138 - Riots, Civil Unrest, the Olympics and World Cup: Jake, the International Security Specialist Guy

Today, back by popular demand, is Jake the International Security Specialist Guy. This time I'm catching  up to him while he was at home in Thailand.  Jake has been doing security work in trouble spots all over the world and was gracious enough to drop in a let me pick his brain on several topics.  In this episode we're going to talk traveling in a country with civil unrest, demonstrations, and riots.  Jake's going to explain how to avoid trouble and take care of your family while the streets are shut down and the phone service is cut off.  You'll like hearing a cop like Jake talk about this stuff and, even if you're not leaving the country anytime soon, there's still a lot here you can apply to emergency situations at home.

Music is by Cumbia Deli and by Nick Panek

Hey Chaplain podcast episode 138

Tags:

Travel, Avoidance, Civil Unrest, Family, Maps, Mobile Phones, News, OSINT, Olympics, Plans, Police, Protests, Riots, World Cup, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, France, India, Iran, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Tanzania, Vietnam

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Hey Chaplin. My name is Jared Altic and I'm a chaplain with the police department. The Hey Chaplin podcast is about talking to police officers who say, Hey Chaplain, I've got a story to tell and some hard-earned wisdom to share. The guests on Hey Chaplin come from across the world, from the LAPD to Scotland Yard, from Thailand to South Africa. They are sharing their wisdom so that you don't have to learn the hard way. And as a patrol chaplain, I think you deserve something positive and encouraging. Hey Chaplin remains a free resource to encourage police officers, chaplains, and other first responders around the world because of supporters who are quietly helping behind the scenes. If you want to help out like this, just follow the link in the episode description or the show notes to support the show. Today, backed by popular demand, is Jake, the International Security Specialist Guy. This time I'm catching up to him while he was at home in Thailand. Jake has been doing security work in troubled spots all over the world and was gracious enough to drop in and let me pick his brain on several topics. In this episode, we're going to talk about traveling in a country with civil unrest, demonstrations, and riots. Jake's going to explain how to avoid trouble and take care of your family while the streets are shut down and the phone service is cut off. You'll like hearing a cop like Jake talk about this kind of stuff. And even if you're not leaving the country anytime soon, there's still a lot here for you to apply to other emergency situations at home. Here's Jake, the International Security Specialist guy. Hello, Jake. How are you today?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

I'm good. How are you? It's been a while since we got to see each other.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, it was great having you when you were visiting the United States. Uh, you actually came by my office, which I hugely appreciated. And now we're 12 time zones away, and and I've got you on the video screen. So I'm glad to have you here. Good to be here. We're gonna talk today about when we travel overseas, running into civil unrests and protests.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

You know, what I always want to be careful to do is not to fear people up to travel by talking about these subjects, because while the reality is that protests and demonstrations and all of these things are very common, uh, at the same time, they're very common in the US, and people frequently travel in the US, and there's there's not an issue. And so they're common in the US, they're common in every country, every European country. I was in Paris during the Olympics, and there were protests and demonstrations going on every day. I was just in uh Milan with the Olympics, and same thing, you know, I'm tracking them on a map. And the thing to keep in mind is that these things are common. You don't have to be going to uh somewhere in Africa or somewhere, you know, in a far remote place. They're happening everywhere. And don't be afraid to go necessarily just because you see something on the news that this type of thing is occurring. I think you just start from the perspective that these are common and everywhere. And so it's more about how do we avoid and mitigate as we go, and it's less about being being feared up over the fact that they're happening.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Well, tell me what you saw in Italy. So you were just at the Winter Olympics not long ago. What kind of protests, what kind of civil unrest did you see there?

SPEAKER_00 4:02

A range. You know, at one level, people are just holding flags and signs. People are walking around them and taking photographs. The the biggest grievance there was that these people are blocking uh the selfies that people are are trying to take. I mean, they're interfering because now you have a flag in the background of a photograph that you're trying to take. Right, right. And on the other end of the scale, you had the riot police that are using water cannons and arresting people and they're shooting fireworks and being violent and people are being injured.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

You had Americans there, you had people from from almost every nation. How do you think they handled that? I mean, were people holed up in their hotel scared? Were people just going about as normal?

SPEAKER_00 4:50

I I would say most of them were situationally unaware.

SPEAKER_01 4:53

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

I don't I don't think most people even knew that these things were taking place. When you look at different countries, they have different ways of dealing with this, and none of this took the Italy uh Italian law enforcement by surprise. Okay. Usually the more experience these countries have with these things, the more of a plan they have to deal with them.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

Now, this is off topic of what we had discussed beforehand, but the protests that happen in Iran, where there's reports that a few thousand might have been killed by their own government by the Ayatollah, or maybe maybe twenty thousand or thirty thousand. Do you have a feel for even I mean, we're hearing this these reports from from the outside? Were the numbers more on the low end or the high end, do you think?

SPEAKER_00 5:40

I I couldn't tell you, but my guess would be either on the high end.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Why? Because that's a regime like fighting fighting to survive or for a different reason.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

I think because of the blackout of information that that you couldn't get. I mean, they they shut all the ability to communicate out, and when they do that, there's usually a lot of no good that's happening.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

What about in Mexico? You saw in uh Puerto Vallarta, uh, there was uh in other cities too, there were cartels that lashed out. Uh cartel leader was killed, and then there were for a couple days there was pretty severe violence, and Mexico kind of got shut down. I mean, there were scaremongers out there that were like, like, oh, this is you know, you can't go vacation to Mexico ever again.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

I think on the escalation ladder, the um Mexican cartel certainly could have done a lot more violence than they didn't do very easily. Lighting a gas station on fire or doing something like that, whereas it makes great TV, it was not even close to as violent as they could have been if they chose to.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

What's your take on that? That it was performative or that they were restrained for some other reason?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

I mean, I'm not an analyst to to study all this, but it it was not an uncontrolled violent lash out. It was strategic at some level.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

They could have targeted a lot of people, but yeah, instead they dragged cars out of the street and set them on fire, and that seemed to be about it in many cases.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Yeah. Yeah, made some great TV. I'm not intimately familiar with all of the nuances of what happened. I mean, I'm sure people maybe somebody was violently attacked and bad things happened, but I'm just looking at it superficially. I don't follow a ton of things in South America. I triage a little bit of my intel because it's overwhelming to look at everything that I do. Yeah. So we do have people that look at that and follow it closely, but I follow right now I follow South America pretty shallow.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Okay. Okay. So Latin America's not high on your list.

SPEAKER_00 7:53

It is a high on the list where things happen. Yeah. A lot of things happen down there.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

How much of the year are you away from home?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Probably around six months out of the year. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

It seems like every time I contact you, you're in a different country. And so I never know what time zone you're in. It's like, yeah, I'm in Malta, or I'm in Italy, or I'm in in Thailand, or whatever. And and Thailand's home, but uh you mentioned that last time, but you've been Africa and and all over the place. And so let's talk a little bit about you're traveling overseas and you run into civil unrest or protests. Where do we start?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Well, I think the place to start is with a mindset towards how do we avoid being in a situation we don't want to be in. Okay. So the avoidance piece is a big deal. It's great to talk about running for cover or shelter and getting out of a crowd and what to do if and all of that, but really the skill is how do we avoid being in the middle of something that we don't want to be in the middle of? And that starts with uh assessing where you're going. A lot of police officers are familiar with UDA. That's a very common term that we have: observe, orientate, decide, and act. Well, this is really the the observation and the orientation phase. How do we observe and orientate really well so that we can avoid something from happening altogether? Yeah. From from the UDA standpoint, when we're looking at observing and orientating, this is mostly done through open source information.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

It's not like you're walk seeing a suspect walk towards you and you're assessing his behavior. It's not that type of observation and orientation. It's really a lot of Googling and getting on the computer and looking at information like that.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

You're you're collecting publicly available information that is out there and is provided and hopefully updated. Uh, that's that's stuff that you should be paying attention to when you travel.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

And a lot of these things are they're being reported in the news. But most places that people travel to, like the Olympics or like somewhere that's frequented by tourists, if there is some type of massive protest or disruption, it's probably going to be in the news. Okay. If it's ongoing. And even even somewhere like India, in 2022, I've got twin boys. And at the time they were 18 years old, and some some young lady that is in our circle, she had to go from Thailand to India to do a border run. So you have to reset your visa sometimes. And she didn't have to go to India, but I thought, yeah, go to India. India is a great place, but if you're going to go, you need some physical protection. So I sent my two boys as bodyguards basically for this friend of ours to do a border run. But as we're researching, they're going to Delhi, and you can see that there's these ongoing farmer protests that are taking place. Well, you can actually put pins on the map. You can see where these are occurring nightly. So what we did, we just dropped these on a map so that as my kids are running around getting taxis, uh, they can see where they don't want to go. You know, this was not a reason for them not to go. So they had a great time. They avoided uh all the protests very easily just through a little bit of research.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, it wasn't complicated to put this on a shared map and and know where not to go, and that alone was enough to make the trip doable.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Yeah, it's it's the difference between a aware versus unaware. Okay. If you're just going and you're not even thinking about security or safety, then you could walk into something that you don't want to walk into. I learned this lesson because I went to Malaysia, I went to Kuala Lumpur a couple days after Trump dropped a bomb on Salomani in Iraq, if you remember all the way back then. Yeah. And we're walking, I'm walking around with my family, and all of a sudden I started getting. It's been great. I'm walking around, no problems. Uh now I see a bunch of guys that are dressed differently. They're standing on the street, and they're giving me very hard eyes. They're giving my family really hard eyes. And it's like, what was that place? What was happening? Well, that was I looked on the map, that was the Pakistani embassy. Uh, and I don't I don't know why all these guys were waiting outside, but they were Pakistani, and the sentiment was uh a lot of people were angry with Americans at that time, and I thought, man, I should just drop that on the map somewhere I don't want to go and just avoid this altogether. So we took those lessons and we applied it uh like two years later to my boys.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

So Americans killed an Iranian in Iraq and the Pakistani embassy in Kuala Lumpur was giving you side eye. Right. Oh, I'm just trying to keep this straight, you know. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. All right. Let's say there is something in the news. You're gonna travel to a country where there's problems and there's something is is is kind of you know popping off a little bit, but you still feel like it's safe to travel, or maybe you're traveling for work. How do you monitor the threat and that kind of thing?

SPEAKER_00 13:33

You definitely want to start with uh open source monitoring. I'll just drop different links on a PDF or um something or a Word document that I can click on and look at uh through the day, but things change, you know, and if you're in a situation where the normal now is changing drastically, it's probably going to be reported on. And one of the best places to look, if it's at that scale, would be the US embassy website for wherever you're going. They have country reports that tell you what the baseline is in on in a country on a normal day, but they also have embassy alerts uh that will tell you recent updates. And uh this is your your tactical intelligence, if you will. Okay. And they'll they'll put that into the STEP program too, which is something you can sign up for uh through the U.S. Embassy, and that way you just get it right on an email on your phone.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Okay. Now, several times I've been out of the country and I've not had any kind of international phone plan for my phone. What do I need to do to fix that? I mean, i is this a matter of switching SIM cards? Is it is it contacting my phone carrier and just signing up for some expensive plan? Uh, what do I need to do so that I can have internet access while I'm abroad?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Well, regarding the step alerts, I would say checking those when you're on Wi-Fi would be sufficient. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Okay. That's not a minute-by-minute thing. That's a maybe a day-by-day. Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

But you know, with your phones, there's all kinds of options with that. That's a it's a complex subject, but Well, I know you love IT.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

And so you you were saying that that was your favorite subject.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah, yeah. No, that's okay. I I think that first you need to make sure your phone is unlocked. It may not be unlocked, so it may not be capable of taking local SIM cards. But what I do is I have a it I do an eSIM on my phone. Okay, and I'll get the SIM card before I land. So when I land, if I've got all my settings right, it'll automatically start giving me service. Okay. And if it doesn't work by the time I get off the airplane, uh, I will consider whether I need to go to uh a booth and get a local SIM card put in. But your phone has to be unlocked to do that.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Because I've heard travelers talk about that. They get off the airplane and they go get a local SIM card. I've actually never done that. That that's not something I've ever done before. And so if you want to be on the local networks, that should work typically.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Oh yeah. You can get a local SIM card about anywhere. Uh there's some places you go. I was in, I think, Tanzania, and there was no eSIM option at that time. I'm sure that's changing. And so I then I had to get a local local SIM card there, but very common.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

In my perception, mobile phone technology spread across the world and became just really uh it was a really powerful tool for people, uh, for local people in in many, many, many countries. And so I've been surprised at how well that technology has been adopted where other technologies in the 20th to 21st century didn't necessarily spread everywhere. It was sort of like a first world luxury and not a third world uh reality. But have you ever been somewhere where they just didn't have cell phone towers in recent years? I mean, I mean, obviously some remote place where there's no people, yeah, you know, but but I mean most places you would travel to, if they have an airport, they have some kind of cell phone coverage, usually, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:15

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And anywhere that someone is going to be traveling for for entertainment is gonna have it. And if they don't, it's because you're purposely putting yourself in a remote place for the sake of tourism. Right, like mountain climbing or something. Yeah. Now you need to look at in-reach devices, satellite phones, things like that if you want to maintain communication.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Okay. All right, let's go back to threat monitoring. What else should you be looking for?

SPEAKER_00 17:45

You can do Google Alerts, that's one option, which will basically drag the internet and send you articles uh as you put in like hashtags that you're specifically looking for, like you could put in Delhi and Protest. And then it's gonna the same way that the government would email you the STEP program uh information, it's just gonna give you the news article, which is good if you're looking to do some kind of ongoing monitoring. And you may just be reading the headlines on the article. Right. I'm not saying you're gonna have to go all the way deep in, but yeah, if the situation changes, uh you're probably gonna get information on it. And when you're reading an article, you just want to look at the source. Any place that's has an editor is at least trying to get the main facts right. It may be skewed politically one way or the other, it may be sensationalized, it may be trying to fear you up, but you're looking for the basic facts of this happened and this is where it happened. You can a lot of times get that information out of an article.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

So news networks, major newspapers, that kind of thing. They're at least trying to get the basic facts right.

SPEAKER_00 18:58

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

Yeah, because there's some responsibility there when you have an editor that's producing something. Now, random bloggers is just looking at what's coming, yeah, random blogger, what's coming over X. I'm not saying those things don't have their value, but for the purpose of someone traveling, you know, you you probably we could talk about breaking news and how important that could be and how to get those sources. But right now we're just talking about getting the basic information of what kind of trajectory this is is on, as far as the the unrest, and then also where it's happening, if it's happening.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah. The when Puerto Vallarta was having cars burned in the street, the first photo I saw and the one that I showed my family was actually AI generated. It was not real.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 19:47

And so it was off of off of X, and and sure enough, turned out not to be authentic.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

And I think this moves into another important topic of uh just emotional management in these situations. Because if you are with your family or with a team and the normal now is changing, where now we're looking at some kind of unrest that may be uh building, this is an opportunity to really steal your peace on this trip and get everybody feared up because you're the guy collecting the information, a lot of times you want to share it, and in doing that, you're fearing everybody up and you're changing the whole dynamic. Having be being aware is good, being paranoid is something different.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Well, cops often struggle with that anyway. I mean, every cop I know sits with their back to the wall, facing the door, you know, doing constant threat analysis. Do you have any recommendations? I mean, I mean, it's hard to break out of that, and it's also hard not to pass that on to your family. And you're you're causing them anxiety and fear that really may not be necessary in all circumstances. Not everything is a 10 out of 10. So uh what's your recommendation for that? I mean, part of what you do is helping people stay calm in emergencies. So, how do we how do we switch from getting things ratcheted up to helping our family and our friends that we're traveling with stay calm?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Well, I jokingly say that my paranoia served me very well as a law enforcement officer. Uh, but it's it's probably not a good thing to pass on to your family and while you're on vacation. And the reality is you're you're not dealing with the things that you would have to deal as deal with as a law enforcement officer. Although something may be possible, the likelihood is still very low in almost all of these circumstances that you're going to become victimized in this, especially if you have some sort of awareness of what's happening and you have a plan. I think that. How you communicate is very important because we can become excited that something's happening. We can, you know, then say this to our family members, and it may be perceived in a different way. Uh, that that's they're not used to dealing with stress and anxiety, and it could really have an eye high impact on them emotionally, even though the impact of the event is probably not even likely. I'm not a fan of keeping things from my family I never have, but how you communicate it as you do this is important, especially if you're tracking the news, you can become obsessed, and you can kind of uh kind of lose the plot of why you're there in the first place. That's why I say at the beginning: protests are normal, demonstrations are normal, sometimes even violent, violently. You need to look at who's being targeted. Most of the time they're upset with the government, they're not upset with you at all. They're not upset, they're not targeting Americans, they're not targeting Westerners.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah, uh, maybe we have a little bit too much um main character syndrome where we think everybody's watching us, we're ever we're what everyone else is thinking about, and most times people look at us and say, Oh, look, an American. And then they go on with their day. They don't care. It's it's not always that you're the center of attention.

SPEAKER_00 23:23

Just just tell them you're Canadian and it's no problem.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yeah. This next section of the interview, I'm gonna drop it in right here because it's a nice transition to what I'm gonna give you in future episodes, talking about contingency planning for your family. But here I was specifically thinking of Jake's recent experience working around the winter Olympics in Italy, and I wanted to pick his brain about the World Cup coming to North America in 2026, and what we might expect to have hundreds of thousands of people coming in from other cultures uh into American cities. Here's what he had to say. You have a lot of experience overseas and a lot of different countries, a lot of different cultures. And you were just recently at the Olympics, but we have the World Cup coming to us. Local police are really interested in all of these uh foreign populations descending upon our cities uh to root for their football teams. Do you think feel like there's a security risk there or is that overblown?

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Well, soccer's a big deal. I happened to be in Vietnam when one of the biggest games was occurring, and I had no idea this was happening. It was uh it was Vietnam versus Thailand, and it was the game, and we're heading to a downtown area just because we wanted to see this famous uh dragon bridge that breathes fire and water and all this stuff. And we get in, and our cab driver is just sucked into the game on his phone. He actually has a TV in his cab. And and I start looking at all the shop owners who have their shops are sort of wide open, and there's TV screens that I can see. Everybody's watching this game. Every single shop we pass. And what and what I didn't know was that I was being taken to the epicenter of where the celebration was because when we got to this dragon bridge, there's this huge screen, I mean, massive screen, and there's, I don't know, thousands of people with thousands of scooters and motorcycles there, and they're all just completely enthralled with the game. And and of course, Vietnam wins. We didn't tell anybody we lived in Thailand, we just rooted for Vietnam like everybody else. And this massive celebration of, you know, so many Vietnamese flags, and I mean it was it was a huge party. So yeah, the soccer is a big deal anywhere you go in the world. In some countries, there will be quote celebrations, unquote, uh after the fact, and they can be pretty pretty destructive, burning cars, doing things. Uh these are more like demonstrative crowds, right? But I think when we look at likelihood and probability, if someone is traveling outside of their culture and they're in our culture, same thing as you, you know, if you travel to another country, you're you're not in your home country, you're you're probably going to somewhat acclimate to how the celebration is occurring where you're at, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

Okay. So we probably shouldn't just expect a one-to-one correlation. You know, what we've seen in other places won't necessarily be coming to American and North American cities when the World Cup matches happen. I wouldn't imagine that. Okay. Well, I know, I know a lot of our uh, you know, local police commanders are have been in every kind of security, meeting with FIFA and federal government and and all kinds of interagency cooperation trying to plan for this. So there's going to be this really heavy police presence, uh, security around not only the matches, but the practices and the populations with hundreds of thousands of people coming into the cities that are hosting, Kansas City being one of them, and buying a properties sometimes an hour or two-hour drive away so that they can just be near their team. They don't even have tickets to the match, they just want to be near their team uh while they're here. And so we can't.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Yeah, I think any of these events they present a potential target for bad actors, yeah. Yeah, uh, threat actors that anytime you put a bunch of people uh and a bunch of cameras in one place, then obviously this can become a tempting target for some kind of act of terrorism or or demonstrations, as people, you know, it it amplifies their grievance when they can get in front of a lot of cameras. From a strategic standpoint, when you're talking about some kind of organized protest or demonstration, yeah, these are high potential events where uh you can have people go on strike because you know, hey, everybody's coming in from the airport, and so if we uh and I'm not saying this is a talk in Kansas City, this is common in places where you know we know that if we demonstrate or go on strike now, it's really gonna hurt the whole uh operation that's being planned. You can have those type of demonstrations as far as a mass crowd that's a demonstrative crowd that does violent, destructive things after a sporting event. Have we seen that in Kansas City? No.

SPEAKER_01 28:46

No.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

I don't know. I don't think so. So I would probably more look at the high end of how we've handled celebrations poorly in the past. Right. And you know, it's funny because uh I'm from Missouri, and if you hear gunshots in the country, people say you have good neighbors, and if you hear gunshots in the city, then they say you have bad neighbors. Yes. But yeah, I mean, I would look at what's happened as a predictor of what what could happen or probably will.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Yeah, yeah. Well, there is a lot of preparation for for just what you said demonstrations, terrorist attacks, that kind of stuff, that will be uh very well guarded against. And the misbehavior by by soccer fans, I don't know if that's it really as big a concern, although that does get talked about a bunch.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

So yeah, I think if you're gonna go into these areas with your family and participate in in things like uh, you know, I know the parade was a was a big deal with the Chiefs victory. One of which one of which had a shooting at it. And so I know a lot of guys that were there, yeah. So if you're gonna participate in those things, this is where the type of contingency planning comes most in handy, especially if you're gonna park somewhere a long ways away and then commute in somehow. I don't know if that's happening, but I think just instinctively in our American context where we drive everywhere, the car is the meeting place. Yeah. If something happens, we don't we don't discuss it, it's just assumed that if I can't find you, we're gonna come back to the car. But if you take the car away from the equation because you've you've busted in or you've done something, or they don't know where the car is, yeah, because they're not paying attention. By the way, one of my favorite things to do is when people come and see me in Thailand, I take them to a big mall and we'll park the car, and then we'll spend about an hour or something in the mall, and then I'll look at them, especially if it's a younger person, and I'll say, Okay, take us back to the car. Yeah. Shock, surprise, panic. And I'll actually it it drives my wife crazy because I have the patience to do it. I will just let them walk around until they figure out where the car is.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

But but that's an important lesson though, that that you can't just have your head down, especially walking around on a screen and not paying attention to your surroundings. That that's a little bit dangerous. It makes you more of a target. It it creates a vulnerability that doesn't have to exist.

SPEAKER_00 31:28

Yep. And sometimes if I'm traveling, I'll create a group chat just for that trip. And then if we park the car or we get off of a subway or a bus stop or something, I'll drop a pin in the chat where it is and just drop a little note because they're they're probably not paying attention, they probably can't find their way back. But if nothing else, they can open up that that pin and navigate. And if you're traveling overseas, have them download the offline maps so that their maps are actually gonna work even if they don't have cell service. That's excellent. That's excellent. But those are all good good ideas if you're gonna go into the city and participate in some of this stuff because you may feel like you have accountability. You may be together, you may be standing right next to each other, sitting at a table, but if a if a threat event happens, people become separated very quickly. You as a first responder, you may instinctively run towards the threat. And your family may be moving away from the threat. So don't think because you're together that we're gonna be able to maintain accountability necessarily in an event.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Or or have that false sense of security because we're not traveling overseas, but we're going to this big event in our own city, then hey, we're all familiar, right? Well, your teenagers have not memorized the 100 blocks of your city like you have. And so, and so you they're it's appropriate to do some of this preparation that we've talked about. All right, we're going to stop right there. But I have so much more to give you because I talked to Jake for quite a while and have enough for multiple episodes. And this next episode that I'm going to give you, we're going to talk about contingency planning for your family, especially maybe when your family's not immediately with you. Uh, how do you designate rally points? How do you use technology? What are just some smart ways to prevent some problems? He's got so much good stuff. And so here's just a little sneak peek next time on Hey Chaplin.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

But we didn't hear from him for three days, uh, which we sort of expected. But once he got there, he had a heat stroke, he was carried down to a river and dunked in the river by the cooling mall before he could be carried to a really a bamboo hospital. So he's in a very remote place, but when they dunked him in the river, his cell phone slipped out of his pocket and ended up at the bottom of the river. So after days of hiking, he he's okay now. He wakes up in the hospital and it's a very, very remote hospital, but it's um you know the problem is he doesn't have a cell phone. So he doesn't remember his password to his email. And he doesn't, I don't think he knew my phone number, right? You know, and I don't think he knew the password to his email. So he just figures it out how to communicate with me all on its own. And I receive an email from a stranger's email, and the the headline is This Is Your Son Hunter.

SPEAKER_01 34:58

The views expressed here are the personal views of the hosts and our guests, and do not necessarily represent the views of any law enforcement agency or its components. If you like this episode, please share it with a cop or someone who loves a cop. Thank you for listening to Hey Chaplin. And as always, let's pray for peace in our city.