrests as we have on the international terrorism side.”

Yet the proliferation of the extremist categories concerns Michael German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security program. “It’s part of the radicalization theory the FBI has promoted despite empirical studies that show it’s bogus,” he said.

German says this new category is a continuing part of FBI overreach. “They like the radicalization theory because it justifies mass surveillance,” he said. “If we know everyone who will do harm is coming from this particular community, mass surveillance is important. We keep broadening the number of communities we include in extremist categories.”

For Garrow, the historian, the FBI’s expansive definition has its roots in bureau paranoia that dates back decades. “I think it’s their starting point,” he said. “This goes all the way back to the Hoover era without question. They see ideology as a central motivating factor in human life, and they don’t see mental health issues as a major factor.”

Yet trying to label a specific belief system as prone to violence is problematic, he said.

“I don’t think most of us would do a good job in predicting what sort of wacky information could lead someone to violence, or not lead anyone to violence,” Garrow said. “Pizzagate would be a great example of that.”

While Trump may not be supportive of labeling a group like QAnon, which sees him as a hero, as extremist, he’s in favor of broadening the number of organizations that are labeled as violent extremists, at least on the left. On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that Antifa, a far-left movement opposed to what it considers fascism, should be labeled a terrorist organization.

Snyder, the former Homeland Security official, agrees that conspiracy theories may in fact inspire violence and be a threat, but questions what the government is going to do about it.

He notes that at the Department of Homeland Security, “nearly all, if not all, the intelligence analysts focusing on domestic extremist groups” were eliminated under the Trump administration. “There is no one there doing this,” he said.

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Reposted from Security Management

​It is one thing to expect the unexpected. It is quite another to accept the unexpected. Denial is a powerful thing, and even the best of us can be convinced that our plans are comprehensive and our preparedness complete. 

The key ways to overcome this sort of complacency are to link crisis management and business continuity meaningfully, and to incorporate Adaptive Business Continuity principles that enable an organization to react quickly to the unexpected.

Consider that the past few years alone have seen increasingly active Atlantic hurricane seasons, major cyberattacks against global corporations, and secondary losses of key infrastructure following major disasters. Organizations in the public and private sectors are asking their teams to do more with less while also performing to higher standards. The need to recover quickly from losses is as important as ever, while in many cases the resources are thinner than they used to be. These realities require new and innovative approaches.

In addition, as our society grows increasingly interconnected, businesses, organizations, and governments will depend upon one another’s services to tighter and tighter tolerances. Utility and communications regulators, for example, are demanding that companies meet stricter reliability standards. This trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the costs and consequences of large-scale incidents will grow. Disaster events claimed more than 11,000 victims globally in 2018. The estimated losses from natural and manmade disasters in 2018 are estimated to be $155 billion, with global insured losses estimated to be around $79 billion, according to data from the Swiss Re Group. 

These conditions paint a frightening picture, but therein lies the opportunity. A well-crafted business continuity program, clearly linked to crisis management activities, can be a source of value for an organization—not only in response to disaster, but on “blue sky days” too. The business continuity (BC) program and its practitioners can become meaningful business partners with the organization.

A Tall Order?

Great organizations confronted with crisis can choose to accept the unexpected, adopt a new normal, and bring out the best in themselves and their people. In doing so, they take a position of strength that recognizes crisis as a form of change and redefines it for a better future. 

To do this, the organization needs to be poised in its response—not just when a crisis or business interruption occurs, but ahead of it. Done skillfully, a business continuity program can not only enable a better response, but also foster continuous improvement and identify areas of operational improvement along the way.

Security managers are in a key position to influence their organizations if they adopt practical notions in their BC approach. And, in some cases, it is the security manager who is tasked with creating a new BC program where none existed, or worse—with reviving one that has languished.

How does one proceed? By connecting BC to the delivery of continuous improvement and operational value and by linking crisis management and BC in a meaningful way.

To achieve the best outcome, business continuity depends on the planning and preparation effort that comes along with response and recovery. This is where the true blocking and tackling of BC work takes place. 

Some industries and regulators are decidedly prescriptive about the required activities of BC programs under their purview. They mandate activities such as assessing risk, completing a business impact analysis, obtaining buy-in from senior leadership, training, validation, testing and exercising, documentation, and communication. This is especially true in the financial sector and in the healthcare industry.

Good Practice Guidelines from the Business Continuity Institute and the standard ISO 22301 are good starting points where such accredited certification is needed or preferred. However, such traditional practices are not the only route to a meaningful BC program. 

​Pitfalls of Tradition 

In some cases, the activities and approaches traditionally associated with continuity planning can pose an obstacle to implementing a program. While these may have their appropriate place within many BC contexts, they can also present challenges. 

This is especially true in cases where an organization may have greater latitude in designing a new program or revising an existing one, or in organizations with a culture that favors iterative, agile processes over linear, sequential ones. In these cases, it may be preferable to place the primary focus on quickly delivering value.

For example, a core concept of much BC planning activity is the focus on recovery time objectives (RTOs). The use of RTOs is intended to help quantify recovery needs, prioritize response activity, and drive planning activity. 

However, employing time as a target, instead of simply a restriction, can be problematic. In practice, many times RTOs and recovery point objectives (RPOs) are subjective or even arbitrary. They are best applied where truly static, precise, and predetermined time restrictions exist, such as regulatory time limits, violations, or specific matters of health and safety. Otherwise, the effort undertaken to arrive at and assure an RTO may not return value. In other words, if it is clear that failing to meet a six-hour time frame for service restoration will result in a regulatory fine of a specific dollar amount, the decision making process becomes quite straightforward because investment in meeting the RTO can be clearly weighed against the risk of penalties.

Another cornerstone of the BC world is the business impact analysis (BIA). While the BIA can be an invaluable tool for the BC practitioner, it can also be a subject fraught with confusion. 

In actuality, the proper sequence of service restoration will always depend on the exact nature of the post-disaster situation. As such, responses need to be flexible and adaptive. This is especially true in today’s environment where the cause of a service outage might not be immediately obvious—as in the case of a deliberate cyberattack.

As a consequence of all this activity, an overwhelming amount of documentation can be generated which needs to be guarded, maintained, and updated. But rarely is it used in actual response activities. In some cases, BC and response plans are so voluminous that they could not possibly serve a practical purpose in a real emergency. They become the proverbial shelfware.

Lastly, traditional methods emphasize obtaining exclusive senior-level executive support and doing so at the outset. While important, it can be more meaningful to engage at many levels in the organization. 

The real danger here is slipping into a trap where the organization is carrying out extensive business continuity activity for business continuity’s sake, which only delivers value on an arbitrary or periodic basis and could create a false sense of preparedness in departments where little actually exists. The goal, instead, should be to explicitly link to the organization’s objectives and to deliver value incrementally and continuously. 

A Practical Approach

Consider some of the following practical approaches in connecting BC to the delivery of continuous improvement and operational value. These are notions borrowed directly from the approach called Adaptive Business Continuity. Five of Adaptive BC’s core principles, outlined here, are essential for better partnership between crisis management and business continuity. 

Exercise first. In the strictly sequential approach often favored by traditional BC practitioners, testing and exercising come during later stages of the cycle, after plans and assessments have been completed. 

But discussion-based tabletop exercises are the single most powerful tool an organization can use to identify gaps in planning and address assumptions in both crisis management response and BC. Dollar-for-dollar, there is no better value. So why not start there? By walking through a scenario as a group, a team can quickly and easily spot gaps and identify solutions. 

Such exercises can be lightweight and even informal. The key is to have a direct, focused approach driven by one or two clearly defined objectives. 

For example, the objective of this exercise might be to assess the initial size up and response to an unplanned event; to evaluate the escalation protocol defined in the planning documents; or to review the organization’s ability to activate the crisis management plan.

By driving toward the objective, a planning team can steer away from overly complex exercise scenarios. Inevitably, the discussion will uncover lowhanging fruit of an operational nature; the exercise players will establish closer personal connections; and the collective team will identify gaps around the predetermined objectives. 

Consequently, the results are both of immediate value and can be used to drive action planning over the medium and longer term. And, in doing so, the team has also established clear connections between BC and crisis management capabilities.

Simplify documentation. Elaborate crisis management and BC plans that are hundreds of pages long are a detriment in three critical ways. First, they require extensive—often labor intensive—maintenance and continuous updates. Second, they are not practical in an actual crisis. Lastly, these are not value-generating activities. BC activity and documentation for its own sake is a common pitfall. 

Simplify plans so they can be internalized and recalled easily by the people that need to know them. Where appropriate, checklists are an excellent tool.

The exceptions, of course, are cases where such plans are mandated or regulatory requirements, such as in the finance and healthcare industries. Absent any compliance or other compelling need, voluminous documentation should be replaced by slim, user-oriented playbooks. 

A practical example of this is an organization with a 75-page corporate incident response policy. Key leaders in the organization had acknowledged that because of the policy's length, it was universally ignored—posing a critical risk. The solution was to reduce the most significant end user elements of the policy—what the responder truly needed to know first—into a one-page infographic. 

The infographic was introduced to the working teams through a series of short, focused tabletop exercises. Teams were asked to use—and break—key aspects of processes contained in the infographic. 

In the course of the exercises the teams also uncovered critical communications gaps and assumptions and were able to address them. They formulated the catchphrase “Don’t Hesitate to Escalate” to drive home their solution to the communications problem. In doing so, they delivered immediate value to the organization, improved operational efficiency, and established a basis for continuous improvement of their BC and crisis management capabilities. 

Continually improve. The most compelling case a BC professional can make to a client or constituent is that the cost and effort required of proposed BC-related activities will offer some immediate payoff, as well as continuous, iterative improvement throughout the process. 

Free from documentation for its own sake and a strictly sequential BC cycle, the BC professional discovers the opportunity to take more of a role as a partner in the business. Where performance measures like RTOs are needed, along with taking an inventory of key business processes, discussion around these topics should not focus on an arbitrary target. 

Rather, an opportunity exists to engage stakeholders about their goals for the organization and to rationalize the findings of their assessments—challenge them to apply their own intuition to the targets and see if they pass the test of common sense. And by asking why the target is there, call into question how it may be reached on a “blue sky day” more efficiently. 

The BC process can be a source of continuous improvement by providing a venue for these conversations among stakeholders. People are eager to share personal experiences of working through crises—with outcomes that were positive or negative for the organization—especially in a setting where that experience can add value.

For example, one organization recognized that its list of key business processes was extensively detailed and complicated. A very candid, common sense discussion reduced this list from dozens of items to six, only one of which was considered critical. Consequently, the BC management process was simplified, and the crisis management response framework was easier to internalize.

Plan for effects. The causes of catastrophe are innumerable. We cannot plan for every eventuality, and even if we could, our best laid plans often get overtaken by the events. Instead, we should focus on effects. 

Generations of military leaders have understood that  “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” The notion is familiar and often repeated in more contemporary contexts, but perhaps best by Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Consider the extreme weather phenomena experienced by the U.S. Northeast in 2011 and 2012. In the fall of 2011, the area experienced a nor’easter and Hurricane Irene in rapid succession. The following fall in 2012, it experienced yet another nor’easter and Superstorm Sandy.

All four events can easily be described as storms, natural disasters, or extreme weather. The acute causes of the localized emergency were highly specific, however. Each storm had its own unique character: inland flooding, coastal flooding, a snow event, or a tree event. Some would argue that this calls for four unique types of plans—or that each cause needs a corresponding plan. 

On the contrary, the effects of these catastrophes are much fewer. The effects will only be the unexpected unavailability of people (staff), places (facilities), or things (resources and critical suppliers). 

Focusing on effects makes for much simpler, more meaningful and manageable planning. 

Know the business. Above all, the people responsible for carrying out any BC or crisis management activity need to know the business. BC practitioners should align closely with operational teams at every level of the organization—not just at the senior leadership level. Having executive support is beneficial to driving outcomes, but the discovery of ground truth comes from frontline teams. The best BC professionals don’t just drive an arbitrary BC cycle. They understand the people, places, and things that make the business unit tick—and why. 

If we consider crisis management an unexpected opportunity to change, then BC should serve as the practical, sense-making corollary. In other words, the lessons learned in acute responses to crises can be sharpened into operational improvements and ultimately greater resilience when incorporated by the BC process.

The BC professional’s biggest client in any organization is operations. Delivering value during crisis means having close integration between business continuity, crisis management, and the real needs of the business.

If we accept that organizations will continue to be challenged in unexpected ways by the external environment—and that this will result in losses—we have to look at how our BC efforts match with the demands placed upon them. 

The organization that is in a position of strength is one that has truthfully inventoried itself, assessed its own assumptions, and made use of what it learns along the way—not just in the moment of crisis or business interruption. 

The path to this outcome can follow a traditional, prescriptive route as defined in the ISO and the Good Practice Guidelines—but it can also take more innovative and ongoing forms by linking BC and crisis management to the goals and orientation of the organization. A more practical, agile, and lean approach like the one outlined by Adaptive Business Continuity is likely to provide more value—and at a faster pace—than traditional practices we currently have in place.  

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Reposted from The Business Journal Daily

In the wake of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, the safety and security of those at local institutions across many sectors, from education to entertainment, is being revisited.

A multilayered approach to active shooter scenarios is in place at Youngstown State University. Ron Cole, public information officer, said the YSU police department consists of almost 30 full-time officers and 100 part-time commissioned officers who go through regular training relating to situations that may occur on campus.

“Most recently, we’ve updated a lot of our emergency operation plans across campus,” he said. “Every building has an emergency operation plan, which outlines what should be done in the event of a variety of situations on campus.” 

All classroom doors received new locks that automatically lock when the door is closed and the recently expanded PenguinAlert system ensures the safety of all students with emergency text alerts, he said. Students can sign up for PenguinAlert at YSU.edu/PenguinAlert. Additional communication will be going out before the academic year starts to outline safety precautions, including a video that will show how to respond to an active shooter scenario.

“We have a good crisis communication plan that puts into place a variety of actions we would take in the event of an emergency in terms of how to communicate to students, to faculty, to the community, the media,” Cole said.

On campus and as well as in the city, police officers at the Youngstown Police Department participate in two cycles of annual training to ensure the safety of the community.

“During those in-services, we have done responses to active shooter training a number of times so the officers are familiar with it,” said Chief Robin Lees. “Our community police officers are trained in the new alert training, which is a response to an active shooter typically in a workplace environment.”

The training is available to local businesses in the Youngstown area as well, and would serve employees and management well if they find themselves in an active shooter situation, Lees said.

“You want to evacuate or take cover, and these are assessments you have to make on your own,” he said. “You need to be practicing good crime prevention to begin with. Know your surroundings and understand who and what is around you. If you feel somebody is suspicious or see something that looks unusual, don’t keep that to yourself.”

Active shooter safety education programs have been put into place at the Ohio National Safety Council in Youngstown, including running, hiding and fighting defenses others can take advantage of should they find themselves in an active shooter scenario.

“I think that as they describe them as soft targets, it makes all of us a little more aware of those places that we go everyday,” said Larry Kingston, executive director of the local National Safety Council chapter. “We need to check out things like exits. Anything that sounds like a gunshot, even though you might think it’s a firecracker, you need to react to it and get away from it.”

Addressing cultural things such as the younger generation being involved with social media and the dark web will further impact the safety of others, Kingston said.

“If we hear somebody say something that is very harmful, they want to kill people, they want to eliminate people of a certain culture, a certain color, we need to notify the police and let the police sort it out before it gets to the extreme,” Kingston said.

Safety precautions are taken daily at the Eastwood Mall Complex in Niles. People have to be aware of soft targets, said Joe Bell, spokesman for the Cafaro Company.

“That could be your church, that could be your daycare center, any place of businesses,” he said. “We have to get into the mind frame of thinking about where you are at any given time of the day and how you would defend yourself or save your life.”

Fourteen years ago, safety precautions were upgraded within the mall complex in light of the Sept. 11 attacks and continued to be updated, Bell said. With shopping malls being crowded with people, it’s an easy target for an active shooter.

“We have run a variety of scenarios and training programs since that time with our own internal security, with our tenants, our employees and local law enforcement so they can drill on these types of scenarios,” Bell said. “It’s been very helpful. People have learned a lot about how to operate in an environment like an enclosed shopping mall.”

Training exercises are done as often as possible, which entails real life scenarios people undergo during an emergency. Last week at the Cafaro corporate headquarters, employees were engaged in active shooter training to understand the basis for attacks like this and the best ways to defend themselves, Bell said.

“We’ll bring in local police chiefs, other first responders and have them in on the planning, and very often, local volunteers will act as victims or shoppers,” Bell said. “It’s very realistic with guns firing blanks. Police officers will be doing everything they would do should shots start being fired in a mall.”

Over the last 12 years, the security of customers, employees and artists has increased at the Covelli Centre. Metal detectors have been added at entrances at the Youngstown Foundation Amphitheatre and the Covelli Centre, and security has doubled over the last five years, said Ken Bigley, vice president of the JAC Management Group.

“We don’t open the doors to any event without an armed, uniformed police officer on-site,” Bigley said. “We’ve created a relationship with [U.S. Department of] Homeland Security to stay on the forefront of any alerts or messaging that’s going out from Homeland Security.”

Active shooter training courses have also been implemented for the security and event staff at the Covelli Centre and the amphitheater. Safety is always taken seriously with the event calendar filled with family and children related shows, said Phoebe Breckenridge, marketing and sales coordinator.

“We never want anyone to feel unsafe when they come here,” she said. “We aim to be a safe, fun place for people to come to for entertainment.” 

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Reposted from Irish Legal News

A man who suffered an injury to his knee requiring surgery after he slipped on the stone staircase at the National Museum of Ireland has been awarded €67,000 in the High Court.

Criticising the Museum for its failure to provide the court with CCTV evidence of the fall, or present witnesses who had viewed the footage, Ms Justice Bronagh O’Hanlon found that the accident was caused by the Museum’s negligence in failing to provide a hand rail for people to hold onto the entire way down the staircase.

Background

The plaintiff, Warren Baldwin, is a 70-year-old man from Sydney, Australia, who came to Ireland on holidays in June 2016. On 5 June 2016, Mr Baldwin was visiting the National Museum of Ireland when he lost his footing while descending the main balcony stairway, and suffered severe personal injuries loss and damage as a result.

After the accident, Mr Baldwin was brought by ambulance to St James’ Hospital where he spent over 15 hours on a trolley waiting to see an orthopaedic surgeon. Mr Baldwin was diagnosed with a quadriceps rupture, and a retraction of the rectus ligamentous muscle (consistent with a partial tear of the quadriceps tendon). Mr Baldwin was administered painkilling medication which he continued to take until he was seen by his own GP in Sydney. Upon his return to Australia, an MRI confirmed that Mr Baldwin had suffered a full thickness tear of more than 50 per cent of the quadriceps tendon, requiring surgical repair.

Before the accident, Mr Baldwin was described as being very active and a keen golfer. In her evidence to the court, Mr Baldwin’s wife said the accident slowed him down by about 50 per cent and that walking became painful for him after a while. A consultant in emergency medicine who examined Mr Baldwin also believed that the injuries seriously curtailed him playing golf, walking, and gardening, and that psychologically he was much slower.

Omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem

Mr Baldwin’s claim was based on the Museum’s alleged negligence, breach of duty, including breach of statutory duty, nuisance and/or misfeasance in the design, construction, upkeep, maintenance, management, care, supervision and inspection and control of the premises – particularly the main balcony stairway.

The Museum argued that Mr Baldwin’s fall was entirely his own fault, and relied heavily on an accident report form which recorded that Mr Baldwin had missed the last step and fell (which was inconsistent with Mr Baldwin’s description of his fall). An orthopaedic surgeon who gave evidence on the Museum’s behalf said that Mr Baldwin’s ongoing difficulties were age-related. He also said that Mr Baldwin would have had a better chance of repair had his operation been sooner – i.e. the following day, rather than a number of weeks after the accident.

Ms Justice O’Hanlon found Mr Baldwin to be “a very credible witness who came to court in good faith and travelled from Australia to bring his case to trial. He … gave his evidence in a very candid normal way without embellishing matters in any shape or form”. She said the court “had no doubt but that he was doing his best to give a true and fair recollection of matters as he perceived them”.

Considering the inconsistency between the accident report form and Mr Baldwin’s description, Ms Justice O’Hanlon was highly critical of the fact that the CCTV evidence of the fall was not made available to the court, nor were employees of the Museum who viewed the CCTV called as witnesses. She said Mr Baldwin was entitled to rely on the maxim omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem where all things are presumed against the party that has destroyed evidence. 

Negligence

Ms Justice O’Hanlon said that on the balance of probabilities, Mr Baldwin lost his footing on the third last step and fell into the landing below. She said that the stone steps in question were “shiny and slippy”, and that if there been an adequate and safe handrail system, Mr Baldwin would not have suffered the injury he did. Ms Justice O’Hanlon also accepted the evidence from Mr Baldwin’s engineer that because of how the railings ended prematurely before the bottom step, there was a tendency for this to cause people towards the centre in descending the stairway. She said she was entitled to draw an adverse inference from the Museum’s failure to call evidence to assess the stairway or address the handrail issue.

Finding that it was reasonably foreseeable that a person could suffer such a fall, even though it was a rare occurrence, Ms Justice O’Hanlon said the accident was caused by the negligence of the Museum in failing to provide a safe system – in particular a railing for a person such as Mr Baldwin to hold onto the entire way down the staircase.

Ms Justice O’Hanlon awarded €65,000 in general damages, together with agreed special damages in the sum of €1,989.59, giving a total award of €66,989.59.

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