Cops and Teachers: The New Social Workers

Social Work

The social workers and case workers of the future probably reside in our schools and police stations, carry gradebooks and body-worn video cameras, walk the halls of schools and the streets of our cities.

Let’s face it, police officers and teachers have always been astute, street-wise (and “hallway-wise”) psychologists.  Few people have the guts to be locked into a roomful of 30 high school sophomores in a required math class for 60 minutes.   Not too many of us have stepped out of a patrol car to investigate an assault in a bar only to be greeted by a crowd of drunken, angry, college students.  (Having been both a police officer and high school teacher, and faced both situations, I’ll take the bar crowd any day.)

Good teachers rapidly learn to “out-psych” their students and trick them into learning.    I’m not talking about the advanced placement classes, mind you.  Anyone can teach advanced placement English or high school calculus.   But trying to teach a classroom of C and D students basic English grammar is a challenge of a different order.  Good teachers rapidly develop techniques to control the class and actually make students interested in the material.

Similarly police officers – especially detectives – develop techniques to help discover concealed information from suspects and informants – even witnesses – and use it to solve crimes.

Social work, however, is becoming a new calling for teachers and police officers.

Foster High School

The Seattle Times recently wrote about Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington, and a turn-around in its performance.    The article states:

The school’s guidance counselors serve as de-facto social workers, fielding requests for help with utility bills and eviction notices — even dealing with bedbugs and moldy apartments.

“We come in and hear hard, hard stories,” said Laura Linde, Foster’s chief guidance counselor. “We don’t always have the resources to help.”

They usually find a way.

Teachers have long recognized that effects outside of the classroom have a huge effect on learning.  Angry, abusive parents, hunger, homelessness, fear, even out-of-date (“uncool”) clothing all affect students’ ability to learn.   In the past educators and schools felt there was little they could do to affect such outside influences.

School lunch programs were an early intervention, instituted before World War II, to address the issue of hunger in schools.   Some schools implemented uniforms to reduce social inequity between students which prevents learning.

Schools such as Foster take this intervention to a new level, actively seeking those factors which distract students, and working with parents and social service agencies to address them.   Perhaps individual teachers are not becoming social workers, but certainly they are at the forefront of seeing problems with learning and helping to identify specific problems with individual students, so guidance counselors and others can intervene.

Similarly, many police departments are trying to move from a “warrior culture” to more of a “guardian” one.   Former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, now executive director of the Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission, has been a leader in such a cultural shift.     Part of the “guardian” idea is that police officers’ jobs are not just to apprehend criminals and catch members of the public doing something wrong (speeding), but rather to help determine and correct the underlying causes of crime in individuals and families.

Seattle Police Crisis Intervention Team

The Seattle Police Department, among others, has been at the forefront of this cultural shift.  Every Seattle Police Officer has received at least 18 hours of crisis intervention training.  More than 400 officers have received 40 to 80 hours of such training.  When police officers encounter people in crisis – specifically the mentally ill or homeless individuals who are potentially at risk – they attempt to engage social services to address their physical and mental health needs.  For individuals who police frequently encounter, the Crisis Intervention Team is building an individual Crisis Intervention Plan, which includes resources such as their caseworker, social worker, concerned family members and others who can be engaged to immediately help the individual.

Every such encounter is logged.   Sometimes an individual is violent, or armed, or so mentally impaired that officers have no choice but to use force and the result is jail or a mental ward.  But less than 7% of encounters end in this fashion.

Washington DC Frequent 911 Caller

Fire departments also encounter people in real or imagined medical crisis.  One woman called 911 in Washington D.C. for medical help 226 times in a single year.  Another study found that 14 to 27 per cent of calls to 911 for medical reasons are really not emergencies and could be handled in doctor’s offices or walk-in clinics.  A third study found that 1% of “frequent flyer” users account for 22% of the health care costs.

Salt Lake City addressed this with a “Nurse Navigator” program – a trained nurse-dispatcher handles low-acuity 911 medical calls, attempting to find the proper resources, other than a fire department paramedic and ambulance – to address needs of some frequent callers.

As Sergeant Dan Nelson of the Seattle Police told radio station KUOW’s David Hyde: “I say all the time, police and social workers are two completely different jobs while we’re going towards the same common goal. We want this person to not be relying on the emergency rooms and jails, not have to be such high utilizers of the system, and at the end of the day we want this person to have a nice productive life.”

I’m not sure where these efforts will ultimately lead.   Perhaps every American will, to some extent, become a social worker.  This actually would take us “back to the future” – back to a time when families and communities “took care of their own” before a time when government was expected to be the first line of attack for social problems.

But I hope the new equilibrium we reach does not abandon government programs all together, but rather involves most government workers – especially teachers and cops and firefighters – as “guardians” of the social fabric, yet keeps many critical social programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, school hot lunches and housing subsidies in place.

Of course there will always be hardened criminals, and evil people, arsonists and people so mentally unbalanced that they need to be institutionalized.  We’ll still need jails and mental hospitals and professional “guardians” of our social fabric.

But, with a little bit of luck, every American will become more involved again in taking care of our neighbors.

Lee Harvey Oswald and 9/11

Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald robbed my parents of their youth.

In a similar way, 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Centers may have robbed the rest of us (even those of us now in our 60s) of our youth.

When Oswald killed John F. Kennedy, he also killed – or at least damaged – the “youthful outlook” of the “Greatest Generation” – those who had survived the Great Depression and put their “youth” on hold to fight World War II.   That generation – which included my parents – came back to peacetime, after WWII, and immediately married, had kids (lots of kids – the Baby Boomers) and got engaged in work and business.   This generation saw Kennedy as a hero.   He was, indeed, a bonafide war hero from PT-109.  But he also had an eloquence and a youthful outlook on the world symbolized by his goal to put a man on the moon and his speeches including “ask not what you can do for your country …” and “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans”.

Oswald killed all that.

And afterward, of course, my own generation would not “trust anyone over 30”;  the nation became bogged down in the Vietnam War;  and my parents became “old fogies”.  Bill Flanagan on CBS Sunday Morning eloquently described the disillusionment which followed November 22, 1963.

Something similar occurred, I fear, after September 11, 2013.    For over 230 years, the United States survived on isolationism.  We were separated from Europe and Asia by vast oceans as well as centuries in time.  The United States was the “young democracy” on the globe.  Sure, we lived in fear of nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War.   But “bombs dropping invisibly from the sky” is an abstract concept.  And, of course, that nuclear war never happened.

September 11, 2001, changed all that.

The war came to our shores.

Americans died – by the thousands – in Manhattan.

And, I think, to a great extent, the “youthful outlook” of the generations who remember 9/11 died also.

Now we have a National Security Agency which tracks our phone calls and our social media and probably tracks our email and web browsing.   We’ve built a giant security apparatus worthy of George Orwell’s 1984.  Our drones strike at people around the world.   We fear the Chinese have completely cyber-infiltrated our government systems and private businesses.  Every time we go through a TSA line at an airport we are personally reminded that terrorists live among us.   We’ve wasted trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (including the lives of the dismembered) on foreign wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.   Every month another mass-shooting born of mental illness and despair seems to occur. And we are constantly reminded that our passwords are not secure, our financial information is not secure, and our very identities may be stolen.

I have great cause for hope, as well.  There’s a whole generation growing up now who do NOT remember 9/11.  The wars are winding down (although the debt they left us has not).  We’ve got a vigorous non-profit sector of hackers (in the good sense of the term) who are building applications from open source and demanding open government data.   A whole set of technologies is sprouting which will enrich our lives:   network-connected glasses, autonomous vehicles, tablet and smartphone computers, and other wonders yet to be unveiled.

Lee Harvey Oswald robbed a generation of its youth.  9/11 robbed more generations of our youth.  Can our next generation perhaps live out its dreams?

– Bin Laden changed Gov’t Tech

Osama Bin Laden’s death is a welcome event for most people, especially in the United States. Yet his life profoundly changed the direction of information technology as it is used in City, County, State and the Federal government. Indeed, my own life is vastly different than it would have been if the World Trade Center towers had not been destroyed on September 11, 2001.

The most visible effect for most Americans, of course, is our two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even there, the effect is distant from the majority of us: relatively few families have friends or relatives who serve in the military. (A notable exception – reservists and the National Guard – I have a friend in the Seattle Parks Department who has been activated three times, once each for Afghanistan, Iraq and Djibouti,and now has been notified of an upcoming fourth deployment).

Of course anyone using airports notices the “new” fedgov bureaucracy, the Transportation Security Administration and its wide variety of high and low technologies from “spread ‘em” millimeter wave body scanners to “feel ‘em up” intrusive body pat-downs.

But Bin Laden’s war on the United States changed much more in the way we live and govern our cities and counties and states.

After September 11th, the threat of terrorist attacks took a prominent place alongside earthquakes and hurricanes as a potential disaster. Now we worry about “dirty” bombs, and nuclear weapons smuggled in aboard ships and bio-attacks (remember the anthrax delivered to Congress?). In Seattle, we’ve done vulnerability analyses on likely targets such as the Space Needle, Microsoft headquarters, Boeing plants and Washington State ferries. Indeed, you can often see Coast Guard fast attack craft zooming alongside ferries. And traffic barriers and bollards protect buildings which may be targets.

Most visibly from a technology point of view, interoperable communications for first responders has taken center stage. In the World Trade Center attacks, New York City police officers in the buildings received the radioed notice to evacuate, but firefighters – operating on different radio channels – did not, and many of them died as a result. Many meetings have been held and much legislation proposed, but as of this writing – almost ten years later – we have few concrete improvements in interoperability. Notably, the Obama Administration has proposed a $12 billion grant program, financed by the sale of spectrum, to build a nationwide interoperable public safety wireless broadband network. http://www.cioupdate.com/news/article.php/3922331/Obama-Looks-to-Drive-RD-Wireless-Broadband.htm Whether Congress has the ability stop its internal bickering and actually enact legislation for this program is an open question. Nevertheless some cities and states, such as Charlotte, Harris County (Houston), Mississippi and the Los Angeles and San Francisco regions, are boldly building the first of these new, vital, networks.

Other changes include a new Fedgov Department, Homeland Security, to improve our readiness to combat terrorist threats. It’s initial steps to help us prepare for terrorist attacks include not only the TSA, but also the ill-conceived color-coded terrorism threat level (i.e. nuclear urine yellow) system. Recently, TSA and air marshal programs, fast FEMA responses, and Coast Guard interdiction of threats have allowed DHS to come into its own.

Whole grant funding programs have sprung into being as well, for example the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI). UASI is funding thousands of programs to help harden vulnerable targets, equip first responders with personal protective equipment, and conduct exercises and training to improve our ability to withstand both terrorist events and disasters.

In the Seattle area, we’ve built a secure fiber network to interlink the seats of Government and Emergency operations Centers in central Puget Sound. Seattle – and many other cities and counties – have invested local funds to construct new, state-of-the-art 911 centers and emergency operations centers. Concerned about cybersecurity threats, we’ve hardened our control networks which manage the electricity and water grids. Indeed, the whole field of cybersecurity and information technology security now has new life confronting not just terrorist threats, but the very real problems created by hackers, phishers and identity thieves. With the help of homeland security dollars, we here in Seattle are building a cyber event logging system which will help correlate cyber security events across the Puget Sound Region.

Is America safer now than in 2011, especially given Bin Laden’s death? I don’t know. But I do know we are somewhat better prepared to meet disaster and terrorist acts. We have disaster preparedness plans and we exercise them. We are a more connected society with wired and wireless networks, and we are keenly aware of potential cyber security threats. We are more vigilant.

But we have a lot – a LOT – more to do. President Obama, Vice-President Biden and their Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra have shown great leadership in boldly proposing to fund a new public safety broadband wireless network. The FCC has granted waivers to 20 cities, regions and states to build these networks. Courageous leaders in Congress such as Senators Rockefeller, Hutchison, McCain and Lieberman, and Representatives Peter King and Benny Thompson, are proposing legislation to finally build the nationwide networks first responders need to meet the challenge not just of terrorist events but also the daily incidents and disasters. Even the New York Times has endorsed these efforts.

Will their leadership overcome the naysayers in Congress and elsewhere?

For the sake of the nation, for the health and safety of every one of our citizens, I hope it does.

– Two Seattle 911 Centers?

Click to see calls to Seattle 911

Original post:  18 May 2008
We’ve opened a new fire alarm center (FAC) in Seattle – see yesterday’s blog entry.  This center accepts 911 calls for medical emergencies and fires – anything handled by the Seattle Fire Department.   There is a separate 911 center elsewhere in the City for 911 calls for police service and police dispatching.   How do we manage two separate centers?   The answer:  all 911 calls go to police first, and then, if the situation requires the fire department, the caller is “hot transfered” to the FAC.   “Hot transfer” means the police 911 call-taker stays on the line until the fire call-taker picks up the call.
Gee, this seems quite inefficient – we have two separate groups of folks answering 911 calls, two separate buildings, two separate telephone systems, two separate computer systems to enter the information (“computer-aided dispatch”) and so forth.   Isn’t this much more costly for Seattle taxpayers?
A long time ago, I thought so.   Many cities (e.g. Chicago) have a single 911 center where dispatchers and call takers for all three disciplines (police, fire, emergency medical) work.
But the philosophies and requirements have changed, largely after the San Francisco earthquake of 1989 and that event in New York City / the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.   Now almost every City has a backup 911 center – a separate physical location with a whole set of separate systems.   In most cities, this separate location just sits, unused, most days of the year.  It is only activated for testing and during those very rare occasions where some event makes the primary 911 center unusable.   Such events occur more often than one might think – they could include white power (anthrax) scares or power failures (including failure of backup systems), as well as disasters.
In Seattle we’ve chosen a different – and, in my opinion – wiser route.   Both our 911 centers are active and in use every day, 24 hours a day.   We KNOW all the backup systems work because they are constantly in use – we don’t just test the backup center once a year.   Once again Seattle leads – becoming the City most prepared to deal with a disaster.