Was the very first thing. To your other point, one of our congressman i come walking out and hes got the mike giving a lot of disinformation and heated political rhetoric, and remove him from there. I would point out voters removed him recently. Im not saying there is causality there, but how he chose to talk about the attack didnt help him in his reelection bid. It wasnt helpful to us or anybody else. So i had to come out and tell everybody it wasnt 20, it was 50. At that point i knew that i had to keep my calm and keep my cool because if i broke down that, was not going to be good for anybody. That was one of those really deep breathing exercises where you take a really deep breath then say everything you have to say before you take a second breath. I can tell you looking out at say this was the press corps, there were a lot of seasoned people there. There was an audible reaction. We heard from a number of reporters there was shock in the room. One thing we heard from everyone we talked to was this feeling of being overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by what happened and overwhelmed by the amount of information that was coming in, especially once the rest of the country woke up and woke up to the news and the social media spiral began. That the amount of questions, the amount of speculation, all of it was overwhelming. We heard this from everybody. Orlando sentinel reporters, everyone we spoke to. It would be interesting to hear you talk about that. But also we were very impressed with how the police and the city used social media to sort of manage that onsought of influx and how much worse it would have been if it happened in the middle of the day. That feeling of being overwhelmed would have happened immediately. No doubt we were able to handle the communication aspect of it. In a more effective manner, lets say. We have three or four hours to get prepared before the onslaught came. We totally activated our Emergency Operations center. We had our Communications People there, social media people there, we had somebody monitoring all social media coming out of any of our different areas, and we had a protocol in terms of press, in terms of press requests. I have no idea how many of those were actually were, but we had a team that everything filtered through. Team that everything filtered through. That was on the city side. Even the police side of stuff came through my staff through the communications staff. Then i told you we had the protocol in place since it was this type of incident, the outgoing feed would be through the opd twitter feed. Everybody else would take from that feed, as well as regional parkers. Everybody else Orange County or osceola county, everybody was letting opd to disseminate the message and retweeting, reemphasizing that message. If reporters called, they he got a message that said go to our twitter and facebook. Thats how they got information. Right. We tried not to have press conferences just to have press conferences. We only had three main press conferences that first day. The second one was to convey the numbers. But also to start taking care of the victims and the families. So we had established a hotline for anybody that had information about anybody that might be a victim where they could call and set up a website that was going to have names of victims on there. That became a very tough thing to manage as well because we set up a Victims Assistance Center where families could go to to get information. Some people asked mistakes we made. That open mike was one. Second was not having a secure location that the press could not get to the family and victims because they were there tracking people from the car to the building and back. So day two we went over to camping world stadium to park people in a secure place and they could walk in without the press being able to get at them. Late in the day, we were able to evacuate the victims from pulse to the medical examiners office. Thats county position. The guy had been on the job a week at most. He had not even been confirmed by county commission at that point. But we emphasized to him how important his job was because if we went a day or two without identifying who the victims were, wed have a different narrative going. He identified 48 of the 49 victims overnight. I came back in at 7 00 and that was the next press conference was letting everybody know we had identifications. He was able to identify the last one i think by about noon. That was critically important. He also had the presence of mind to take the killer into a different building and do the examination totally away from where the victims were. Sxwri think juliet to turn to you here now. What you hear is that the mayor focused on victims. He focused on telling his city to show the world that they were, this didnt define them, and specifically they were lgbtq friendly, but also he focused on the imam and the message that this was not the communitys fault. It was not the islamic communitys fault that this happened. This gunman did not speak for them. Now, i think in orlando you saw the city respond to all of this. However, in ft. Pierce, there was an arson event at the mosque that the shooter used to worship at. Also a mosque in tampa was attacked. So i think this generates a lot of fear in the Muslim American and Arab American Community in a lot of different communities. I wonder if you could talk a little about that. Also, theres been a lot of rhetoric in this campaign thats given people that set the stage for this to be an echo chamber. I wonder if you could talk about that. I can and i talk about it not just because of my family, but i want to talk about it as a Homeland Security policy and some of the challenges or how we think about it in terms of Homeland Security and counterterrorism. We want to thank the mayor. As youre sitting there, i think gosh, i hope you memorialized this because i know its hard to do. You dont know for generations people will want to hear your story to learn from it. And clean the mistakes. I have these little handwritten notes from each press conference and i kept a journal the first four weeks. To peters point, when he said what makes a resilient society. I teach on resiliency. One attribute is that rigorous lessons learned. I know you will look back and know did you things right and wrong and there are questions about the police waiting and whether that was right or wrong. Thinking about the obligation to unfortunately the next mayor. This idea of orlando, i had been in orlando two months before doing a speech to your Police Department on counterterrorism and how to think about it because they are so serious about it. Was the first time i got a flavor for the nonDisney Orlando. I have three kids. The Disney Orlando. Theres better than the Disney Orlando if you have three kids. Its an amazing city. If you just go in, fly, go to disney and back, that vibrancy was captured. Thats what helped the city in terms of that sort of sense of were in this together, were a all victims, were all unified in the response. In some ways in this lessons learned, your Immediate Reaction in terms of who youre reaching out to in the community so they could be not the first spokesperson but the second, third or fourth spokesperson. The challenge for mayors that might not be as sophisticated as you, who are those spokes people. You will find people on the other side. We certainly know that. A lot of times its not the imam. The Muslim Community is as diverse as any other. Who represents the Jewish Community . Its not necessarily the rabbi. Figuring out who is the leading muslim doctor in the community who can come out, who is the leading big Business Owner and stuff, having multiple voices that arent through the religious lane. Because in some ways the Muslim Community is as diverse as christian and jewish and other communities. I will say, and we were talking about this before the extent to which this islamaphobia is so outside the mainstream of a bipartisan sense of what is Homeland Security cannot be underestimated or underscored enough. For good or bad, there is an established national Homeland Security community. It has from the moment george bush went to a mosque a few days after 9 11 to a very rigorous outreach by your former boss and predecessor to my boss, department of Homeland Security to what mayors have learned, which is Community Outreach through your Diverse Community is important. Theyve actually, mayors have taken on the department because they dont like what we do with immigration. They know outreach and getting communities to come out is the most important thing rather than immigration an enforcement. Its just a complete outlier. What i like to remind people, its an outlier not only because we are a diverse nation and we need to be respectful of other religions, its actually if you ask people in counterterrorism and Homeland Security what makes america safer i never say safe, always say safer because we try to minimize risk. Our oceans really help. You cannot drive from dorchester to damascus. Whats going on in europe is very different. The other attribute is our capacity as a nation through not perfect, i will admit that, but our capacity to integrate the other. You look at los angeles with the Mexican Community and you look at my city boston with the irish. They run the city or dearborn with the Muslim Community. That capacity to create generations of immigrants that are invested in americas safety and security is really probably our most successful and in some ways accidental Homeland Security strategy that reduced the risk. If we do things to alienate those communities or radicalize those who are not, or as you were saying, the complicated nature of some of these cases. It looks like a couple of them have behind the isis is some Sexual Orientation aspects to it, they are questioning their Sexual Orientation, certainly thats the case in orlando. Thinking about our outreach to communities as being an important part of our efforts and the extent to which this bashing of certainty communities or profiling youre hearing from giuliani who should know better, is really just so outside of a bipartisan acceptance of how we go forward. After a crisis like this. Katie, do you agree with that . I exactly do. I was going to say one of the unique things i have in my role being in congress i do international travel. The embassy can allow me to speak to foreign officials with a partisan voice. The embassies try hard not to. Over the course of the last year i go to the middle east probably every month or so, meeting with foreign officials. They want to talk to me most of all about the rise of donald trump and what that means for america and them, the likelihood of his success, what his sort of antimuslim rhetoric means. I take that opportunity to actually dispel some myths that a majority of america or majority of the Republican Party believe the extreme views interpretation of what he is saying to put a nuance on it. Some people i know can be very conservative on the immigration front, and therefore, out there aligned with donald trump dont necessarily agree with his rhetoric of antimuslim rhetoric. I definitely agree its not helpful from a security standpoint to be so devisive with that world, with the arab world in particular. We thought about that a lot on the hill, at least among the staff that its made it harder. I would agree the National Security, i think, general view of the last year has not been particularly helpful to our safety. Does it hurt resilience, too, is the question, here at home . I study less the community resiliency. I would have to assume so if your voices are devisive and youre putting neighbor against neighbor, that is not going to be helpful to a Community Rising up out of potentially bad situations. How much do you think one thing going back to the nature of the threat, a lot of the recent attacks have been selfradicalizing american citizens. Its not necessarily a foreign threat in that sense. Its a selfradicalizing group of americans. Absolutely. Is that what we are going to see in the future . Hopefully not. Hopefully we can solve the problem before it gets to a point where we cant stop the threat out there that is anybody particularly disillusioned or doesnt feel a strong community, you dont have to be an american citizen or not american citizen that youre susceptible to the messages these violent organizations can put out. The difference with the terrorist organizations right now, they are exceptionally good at it, particularly isil have taken sort of their Media Campaign to a whole new level. Anybody susceptible when we are getting briefed and thats one of the benefits we have on the hill is the agencies come and will explain to us what they are seeing, it is selfradicalization. It knows no citizenship. Juliette, now that youve sort of changed sides here, at least in terms of whether youre a public official or press, how much responsibility should the press have to people like mayor dyer when something happens . Is it their job to calm the public . Do they have a Civic Responsibility . Do they take it seriously . Are there guidelines . I can only speak from where i work which had mistakes. Certainly people theyre election focused and thats cnn. I used to write columns for my local paper, the boston globe. Im surprised how they do want to get it right. In other words, that reporters want to get it fast, but also want to get it right. Part of the obligation, and i think you heard in the mayor, you need to get you cant get your numbers wrong. Thats what i see killed i was on the government end during the bp oil spill. We got our numbers wrong, how much oil was spilled. We never recovered from that. Get your numbers right. Take the time to figure out the bad news about 50. I probably see it less. It was the first time i had been down to an event. Cnn asked me to go down. You do see the vulture aspects of it. Im more an analyst. Im watching tv then going on air, which i think has to be managed by a real the thing i saw orlando do which was a helpful lesson learned. There are so many rumors going round. There was a rumor that the body might have been a second shooter. Remember, they couldnt identify the body. That was one rumor. The other one was whether the s. W. A. T. Team had taken too long to go in. That started to be a narrative. What you guys did on twitter was important, which is you acknowledged that you understood that there was that rumor mill. So you dont look like youre stupid and didnt know everybody else is talking about this. We are aware there is one more body identified or we are investigating this. In some ways by acknowledging it you protect yourself even though youre not buying into that narrative. I think thats something because Public Safety tends to be slower than social media, and twitter trends is something Public Safety has to get better about, which is you see it coming. You cant act like its not happening. And so acknowledging it even i think is key. Were you watching the twitter trends . Were you keeping track of what was popping up . Yeah. He was. She was. They would not say on the social media guru of the city of orlando. Can i respond to one thing on the press though . Sure, yes. We as the city wanted to get out a lot more information than we ultimately did in the early time frame because the fbi had an active investigation. Their thought process was if were trying to figure out if there are other people that are involved here if they know intimate details of what happened in the club during the night and we can interview them and they have information that has not been yet conveyed to the public, thats part of our case. So the fact that they went in and we had most of the victims cleared by 2 30 or what was going on in bathrooms and all of that type of stuff we would have loved to have put more of that information out there but our hands were kind of tied by the fbi, and even the explosive device as part of that, they didnt want to us do that and i ended up at a press conference by myself a couple days later and went ahead and told that to get it out there, because without that part of the narrative, if you dont know that we think theres explosives in there, again, youre left to speculate why did you wait so long . And in the way things move today that story could be set before you have a chance to set is straight. Exactly right. At this point id like to invite the audience to have questions. Peter, if you come back up ill give you my chair and ill come over to the podium so i can field questions. If you have a question or comment, please identify yourself, what you do, or who youre with and pose your question. Again if youre going on a monologue i may cut you off. Lisa simms . Im lisa simms with new america. And the coauthor of this report. Ill ask a question on behalf of dr. Vasquez at ucf actually. He says i wonder to what degree the approach of mayor and his staff in managing information might have been under different challenges for example had a recent terrorist attack in orlando more closely resembled the dynamics of the marathon bombing in boston, attacks and suspects on the run for three or four days before they were cut. It would have made it hard to stress the community was safe and we had this under control in the First Press Conference. We had the same situation the gateway shooting which was a shooting in an Engineering Company by a disgruntled former employee came back, killed one person, shot three and then escaped, and we had no idea where he was, that there were lockdowns, i4 wa