CHAPTER TEN- HEADING FOR THE FINISH LINE

  The following incident gave me an up close and personal look at media bias and fake news. We had another incident that illustrates the difference between the leftist media and conservative media. I got a call from an officer one night that he had asked a woman that was wearing a shirt with profanity written on it to turn her shirt inside out or to cover it up with something. He said that she was very cooperative and agreed to do it. About 30 minutes later he saw the same woman and she was still wearing the shirt. She was with a man and this time my officer told her to leave the mall because she had not complied. The man spoke up and said that she wasn't leaving the mall because she had a 1st Amendment right to wear it. I told my officer to  call the police and have her removed. 

 This couple, who were man and wife, bombarded Twitter with posts saying that they were forced to leave the mall because they were wearing Trump MAGA hats. Until these Twitter posts I never even knew that they were wearing MAGA hats. My officer never mentioned MAGA hats to me. We made her leave because of profanity on her shirt. The irony is that I am a Trump supporter and I definitely would not ban them for a Trump hat, Biden hat, or any other hat as long as it doesn't have profanity on it. I was in the mall managers office when a reporter called from WTN 99.7 radio news asking about the incident. The mall manager explained what really happened and the whole issue was dropped. This is the difference from fake news reporting and real news reporting.

In April 2021 I was called to Spencer's because a man was causing a disturbance. It was a Friday night and I was so low on manpower at the time that I was working by myself that night and had no back-up. On night shifts during the week we always had at least two officers working and on weekends at least three because we were more likely to have trouble during these times. Because of my experience I wasn't that nervous about being alone because if I needed back-up I would just call the police. Of course it might take them a while to respond depending on how busy they were. When I arrived at Spencer's I tried to approach the man who was very large and buff in a respectful manner but he quickly escalated the situation by being a jerk. I told him to leave the property and of course he refused along with issuing forth a stream of profanity. When I called the police he started walking toward the door and turned into the mall. As I began describing him to the dispatcher he ran through the mall headed toward J.C. Penny's. I ran after him in order to make sure that he left the mall which is all I wanted him to do anyway. He left mall property before the police could get there. 

The next day on Saturday I was working alone again when I was called to Hibbitt's Sports to deal with an unruly customer. When I got there a woman had a female manager backed up against the wall giving her hell. I told her to settle down or I was going to call the police. She then turned on me. For eleven minutes she was in my face while I was on the phone with the police dispatcher. She kept swinging her arms in such a way that I thought she was going to hit me. All of this was on my body camera and I kept telling her to back off and get out of my face. She never stopped or slowed down until the police finally arrived. I had the police trespass her permanently from the mall but it wasn't until I reviewed the body cam footage later that I realized that she had threated to shoot me three times. Twice she said "I'm going to pop you." Then she said "I've got something in my car, I'm going to pop you." If I had known that I would have had her arrested for threatening me but I was so focused on keeping her away from me I didn't hear the threats. 

The woman had won a pair of shoes in an online contest sponsored by the store. Because of her own stupidity she lost the shoes because she didn't claim them at the appointed time. If I remember right she had until 1115 to pick up the shoes but she didn't show up until 1200. On the stores website the rules specified that if she wasn't there on time the store reserved the right to sell the shoes and they did. This is why she went berserk. That eleven minutes dealing with her seemed like eleven hours. These are only a fraction of the stories that I could tell about the mall. I have had numerous jobs in my life but other than my time at NORAD this job was the most challenging but it was also the most rewarding. I wanted it to be the last job that I ever had. Alas, it was not to be. 

I was terminated from Stones River Town Centre on May 30, 2023. The security company that I worked for liked me and I was not terminated from the security company. Mall management wanted me gone and I think that it was primarily for my political beliefs which were very well known because of my many bumper stickers. The security company was only there because of me. I was the one who set up the meeting with the then mall manager who hired them upon my recommendation because of his trust in me. Our mall was dying even before COVID which is a fairly common thing for malls all over the country due to the success of businesses like Amazon. Brick and mortar stores seem to be on the way out. On the other hand I think malls can survive with good competent management that is capable of thinking outside of the box but in my view it won't happen with the present mall management.  Even as a regular security officer when I first started at the mall I took ownership of it. I did not want to do anything that might allow the mall management to be embarrassed or the security company that I was working for. My attitude never changed. In my mind Stones River Town Centre was my mall. I wanted it to be the last job I ever worked and I hoped to work there as long as my body and mind was able to pull it off. 

 In September 2022 I was needing new officers because several had moved on to other things. One day a young man walked into my office wanting a job. I had a 2nd shift supervisors job available. I interviewed him and I was willing to take a chance on him. The interview went well but toward the end of it he said "Oh by the way I am transitioning into a woman". From the standpoint of being a supervisor in this age of wokeness I probably shouldn't have said what I said but any relationship, whether professional or personal should be based on trust and transparency. I have personal convictions about the trans movement and I wanted him to know up front where I stood. I wanted him to know that I wouldn't compromise on my values but I would not allow my values to interfere with our professional relationship. All I cared about was that he did a good job and he told me that I was being fair. From the beginning our relationship was based on courtesy and respect.  To be honest, in the security business I didn't have a lot of wiggle room when it came to hiring. Applicants are few and security is a 24/7 business and posts have to be manned. So, unless I saw something so obviously wrong during the interview process I was willing to take a chance on applicants. As a result I ended up hiring some real winners and one or two were lunatics. In this case after hiring him I managed to assemble a pretty good team over time.

He once told me that he is a proud leftist and he has told other officers that he is a socialist. I feel sure that if he knew the history of world socialism and how destructive socialism is he would probably have changed his mind. I was told that he came from a dysfunctional family background. The trans movement is financed by elitist billionaires. It is not a grass roots movement as is believed. The medical industrial complex as well as big pharma is also pushing it because of the opportunity to make tons of money. For this they are willing to permanently maim children with life altering surgeries and drugs. I am not surprised since the Democrat party has been responsible for the deaths of over 60 million babies through abortion. The cultural Communists have been pushing the trans agenda in order to undermine traditional common sense family values, or the values of the Bourgeoisie. Common sense is the biggest impediment to Communism. In order to win the Communist argument you must destroy common sense. 

 The conservative movement now represents the truth and the Democrat party represents the "Big Lie" . Their agenda claims everything that is wrong for this country. They preach hatred for America, open borders, the climate change scam, the radical homosexual rights agenda, the trans agenda, out of control spending, a proxy war in Ukraine which enriches corrupt politicians, Critical Race Theory, the indoctrination of our children and our military with the Communist woke agenda, the weaponization of the FBI, CIA, intelligence services and the IRS which is unleashed against the American people. They turn American against American by defining half of us as white supremacist terrorists. At one time American's had different political opinions and we had valid debates. Today many people can't even agree on self evident truths such as the biological fact that there are only two sexes. America has become one big insane asylum. The Democrat Party has always been bad for this country. They were the party of the Trail of Tears, slavery, they started the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history because they couldn't accept the results of a national election, they were the party of segregation, the Klan, lynching and the party of internment for American's of Japanese descent. From this they have morphed into an elitist globalist, Fascist party. 

My transexual officer told me when I interviewd him that he thought he could handle confrontation but being a transexual might invite bullying from some of the people he had to deal with. I told him that I hated bullying and I would have his back if I ever witnessed anyone trying to bully him. If it came from the customers, tenants or anyone on our security team. I hired him in September 2022 and we had a cordial and respectful relationship until my termination. He asked for many days off which I never refused to arrange for him and many shift swaps. If it were possible to swap shifts we did it. Many times I swapped shifts with him myself. He was very good to me when my wife spent six weeks at Vanderbilt hospital having a heart valve replaced. If I needed a shift swap he always complied and was always asking me if he could help in any way. He never failed to ask how I was doing and how my wife was doing when he saw me. It seemed like a genuine concern. Over time I noticed though that he was not filling out paperwork correctly and wasn't following proper security protocol. He tended to hand off responsibilities to other officers that he should have been taking on himself. 

 I hired him to be a shift supervisor and he was reluctant to supervise. His coworkers were complaining that they felt like they were working alone when he was there and that they couldn't count on him as back-up. I spoke to him many times about these problem areas and he was always very apologetic and would promise to do better. As far as confrontation many times he would take the side of the offender and did not seem to have a grasp on the fundamentals of security protocol. I saw this firsthand when we were working together one night. A store manager called our security phone and asked if I would escort an employee from his store that he had just terminated. I told the officer to follow me to the store and he was to stay close in case I needed him. Upon arrival I went in while he remained outside. The employee was irate and taking her time gathering up her personal things to leave. The terminated employee was also using foul language. I asked the employee to speed things up. The manager asked me to call the police which I did but I terminated the call when she finally walked out of the store. After returning to the security office the officer told me that the terminated employee was in the right because she had been fired for bogus reasons. I had to explain to him that it didn't matter if she was completely in the right. We had to follow the wishes of the store manager. I told him that she could take civil action later but our job was not to represent her in that situation but we were there to represent the interests of the tenant. I told him that the concept of private property generally trumped everything else. This was security 101 and he simply had difficulty grasping the concept. 

By the end of May my patience was wearing thin with him. The tipping point came when he answered a theft call at one of our department stores. He didn't fill out the ban form properly for each of the two alleged thieves and did not write an incident report. I decided that I was going to have to start documenting. He was fourth in seniority behind me and two other officers. In my view he had been there long enough to know how to handle a theft. We had several training sessions regarding the banning procedure.  I started out with an oral warning which is the first step in what can be a four step procedure ending in termination. My hope was that he would improve the quality of his work performance so that it wouldn't end in termination. I am all about redemption. 

 On the day I gave the officer the oral warning we walked to the conference room. In the conference room I began the meeting by asking him how long he had been employed with us. He replied since September. I said that by now he should know how to fill out a ban form. Then I took the ban form and explained to him what he had done wrong. He apologized and acknowledged that he had not followed procedure. I then asked him "where is your incident report". He tried to argue that he didn't fill it out because the police never showed up. Actually they had but it had been about thirty minutes after they had been called by the stores loss prevention. I explained that I didn't expect him to wait all night for the police but there had still been an attempted theft and two people had been banned. Regardless of how long it took the police to respond the ban forms were not filled out properly and an incident report needed to be filed. He agreed with me and promised to do better. I told him that if he ever had a similar situation in the future he could call dispatch and get the police report number for his report, name and badge number of the officer. Also I told him if in the future that if he had to leave before police arrived to follow up with the tenant and find out how the situation was resolved. In this case the tenant decided not to prosecute the alleged thieves but they did want them permanently trespassed. 

 Not long after this incident the housekeeping supervisor walked into my office and in his animated fashion asked me if I knew that the mall manager was quitting. I said no, I hadn't heard anything. He said that the officer I had written up was spreading the news around the mall. I was irritated by this because I don't want officers spreading news like that around the mall until it becomes official and I expect them to tell me before they tell anyone else. When I confronted him about it he said that he had told the property manager in a conversation that he was quitting in a couple of months. This is when the property manager told him he was also leaving. This happened just prior to our meeting where I gave him the oral warning. The next day I believe Carol, our mall secretary, wanted me to listen to a voice mail that she received from a female customer complaining that while she was using a restroom with her small children near Spencer's some teens were beating on the door. She kept telling them that she would be out in a minute but they wouldn't stop. She said that this frightened her and she complained that there was no security personnel around. The woman also said that she would never be back to the mall. I defended my officers who were working that night because I knew they were good about patrolling and I knew from experience that no matter how thorough your patrols are you can't be everywhere at once. Carol agreed with me. Later, that day. however; I was livid when I found out that this officer was approached by this woman but he did nothing. He did not offer her a customer complaint form and he didn't do an incident report. I decided right then that I was going to write him up again. This time it would be a written warning. 

I called my supervisor and told him that I was going to write him up again. He told me to wait until the Tuesday after Memorial Day to do it because he wanted to be there when I gave it to him. Unknown to me, apparently the decision had already been made by mall management to terminate me. He later told me that he would be there at 2:00 PM on May 30th. When I told him that the officer in question was off on Tuesday's, he said not to worry, he would contact him. That Tuesday he showed up exactly at 2:00 PM which was very unusual because he usually never showed up in the past when he said he would. When he walked into my office he closed the door behind him, sat down and quickly came to the point. He opened by saying that this was the kind of thing he hated to do but I was no longer going to be working at the mall. I was being terminated because mall management wanted a change. When I asked why I was totally floored by his answer. He said because I couldn't get police officers to work at the mall. They didn't want to work with me and also I had bullied the transexual officer in the disciplinary meeting. Supposedly mall management was afraid that he might file a lawsuit. My head was spinning. It was like a living nightmare. I had one hour to clear 13 years of my life out of my office. 

 To begin with both reasons for my termination were totally bogus. I had been having problems for a while getting police officers to work at the mall. We only had one deputy working there at the time. About a year ago I talked to the mall manager about the problem. He asked me what I thought the problem was and I said that it could be several things. I said that a previous security company had problems paying the officers and we might have developed a bad reputation because of it. I also knew that I had one particular security officer that some of my off duty police officers didn't like working with but he was no longer working at the mall. I suggested that the pay was not competitive enough. We were only paying 30 dollars an hour and most places were paying 40 dollars an hour. He immediately agreed to raise the pay to 40 dollars but even the pay raise did not attract extra officers. I checked around and other businesses were having the same problem hiring police officers. After I was fired I talked to an officer who is a personal friend of mine and who worked with me for years. He laughed when I told him what they said. The reason he said that officers didn't want to work at the mall wasn't because of me. It was because they wanted off duty jobs that weren't like their regular job. He said that when you are a police officer working at the mall you are going to be chasing people down, making arrests, doing paperwork and spending time booking them. When he worked at the mall he said that he worked harder than he did on his regular job. He said that he had more foot chases at the mall than any place he ever worked. 

The charge that I bullied the transsexual officer was totally bogus also. I have been bullied enough in my life to recognize bullying and I did not bully him. The next morning he called me and ask me if I was okay. He said that he had received a strange text from a friend of his on the housekeeping crew. I told him that I been fired and to be blunt the reason given was that I had bullied him in the meeting. He sounded as incredulous as I felt the moment my supervisor had repeated the accusation to me. The officer said that he never felt bullied by me and that I had always treated him with nothing but respect. He said that he had it coming because he hadn't been doing his job. I asked him if he had complained to mall management and he said no. At that point I was contemplating legal action and I asked him if he would repeat what he had told me under oath in court. He said that he would. Under Tennessee law a person can be fired without cause. In this case my character has been attacked, however. If they had told me I had been fired because I wasn't patrolling enough or for something I was doing wrong on the job, or even that I was too old I wouldn't have agreed with them but I could have accepted these reasons better than being charged with bullying someone because I disagree with their lifestyle. I wasn't given the opportunity to defend myself or face my accuser just like in the play area incident. The decision was made and just like that I was terminated.

  Does this mean that at Stones River Town Centre a transexual can never be disciplined in any way? What is the difference between this situation and saying that a person cannot be disciplined because of the color of their skin or their gender. Can they just do anything they want to on the job and never be disciplined for the poor quality of their work. We hear all the time from the left that the trans community are fearful of people who don't see things their way. I wish I had their power to scare people with just the threat of a lawsuit. The moral of this story is that no matter what they did to me I will not be defeated by this. I am a victor and not a victim. You might ask why I chose to write about this. It is because this is my only platform for telling my side of the story.  I have to believe in the truth of God's Word. I am very angry about this and I know that eventually I will have to forgive the person or persons responsible and who rewarded my loyalty and commitment to my job with such treachery. The wounds are too fresh right now, however; but when time heals these wounds I will be able to forgive. In the meantime I believe we serve a just God. Romans 12:19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.