U.S. Elections Safety Perspectives

I had the opportunity to interview our in-house expert on federal law enforcement, Tracy Reinhold, and our in-house expert on local law enforcement, Michael Kostrzewa, regarding the impact of the upcoming U.S. elections on matters of safety. You can listen to a 30-minute edit of that panel below, or else review the quicknotes version in text below.

Some context from past U.S. Elections by Everbridge's RIMC team

• 2000 Presidential Election Protests were held in dozens of cities across the country, including in front of the Supreme Court in Washington DC, throughout the month-long series of legal battles to protest the discrepancies in the Florida results.
• 2004 Presidential Election Protest activity occurred on the day after Election Day in over 80 cities across the country without significant incidents.
• 2008 Presidential Election In the days following Election Day, there were isolated reports of targeted attacks against the president's supporters and destruction of property.
• 2012 Presidential Election Claims of election irregularities were raised, particularly in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. At least several protests were reported the day after Election Day.
• 2016 Presidential Election Thousands of demonstrators in at least 25 U.S. cities took to the streets to protest the president-elect the night after their election. While the vast majority of the protests were peaceful, incidents of violence were reported.

What lessons has history taught us through past elections given your rich federal experience?

Tracy Reinhold: History has shown us that the country as a whole is very resilient. and that humans in general have the ability to overcome adversity. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the institutions that make this country strong will continue to function during any sort of disruption post-election.

How might law enforcement and other government agencies be preparing differently for this election?

Michael Kostrzewa: I think they're going to be leveraging technology to identify, assess, and take proper action in order to address and resolve risk issues quickly. The ultimate goal will be protection and preservation of personal rights, persons, and property. And I think with the myriad of potential events and the dynamic fluidity of them, versatility and adaptability will largely depend on timely and accurate information sharing.

Tracy Reinhold: The federal government will be reluctant, and rightfully so, to engage in state matters. And I think that when you look at the capabilities of state and local law enforcement, they're very robust. They live in the community. They understand the community. So they can take a pulse check best.

How can technology help manage critical events to keep businesses running?

Tracy Reinhold: Technology helps corporate security manage critical events, which is fantastic. But before they even get there, they have to be able to understand what are the key capabilities of the organization they're trying to protect. If they don't focus on what is important to the company, then the best technology in the world is not going to help them because they might be misdirected.

Technology is a great enabler. But technology without trust — the two T's, right? If you lose your people's trust, you can have all the technology in the world and nobody's going to use it because they don't trust you. Two things you need to do aside from technology are:

1. You play like you practice. So made sure that your training drills are realistic — and that you're managing those expectations. As Jennifer has often shared, "Execute drills ahead of time so that everyone is familiar with the technology that you're using to do all of those things. That way they're not getting familiar with it at the very last minute when it is an emergency."
2. Engender trust with your employees. Your company needs to be as transparent as possible to earn trust from your employee base so that when they do practice the drills, or when they do have an event, there's a confidence level there. One where they know that the organization is looking out for their welfare at the same time that they're looking out for the continuation of business.

In addition, Everbridge's VP of Product Management Jennifer Sand weighed in on what we're seeing with how Everbridge is being used across industry verticals and with compound critical events

Jennifer Sand: I think that it's important to consider what our customers are dealing with already. And then what they're having to layer on top of that, when you think about something like the upcoming elections, and, potential civil unrest. In this year, we've seen, an increased frequency of these types of critical events. And what that's doing to our customers is we're also seeing that they're having to overlay their responses to multiple events simultaneously and think about how those events interact.

For retailers, they have a large distributed footprint so they can be simultaneously impacted by hurricanes as well as civil unrest. And they need to be able to respond effectively while leveraging a very distributed employee base in order to, orchestrate that response. And that also applies, by the way, to retail banks and financial services. From a manufacturer's and pharmaceutical's perspective, they're already looking at potential supply chain disruptions, while they're preparing for COVID-19 vaccine's availability. We have a significant customer base across state and local governments who continue to use our platform for their COVID-19 updates while preparing for whatever happens next with the pandemic. So when you layer civil unrest on top of that, it's additional complexity that we all need to consider in addition to the tectonic shift to Work From Home, and now the attempted shift to Return To Work.

We just released a new capability called the Impact Tracker and we're working with a number of customers right now to augment the automated correlation that our platform does. We identify automatically, who or what within their organization might be impacted. The impact tracker then takes that correlation to the next level and allows our customers to survey the folks who would be responsible for those facilities and ask them what the state of that facility is and what the actual impact from people with boots on the ground. It allows for a decentralized approaching using mobile connected to our robust cloud platform.

And if you'd like more information on this. Then you can feel free to reach out to us. here at Everbridge as we are offering a free, two-week trial of our risk intelligence products that includes the U.S. election feed.

What's Critical Event Management (CEM)?

Imad Mouline (CTO and Everbridge CEM visionary): Everbridge was founded in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11. It's a solution that keeps an eye on all of the things that organizations care about — the most typically starting with people.But we also constantly look for things that organizations worry about the most — today that would be pandemics. We've created a platform that every part of society can plug into it, like factories, universities, corporations, airports, hospitals, and also governments at the municipal level, at the state level, and even at the country level.

Visit everbridge.com to learn more