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THE RECORD FEATURES JUNE 6TH, 2022
On the lookout: A behind-the-scenes look at the work of Public Safety Vidhatrie Keetha and Neeva Patel Staff Writers “We’re not up in the forefront. We stay very much in the background, and that’s the way we want it,” Assistant Director of Public Safety Peter Clancy said. “When the time comes when we need to step forward, we do that, we take control and we calm things down.” Whether they are helping a student get on the bus safely or taking action during an emergency, the school’s Public Safety team aims to ensure that students feel safe every moment that they are at the school, Public Safety Specialist Glenn Smith said. The team is made up of 36 members, making it one of the largest departments in the school. The team is composed of two directors, four supervisors, thirteen parttime officers, and 17 full-time officers. Almost all members of the school’s Public Safety team have previously held careers in law enforcement. Among the staff are ten retired police officers, two active duty police officers, three retired police lieutenants, one supervising fire marshal, one active duty fire marshall, two detectives, and one retired New York Police Department (NYPD) firefighter who was a police officer for ten years before joining the fire department, Director of Public Safety Mike McCaw said. McCaw himself was formerly a police captain in the NYPD. McCaw has worked as a member of the school’s Public Safety team for fourteen years. Prior to working at the school, he served as Director of Security for the College of Mount St. Vincent, worked in the position of Assistant Director of Security Operations for New York University, and was the Commanding Officer of Transit Bronx Task Force with the NYPD. McCaw has worked with the police department for a total of 21 years and has also worked in educational institutions for 21 years, he said. Smith, a retired fireman and fire marshall, said that having had prior experience in law enforcement — such as experience as a police officer, court officer, or fireman — is a necessary prerequisite for working at the school, he said. “I was most likely hired due to my previous experience as a fire marshall because there I worked a lot with safety.” Max Feng (10) thinks it is vital for Public Safety officers to have previous law enforcement experience, he said. “I do know that a lot of our Public Safety officers are retired firemen and policemen, which is good for knowing how to deal with a variety of situations.” McCaw, who is in charge of hiring, intentionally selects members from a variety of professional law enforcement backgrounds with the approval of Head of School Dr. Tom Kelly, he said. “They bring a wealth of experience. It’s all about emergency response, handling medical emergencies, any serious and minor incidents and how to interact with the community.” English teacher Brad Engelstein thinks those with law enforcement experience are appropriate for the job, he said. “I think the individuals on campus are responsible and exude a sense of confidence.” Sofia Kim (10) feels safe knowing members of the Public Safety team are professionally trained and have the experience and the knowledge required to best protect the school, she said. “While there are obvious flaws within
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the police system, I think the officers we have on campus have been working here for a while and they strive to protect our school, so I would hope they still have those goals in mind.” Although a candidate’s experience in educational institutions is an important factor in McCaw’s hiring process, the most important quality is a candidate’s personality and ability to interact with community members, he said. “The major part of our job here, probably 98 to 99 percent of our job, is public relations. How do we interact, and how do we help?” McCaw said. A candidate’s ability to blend into the background on campus is also taken into account when hiring, as it is an important part of how the team operates and responds to emergency situations. “A lot of us dress very casual, so we could look like a teacher. We can look like a coach in case somebody is watching and seeing what’s going on,” McCaw said, “We need people that are going to be friendly, and who are going to be kind, and in the event of an emergency, be able to step forward and take complete control of the situation.” Engelstein has not had many interactions with Public Safety
we do a lot to prevent that from ever happening, so when you’re responsible for the safety of others it can be a little stressful,” Clancy said. “But it’s just more customer service paced — we’re here to help the community, and like in the police department, we’re there to help the citizens too.” One incident during which the Public Safety team stepped forward happened around seven years ago and involved a woman who did not properly park her car. The woman’s car started rolling and as she went to jump into the car to try and stop it, she ended up getting caught underneath the car. “We all responded very quickly. We stabilized the scene, we stabilized the car, and we were in the process of removing her from underneath the car when the first responders arrived,” Clancy said. The situation also demonstrates the experience the team has, Clancy said. “We knew what to do. We knew that the scene had to be stabilized and that woman needed medical attention,” he said. “We were underneath the car keeping her calm, while other members were trying to jack up the car to get her out,” he said. “And luckily she wasn’t hurt. Very minor injuries.”
said. “Cameras are tools used to identify and also respond to emergencies so that we can intercept them before they can even happen.” The team keeps a lookout for anything that might negatively affect students, Smith said. “We go to every medical emergency there is at the school and we monitor what’s going on outside the school, to make sure it stays outside the school,” he said. “We respond to anything that’s out of the ordinary and do drills like the fire and lockdown drills the school has.” Along with drills, to ensure that students are familiar with protocols at the start of the year, the Public Safety team hosts the annual safety assembly, introducing members of the team and showing safety videos. While the team has a number of other measures in place, McCaw intentionally does not present all this information at the assembly, to avoid the risk of exposing the team’s procedures to potential bad actors. “We don’t know where [that] information is going to go,” he said. “So, we talk to you, I’m not telling you about everything that we have.
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members, but he appreciates that they stay behind the scenes, he said. “I feel as if it would be a distraction from their state of permanent vigilance if they were to prioritize talking to teachers or students,” he said. Smith does try to talk to students when they enter the school because he rarely needs to use his emergency departmental skills. He has a Certified First Responder Defibrillation (CFR-D) credit from the fire department as well as other professional law enforcement experience but finds that his knowledge rarely comes into use during the school day, he said. Although members of the team, such as Smith, have years of immediate response experience, the team’s daily operations rarely require the actual handling of major emergencies. Working in a school is more engaging for McCaw, he said. “The police department comes with a high level of stress, but there’s also anxiety and there’s pressures and there’s so many things going on in schools, colleges, universities,” he said. “So it’s a beautiful kind of transition, because we serve a purpose.” Although the job still comes with a lot of responsibility, Clancy finds that working at the school has been less stressful than his time as a police officer, he said. He has worked at the school for close to ten years, prior to which he worked for 25 years as a police sergeant for the NYPD. “We don’t want anything to happen to any member of our community, and
Because emergencies do not happen frequently, Julia Werdiger (10) thinks the team has expanded more than they need to, she said. “I don’t remember the last time where I was scared for my life or when the team stepped in, maybe it’s happened, and I just don’t know it,” she said. This method reflects the Public Safety team’s approach, McCaw said. “It’s a team method. It’s comprehensive and every component works together. So if you think of a puzzle, it’s putting puzzle pieces together. My job is to obviously manage it,” he said. A typical day for Clancy mostly involves overseeing daily operations. “Probably one of the busiest parts of our day is the arrival with the students and faculty and staff coming in, coordinating the buses coming in and out, controlling the traffic and making sure the students get across the street safely, and just making sure all of our equipment is up and running — our camera systems, our access control devices and different things like that,” he said. Public Safety Trainer Rob Aviles, who manages the security in Lutnick Hall, uses cameras to piece together stories and look for situations or people that might need assistance, he said. “Although we help members of our own student body, we also look out for anyone that shouldn’t be on campus,” he
Since the start of the pandemic, the public safety department has almost doubled in size, and fences have been built around the entirety of the campus.
I wouldn’t tell anybody about everything that we have.” Giselle Paulson (11) finds the information shared in the assembly repetitive. “I can’t say I’ve noticed the reactions of other people, but I assume that like me, they know all this info already, so I don’t think it’d be a stretch to say they’re less engaged in this assembly than others,” she said. “However, they’re actually more engaged in the video than normal, because everyone loves the ‘sorry I have a bus to catch’ line.” Along with hosting the annual assembly, the team is responsible for making sure students leave school safely at the end of each day. “Arrival and dismissal, that’s when you’re mixing school buses with cars and students and crossing the streets and it brings a whole set of scenarios that could turn really bad really quick,” McCaw said. “So we have to manage that completely.” While monitoring cameras during arrival, dismissal, and throughout the day, McCaw watches for anything out of the ordinary, he said. “Let’s say there’s a suspicious person that we need to keep an eye on, or a traffic hazard, we can watch it and we can make calls to let’s say 911 and get additional services if needed.” To Aviles, “suspicious” is a general term, and the team usually identifies when someone is a danger to the school using their judgment as retired law enforcement, he said. The team does not have a specific “look” that they deem suspect, but identification is more so based on the behavior of people and narratives of the day, he said. “If we have a football game that day, we have to stay more vigilant since parents and other individuals are entering the campus
The team is made up of two directors, four supervisors, 13 part-time officers, and 17 fulltime officers, and almost all members of the school’s Public Safety team have previously held careers in law enforcement.
who are not here on a daily basis.” Because most of the team has worked at the school for a period of time, Aviles finds that the team is generally aware of the cues and cultures that comprise the typical rhythm of life on campus. “It’s funny when you live in a world of unison, the odd thing presents itself to you,” he said, “If an individual is on campus, I ask myself, ‘why is this person continuing to stare in this direction?’” Aviles looks out for subtleties when visitors come to campus, he said. “If someone says that they came to the school 25 years ago and explain that they are lurking outside campus just admiring the new structures, they might want to get into the school,” he said. Alara Yilmaz (10) also feels that the team handles emergencies well, although she does not know much about the team’s operations, she said. “Especially with recent events, if something like a school shooting were to happen, cameras and other technology would be very helpful and effective.” In addition to managing daily operations, a major part of operating the Public Safety team is research. “If any violent incidents occur in schools, we research it, we look into it, we all discuss it to see if we need to tweak any of our security systems,” Clancy said. After the school shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, the team conducted an in-depth analysis on mass casualty incidents, he said. “Any kind of mass casualty incident we evaluate it to see what we can learn from it, and what we can change and we have changed things in the past.” Some of these changes include announcing fire drills before they happen, tweaking lockdown drills, and informing students, faculty, and staff how to respond to an emergency situation, McCaw said. The team recently changed its lockdown procedure in response to a strategy used during the shooting at Oxford High School on November 30, 2021. The shooter knocked on locked doors and urged students to come out of hiding by pretending to be the police, McCaw said. “We modified our procedures based on that. Our procedure before was that the police will come and knock on the door, and then you open the door, so we had to change that.” Generally, in response to any instance of school violence — including school shootings — the Public Safety office puts together a detailed review of the event, Kelly wrote in an email. The review typically summarizes how the school would have responded to the event, as well as the areas where the school might have fallen short. From the review comes a list of recommendations for Kelly and the board to consider, he wrote. Aviles thinks it is important to stay current and change procedures without students being tipped or gaining knowledge of those changes, he said. “Most people don’t realize that we are armed or even understand what we do everyday, and that’s fine, that’s actually what we want,” he said. “However, when the school needs someone to respond and react, they want people with expertise who wear many different hats.” Anyone who speaks to Aviles would see him talking about different tactics to combat threats, he said. “Most people assume that by ‘tactics’ I mean kicking and fighting, but it is more so just going over hypothetical scenarios to increase our default response,” he said. The team often practices active shooter scenarios to prepare for a situation that could
The school currently has over 620 cameras installed across its three campuses, including the nursery division and Dorr, and the number has been expanding for the past 12 years.
