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.
It 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 the community.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: My name is Eli Saslow. I'm a staff writer for the New York Times. I live in Portland, and I'm writing about Echelon and what they do.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Welcome back to the write along. I'm Alex Stone, your host, our guest tonight is Eli Saslow. He is a journalist for the New York Times, and he's here to actually kind of do something a little bit unique and different. He's going to be really interviewing me. We've done this a couple of times with other media personalities, and I think that this guy is one of the, probably the top tier journalists that I've encountered.
Of course, I'm not just saying that he actually does a really good job. You've won the Pulitzer Prize twice.
[00:01:29] Speaker C: I have.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: In journalism, yes.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: Thanks.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: And so that's seen as a pretty substantial type of prize, right?
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Within journalism, it's sort of the big prize, but I've won that prize basically for doing deeply reported embedded work where I write about how places are dealing with the big issues in the country, which is how we met, because I think you guys right now are very much at the forefront of some of the big issues in the country and working on them here in Portland. So really, I just appreciate you letting me tag along and spend time kind of watching and observing and learning about what you guys are doing.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: So you're not a flyby night journalist?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: I'm not a fly by night.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: I don't mean that as a pejorative, sure. But you're paid to spend time on one topic versus other journalists who are paid to meet deadlines with a variety of topics. Sometimes 10, 20, 30 stories are working at one time.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: And my job is unfortunately becoming increasingly uncommon in journalism because my job is very true. It's expensive.
[00:02:30] Speaker A: Right?
[00:02:30] Speaker B: Like, I write eight stories a year and I make a full time salary, whereas there are some people whose job is to write eight blog posts a day. Right.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: So it's a different kind of thing. It's a lot of writing, whereas mine, the stories are long, but at least I don't have to do eight of them a day. It's bearing in for several weeks at a time to really invest time and energy in the people that I'm writing about.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: I really like that.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Nuanced.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: I like that. And I wish we had more of that. I think sometimes there are individuals within media who, because they're meeting a lot of quotas and they're restricted on time, so they don't always get the facts right. And I don't think that necessarily they don't want to be known as people who don't get the facts right because they're in general.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: But you just don't have the time.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: Totally.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: It sounds like you have plenty of time.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think a lot of people write from a place of assumption, basically, or sometimes from a place of stereotype instead of going.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: And actually an unconscious bias, possibly.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Unconscious bias.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: We'll say this. Possibly.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yes, definitely. And you can't overcome those things unless you go and you talk to people for yourself. You see things yourself.
I think in general, just as people in the world, it's easy to feel sure about things that you don't know very much about. Actually, once you start to learn a lot about them, your opinion becomes much more nuanced.
[00:03:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: You start to see things.
Everything's nuanced. So the main goal in my work is to achieve a place of nuance, to write about things as they really are by talking to people on all sides of an issue and really by going there and spending real time watching things play out for myself, like a good documentary does. And I think that's when you really achieve stories that allow people to get to go beyond a place of assumption and stereotype and actually learn about the real issues.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: So you're a word documentarian.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a pretty good way to describe what I do.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Well, as a CEO and owner of multiple companies, including a media company, including Echelon, including other tech companies, I want to make sure that my audience understands we're not friends. I mean, we're friends. I like you, but we don't know each other. We don't have a long term relationship.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: No.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: I'm just beginning reporting about what you guys do now.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: I met you through another media contact.
In no way are you here to be biased or unobjective.
[00:04:53] Speaker C: Right, totally true.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: You might see us having some sense of banter, or I might have to protect you. You might even protect me because we're going to go on the streets.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: But in no way should the audience feel that you're not here to tell the truth and be objective.
[00:05:06] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: I should say, though, if I have to protect you, we're both in trouble. Let's have you doing the protecting.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: I like that. Okay.
So I kind of want to leave it open to you to discuss what your goals are, kind of your mission and your goals.
[00:05:22] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: And then I want you to feel free to ask, because I want you to remain objective. So I don't really want to interview you. Why don't you interview me? And then afterwards, we'll hit the streets and see what's going on.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: That sounds great.
In general, in my work lately, I've been writing a lot about, I think, things that you guys and people on your team on the street deal with every day, which is basically like the intersection of the homelessness crisis right now in this country, the fentanyl epidemic, and the number of people dying, rising public safety concerns in a lot of big cities around the United States. And I wonder for you, when you were starting this, if some of those things were already in mind, if those issues were manifesting in ways that made you realize what the need was, or if some of it has even surprised you over the last few years in terms of what's been happening on the streets and what your team is encountering in Portland.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: So, great question. I would say primarily that I knew when I kind of transitioned in 2016, 2017, and prior to that, when I was in law enforcement, I was moonlighting in the security field.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: And in that time, I had met several other owners of security companies who were telling me, yeah, they're having a hard time hiring. And I was actually at a particular job where I was liaising for a large venue, concert venue. I was their liaison to law enforcement agencies.
[00:06:56] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:57] Speaker A: We had some talent that was going to be on stage that night. They were on a national tour, and an agency came from another jurisdiction, from another state. They had a warrant based on a criminal complaint of a sexual assault that happened in a tour bus. And so these types of things. And I'm also liaising with local law enforcement as well. And I could hear the grumblings of the lack or the inability to recruit effectively. And so that. And along with, I was on the board of the Fraternal Order of Police here in Oregon. The FOP, or the Fraternal Order of Police, is a national fraternal order. I think it's the first or second largest unionizer for law enforcement officers. So they come in and help you create a union to help you protect against your city. They negotiate your contract with private security companies or just with no law enforcement and law enforcement. So being on the board of the FOP, it was constant. I mean, recruiting had been going down for almost a decade.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: And is that because the jobs had become more dangerous? Like, people feeling disempowered in their jobs, people feeling like they were working in communities that didn't want them to perform the roles that they were performing. I mean, what were the issues that was driving that?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: I would say there were a lot of issues. I would say the overarching issue was just the lack of participation in things that would be considered civic duties or civic groups. VFW, Eagles Lodge, Elks Lodge, Mason lodges, all trending down. All trending down.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Right.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: All trending down. Right. Even participation on levels within certain areas of government, not just governmental bureaus and trying to hire through those bureaus. I think that that was trending down as well in smaller jurisdictions, specifically.
And then we've had a trend of urbanization where people grow up in smaller areas. They only need one or two kids to really stay on the farm, to inherit that farm. The other kids will go to college and get degrees, and they go to urban centers.
[00:09:11] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: And so just all these trends merging together, this convergence of macro trends, I think, led to the idea that I need to work on myself.
When you grow up in a small community and you know that community, you have a sense of civic duty because you're in the community, you have an emotional attachment.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: But when you grow up in rural Iowa, and then you go to college at Stanford, but then you take a job in Portland, in a suburb, like, mean, where's your civic?
[00:09:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: So you don't feel connected. You don't feel connected. Lack of emotional attachment leads to the divestment. Sure. Of time and civic duties. And so to couple that, people are no longer staying in careers for 20 to 30 years at one place. Right. So they're no longer staying where they originally get their job. They're then taking, well, I'm going to get $12,000 or more a year here. So there's a lot of free agency. And again, I think all that attacks the ability to build that civic tie, that community group. I think the only people that are retaining these community groups are faith groups.
[00:10:25] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Right. So people are staying active in their faith groups. Catholics, people like, sure, they're still connecting there, but they're not connecting to jury duty or the VFW or the Eagles lodge. These.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: I mean, I guess I also wonder.
You've seen some of these issues from a few different vantage points.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: You were in law enforcement. I've read some about that. I know there's some parts. It's out there, and I know it was a really challenging and in some ways pretty horrific experience, but it was.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Definitely a learning experience.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
And you said you were doing some moonlighting even then.
[00:11:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: So you had a sense of the private security industry. A little bit. But I wonder, especially because we've been talking about assumptions and how what I am often trying to do is get people beyond assumptions, what your notions were at that point about what private security was, as you were just beginning to moonlight when you were in law enforcement, what your sort of perception of the industry was and some of the problems with it or the flaws with it or the strengths of it.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: So excellent question.
[00:11:36] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: You're an investigator.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Investigative journalism right here.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: Do this all day.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. I love it.
When I initially stepped into the security realm, I had a sense, and I think the sense is common for most people coming out of law enforcement going into that industry, is that it's a false dichotomy.
[00:11:59] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: We get trapped by this false dichotomy, people coming out of law enforcement, going into the security world. And that is that there's really two tiers of security. Observe and report. And that's for people who don't have experience.
[00:12:12] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Lack experience or these things. Right. And then there's the other industry or the other part of the industry, which is. It's a kind of a law enforcement esque or law enforcement light model. Right. And that's what I saw, those two models.
[00:12:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: In fact, I was hired to be a liaison to law enforcement. They wanted someone who understood laws, who could determine whether that band, whether law enforcement should get involved.
Because does a fight between a band members, is that civil or is that criminal? When does it arise to a criminal level that a venue could possibly be sued or have some type of concern that there would be an issue like that?
[00:13:07] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: And then they would want to get law enforcement involved, and if they didn't, that could be seen as bad.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: And just to interject for a quick sense of perspective. So say in a city like Portland, what percent of private security or security jobs are sort of more that observe and report and what percent are like the sort of law enforcement light, as you termed it nicely?
[00:13:29] Speaker A: That's a really good question. So in Oregon, there's around 30,000 security guards.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: Huge number.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Huge, huge. For sworn officers. In Oregon, it's like 4500.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Wow.
That's amazing to think about.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: And I would say 85% to 90%. Well, maybe 80%. The numbers are hard to find.
[00:13:49] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Because if you drive an armored vehicle and you're a guard and you have a firearm, with the department of labor statistics, you're considered basically a driver, a teamster.
[00:14:04] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: And so the security realm is difficult to gather statistics on for this.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: So it's probably even bigger than the 30,000 in some ways.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: No, that's people who actually have an arm, who have license, who is licensed by the state of Oregon to provide security.
[00:14:16] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Now, there are a lot of moonlighters. Sure.
I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but a lot of bouncers. This is very common to not have a certificate.
But yet in that 30,000, I would assume at least 15% are doing that law enforcement model versus the observant report.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: So the observant report is the lion's share. I mean, that's by far the most.
[00:14:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: It's really a byproduct of the insurance policies.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: Right. The insurance company is like, hey, you need to have security.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yes. And when we think about observe and.
[00:14:51] Speaker C: Report.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: This is probably my own stereotype, but I have an idea in my head of, like, somebody sort of standing in a uniform, maybe outside a building or outside of a club or a restaurant, often unarmed, maybe sometimes armed, maybe with a taser, something like in the middle. And basically just that person's job is they're looking to see if something bad happens, and then they themselves are calling the police. Is that essentially what that role is?
[00:15:16] Speaker A: They observe and they report. Right. They call 911. So the reason that model doesn't work is because the lack of emergency services no longer allows that model to function.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Healthily because they call, and oftentimes nobody can respond, no matter what.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Another part of why that model really fails is there have been a lot of recent lawsuits that the companies are sued because they don't act. And so they'll say, when you're wearing a uniform, there's what is called implied authority. So even though you're not law enforcement, there's implied authority.
[00:15:51] Speaker C: Right.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: And that means that people are going to assume that you are going to act. Even in security, you don't have a duty to act. Unlike law enforcement, that does have a duty to act.
[00:16:01] Speaker C: Got it. Right.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: And so there was a case up in Washington state, and in Washington state, there was a very famous, typical unarmed service handling a transit contract.
[00:16:12] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:16:13] Speaker A: A group of individuals ran and beat up a lady, stole a purse. She dies, and it happens in front of the security guards.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Oh, jeez.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: And they don't attempt to actually stop the assault.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: They just call 911 and watch. And so what happens during that situation? Everyone sued everybody else. All the people involved in that guarding company lost their jobs. They sued, and they won because technically.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: They were doing their job.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: We did our job. Right.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Maybe they did not exceed expectations.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:16:45] Speaker B: They observed and they tried to report.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: They were concerned they would get sued if they did anything above and beyond contract. And that used to be the case. And so the family of the victim sued, and everyone had to pay, even the garden company. And then the garden company sued the city or whoever held that transit contract. Right. And the garden company won.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Right. And then the city sued the garden company, and then. They mean everyone actually won, and then everyone lost at the same time. And so a lot of people are realizing because of these lawsuits that it's really not enough to observe and report. In fact, observe and report in Oregon is not even really a security function.
[00:17:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: Like, you can go on a firewatch. I can observe and call police. That's not really a security function. I'm not really doing anything.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: A private citizen can do that. So you don't need a security certificate to conduct that type of behavior.
[00:17:44] Speaker C: Right.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Obviously, then when you were thinking about building this and what you wanted to do, I'm sure that some of the flaws of that observe and report model were in your head. You knew you wanted to create something much more proactive.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Not initially.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: You didn't know initially.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Okay, I did not know initially.
I thought, because I was prior law enforcement, that when I observed and reported, it would be taken more serious.
[00:18:11] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: Something would happen.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: It would be escalated as a real call because I've done death investigations and sex crimes.
Eventually, dispatch would know who I was, or they would know team members, and then that's not the case.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: And were there a few frustrating sort of learning moments where you realize, this is basically worthless? I don't want to be doing this. This observe and report model. I mean, early on, when you didn't yet know, do you remember times where you would call or you would report, and it was like, nobody's home?
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Yeah. All the time. Every single time.
[00:18:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: I wouldn't say it was one particular incident. I would say it was all the incidents. It was every single incident. And then the straw broke the camel's, and I don't want to talk about any particular. Well, we'll stay Portland.
[00:19:05] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: We're in a lot of other jurisdictions, but in Portland, they're only at around 35% force strength.
[00:19:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: So the FBI has an FBI number this many per capita, and they're at one third of that recommended amount of policing per capita. In an urban environment, they're only at one third of that amount.
[00:19:26] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: So the officers are literally, they have an MDT or a system in their car with a screen with all their calls, and they're literally eight calls down. And so, I mean, what are you going to do? You have a security guard that says that he saw someone punch somebody. Okay, well, I got six shootings.
You know what I mean?
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: I'm not saying that we need more law enforcement.
[00:19:52] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: I want people to be clear. I'm not this gung ho pro law enforcement guy.
[00:19:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: I think that we need a multidisciplinary approach. I've been writing about this for years. I think that law enforcement needs to change, and it's a paradigmatic change that needs to occur within law enforcement, similar to what happened with the fire departments when they pulled the ambulances into the firehouse and they all became emTs. I think a lot of this has to change. I think a lot of burdens have been placed upon law enforcement unduly, unnecessarily. There's no one else to take those mental health calls after we shut down all the state institutions after O'Connor v. Right. The O'Connor case in 1972. So we kind of got stuck with, in law enforcement, we got stuck with all these responsibilities.
[00:20:41] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: And really, we were never supposed to have these orderlies and doctors and nurses and medics. And there are so many things that we do, and I think that we need to rethink how we do law enforcement.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: People probably see some of this, right, in these kind of, kind of videos, and particularly when they're out watching the work you guys do on the street. But I guess it would be helpful for me, even from a macro level, to think about. So you step into this, basically, this vacuum, I would say, like this empty space a little bit.
Know, in your company where you have so police officers, they have eight calls waiting on their screens that they can't get to. Ambulances, at least in Portland, the city you referenced, often taking a very long time to respond, or sometimes the city being at level zero with nobody able to respond, increasing mental health needs, basically a time where the demand for these services has gone up. The strains on small businesses, parts of the community have gone up, but the ability of law enforcement enforcement to respond for a number of reasons has gone down.
[00:21:47] Speaker C: Right.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: So it's like kind of this perfect storm where you're going in and you're providing some version of part of that solution. And I guess I wonder if you, was it all sort of learned experience doing the job? Was it conversations with people? Was it looking at other models of, like, how do we proactively step into this space? I mean, how did you start to figure out, I want to build a company where we have 24 hours patrols in parts of the neighborhood where we're not just standing in front of places that hire us, but we're working in whole neighborhoods and we're narcanning people and we're doing, how did you land on that model and how much time did that take?
[00:22:24] Speaker A: It took about six months. My business partner, Reed Kerr, was integral in that development process. But basically we said we need to keep doing what we're doing, but we need to pause and really take time to really think about this. We need to take a deep dive, stay down long and think. And during that six month period, we looked at probably six different things, right? One, we looked at what is law enforcement? Really?
What is law enforcement?
And then we looked at what is private security? What is that? Right. And then we looked at those kind of led to other areas. So we looked at, can private security be law enforcement?
Right. You have law enforcement who have to conduct investigations and arrest people.
[00:23:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: Now, all those tiny little things are small civil rights violations that are illegal, ethical and moral. We stop a car because they don't use an indicator or turn signal. So we're violating someone's rights for twelve minutes to id them, give them a warning or a ticket, let them be on their way. Right. But all that is escalatory because you're building, if I pull someone over for something small, but I detect an odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from the vehicle, well, then going to the next level, that is an extended stop.
[00:23:51] Speaker C: Right.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Which is an extension of that constitutional violation. Right. And then if I determine that there's probably based on questioning that something else, that they might have drugs or alcohol in their system, that then turns into field sobriety tests, which is another extension. If those tests indicate that that individual is likely to be under the influence of an intoxicant, well, that's likely going to end up in an arrest, which is another continuance of that rights violation.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Sure. Right.
[00:24:25] Speaker A: And so what we realized is security should never act like law enforcement, which is crazy because like ten to 15% of the industry is acting like law enforcement, right.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: And the other 80, 85% is standing and reporting or for the most part, observing, reporting. Observing and reporting.
[00:24:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: And so we said, hey, okay, sometimes you have to make an arrest. If someone is on a property and they're committing a major crime, you have to take them into custody. So law enforcement can take them into custody. I mean, there are periods, there is a little bit of overlap, but primarily, that action is not a rights violation. It's actually protecting someone's property rights or a person's rights. Right. So if someone attacked you right now, I might take them into custody and call cops. But really, I help save your life.
[00:25:18] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: And so saving your life is a civil rights action.
[00:25:23] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:23] Speaker A: Does that make sense? So there are minority groups that hire our company because they receive hate crime or they receive notifications that they're likely to receive threats and. Threats and hate crime against their property. Right. And so we take on these contracts, and we protect the right of these groups to worship or free speech in public spaces and private spaces.
[00:25:48] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: So a lot of this, what we determined was that as a security company, we're really more like a civil rights organization.
[00:25:55] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Like, if we can really hold on to that as a value system and as an anchor, then we're really doing our job. And we're doing it, and we know why we're doing it.
[00:26:06] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: We're not doing it because we think because we're, quote unquote, want to be cops. We're doing it because we want to protect people's rights.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: And that gives us a sense, and it gives every team member on our team the sense that we're doing something amazing for people.
We're protecting people's rights and civil liberties.
And sometimes a lot of people on my team, we don't always agree with what rights are. Right?
[00:26:31] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:26:32] Speaker A: This is why we have Supreme Court in district courts and a federal district court and supreme courts of states.
One of my clients has a planned parenthood, and they don't call law enforcement when people are harassing the females coming in and out. Right.
[00:26:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:47] Speaker A: They call us.
[00:26:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: And so sometimes we're protecting all these rights. And so that's really what we went for. But we also discovered that as a security company that's in a neighborhood, our job should be to decrease the amount of criminal occurrences.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: But not to do that through the law enforcement model.
[00:27:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: So it was like the fourth thing we looked at.
[00:27:16] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: Because we want crime to decrease.
[00:27:18] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Because we're protecting people.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: We want to protect your right to own a vehicle.
[00:27:22] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: We want to protect your right for you to go outside and enjoy private space.
[00:27:26] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: And so how do you do that?
If you're not law enforcement and you don't want a law enforcement model, how do you decrease crime?
[00:27:35] Speaker C: Right.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: Well, we realized the way you decrease crime is through community engagement. As engagement goes up in a neighborhood, the criminal element will consider that more risky to conduct business in that area, and that criminal element will decrease, and therefore, crime occurrences decrease. And so what we said, well, how do we get people in the streets in order to make that shift? And again, it's like the civil rights movement. So when we wanted a change in civil rights, what did we do? We took it to the streets.
[00:28:12] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: This is why protesting is actually a very effective form of redress against the government, because you're owning space. And during that ownership of that space, it's very hard for entities to commit crimes or civil rights violations or any type of abuse because you're owning it with witnesses. So we said we're going to engage the community and get the community out. Sometimes we even do barbecues. Like we did a barbecue on July 4, we fed 517 persons in a very disaffected area, people living on the street.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: But when that happened, our call volume for that entire district plummeted during extremely hot day on the summer. On a summer day when we would typically get 2030 calls, we got five.
[00:28:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: And that's because people had something positive to do. They had a place to be, and they were engaged.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: And they're engaged with people that have eyeballs.
[00:29:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:07] Speaker B: And when you say your call volume, those are clients who recognize, hey, something's happening at our building, outside our business, whatever else. And they.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Person A is punched person b in the face in front of that business. They're blocking the door. They're fighting, physically fighting. And I have customers who can't leave the store.
[00:29:24] Speaker C: Right.
[00:29:25] Speaker A: Can you come check it out?
[00:29:26] Speaker B: And they're calling you.
[00:29:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: So that day, less incidents occurred.
[00:29:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: Because as community engagement increased, incident levels dropped.
[00:29:37] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Taking it to the streets, as you put it, like, sort of becoming increasingly proactive and going out into neighborhoods. Is that over the last year? Two years, how long ago did you guys really go all in?
[00:29:49] Speaker A: So this is something I've always done.
I used to work with nonprofits 20 years ago, a long time ago, and then I did it a lot in the military. And what I've learned throughout my short life is that when you engage communities, that is de escalatory.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Right.
[00:30:11] Speaker A: When community increases, that deescalates an entire community. So rather than trying to de escalate one person on one incident. We're de escalating an entire community by creating community, by creating a network of relationships and friendships that give the opportunity for communication to occur, for mass deescalation.
[00:30:32] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: Right. The UN does this.
That's like the fifth thing. We looked at overseas operations. We looked at us aid, we looked at Band Aid, we looked at how groups like NATO or UN step in and deconflict areas like Rwanda.
[00:30:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: And now you have might have, you might in these areas, you might have some ethnic issues, but there isn't a complete genocide going on.
[00:30:56] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Like in Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina. So you have all these areas. Right. And if you apply the right pressure and you force community into an area. Not force, but if you support community in an area, the results are actually dramatically. It's amazing. Yeah, it really is.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: I wonder, just because there's something novel in that approach, if it's been hard, if explaining that to your clients is challenging, or if they intuitively get it, or if they have to see, you know, say, for instance, I'm a small pizza shop in a certain neighborhood of Portland that's having a hard time, and my windows have been broken six times in the last year, and I've got people sleeping outside, and it's detracting from the customer experience.
I say, you know what? Heard great things about echelon. I'd love to work with them.
And I can imagine people who weren't used to this model, they might say, well, we've hired you, and I see your guys spending a lot of time in this encampment that's six blocks away and doing a lot of work there, but nobody's standing in front of the pizza shop enough. Right. I wonder if you have to explain this to those places or if they get it or they see in the results. I don't know.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: So you have to do both. You have to explain it, but they also see the results.
There's always a balance between how much quote unquote, nonprofit, ngo style work you're due we perform versus taking calls and being effective in showing up in three or four minutes.
[00:32:43] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: So to get back to the business model, and this is really the 6th thing, what we realize is security isn't security unless it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
[00:32:52] Speaker C: Right.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: In America, we have a seven and a half minute response time for law enforcement in Portland. It's around 15 minutes.
[00:33:00] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: Right. So if there's an incident and we can't respond in under seven minutes, then we're failing.
[00:33:07] Speaker C: Right.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: Because in order for a community to be engaged, you have to have short response times. And so that's why we went with the district model. The district model helps, and there's an economy of scale. Number one, it's cheaper for the client, but number two, it provides 24 hours, seven day of service. So in the explanation of to get back to the question, I had to chase that rabbit.
[00:33:30] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Sometimes there are rabbits that need to be chased.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: I get it.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: There's carrots that have to be bartered with and holes to be dove into. So to get back to your original question, when you go to explain to the client the overall business model, they get it because these all make sense. I can't tell you how many people said, well, I just need security at night. I don't need security during the day. My windows are only being broken at night.
[00:33:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:33:57] Speaker A: And I was like, yeah, but the person breaking your windows is probably walking by your business like, five times during the day.
[00:34:02] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: And they're like, really? And I'm like, yeah. And you're going to just contact them during the day. And I said, yeah, because we want to build community.
And it's hard to build community in the middle of the night when a guy's coming up to you in a uniform and they look all scary.
[00:34:17] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Right.
And so daytime is for community building, and nighttime is for protection, protecting property rights, protecting persons rights. You don't have the right to punch this guy in the face because I'm here to help him.
And so without that balance, without that daytime nighttime balance, it's impossible to get the results you need because you can't deliver the entire service.
[00:34:42] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: So in the neighborhood that we're about.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: To go see, old Town.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Old Town. Old Town Portland.
[00:34:47] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: I mean, it's a phenomenal neighborhood. I also live here, but also a neighborhood that's kind of been at the epicenter of a lot of the challenges we've been talking about. So in a neighborhood like that, who are your clients? How many do you have? What kinds of places are they? What sort of diversity of kind of City life are you guys representing over there?
[00:35:07] Speaker A: Great question. So we have a lot of clients, about probably 70 clients. Right. And some of them, we don't always just take the big clients, but you got to take everybody, and you have to make it affordable for everybody or it doesn't work if you can't get the entire community engaged, it takes a longer time to deliver results, and it's harder to maintain that level of safety.
We have clients that are small time businesses, mom and mom shops or mom and pop shops, whatever you want to call them.
[00:35:40] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:40] Speaker A: And so we have these little delis. We got, I don't know, like a museum or something. Right.
[00:35:48] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Very little foot traffic, and they pay a very minimal amount.
But they're engaged.
[00:35:54] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Their clients are engaged, and they're looking out their windows and they're making calls. Right.
We got a snitch on every block. But we do. We have multiple snitches on every block.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Because, I mean, old town is not, we're not talking about a huge neighborhood. If you have 70 places in that.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: Lot of coverage in one block, we could have five clients.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Right, exactly.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: And so that's how it works.
[00:36:17] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: You have this tiny little salon, or in some buildings, you have multiple businesses officeing out of that building. And we'll have those as individual clients. Right.
But let's say in one building we have three or four clients, but they're all going to be parking at different times.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: Right.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Because they all have different work schedules. And so they're all filtering that intelligence, that communication, whatever's going on in the neighborhood, that intelligence is filtering up. Right. And it's allowing us to then respond to calls and identify people and stay on top of everything.
[00:36:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: It's feeding in real time.
[00:36:55] Speaker C: Totally.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: This is probably hard to quantify. I guess I'm more asking for a sense than anything beyond that. But ten years ago in Portland, say, or ten years ago, really, in Albuquerque or Seattle or any of the other places where you guys are working, I guess. And again, could be wrong, but my own assumption would be that the nail salon in old Town ten years ago didn't maybe need this in the same way.
The need wasn't as high.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: No, the needs are higher now.
[00:37:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess that's what I'm asking.
Those 70 places in old Town Chicago.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Has always been Chicago.
[00:37:37] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Since the Chicago mob.
[00:37:39] Speaker C: Right.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: I mean, let's just be honest here. New York's always been New York, a lot of things. So what people don't realize is crime is cyclical. Obviously, you know this. But crime is cyclical. It's generational.
Right. It tracks population growth. It also tracks the growth of industries.
Right.
And so in Portland, what you had was, what I loved about Portland was it was really what in Europe you'd call a village, right. It wasn't really a city. It was a city, but it was a city that was, like, pristine and perfect and low crime.
And it was almost like a cathedral village, like in Scotland or like in France somewhere, right?
[00:38:25] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Kind of far off from the big cities where, know, professional criminal elements were not aware of. There was someone out there running mean, like taking bets.
[00:38:37] Speaker C: Right? Yeah.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: There was someone out there in that game doing that thing, part of that life, feeding off of the population.
[00:38:44] Speaker C: Right.
[00:38:45] Speaker A: And over the past ten years, Portland has graduated from that pristine cathedral village that you would find out in the middle of the Netherlands to a major city.
[00:38:57] Speaker C: Right.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: With major city problems like New York, Houston, La, Atlanta, Miami. Right. You have legitimate. When I went through my gang training in law enforcement, I was told by my instructor that there are no nationally recognized gangs that operate in the state of Oregon.
[00:39:19] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:39:19] Speaker A: Meaning like, sure, you have the biker.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: Club, local factions, but not.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah, you have the biker club that lost to the California biker club and they were forced to move up here in the, this is their territory now.
[00:39:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:39:34] Speaker A: And they're the head of the council of clubs. And you have that, but you don't have a street gang that's a rolling 60s street gang that's paying dues to a 60s crip gang or some type of gang in LA that wasn't occurring. Right. And they weren't sending people in to give advice or there was no eb and flow of information either.
[00:40:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: It was just people just said, oh, rolling 60s. That's cool. I'm going to call myself a rolling 60. And they were little guys got together and they were rolling 60s, but they really weren't. Now you have legitimate criminal organizations that have moved in to Oregon and have claimed that territory. And part of that is traffic. It's easier to travel than it was 30, 40 years ago.
[00:40:25] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Right. A lot of that is the policies that have occurred over those several decades.
[00:40:32] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: In Old Town, for instance, this neighborhood that we're going to go see here in a few minutes, what percent of not just the calls that you get, but I guess your clients concerns trace back to these sort of epidemics of the moment that I was talking about at the very beginning and that I spend a lot of time writing about, like the homelessness crisis, the fentanyl and sort of opioids epidemic writ large, the mental health situation right now in the country, how much of what you're hearing about in old town traces back to that and to the organized crime around those things?
[00:41:09] Speaker A: So that's a really good question.
I think the majority of people that make calls are people that are, whether they, I don't think a lot of them know that they're reporting crimes or not crimes.
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Right.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Because I think the average citizen isn't rocking around with a criminal code in their head.
[00:41:26] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Kind of like probably you are now and I am because of my training. I think what they're reporting is abnormal behavior, or what they perceive to be.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Abnormal behavior, which is often probably mental health crises.
[00:41:39] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Or there's a guy, he's been digging in this backseat of this car, and the window looks broken.
[00:41:46] Speaker C: Right.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: I don't know if he owns the car. I don't know if he broke into the car.
[00:41:50] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: It just seems od. Right. Those are the typical phone calls. Oh, there's a guy, he's waiting at the back door of a building.
I think he has a tool in his hand.
[00:42:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: But it could be the handyman.
[00:42:03] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Actually, I think, gosh, he kind of looks like the handyman, but I don't know.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:07] Speaker A: Maybe you should check it out.
[00:42:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
[00:42:09] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: And so they're seeing something that's an abnormal behavior.
[00:42:12] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:12] Speaker A: And that's why calls are so hard to triage and understand. Unless it's like, hey, someone just stabbed someone in the neck.
[00:42:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: And you're like, check in or out.
[00:42:20] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: So these abnormal general calls, they're just saying, hey, there's a behavior happening. And I grew up in West Lynn, and I just moved to downtown Portland like two years ago. And it's really od.
[00:42:36] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: I had to chase that rabbit. But to get back to your answer, I would say 100% of the calls are for this reason, because there are so many.
Portland is a city that has embraced an extreme form of libertarianism when it comes to freedom of speech, freedom of religion. I mean, there was a giant, like, church rally just the other day.
[00:43:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:43:03] Speaker A: I mean, they really allow people to do whatever they want. You can do yoga naked and a.
[00:43:09] Speaker B: Lot of drug decriminalization.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Extreme forms of libertarianism.
[00:43:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Where marijuana is legal, narcotics has been decriminalized on a personal use level. And so when people see things, if I grew up and I never saw someone smoke meth and look high, I would call that in as Od behavior.
[00:43:31] Speaker C: Right.
[00:43:32] Speaker A: And that's what's happening. And this is overwhelming, not just us, but 911 or boeque or these communication centers that deal with these issues. And so get back to your question. It's really everything.
And obviously meth, psychosis, all these things. It's always a problem. It's always going to end up in some type of call.
[00:43:56] Speaker C: Yep, totally.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Well, I could sit and talk to you here all day and you're really good at it. I could probably continue to do that.
[00:44:03] Speaker D: I will.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Over the next week, the New York.
[00:44:04] Speaker A: Times should give you a podcast.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: Hey, there we go. We've got a lot of podcasts. I know a whole audio app. You can promo the Audio app.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
And when I'm done writing the story about you guys and what you guys do, that'll be on the audio app. People can listen to it instead of reading it. But, yeah, I'm also just really excited to go out there and see it and watch sort of this district model at this moment unfold in places where the need is so high. So thanks for letting me tag for it.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Let's roll out then. Let's go.
[00:44:35] Speaker C: Sweet.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:44:37] Speaker A: See you on the streets.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: All right, looking forward to it.
Where's the boundary between old town?
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Down Broadway.
[00:44:50] Speaker E: Broadway.
[00:44:51] Speaker D: Broadway.
[00:44:51] Speaker A: And what Pearl district is to our right. This is the Pacific Northwest college of Arts. Old town is to the left. And look, here's the guy running a chop shop.
[00:45:00] Speaker D: Yep.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Are there certain pockets of old town that end up producing more calls and more issues, or. It's pretty much, well spread throughout.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I would say the transit. The mass transit areas, because the majority of the calls are usually drug related, whether it's some type of drug induced psychosis or whether it's people arguing about drugs, whether it's a stabbing or shooting about drugs. Right.
Whatever. And the quickest and easiest way to sell dope is to be on a mass transit line, whether, like, Broadway, easy street. You come right off of the bridge. Boom, you drop in, you can hit another street and drop out.
Transit, easy. You jump off, you jump on, and you're gone.
[00:45:55] Speaker C: Yeah. Right.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: Of your calls, how many do you think eventually end up involving police or.
[00:46:03] Speaker E: That's pretty rare.
[00:46:05] Speaker A: I would say maybe 2%.
[00:46:08] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:46:08] Speaker B: So it's a very small volume.
[00:46:10] Speaker A: Yeah. We're really taking the calls. We're taking a lot of de escalatory calls.
[00:46:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: We're working on deescalation, and if there's a real crime, we're definitely going to call the cops, because we're not the police.
[00:46:24] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Right. I would say the majority of calls don't warrant a law enforcement response. Even in 911, it could be a medical issue. Now, if there's a medical issue.
[00:46:34] Speaker E: Hey, there's a guy here.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: It looks like he's passed out. We take it.
[00:46:37] Speaker C: Right.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: I mean, we want them to call an ambulance, but we're, like, usually right there. So we'll narcan them, and emedics will show up, and then they'll take them.
[00:46:46] Speaker C: Got it.
[00:46:47] Speaker B: And you're going to stay in until the ambulance arrives like you're narcan somebody and then waiting.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: Yeah, well, you have to stay with them because Narcan.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: And sometimes you need a lot of it.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Sometimes you need a lot of it. But Narcan in the human body has a shorter shelf life than the new designer drugs coming out of China.
So if you narcan them, they can.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: Come out of it, you can think.
[00:47:13] Speaker A: They'Re okay, and then, boom, there they walk away, and five minutes later, they overdose again.
But the problem is. But they're like, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. And you can't stop them from believing, but we notify them. Hey, I know you think you're good, but I just did chest compressions on you, and you were like talking to the ancestors, bro.
[00:47:32] Speaker C: Right.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
You were communing with the dead.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: I mean, your team is narcaning somebody every day.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: I would think so. I would think so sometimes. No, because, again, it's cyclical.
[00:47:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: What badge is on the street right now? You might get a really.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: This is an old town.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: Yeah. This is what is called the pit. Not by us, but by people who live here.
[00:47:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:48:02] Speaker A: All right, man. So we're no longer in studio. We're actually in the streets.
Shit can get kind of crazy.
So you can walk away at any point.
[00:48:12] Speaker D: Appreciate that.
[00:48:13] Speaker A: You don't have to engage. And remember, we do not have a duty to act. We're just trying to make shit safe.
[00:48:18] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: Okay. You're not wearing a vest. You're cool with that? We talked about that.
[00:48:22] Speaker D: You're going to got a notebook and a pen, is my. Yes, exactly.
[00:48:26] Speaker C: Great.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: We're going to hook up with Jacobson. Last names only.
[00:48:29] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: You'll be able to talk to him, interview him, and the area we're going to used to be one of the highest call volume properties before we took it over. Now it's a lot more chill, but shit could pop off.
[00:48:41] Speaker C: Okay, great.
[00:48:42] Speaker D: Okay, sounds good. How long has Jacobs been working with you guys?
[00:48:44] Speaker A: About two years.
[00:48:45] Speaker D: Oh, great.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: Yeah, he's a coordinator. Community coordinator. So he's a supervisor.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Hey.
[00:48:52] Speaker D: Hey. How are you? I'm Eli. Nice to meet you.
[00:48:54] Speaker C: Great.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: Cool, bro. You want to roll?
[00:48:57] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: All right.
[00:48:58] Speaker D: You said patch?
[00:49:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:49:03] Speaker E: In the last month, there's been three or four dudes who have required a fair amount of naloxone and CPR to come back to life.
[00:49:12] Speaker D: I mean, what I've heard in other cities and some here. Is that also, like, the average number of doses required has really gone up lately?
[00:49:21] Speaker E: It's gone way up. We stopped carrying the four milligram narcams, and now we're carrying eight milligram cloxidose because it takes almost twice as much.
[00:49:32] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:49:32] Speaker E: To get people to come back.
[00:49:33] Speaker D: And how many of the eight milligrams are you having to hit some of these people with?
[00:49:37] Speaker E: Generally, it's two eight milligrams and sometimes a four.
[00:49:41] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:49:41] Speaker D: And is that. I mean, every neighborhood in the city, are those three or four concentrated?
[00:49:46] Speaker E: It's predominantly old town and downtown. Every so often, you come across one in Goose Hollow.
[00:49:52] Speaker D: But typically. I was asking Alex about this, but you're at the shift meetings and everything else. Would you say that across the company, you guys are narcanning somebody every day?
[00:50:06] Speaker E: Probably not every day, but I would say at least two to three times a week it comes up. I think our most recent one was on Saturday.
[00:50:15] Speaker D: Okay. And predominantly old town downtown. Like the main.
[00:50:20] Speaker E: Yeah, predominantly your main areas.
[00:50:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:50:22] Speaker D: I'm guessing also occasionally witnessing people who you're too late to save.
Has death become a bigger part of it?
[00:50:36] Speaker E: I'm fairly happy to say that I have not had to have anyone not make it under me.
[00:50:42] Speaker C: Good.
[00:50:43] Speaker A: That's pretty amazing.
[00:50:45] Speaker E: There's been a couple of dudes who've been, we'll say, circling the drain a little bit.
[00:50:50] Speaker D: Got it.
[00:50:51] Speaker E: But we've always been able to get them to come back after a while. Generally right around the time ambulances show up, that they're waking back up.
[00:51:00] Speaker D: But it sounds like you guys often are beating the ambulance there.
[00:51:03] Speaker E: Yeah, well, we come across them. The ambulances don't go out in patrol. They have to be called there.
[00:51:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:51:08] Speaker E: So we come across them every so often, somebody will just kind of .1 out and just sort of be like, hey, there's a guy in this parking lot who is just laying here.
[00:51:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: And I would say, because everything switched from meth to opiates or synthetic opiates, there's so many people in the days or asleep that few and few people are calling these types of things in. I mean, they're not really seeing.
[00:51:33] Speaker C: Right.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: They're just seeing someone passed out. No one really knows if they're going to die or not.
[00:51:38] Speaker C: Right.
[00:51:38] Speaker E: It's hard to recognize the signs of overdose for people who aren't trained on it. That's why we have so many trainings on it. We make sure that we know what we're looking for.
[00:51:48] Speaker C: Right.
[00:51:48] Speaker D: It's also become increasingly normalized for, like, people passing by on the street. They might just not react.
[00:51:54] Speaker E: It's become so normalized that one of the most recent dudes who I had to give Narcan CPR to, by the time I came across him, he had already been given one dose of Narcan by another homeless person who carries it for when they overdose.
[00:52:07] Speaker C: Right. Yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Really? Did he travel from that location to a new location?
[00:52:12] Speaker E: No, he was just in that parking lot doing his thing, and then the dude fell over, and he walked over and narcanned him once, and that didn't work. So he came and got us who were standing across the street.
[00:52:25] Speaker D: So when you go out on patrol or, like, when you're starting your shift, what do you have on you right now? I mean, Alex has talked about sometimes you guys might be handing out a cigarette. It's Narcan.
Do you have stuff in your car?
[00:52:40] Speaker E: On me, I have cigarettes. I have Narcan and other medical supplies with me in my vehicle. We have resource totes that are provided to us by loving one another. And that's got food. It's got hygiene supplies. We have cases of water that we carry around shelf stable food. Sometimes there's clothing, sometimes dog food. Yeah. We do come across a lot of homeless people who have their pets, and for a lot of them, it's almost more important to ensure that their pet eats than them.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:53:14] Speaker E: As bad as it is to say humans can eat dog food.
[00:53:16] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:53:17] Speaker C: Right.
[00:53:18] Speaker D: And also on you right now, for your own personal safety, what else are you carrying? Flashlights. Flashlights.
[00:53:25] Speaker E: Essential personal safety wise. I've got pepper spray and a firearm.
[00:53:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:53:32] Speaker E: I have carried a taser in the past, but I feel like it's just a little bit more of an aggressive show of force than I need.
[00:53:38] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:53:40] Speaker E: I'm not somebody who gets into really heated engagements with people. I'm generally pretty good at talking them down.
[00:53:46] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:53:47] Speaker D: It sounds like deescalation is probably a huge part of the job.
[00:53:50] Speaker E: Deescalation is the biggest part of the job. Deescalation, compassion and relationship building. That's all it's about.
[00:53:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:55] Speaker D: Did you know that going in?
[00:54:00] Speaker E: It was told to me in all the hiring process, but I really, truly didn't understand the scope of it until I started working. Like most of the officers here, obviously, I came from a more traditional security background where it's more just if there's somebody, they need to leave.
[00:54:16] Speaker C: Right.
[00:54:17] Speaker E: And that's kind of all there is to it.
So working here taught me a whole lot about how to talk with people, how to build relationships with people.
Going through the city for as long as I can, it's created some very interesting perspectives. It's interesting to go out and contact people and to always remain humble and remain aware that I'm way closer to being that guy than I ever will be, to being the guy who pays me to kick people off of their.
So they truly are. It's all the.
[00:54:55] Speaker D: And I guess I wonder, this question for you, too, Alex, in terms of.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: Company wide, but I'm looking around doing security while y'all are talking to me.
[00:55:04] Speaker C: Sure. Good.
[00:55:05] Speaker D: I'm not doing that, so I'm glad you are.
Do you run into compassion fatigue or do you worry about it, or do you do things to protect against it? I mean, just kind of like guarding your own empathy. When you're seeing a lot of human.
[00:55:21] Speaker E: Suffering every day, you just sort of have to remind yourself that you're doing everything that you can.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:55:30] Speaker E: Obviously, there comes a certain point where you can't help anyone.
[00:55:34] Speaker A: Let's hold up here for a second.
[00:55:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:55:36] Speaker A: It's good to hold up on a corner because it gives you two angles.
Does that make sense?
[00:55:41] Speaker D: Get a sense of what's going on.
[00:55:43] Speaker A: So I can see all the way down to the end.
If I see something frantic or odd, abnormal, that gives me. I'm pretty much covering half of the property, the perimeter right now, by holding up on a corner and just chilling, just being part of the community, hanging out, saying, hi. Hey, what's up?
[00:55:59] Speaker D: And this is a big property?
[00:56:00] Speaker A: Pretty big property, yeah.
Several square blocks.
[00:56:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:56:05] Speaker D: How many units? Do you guys have any sense?
[00:56:07] Speaker A: 400, 500, maybe.
[00:56:08] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Something like that, yeah.
So, yeah.
[00:56:16] Speaker D: So you were saying you remind yourself that you're doing all you can.
[00:56:19] Speaker E: You do all you can. There's a certain point where you can't do anything anymore. There's a certain point where it becomes up to the individuals to meet you halfway on help. And if they don't want to, that's their choice. And it's not going to stop me from reaching out and doing what I can. I mean, you develop relationships with people, and you start to realize that a lot of them are out here because of decisions that they continue to make. And that's okay. They're people and they're members of the community, and they're still deserving of compassion and resources.
[00:56:51] Speaker D: Now, doing security this way, when you think back on the previous ways that you did it, has it changed your perspective on that, too.
[00:57:00] Speaker E: 100%. There's no more effective method than this. I've never had any sort of job that even encouraged me to build connections with the individuals that I'm contacting.
Quite literally, just, you are here. You are a person, and you need to leave.
[00:57:17] Speaker C: Right.
[00:57:18] Speaker E: This is the first time I've ever been encouraged to build a relationship with them. I mean, I. I would say that at this point in my life, I know and regularly associate with more homeless people than I do non homeless people on a daily basis, because that's.
[00:57:33] Speaker D: I mean, I'm guessing a very large percentage of the people you're dealing with on your shift. Right.
[00:57:38] Speaker E: Especially right now, you get non homeless individuals. We get a lot of people coming up just asking for directions.
[00:57:44] Speaker D: Sure.
[00:57:45] Speaker E: Asking for advice, asking for where certain things are. But I'd say the vast majority of people I'm talking with not only are they homeless, but they're people who I've now known for years. So it's become not so much a security guard and transient relationship, so much it's just sort of the game we're all playing. I hardly even have to ask people to leave anymore. You just kind of walk up and say, hey, what's up, guys? And they go, yeah, we'll be out of here in ten minutes.
[00:58:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:58:14] Speaker E: That sounds great. Thank you very much.
[00:58:16] Speaker A: It's just community members respecting each other's needs, really, at that point.
[00:58:23] Speaker E: I mean, there's no shortage of people replying, hey, thanks for being cool about it. Hey, we appreciate what you do.
It is fully and completely just different aspects of the community doing what they do.
[00:58:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:58:37] Speaker D: In a given shift, how much of your time are you responding to calls? How much of your time is sort of, like, more proactively patrolling?
[00:58:45] Speaker E: I'd say it's probably about 15% to 20% call response, 80% proactive patrol.
[00:58:51] Speaker D: Okay.
[00:58:51] Speaker A: See that?
[00:58:52] Speaker E: Proactively, they can get busier. But the thing about being proactive on patrol is you start to come across the issues that somebody would call about before they call about them. There's honestly no greater feeling than dispatch sending out a call and say, hey, you got to call for society. And you're like, I'm here, right? I'm on site dealing with spot.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: And that free time, that non call time allows you to build relationships. Right.
[00:59:18] Speaker D: And when you're patrolling, are you in the car? Are you on foot? Is it like a combo?
[00:59:24] Speaker E: I generally start my shift in the car. You drive through the district and see where problem areas are, and you park and you walk. I'd spend probably a good 60% to 70% of my time walking.
I have specific ways that I do my patrol. I don't really kick people out of places before, like 1130, because chances are a guy sitting there smoking a cigarette at 830, if you don't talk to him, he's going to be gone at 845. It's not worth making him feel aggressed. It's not worth making him feel like he's doing something wrong for existing.
[01:00:01] Speaker C: Right.
[01:00:02] Speaker E: I generally don't start to kick people out of places until either they're making a mess and disrespecting the property, causing a safety hazard for people, or they're inviting a large amount of illegal activity. But for the most part, somebody sleeping in front of a door, I will give them until well into the night before I actually have them move. Granted, I'll talk to them at the beginning of the night. I'll swing by them at 08:00 p.m. And just sort of be like, hey, man, I can't have you here all night. I'm going to check on you throughout the night.
Come later in the morning, I am going to have to ask you to move. And generally they're gone by the time I check on them again. But if they're not, they're all very respectful about moving because I gave them ample warning that it was going to.
[01:00:53] Speaker D: Alex and I have been talking about this a lot. You patrol in a lot of different districts. You have a pretty good sense of the city.
[01:00:59] Speaker C: Yes.
[01:00:59] Speaker D: I guess I just wonder over the last two years in this job, even going further back than other jobs, how you've seen sort of the landscape of some of these major endemic societal problems, change in Portland, whether it's like the fentanyl crisis, homelessness issues, public safety, mental health.
If you feel like you've seen some changes in place.
[01:01:21] Speaker E: Oh, absolutely. So I moved up to Portland in 2018, pre Covid my first year of living up here. I used to just come to downtown and walk around just because play Pokemon go or just go shopping. Then obviously, the pandemic hit, and I was down here for work, doing things with the riots and stuff like that, protecting against stuff like that. And late 2020, I was definitely able to witness Portland become essentially closed down, essentially one giant homeless encampment.
[01:01:56] Speaker C: Right?
[01:01:56] Speaker E: And then since working here since 2021 and on, it's very interesting. I'll take ride alongs around. They'll be like, hey, wow, Portland looks great. It's actually starting to look better, and it's cool to be able to be like, yeah, I could take credit for that.
[01:02:13] Speaker C: Right?
[01:02:14] Speaker A: 100%. We did that. We did.
[01:02:17] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:02:17] Speaker A: For sure.
[01:02:18] Speaker E: Downtown Portland looks as good as it does right now.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: Other people did it with us, of course, but we were trying to lead the way.
[01:02:27] Speaker E: I feel like we were the first ones out here saying, maybe if you just get to know them, they would move from out in front of your business if you gave them an idea of a place to go and some resources to take with them. And other companies in the city are starting to catch on to that, I think.
[01:02:43] Speaker C: So.
[01:02:43] Speaker E: Northwest enforcement is starting to carry around resources.
[01:02:48] Speaker A: Clean and safe.
[01:02:49] Speaker E: Yeah, clean and safe is always.
[01:02:51] Speaker A: They work with lakes.
[01:02:52] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:02:53] Speaker E: So not only is it nice to be leading the charge, but it's nice to see other organizations in Portland kind of taking up the mantle and sort of being like, hey, this is achievable. You don't just have to be echelon to get this done.
[01:03:05] Speaker A: Correct.
[01:03:06] Speaker D: I know this will be sort of a guess, but how many security organizations are working in greater Portland? I mean, dozens.
[01:03:13] Speaker E: More than dozens.
[01:03:14] Speaker A: I would say a thousand, maybe 400 to 500. Maybe a thousand individuals. So I can have a manager's contract. I'm on the board of department of Public Safety.
[01:03:24] Speaker C: Right.
[01:03:25] Speaker A: For security. So you can be a sole proprietor PI and take a contract. Okay, so a lot of these people are 1099 sole proprietors with their own manager certificate.
[01:03:37] Speaker C: Yes.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: So, dude, there's definitely hundreds.
[01:03:39] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:03:40] Speaker A: There's definitely hundreds.
[01:03:41] Speaker E: There are larger players that obviously you come across more frequently, but I can't tell you how often. I'll meet another security guard and I'll look at their arm or their batch and just sort of be like, I don't even know what company that.
[01:03:56] Speaker D: Because there are just so many.
[01:03:58] Speaker E: There are just so many. I mean, everyone needs them at this point.
[01:04:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:04:01] Speaker A: And there's a lot of people bouncing. And all those are going to be private Contractors and they have their own manager certificate, hopefully.
[01:04:08] Speaker E: It's just been interesting seeing the company grow. I mean, we've always been based here at the yards, but we've expanded just from right here all the way into the point where you go into the middle of old town. It's sort of everything the light touches is my kingdom sort of situation. Yeah, we've seen most of the yards. Why don't we head.
[01:04:28] Speaker D: Yeah, why don't we go see some more?
[01:04:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:04:31] Speaker D: So you're working days and you're handing off at night or you're working nights, are you swing shift?
[01:04:37] Speaker E: Okay, I work nights. I work 06:00 p.m. To 06:00 a.m..
[01:04:39] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:04:40] Speaker E: You don't want to see me during the day. I'm zombie.
[01:04:43] Speaker D: And you like nights?
[01:04:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:04:45] Speaker E: No, nights is what I've always preferred.
[01:04:47] Speaker A: Noah's married to the nights.
[01:04:48] Speaker C: I am.
[01:04:48] Speaker A: Really?
[01:04:49] Speaker E: It's interesting. When I was getting into security, obviously, I started on days, and then I had a few nights jobs that I had a lot of trouble staying awake for. I was even let go from a company once for falling asleep at the desk because I could not stay engaged with the job. I have never had a problem with that.
[01:05:08] Speaker D: Here, because you're out and about more and interacting.
[01:05:11] Speaker E: It's engaging.
I got into security to help people, and I didn't really know what that meant other than, like, I just want to be helpful.
[01:05:22] Speaker C: Right.
[01:05:25] Speaker E: And so I've always gravitated towards. I started with concierge type jobs. I worked at Nike. I worked in the life safety dispatch office at intel. And so that was helping people, but I never.
[01:05:38] Speaker D: But a little more distance from the ground.
[01:05:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:05:40] Speaker E: I never truly understood what security could do for people until getting into this job. It's really interesting. Every so often, people don't like people who look like this, and they'll argue, like, why are you trying to be a wannabe cop? Why are you trying to do this? And it's real quite simple. I figured out a long time ago that my gloves.
[01:06:05] Speaker A: Do I have gloves?
[01:06:06] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:06:07] Speaker A: It's a baggie.
[01:06:10] Speaker D: You figured out a long time ago that you're.
[01:06:11] Speaker E: I figured out a long time ago that my opportunities to help people are significantly greater with this job.
[01:06:18] Speaker A: So that could have fentanyl in it.
A kid could grab that and get really messed up.
[01:06:24] Speaker C: Yeah. Right.
[01:06:26] Speaker A: If I send you that, will you do the report on that?
[01:06:30] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:06:30] Speaker E: Absolutely. Baggy of fentanyl at the yard.
[01:06:33] Speaker A: It was brown substance.
[01:06:36] Speaker E: Baggy of unknown brown substance at the yard.
[01:06:39] Speaker A: Probably just sugar.
[01:06:39] Speaker E: I'm not an investigator.
[01:06:40] Speaker A: Just brown sugar.
[01:06:41] Speaker D: Brown sugar in that bag?
[01:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:45] Speaker E: You never know.
[01:06:46] Speaker D: A neighbor bringing a little brown sugar over for somebody's oatmeal.
[01:06:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:06:51] Speaker A: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you all.
[01:06:52] Speaker D: No worries. So, no. Is it the same number of people on during the day?
[01:06:55] Speaker E: Essentially is a little bit smaller. I would say day shift has about nine to ten officers working.
[01:07:01] Speaker C: Got it.
[01:07:03] Speaker E: The demands of day shift and night shift are a lot different.
They both serve the mission extremely well. But day shift is a lot more client facing. Businesses are open. It's a lot more.
[01:07:15] Speaker A: Sup baby, how you doing? Good to see you, bro. How you been?
[01:07:19] Speaker C: Good.
[01:07:19] Speaker A: Remember me?
[01:07:20] Speaker C: Yes, sir. All right.
[01:07:22] Speaker A: I want to interview you soon.
[01:07:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:07:25] Speaker A: All right, brother one love.
This guy was homeless, and we helped him get his unit here.
[01:07:32] Speaker C: Cool.
[01:07:32] Speaker A: We've actually paid his first month's rent, so he's struggling. He's like, a couple hundred dollars short on this month's rent.
[01:07:41] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:07:41] Speaker A: He's been doing really well. He's full time working, working hard. So that's what that was about.
[01:07:47] Speaker D: Where was he homeless?
[01:07:48] Speaker A: Here in Portland. Old town right here.
[01:07:49] Speaker C: Wow. Yeah.
[01:07:51] Speaker A: So he's been living here for a lot of people.
[01:07:54] Speaker E: Remember James Harmon?
[01:07:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:07:55] Speaker E: We did everything we could to keep him here.
[01:07:57] Speaker A: Iraq vet. We'll run into him eventually, I think.
[01:08:00] Speaker D: You mentioned him to me.
[01:08:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:08:01] Speaker D: Just somebody who's had a very hard time for a long time.
[01:08:05] Speaker A: There's no reason the VA doesn't have him. He needs to be in an institution, and he needs to get regulated over a three to six month period.
[01:08:12] Speaker D: What neighborhood is he staying in? He's in Old Town.
[01:08:15] Speaker A: Old Town.
[01:08:16] Speaker D: And so whoever's patrolling old town knows we know him. Knows him well.
[01:08:20] Speaker E: We know him very well. I've known him for about as long as I've been with the company. When I first started, he lived here at the yards, and then I was one of the responding officers on the assault call, which got him no longer driving at the yards.
[01:08:32] Speaker A: He thought there were snipers on the roof.
[01:08:34] Speaker E: He sure did.
[01:08:37] Speaker D: He's in the pit or he's just.
[01:08:39] Speaker A: He is usually around Lancey. Chinese guardian society hotel.
[01:08:43] Speaker D: I cry.
[01:08:43] Speaker E: Last time I saw him was on the 4 July. He was running down Broadway with a big old knife in his hands.
[01:08:48] Speaker A: Sounds about right.
[01:08:50] Speaker E: 4 July is a rough time.
[01:08:51] Speaker A: And this dude has free medical, bro.
The VA will take care of him, bro. It's just like.
[01:08:58] Speaker E: I mean, I met an individual last night over at University of Oregon who's only been homeless for four days, and he's been trying to get in contact with the VA for four days, being like, I just lost my house.
[01:09:09] Speaker C: Where are you?
[01:09:10] Speaker E: Drugs? I'm just trying to not be a 74 year old man who lives on the street.
[01:09:14] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:09:15] Speaker E: And the VA will not pick up their phone. They have put him on an indefinite waitlist.
[01:09:22] Speaker A: I knew a suicidal veteran who is still waiting to get health care. He's waiting 30. More than 30 days to get care.
I got to check, bro.
[01:09:31] Speaker D: Somebody like James, whoever's in old town every day and every night is probably putting eyes on him at some point.
What are all the things that you guys have done in a situation like that? Okay, so take James. You have somebody that you know is suffering and also causing a lot, know, occasionally alarm, obviously, in the neighborhood, other than putting eyes on him every day, what are the various things you're trying to do to get him help or the various things you try?
[01:10:05] Speaker E: Personally, I find with James that the best way to get him to calm down is just to have a conversation with him about whatever he's going through. I came across him at a call box for an apartment that we did, and he was screaming into the call box, and I just sort of pulled him aside and said, dave, james, what's going on? He just started telling me about various people who were after him and various people who were threatening him and all this stuff, and I just kind of handed him a water and a cigarette and said, hey, well, you're in luck. I do security for this building, so I'll keep an eye on that. I won't let anything happen to you. It's going to be okay. And his demeanor completely changed, and he was like, okay, yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate this a lot. Wandered off. James is really smart. I've had conversations with him when he's more lucid throughout the.
[01:10:59] Speaker A: But when he first came down to Old Town, he was very regulated.
[01:11:04] Speaker D: So are you on Old Town tonight or what you're saying? And is that how frequently lately are you doing Old Town?
[01:11:11] Speaker E: Generally about twice a week.
[01:11:13] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:11:14] Speaker E: I work five days a week. They generally put me in Old Town two to three days a week. Old Town is typically run by our shift coordinators just because the relationship building is so important.
[01:11:24] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:11:26] Speaker D: And because it's also known as being sort of, like, high need area.
[01:11:31] Speaker E: It's a very high need area. It's a very high engagement area.
[01:11:34] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:11:35] Speaker D: I'm going to end up next week. I'm going to sort of spend a full week writing about, in a big way, what you guys do as a company and what's happening in the city and all these other things. But I think I'm going to do it through, you know, spending a bunch of time with. With you guys in Old Town and what you guys are doing in Old Town, would you say, like, you're.
So, who are the four or five people that are sort of like, that have those relationships in Old Town?
[01:12:03] Speaker E: So at night, it's myself, Austin Haynes, and Jacob Luskin. Those are our night shift community coordinators.
[01:12:09] Speaker D: And it's usually one of the three in Old Town.
[01:12:12] Speaker E: Almost always one of the three of us who is posted in Old Town.
[01:12:14] Speaker D: You, Jacob, or Austin.
And what about, huh? What about days?
[01:12:22] Speaker E: Days generally abides by the same rules.
Calihoe train.
[01:12:35] Speaker D: So, like Old Town in particular, when you say you usually start by driving and then.
[01:12:46] Speaker C: Tonight.
[01:12:49] Speaker D: I know it's different every night, but a general sense of where are you driving, where are you spending time, where do you anchor down?
[01:12:56] Speaker E: So I'm going to start my patrol. Luckily, Portland's a grid system, so I quite literally down first up second down third up fourth down, 6th up Broadway, and just sort of see what the issues are. I'll park at one of our properties that's kind of out of the way. Typically three point oil. It's a secluded parking lot. It's not a highly trafficked area, and I can park my car behind a building so it's not visible from the street.
I personally have had my vehicle broken into twice and stolen once while working here.
[01:13:26] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:13:28] Speaker E: Now I'm very careful about where I park.
[01:13:31] Speaker D: Yeah, I bet.
[01:13:33] Speaker E: So I'll park there, and that's up at the top of old town. And that provides me a very good nexus point to be able to walk the rest of it.
[01:13:42] Speaker C: Okay.
[01:13:42] Speaker E: I will typically drive till about eight. I'll park my car and I'll walk from eight till about 1130.
And then at 1130 to one, old town gets a little hectic. So I get back in my car, and that way I'm a little more call responsive.
It's not a great feeling when you get called for a dispatch call and you're 15 minutes from your vehicle on.
[01:14:12] Speaker D: A typical night in Old Town, you might be responding to four or five calls.
[01:14:16] Speaker E: Old Town doesn't get super heavy. I would say Old Town is probably between five to ten calls. It's generally, that's still pretty steady throughout.
[01:14:24] Speaker D: The course of the night.
[01:14:25] Speaker E: It's less typical security calls. It's more generally businesses that will be calling about things that are happening in the area. The society hotel will call us all the time for things that are just happening at third and Davis because they abnormal behaviors.
[01:14:39] Speaker C: Right.
[01:14:40] Speaker E: They know that we're going to be there before the cops.
[01:14:42] Speaker D: And because of the location of the society hotel, they've been vocal in a lot of this stuff because it's hit them very significantly.
[01:14:49] Speaker A: Right, correct.
[01:14:50] Speaker E: We rely on a lot of our clients to provide us with information about what's going on in the city.
[01:14:55] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:14:56] Speaker E: So typically from about 1130 to two, I'll be vehicle based responding to calls. That's also when things get hectic in other districts. So that allows me to go check in on the downtown officer Goose hollow slab town, pop across if I need to. As a community coordinator, it's my responsibility to show up whenever anyone gets into a use of.
[01:15:16] Speaker A: So do me a favor. Look back over your shoulder at these tents.
[01:15:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:15:19] Speaker A: You see anybody?
One person. Right?
[01:15:22] Speaker D: I see one person.
[01:15:23] Speaker A: Remember how many people were there when we walked by earlier?
[01:15:26] Speaker D: Yes.
[01:15:26] Speaker A: How many?
15.
[01:15:29] Speaker D: 810.
[01:15:30] Speaker A: They're 15.
[01:15:31] Speaker C: They scour.
[01:15:32] Speaker A: There are 15. I counted.
Engagement.
[01:15:35] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:15:36] Speaker A: Engagement cameras brings everything down legally, ethically, and morally, just by having people out. It's like civil rights movement. How many racists are going to come out with dogs and fire hoses and look bad on the video?
So if you own the streets and you do engagement. Right, you get less activity.
Right. If we could stay here for another couple of hours and all the drug dealing would just end.
[01:16:04] Speaker D: Because cameras are out here.
[01:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really that easy.
[01:16:08] Speaker D: All you got to do is hire a camera crew to do every block.
[01:16:12] Speaker A: That'd be awesome.
It's the uniform and this because they don't know if he's security.
[01:16:19] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:16:20] Speaker D: I mean, the uniform, like, just even talking a little bit about it seems like it has big pros and cons. Right.
[01:16:27] Speaker E: It's got just as many pros as cons.
[01:16:30] Speaker C: Correct.
[01:16:30] Speaker E: Honestly, obviously, people will take you a little more seriously. People will respect your request, and it provides a good opportunity, because when somebody in this uniform is extremely personable, handing out resources, I always talk to people in the city. Your contacts need to be casual, compassionate, and confident.
[01:16:52] Speaker C: Right.
[01:16:52] Speaker A: I like that. Casual, confident.
[01:16:54] Speaker D: Three C's.
[01:16:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's good, bro.
[01:16:56] Speaker E: And so people see somebody dressed like this being that way, and it sort of disarms them. But at the same time, we're what I like to refer to as cop like objects.
[01:17:07] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:17:07] Speaker E: And people are not a big fan of cop like objects.
[01:17:10] Speaker A: Correct.
[01:17:12] Speaker D: And you were also saying the relationships with law enforcement has.
[01:17:18] Speaker E: They've come and travel around. When I first started, law enforcement was not a super huge fan of us because they were strapped and they were stressed and they were upset that we were taking their cake.
[01:17:28] Speaker C: Right.
[01:17:28] Speaker E: And nowadays, the cops show up and they're almost relieved to see us. They show up and they go, oh, cool. Have you already checked all the doors? Did you clear it already? Have you made sure that you called the alarm company? You got the owner on the way?
[01:17:41] Speaker C: All right, cool. Thank you.
[01:17:41] Speaker A: We're out of here.
[01:17:42] Speaker E: 75% of our job. Here's a cad number. We're going to go to where the shooting is going to be.
[01:17:47] Speaker C: Correct.
[01:17:47] Speaker D: Because they got a lot to do, and you're getting dogged on a lot.
[01:17:52] Speaker E: In this city for not coming to stuff they do.
But quite honestly, 90% of the things you call the police for, you don't actually need law enforcement for security is perfectly legally and able to handle that situation.
[01:18:09] Speaker C: Right.
[01:18:10] Speaker E: The police are really only necessary when you need a mobilized response from the state, correct?
Yeah, pretty much. If somebody's rights need to be taken away, I'd like the state to do their freedom of movement or their freedom to life. Exactly like the state to do that.
[01:18:30] Speaker A: They're specifically qualified to do that, yeah.
[01:18:33] Speaker E: Other than that, though, I am perfectly capable of asking a guy to please leave a convenience store and stop throwing things.
[01:18:40] Speaker C: Right.
[01:18:41] Speaker D: So in a given week, you're not calling the police very often. If there's an OD, you're calling for.
[01:18:47] Speaker E: An ambulance, I call medical. If there's an OD, I call the police. If we take somebody into custody, obviously we're required.
[01:18:54] Speaker A: There was a gentleman that pulled a firearm the other day. Kind of.
[01:18:58] Speaker E: Yeah, there was a man.
[01:19:00] Speaker A: This is a couple of days ago.
[01:19:01] Speaker E: On the 4 July, there was a dude who had a firearm, discharging it into the street and being very aggressive with myself and Austin.
And I'm on the phone with the police with my firearm drawn to low, ready, getting behind cover, listening to please do not hang up. This is the 911 emergency. Your call is very important to us.
And then when they finally did pick up, I gave them all the information and I actually had to hear the dispatcher go, yeah, well, we're on high Priority calls only right now, so I don't have anyone I can assign to this call. Just sort of like, there is a man with a firearm shooting. Shooting the ground in old town, and.
[01:19:44] Speaker D: They didn't have anybody.
[01:19:45] Speaker E: Yeah, it took a good five minutes for the call to be assigned and then another five minutes for the police to show up. By the time they did, the individual was off site. And all they did was grill me about whether or not I actually saw him shoot the firearm versus just heard him shoot the firearm.
[01:20:03] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:20:05] Speaker E: And then I gave them.
[01:20:06] Speaker A: But you all were able to de escalate the situation.
[01:20:08] Speaker E: Yeah, we were able to get him to walk away and give the police last known travel. So that was good.
[01:20:15] Speaker D: It does make me think about sort of your own personal safety in the job. So your car has been broken into twice, stolen once, gun pulled on you a few days ago.
How often does that stuff happen?
[01:20:26] Speaker E: Not very often. Not often enough for it to not be worth the amount of help I get to give people. I tell people when they start out at this job that they need to find their why. They need to find the reason why they're out here doing this, because otherwise it will burn you out. Otherwise you will eventually be moving a dude who's covered in shit, who's throwing needles at you, and you'll be moving him and being real nice, and you'll start to think to yourself, hey, why don't I serve food at olive Garden?
[01:20:53] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:20:55] Speaker E: And you have to have an answer to that question. You have to develop a reason of why is this worth it?
[01:20:59] Speaker C: Right.
[01:20:59] Speaker E: And as long as you have that reason for why it's worth it, this job remains worth all of the dumb stuff. Plus, then you have casual nights, and you get to appreciate the spooky night.
[01:21:11] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:21:12] Speaker E: There's nothing nicer than a slow night. And you're like, oh, that's cool. Somebody pulled a gun on me yesterday.
[01:21:20] Speaker D: Are the casual nights rare?
[01:21:26] Speaker E: What I mean by a casual night is nobody tried to hurt me. Right.
A casual night for me is walking around, getting to know people, catching up with people who I haven't seen. If I haven't been in that district for a while, seeing what's changed, seeing what dynamics on the street have changed, I really appreciate nights where I just get to engage with the community.
[01:21:45] Speaker D: Go stop by, talk to James.
[01:21:47] Speaker C: Talk to. Yeah.
[01:21:47] Speaker E: On nights where I have to do cop shit, that's less fun. I'm not a cop. I would like the cops to do cops.
[01:21:54] Speaker A: We're taking up a lot of your time, man. Let's head back.
[01:21:57] Speaker C: All right, let's do it. Yeah.
[01:21:58] Speaker A: Because I wanted him to get on patrol for sure.
[01:22:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:22:01] Speaker D: Do your thing.
[01:22:02] Speaker A: You'll have plenty of time to talk to people, I promise.
[01:22:04] Speaker D: I know, I know.
[01:22:04] Speaker C: That's great. It.
[01:22:07] Speaker D: What's your schedule like? What nights do you work?
[01:22:10] Speaker E: I work Friday through Tuesday, Friday through. Sometimes Wednesdays if there's a call out.
[01:22:16] Speaker D: And that's today?
[01:22:17] Speaker E: No, today is a Monday. Today I'm scheduled.
[01:22:20] Speaker D: Okay.
So usually Friday to Tuesday?
[01:22:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:22:24] Speaker D: And when do you figure out what district you're working in?
[01:22:27] Speaker E: The schedule gets published the week ahead of time and then, plus I'm a community coordinator, so I have access to the schedule a couple of weeks out.
[01:22:34] Speaker C: Got it. Yeah.
[01:22:35] Speaker A: So this is a really interesting spot.
Let's just stop and talk about for a second.
[01:22:41] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[01:22:42] Speaker A: You know, the lady who has one arm in Old Town. Yeah. I wasn't going to name her, but.
[01:22:46] Speaker D: Yeah, of course you know her name.
[01:22:47] Speaker A: So she lost her arm because she overdosed and fell asleep here at these treks. And no one was awake. Everyone was pretty much passed out, and a train came and took her arm off.
[01:22:57] Speaker C: Oh, my goodness.
[01:22:58] Speaker A: And this lady, that was how long ago? Three years ago maybe.
[01:23:01] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:23:01] Speaker D: That's before I started.
[01:23:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:23:02] Speaker A: And she's still walking around old town living in a tent. Man. I saw her yesterday.
[01:23:08] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:23:09] Speaker A: Prior to this, she was actually more normalized. So this was a really traumatic incident. Obviously there's some mental health things because we saw her behavior change from that incident and she's still living here in Old Town.
[01:23:21] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:23:22] Speaker D: And you saw her on patrol?
[01:23:24] Speaker E: I spoke with her yesterday, yeah.
[01:23:25] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:23:25] Speaker E: I see her regularly.
[01:23:27] Speaker A: She's been with the same guy for like, four years, maybe.
[01:23:30] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:23:30] Speaker E: She and her boyfriend are still together.
[01:23:32] Speaker D: They still live in.
[01:23:33] Speaker E: They actually live in a tent down under that bridge right down there.
[01:23:35] Speaker C: That's right.
[01:23:35] Speaker D: That's amazing. I mean, how many people do you think are homeless right now in Old Town?
[01:23:41] Speaker E: I couldn't give you an estimation. It's over 100.
[01:23:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:23:44] Speaker A: Oh, easily.
[01:23:46] Speaker D: And you probably know many of them by name. Absolutely.
[01:23:49] Speaker A: I would say there's around 80 to 100 tents. When we came into old town, there were about 400 to 450 tents.
[01:23:56] Speaker C: Wow.
[01:23:57] Speaker A: And I would assume 1.25 occupants per tent. So old town was historically sheltering 15% of the total homeless population of Oregon neighborhood.
[01:24:11] Speaker C: Wow. Okay.
[01:24:12] Speaker A: And so right now there's probably 80 to 100 tips started on average. 80 to 100. So it's decreased significantly, but it's still a high concentration. Very high concentration.
[01:24:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:24:25] Speaker A: Very high concentration.
[01:24:26] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:24:26] Speaker E: We're doing well.
[01:24:27] Speaker A: It means you do what we can. These aren't even our properties then.
[01:24:30] Speaker D: Sure.
[01:24:30] Speaker A: That's not our property.
[01:24:31] Speaker C: Right.
[01:24:31] Speaker A: This isn't our property, but we do what we can. We offer sheltering. We work with nonprofits.
[01:24:37] Speaker C: Sure.
[01:24:38] Speaker D: And also, I'm guessing, like, your clients understand that by working here, you're reducing some of the issues that they might end up dealing.
[01:24:46] Speaker E: I would say that even when it's not on our property, people are generally happy to see us out giving resources and providing a presence. We obviously don't provide security for properties that aren't. Yeah, exactly. But I like to think we provide security for the community in general.
[01:25:04] Speaker C: Totally.
[01:25:04] Speaker E: Just by being around.
[01:25:05] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:25:05] Speaker A: Because engagement, as engagement increases, criminal activity decreases.
[01:25:11] Speaker D: Well, that means you got more work to do.
[01:25:12] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[01:25:13] Speaker A: I know we don't have a lot of time. You've got to get on patrol, bro.
You know you're my favorite.
[01:25:18] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:25:19] Speaker D: Hopefully you've met him before.
[01:25:20] Speaker E: Yeah, just a couple of times.
[01:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah, right?
[01:25:22] Speaker E: Yeah, just a couple of times.
[01:25:24] Speaker D: We're walking back with you. All right, well, no, Alex has it, so he can text it to you. Or maybe you can link us up with a text and contact.
[01:25:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:25:32] Speaker D: And that way I can figure out what your schedule is next week.
[01:25:36] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[01:25:37] Speaker D: I'm happy to have you with me. We can link up.
It'll especially be like to do some of those stretches where you're starting out in the car, walking around with you. And honestly, next week, it's just like me and an opel hanging right on. I'll walk again.
[01:25:52] Speaker E: Have a good night, you guys. Tahira.
