School Safety_mixdown.mp3

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School Safety_mixdown.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Welcome back to the City of Reading Podcast. In this episode, we sit down with Police Chief Bill Schuler to talk about school safety, police training and gun reform in the wake of the Uvalde School shooting.

Katie:
It's a serious topic, and it's on the minds of parents, teachers and community members in Redding. So how safe are Redding schools and how is the Redding Police Department being proactive to ensure student safety?

Steve:
Chief Shuler talks to us about all this and more, including mental health issues and new park ranger and bike teams hitting the streets and parks soon.

Police Chief Schueller:
My name is Bill Schueller. I am the police chief for the city of Redding. I have been with the city for almost 20 and a half years and been the chief for it'll be three years in August.

Katie:
And Chief, we're here today to talk about a very serious subject that's affecting the whole nation right now, which is the safety of schools, obviously, in the wake of the Valdez shooting. And a lot of community members are going to have questions on how safe riding schools are and what is our RPD perspective on school safety. So maybe we'll just start there. How would you rank the safety of schools in Redding?

Police Chief Schueller:
Well, that's that's that's tough to rank. Every school is different. Every district is different. So it kind of depends on when the school was built. That always has a significant impact on the safety of that school. Older schools, unless they've been remodeled and changes made, they were designed to be more open. Sometimes classrooms will have multiple doors. They have multiple entrances onto campus, which can make it more difficult to keep that school safe in a lockdown lock down type drill or a lock or actual significant event or real event. So a lot of schools are doing remodels, adding fencing, doing things like that to make them more safe. And then the modern schools, the way they're designed, a lot of them have single points of entrance or more control points of entrance and exit to keep them so they can closely monitor who's coming and going as a whole. I think our schools are pretty safe. We have a pretty robust school resource officer program, so we have officers in basically almost every school in this in the city of Redding, not maybe not full time, but back and forth in the campus that several hours a day, every different school.

Police Chief Schueller:
So we have contracts with all of them. In fact, we're expanding our school resource officer program. In August, the new year, we're going to add another one. So we'll have five school resource officers sharing all the schools and the Shasta College. And so the integration we have in our schools I think makes our schools pretty safe. We had an incident not too long ago of a report of somebody on campus with a firearm at Enterprise High School, and that was reported to a school resource officer who was on campus. And that person, that officer immediately started the lockdown procedures and we had a very large response to that school. Within a matter of minutes, we had officers on scene, multiple officers other than just the school resource officer and flooded that school. We were able to it turned out to be probably a false report, but we were able to narrow down where the kid was, in what classroom very shortly and quickly calm down everybody at that school. But yeah, it worked out. So back to your original question. I think we're doing a good job. We can always do better.

Steve:
And Chief, speaking of school resource officers, is there additional training that those officers go through in the department when dealing with children on a more regular basis? And if so, what does that look like?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yes, there is a post California Post, which is the regulatory body for police officers in California. They have a school resource officer training program, I believe it's an 80 hour two week school where they go and learn not only teaching methods for kids, but relationship building, school safety, all of those aspects that they'll deal with as a school resource officer. The big part is breaking those barriers down and making those school resource officers friends to the kids on campus and so they can talk to them and feel comfortable. Just like what happened with the officer at Enterprise who got the report. Somebody might have a gun. So that's exactly what we want.

Katie:
Are they full uniformed officers when they're on the campus?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yes, full uniform, just the same as any other police officer.

Steve:
And how does that model compare to to other cities, both here in California and across the state? Is that pretty common now for the school resource officer?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yeah, it's pretty common. 90 I would say 90 to 95% of the schools are this way where the officers are in their full uniform. You might see some areas in the state where for a while there was kind of this take the guns out of schools and they were having their own police departments in schools where you had officers wearing plain clothes or something similar, maybe a polo shirt not carrying a firearm. In my personal opinion, that's a recipe for disaster. You don't have what good is an officer there on campus and they can't respond to a critical incident.

Katie:
And I guess on that. Maybe this is slightly off of this topic and we'll touch a little bit more on this later. But there have been some discussions in certain circles about arming teachers and administrators to be a part of that response. What's your opinion on that?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yeah, I think I think it depends. So I would be supportive of it if a teacher or administrator was willing to put forth the amount of training that it would be necessary to be a help and reactive in a scenario like that. The last thing we would want to do is respond to an unarmed incident at a school and end up shooting a teacher that was trying to help out, or a teacher who was trained or partially trained or didn't have enough training and accidentally shot a kid or hurt somebody. If you look at police shootings in general, our officers go through training and firearms at least once a month. So they're out of their range at least once a month. And in a critical incident, critical situation where maybe somebody is shooting at you or they're armed or whatever that scenario may be. Our officers, you know, they miss it. It is what it is. You add emotions and a ramped up heart rate. And no matter how much training, even though we train our officers with that kind of scenario, you're just not 100% accurate. We can buy the best firearms. We can actually buy new type of sight systems to make our officers more accurate.

Police Chief Schueller:
But it is, and I don't like to use it in the heat of battle, but in in an incident where you're emotionally at this high level, your heart rate's super fast and you're at this fight or flight mode. You can tend to make mistakes, especially if you're shooting at a moving target. So now you take that and you take a teacher whose job every day or administrator is to protect these kids and teach these kids. And then now they're in that scenario, it could be more detriment than helpful. It would take a system in place where we had officers, where teachers and administrators were going through routine monthly training and qualifications in order to make them qualify to have a firearm in a classroom for that kind of a situation. Even our concealed weapons permit holders in town who I'm supportive of CCW programs, but they have, I mean a lot of them trained on their own, but they have to train, they have to go through a qualification once a year. So we're our officers are going through at least 12.

Katie:
Well, in that case, I don't know. Just just my opinion once a year doesn't seem like very much, especially if you're talking about like a high, elevated emotional scenario where you have to react quickly and be accurate.

Police Chief Schueller:
And that's a perishable skill. Firearms training is very perishable. I do not shoot the same as I did when I was on the SWAT team almost ten years ago. When you're shooting two or three times a month and you're it is definitely perishable. And then, like I said, when you add that emotion to the to the scenario, you add kids to a scenario. Accuracy is going to be an issue. And that's part of the reason why we have switched to a new firearm and a new reflex. It's a new sighting system to make our officers much more accurate in any of these type of scenarios.

Steve:
And in the wake of the of all the school shooting, have all the police departments come under a lot of scrutiny for how they handled the active shooter situation? What's your opinion as the police chief on that situation? And how would you compare that to how RPD is trained to respond?

Police Chief Schueller:
You always hate to sit there and be a monday morning quarterback, especially from how many thousands of miles away from you. I'll be right there now. And I've never I'm not there. I don't know what the investigation is, but there's been a lot of information released. And we have to be in this business thick skinned and know and we do things right and do things wrong. And whether the time period for them to get in into that classroom and end that threat was a result of not being able to get in the classroom or whatever those things would be. Frankly, that's not the way we want to train and not the way we want to protect our kids. When Columbine first happened, Columbine was kind of the it was the first one, right? First big school shooting, active shooter, mass shooting that we had in this country. And the law enforcement response to that was typical. What we do in any scenario, we lock the place down and call SWAT and that got kids killed. So now law enforcement were right after that and started training differently. We started training where we would send in small teams, first team that gets there, small team goes in there and deals with that threat even that's too slow taking two or three officers, grabbing shields, walking in a formation, training to do that all the time down to find the threat and eliminate the threat is too slow.

Police Chief Schueller:
So now our response is the first officer on the scene doesn't care what rank they are, does it matter who they are? Because no matter what agency they're from, because when you have an active shooter, you're going to have officers from every agency around respond and they're going to enter that that school, that grocery store, that business, whatever it may be. And they're going to eliminate that threat. That is their job. Stop the threat, whether that is the suspect, which in often cases they in their own lives or the person barricades themselves alone somewhere, and then we can deal with that in a different way. But that'll be the way we deal with it, and that's the way all should have likely have happened. I know there were some issues getting in the doors. We have like I said, we have SROs in our schools. Professors have master keys to schools. You don't have to just go through a door to get into a classroom. Classrooms have windows. We will always make every effort to get into any situation where there's an active shooter and end that threat immediately. That's the way every department should train and how we train our staff.

Katie:
I know SWAT training or team training is different than like being an individual solo officer heading into a dangerous situation. Does RPD do dedicated training? Like if you are a solo officer heading into a dangerous situation? What that what that looks like?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yeah, we do it in a couple of ways. So we do active shooter training drills. Pre-covid, we were doing them annually, so we would have a scenario set up where we had role players, which were kids and teachers, and we would go into a school that was closed during the summer or during a break, and we would simulate an active shooter type scenario where you are the first officer or maybe you're the second officer and you're going into this school and we'll do things like playing loud recorded screaming or shooting or something over the over the loudspeaker. So people hear it. So it seems as legitimate as it can be, and they'll have to go into that scenario. We'll use ammunition rounds, which are basically a paintball type round that will fit in our firearms, or we'll use airsoft guns. And it'll be very, very kind of a real simulated scenario where they all have to enter the school either by themselves or maybe with one other officer that happens to show up. At the same time, we'll have to walk over kids that have been shot or adults that have been shot. That is a mindset thing that you have to build into them because you want to be there to help, but you can't help somebody that's that's been injured if you don't stop the threat from continuing.

Police Chief Schueller:
So we train first officers go in to eliminate the threat. Next, officers come in and they start doing first aid and triage. Our biggest change now is we are starting to incorporate fire into that second response. We call those warm zones. So the hot zone is the shooter. The warm zone is everywhere where the shooter is no longer in where there's injured adults or kids. The fire department will go in with us. We protect them. They have body armor and helmets now. And they will go in. They will start triaging, getting those kids and anyone injured out of there so that they can immediately life support. It's a holistic training program that we go through. We are going to do some more of the summer now that covid's kind of hopefully going away. We're going to do some more of the summer and then we're going to have a big drill later in the fall, probably during one of the fall breaks with fire and other all of our agencies locally to simulate another event like this.

Steve:
And what can you tell parents and administrators who might be experiencing fear or worry of either sending their children to school or being in the schools themselves, given seemingly that the increase in incidents like this across the country, what can you say as the chief here in reading to appease some of those worries and fears?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yeah, I mean, I get the concern. My kids have all gone to school here. All did. Now they're just graduating. But they I have had my kids in the public school system here. I feel that our our schools are pretty safe. Our officers are well trained, and we have contingencies in place for these scenarios, everything from how we barricade doors when necessary, how our kids respond to these incidents. A lot of our officers, myself included, for many years, sat on school boards. So we're heavily involved in those schools from an administrative level as well and providing advice we do safe. We're involved in safety planning for those schools, whether we have SROs at the schools or not. There is a. Large group made up of school administrators Skokie and our staff and law enforcement staff throughout the county. That talks school safety once a month about everything that's going on in school safety. We make recommendations on design of schools or remodeling the schools to make sure they're safe. For example, when I was sitting on a school board and there was a school shooting elsewhere, we started at the school.

Police Chief Schueller:
I was on the board. We started discussing ingress and egress. And like I said before this, a lot of our classrooms had two points of entry. Most most of them did. So what we started doing was locking those doors on the public side where the public could easily come in, so they could only get out the door in the door. Once school had started and then the back door to those classrooms was left unlocked all the time so people could come and go. And that may seem like a simple thing, but those are just those are ways to slow the access to somebody coming on campus that shouldn't be there. Increase in cameras, usage, having somebody monitoring those cameras, all of those things are are talked about by our staff and school administrators. And I think we've done a pretty darn good job trying to make our schools more safe. Like I said, I feel safe having my kids in school here in Shasta County and city of Redding, and so do all my officers. So you don't see us taking them anywhere else.

Steve:
You mentioned that the school resource officer program will be expanding beginning this summer. How does it work for private and charter schools here in Redding? Are those included in that overarching area as well?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yes, some of them are. So, for example, you prep is charter, they are part of chassis high school district. So they get our school resource officer services. There are some charter schools that are part of Redding School District, so they get our SRO services. So just depends on the contract we work out with the school district. The school district pays for about three fourths of the officers salary and benefits because they're only working for the school for basically three fourths of a year. And so the more we can get those contracts, more officers will put in schools.

Katie:
And I know this is kind of a complex topic. I mean, there's no one answer to this, but just wanted to get kind of your thoughts and opinions on it. And I mean, what can be done to just prevent school shootings from occurring at all?

Police Chief Schueller:
You have to look at every school shooting and kind of make an analysis. What could we have done differently? You look at you've all you've got an 18 year old buying to two rifles within days of his birthday. Could we have done something different where he was not able to make those rifle purchases at 18? Possibly. That's one option, right? Increase the age so you can't buy a handgun at age 18. So maybe you can't buy that rival. I'm not sure if that's the answer or not. In California, the laws are much more strict and we still have school shootings here. So I don't know if that's the answer or not, but we should we've got to have these conversations. My biggest concern right now is mental health. And I see that we have people that are suffering from mental health issues and they're either not getting the treatment they need or they are getting treatment. But nobody is talking to law enforcement or talking to the background check system to prevent those folks from buying a firearm. And that's where I feel like the biggest breakdown is right now. We have a background check system in place and because of laws regarding mental health, we get a lot of that information is protected and it needs to be protected in some ways. But if someone is a psychologist or a psychiatrist is treating somebody and that person has potentially homicidal or suicidal thoughts, that needs to be reported. There needs to be a red flag that's raised and so that they can't buy a firearm or keep the existing firearms they have. If they do that, I think that would stop a lot of this. Nobody in their right mind that's killing kids.

Katie:
So I guess maybe that's a question. I didn't think of how the background checks then work because I mean, obviously there's some information flow to law enforcement when a background check happens. But you're saying because of HIPAA laws, people who aren't maybe even necessarily applying for a gun right now, their files are not making it over to police departments. So you don't have a chance to say, oh, hey, no, this person shouldn't have a firearm.

Police Chief Schueller:
The background check system is run by the FBI through DOJ, federal DOJ. So that information should be reported to DOJ so that when the gun dealer is selling a gun, that in that person gets fingerprinted, that it puts a stop on that purchase, or at least it doesn't have to be a permanent stop. And there has to be a process in place for someone to challenge that through a court, however that may be. But yeah, that's not that's not happening. And if a prohibited person gets a firearm, they go through the process and maybe the background check didn't initially find something, but they do find it out later. We do get notified about those, but those are usually just folks that were in prison or were in prison in a different state and it didn't get shared with the system. The mental health piece is the part that's lacking at the moment.

Steve:
Are there things that community members or students themselves can be doing to be proactive or to be aware? The old see something, say something type thing, contact law enforcement if they notice something or I guess, what do you suggest or recommend in that instance?

Police Chief Schueller:
Well, yeah, the see something say something applies to both physically. You're in school, you see someone like what happened in the enterprise. You see you see someone that's acting in a way or may have a firearm or they have a firearm. That's what you need to report that immediately to staff, to an SRO, whatever that may be. But a lot of these things, these school shootings or these active shooter incidents have there's precursors that are out there that happened days or weeks in advance of when this happens. They may be somebody that's a loner that's having issues. They're posting things on social media, whatever that may be. You've got to say something about that, too. We recently in the last year created our crisis intervention response team, and they can go out and check on people that are that are having some sort of potential mental health crisis. It doesn't have to be that they're a danger to themselves or others. But if there's somebody that's having an issue, these officers who are dressed like civilians with a mental health clinician with them can go talk to these kids or adults or whoever it may be and make sure that they're not suffering from a crisis and a danger to someone else or others. And we will follow up with any type of social media post that strange that has a potential for violence. And so it's just but we can't we don't monitor social media 24/7. Obviously, that's impossible. So it requires, just as you said, students to see something and say something, call us, talk to us, talk to your school administrator. They'll call us. We and we do get those and we follow up on every single one quickly, rapidly getting our school resource officers involved. And it's just important for everybody to stay vigilant with that stuff.

Katie:
And going back to gun reform laws for a second, you know, these I mean, it's all over the news right now, right? Everybody's talking about the gun reform laws that are before Congress. You know, Shasta County is a very gun friendly community. It's a concealed carry community. There's a lot of very proud concealed carry gun owners in Shasta County. Do you think that the gun reforms or the gun laws being put before Congress, do you think those will help or hurt Shasta County in terms of violent crime? Kind of what's where are we right now with violent crime? And do you think that gun reform would would shift any of those numbers for us here?

Police Chief Schueller:
Now, the gun the gun laws that are being proposed, California already has stricter gun laws than what's being proposed on a national level. They won't make any difference unless unless there's there is talk about the mental health piece. And I'm hopeful that that grows as these talks continue and there's more discussion about mental health. But I, I don't anticipate those gun laws would have any change in violent crime here.

Katie:
And there's one gun law that I'm particularly just kind of curious about, the gun law that is being at least talked about to raise the age, as you mentioned earlier, from 18 to 21, being that many of these more violent crimes do happen by young males between the age of 18 and 21. What are your thoughts on on that piece?

Police Chief Schueller:
Well, let's just take a look at you. Had you had that lob and in place prohibiting an 18 year old from buying a semiautomatic rifle. That. That kid, that guy would not be able to buy that gun. I don't think he couldn't have got one elsewhere. That's always possible. Got one legally somewhere else. But who knows? But it would have at least slowed that down. Or maybe maybe changed his tactic. I'm not sure. I think if that law was to pass. There has to be some exceptions for potential law enforcement candidates that are going to be employed. We do hire 20 year olds sometimes and they are in the academy at 20 and they got to have a possess one of those rifles now be a city owned rifle. But still they have to have a possession of one of those rifles. Those rifles are also used for hunting and they're also used for competition shooting. So there has to be some, in my opinion, some sort of exemption for those kind of folks. But those are the kind of folks that are doing school shootings. So as long as we have a process in place where someone is a competitive shooter can get the still get the firearm they need for that or a someone that's in that 18, 20 year old range that's 100 has gone through 180 program and has been backgrounded and all of those things. And I don't have any problem with that. But yeah, it's like I said, I'm open to these discussions. I think these discussions are good and I think we should try and do whatever we can to prevent these things while maintaining everyone's rights to have firearms guaranteed. The second one.

Steve:
You touched on the mental health piece and the crisis intervention response team and some of the good things that that team is doing here in the community. Mental health can be a factor in some of the violent incidents here locally as well as nationally. Have you seen an uptick in mental health issues correlating to crime and the youth population in Redding?

Police Chief Schueller:
Not that I can quantify. No, I haven't. Mental health, especially during and after COVID, has been an issue with kids that's well known on a national level, not to the point where it's it's causing crime. We're not seeing that really here. Statistics, violent crime is down. I mean, all crime almost across the board, except for some certain property crimes is down. Yeah, Redding is a very safe place to live. We're not exempt from potential violent incidents. They can happen, but they can happen anywhere.

Katie:
Maybe that's a good place to just. Give us an update on what's Redding look like now. I know you've hired some new officers. We were looking for officers for a while and we've got some new people on board. So what is the safety outlook of Redding, I guess you would say?

Police Chief Schueller:
I'm pretty excited about the direction our department is going. We have hired in the last year in excess of 35 police officers. We have for the first time since 2008, as many officers as we are authorized are meeting positions. We were authorized back then before the Great Recession and then with the additional school resource officer that starts in August, we'll actually have 120 sworn officers and we'll be the largest amount of officers we've ever had at this department. And we're doing some really cool things with our downtown bike team just started this week. Finally, it was approved by council over a year ago, but it took us this long to get staffing going. And so the first two officers of downtown became, we're just calling the RPD bike team because we're not going to just work downtown. But they started this week, so they're going to be patrolling the bikes, downtown, parks, trails or commercial areas and shopping areas on the east side of town. And then we have our park ranger program, which will probably start in August. So we'll have at least two initially and eventually for park rangers. I'll be working seven days a week and they'll be police officers, but they'll let it be in a slightly different uniform.

Police Chief Schueller:
We haven't quite figured that out yet, but they'll be on bikes and pickup trucks and they'll be in all our parks throughout the town. So the city they're going to my expectation is they're interacting with kids and people using the parks and they're making our parks safe. But they're also being kind of part of that community policing of our folks that are in parks. We have five more officers that will start for an APB. That'll start probably in January. Once these officers we've hired get through training. We have nine officers in field training right now, a mixture of laterals and academy graduates. Our 40,000 signing bonus has done a great job helping our recruiting. We're hiring officers from all over the state. We just hired officer for San Francisco. We've got officers from Roseville, Humboldt County locally, not any of our immediately local agencies, but around the area to Pima County, Red Bluff, Siskiyou We've just really stepped up our recruiting and have been able to find some great quality candidates going to work here. And I'm excited about the way that it's going to go.

Katie:
And I did want to just touch on something. Maybe you can help me with the details here. But one of the things that makes Redding unique not only for police, but also for all of our utilities and for all of our services, is Redding is actually a pretty large area for the amount of people that live here. So when you say there's an eighth beat coming soon. We currently only have seven, which you can tell me. I can't remember exactly what the numbers are. It means there's only so many police officers at any given time for the number of square footage that we have.

Police Chief Schueller:
Right. Yeah. So we have seven officers minimum staffing right now. Friday and Saturday nights, it's eight, but that's seven beats in the city of almost 70 square miles. So they're not all divided up evenly. But you can imagine, imagine having to drive ten square miles to be your beat or your spine to beat across the river or across the freeway. It can be a long response time. So an eight B will split the city up again. And we're currently analysing where the calls come in current response times and we will redesign all the beats so that we have eight and then our minimum staffing will be eight at all times. With weekends, Friday and Saturday nights I'll go up to nine officers will be one officer roving not on a beat. So yeah it's it will reduce response times significantly just five extra officers, one extra officer per shift should reduce our response time by several minutes.

Steve:
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot to be excited for about the future of policing here in Redding.

Police Chief Schueller:
And the programs we're doing like CRT. I'm pretty proud of like the park ranger program I think is innovative. Not a lot of cities do that. The downtown bike team having full time bikes I think is a great program. Getting people, officers out of patrol cars and out on foot or a bicycle is very, very helpful. A great way to connect with the community, but it's also a great way to get to places that you're not you can't in a patrol car. So I just think we're doing some pretty cool collaborative things with our with the rest of the city and with our community and our business community to do some visibility projects and make our city the best in the North State.

Steve:
You've mentioned in the past conversations with us about some of the challenges with AB 109 and some of the other regulations here in the community. Do you see reason for optimism around some of those frustrations and challenges you've had in the past as a department?

Police Chief Schueller:
Yeah, I am hopeful. You never know what's going to happen in the legislature in California, but there is some bills out there that are pending that could reverse some of those maybe 109 and Prop 47 impacts. For example, we had the we didn't see it in Redding so much, but the massive retail theft where you had groups coming in and overtaking a business and stealing jewelry or whatever they can. There's been a lot of discussion about changing Prop 47 to lower the threshold for felonies on retail theft or bringing enhancements for serial shoplifters bringing those back. So I am hopeful that happens, but you never know with the legislature in California. Luckily, we have a strong district attorney here. We have a sheriff that is working to expand or add an additional jail space which will make a difference while also thinking about programs and breaking the cycle for people, or getting the mental health or drug treatment and job training. All is part of that rehabilitation process. So I would say for all of us, I think it's going to be very helpful for our community.

Katie:
Any last thoughts or words or anything you'd like to leave the community with in terms of school safety or just safety in general here in Redding?

Police Chief Schueller:
I understand the concern as a parent myself of your kids in school, but they should know that we think about this often, we train about it. Our school administrators think about this. They train with the kids and drills. We're always looking at ways to improve schools for safety and improve our way of responding. Like I said, integrating fire into these incidents to provide a quick emergency medical response. All of these things we're always thinking about, it's an evolving process. But I think folks should be comfortable, very comfortable to send their children to school here knowing that we're doing everything we can to keep it safe.

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