Fire System Valve Theft Suspect

On December 14, 2012 a brass standpipe valve was stolen from the fire system in the parking garage of a Golden Valley business along the 394 corridor.

We understand that business properties in Brooklyn Park, Edina, Plymouth, and St. Louis Park have been the victims of similar thefts.  

The theft occurred at 4:22 pm on Thursday, 12/13/2012.  The Golden Valley Police Department case number is 12-3216.

Thanks for any help.

Gordon Graham at INFRAGARD

In June 2011, the Mall of America and the Minnesota Chapter of InfraGard presented: Terrorism, Social Media & You, but our featured speaker, Gordon Graham, had to cancel last minute. 

On January 16th, 2013, we bring Gordon back for a 2 hour session on “Why Things Go Right – Why Things Go Wrong”.

Gordon Graham is a nationally recognized expert on risk management, whose work has had tremendous impact on the risk management effectiveness of law enforcement operations and private sector companies around the country.

This event is FREE. Sign up now to reserve your seat as seating is limited http://tsmy2.eventbrite.com/

Gordon Graham – “Why Things Go Right – Why Things Go Wrong”

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 from 9am to 11am

Mall of America
Great Room (located in the SW corner of Nickelodeon Universe)
60 E Broadway, Bloomington, MN

Registration is Required – Please RSVP at Event Brite http://tsmy2.eventbrite.com/

Business/Police Academy Kick-Off

Business/Police Academy Kick-Off

November 2, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Bloomington Police Department

This event requires registration: http://www.minneapolischamber.org/bmsm

Business/Police Academy Kick-Off - FREE Event

As a part of our Business Matters/Safety Matters series, we will kick-off our Business Police Academy in partnership with the Bloomington Police Department!

Modeled after the popular Citizen's Police Academy, this series will offer participants an business oriented inside look at how the police department operates, its policies, procedures, programs, priorities and challenges. Presentations are by Police Department personnel and cover a wide spectrum of topics.

At this free kick-off event, we will receive our welcome from Police Chief Jeff Potts, Police Dispatcher Stacey Bays will discuss 9-1-1 operations, and then we will take a tour of the Police Department.

Future topics will include a business-based look at Crime Techs, a K-9 Demonstration, SWAT Team, Bomb Squad and Use of Force.

Location:

Bloomington Police Department
1800 West Old Shakopee Rd.
Bloomington, MN 55431

To register (Free) visit:

http://www.minneapolischamber.org/bmsm

Event Organizer: 

Mark Thorson, Commissioner, Bloomington Housing and Redevelopment Authority | Police Reserve Officer | Marketing/PR Professional

MN ASIS October Meeting Speaker in the News!

Vikki Sanders – Public Sector Principal Consultant for the Department of Labor was interviewed on KARE11 last evening.

http://www.kare11.com/news/article/993381/396/What-happened-the-day-of-the-Accent-Signage-shooting

For 24 years, Vikki Sanders has worked at the Department of Labor and industry as the Workplace Violence Prevention consultant for the state of Minnesota. She has worked 7 years as an OSHA investigator and 14 years as a consultant specializing in workplace violence, general industry and public sector employer safety and safety committees.

Vikki has taught over 450 businesses and 45,000 employees on safety topics to a variety of industrial and public sector settings including healthcare, education, housing, manufacturer and business.

As a Consultant/Trainer and Co-Author of the workplace violence prevention manual, Vikki Sanders offers practical tools of awareness and understanding that will help make your workplace safer. 

There are still seats available for the October 11 meeting!


Join us on Thursday, October 11th, 2012, from 11:30am-1:00pm, at the Chateau Medicine Lake, 10715 South Shore Drive – Medicine Lake, MN 55441

Please visit the ASIS Minnesota Chapter #25 to register 

http://www.mnasis.org/meetings/meetings_speakerbio_2012_10.html

Pre-registration is required and must be received no later than October 4th, 2012.

$25 for local MN Chapter of ASIS Members
$35 for Non-Members

Cancellations must be made by 4pm on October 9th, 2012.

If you have questions or need further information, please email lmountain@hannonsecurity.com

Lisa Mountain, CPO
Business Development Manager
Hannon Security Services, Inc.
952-887-1119 phone
952-881-6524 fax

MN ASIS October Meeting - Workplace Violence Prevention

Topic: Workplace Violence Prevention

Speaker: Vikki Sanders – Public Sector Principal Consultant for the Department of Labor and Industry

For 24 years, Vikki Sanders has worked at the Department of Labor and industry as the Workplace Violence Prevention consultant for the state of Minnesota.   She has worked 7 years as an OSHA investigator and 14 years as a consultant specializing in workplace violence, general industry and public sector employer safety and safety committees. 

Vikki has taught over 450 businesses and 45,000 employees on safety topics to a variety of industrial and public sector settings including healthcare, education, housing, manufacturer and business.

As a Consultant/Trainer and Co-Author of the workplace violence prevention manual, Vikki Sanders offers practical tools of awareness and understanding that will help make your workplace safer.

Join us on Thursday, October 11th, 2012, from 11:30am-1:00pm, at the Chateau Medicine Lake, 10715 South Shore Drive – Medicine Lake, MN 55441

Please visit the ASIS Minnesota Chapter #25 to register http://www.mnasis.org/meetings/meetings_speakerbio_2012_10.html

Pre-registration is required and must be received no later than October 4^th, 2012.  

$25 for local MN Chapter of ASIS Members

$35 for Non-Members

Cancellations must be made by 4pm on October 9th, 2012.

If you have questions or need further information, please email lmountain@hannonsecurity.com

Lisa Mountain, CPO

Business Development Manager

Hannon Security Services, Inc.

952-887-1119 phone

952-881-6524 fax

A Review of Mass Murder in the United: A History

When faced with dramatic and horrible crimes we naturally seek ways to make sense of the senseless.  Such is the case with mass murder, such as we saw committed in a movie theater in Colorado and a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin.  Where shall we turn?  There seem to be very few experts on mass murder. Perhaps that's because - despite the 24 hour news media's urgent pronouncements to the contrary - it's rare. Author Grant Duwe, Ph.D., Director of Research at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, is an expert on this highly specialized and frequently misunderstood topic. He's written on the issue for years and was widely quoted in the aftermath of the mass murder in Aurora, Colorado.

Duwe's 2007 book, Mass Murder in the United States: A History, is a fine piece of scholarship that draws upon his detailed examination of 909 mass murders committed in the USA during the 20th century. He makes a compelling case that mass murder is not new, that the rate of mass murder is not on the rise, and that the severity of each incident is not, on average, increasing.

Mass Murder in the United States draws upon 909 mass murder events in the U.S. in the 20th century.  Duwe tells us that mass murder scenarios break down into three broad categories: criminal massacres of competitors, public mass murders, and family annihilations.  He selected cases in which four people were killed in an event lasting less than 24 hours.  Duwe detected two surges in the data. The first, in the 1920-30s, were largely divided between gangland crimes – the “The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre” being a notorious example – and family annihilations perpetrated by distraught Depression-era fathers with a sadly misapplied sense of obligation to their families. The second wave started in the mid-1960s, peaked in the 1990s, and is now in decline. The wave of mass murder our generation has lived through is evenly divided between criminal massacres, public mass murder – in public, in schools and at work, and again, family annihilations. Grimly interesting is the fact that bombing and arson have accounted for a higher proportion of deaths than most realize.

Duwe's discussion of moral panics and the role the news media play in the social construction of concern on this and other issues is very helpful to those of us interested in understanding why hysteria frequently drives public discourse. As we attempt to engage in productive discussions about frightening events we must lead with facts rather than fear. If you would have an opinion on this topic you owe it to yourself, your clients, and your community to read this book.

Mass Murder in the United States: A History, by Grant Duwe
Paperback, 213 pages
ISBN-13: 9780786431502 Publisher: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date: 6/28/2007

Secure360 2013 Call for Presentations are Open!

Secure360 will be held May 14-15, 2013.  The call for presentations are open.

If you have knowledge to share and would like to submit an abstract for a one-hour breakout session, please visit our website to access the Call For Presentations. Click on the "for speakers" drop down, then choose "call for presentations" and follow the prompts. 

Topic Ideas

Over 800 risk management and security professionals attended the 2012 conference.  Secure360 strives to offer education on a wide range of topics including the following: 

 

• Physical Security
• Audit
• Project Management
• Forensics
• Privacy
• Facilities Management
• Incident and Emergency Response
• Business Continuity Management
• Governance
• Security Technology
• Innovation
• Enterprise Risk Management

 

Go to our website and submit your presentation idea.

Gun Safe Safety Hazard

If you keep a handgun at home in a small gun safe please have a look at this Threat Level blog post titled Kids Can Open Gun Safes With Straws and Paper Clips, Researchers Say written by Kim Zetter.

A Review of Potential: Workplace Violence Prevention and Your Organizational Success

My review of Potential: Workplace Violence Prevention and Your Organizational Success by Bill Whitmore has been published in the March/April 2012 edition of the The Workplace Violence Prevention eReport. The eReport requires a free subscription which is painless to request. What's more, subscribers to the The Workplace Violence Prevention eReport are eligible to receive a free PDF copy of Whitmore's book. For some reason my review of *Potential *starts in the middle, so until that's fixed just follow the link to the complete text.

Metro Area Test of "Operation Medicine Delivery"

This interesting program may affect residents in the 394 Block Club service area.  Please do what you can to spread the word.

On May 6 a government exercise called "Operation Medicine Delivery" could be happening in your neighborhood and the neighborhoods of the people your organization serves - help people be informed!

On Sunday, May 6, U.S. Postal Service volunteers will make an unusual delivery of an empty pill bottle in selected Twin Cities' neighborhoods. People living in ZIP codes 55101, 55102, 55411, and 55422 (parts of Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Robbinsdale, Golden Valley, and Crystal) may receive an empty pill bottle in their mailbox - that's approximately 37,000 residences.

The pill bottle delivery is part of "Operation Medicine Delivery," an exercise designed to see how fast postal teams can deliver medicine to homes in a simulated public health emergency. ECHO's role in this event is to make sure that non-English speaking residents of these ZIP codes get the information they need to understand what the test is and why it is happening.

To help with this, ECHO has created materials in four languages (English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali) including:

An Educational Video: These 3-4 minute videos will help community members learn more about the exercise. They are streamable online for free and are available on DVD upon request by emailing olson@echominnesota.org These videos are ideal for playing in waiting rooms and other public spaces. View them here http://www.echominnesota.org/library/operation-medicine-delivery

An Outreach Flier: These fliers can be used to hand out at events, hang on community bulletin boards, distribute at community markets, and more. They can also be emailed to the mailing lists, clients, and staff in PDF form. View/download here http://www.echominnesota.org/library/operation-medicine-delivery/translated-fliers

A 5x7 Inch Advertisement: These advertisements can be used in print publications, posted online, in church bulletins, and more. Due to space limitations, they contain less information than the fliers. View/download here http://echominnesota.org/library/operation-medicine-delivery/translated-ads

Translated Webpages: These webpages contain the video explaining the exercise, the information that is on the flier, as well as links to additional resources. View here http://www.echominnesota.org/library/operation-medicine-delivery

A Pre-Event Audio Message: This is an audio version of the postcard residents will receive the week of May 1 explaining the exercise. Postcard recipients will see translated sentences directing them to ECHO's pre-recorded phone line (888.883.8831). Upon calling, listeners have the option to have the postcard read to them in either English, Spanish, Hmong, Somali, Vietnamese, or Karen. Read scripts and listen to audio here http://echominnesota.org/library/operation-medicine-delivery/pre-event-audio-message

Please help get this important information to households in these four ZIP codes! Spread the information in English and also pass along the translated materials to those that may better understand this information in their native language.

Contact wanduragala@echominnesota.org to learn more about using these resources to communicate to the communities that your organization serves.

Thank you!

The ECHO Team

What Do You Mean When You Say Workplace Violence?

Security Management magazine rejected my article regarding careless use of WPV statistics. Not wanting to waste the work I put into it I've posted it at http://eclecticbreakfast.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-do-you-mean-when-you-say-workplace.html 

Mindsets and Toolkits: Thinking Positively About Security...

...is the working title of a talk I'll be giving May 9, at 1:30 pm. I volunteered to serve as a backup speaker for the Secure360 Conference being held at the River Centre in Saint Paul, MN, May 8-9, 2012.  As the contracts were confirmed the coordinator came up short so they asked if I'd fill a programming slot.   As currently and extemporaneously imagined my talk will present several examples which will demonstrate the importance of approaching the business security process with a sense of civic responsibility, critical thinking, and without using fear as a lever to advance the program.  Register to attend or exhibit today!

An Interesting Crime Prevention Paper

The Crime Report pointed us toward an interesting paper.

The RAND study The Effect of Business Improvement Districts on the Incidence of Violent Crimes suggests that private sector spending on security improvements be considered as part of the reason crime rates continue to fall year over year.

Very interesting news, especially for private sector security professionals. It only makes sense that effective corporate security programs contribute to the reduction of crime rates in the the communities where companies operate. It's time private security takes some credit. Public policing is not the only way to affect crime rates.