Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: I'm Alex Stone, former military service member and law enforcement officer, now CEO of Echelon Protected Services, one of the fastest growing private security firms on the west coast. And this is ride along, where our guests and I witness firsthand the issues affecting our community.
I believe our proven method of enacting meaningful change through compassion and understanding is the best way to make our streets a safer place and truly achieve security through community.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: My name is Matt Caskel, and I'm.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: A former Green Beret in the US.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Army in a previous life. Right now I am a high school principal here in the Portland metro area.
[00:00:57] Speaker D: Hi, my name is Evans Pang. I'm the director of patrol and operations for Pacific Echelon. Today I'm just here to show my budy, Matt Castile, what we do and how we do it in the Portland area.
[00:01:07] Speaker A: Hey, Alex Stone here. Welcome to the ride along. We have two fantastic guests today. We have Evans Pang and Matt Castile. Gentlemen, you're on the ride along today. Why don't you kind of introduce yourself to the folks, give a little bit of a background.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: You want to go first?
[00:01:22] Speaker E: You go first.
[00:01:23] Speaker F: All right.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: My name is Matt Castile. I am currently a high school principal in Beaverton, Oregon.
That's after a variety of or an exciting life.
Prior to that, I actually met Evans at Oregon State University back in.
[00:01:44] Speaker F: What was that?
[00:01:45] Speaker B: About 84? 84, eightyre.
[00:01:48] Speaker F: Something like that.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: I thought you were a top gun together.
[00:01:53] Speaker E: Civil war brother.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: A little bit older than that. I do remember watching Top Gun. I think we went as a group.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Yes, we did.
[00:02:01] Speaker B: But anyway, doesn't matter. We were in army ROTC together and actually. And both got commissioned and I went into active duty as an infantry lieutenant.
Did all the cool guy stuff, Ranger school, airborne, all of that stuff. Eventually worked my way to selection and was lucky enough to be selected to enter special forces, the Green Berets. And I did that for the last, I don't know, 22. Three, four years of my career and retired in 2014, which is when I started my career in education. And I'm married, two kids, lots of good friends.
He's not really one of them.
[00:02:53] Speaker E: 40 years, man, 40 years in county, my background, same thing. Oregon state. Met Matt and got commissioned, actually, as a military policeman. Did my reserve time, didn't go active duty, but had some fun times. Got deployed to Korea for a short tour and went to SRT school through the army. That was fun. Yeah.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Tell the folks what SRT is.
[00:03:18] Speaker F: Oh, sorry.
[00:03:18] Speaker E: It's SWAT school. For those who don't know what SRT special reaction team so got to do that. Fast forward. My civilian world.
I call it the buffet of life. I've tried almost anything from finance to the fun one was cooking. I did cooking for three years. Great.
[00:03:38] Speaker C: I did it for three years.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: He's the tactical chef. That's what we call him.
[00:03:41] Speaker E: Yeah, I'm just a cook. If you know that Steven Seagal reference from under siege.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: I remember that movie.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: As a little bit.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: That was his.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Better than top gun.
[00:03:52] Speaker E: Yeah. I'm always stunned by Steven. Fast forward to meeting Mr. Stone here. He changed my life.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: That's right. You were working for a Fortune 500 company.
[00:04:05] Speaker E: Yeah, Silicon Valley, doing their SRT SWAT.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: Type of call out. Right.
[00:04:10] Speaker E: It was basically plain clothes. I wasn't the close protection team, but we were basically the SRT for like a QRF. Yeah, QRF, plain clothes. Me on a laptop doing geek stuff, pretending to do geek stuff.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: You blend in well. Right?
[00:04:24] Speaker F: Thank you.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Especially those glasses.
I love the urban camo glasses.
[00:04:29] Speaker E: That was fun for a little bit. And then I got the call from you and said, hey, you want to come up to Oregon? And I was honestly very shocked in a very nice way of saying, hey, man, we want you to come up to Portland and help run it.
[00:04:41] Speaker F: That's right.
[00:04:41] Speaker E: It's like, wow.
[00:04:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: We were a young company still then at that time.
[00:04:45] Speaker E: How many people did you have then? Less than 40.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Less than 40?
[00:04:49] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:04:49] Speaker E: When I stepped on.
[00:04:50] Speaker B: What do you got now?
[00:04:51] Speaker A: About 120, I think.
[00:04:53] Speaker F: Okay.
[00:04:54] Speaker E: Over 100, for sure.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Nationwide, they say 200 in the papers.
Those are ghost operators who don't doubt them.
[00:05:01] Speaker F: Right.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: So you're here at the ride along today, Evans. You're currently one of the directors here in Portland. You're poised to take over California. So you're going to be running the big norcal.
[00:05:13] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: And we're going to go on a ride along later today. But really, this portion of the podcast is about explaining your background and the intersection between what we're trying to achieve here in Portland. So many people in the nation know kind of exactly what's going on in Portland, Oregon. We're suffering from a drug epidemic. We have a huge houseless cris, a homelessness crisis.
[00:05:37] Speaker F: Right.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: About one to one and a half percent of the total population are homeless living on the street. And so when we came into this market as a security company, both me and my business partner, Reed Kerr, we realized quickly that in this industry, most people are paid to not deliver results. Right. Most people have security because they need it for insurance.
You know, no one really expects anything from their security teams. And we realized quickly that we were kind of stuck between two models, that law enforcement model, which never works because security isn't law enforcement, and the observing report model, which doesn't work because of the lack of emergency services. So we quickly did a deep dive, and we looked Okonis we looked outside the United States to see successful security models. And luckily, I've spent some time overseas. I was able to partake in some of these models. You did as well on the OdA side, right, that special forces side. And that's kind of the model we went with. We decided that just a regular security force wasn't going to work. We had to have a level of intelligence.
We have major criminal operations. We have central american gangs. We have cartels. We have street gangs, nationally recognized crip gangs, rolling 60s, things like this, engaging in trafficking of narcotics, humans, things like that.
[00:07:12] Speaker F: Right?
[00:07:13] Speaker A: And so we recognized quickly we needed a level of intelligence to work from if we're going to be strategic and actually deliver results. We also realized really quickly we needed a way to take the drug dealers customers away, the people they enslave, they'll give them a month of drugs. And basically the drug dealer owns you.
[00:07:36] Speaker F: Right?
[00:07:36] Speaker A: You're constantly stealing things, petty theft, bike, going into a ride aid, going into a pharmacy store or a clothing store, constantly stealing stuff to pay off that drug dealer.
And we realized we had to be a non governmental organization, an NGO, nonprofit. And so this kind of coalesced over a six month period, this type of thinking.
And we're working directly with the houseless community, getting them into shelter. So last month alone, we sheltered or transitioned into services like detox, getting people back with family, home care, faith groups.
[00:08:12] Speaker F: Right.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: We transitioned more than 150 people last month.
[00:08:16] Speaker F: Right.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: So in that 30 day period, we would contact people in their tent or on the street, passed out on fentanyl, and we would say, hey, we know you're not living your dream.
When you were in second grade and your teacher asked you, what do you want to be when you grow up?
Did you think you would put down, I want to be a drug addict in Portland, Oregon. Right. And they always say, no, I always wanted to be this, or I thought, you know, I thought I'd be a teacher. And we tell them, well, today I'm going to help you live your dream. I'm going to get you off the streets. We're going to get you to shelter. You want to do that? And we get a pretty good response rate because we're there every day. They know us by name, and so this is kind of the security model we've chosen. It's a community transformation, holistic approach to security services.
[00:09:06] Speaker F: Right.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: And so from your background, I'm kind of interested in what you think that looks like and kind of give an example of overseas operations where you were able to participate in that type of security model overseas as that security portion.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Well, it's funny just to hear you describe your mission and how your vision of how you're going to tackle it. I could not help but think back to way back days.
In special operations, there's a category of mission types that we would commonly refer to as, like, fid fid, foreign internal defense, which, first of all, comparing any two models is always going to have flaws. So I don't mean to say that they're the same, but the connection between what you're describing and what I spent a chunk of my life doing was there's a lot there. I mean, successful foreign internal defense, which means one version of it is to go into another country and try and help them.
In a nutshell, it'd be like putting down an insurgent. Now, that's different than your mission. Obviously, there's a human enemy here that foreign internal defense needs to deal with, and sometimes kinetically. That's very different than what you're doing.
But the ideas are of the. The critical nature of intelligence, the critical nature of resources to bring into the community, which is things I'm hearing you talk about. And probably the most critical thing is to develop trust with the country, the people in which you're operating, if you can get those three things. And it always starts and ends with trust, which is about relationship, which is about. In my world, it was actually living with. Living among, learning to speak the language, eat the food, learn the customs.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Complete immersion.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Exactly.
To show a commitment to a community.
Then a trust starts to develop, and then you can start to use the combination of intelligence and resources to actually lift communities up.
Which is the best way to fight an insurgency, is to dry up an insurgency. When an enemy can no longer find safe haven, can no longer find recruits, a community that's willing or necessarily has to support them, then they fade away, and you don't have to fight them anymore, because they simply can no longer survive in that environment. It sounds in these sort of strange ways that you're doing the exact same thing without all the kinetic stuff that the military, my background, had to deal with.
Anyway, it was just fascinating, just those three minutes of explanation. It set me back 20 years.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: Ideally, you're dealing with community leaders, whether it's just a subculture on the street.
[00:12:42] Speaker F: Absolutely. Right.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: And we're building that trust every day. And a couple of things that we've noticed that I think are overlaps. Is, number one, a community without hope is easily enslaved.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: A community without hope will always bring recruits to radical groups.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:13:02] Speaker F: Right.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: So building hope, which begins with increasing self worth and increasing agency.
Hope comes from worth and agency. That's kind of the triangle of hope, right? Absolutely. And so we go in most of these urban models where you're trying to offer personal transformation.
We call that the field of Dreams model from the movie where they built a baseball field in the.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: And again, another movie. Better than Top Gun, but whatever, right.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: That's like a Gen X thing, right? Everything has to go to a movie.
[00:13:37] Speaker E: Or Kevin Bacon.
[00:13:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Who doesn't love Kevin Bacon?
[00:13:41] Speaker E: I love bacon.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: I don't need bacon.
That's a long story.
[00:13:49] Speaker E: More for me.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: So we have the field of dreams model, where people with. People with the power. Right. So there's a power dynamic always in place. The people with the power stay up in their office spaces, their million dollar office spaces. Right. And they say, if you need something, come and see us. And what they're really saying is we want you to abandon your tent. So you'll get robbed. Go steal a shopping cart, take all your items, put it in a stolen shopping cart, push it for an hour or two in the rain or the sun, and then go wait in line for four or 5 hours with the hope that you'll get an answer.
[00:14:25] Speaker E: Right.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: And all that does is deplete someone of agency, and it depletes them of worth, and it actually increases that power dynamic.
And so what we believe is that to truly empower the individual in the community, the people who hold the power have to come into the community and serve. And you actually humble yourself and you lower yourself in that power Dynamic.
[00:14:50] Speaker F: That's right.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: And through the lowering of yourself in that power dynamic, you're actually empowering the other person.
[00:14:55] Speaker F: Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: It's the transference of power through changing the dynamic that's going to literally empower that person. And through that empowerment, by beating someone where they live every day, by going to where they are, you're literally telling them with your actions. You mean a lot to me. You're important. I'm here for you.
[00:15:19] Speaker F: Right.
[00:15:19] Speaker E: If I could jump in.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll jump in. So long, burpees.
[00:15:22] Speaker E: No jump in. Just a little street stories. Yeah.
Literally taking a knee and meeting people houseless. That are on the ground, seeing them eye to eye as opposed to looking down at them, that physical energy changes.
[00:15:36] Speaker F: Right.
[00:15:36] Speaker E: The dynamics. So kind of giving that prime example of, hey, I'm going to take a knee. Hey, how can I help you, bud? Talk to them eye to eye. Respect them. I told a homeless guy who was beat up on the street and cold, this is during the wintertime. I loved him because he needed to hear that I felt right. And I got to know his name. And I see him on the street now and sometimes say, hey, Thomas, put your clothes back on to, hey, brother, can I get you something to eat or a cup of coffee? So, yes, I think the other thing to come circle is, I know this is overused term, but hearts and minds, right? We're winning hearts and minds.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Hearts and minds.
[00:16:12] Speaker F: I love that. Yeah.
[00:16:13] Speaker E: It's something that's been in insurgency and counterinsurgency topics, but I think it's kind of come home domestically.
[00:16:20] Speaker F: Right.
[00:16:20] Speaker E: And that's what we're doing in Portland.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: We're nation building in our own nation.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: That's exactly right.
Again, I don't want to overemphasize potential connections between my old world and what you're doing here, but the most powerful things we were able to do, most of my experience in this was in Afghanistan, was getting into an area, living there, getting to know again there. It's a tribal system. And so you really had to earn the trust and friendship with the tribal elders. And then it all became about, where can we put clean water wells? Where can we run small med caps and maybe build a small hospital?
Where can I help this community build a school so kids, for the first time in decades, can learn to read and write in their own language.
Same thing it is trying to lift them up, give power to their structure, their comfort level, and better their lives. Give hope, provide hope, a vision for a better future.
That's what all people want for themselves and their kids.
They want to have a bright, hopeful future.
And then in a world like that, enemies have a much harder time living. And I don't care whether that enemy is an insurgent or it's drugs or it's crime.
That's not a place where they can find strong footing and survive and grow.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: What we realized was, in that field of dreams model, when you force someone out of their space and you take their worth and agency away and they actually show up to an office building, you're dealing with that person as an individual.
[00:18:22] Speaker F: Right. Yeah.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: So you're always going to be locked into the personal transformation model. Right. But when you're embedded and immersed in a community, something different happens. You're no longer just operating out of that personal transformation model. You're actually working in a community transformation model.
When you're empowering multiple persons that are already part of the same network, then the self empowerment dynamic becomes a community empowerment dynamic, which is what I found was so unique in that Oda intelligence model. Right. And I think that we actually have seen this. I think that we've seen this firsthand.
The principle that we go by, or the kind of the adage that I like to talk about how this works is they say if you give someone a fish, you give them a meal for a day.
[00:19:15] Speaker F: Right.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: If you teach someone to fish, you give them meals for a lifetime. But if you teach a team to fish, you can feed an entire village.
[00:19:24] Speaker F: Yeah, that's a good point.
[00:19:25] Speaker E: Yeah, I like that.
[00:19:26] Speaker F: Right? Yeah.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: And so what we're doing is we're not just teaching the individual. See, this is where the model fails. They're never getting to the team environment. They're actually never getting to the community level of involvement that's truly required to transform an entire neighborhood because they're locked in their offices dealing one on one. One on one therapy is great, one on one drug addiction counseling is great.
But at the end of the day, if you want to transform that neighborhood, if you want to make sure that you're getting such a high level of community engagement that criminal organizations are like, hey, we can't sell dope here anymore.
[00:20:04] Speaker F: Right?
[00:20:04] Speaker A: There's too much engagement. There's community barbecues, there's faith groups out doing whatever they do.
[00:20:10] Speaker F: Right?
[00:20:10] Speaker A: You have all this level of engagement that you can no longer feel safe because there's too many eyeballs on the street.
[00:20:16] Speaker F: Right?
[00:20:17] Speaker A: And so we've achieved that. And I would say in almost two or three neighborhoods on the east side and several of the neighborhoods on the west side, here in the downtown, I'll.
[00:20:25] Speaker E: Say old town has changed. In the time I've been here, 100%, it's been old town Chinatown, right?
[00:20:30] Speaker F: Yeah. Right.
[00:20:31] Speaker E: That area has changed for us. When I was here, well, 18 months ago, it was a different dynamic. Evans, don't go in that area. There's a block boss. And luckily for me, I've always been polite. And I know learning from what we learned, just, hey. And I was very polite to that guy. And later on I was told, like, he's the block boss. If you talked to him sideways, he would have put out a hit on you or something.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: He threatened that we had people quit.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:59] Speaker E: I didn't know.
[00:21:00] Speaker B: I just polite to everyone in this concept.
Good people. In enough time, they can get you the trust you need, and they can get the information, the intelligence. Where's the resources coming from? The third leg of that stool.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: Resources come from our nonprofit, so we have strategic partnerships with probably 20 to 30 groups. We have an insurance company that is raising money for us at the end of the year gala ball.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: They do.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: We have all kinds of groups. A lot of our security clients give monthly to nonprofit.
[00:21:40] Speaker F: Got it.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: I have a pickup tomorrow. And so, yeah, we pick up pallets and pallets of resources. I mean, yesterday alone, I think we handed out probably eight to ten cases of frozen water bottles because it was 105 degrees.
[00:21:52] Speaker F: Right.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: And so a lot of what we're doing is driven by resources. It does require a lot.
[00:21:58] Speaker E: And on the grassroots level, I've gone back to clients like these high net worth people who live in nice little apartments and go, hey, would you mind? We have a need. Give us your old towels or blankets and t shirt, shoes. And they've stepped up, so good for them. Right.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: So you're drawing the people in power. I don't mean that in a negative way, but people with resources, you're drawing them into this.
They're sold out, different way of thinking.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: They're totally bought into the business model. Right. That security service model, now that they've experienced the transformation and their own properties.
[00:22:40] Speaker F: Right.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: They're like, we want to help. How can we help?
[00:22:44] Speaker G: Yeah.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: They go, we know you're doing this. We see what you're doing, and we realize this is the only way. It's truly humanitarian.
[00:22:51] Speaker F: Right.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Because you're putting the people and the community first.
[00:22:53] Speaker F: Right.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Think about it. We transitioned 150 people in a 30 day period to unity for mental health detox.
Emmanuel different places, and then a myriad of different county city shelters and private shelters. Did you go to Hooper? We put eight people in Hooper detox last month alone. And so this is something that every single agency has different paperwork. They all require a different checklist.
[00:23:25] Speaker F: Right.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: And so the paperwork, the load that it takes to do that, it's nearly impossible. The nonprofit is able to, because of, it's a 501 C three status, is able to partake in a program that allows us to get Narcan. So we get around $60,000 of Narcan a year, and we give it to other nonprofits. So most of the nonprofits in our regions, we're actually giving them Narcan. There's actually, another security company, we provide Narcan for that security company.
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Sounds like it's expanding and you're having greater and greater impact here.
Talk to me about beyond the borders of the Portland metro area.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: Well, most of our clients that own property in Portland, they're national or international institutional investors.
[00:24:12] Speaker F: Right. Okay.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Just in the Bay Area alone, there's one group that has multiple properties here.
They have 42 major commercial properties in the Bay Area, in Cali.
[00:24:24] Speaker F: Right.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: And so they noticed the transformation single handedly. They were like, this is literally, we're amazed. They go, we want you in California. And so, I mean, it's literally that simple. I mean, people are just like, we need this everywhere. We need this in Seattle, we've been invited to, every state we're in, we've been invited to. We haven't had to run any marketing programs.
Our marketing budget is literally zero.
This is our marketing budget, the podcast. But this is brand new.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: This is exciting.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: We just got invited.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Life changing community.
[00:25:05] Speaker A: Mean when we took our first property, and we'll drive by there later today, our first contract in Portland was a multifamily residential property.
[00:25:14] Speaker F: Right.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: And it had the highest call volume for law enforcement contact in the entire central district. So a third of Portland had the highest call volume for any other multifamily residential property.
[00:25:26] Speaker F: Right.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: I mean, 1015 major calls a day.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: How long ago was that?
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not going to mention the name, but, yeah.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: How long ago was that?
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Oh, that was five years ago.
[00:25:35] Speaker F: Five years ago. Yeah.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: And now there's no calls, there's no problems. I mean, we have minimal issues. And the access and egress points in this property make it prime for drug dealing, for dropping off stolen cars, because you can run across a pedestrian bridge and you have a natural barrier of railroad tracks. You can jump a fence and run. So it's easy to do dope and drugs and run girls in this area.
[00:26:01] Speaker E: It's a jurisdiction thing too, right? Yeah, there's a lot of gray areas, so they can slip through the cracks.
[00:26:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:07] Speaker E: That makes.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: That the people who own that, the investment group that owns that, they're the ones that said, hey, Albuquerque is on fire. The current taking over, we need you in New Mexico. And that's why we opened up New Mexico, because we were invited there.
[00:26:23] Speaker F: Right.
[00:26:24] Speaker E: So, yeah, when Alex said this was happening in Portland, a, it was a shock, and b, I know what it resonated with me. So I knew that at some point this was going to be more than just a Portland centric problem.
It's everywhere.
[00:26:39] Speaker C: It is everywhere, right?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: I mean, I'm getting calls from Texas all the time now.
I get calls back east. People in Philadelphia are like, oh, man, we need you over here. It's the same thing. And I'm like, I'm not going to go to Philly, bro. Right. I don't know that territory. I have to do a lot of research and on the ground first. But you're such a great guest. You're like a host. I feel like I'm being interviewed today as the great.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Your story is more interesting than mine, so that's cool.
I don't know.
I don't want to get overly philosophical, but a lot of the motivation for at least the paths that I've chosen in my life was because I genuinely want to help people make this place a better place. And the idea that you guys are doing it for people who need someone desperately to give them hope and to give them purpose for a better life, that's pretty motivational.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: These are our fellow citizens. These are other Americans.
[00:27:58] Speaker F: Right.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: And they're just dying on the street.
[00:28:01] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Gunshot dying. We did wound care.
[00:28:09] Speaker E: Two gunshot incidents in the last. Since last four days, last Thursday, and then one on Sunday morning right in the local area.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: We had one of our guards witness someone get shot in the head.
They witnessed it right there when it happened.
It's violent. This is a lot of real street violence. And unfortunately, there's no will and to bring back the law enforcement and the numbers that are needed for them to not just be out taking calls, but actually being engaged as community members.
And I don't even know if that's ever going to be a possibility in the future. I don't know if it will in these urban areas. I just don't think that that's ever going to be viable. I think that we need to really rethink how emergency services operate.
[00:29:12] Speaker E: I agree with that.
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Well, we can talk about this for days, right? I mean, we all live in problem areas. We know what that's like. Being a principal, I'm sure you're seeing an uptick in drugs and issues like that, gang violence, and we're not going to mention where you work, but as an administrator, that's a big problem.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: It is for a story that's not worth really telling now. But recently I was in a conversation with one of my superiors who was questioning some information that had gotten out into the community about the level of houseless students that I have at my school. And so I did some real quick research, pulled up the lists of the current kids that I have on McKinney Vinta, which legal things just around dealing with houseless homeless families.
And I have 14.2% in my high school.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: That's high.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: That's high. So think 1600 kids, 14% of them, 200 kids.
[00:30:24] Speaker F: Right.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Which could mean that you have just multiple families living in a single apartment.
It doesn't mean that on the streets.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: But transitioning so much.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:30:33] Speaker A: That they don't have an actual home.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: That's right. So 14% of high school students in my school alone who may not have a bedroom, that they can go home and even study, do the work that you would expect a high school student to do, or they may have a bedroom, but there's also three or four other students living in that same or any scenario like that. It's just an understanding and an appreciation for the fact that there are a lot of people around us that do not have the stability, maybe the hope, that some of us take for granted.
It's a call for service and action and concern.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: I grew up in that category. I went to 17 schools. I lived in six states, transitioned in and out of care. My brother was adopted by a separate family.
So, yeah, I mean, it is hard. I remember I never did homework.
I didn't have a room either. I never had a room growing up until my grandparents. I finally been doing my grandparents when I was in high school. And so it's hard. And I guess maybe that's part of the reason I do what I do is because I've kind of experienced that homelessness as a child, and I'm not going to let it happen on my watch.
[00:31:58] Speaker C: Good for you.
[00:31:58] Speaker B: We need more people like that. We need more people like that.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: I know right now there's a five year old and a seven year old living in a tent in old town with their father.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Heartbreaking.
[00:32:10] Speaker A: And he does want a shelter. We've tried multiple times, and he's like, we're fine.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: So, anyway, this is called the ride along because we don't sit in the office and do nothing. Got it at our desk, and just type emails away like giant or robot monkeys.
[00:32:30] Speaker F: Right.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: We're going to actually go out in the field. We're going to meet some folks, we're going to patrol, and we're going to change the community today.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: That's perfect, right?
[00:32:37] Speaker A: Sounds good, guys. I love it. Why don't you lead us out now? Yeah, let's go.
[00:32:42] Speaker F: All right.
[00:32:43] Speaker E: Possibly up.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:32:44] Speaker F: All.
[00:32:47] Speaker E: I get to keep this Navy seal no.
[00:32:52] Speaker C: Get that open.
You got the radio?
[00:32:58] Speaker F: Yeah, check.
[00:32:58] Speaker D: I already called it in.
[00:33:05] Speaker C: Just the other day here in the parole district, middle of the day, around 03:00 p.m. We had carjacking, like four blocks over, and elderly couple, two guys jump out of another car, ski masks with firearms. Boom, boom, boom. We want your car. Pull up Brit Mountain. I mean, this is like a Wednesday at 03:00 p.m. In the Pearl district. So there's an act of serial killer right?
[00:33:33] Speaker F: Now.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: One of the victims was a female prostitute here in Old Town.
One of the guards had information about that after there was a reach out from the DA's office, right.
Very difficult.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: It does seem like in a lot of ways, you guys would end up with better sort of on the ground information than even. The police.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: Seem to be all in the mood. They don't have the time to stand there, chat with people. Especially in Portland, the lack of services.
A lot of these frontline police officers, they're literally every day going call to call, right?
5615 calls deep. And I've been there. You've been there in law enforcement, and you get calls stacked like that, and you're talking major calls, domestics, stabbings, and you don't have time to sit back and kick it. And in uniform, it's hard to gather intelligence in a uniform, right?
Very difficult, as you know, being in the green braves. A part of what y'all do is that overseas operations, that intelligence gathering, right?
I think that definitely.
And this know from my time in Africa and the Middle east, there's definitely a warlord culture on the street level. So you'll have block captains, you'll have bloods, crips, 60s, aryan brotherhood, prison gangs, right? Running certain blocks. And you really need to establish yourself as a presence in the neighborhood because they know we're not police, right, but we still establish ourselves as a real presence to where they have to deal with us, right? And I think once people know, hey, don't fuck with these guys. I hate to mean that's the language, but it makes people comfortable giving us information, especially information on their mean. That's really what it turns out to. Because there's so much competition with drug dealing right now in Portland, they don't have a problem giving up other gangs and other clicks.
They love doing it. I would say they love doing it.
[00:36:06] Speaker D: It could be as basic as even watching our backs.
[00:36:08] Speaker C: That's Dolson right there.
[00:36:10] Speaker D: Yeah, Golson's one of our key guys, man. He's like a gold standard when it.
[00:36:16] Speaker C: Comes to patrol sub. Golson.
What up, t?
What up, you? That's what I heard. Evans is back here telling me the story.
Good, bro.
Resource time, baby.
He said it got bloodied up. And so we try. I mean, you don't want to use force, but it's a part of the job. But the end of the day now, we have, we got security, we got the nonprofit. We're lining people up at the resource center. We run our own resource center. And this is, again, another place to gather that human intelligence. I think we're green.
[00:37:10] Speaker F: We're green.
[00:37:10] Speaker C: Let you go. Walk out and go in there.
You ready?
[00:37:18] Speaker D: Yes, sir.
[00:37:20] Speaker C: As they're watching, they're going to be looking at us and they're going to see us. They're going to go and tell the other people and then that's what, you know, that whole area because they won't be able to sell hill people. And that's really what you're looking for locked in.
You're looking for people looking at us kind of curious, and then they walk away to look. So we're going to go inside this resource center. This is our resource center. We set up a nonprofit again, that whole NGO kind of idea, human intelligence gathering. You got to have a real network in place. You can't just have people in uniform always walking around.
And so we'll introduce you to Lafen, Terrence. I think they should be inside.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: What services roll out of here?
[00:38:06] Speaker C: This is our resource center. So clothing, food, people work with us. We work with them. We ask people to come hang out with us. We let them go shopping, get different things.
This is loving one another.
[00:38:20] Speaker A: This is the resource center.
[00:38:22] Speaker F: Got it.
[00:38:22] Speaker G: What's going on, guys?
[00:38:23] Speaker C: Hey, Evans, where you at?
[00:38:24] Speaker G: How you doing? Matt Spencer, cousin Budy.
[00:38:27] Speaker C: How you doing?
Good.
[00:38:30] Speaker F: Yeah. All right.
[00:38:30] Speaker G: Evans, how you doing, bro?
[00:38:33] Speaker D: Hope you're doing well.
[00:38:34] Speaker G: Good.
[00:38:34] Speaker C: Wolf, what do we got going on, sir?
[00:38:37] Speaker G: Nothing, man. We're just out here trying to serve.
[00:38:39] Speaker C: Any shoppers today?
[00:38:41] Speaker G: We've had about seven shoppers today.
[00:38:43] Speaker C: Yeah. Nice.
[00:38:43] Speaker G: We open it up about three, usually about 345 to 430, about 45 minutes, so they can get the temporary supplies.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: How many people do you think we transitioned into sheltering today?
[00:38:54] Speaker G: Today we got three into shelters and 14 on a waiting list.
[00:38:58] Speaker C: So tent into shelters. Three people were living in tents when we showed up today, and now those.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: Three people are now in shelters.
[00:39:05] Speaker C: We got 14 more on a waitlist.
[00:39:07] Speaker F: Correct.
[00:39:07] Speaker C: Boom.
[00:39:09] Speaker G: Another three. Another three more total.
[00:39:11] Speaker C: Awesome.
[00:39:12] Speaker F: 17 total. Incredible.
[00:39:13] Speaker G: Yes. All right, well, let me show you around. Let's show you what we got here for tomorrow morning because they didn't get them until the afternoon. And you know that if you don't get them in there right away, you'll get a spot. They got to get there early. You got to get in there before eleven for sure. Otherwise you don't get in.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: So if they're doing a ring list today, does that mean that they can get in in the morning?
[00:39:32] Speaker G: It doesn't always mean that.
The city has a certain amount, a.
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Lot of beds around 213.
[00:39:39] Speaker G: Yeah. We work with the total for the city.
[00:39:41] Speaker C: The county has over 2000.
[00:39:45] Speaker G: So I'll get them on first thing in the morning. Depending on how many beds the city has, we'll get them in. If not, then we'll just go over the next day. The next day.
[00:39:53] Speaker C: How long can they stay in a shelter?
[00:39:55] Speaker G: They stay there as long as they want to. And that's how really you get transition into more permanent housing.
[00:39:59] Speaker F: Right.
[00:40:00] Speaker G: So that's really how they're doing that right now is you go through the shelter process and then usually within two, three months they can get you into something.
[00:40:07] Speaker B: So what do you do out of here? I mean, I can see the clothes, shoes.
[00:40:11] Speaker F: Right?
[00:40:11] Speaker C: Give a tour.
[00:40:12] Speaker F: Give a tour, bro.
[00:40:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:40:15] Speaker G: This is where we kind of have more the temporary needs of people, right.
If there's somebody on the streets and they don't have shoes or they don't have clothes or say, echelon comes across somebody and they call me and say, hey, do you have any shoes? Size twelve? That's what we just did. And got any pants this size? We'll make sure that happens for them. Got it. They can get their stuff. For the people on the street, the goal is to do is long term, right. For us, we want to transform their lives, help them transform their lives. But there's also the temporary need, too. Clothes, blankets, shoes, whatever it is, and food. So we have all that stuff and then we have, oh, you're good. You're good. Back here we have just like, we have women's feminine products. We got wipes, we got Narcan, we got all kinds of stuff back here. And then, hello, back where we keep.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: All of our water.
[00:41:11] Speaker G: So we have excess water. So for us, or if Escheline calls, like Thursday, I'm going to pick up 120 cases on Thursday.
[00:41:18] Speaker F: Got it.
[00:41:18] Speaker G: But you go through that pretty fast. It's going to be 95 degrees starting tomorrow with it comes to food and all that kind of stuff. We always try to take them to point them to the blanche, get your food there. But they have a deal with subway where if they miss subway, and then I pay the bill for that once a week and pay the bill for that.
Just try to do the little things that turn into the big things. Just trying to build these relationships. It's like a lot of times we'll go through for a whole week and talk to the same person. They're not ready to go yet, and we're just planting a seed going, hey, when you're ready, we're here.
Hey, Tom, how you doing? What do you need today?
[00:42:01] Speaker A: What do you need today? Meeting that immediate need is really the.
[00:42:05] Speaker C: Key to deescalating a situation on the streets. Spencer took a call the other day.
Originally they sent a security officer.
The guy squared away.
He's done private investigations, law enforcement for years. Showed up and, you know, I'm in the uniform, I'm wearing a gun.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: Maybe we need a better look right.
[00:42:24] Speaker C: Now because the guy was pretty escalated.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: Call came, suicidal, possibly actively suicidal.
[00:42:29] Speaker C: So Liv shows up.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: You want to tell him what happened?
[00:42:31] Speaker G: Yeah, so I showed up.
I walked over and sat with the guy and just sat there and listened to him. I knew David. I guess I shouldn't say names, but I knew David.
[00:42:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's okay.
[00:42:41] Speaker G: Could be a street name. Most of the time, David's just. He's mentally ill. Guy has delusions of grandeur, quite a bit.
About 15 minutes, I walked up to Safeway and we got him something to eat and got him something to drink, gave him a few cigarettes. And I said, are you suicidal? You homicide? He's like, no, I just needed something to eat.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: I was tired.
[00:43:01] Speaker G: I was know, it's the little, you.
[00:43:04] Speaker C: Know, little things sometimes just a cigarette. We had a guy losing his mind.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: In a parking lot about three blocks from here.
[00:43:12] Speaker C: And they called Portland police. Portland police pulled up and they were in a stack waiting to go in to deal with it. And one of my guys like, hey, I know this guy. I'm just going to walk in and gave him a bottle of water and a cigarette. And the guy calmed down and walked away.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: And so it's that first level of service without having.
[00:43:30] Speaker C: Law enforcement loves it because we handle a lot of calls that really they don't need to be handling.
[00:43:37] Speaker G: Even sometimes law enforcer call me and say, hey, you got a blanket, you got a pair of pants, you got a pair of shoes. And we have a beautiful relationship with law enforcement.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: Good to hear.
[00:43:46] Speaker G: It is, because it's going to take everybody to solve this problem.
That's when I worked for echelon. That's how it all started. It started with pushing people across street, wheelchairs or giving a cigarette or buying a sandwich or. I took my vested gun off, concealed, carried, when I was working for echelon, just because I wanted to be approachable. And it took about six months of every day being down here and not just acting like I care, but really caring about the problem.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:44:15] Speaker G: And you got to build those relationships. Without those relationships, man, you're sunk. These people have to trust you. They have to know that you're not just here. Yes, we have clients that we have to work for, and we have to do the job for them. But the best way to do that is to build relationship with the people on the streets. I started down here. Alex Reid gave me the tools, allowed me to do what I needed to do to fulfill what I felt was necessary, especially for this area. Every area is a little bit different, but at the end of the day, it is all the same. It's about building those relationships, building relationships of trust. So I'm definitely no expert.
I love people, and I hate to see what's going on out here. And I figure if we can do our part and we can get others involved and do their part, we can make a dent in our community.
Put me to work. That's all I want to do.
I don't like being in mediums. I don't like pushing paper. I want to be out here where we get down and dirty out here.
That's really what it's about, man.
[00:45:18] Speaker C: Really inspiring, really moving.
[00:45:21] Speaker G: Incredible. Most of the time, you come to work, and it's amazing. And sometimes you come to work, and it's hard.
When I first started, I wanted to save everybody.
[00:45:32] Speaker F: Sure.
[00:45:32] Speaker G: And then I realized that you got to save the ones that want to get saved and plant a seed for those that don't. And it's like I always tell them, listen, when you're ready, Terrence is here. I'm here, Alex is here.
Whenever you're ready, you have to be ready. They have to be ready to do so. But also helping them get ready to do it is people showing up every day and going, hey, man, we love you.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: Every day, better.
[00:45:54] Speaker G: We want better for you.
You're awesome.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: We're not stuck inside this building every day.
[00:45:59] Speaker C: We're going into the neighborhood.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: We go to every single tent every day, multiple times a day. And I would say, I think around.
[00:46:06] Speaker C: About 85% of the time, 90% of.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: The time, the people completely resistant to anything.
[00:46:13] Speaker C: But what we found is, 100% of.
[00:46:16] Speaker A: The time, they want help.
[00:46:19] Speaker C: Two times that week they want something. So if you go by every day, there's 100% chance they're going to want to build that relationship. You just got to go by every day.
[00:46:30] Speaker A: If you want that person to feel important, if you want to build hope and agency and worth into that individual.
[00:46:36] Speaker C: You need to go to that tent and contact them at the tent.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: So that's what we do.
[00:46:41] Speaker G: And I'm not saying that we're out here just giving people everything. Here's the thing.
I always tell them, I'm going to take five steps towards you. I just need you to take one step towards me.
[00:46:50] Speaker F: That's right.
[00:46:50] Speaker G: You take one step. Guess what? I'll take another five. You just got to take one. Just let me know you're ready. Because it's very time consuming. And not just time consuming, but it can be exhausting.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:47:02] Speaker G: A lot of wolves out here. And that's why we got to be sheepdogs.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Sheep dogging it in downtown Portland.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: Good talk. Well, we're going to head out. Yeah, do it, Spence. Appreciate your time, bro.
[00:47:13] Speaker G: Of course.
[00:47:14] Speaker F: Real pleasure.
[00:47:14] Speaker G: Pleasure, man. Absolutely appreciate you coming out and thanks.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: For what you doing.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: Thanks, brother.
[00:47:18] Speaker G: All right, man, see you tomorrow.
[00:47:22] Speaker C: See, I appreciate you. Promise.
You would think this would be a lot easier, but this is like, this is how it is. Like that.
Yeah. In studio stuff is easy. You just sit down and talk. That's why everyone just has podcasts, because you just sit down and talk about, hey, guys, how are you all doing? Good. Yeah.
[00:47:48] Speaker B: How many people you got on the street?
[00:47:51] Speaker C: We have about a little over 50.
[00:47:54] Speaker D: Nationwide we have 105.
[00:47:55] Speaker C: And then you include other staff.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: Do you have enough to cover your property right now?
[00:48:07] Speaker C: Obligations.
[00:48:10] Speaker D: It's always a teeter totter. When I do, I have to fight for manpower. Like, hey, my guys are at kind of capacity. Or, hey, I can take on more property or the cup keeps having. Pouring water.
[00:48:23] Speaker C: Yeah. And we will not keep a bad apple.
Our mantra is we don't report people. We report patterns.
[00:48:36] Speaker F: Right.
[00:48:37] Speaker C: But if there's a pattern, they're gone immediately because you don't.
[00:48:41] Speaker B: What are the patterns?
[00:48:42] Speaker C: Why do people get fired?
Inability to move up and down, use of force, escalate, de escalate. We have people that work for us that have been in law enforcement for years. We have people that have been mental health workers, social workers, all kinds of different backgrounds. And at the end of the day, they can all fail or succeed if they want to learn.
Some people, we have a pretty decent training program. Yeah, no, it's good. I mean, for security, I think it's top notch.
Do we get a full two year field training program like law enforcement? No, we do get several weeks, and then every week like this Friday, we're going to have training scenarios. So we're constantly running training scenario programs, and those are fast evolving.
[00:49:53] Speaker D: Little tinfoil action.
[00:50:00] Speaker F: Cool.
[00:50:02] Speaker C: So open drug market, right?
[00:50:06] Speaker A: People can just do drugs, no consequences.
[00:50:11] Speaker D: Yeah. PD has a little substation right here, and they're.
[00:50:19] Speaker C: Know selling is illegal, people shouldn't be using, but it is what it is.
[00:50:23] Speaker D: Go.
[00:50:24] Speaker C: Are we ready to walk? Okay, cool.
[00:50:26] Speaker D: We'll work on this side.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: So when we came into old town about three years ago, just at that location, Lancet, where we were, where we drove through 27 10th, just on that one block.
[00:50:42] Speaker F: Right?
[00:50:42] Speaker C: And on the backside, we had a guy, he was a member of a prison gang. He was running a weapons cash, so anyone could go up there and get any weapon they wanted. He was getting paid several hundred dollars a month just to run this weapon cash, including firearms. We never saw firearms in there, but, yeah, they have firearms.
We did an investigation at twelveth and Taylor at a camp there. And after it was turned over to the city, the city went in, made multiple arrests, and got multiple firearms.
[00:51:13] Speaker F: Okay.
[00:51:18] Speaker D: Guys.
[00:51:21] Speaker C: So 27 10th criminal organizations running the street, selling dough. Reed and I are doing an investigation. One day, this is like a week later, and we're in the surveillance van, and we're not even looking at the property next door. We're looking at Lansu chinese garden, trying to figure out who the shot caller is.
[00:51:38] Speaker F: Sure.
[00:51:38] Speaker C: Who's running the block.
[00:51:39] Speaker F: Right.
[00:51:40] Speaker C: And all of a sudden, a guy comes up, hits the dude in the mouth. This is across the street. Where's my money? Starts shaking him around. And he then goes into a tent and starts beating up a lady inside there. Rolls her out of the tent, right into traffic, like 10:00 in the morning, completely naked. She was in there with a guy, right, because they're running prostitutes out of this tent.
[00:52:01] Speaker F: Right.
[00:52:02] Speaker C: And just a complete nightmare, man. I mean, this is the worst. Hey, how's it going?
[00:52:07] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:52:08] Speaker C: Good to see you.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: You guys start working it.
What does that look like?
What does that mean, that you guys move into that area?
[00:52:20] Speaker C: Yeah. It's a multipronged approach. Right. And this is kind of that overseas approach that we basically modeled our company out of. And you have to attack it not just from the security model or even law enforcement, but you want to attack it as an NGo, as a nonprofit. You want to make contact, see if there's anyone there that has a soft heart that you can get information out of but also lead to a better place.
[00:52:45] Speaker F: Right.
[00:52:46] Speaker C: If you can take those women that are being forced into prostitution off the street, you don't want to wash.
If you want to take those women off the street and get them into a shelter.
[00:52:56] Speaker F: Right.
[00:52:59] Speaker C: That revenue source, that prostitution revenue source is no longer there.
[00:53:03] Speaker F: Right.
[00:53:03] Speaker C: You're taking that away from the criminals. Right. Same thing with their clientele for drugs. If you can get people into rehab, if you can get people into shelters, that's less clients that criminal organization has. What we always say is it's the path of least resistance. We can't stop the river, but we can block it and change the direction.
[00:53:24] Speaker F: Of the flow of the river.
[00:53:26] Speaker C: We can save lives when we're there in the moment, but we don't control the city of Portland. We're an enhanced service.
[00:53:34] Speaker F: Right.
[00:53:34] Speaker C: We're here to augment law enforcement and fire and rescue.
[00:53:40] Speaker F: Right. Right.
[00:53:41] Speaker C: That's our job. The goal is to remove everyone that wants help.
[00:53:45] Speaker F: Right.
[00:53:46] Speaker B: Even if they don't know that they want to help yet.
[00:53:48] Speaker C: Yeah. And what we find is when we're out here every day, there's about an 85% resistance, rate of resistance to change. So if you're a case worker and you make contact with your person once or twice a month, every contact, you're going to have an 85% to 90% resistance. Rate of resistance. Right. But sometime during that seven day period, they were at their lowest of their low and they were ready for change, but no one was there to catch them.
[00:54:13] Speaker F: Right.
[00:54:14] Speaker C: You're not going to catch someone in their low point.
The idea that you can just magically show up once a month and catch them when they're ready for change. I mean, how often are you ready for change?
[00:54:23] Speaker F: Right.
[00:54:25] Speaker C: It's when we've had us able to self reflect or something's happened in our life that's given us the ability to say to ourselves, I think I need a change now. So what we do is, as a security company, we're out here every day, we're going to the tents with loving one another, with the nonprofit and other organizations, we're contacting people 23456 times a day. And that ability allows us to get more people in than most organizations can.
[00:54:51] Speaker F: Right.
[00:54:51] Speaker C: I mean, we're getting 90 to 100 people in shelters every month.
[00:54:54] Speaker F: Right.
[00:54:54] Speaker C: And that number is if you think that only three to four people are doing that amount, the reason they're so successful is because they're not sitting in an office building, they're going by tents every day.
[00:55:04] Speaker F: Right.
[00:55:05] Speaker C: So that's really the change, the difference, and when you continue to do that. So when we came into old Town, there were about 500 tents here. Now we have chronically, what, 50 less?
[00:55:14] Speaker D: Probably less than 50.
[00:55:17] Speaker C: So it went from 500 tents to 50 tenths. So the people who stay, yeah, those are going to be the people that are really resistant. But even in that group, we had a guy we've known for 18 years.
He was on the street 18 years. We knew him for three years. And he chose to get off the streets.
[00:55:35] Speaker F: Right.
[00:55:36] Speaker C: He moved back to New York. He reconnected with his family. This happens all the time. We had a guy that he was the number one individual engaged in theft at a target, and we got a call from a property. This gentleman was living in tents on an adjacent property. They were concerned about a lawsuit from the property that was actually. That had the target on this location. And they said, hey, we had this homeless person on our property. He's crossing over to this other property. He's robbing a target.
We don't know what to do about it. We're afraid that we're actually going to get sued because we're letting this guy basically stand our property.
And we sent one person over there, one of our directors, Mariah, for Portland area. She spent about 5 hours with this guy. 5 hours with this guy. He had two or three huge tents, like Bedouin style tents, thousands of dollars of target merchandise with the tag still on it.
And she talked to the guy for 5 hours, and after 5 hours, he agreed to call his wife back in Florida. They reconciled on the phone. She drove him to TPI, got him an id.
We were able to get him a ticket back to Florida to where his wife lives. And we put him up in a hotel that night, cleaned the entire campsite, gave all that merchandise back to target, and all that took was a five hour conversation. The problem is, no one is actually going to where these people live, right.
If you're going to go talk to someone and have a conversation about changing their entire life, you have to meet them where they are.
[00:57:07] Speaker F: Right.
[00:57:08] Speaker C: You can't expect them to come to you and have a meaningful conversation. That just doesn't happen in life.
[00:57:12] Speaker F: Right?
[00:57:12] Speaker C: Does that make sense?
[00:57:13] Speaker B: It does, yeah.
What do you need to achieve that goal? Is it just time with the resources you have? Or is it greater resources, more people, greater capacity?
What keeps you from the dream of everybody who wants help has got it, and now they're in a better life?
[00:57:38] Speaker C: We do it by having a vast network of other organizations that are working together on the streets. We need churches, other types of nonprofits, shelters. We need people on the street engaging people. See, look, right behind us, we have a tent. There's, like, 20 people hanging out. No one's going to come by and offer them anything.
Now, right here, you can come and get a free meal three times a day, but there's no one actually engaging the group. Right here.
Look, if someone was engaging this group six, 7 hours a day, this specific group, that group wouldn't be there anymore. Right. It's obvious that the person on the yellow bike is a drug dealer. They just pulled up.
They were looking around, digging in their pockets. They've already done three handoffs since we've been talking. Looking at them, looking at you right now, he's digging in his pocket, getting his next dope. There's more dope out to hand out. And so if you had people engaging this community engagement on multiple levels, where they don't think it's just a security company, and it's not just the police, but it's all these different nonprofits. It's a cleaning services company. It's the property manager. Right. This level of community engagement scares people away because it's so many eyes on the street that drug dealers no longer feel comfortable. If we just had someone giving tours at night and a group of people walking, ten to 20 people walking around in tour groups doing historical architectural tours, that would actually scare drug dealers off. They would go somewhere else. So as you increase community engagement, you're going to make that area higher risk area to engage in criminal activity. Most people think, oh, if we just get more cops. But what you really want from the cops is community engagement.
But when we get too many cops, that engagement turns into a civil rights violation. That turns into a death. Right. Because cops have to escalate. That's how you make arrests.
[00:59:35] Speaker F: Right.
[00:59:36] Speaker C: And so then that will. Then you lose trust, and then you take three steps forward, but you go back five.
[00:59:42] Speaker F: Sure. Right.
[00:59:43] Speaker C: Every time you suffer that death in that community, you lose all that momentum you gain, because most of that community engagement momentum should be happening on the local level, with politicians, with property owners, security companies, people that are actually here every day doing the work.
[01:00:02] Speaker F: Right.
[01:00:03] Speaker C: So if you're overseas, right, you're in Afghanistan. What do you want from those tribal leaders?
[01:00:08] Speaker F: Relationship.
[01:00:09] Speaker C: Relationship.
[01:00:10] Speaker F: Yeah.
[01:00:11] Speaker C: Right.
You're a Green Beret. You're working overseas, you got operations. You have an area of operations you got to work in. You want intelligence right. You want community partners. You want people that are not just going to feed you intelligence, but maybe they're willing to even do a couple of things for you.
And that kind of level of community engagement, that's what's needed here.
And just like in Afghanistan, they don't want it to be from the government.
It has to be localized, and it has to be built over several years.
When we came to Old Town, no one thought we were going to do anything.
They said, you're crazy. This will never work. And they didn't understand it's going to work. It's going to take two years, but it's going to work. If you have ten criminal organizations, it's easier to hide. But when you only have three, everyone knows who you are.
I can talk for everybody.
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I get it.
At some level, does it come down to more contracts with more pieces of property? Because that means more income to hire more people with a heart that you're looking for to do more work better?
[01:01:31] Speaker C: I think that's definitely at least a third of the pie.
[01:01:33] Speaker F: Okay.
[01:01:34] Speaker C: You got to have the right security work, but you also have to have the right nonprofit work.
[01:01:39] Speaker F: Right.
[01:01:40] Speaker C: And then you have to have the.
[01:01:41] Speaker B: Contracts also feed into the nonprofit.
[01:01:44] Speaker C: As a company, we give a large percentage of our income to the nonprofit.
[01:01:49] Speaker F: Got it.
[01:01:50] Speaker C: Because at the end of the day, if you're not changing individual lives, you have no hope in changing community.
[01:01:55] Speaker F: Right.
[01:01:57] Speaker C: That's part of it. The other part of it is the intelligence services. We have full time private investigators, and we have to know who people are.
[01:02:05] Speaker F: Right.
[01:02:06] Speaker C: If you're just walking around and you're doing security work, you're still in that reactive state. You're not doing proactive work. You're still reactive because you're waiting for something to happen.
[01:02:16] Speaker F: Right.
[01:02:17] Speaker C: But when you know, hey, okay, this person, we know who they are, we know their mo, we know kind of crimes they engage in. Right. They're at this tent over here. And so we start knowing these things. We could pass people up to our investigators. They'll kick that information back down.
That's more helpful. So there's really three pieces. There's intelligence, then there's the security work. When you actually got to do operations, including law enforcement, there was a shooting. We found who conducted the shooting. We immediately told PPB. We had it recorded. We were able to hand that to them.
[01:02:53] Speaker A: Right.
[01:02:54] Speaker C: Making that arrest made that corner over.
[01:02:58] Speaker F: Right.
[01:02:58] Speaker C: And this vacant property lot or vacant lot we were just at. No one wants to sell dope there anymore.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: Right.
[01:03:03] Speaker C: So it's being able to conduct the right type of intelligence with the right type of people, and then knowing exactly when to strike.
I get it. Cool. Well, let's go check out another spot.
[01:03:19] Speaker F: Got it.
[01:03:26] Speaker C: See, like, that person could be dying.
No one cares.
[01:03:32] Speaker G: Nobody cares.
[01:03:37] Speaker C: We all carry narcans.
The nonprofit gets it for free. This is why you got to have that nonprofit. We get, like, $45,000 of Narcan this year for free.
We give Narcan to four to five other nonprofit agencies that don't even have it.
How many people did we Narcan last week? Guys, what do you think?
[01:04:03] Speaker F: Someone.
[01:04:04] Speaker C: Yeah, we take their echelon patch, and then we get a red cross stitch into it, and I think you can get up to three m on there then. That's called fish.
[01:04:27] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:04:30] Speaker C: About 80 people up there.
Yes.
They have the money.
Skate park.
When we took this property over, this was my first contract in Old Town. And then when Reed came up here, it was our only contract still. So Reed and I's only contract, and it had the highest call volume in central District for any multifamily residential property.
And now there's no call there ever, because we've literally transformed this entire community.
[01:05:12] Speaker B: How does that story get out?
[01:05:15] Speaker C: This is how it gets out. Podcasts getting you to tell our story.
[01:05:21] Speaker F: Right.
[01:05:22] Speaker C: That's how it gets out, because no one cares about security guards.
There's 4500 sworn officers in Oregon working law enforcement. There's 20,000 security guards.
Yeah.
So this is the exact spot that.
[01:05:47] Speaker A: We were talking about in Old Town.
[01:05:48] Speaker C: I wanted to bring you here to kind of explain just the geography and how it works. So we were just right down here in Old Town. This pedestrian bridge. If you're going to steal a car in Old Town and you're going to ditch that car, you're going to ditch it on this street back here, and then you're going to run across this bridge. Once you get down on this side of old town, you can disperse in five, six different directions. You can jump in a tent. There's a hundred different tents you can jump in really easily.
[01:06:17] Speaker F: Right.
[01:06:18] Speaker C: Same thing on that side. So a lot of people, this becomes more of a high crime area. You have a lot of shootings and stabbings in this area still now today?
[01:06:27] Speaker F: Yeah.
[01:06:27] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Still today. We had a shooting just, what, two weeks ago, Austin jumped on the guy, got shot in the neck.
[01:06:34] Speaker D: NATO. It was on NATO and Everett.
[01:06:36] Speaker C: Yeah. So he would get into it here, and then they would run this way, come up. This is NATO down this quarter, and then they would just run, trip, cross. And so you're constantly seeing the cops coming and going, trying to run across the bridge or stop.
So this is one of those critical choke points. So when we took this on as a first property, obviously it was very difficult because it's a pedestrian thoroughfare that's not patrolled because cops don't patrol foot anymore.
[01:07:05] Speaker F: Right?
[01:07:06] Speaker C: So we had to come up with a strategy. How are we going to control this area and really dominate this space? And so what we did was we just stood up here all night long. We would park the surveillance van. We would park the surveillance van right there, and we would park it in such a way, we would even have a camera in there and point it right at the bridge. And so we would take pictures of the bridge at night and let people see, oh, people up here selling dope. Or like I said, there was a guy that was raped in the elevator, right? We would constantly be parking these surveillance vehicles, our sprinter vans, minivans that are blacked out, these types of things. And so when you do that, you're creating that kind of psychological overtone, and it just scares people away. And literally, within three months, this bridge, no one likes to use this bridge anymore because they constantly feel like they're being watched, they're being seen.
Just one of the tiny little things, right? You want to always same thing overseas, the area operations. You want to find out you have a footpath coming from this village to that village. You want to control that flow, at least. You want to know information, who's using that footpath when they're coming and going. You want someone counting how many people are using it, who's using it. The trucks that are going down that road, right? Same thing here. You constantly want that information. Like I said, we used to be the highest call volume, 15 major calls a day. Our first week, a guy bring it, stabbed him in the belly with a katana sword right in the lobby. First day, first week, and now there's no calls here.
[01:08:49] Speaker A: I mean, look how peaceful it is.
[01:08:51] Speaker C: My God, we got our guy up there.
[01:08:57] Speaker D: That's all.
[01:08:58] Speaker C: Just waved for me up there. We got our guy down here. Boom. Right there. All the critical choke points. Doing overwatch, seeing what's going on. He just waved at us. Guy down here, community engagement, hanging out with the smokers. He's going to find out, hey, we've seen these suspicious vehicles.
Who's been walking through here lately? Anybody selling dope back here, right? Constantly getting that information.
Boom, boom, boom. I don't know, man. This is what we do, right? At the end of the day, private security is here for the individual.
Right?
I don't think that individuals know that.
I think that a lot of people, they look at private security and they think it's law enforcement.
Privateer law enforcement, private policing. And it's not. It's actually.
And when we look, Reed and I, when we first looked at what kind of security company we want to own, we looked at everything and we said there's two models, there's observant report, which doesn't work because no one's going to show up. Report to who?
[01:10:01] Speaker F: Great. Right.
[01:10:02] Speaker C: 45 minutes response. And then the other one is pretending to be law enforcement when you actually don't have the. And you have no authority.
We have no authority. You can't actually do that. You just end up being a bully.
And so we said, well, what are.
[01:10:17] Speaker B: We going to do?
[01:10:17] Speaker C: And we looked at the overseas operations model, we looked at the Green Beret Oda model, and that's what we went with. We said, hey, CIA intelligence working in and outside the government in order to direct security operations that are community based. And that's what we went with. And you know what? It really works.
[01:10:39] Speaker F: Yeah.
[01:10:40] Speaker C: We should go back to the studio. Let's go to the studio and talk some more.
[01:10:44] Speaker D: And a cherry on top of that is a lot of people come to us and say thank you for bringing back our sense of well being, making us feel safe again. Right. That's the kind of payout I get. Close.
