CHAPTER NINE - HEADING FOR THE FINISH LINE

 I am working for my fifth security company since I came to work at the mall in June 2010. Management had asked me numerous times to become the site supervisor since then but I declined for two reasons. The first reason is that I considered this job to be my retirement job and I did not want the stress of management. Second, I couldn't even if I wanted the job because from the age of 62 when I began drawing my social security, until the age of 66, I was only able to work 32 hours or less each week. I had a yearly wage cap that averaged 15,000 a year. 

 When Allied-Barton took over the contract I was asked to be a site supervisor but instead I agreed to be a Lieutenant, or the assistant site supervisor. During this time I had several supervisors that I was able to get along with okay, and was happy not to have that responsibility. Two of my supervisors were no more than 19 or twenty 20 years old but I actually enjoyed working for them. My daughter Misty, to my delight, became site supervisor. I loved working with her because it was a perfect working relationship and we got to see a lot of each other. It was far too short, however; because she moved to Clarksville and the daily long drive became too much for her. Like me, she loved the job but had to give it up. I still used her, however; as a fill in from time to time and everyone loved her at the mall. 

 After Misty we had a site supervisor named Cindy but she was only at the mall for about a month because she got a better job offer. Cindy was also great to work for but I was now faced with the dilemma that I had dreaded all along. At the age of 66, and heart trouble, I did not want the extra stress and the responsibility. This primarily comes from having to keep posts manned 24/7. If someone doesn't report to work, which can happen frequently, I have to scrape and claw sometimes to keep the posts manned. If I can't find someone many times I am the one who has to work. This is the one aspect of being a supervisor that I hate. I also hate writing people up, but I do what I have to do to get the job done. Everything else is a piece of cake.

  The play area in our mall has been a thorn in our side since the first day I started working this job. It is a no win situation. We are tasked to enforce play area rules but many parents seem to have a sense of entitlement when it comes to their children. In their mind the rules don't apply to them. They can become very defensive and very rude. We always approach the customers in a tactful and professional manner but we are not afforded the same respect by the customer many times. At one time the friction built to where parents were complaining on security. They were accusing us of being rude to them which was a total lie. 

 Mall management was on us hot and heavy about enforcing the rules. Some of the rules listed were that children had to use inside voices. They couldn't play if they were over 42 inches tall, and no strollers or food was allowed in the area. These were just a few of the rules that we had to enforce all of them. In addition, no one was allowed to enter the play area before 11:00 AM, and they had to leave by 8:00 PM. I didn't understand the 11:00 AM opening time because the mall opened at 10:00 AM so it stood to reason that kids should be allowed in the play area at that time, but I didn't make the rules. We had to block the entrance, and maintenance even put a chain across the opening at one point but parents were taking the chain down and going in anyway, or setting their kids down in the play area from the outside of the wall, When they did this we had to make them leave until the play area opened. This was not a popular rule to say the least.

 On one particular morning I received a call that parents had taken down the barrier and their children were playing in the play area. It was 10:30 AM and the play area was supposed to open at 1100. Because of all the friction caused by our enforcement of the play area rules, I decided that I better videotape this in case I had problems. When I arrived there were several children and parents in the play area. A man and a woman were seated to my left and a lone woman was seated to my right. Loud enough to be heard by all I told the parents that the play area would not be open for another thirty minutes and they could come back at that time. 

 The man to my left and the woman to my right were very understanding and began calling their children over so they could leave. The woman sitting next to the man, however; was stony faced and acting as if she hadn't heard me. I said "ma'am, you heard what I said, right?" She looked at me and said "I am not leaving". I said "ma'am, I am sorry but you will have to leave". She said, " I am not leaving. Are you going to arrest me?" I responded, "no ma'am, but here is what I am going to do. If you don't do what I am asking you to do I am going to call the police. They will ask you to leave, and if you don't leave they will arrest you for criminal trespass". At that, she angrily began collecting her things, along with her children. She told me, it is obvious that you don't have any children. I told her "ma'am I have raised 5 children and have 12 grandchildren". She only had two and she was preaching to me.

 After she left I walked to the mall office and told the secretary that if anyone complained on me about what happened in the play area I had videotaped the encounter. Sure enough, about an hour and a half later I was called to the mall office. When I arrived the woman's husband was in an intense argument with the mall manager. Apparently his wife had lied and told him that I was rude to her. The mall manager saw me and told me to show him the videotape. She hadn't seen it herself at that point. After only a few moments of watching the encounter on film the mans whole demeanor changed. It was obvious that his wife had made a fool out of him and he humbly apologized to me and everyone in the room before leaving. I decided to invest in a body camera after this. I love my body camera and it has come in very handy over the years since I bought it. The good thing about my body camera is that I can get good screen shots of people we have banned and sometimes if I forget to get a license plate I can get it off of the body camera later. It also helps me give a better description of people in my incident reports and to the police. I also use it as a training tool.

During the time that Cindy was still site supervisor and a short while after my encounter with the aforementioned lady you could cut the tension growing over our enforcement of the play area rules with a knife. At this time we had a mall manager who insisted that we strictly enforce the rules. We were starting to see Facebook posts where parents were complaining about the way security was enforcing the. One post suggested on a certain day parents should bring their children to the mall after feeding them plenty of sugar and have a children's riot. I brought this post to the attention of the mall manager and she told me to have extra security on duty that day as well as an off duty police officer. I did as I was told but nothing materialized on the day that the children's riot was supposed to occur. 

  One day I was working a dayshift and I got a call from one of our tenants complaining about the noise coming from the play area. I was on mobile patrol so I dispatched the security officer patrolling the inside of the mall to respond to the play area. We received numerous calls every day about the play area so I didn't sense that there was anything out of the ordinary about this call. In retrospect I have regretted that I didn't take the call myself. Not because the responding officer did anything wrong, but because I could have witnessed what happened firsthand. When my officer arrived on scene he was met by the mall manager who had also heard the noise coming from the play area. I was told that there was a child jumping off of one of the toy fixtures in the play area and the mall manager was afraid he was going to get hurt. She told him not to jump like that because he could get hurt. The child's mom was sitting close by and she told her not to tell her child what to do. The mall manager identified herself and told the mom that he could break his arm. The mom responded that he could also break his arm at home, which prompted the mall manager to respond that if he broke it at home the mall wouldn't have to pay for it. 

That night our mall Facebook page erupted with complaints about how rude the mall manager was and how security bullied them. We have never bullied anybody and our officers were always professional. We had a young officer working for us who was extremely nice and a perfect gentleman. If anything, he was almost too nice to be an effective security officer and I tried to toughen him up. He was working one day when the play area was crazy. I was told by nearby tenants that they had never seen as many kids in the play area and the children were screaming to the top of their lungs. On 4 different occasions he was forced to respond to the play area that day because he was either hearing them from center court or he was getting calls from tenants. On the 3rd call he was responding from center court when he ran into the mall manager and she told him to follow her. When they arrived on scene the mall manager did the talking to the parents. In a stern but not in an unprofessional way, she asked them to help hold down the noise. After walking out of their hearing she told my officer that if he got one more call about the noise he was to ask everyone to leave and call housekeeping over to clean the play area. 

  Well, as fate would have it, he got a noise complaint from a tenant and he proceeded to do exactly what he was told to do. When he announced to the parents that he was closing down the play area a woman sarcastically asked him if he was closing it down because of the noise or because the play area really needed to be cleaned. The officer was only 18 years old, and being the good kid that he was, he didn't want to lie to her. He responded that we were closing it down for both reasons. I try to be truthful but in this case the proper response would have been for housekeeping. She then turned to the parents who gathering up their kids to leave and screamed out at the top of her voice that they all had to leave because of the mean security officer. From this point on my officer did not respond properly to the situation and his meek response to her only allowed the situation to escalate to the point that it did. When the woman screamed out the way she did the officer should have told her to leave mall property and if she refused he should have called the police. I was later told by a police officer that she could have been charged with disorderly conduct. 

 The woman then demanded to talk to the mall manager. My officer told her that he would escort her to the mall office. On the way there, and without provocation, she called him a smart ass and told him that she worked in marketing. She then threatened the officer by saying that she would fix him. This is the second time that she should have been told to leave the mall. Upon arrival at the office she got into a heated exchange with the mall manager. This was the third time that she should have been told to leave the mall. After this she walked around to the tenants in the immediate area of the play area wanting to know who snitched on the children. This was a fourth reason to make her leave.

I can't prove it but I believe this woman was the same woman who had the earlier confrontation with the mall manager in the play area. There was a mother's group that met at the play area on a regular basis and I believe she was a member. It is my belief that this whole incident was a setup. This was the children's riot that had been promised earlier on social media. This woman went to our local newspaper, the Daily News Journal, and complained to a reporter. The reporter did not bother to investigate, or check into our side of what happened. She printed the womans perspective in a front page article. We were accused of bullying this woman. The mall upper management folded like a cheap suit. Our mall manager was fired and they wanted to fire the entire security staff except for Cindy and myself. I was present the day Cindy received the call from the mall CEO and could hear him telling her to fire all of our officers. Mall management  never asked to hear our side of what happened. We only had one officer involved in this incident and they wanted to fire security officers that weren't even working that day.

  I took over security a few days later and I had a good security team at the time. If they pressed me to fire them I was determined that I would resign before I would allow them to be fired. I definitely was not going to fire the officer involved just for doing what he was told to do. Fortunately the subject of firing my officers never came up again. If I had been working that night I know that they would have wanted to fire me because I would have followed security protocol. The woman would have been forced to leave the mall after the first incident or she would have been arrested and permanently banned from the mall. I would have given her a real story to print in the DNJ. When the next mall manager was hired we were told that if anybody tried to enforce play area rules in the future we would be fired. I relate this story at some risk because I still work at the mall but I feel compelled because the way we were treated was probably the greatest personal injustice that I have ever witnessed. At the time it happened I felt helpless because I could not respond to the woman's lies on social media or the lies told by the DNJ. My blog, and this book is the only public venue that I have to set the record straight and I am determined to set the record straight before I die.