Welcome to the secured podcast. This is Mike Matranga, your host, coming to you from the ASAP Studios. Today we have the great guest and visitor from Colorado, Susan Payne. Susan, how are you doing? Doing well. It's great to be in Houston. Great. Fantastic. Quite a bit of difference in the weather and humidity from Colorado Springs. Definitely a difference in the humidity and the air temperature. It's good for the hair, though, right? Yeah, the humidity. The hair, the hair is a struggle in Houston. Now you know why all the women in Texas have big hair? Well, yeah, they do a great job and they must have great products because it's a challenge for people. It's the thick, humid Houston, Texas area. I definitely have bigger hair here. It's awesome for. Sure. Well, good. Well, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. So we have a couple of things we want to talk about today. But for our viewers, why don't you just give us a quick introduction of who you are, kind of what your accomplishments are and what you're known for and what you do in the K 12 security space? Sure. My background has really been at a long history in law enforcement, 28 years. I started with the Colorado Springs Police Department. I had many opportunities in stood up their first SRO unit have the opportunity to work in schools, but also work as a team leader for hostage negotiation. I went after the Columbine tragedy in Colorado. I was brought up to the state level to assist and support in the aftermath of that tragedy and became the special agent in charge for public safety for the state of Colorado. I founded a nonprofit called Safe to Tell. I've helped many states replicate their reporting systems and a statewide infrastructure for both reporting and information sharing and really the continual thing of early intervention and being able to hopefully prevent tragedies. A lot of people know you about or know of you and your reputation with Safe to Tell. But I would say an equal amount of people also know of you and your work that you've done with the National Threat Assessment Center at the United States Secret Service. So you've had some publications, you've worked on multiple different projects with very world renowned people like Dr. Leana Atari, Dr. Catherine Camilletti, multiple people within that industry coming from the National Threat Assessment Center, who's really set the standard moving forward for for not only mass shootings and targeted violence in the US, but in particular schools. And that's what I'm passionate about. That's what you're passionate about. So can you talk to us a little bit about your time spent with the National Threat Assessment Center? Sure. I'd say in all my years in working in this industry of school safety and law enforcement and prevention, some of the studies going all the way back to when the tragedy at Columbine happened, where studies by the Secret Service and the National Threat Assessment Center that really gave us the specific data that we needed to say what happened in the past. The first one would be the bystander study. That study went back all the way to 1974 and continued to any school shootings or mass acts of violence that occurred in schools until the year 2000. And it really told us that 81% of the time or four out of five incidents, somebody knew and didn't speak up. And 93% of those folks that knew were young people, students, peers, family members of the perpetrator. And it was really important for us to not only educate and engage our communities, our students, our staff on what the indicators and warning signs are, but what to look for. Now that's changed over the years because obviously we have an entire digital age of students and adults. So we had we've had to modify it along the way. But those principles still hold true today on the early intervention part and most recently, I'd say all the way through we have the Safe School initiative and most recently the enhancing school safety en masse acts of targeted violence that this that the Secret Service completed in 2019 and that really resulted in protecting America's schools. That study brought us into some of the school shootings that have occurred since then and really give us the information of what the social, behavioral and emotional factors are with the perpetrators of these violence acts and how do we intervene and hopefully help schools with these daily tools of building their multidiscipline teams and training them to intervene early and to manage threats, but also to be able to assess them in a consistent way so that they can protect the students, the staff from the tragedies that might happen. One of the things that I always say is that when we go out in an M6 global and ASAP security, when we go do our physical security assessments, vulnerability assessments, our technical security assessments, assessments in general, you know, we believe in a holistic. Process, taking into consideration your physical infrastructure, your personnel. Your policies and your procedures. What does that entail? Counselors, What type of training they've had, What type of behavioral threat management training and plan and operations do they have for management? You know, taking into consideration your technology, that's the holistic approach. And there's a whole lot of other things that we're, you know, just for the sake of time and whatnot that we could get really into the weeds on. But you know what I always say when I'm meeting with clients is that, yes, the infrastructure is important. Yes, policies, procedures, planning are extremely important. But really the foundational component of thwarting any type of violence that we've seen, not just in opinion but based in data and research by the National Threat Assessment Center, is the foundational component is assessing behaviors of students. Because we know from the 2008 report we've known from the 2013 James Hodgkinson report. We know from the 2019 and now the new January 2023 report where 173 attacks were studied from 2016 to 2022, I believe, and there were 180 attackers. And of those attackers, 100% of them, or close to 100%, I think it was 97%, all exhibited the same signs and symptoms of behaviors. And so what do you say to governmental entities and legislations, whether it be at state or federal level, that are primarily focused on law enforcement response and the physical security infrastructure? It seems like there's been this push to prioritize that over the behavioral threat management of these students. How do we deal with that? How do we change that narrative and make the foundational component of the behavioral threat assessment piece a priority? Well, making it a priority is going to require education and training across key stakeholder systems. So if you put yourself in the shoes of someone that's a leader in law enforcement or government, it is important that we can cross, train and educate on these principles and make sure that that it's a comprehensive umbrella of services. It's not one without the other. So you have to identify we have these things in place. It's all a slice of the pie, but you can't have one without the other because you still have to have sort of the safety net of a response strategy if something does happen. But what we know is most of these act if we if we take that holistic approach and we look at the lessons learned in these past tragedies and this these research studies, we can implement practices that not only prevent mass acts of violence, but they interrupt concerning behavior with young people to get them on a pathway to success. So with the increase of mental health and counselors and social workers in schools, it's important that we are cross training the stakeholders and we're implementing these principles that we know work because we can see in our country often there's a lot of time and money spent on things that we also know don't work to the effective level and a highly effective level of things like the Secret Service study. Right. You know, I think, you know, looking forward and the trajectory in which our country is, is heading, we've seen an increase of these particular types of events happening, not only in schools but in our communities, whether it be at a nightclub or a grocery store or our churches. All of these places that used to be off limits, you know, morally and ethically used to be off limits for violence. But with the emergence of technology and, you know, reality TV and social media, I believe that there's a direct link in correlation to violent, increased violent behavior due to these things which are now making these particular targets a very target rich environment, I guess is what I'm saying, for lack of a better term, because people know that these places are not as well protected as courthouses or, you know, sporting events or, you know, these other particular types of facilities that that usually have a robust security plan in place. And so is it safe to say, do you agree that the that the foundational component to any security plan, especially in K 12, is the human factor, the behavioral threat management? How important is that? And then how important is the. Hoarding of that. Well, a couple of things in there. I would say that no matter what we might believe. These incidents don't just happen, right? There might be trigger points, but these are well thought out, well planned events. And the the folks that plan these events, they look for softer targets. They look where they're going to meet the least resistance. And so when the site selection of targets or where they have their particular grievance, those are all part of the indicator and the early warning signs of who has that and how we protect America's schools. So taking that principle of the humans that are in schools and the awesome there's technology, there's physical target hardening properties that we want to see in that footprint of the environmental design. But along with that, we have to make sure that the human beings in those schools are trained to have a consistent approach on identifying early warning signs and being able to, you know, really intervene at the earliest opportunity with those resources and to create strategies to manage someone that does pose a threat to themselves or to others. So that includes depression or suicide ideation or that that moving all along that pathway to an intent for a mass act of violence, somebody that has a grievance or a plan. And what those early warning signs are, indicators are. So we're seeing and hearing more and more across this country in the media about incidents that occur. And the reality is, is no one can think it cannot happen here. So you can't go in with blinders on and say, you know, my children go to this school. And the likelihood of this happening here, I think that is a really dangerous approach because no matter what school your children are in or what location they go to, we have to teach them the skills and make sure that we have a well trained staff in a very protective environment so that people have a chance at preventing it before it happens. So we know these principles work, but we we need to consistently share those across systems. What do you say? You know, there's there's two common themes that we hear with our clients and we certainly understand and we we can absolutely relate is two of the two of the most popular excuses we hear for not taking action in the K 12 space is one, we don't have the funds and two, it won't happen here. So what do you say to those people who continually say that we don't have those type of kids? It won't happen here. And secondarily, what do you say to the people that say, we can't afford it? How do they how do they access those funds? Well, for one, it's important to say people do say that every day. And what we see is with tragedy sometimes that sparks those leaders at the top of government to provide more opportunities for those strategic funds. It's important that we're engaging in talking with them about assessing statewide. You can go all the way from the local level to the state level to the federal level. So there are grants available. We need to prepare for those in advance because often they come down in May or in the spring time when schools are very busy and they're due early June. So you have to be prepared almost before they release. So having a plan for that, but also before you have that, you have to know and have an assessment of what your gaps, what your barriers are and what your your plan is that you need to implement. So by having that ready to go, that gives you the ability to then plan for those funds and to make it happen. So, I mean, you know, some of the things that we're starting to see, especially in the private school sector, is parents are starting to rally up and fund these things themselves. And, you know, that's one of the things that I always talk to our clients about is, is they talk about funding. We've recently partnered with Jenny Stone and partner forces that writes grants for our clients. We go out and conduct our assessments as a means to define that the federal or state money that's out there. And so that's one of the offerings that we have. You know, some some schools are moving to bonds. And I would say that would probably be one of, you know, as a as a conservative, primarily conservative. But I would say that would be one of the last resorts because it always raises taxes. Right. But at the end of the day, what I tell them is that you cannot wait for legislation. Even if legislation is passed today, it's going to be a while before that's passed and even funded. And so what I say is you just can't wait. You have to find some some means to get it done. And, you know, the basic premise of what we do doesn't always have to be astronomically expensive. The planning, the operational component, the communications plan, the behavioral threat management training, those in relation to the overall plan or solution that we provide are relatively inexpensive. Now, if you want a complete, comprehensive and holistic plan, you've got to got to go all in or you do it in phases. But you know, the the days of just saying we can't afford it or we don't have those particular types of kids, that philosophy has to stop because, trust me, I don't think that anybody in Uvalde, Texas, thought that that that would happen there. Santa Fe, Texas. Parkland, you know, Columbine. As far back as Columbine, we're approaching the 25 year anniversary. I've heard you talk about an upstream approach. Can you explain what that means to our audience? Sure. When you think about an upstream approach, you think about the issues facing young people. What are the things we worry about as parents? Their safety being hit by a car in a parking lot? Right. We look at, oh, they're in a pool and somebody is struggling and we need to intervene. We can throw them a life ring. A more upstream approach would be, oh, wow, we know they can't swim. So we're going to make sure that they have a life vest so that when they're playing around the pool and if they fall in, they're going to be protected. But even a more upstream approach would be we're going to know they don't know how to swim and we're going to teach them to swim. So the same thing applies when it comes to the school safety principles is we know in schools they do a great job, but this has become overwhelming and we need to take the teams that have been developed to Multidiscipline team, these things that have been communicated since Columbine of best practices, and we need to take that to the next level. We need to take and we need to train that team. We need to make consistent tools so that they can get it right. We need to make sure that if we're intervening with a student of concern, that we are doing it in a very strategic way with the best practice principles that we know and today, today's world and we can do that. Do you think that, you know, we're talking about these same principles that we've identified in the behaviors of these of these individuals that want to either harm themselves or harm others? We talk about mass shootings a lot, but one of the things that I feel like always gets left out is suicide and self-harm. And so can you talk about the parallels between those two of suicide and mass shootings or those who want to, you know, conduct a mass shooting? So I think it's really important that when we see students that have some of those early indicators, such as depression or anxiety or worrisome behavior, it sometimes can be that they are really struggling. And, you know, with the adolescent brain, they're going through a lot with their physical and mental growth. So when those indicators occur. We have to be able to assess what's going on. So when we see the warning signs of even a student that might commit suicide or be on that pathway, it's important that we have a consistent set of trained individuals and questions that adults can ask. So we know those principles. But there is also a fluidity between feeling suicidal and having a grievance or a disappointment, failure and loss, and being on a pathway to not only considering taking your own life, but taking others with you. Right. So all of those things have to remain in the in part of our best practices of consideration of how we manage that, because we want to protect life. We want to protect the person that's struggling. We want to get them on a pathway of success. And those preventions happen every day with these principles. We know it. It's just we don't hear about the successes because we don't want to alarm people with the successes and the prevented school shootings. And the ones that do occur end up as a mass media event. So those principles of what we know works by research are what we implement and train those multidiscipline teams are and streamline it into a streamline it into a consistent way to intervene early and to track and to measure successes, measure outcomes, but also determine anybody that might be a threat to your particular facility. And that's for insider threats. Sure. And you just talked about training. So I think it's a perfect segway to to make the announcement that Susan Payne has now become the director of behavioral threat assessment and Training for M6 Global Defense Group. And so, you know, thank you for joining the team. We are extremely excited to have someone of your caliber in this space that can, you know, kind of bring bring up our skill level. You know, the majority of us have are former law enforcement or former United States Secret Service agents. We have about 500 years of experience in the fields of behavioral threat assessment and physical security, executive protection. You know, advanced security operations. It's an easy decision because just the caliber and credibility and trust and respect of this team that's being created is those are the principles I live by, and I'm excited to join that team and hopefully I can be a value add. I think of Texas as a second home. I'm excited to do the work and get moving. I think it's a balanced approach to school safety and comprehensive one, and we can bring some real we can really equip schools to do what they need to do. I think I think this is what the industry needs. I mean, you look at some of the the competition that we have in the the consulting space and no discredit to anyone. I think there's some very good competitors out there, very well respected competitors out there. But, you know, the beauty of what we're doing at M6 Global is we haven't even really shared the depth of our team, right? People don't even really know the power behind the team. We now have 30 consultants, 16 states. We're growing every single week, it seems like, and you know, there's something about the way that we're doing things in a very holistic manner with the knowledge and experience and training that we have and, you know, bringing on individuals like you to the team to really uplift what we're doing, because I'm super passionate about the behavioral threat assessment piece. I know in my heart and what I know from my experience is and I think you will agree with this, that if we can get that component under control for Texas's kids and America's children, that we're going to have a significant impact. So thank you for joining the team and thank you for being here. I appreciate it. It's an honor. Thanks for having me.
