Robert Mahoney: A Better Way to Keep Us Safe

Wendy & Rich 0:01
Coming to you from the Freedom Federal Credit Union Studios Hartford County living presents conversations with rich ballot. 

Have

Rich Bennett 0:27
you ever watched the news after tragic act of violence and wondered, how did no one see this coming? What if I told you that according to today's guest, that's often the wrong question to ask. My guest today is Robert Mahoney, founder of TVTP solutions and a nationally recognized expert in behavioral threat assessment in violence prevention. For more than 15 years, he's worked at the federal, state and local levels, helping communities understand something that challenges one of our biggest assumptions. Acts of target violence rarely happened out of nowhere. Instead, they often follow a recognizable pathway with warning signs that can appear long before an attack ever takes place. So in this conversation, we're going to explore what those warning signs could look like, why so many organizations spend their time preparing to respond instead of preventing violence in the first place and how educators, parents, employers, faith leaders, law enforcement and even neighbors can play a role in creating safer communities. Something I think we forgot to do a while ago. We'll also talk about why these same prevention strategies can extend beyond substance abuse and other community risk factors through collaboration and early intervention. And this isn't a conversation built on fear. It's a conversation built on knowledge, awareness and the belief that informed communities can make a real difference. So settle in, grab your drink, because I think you're going to walk away from this episode looking at safety, prevention and people around you in completely different way. Robert, how's it going man? 

Robert Mahoney 2:22
It's going well. Thank you for having me. 

Rich Bennett 2:24
So I always love to ask this question first because let's face it, this isn't exactly the career path that most kids dream about growing up. So what first drew you into the world of violence prevention and behavioral threat assessment. 

Robert Mahoney 2:42
Yea. So you stumble into these kind of things, right? 

Rich Bennett 2:47
You. There's a big stumble. 

Robert Mahoney 2:48
Yeah. Pretty big stumble. Um, I, uh, I started out around 2005, so I 

Rich Bennett 2:56
Okay. 

Robert Mahoney 2:56
was watching, uh, the Hurricane Katrina response. And there were certain things within that response, I think that if you remember it, you're old enough, remember it, that there were just certain things that was going on that just seemed very, very logical of like, that should have been prepared for. Um, one example that sort of inspired me was, I heard that a lot of people were being evacuated out of the city. Um, because local authorities had not made any accommodations for their pets. And at the time, you know, I'm in college, I'm not a huge pet person as I was, as I am now. 

Rich Bennett 3:33
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 3:34
But I, I felt like really there's no, like, crazy pet, pet person in any of those, you know, whether it was local, state, or federal agencies that didn't think, like, hey, what about people's pets? I know my wife, if there was something that was an emergency at the house, she's going to go save the dog before she even checks on the see if I'm awake, right? Oh,it's , it was one of those logical things that I just thought, okay, maybe that, that's something that I can do. I got kind of interested in that of like, what is that problem? And so I went to grad school and got a master's degree in emergency and disaster management. 

Rich Bennett 4:16
Right. Oh, wow. 

Robert Mahoney 4:17
And I started working up the chain, sort of at the county level and working with states. And ultimately at the federal level, mainly for, you know, weather related things, but also, you know, a combination of, you know, earthquakes and, and, uh, new grad stuff and, 

Rich Bennett 4:35
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 4:35
and food distribution plans and things like that. And what I ended up sort of realizing in that career was a lot of it had to do with coordination, bringing a lot of different people together, a lot of different subject matter experts and sort of bringing these together into, and formulating sort of a communication strategy as well. 

Rich Bennett 4:55
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 4:55
Of like, how do you get people motivated to do things from a safety standpoint, rather than sort of dictating to them what they need to do? And so as I progressed in this career, as we've all sort of seen, there's been this uptick of sort of these violent attacks, these targeted violent attacks. And I couldn't square the circle for myself in in my mindset, because I would hear the press and even sort of our local leaders and stuff like that talking about this horrible random act of violence. 

Rich Bennett 5:32
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 5:33
And five to ten minutes later, or a day later, as more information came out about the perpetrator, finding out that like, oh, they've had a number of behavioral incidents at school, or they had run ins with the police, or they were under mental health care, or all these sort of things. And I couldn't figure out like, well, then that's not random. 

Rich Bennett 5:54
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 5:54
Right. So, so what is much like sort of, you know, the pet evacuation problem, like what is the problem? And so I started delving in thinking that, all right, maybe I, if I use that experience, that emergency management experience of bringing different people together from different sectors, I might be able to start pulling on some of these threads and start finding out what exactly it was. And sort of post 9/11 society, sort of the C something, say something campaign, which is kind of, it's a great campaign, it's kind of been integrated into all of our lives. I started to realize that we don't really have a reporting problem, right? Like no, as I mentioned earlier, like police knew about this individual or schools knew about this individual, people within the community were concerned. So we didn't have a reporting problem. What I ended up learning is that we had a coordination problem in that they weren't, they were either too focused on their own systematic 

Rich Bennett 6:59
yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 6:59
contact, in which they were interacting with this individual, or they just didn't have the apparatus or the methodology of reaching out to these different sectors to get a more holistic idea of what this person was going through. So that the help could be sort of employed. 

Rich Bennett 7:17
Right, the thing, and I, because I remember 9/11, like it was yesterday, and it's hard to believe it was over 25 years ago, but that in Katrina, you saw the nation, like gather together to help people out. And especially after 9/11, awareness was a big thing. People were where You always watched your surroundings. But I think that has fallen to the wayside today. 

Robert Mahoney 7:47
Well, I think it has, I don't think it has fallen to the waist side as much as it's been sort of redirected and isolated in a contextual way. So, 

Rich Bennett 7:57
okay. 

Robert Mahoney 8:13
The attack is going to come 

Rich Bennett 8:15
from. 

Robert Mahoney 8:16
Right. And so, what ends up happening is that you immediately shift to a more protection/response methodology. Right. If you don't know where the attack is going to come from, yes, logically, by all means, put as many protection measures as you feel necessary. 

Rich Bennett 8:35
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 8:35
We, me and that other person, right? Because you don't know where it's coming from. As I just mentioned, that's not the actual truth, right? We do know who the concerning members in our communities and things like that, where these attacks are actually coming from. So, what ends up happening is you take it to offensive approach when you take more of the protection. So, things such as the bulletproof glass and the cameras and the fences 

Rich Bennett 9:02
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 9:03
and the more security personnel and everything else. These are all protection measures. They don't necessarily like prevent the attack from happening. 

Rich Bennett 9:11
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 9:12
you are doing is you are hoping that all of those things will stop the attacker. 

Rich Bennett 9:17
Or 

Robert Mahoney 9:18
Right. And also from a response methodology. You're doing your head down drills or your active shooter drills 

Rich Bennett 9:25
what 

Robert Mahoney 9:25
and things like that to try and get there as fast as possible to neutralize the threat. By blocking it in as a sort of a random act of violence. You can sort of see why you sort of lean in that direction. Right. And so what most of my work is is to bring people not from the is to kind of balance out that value set. There is value to the protection. There is value to the response measures and stuff like that, but it's at a balance. Right. You've, we've, we've put way too much value on those things. And less value on the prevention side. Right. Seeing, seeing behavioral signs that somebody is struggling or that somebody is headed down this pathway of violence and being able to sort of intercept them early on. So that they don't get to the point where they believe that violence is either their only way out or the only way that they can get attention. Right. And 

Rich Bennett 10:28
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 10:28
to get what they need. And so shifting that mindset away from sort of this idea of a random act of violence and to like getting them to move a little bit more to the offensive approach, rather than the defensive approach is kind of what what I do for, for, you know, up and down whether it's local governments, federal government, state governments. 

Rich Bennett 10:51
Do you find it hard to 

I don't know if it's shifting people or you know shift in their mindset or whatever to because with the pathway to violence. And I know what you, what would you mean by that because again, I don't believe in this random act. Somebody, I think they always have a planned out, you know with the exception of maybe road rage or something who knows. But do you find it difficult for people to accept because we've been conditioned to think these events come completely out of nowhere. 

Robert Mahoney 11:32
We are conditioned to not have empathy for people that express violent ideation. So if you know we see somebody struggling with substance abuse or with depression and has some suicidal ideation and things like that. There's a tremendous amount of empathy that we have towards that person that is struggling to try and get them help or and be there for them to try and guide them through that difficult time. 

Rich Bennett 12:02
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 12:02
You start popping off about, you know, your desire to inflict pain on certain races or a certain group of people or certain political beliefs or things like that. That isn't something that we gravitate towards. That is something that we repel, right. And so one of the, the things that we have to understand is that a lot of. this is emotional. It's a psychological sort of thing. And we don't have the same empathy for those types of people. So what ends up happening is we isolate them, we push them away. And the narrative in their subconscious is that didn't work at getting me the attention that I needed for help. So I need to ratchet up, right, until somebody actually comes and kind of gives me the help that need. It's a bit like when you're, you know, an adolescent and you make fun of a girl, but you actually like them, right, you don't know how to actually express, You know, your feelings or the help that you need or everything like that. So you push the girl or you say something mean to or something like that. And everybody just thinks that you're a mean or a bully or something like that. 

Rich Bennett 13:23
right. 

Robert Mahoney 13:23
When actuality, you're just, you just don't know, yeah, you don't know how to express it and they're, just have this sort of explosion. And I think understanding that sort of mentality and that psychology is helpful when you want to be sort of on the front foot 

Rich Bennett 13:41
you 

Robert Mahoney 13:41
of prevention. Because all of our senses from an evolutionary standpoint have been sort designed to look for abnormalities. 

Rich Bennett 13:51
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 13:51
So we don't have enough bandwidth to just take in all the information. So what our brains do is it prioritizes. So if there's, you know, whether it's a flower on a tree or a smell, an interesting smell or a taste or something like that, that triggers something in our brains of a possible threat or non-threat. So we are keenly aware to different sounds and things like that. There's a lot of science behind this that this is the reason why water is like clear and tasteless, right. So if water tasted like, you know, Mountain Dew or Diet Dr. Pepper, it would be very, very difficult for us to decipher whether or not that was good water 

Rich Bennett 14:36
water, right, 

Robert Mahoney 14:36
clean right, right, or bad. So the idea that, you know, it's clear you can see right through it. If it's foggy, there might be something wrong with it. It's smell, it doesn't have any smell. So if it smells weird, you know, we probably won't. And if it tastes different, we'll probably spit it out. Right. And so we are, we are keenly aware of those different types of abnormalities within our daily life. It's the same thing for behaviors, right. If you, you, you know, we started the interview, you were like, Hey, how you doing? If I go say F you or, 

Rich Bennett 15:09
right, 

Robert Mahoney 15:09
you know, F off, like, that's a queue. That's a queue that like, Oh, that's unusual. That's not something that normally happens, right. And so that there, when we talk about sort of behavioral threat assessment, this is another sort of terminology that while the, the core science behind it is actually rock solid. And it, and it's absolutely the direction that I think most of us should go into when assessing threats. It is a horrible name 

for things much like sort of random act of violence. It pigeonholes us into looking for threatening behavior, right. And what you end up finding with these individuals, when you go through sort of their long history, they have a character arc of sort of a death by a thousand paper cuts, right, where a lot of these different things that have sort of transpired within their lives in isolation are very innocuous and not threat related in any sort of way. So, you know, the breakup of a boyfriend or a girlfriend, the death of a grandfather moving to a different city. These are not things that necessarily you would focus in on and say, Oh, well, that relates to that's a risk factor. Therefore, there's there's a higher probability of threat. No, it doesn't necessarily work that way. It's kind of a more holistic in combination sort of threat thing. So when you don't want to too wrapped up into the risk factors. And because risk factors, one, are not predictive. And two, people that are sort of enveloped in an environment that would be considered risky. They don't look at it as risky. They look at it as life, right. So like I worked with a county up in Maine, Piscado was county where I think it was something like over two thirds of 18 and under youth were under the care of a guardian because their parents were either 

Rich Bennett 17:17
Wow. 

Robert Mahoney 17:17
Yeah, we're either incarcerated. We're in, you know, drug rehabilitation, had died and things like that. All of those kids, they don't look at that as necessarily a risk factor. They look at it as just life, right? Like all of their friends and all of their community is sort of in the same bucket. So 

Rich Bennett 17:39
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 17:39
trying to go after people that are, that are checking off different boxes in terms of risk factors. Doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to head down this pathway of violence or have these different problems. And so when you look at their behavior, are they becoming more isolated from society? 

Rich Bennett 17:59
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 18:00
Are there grievances turning into sort of a manifestation, like a raise on debt, right? Like they're becoming hard and where this is the only thing that they are they are focused in on. Are they beginning to do research? Are they expressing their, you know, are they are they looking at research for weapons or are they researching different sites or different, you know, ethnic groups sort of gatherings and things like that. Are they prepping? Are they, you know, are they getting bank accounts ready? Are they getting more proficient with certain weapons? Are they acquiring weapons? Things like that. And then what you'll sort of see throughout this whole pathway is something that is, is turned breaching, right? They're, they're leading breadcrums. Okay. And this kind of goes back to, there's a lot of suicidal ideation that sort of filters into this pathway of violence. You can sort of see past attackers. That sort of in their manifestos and things like that have a lot of suicidal ideation 

Rich Bennett 19:09
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 19:09
either they're going, they're, they're expecting to kill themselves after the attack where they're not expecting to, they're going to get a shootout with police or something like that. They're not expected. Yeah, they're not expecting to come out. The same sort of behavioral signs that you'll see with people is suicidal ideation, where they'll drop little hints to see if people will come to their aid. You sort of see this same similar pattern with people that are heading down the pathway of violence. They're going to drop these little crumbs and sort of back to what I sort of said, they're kind of testing the waters or testing the limits. They're, they're trying to express their desire for help. 

Rich Bennett 19:49
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 19:49
And, and dropping these crumbs to sort of see who's going to come to their aid. And if nobody comes to their aid much like somebody who has suicidal ideation, they'll go a little bit farther. And then they'll go a little bit farther and a little bit farther. Until somebody sort of tries to make them make them stop. There's a lot of psychological stuff that goes along with this. 

Rich Bennett 20:13
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 20:14
If you've, you know, as I'm sort of riffing here, you'll, you'll hear me, I'm not talking about any kind of motivation. 

Rich Bennett 20:22
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 20:22
Right. And this is agnostic in terms of motivation. It does not matter, you know, what political or what religious or whatever it is that's motivating them. You will find this pattern with people naturally, regardless of what, of what the thing is. What I see a lot in society is that we will focus our attention on the what, right. That motivating factor, not the why. The why is really, really interesting because it applies to really all of us. So the why I've separated it into sort of like three buckets. Route a day every day of our life, we are looking to fill sort of three metaphorical buckets and those buckets are identity, purpose, and community. Our brains cannot accept us not knowing who we are aware we belong. Right. And so in the absence of that knowledge, we have to like a magnet, like a magnetic north, attach ourselves to something. And so when you have these character arcs of sort of these death by a thousand paper cuts, what you're doing is you're sort of rocking those buckets. Right. Water is beginning to sort of spill out 

Rich Bennett 21:41
buckets. 

Robert Mahoney 21:41
of these 

Rich Bennett 21:41
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 21:42
And you need to find something that fills that back up. And so what ends up happening is that most of the times what they attach themselves to is not the what, it is those intangibles that come with it. And so what you'll see are people that are headed down this pathway of violence and then their manifestos or their journals or anything like that, they'll express sort of contriteness. They'll say they're sorry. They know that what they are going to do is going to cause harm is going to cause a lot of pain both for their families, for the 

Rich Bennett 22:19
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 22:19
families, victims and stuff like that. And that from a logic standpoint, we can't really sort of figure that out. Right. Like that, if you know that you're about to cause a lot of pain, why don't you just sort of jump off the train and 

Rich Bennett 22:35
cause the pain to themselves. 

Robert Mahoney 22:36
Right. The reason is is because there isn't any landing point 

Rich Bennett 22:42
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 22:42
to find that flow into those buckets. Right. And what you end up sort of is we focus a lot on sort of intervention, an intervention has a top-down power dynamic. Okay. So intervention for substance abuse, you have somebody who is physically unable to sort of take care of themselves. And therefore you are assuming the power in that situation and sort of bringing that person along to try and get them clean. When you have somebody who has attached their identity purpose and community to something, that kind of power dynamic doesn't work. What that happens is that's a personal attack. What you are doing is wrong, who you are associated with is wrong. And what ends up happening is you end up sort of digging in your heels because you have not provided them with sort of an off ramp. You have not provided them with a landing spot to showcase to them. Oh, here's a new identity where you can get the same water flow into that bucket. 

Rich Bennett 23:49
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 23:50
Oh, here's a new purpose that you get the same way. Here's a new community that's accepting to you. And so because you are emotionally and psychologically sort of attached to this thing, you are going to carry it to its natural course, unless you find something that is better. And what we find is that human beings are only as faithful as their options dictate. And so if you have another option there, you are more likely to go to that safer option rather than just stay on 

Rich Bennett 24:22
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 24:22
that instructive path. And so it's really more of a mediation than or a negotiation rather than sort of an intervention. And 

Rich Bennett 24:32
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 24:33
so there's a little bit of nuance in that way of when we when we go out and we do our talks and we try to train people and sort of like what we're going to be doing here of one don't so much focus on the what look for the why. Go a little bit more holistic into what is going on with that individual nobody is affected by just one thing it's usually a combination of a lot of different things. hmm. And this is where sort of like the coordination gap sort of happens. You go into more rural communities are you going to smaller cities and things like that. And they're like, oh, well, we don't have the resources that this big city has or that the state has or anything like that. 

Rich Bennett 25:20
Yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 25:20
And I think there's a there's a misnomer that there's there are on occasions resource gaps where a certain resource just does not exist. 

Rich Bennett 25:30
mm 

Robert Mahoney 25:30
And you need to to fill that gap more often than not it's just a coordination gap where the resource exists. But it's competing with another resource for the same, you know, people or people are getting the resources are getting in each other's way, or you just don't know that the resources out there. And so when we start creating these sort of behavioral threat assessment teams, which I've I've stripped that sort of terminology out and I've found much more success with care teams 

Rich Bennett 26:07
I like that 

Robert Mahoney 26:08
because much like, y know, random act of violence behavioral threat assessment context really matters. And a lot of it. You don't 

Rich Bennett 26:17
want it to sound negative 

Robert Mahoney 26:19
right a lot of the feedback that I was getting from, you know, you know, the audiences and things like that was all right. I got training in how to see substance abuse. I got training and how to see suicidal ideation. I got training in child trafficking. I got your training on target violence. I got all these different sort of trainings. And so I witnessed something. didn't know which lane it should go into. 

Rich Bennett 26:48
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 26:49
right? And so I, you sort of have this death by training where you get this hyper specialization. And so because I didn't know what lane to go, I decided to wait. And then that individual sort of removed themselves from my life. They moved on to a different grade or they moved to a different city or they got promoted or they left the office or whatever it was. 

Rich Bennett 27:12
Mm-hmm. 

Robert Mahoney 27:12
And I was able to express that concerning behavior that I saw. Right? Or that nuanced, you know, weird thing that 

Rich Bennett 27:22
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 27:22
was going on. And so you end up sort of seeing this kind of snowballing. So by opening them up to a care team, what you see is that it doesn't matter what the actual issue is, it all gets put into the same thing. And then, By having a care team, you can have that as small or as big as you want. You can have it for a classroom, you can have it for an office space, you can have, we're seeing now actual towns bring, you know, care teams up to the town level where, you know, Law Enforcement, Mental Health, you know, the school districts, even departments of rec, libraries, 

Rich Bennett 28:05
yes. 

Robert Mahoney 28:05
small business associations. We've had actually a lot of success with 

delivery drivers, postal service, Amazon drivers, FedEx. Um, whether you like 

Rich Bennett 28:17
You're 

Robert Mahoney 28:17
it or 

Rich Bennett 28:17
seeing 

Robert Mahoney 28:17
not. 

Rich Bennett 28:17
people all the time, 

Robert Mahoney 28:19
Yeah. And they see suspicious activity. And a lot of the times they don't have a mechanism to report that, right? So if you, if you yell at a post office worker or a FedEx driver or something like that, they have protocols, like, hey, somebody threatened me. But they didn't 

Rich Bennett 28:35
yeah. Right. 

Robert Mahoney 28:35
have protocols for if, hey, I've been on this route for six years. I've never stopped at this house before. And now within the span of like 10 days, I've delivered 16 packages to this house. And all of them have, you know, like the warning explosive, you know, you know, keep away from 

Rich Bennett 28:55
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 28:55
fire signs on the, on the thing. Like, who do I talk about? Because there's something going on here, right? They never had that sanitation. Sanitation department, sanitation departments know when you've had a party at your house, they know when your birthdays are, they know like, they know way more about you than you 

Rich Bennett 29:14
they, 

Robert Mahoney 29:15
truly can, 

Rich Bennett 29:15
oh, yeah, they 

Robert Mahoney 29:16
and 

Rich Bennett 29:17
read that recycle can been there in all them, Glance, 

Robert Mahoney 29:20
Exactly. Exactly. They know what beer you 

Rich Bennett 29:22
yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 29:23
can, they know, right? Like, they know all that kind of stuff. And so what you end up, the reason why you do this and this sort of I try to make it sound a little bit more peaceful than sort of like the surveillance state because 

Rich Bennett 29:37
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 29:37
a lot of the times, when I talk about prevention, they start thinking of like that movie minority report where I'm going to start scanning people's eyeballs and I'm going to start making an assumption or a probability that you're going to do something violent. It's really the direct opposite, right? The idea that you are finding certain concerning things that might be nothing, but are concerning enough that you feel compelled to be like, that's weird. Like somebody needs to know about that. Just from a human to human sort of interaction is, is important. And I don't need to know about your internet history. I don't need to know what political affiliation you are, what religion are. All I'm seeing from your behavior is something that I am considering a little lab normal, right? And that all I'm wanting to do is get the right people to just say, hey, is everything okay? Do you need any help? Right. I don't need the cameras to follow you or I don't need cops or valence 24/7 

Rich Bennett 30:47
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 30:47
or anything like that. And so I find it to be a much more palatable way for safety to kind of occur within our communities and within our workplaces and things like that. And the response to that sort of more human centric approach, that more proactive approach has been really, really positive. Like people actually do want this type of security rather than the more defensive way of that that we've been doing it. 

Rich Bennett 31:22
So with with all that because and I've seen this happen a lot, some people number one are afraid to speak up about if they somebody going through problems because a lot of times 

Whether it be police or whatever, EMTs who go out there, social workers and talk to them and then they're leaving right away, especially if it's like a juvenile. Because now here am I state Marilyn, I don't even think the cops are allowed to question them. 

Robert Mahoney 31:59
Right. 

Rich Bennett 32:10
If there's nothing that's going to happen, what can you tell those people? You're listening to conversations with Rich Bennett. We'll be right back. 

When it comes to car care, I'm pretty picky about who I trust. I only use American auto repair and job, whether it's a simple oil change or complex repair. They handle everything with professionalism and precision. Head on over to American auto repair. Join me in supporting a trusted local business that's been keeping our rides safe and sound. Check them out at American auto repair, Inc, INC. Come recall 410, 679, 6500. Again, that's 410, 679, 6500 and see why I trust them of all my automotive needs. 

Robert Mahoney 33:10
Yeah, well, that's kind of the whole reason why these care teams, or these behavioral, threat of testament 

Rich Bennett 33:16
Okay. 

Robert Mahoney 33:16
team are so important is because it's really bringing a lot more contextual data and knowledge about that individual. So we've seen individual, you know, if you go and call the cops and that individual is not doing anything illegal, there's not a whole lot that they can do. 

Rich Bennett 33:34
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 33:34
You go to mental health and they they're going to ask you, well, are they a threat to themselves or others? And you, if you say, well, no, not yet, well, then getting the back of the line, right? Because I've got a stack of people that are and I've only got a limited amount of clinicians. And to your point with juveniles, you know, you go to school districts and stuff like that. Going outside of the school district for any kind of help is because they're a juvenile and because there's so many laws and whether it's, you know, FERPA and all 

Rich Bennett 34:04
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 34:04
those things, they they like to keep things very, very much in house. We have seen individuals who are dreams at school and absolute terrors outside. We have also seen people who are absolute terrors in school and our dream outside, right? And so when you make your assessment based on a sort of isolated context in which you are associating with them without sort of having that cross communication or that cross coordination to sort of figure out. Oh, maybe they just don't like this sort of school environment or maybe when they're outside, they have to go, you know, through this one neighborhood that's extremely difficult. And so they get very, very violent or anxious or you know, things like that. And so you begin to start putting a lot of the pieces together. One of the things that we did for one school district was we incorporated their bus drivers into 

Rich Bennett 35:09
smart 

Robert Mahoney 35:10
into 

Rich Bennett 35:11
their. 

Robert Mahoney 35:11
their And for the purpose of, you know, identifying behavior that could be threatening what ended up happening was almost the direct opposite. We were able to catch things that were not from a threatening standpoint, really at all from it from them do committing violence. But things that needed to be nipped in the butt. So one of the kids got reported because they were coming to the bus stop in the car and the car looked like it was filled with blankets and pillows and things like that. And they weren't up the further the family had been evicted from the from their apartment, right has nothing to do with violence, but definitely needed some type of action to be taken, 

Rich Bennett 35:54
Yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 35:54
right. That isn't something that the kid is going to advertise to teachers that 

Rich Bennett 35:59
no. 

Robert Mahoney 35:59
may not be something that other school kids are going to feel compelled to say. 

It was something that that was able to be nipped in the butt. Another thing that was nipped in the butt was that there was a kid that was being picked up and dropped off at two different stops and they couldn't figure out why. The reason why he didn't want to get dropped off at his home stop was because the older kids got dropped off before him and they would bully him on the way. Actress House. So it's that contextual knowledge that's like, okay, that's not necessarily threat assessment. Now, I specialize in sort of the worst case and scenario in 

Rich Bennett 36:38
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 36:39
violence because it grabs people's attention, but we're really kind of talking about really proactive preventive community health, right, of getting to people in their time of need. When I start working at like the state levels with all the different sort of social 

Rich Bennett 36:56
Mm-hmm. 

Robert Mahoney 36:56
services programs and things like that, what you end up seeing is a very, very rigid sort of system where you have a system of care rather than a concept of care. And I have worked with, you know, institutions and programs where they have analytics where they could tell you, you know, from the month, week and day, if you were a first time recipient of, let's just say, food, food stamps, they knew they knew when exactly you were going to return for a housing problem, right, but the food people don't talk to the housing people. And so what ends up happening is that the onus and the responsibility of navigating through this crisis goes on to the person in crisis. right. And what you end up having to have is, you know, sometimes you'll see networks within the system. 

Rich Bennett 37:53
Right, 

Robert Mahoney 37:53
There's single points of failure. So somebody will retire or somebody will get promoted and the whole network just kind of like collapses, right. And so that that cross communication just sort of disintegrates and you're sort of back to these very hard rigid sort of system things. That's sort of fine in a certain way, but we've also seen studies Vermont being, being one of them that published something. Now this is this was focused solely on suicide, but it goes, right, it goes to my point where within one calendar year, all the people that committed suicide. In the state of Vermont during one calendar year, I think they found out that 98% of those people had connection to one social service. 

Rich Bennett 38:44
What, 

Robert Mahoney 38:45
yeah, 78% had connection to three or more. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so you can sort of, you can have two, two storylines off of that. You can say, these systems that they've employed at the state level are just, you know, sorry for prison, just absolute dog shit, right. 

Rich Bennett 39:05
Yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 39:06
Like they're not working at all. Or you could look at it from another way of none of these things, none of these sort of social services networks or systems are integrated in any sort of way. Like they're not communicating. And 

Rich Bennett 39:20
right. 

Robert Mahoney 39:20
so you are trying, you are, you are single serving these individuals, thinking that, you know, oh, you're homeless, here's a home. That solves your problems, right. Like, oh, no, I also have undiagnosed mental health issues, or I have an addiction issue, or I can't seem to retain a job because I have PTSD from returning from my rack or Afghanistan. Right. And so, yeah, well, that's not really my, that's not my baliwick. Here's a home or here's a temporary housing assignment. That's all I can do, right. And so when you bring it more holistic from a prevention side, when you get that more concept of care, you are bringing all of those things together and you are sort of sharing that information and and things like that. Now with HIPAA laws and everything else, I'm totally on board with keeping that kind of information as private as possible. That doesn't preclude these agencies in these systems from talking to one 

Rich Bennett 40:23
another. Exactly. 

Robert Mahoney 40:24
Right. So they can, they can be notified that hey, that person that you just put into your network is also on three other networks within the state, right? Like, there needs to be some sort of case manager or 

Rich Bennett 40:38
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 40:38
somebody needs to reach out to that individual to try and coalesce what's happening here. Oh, they also have, you know, within the last two weeks, they've been visited by this mental health or they've been visited by police and things like that. You don't need to know the specifics. You just need to know that a lot of different people within the community are having interactions with this individual. And so your contextual, knowledge of what's going on completely changes. And I get the best example of this was a few years ago up in Lewiston, Maine. If you remember that attack where Robert Card went into a bowling alley and shot up a bowling alley and 

Rich Bennett 41:21
yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 41:22
everything else. So Robert was known by, he was a military, he was a national guardsman. The military was concerned about him. Local police were concerned about him. Mental health was concerned about him. His family had been calling. So everybody that needed to know about Robert Card, knew about Robert Card, right. And one of the, I think it was a state police officer went to his house for a checkup call. 

Rich Bennett 41:50
Okay. 

Robert Mahoney 41:50
And talked to him. Nothing alarming. He's not doing anything illegal. Parents were concerned about him. He's alive. What do you want me to do? He said after that cop said after, if he had known that there had been all these different interactions with him or the span of X amount of months, that checkup call is a completely different context. 

Rich Bennett 42:14
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 42:15
So that cop left because he didn't know any of that on any of 

Rich Bennett 42:20
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 42:20
the information. He was not privy to any of that information. He didn't need to know the context of those interactions. But knowing that there's a lot of different people that are concerned about this individual changes your interactions with that individual. And so when I say that we don't necessarily have a reporting problem in this country, we have a coordination problem. These are the types of examples that I'm sort of talking about. 

Rich Bennett 42:45
And we saw that with 9/11. 

Robert Mahoney 42:47
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 42:49
Yeah. Which you would think 

also, and I think all sources need to coordinate. And not just different police departments, but even down to like your churches and everything. 

Robert Mahoney 43:06
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 43:07
And that's what you do. You go into these communities and pull them all together. And I love the care team. I love that. But you actually helped them to build these care teams and teach them all this stuff, right? 

Robert Mahoney 43:21
Yeah. And the idea around the care team, and I'm going to get a little meta here or a little zen, but the the high coup is basically you want to make the water as still as possible 

Rich Bennett 43:35
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 43:35
so that you can see what's causing the ripple. And When you institute these protection measures and these more response measures into an environment, it creates a lot of noise. And so it becomes very, very difficult to find those subtle oddities, those little subtle ripples, because you've got so much that is in front of your face that you have to sort of immediately take care of. 

Rich Bennett 44:02
right. 

Robert Mahoney 44:02
And what ends up happening a lot from a security standpoint, security today doesn't into account how much of a customer service approach it is, right? You hear a lot of this idea of 

sorry, the door man fallacy, right? When you go to a restaurant or a hotel and there is a door man or there is you know, concierge car service or something like that. Your entire attitude changes, 

Rich Bennett 44:39
Oh yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 44:39
right? You you sit up straight. You know that this is a serious place that you're going into and therefore you need to change your behavior. I talk about this experience that I had going into a liquor store down in the in a city. And as I approach the liquor store, I can see that there's a camera. You know, there there's some chain link fence around the windows. There's a big, you know, bright fluorescent light right by the 

Rich Bennett 45:05
like you're walking into Fort Knox. 

Robert Mahoney 45:07
Right. I'm pulling this I'm pulling this, you know, it reinforced door with bulletproof glass on. I go into like this holding pen. There's a metal detector. I go through the metal detector, then I get wandered by a security guard and then I go into the liquor store and it's floor to ceiling bulletproof glass. There's CCTV cameras everywhere. There's four high fluorescent lights. And I remember thinking like, oh, this is, this is a weird paradox because technically this is the most secure place I've ever been in my life. And yet I've never been more scared in my entire. 

Rich Bennett 45:43
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 45:44
because the narrative isn't, oh, look at all these security measures aren't I safe? It's what the hell goes on here that they felt the need 

Rich Bennett 45:53
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 45:53
to have all these things here. Get me out of here, right? And I think from the protection side of things, this is where the value sort of structure, the weird sort of emotional value thing that happens with human beings kind of 

Rich Bennett 46:09
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 46:09
makes into place. This is the reason why the price is right has been on the air for so long is because we actually as human beings are terrible at assessing value. We're just terrible at it. We 

Rich Bennett 46:22
no 

Robert Mahoney 46:22
have 

Rich Bennett 46:23
I 

Robert Mahoney 46:25
can just throw numbers of a week long vacation in Kankoon or a 50 inch TV, I can't tell the difference. And there's been a lot of studies on this as well, where I think the Austrian School of Economics or something like that came out with a study for restaurants that basically boiled it down that human beings cannot distinguish between the man that cooks the food and the boy that sweeps the floor. Meaning the experience of an environment is all encompassing. 

Rich Bennett 47:02
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 47:03
And so just like going into the liquor store, the more you put these security measures in or if you're a school and you put metal detectors in and then you have a heavy police presence and then you've got harsh lighting and stuff like that, that changes people's behavior. 

Rich Bennett 47:18
And 

Robert Mahoney 47:19
it actually doesn't create a more safe environment what it creates is a more noisy environment. So going back to sort of keeping that water as still as possible, right? When I go to schools and I'll ask them a question, all right, you tell me the difference between a quiet kid in the corner and a kid that is sort of in the grips of isolation. Like you tell me what the difference is. 

Rich Bennett 47:42
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 47:44
You can't. And so that is a subtle ripple that might be nothing, but is an unusual thing that's going to catch somebody's eye that might need to be addressed in a proactive way. Right. And so but if you have all this other noise around you, you're going to miss that, right? Because you're going to have other people that are causing ripples as well. 

Rich Bennett 48:10
Yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 48:10
That you're going to you're going to pay more attention to those bigger, bigger ripples. So this learning how that that psychology works, and looking at things like the door man fallacy, or a great example of this from a private sector is actually Starbucks, all right. So knock on as much wood as we can find here, but there has never been a mass attack at a Starbucks. There have actually been attacks like isolated attacks 

Rich Bennett 48:41
okay. 

Robert Mahoney 48:42
at a Starbucks, but there has never been a mass attack at a Starbucks. If you go to any Starbucks, it's pretty wide open. It's 

Rich Bennett 48:48
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 48:48
usually a lot of windows. There's not. I can't remember a time where I've seen a security guard at at a Starbucks. It's a very open place. Starbucks spent a lot of time on lighting, wood grain, HVAC smells, the type of music that is played, things like that, all to get you subconsciously to want to buy a $5 cup of coffee. Right. 

Rich Bennett 49:19
Wow. 

Robert Mahoney 49:21
We can employ that kind of stuff for safety. 

Rich Bennett 49:26
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 49:26
Okay. And I don't I'm not advocating on redesigning every school or office building or anything like that. But there is a lot of evidence that if you put some noise canceling stuff in a cafeteria, anxiety goes down. If you go from 30,000 lumens to 2700, You're your entire attitude 

Rich Bennett 49:50
there. 

Robert Mahoney 49:50
changes. If you go from white walls to you know a great a shade of sage green, your attitude changes. And from a security standpoint, when you look at those things, that is those things really help you out in identifying where your sort of ripples are. In the same way that that door man is active security. Right. 

Rich Bennett 50:16
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 50:16
He's able to sort of take temperature check of, Hey, that guy came by last Wednesday and looked really weird across the street and now he's coming back again. That that's an oddity. Right. Oh, Mr. Daniels is coming over. How are you, Mr. Daniels? Fine. Okay. That's not a problem. Go ahead. Right. And those type that type of dynamic security, that customer service. 

Rich Bennett 50:40
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 50:40
kind of thing and being able to sort of manipulate the environment to get people to behave in a way that is going to have those those oddity behavioral oddities spike a little bit harder is really interesting. One of the industries that is really pioneered this from sort of like a community level is really the transportation sort of sector. 

Rich Bennett 51:08
Okay. 

Robert Mahoney 51:09
So things like there's something called a pedestrian 

refuge. So this is usually like a little concrete island and then there's like a crosswalk that cuts in 

Rich Bennett 51:21
Oh 

Robert Mahoney 51:21
front 

Rich Bennett 51:21
yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 51:21
of it or in through it. So those these things only stick out maybe six or eight inches into either lane. It doesn't really prohibit anybody from just speeding right through. But what it does is it that six to eight inches into your lane isolates the are narrowed down the lane just enough as a driver that you will naturally pull off the gas right. And so I don't need to put a cop there or I don't need to put a flock camera that's taking picture of your license plate or a speedometer thing or anything like that because I've installed this thing that's actually going to get you naturally to just go slower right. They have a lot of to to stay on this sort of transportation thing. They have found that those signs that post your speed. 

Rich Bennett 52:12
Yes. 

Robert Mahoney 52:13
actually don't work at all. You actually think you're probably you know F1 race at Monaco and that's like 

Rich Bennett 52:19
Y'all 

Robert Mahoney 52:19
your lap that's your lap time right. You know you're like oh great you know they've actually found more psychological impact on just putting a frowny face or a smiley face. 

Rich Bennett 52:31
Really? 

Robert Mahoney 52:32
Yeah. Yeah. It's very odd. And sort of like these these weird emotional nuance type things that we can inflict whether it's lighting or the color of something or narrowing a lane just by six inches or putting a smiley face or things like that have more impact on how we behave from a safety standpoint than most of our hardened sort of you know protective sort of things right. And and so as part of the proactive prevention methodology that that we preach we also get them to sort of examine the environment in which they're in right. And so sometimes instead of letting the kids come to the school just getting off the bus and going up the stairs into the school sometimes we encourage the schools to have their teachers or administrative staff four or five different people come out and just greet the student as they come in right. You're able to see if some kid is has his head down or if there's behavioral problems but it also brings those kids that aren't having any problems that this is a safe space right that there's a level of care that is coming is actively going to be here that is that is different. Looking at things like noise deprivation or colors or things like that in the in the environment to sort of begin to get that sort of calm water within within the space. 

Rich Bennett 54:10
Wow. So this is amazing and it sucks because I could talk to you 

Robert Mahoney 54:16
here. 

Rich Bennett 54:17
Where hours to one other services does TVTP offer. 

Robert Mahoney 54:22
So we offer these services we a lot of talk and then we do a lot of plan development so a lot of schools are we what you'll find with either schools or office buildings depending on on what they have is you'll you'll go into response plans a lot of different you know offices will have an active shooter sort of response plan or an evacuation plan. What we do is we go into there and we we see okay is this strictly response or is there an annex that we can put on the front of 

Rich Bennett 54:59
this. Right right 

Robert Mahoney 55:00
where all new employees or all new students and everything else get training in looking at doing prevention. Can we move this, can we move this needle a little bit more to the left, to the boom, basically, where you're not waiting to activate that plan once something has sort of kicked off. Right? Can we get there from in front? The other thing that we do is obviously, so we do that, we work on coordinating in developing those care teams, looking outside that sort of, or elevating that care team. A lot of behavioral threat assessment teams in states are located at the schools. We have begun to try and convince municipalities to remove those out of the schools. Not necessarily take the school out completely. There are component of the overall team, but they do not need to be the coordinating body. They don't need to be the nucleus of trying to communicate through everything. There's a lot of reasons why. One, there are school teachers, they're not security professionals. 

Rich Bennett 56:13
Exactly. 

Robert Mahoney 56:14
Two, 

the data that comes out of these municipalities of their yearly threats are usually way skewed to 18 and under. Right? Because that is the population that is in there. So I don't want to see, I don't believe that all threats in one municipality of 97% of all targeted threats are coming from 18 and under. I don't believe that that's an accurate stat. Right? At that point, kids are no longer the future. They're the problem. Right? So, 

Rich Bennett 56:48
yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 56:48
it's, so you got to, you got to get a more holistic way of where these threats are coming from. So we have seen a lot of town managers, town mayors, and things like that create these sort of care team, you know, committees, or things like that where they come monthly or weekly or biweekly. And what they do is they just basically share information without giving any sort of PII. And so you will see, oh, yeah, you'll get that what we were sort of talking about. Yeah, law enforcement had an interaction with them last Thursday. Mental health was called just 48 hours ago. They've been having, for the last month, they've been having issues at the school with this individual, right? Again, all I know is this surface area, superficial kind of information of, like, right, you've interacted with this person, you've interacted with the person I'm interacted with this person. We're all kind of failing this person. If we're all interacting with this person, there's obviously a major need here. Somebody needs to deep dive on that. Otherwise, I wouldn't share it, right? Like, it's 

Rich Bennett 58:01
right. 

Robert Mahoney 58:01
not in my 

Rich Bennett 58:01
Exactly. 

Robert Mahoney 58:02
They're 

Rich Bennett 58:02
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 58:02
not doing anything illegal. I have no reason from a law enforcement perspective to share this information with mental health. Mental health. I know it. I'm not going to share it with the cop. There's no reason they're not a threat to themselves or others based on the threshold that that system has developed. So I'm not sharing it with that. And I have no contact otherwise with the school district. So you can sort of see how, again, it's not necessarily a resource gap. It's a coordination gap. 

Rich Bennett 58:33
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 58:33
And so we do that kind of stuff as well as just sort of the generalized training of just really creating a different mentality on what prevention is as compared to protection. A lot of what people think they are doing from a security side in preventing attacks is really protection, right? It's the metal detectors. It's getting the cameras and things like that. And it's hard for a lot of people to say, all right, we're going to, we're going to even this out. We're going to take a little bit of money away from these protection measures and we're going to move it to the prevention side. And the metrics on prevention are a little bit nebulous. I'll agree on that. Like I don't know necessarily the best metric to 

from a numerical standpoint to say, okay, we've included these prevention measures. How are we measuring our success? But I would also push back on, okay, if you spent a million dollars on protective security, what is the ROI or what is the metric that you are using to get that? Because it can't be all well, nothing happened today. So therefore it's working, right? Because if you put a million dollars worth to secure a school or to secure an office building, what is your metric to say that that million dollars that your ROI is a million dollars plus? 

Rich Bennett 1:00:07
Right, 

Robert Mahoney 1:00:08
right. And so I think, you know, as much as you don't want to get hippie-dippy and say it's about vibes, man, it is kind of about vibes. Like the retention that you have with staff, the general feeling that you have from students of enjoying to be there, the amount of early detective reports that you get from an administrative or, you know, level and things like that on people, the more proactive interventions or mediations that you are able to do, that's all by putting money into the prevention side. 

Rich Bennett 1:00:49
Yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 1:00:50
And and I think, you know, the just saying, all right, well, we're going to wait to see if something happens and hope that this works is really, really rolling the dice. There was a case in Dayton, Ohio a few years ago where from the first shot that was taken to the point where that perpetrator had been taken down by police, I think was something like 27 seconds. They had shot nine people. They had injured like 30 other, it was 30, 32 seconds, 32 seconds from first shot to neutralize threat. Nine people killed 27 people injured, right? There were already six to cops on that street. 

Rich Bennett 1:01:43
Oh, yeah. 

Robert Mahoney 1:01:45
So it's Conor Betts is the case study. And so my, my argument is, you can't really do better than that, right? You had eight cops that were already there in a heavily populated area that were already looking at doing some crowd control and we're already sort of in, in theater. 

Rich Bennett 1:02:07
Mm hmm. 

Robert Mahoney 1:02:09
If you think that your protection measures are so good that you are going to be able to prevent something, you know, a reaction time of 30 seconds, go ahead, roll the dice. I don't think that you're going to get much better than that. And so I think that it behooves any town or city or state to start moving more to a prevention centric sort of mentality. 

Rich Bennett 1:02:35
Yeah, prevent it altogether. So it never would have happened. Wow. So if with communities, let's say, because I believe every place should have this. I love the care team thing. I think that's awesome. Is it best for people in a community to reach out to, I guess their officials, health department or whatever to have them contact you or should be, 

Robert Mahoney 1:03:05
they can either or yeah, I mean, we have a contact page on TVTP. So TVTP is an acronym that stands for targeted violence and terrorism prevention. So we have a contact page they can contact me directly or they can get somebody from their community to contact me directly and we can work with whatever whatever needs they have. Where I draw my sort of sandbox line is I am not a clinician. So I don't take on cases. Right. So if 

Rich Bennett 1:03:34
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 1:03:34
you have an individual that you are concerned about in your community or something like that, I am not the guy to 

Rich Bennett 1:03:40
Now. 

Robert Mahoney 1:03:40
do that mediation. Right. I am the guy that tells the actual professionals sort of the way in which they should approach the mediation, but I don't do the actual mediation. So I'm not going to take on any cases, but if you are concerned that your police force or your town does not have a behavioral threat assessment. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:03
Right. 

Robert Mahoney 1:04:03
Or you know that your school district has a requirement for a behavioral threat assessment team, but you also know that there is no review of that behavioral threat assessment team by the state. And there's no resources from the state to that that school district on what a behavioral threat assessment team is supposed to look like or do or anything like that. Then yes, by all means give them my contact information on I will help them in as many ways as I can. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:40
and what's the website? 

Robert Mahoney 1:04:42
tvtpsolutions.com. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:45
Now I'll, I'll make sure I have that in the share notes. So Robert, is there anything you would like to add before I get to my last question, what you're gonna pick? 

Robert Mahoney 1:04:54
No, I'm good. 

Rich Bennett 1:04:55
Alright, I need you to pick a number between one and five. 

Robert Mahoney 1:04:59
I'm gonna go three. 

Rich Bennett 1:05:01
Three. Why does everybody always go for the middle? 

Now I need you to pick a number between 41 and 60. 

Robert Mahoney 1:05:11
45. 

Rich Bennett 1:05:13
Oh, no, by his pick this question yet. 

I believe in a way, this goes with what we've been talking about. What does it mean to live a good life? 

Robert Mahoney 1:05:30
Well, I think it's a good life. Man, in that subjective. Right? I think, you know, from, 

for me, I didn't really find my purpose until sort of really sort of late in life. I mean, I was, I was, I was enjoying the emergency management stuff, but once I got my teeth into this, I really, this, I found like, this is my lane, this is 

Rich Bennett 1:06:00
yeah, 

Robert Mahoney 1:06:00
sort of what I was to do. 

I have confidence in myself, in my abilities and my knowledge and everything else that even if this sort of my boats get rocked or my buckets begin to spill, I have enough confidence in myself to know that I can sort of weather that storm, 

Rich Bennett 1:06:23
right? But 

Robert Mahoney 1:06:24
I still need that community. I need that support structure. I need my friends. I need my family. I need the other people within the industry to kind of help me out. So I would say like the key to a good life is being able to know and have those people around you. You don't, there is no such thing as a lone soldier. There just, there is no lone wolf. Okay? Like the, the, it doesn't work in nature. And, and we are social animals. And as much as the community can frustrate us and piss us off and we don't want to be around it, we need it. And so the key to a good life, I think, is, is understanding that sort of community aspect and, and having those people around us that we know that in times of crisis or even, you know, however big or small the crisis is that we have people that we can depend on 

Rich Bennett 1:07:28
and lean on. Yeah. That's a good answer. Robert, I want to thank you so much. The door is open anytime you want to come back because they're, actually, I'm, oh, man. guess I might, I got an idea. I have to run by here 

Robert Mahoney 1:07:41
I 

Rich Bennett 1:07:41
in a minute. Robert, thanks a lot. 

Robert Mahoney 1:07:44
No problem. 

Rich Bennett 1:07:46
So one of the biggest takeaways that I got from this is that creating safer communities isn't just the responsibility of law enforcement or emergency responders. It's something we all have a role in. Robert reminded us that prevention starts long before a crisis ever makes the headlines. It starts with paying attention, communicating with one another, and recognizing when someone may be struggling, instead of assuming someone else will step in. And what really resonated with me was the idea of moving from a culture of reaction to a culture of care. So whether it's schools, businesses, churches, neighborhood organizations, or local government, the more we work together, instead of operating in separate silos, the better chance we have of helping people before they reach a breaking point. Sometimes the smallest act of compassion, the willingness to ask someone if they're okay, or sharing a concern with the right people, can change, of course, in someone's life. If you'd like to learn more about Robert Mahoney, his work, or how TVTP solutions helps communities build proactive care teams and prevention strategies, you'll find all of his information in the share news. I also want to thank our sponsor for helping make conversations like this possible. Please take a moment to support the businesses that support conversations with Rich Bennett. They're investing in meaningful discussions that can make a real difference. Until next time, I'm Rich Bennett, thanks for listening and remember. Every great conversation starts with someone willing to listen and someone willing to share. Now, it's your turn. Join the conversation by sharing this episode, leave in a comment or reaching out to me directly. Take care, be kind to one another, and I'll talk with you again soon.