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Highlight on Emergency Management Director Donna Boston
Happy International Women’s Day! This year we wanted to put the spotlight on Donna Boston, Director of the County’s Emergency Management Program. Donna is an incredible asset to the Sheriff’s Department and the County as a whole. Her career in Emergency Management spans 20 years and she specializes in preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery. She oversees the Emergency Management Division that provides emergency management and preparedness services to the unincorporated areas of Orange County and supports the efforts of the Orange County Operational Area. There are currently over 100 jurisdictions in the Operational Area encompassing all County departments and agencies, public and private organizations and the general population within the boundaries of Orange County.
Donna also spearheads the County’s Alert OC program. Alert OC is Orange County’s regional public mass notification system designed to keep those who live or work in Orange County informed of important information during emergency events and has the capability of quickly sending time-sensitive emergency voice and text messages from public safety officials to your home, cell or business phone.
It’s easy to sign up for emergency notifications and takes only minutes! Just visit www.alertoc.com and type in your phone number. You can also select to receive notifications for specific areas, like where you work, live, or travel to often. Once you are registered, you will receive either voice or text messages about any emergencies that require immediate lifesaving actions.
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Get them talking. Make a connection. Diffuse the situation.
These are the tenets of crisis negotiation, but the process is much more nuanced and complex than it sounds.
It was approaching 9:45 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 13, when the mother of a 3-year-old called the Sheriff’s Department to report the child’s father refused to release her daughter. Her ex, the woman told dispatchers, was acting strangely and had two of his firearms laid out on a table inside the home.
The woman was able to pull her daughter out but, as deputies arrived, multiple shots were fired from inside the house.
A perimeter was set up, a K-9 team was summoned and SWAT was called out.
Any time SWAT is called or a high-risk search warrant is served, the Sheriff’s Department also immediately deploys resources from its Crisis Negotiation Team. The team, which is an ancillary duty for 21 deputies and three sergeants, is trained on how to resolve adrenaline-inducing scenarios such as hostage situations or barricaded suspects.
Deputy Smith, along with other members of the CNT, were called out to assist SWAT with the child custody exchange gone awry in the 34500 block of Camino Capistrano in the city of Dana Point.
“We work as a team and everyone knows their lane and what to focus on,” Smith said. “While SWAT might be focused on tactics and the entirety of the scenario, as the negotiator, I would be focused just on the barricaded subject.”
In their intelligence gathering phase – the first step in a negotiation -- the team learned the barricaded man was a Marine. Deputy Smith had also served in the Marine Corps and thought the shared bond might be a benefit.
For more than an hour, Deputy Smith tried to get the man to engage with him.
“He answered once briefly, then hung up. Then we started texting,” Smith said. “I communicated with him Marine to Marine and convinced him to pick up the phone. The first thing I asked him was, ‘Are you OK?’”
The conversation started irate with the barricaded man demanding to know about the heavy Sheriff’s Department presence in his neighborhood and near his home. He questioned whether or not Deputy Smith trusted the people he worked with.
“I told him, ‘I trust them with my life, and I hope you trust me with yours’,” Smith said.
The barricaded man would show he did, in fact, trust Smith with his life. In less than 10 minutes, the 28-year-old peacefully surrendered to deputies.
“The most important thing in the short time you have them on the phone is showing empathy and getting them to understand that we’re concerned about them,” Smith said. “It’s about less talk, and more listening.”
The man was arrested on suspicion of child endangerment, battery and negligent discharge of a firearm. Although the suspect will face consequences for the choices he made that night, Deputy Smith helped him realize the alternative to surrender could potentially have much a graver outcome.
“A lot of his emotional outburst was knowing that he was going to be in some trouble and possibly lose being able to see his daughter,” Smith said. “When people are in crisis, in that moment, all they see is the negative and they completely detach from everything positive in their life. We have to get them to connect to that positive.”
The Crisis Negotiation Team responds to between 50 and 60 calls each year. The team trains quarterly and also participates in a nationwide competition at the annual Texas Hostage Negotiators Conference. The Sheriff’s Department team took fourth place from among 28 departments during a competition in which they ran a complex eight-hour negotiation. To learn more about the team visit http://www.ocsd.org/divisions/fieldops/security/special/cnt.
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The Orange County Sheriff's Department is seeking the public's help identifying a suspect who robbed a Lake Forest bank on April 26, 2018 in the 23000 block of El Toro Road.
The suspect walked into the bank at about 2:20 p.m., demanded money and left with an undisclosed amount of cash.
He is described as Caucasian, 6'2", 165 pounds wearing a black hat, sunglasses, long-sleeved shirt and blue jeans.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call the Sheriff's Department at 714-647-7000. Tips also may be reported anonymously to Orange County Crime Stoppers at 1-855-TIP-OCCS.
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SANTA ANA, Ca. (February 25, 2019) – The Orange County Sheriff’s Department Coroner Division publicly released two reports today concerning reported deaths of individuals experiencing homelessness in Orange County in 2018.
The OCSD Coroner Division is responsible for investigating deaths that occur within the county of Orange. This includes unnatural deaths such as homicides, suicides, accidents and/or suspicious or unexplained deaths. In Orange County in 2018, there were 5,858 deaths reported to the Coroner Division. Of those, 210 decedents were considered homeless as they had “no fixed abode” at the time of death.
The first report, titled “Coroner Division Homeless Mortality Report,” provides data categorized by the cause of death and the geographic location of where the death occurred. The information is provided for each calendar year 2014 to present, in addition to statistical graphs by mode of death. The Coroner Division has been working to compile this data since January 2019 to study these cases and identify changing patterns important to public health and safety.
The second report was prepared pursuant to a request from the Honorable David O. Carter, Judge in the United States District Court to provide the causes of death of homeless individuals who passed away in 2018 and 2019. The report lists the 210 decedents from 2018, and 25 reported deaths from Jan. 1 to Feb. 19, 2019.
2018 data shows that of the 210 homeless decedents, 75 individuals died of natural causes, with overdose as the second highest cause of death claiming the lives of 44. Thirty-two are still pending an official cause of death awaiting toxicology results.
“Examining this data allows us to observe causal factors that might assist in preventing the deaths of individuals experiencing homelessness,” said Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Don Barnes. “As a member of the Commission to End Homelessness, I will be presenting this data to the commission for further discussion and action aimed at reducing the number of deaths of homeless individuals.”
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SANTA ANA, Ca. – A woman, hired by multiple clients as a home organizer, has been arrested by the Orange County Sheriff’sDepartment (OCSD) on suspicion of felony grand theft. Investigators believe there may be additional victims, and are seeking community members to come forward.
The Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center (OCIAC) on Tuesday, January 29, was recognized by the Orange County Board of Supervisors for their work in 2018, which garnered the team several awards including being named the nation’s top fusion center.
In November 2018, OCIAC was recognized as the 2018 Fusion Center of the Year at the 2018 National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) conference in Alexandria, Va. The Fusion Center of the Year award recognizes one center for providing exceptional services to their jurisdiction and providing an example of best practices to the nation.
OCIAC, established in 2007, houses representatives from 16 federal, state and local law enforcement and related agencies working to gather and analyze information from various sources to keep Orange County safe from criminal and terrorist activity.
The fusion center is staffed by 52 full-time and part-time employees, including law enforcement, fire fighters, and intelligence analysts embedded from agencies including the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Orange County Fire Authority, Orange County District Attorney’s Office, the Anaheim, Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Laguna Beach, La Habra, Orange, and Tustin police departments, Anaheim fire department and officials representing various divisions from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Its key function is to vet information about suspicious activity from law enforcement, fire, public health, the private sector, and the general public. On average, OCIAC fields more than 1,100 tips or leads a year of such activity.
In addition to the Fusion Center of the Year award, OCIAC also received accolades from the National Maritime Intelligence Office (NMIO) and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The National Fusion Center Association (NFCA) represents the interests of the 79 state and major urban area fusion centers, as well as associated interests of states, tribal nations, and units of local government, in order to promote the development and sustainment of fusion centers to enhance public safety; encourage effective, efficient, ethical, lawful, and professional intelligence and information sharing; and prevent and reduce the harmful effects of crime and terrorism on victims, individuals, and communities.
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