What you need to know about security for your ministry... today and tomorrow.
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In this week’s newsletter our featured news story is an incident that should shake every Christian organization that deals with children down to the bone.
The worst-case scenario – a child abducted from a church classroom on a Sunday morning.
By the grace of God (and some very good precautions and security measures taken by the churches involved) this story has a happy ending.
But it illustrates what we teach at the Christian Security Network every day – don’t focus on the sensational incidents like an active shooter because there are many threats and risks that face your church and all are equally important.
By all news accounts, this incident involves a 19-year-old emotionally and mentally disturbed young woman in Michigan who went to at least two churches on a Sunday morning, visiting the nurseries, before going back to her own church (where she volunteered) and taking an 11-month old child out of the church to her home.
Her motives, intentions, and state-of-mind are of little importance because the incident happened – desire and motives of the criminal are something we will never have control over – it is all about opportunity.
The good news of this incident is that the security measures adopted by all the churches involved seemed to have stopped something very tragic from being completed.
We know that the offender visited two churches prior to going back to her own and abducting the child. In one of the churches it appears that the staff was very aware of suspicious people because they became so concerned about the offender and the way she was acting they called the police - she fled.
She visited another church and we don’t know why she did not attempt to take a child there, but based on the other church visit maybe alert staff and volunteers or other security measures scared her off.
These “visits” before committing an act is what we talk about in our training all the time. Whether it is a burglar, active shooter or child predator, the majority of time the offender will do reconnaissance (or strategic observation) before committing the act. If they feel their chances to “succeed” are low, they pick another target.
We can only surmise that this offender choose her own church because she was already a known volunteer, knew the routines, and would not alert anyone while being around the children (this offender had passed a background check according to the church in news reports).
The appears that the church had a very good program of taking “head counts” of the children and when it was discovered one was missing they immediately contacted the parents and authorities.
The church also had a CCTV system, which was recorded and they were able to go back to the video and see the offender walking out of the church with the child.
Again, back to basics of good security – a CCTV system which has cameras placed in key locations, a video recording system that was working, and active procedural security for “check and balances” of keeping track of the children.
We talk in our training about not only having a good CCTV system in place, but to ensure it is working in the event you need to quickly access it for situations like this. How tragic would it have been to go back to those recordings only to find the system was not working?
We can only guess what might have happened if this church did not have these measures in place.
I remember several instances where children where abducted from hospitals by emotionally disturbed individuals (usually woman in these type of incidents) and one in particular in Chicago, where in this case it took awhile to track the female offender down and when they found the infant in her apartment, the baby was dead.
As we have stated, being informed is the first step in being prepared. Every news story of a crime against a church has lessons to be learned – this one has a bunch.
This was not an incident where guns, guards, and metal detectors would have made a difference. The background check in this case did not make a difference. That is why we teach churches, schools, and ministries not to focus on any one particular security measure or plan.
Security and emergency planning is an on-going program that stretches across the whole organization, trying to anticipate the worst-case scenario.
Security is never 100% - but in this case it made the difference between a scary situation and a tragic event for everyone involved.
Pray for the best and plan for the worst – but do plan.
In Christ,
Jeff Hawkins
Executive Director
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