Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Selling fear

I recently heard a presentation by Strategos International on workplace safety and suicide prevention.  The speaker almost immediately set off my BS detector.

Bits and pieces of the speech, paraphrased and filtered through my memory:
We're a big deal with major clients.  I'm Vice President of... (If your company is a big deal, why is a vice president doing a routine speech?)
We love companies like...who hire us before they have an incident.  (Incidents are inevitable without their help?)
I bet the White Settlement Texas church wished they had a security plan before there were 3 dead (The murderer was shot and killed by a member of the security team, while several other parishioners drew guns and advanced on the shooter.  That sounds like they had a plan, even if it didn't turn out perfectly)
The world is a more and more dangerous place  (except statistically it isn't, murder is at or near the lowest level it has been in my lifetime)
We've had XXXX school shootings since... (No definition given, so what counts as a school shooting?  What does it have to do with workplace safety?)

The speech was padded to be half an hour, but could be summed up in a few lines--Most suicides and spree shooters show signs, talk of violence before they strike.  so "see something, say something NOW"

According to Google, their headquarters is a little one-story building next door to a strip mall.  Google Street View shows the strip mall's parking lot to be oddly empty.   It turns out that the strip mall is entirely occupied by the International House of Prayer University.  Strategos main focus appears to be church security, but they got their start with a grant to teach defense against school shooting.  According to their website, the Vice President for Operations is a black belt in Sho-Lum-Tae Karate.  Searching "Sho Lum Tae", the top results are all that the vice president of operations is a black belt.   Basically nothing I found on Google helped to disarm my BS detector, it just got more and more odd.