Critical Incident Management

Analyze the case study below and respond to the questions at the end.

7.3 Case Study 1: Stalking

7.3.1 Incident
A supervisor called the employee relations office to request a meeting of the workplace violence team for assistance in handling a situation. He was counseling one of his employees about her frequent unscheduled absences, when she told him a chilling story of what she had been going through for the past year. She broke up with her boyfriend a year earlier, and he stalked her ever since. He called her several times a week, and she would hang up immediately. He would show up wherever she went on the weekends and would stare at her from a distance. He often parked his car down the block from her home and sat there. He made it known he had a gun.

7.3.2 Response
This agency’s plan called for the initial involvement of security, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), and employee relations in cases involving stalking. The security officer, the EAP counselor, and employee relations specialist met first with the supervisor, and then with the employee and supervisor together. At the meeting with the employee, after learning as much of the background as possible, they gave her some initial suggestions:

Contact her local police and file a report;
Ask them to assess her security at home and make recommendations for improvements;
Log all future contacts with the stalker and clearly record the date, time, and nature of the contact;
Let voicemail screen incoming phone calls; Contact her phone company to report the situation;
Give permission to let her co-workers know what was going on (she would not agree to do this); and
Vary daily routine :
Go to different shop;
Take different routes;
Run errands at different times; and
Report to work on a variable schedule.
The team then created the following plan:
Employee Relations Specialist: acted as coordinator of the response effort. He made a written report of the situation and kept it updated. He kept the team members, the supervisor, and the employee apprised of what the others were doing to resolve the situation. He also looked into the feasibility of relocating the employee to another worksite.

Security Officer: reported the situation to the local police immediately. With the employee’s consent, she also called the police where the employee lived to learn what steps they could take to help the employee. She offered to coordinate and exchange information with them. The security officer arranged for increased surveillance of the building and circulated photos of the stalker to all building guards with instructions to detain him if he showed up at the building. She brought a tape recorder to the employee’s desk and showed her the best way to tape any future voice mail messages from the stalker. She also contacted the agency’s phone company to arrange for its involvement in the case.

EAP Counselor: provided support and counseling for both the employee and the supervisor throughout the time this was going on. He suggested local organizations that could help the employee. He also tried to convince her to tell co-workers about the situation.

The Union: arranged to sponsor a session on stalking in order to raise the consciousness of agency employees about the problem in general.
After a week, when the employee finally agreed to tell co-workers what was going on, the EAP counselor and security officer jointly held a meeting with the whole work group to discuss any fears or concerns they had, and give advice on how they could help with the situation.

7.3.3 Resolution
In this case, the employee’s co-workers were supportive and wanted to help. They volunteered to watch out for the stalker and to follow other security measures recommended by the security specialist. The stalker ended up in jail because he tried to break into the employee’s home while armed with a gun. The security officer believed the local police were able to be more responsive in this situation because they had been working together with agency security on the case.

7.3.4 Questions for the Agency Planning Group

What would you do in a similar situation if your agency does not have security guards?

Source: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ISC%20Violence%20in%20%20the%20Federal%20Workplace%20Guide%20April%202013.pdf