When Crisis Hits: Communication and Community Trust, with Connection Point

In this episode, Dr. Eric Kowalczyk, CEO of ConnectionPoint, and Deborah Spence, Director of Business Development at 21CP Solutions, sit down to tackle one of the most pressing challenges facing public safety today: the growing gap between operational preparedness and public communication.

Drawing on decades of combined experience in law enforcement consulting, crisis communications, and federal policy, Eric and Deborah discuss why silence in an emergency is no longer acceptable, why most agencies fail not during a crisis but in the first 10 minutes, and how social media and AI-driven misinformation have added an entirely new dimension to the threat environment.

Deborah walks through a framework for preparedness while Eric maps it to the communications strategies municipalities need before, during, and after a critical incident. Together, they make the case that operational planning and public communications are not separate workstreams; they must be built together if communities are to maintain trust when it matters most.

Whether you work in law enforcement, emergency management, government communications, or public policy, this conversation is a candid, practical look at what it actually takes to be ready—not just operationally, but in the court of public opinion.

Transcript

Deborah Spence 0:09

Welcome back to the 21CP Pod Perspectives on Policing, brought to you by 21CP Solutions. I'm your host, Deborah Spence. This pod is where we bring together leading voices to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing law enforcement today. Whether you're a practitioner, a policymaker, or simply someone who cares about public safety, you've come to the right place. Today's episode is a special one. We're joining forces with our partners at Connection Point for what we're calling a 21 CP squared conversation. Two organizations, two areas of expertise, and one shared mission, helping governments and public safety agencies be truly ready when the unimaginable happens. So I'm thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Eric Kowalchek of Connection Point. Eric brings deep expertise in strategic communication, crisis narrative, and public trust. And his perspective is exactly what this conversation calls for. So welcome, Eric. Hope you can start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and Connection Point.

Eric Kowalczyk 1:04

Hi, everyone. My name is Dr. Eric Kowalchek. I'm the founder and CEO of Connection Point, and I am thrilled to be doing this joint podcast between Connection Point and 21CP. We're really appreciative of the fact that you're taking time to join us in this conversation. It's going to be about a really important topic in a time in our country where public trust is fracturing in government institutions and government relations, and maintaining that public trust is so important. And that the way that we see really, really strong community relations being maintained is both in the policies and procedures that municipalities have, but also in how they talk about them.

Deborah Spence 1:51

Thanks, Eric. I will say one of the things I am really excited for in this conversation, Eric, is that before joining 21CP, I spent the bulk of my career with the COPS office. And while I was there, I helped design the Preparing for Active Shooter Situations Grant Program. I oversaw all of the COPS funded training that was provided by Alert, and even had the opportunity to serve on the National Fire Protection Association's technical committee for MFPA 3000, which is the national standard on multidisciplinary response to active shooter and hostile events. And communications planning is part of that standard. And I think that's really the space that 21CP and Connection Point intersect at.

Eric Kowalczyk 2:30

Yeah, I think that's what makes this conversation a really interesting one for people to be able to listen to, right? Because at Connection Point, we obviously work with municipalities across the country. And typically when we're working with them, it's when they're in the midst of the crisis, right? And so we're trying to find ways to remind the public of reasons why they trusted their government to begin with. And then where there's a mistake or where there's a misunderstanding of what's taking place, we work to shore up that public trust. And the pre-planning work that you did with the Department of Justice COPS office is vital, right, in having something to lean on, in having a resource or a common set of understanding to go back to. Because what we're seeing right now, in real time, almost on a daily basis now is that every major incident that takes place, whether it's in a small community or a large city, it follows the same pattern. While the individual specifics might be different, the pattern of how the public responds, how the media responds is the same. And what you see time and again is that the public is asking, you know, how did this happen? And from our perspective, the most damaging answer that any government can give is just silence. In 2026, silence isn't understandable, it's a failure. And that failure can have really long-term ramifications for public trust, but also just for public safety in general and how uh those relationships are maintained between law enforcement organizations and their community. And so part of the work that you did was in that pre-planning. Can you talk a little bit about the various ways that you saw that pre-planning unfold, some of the things that you were uh involved in and how you see that threat landscape changing over time?

Deborah Spence 4:31

Sure. Um I will say one of the things that I think it's been really interesting as time has moved along is how the public reacts when news breaks of something happening, a critical incident, right? That now instantaneously everybody pulls their phone out, they're on social media, that's where they're asking questions, that's where they're looking for answers. And I don't know for you, but definitely for me, the internet loves a vacuum. It'll fill whatever space is there. So when I think about the threat landscape more generally, um, I think that that most people within law enforcement are still operating on a slightly outdated picture. Um, and not just about the phones. But what we see is a fundamental shift in how threats materialize. Um, we're moving away from coordinated hierarchical attack models that really dominated all of the strategic thinking and planning that went in post-9-11. Um, what communities are facing now is much more diffuse. I think growing interest in lone wolf attacks is really the clearest example of that. You know, a single individual who probably radicalized online has minimal operational footprint in the community. Um, they don't give the signals that law enforcement is really used to looking for. Um, there's no cell structure to infiltrate, there's no communications to intercept. Um, you know, by the time an agency really gets a read on the threat, uh, the window to act is often already closing. But it's not just the lone actors, uh, the broader threat landscape is just decentralized, you know, groups, ideologies, grievances, um, they spread laterally and it's across platforms, across borders. Um, a threat that emerges in one city can inspire similar action someplace else within hours, not months or years. Um, so to me, the threat isn't just evolving, it's decentralizing faster than systems can adapt.

Eric Kowalczyk 6:28

You know what's interesting about that point is the uh, you know, we're recording this in April of 2026. And not two weeks ago, there was uh an attack on a religious institution that was inspired by a lone wolf actor who was uh uh exactly what you were describing, right? Through the internet was uh radicalized, and then saw an event take place in one city and replicated that event in another. So everything that you're talking about right now, it's not just theory, it's what's actually happening.

Deborah Spence 7:08

I think the speed of escalation is something that we just don't talk enough about to um an incident can go from zero to critical in two to three minutes. And most jurisdictions have response protocols that assume a five to seven minute timeline, but that gap is where the most people get hurt. Um, you know, we've seen in many active shooter situations over the years that the majority of the victims are injured or killed before law enforcement can even arrive on the scene. Um, and then I think there's also a real training question to look into. We have departments that they do their active shooter drills, they run their tabletops, they check those boxes. Um, but how much did that training reflect reality? The chaos, the incomplete information, the decisions that have to be made before you really understand what you're dealing with. Um, that gap between training and real-world performance, I think, is where the failures really live.

Eric Kowalczyk 8:07

There's an expectation, right, that the community has. You and I have both done work in communities talking with uh um faith leaders, civic leaders, you know, sort of these uh advocates of broader swaths of the community. And the thing that always comes up is that irrespective of the threat, irrespective of the nature of uh whatever takes place, how it unfolds, there's an expectation that government has it, that they should have been prepared, they should have been trained for it, they should have known that this was going to happen. You get those uh you get those questions in briefings all the time. And I can think of five different uh large-scale events where within minutes the questions that are being asked are, what did you know? When did you know it? Why didn't you why weren't you able to stop this? Why weren't you able to prevent this from happening? And that training delta that you were talking about, you you know, you look at a possibility probability matrix and you can't possibly train for everything. So you train for the most likely scenarios, and when an incident unfolds that isn't cleanly and neatly in one of those training categories, um, it's not just an operational failure, right? Because the the skills, the training, or whatever was necessary wasn't there, but it's also a narrative and an expectation failure as well. Because as we see the incident unfold and uh law enforcement is reacting to the real-time situation on the ground. And this is, by the way, not to take away from any of the people that are doing the work of responding, right? You you're going into an unknown situation, and that's challenging and difficult, and you're and you're finding solutions in real time. The the failure though comes in how the municipality itself communicates what's happening to its community, how it shapes and frames the narrative. And you started this off by talking about, you know, everybody pulls out their phone. And if there's silence, if there's a vacuum of information in there, people are gonna fill it in. Social media fills it in. I'm I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about too many recent incidents, but there was an incident this past weekend in which a notable political figure uh went um quiet for a couple of hours, and and social media was rife with speculation about what had happened and what was going on, and conspiracy theories were bubbling over. And that same thing at a national level absolutely happens at the local level. And what we tell people is you've got 10 minutes. The the from the first moment that crisis unfolds, whatever it is, whether it's a lone wolf attack, a school shooting, um, some sort of an explosion or a weather event, you've got 10 minutes to start actively messaging to your community. And if you don't, someone else is gonna take hold of that uh that narrative and they're gonna define uh what the trust trajectory actually looks like for not just that immediate moment, but that aftermath. And it's something that we've seen time and time again. The reality is most governments don't fail during the crisis, they fail in the first 10 minutes, and it's all in how they establish that that narrative.

Deborah Spence 11:41

Uh you made a really interesting point in there, too, uh, that I just want to reinforce. And that's that you know, what I have seen over the last two decades is that failure doesn't come from capability, right? First responders are really well trained, and that has continued to improve over the years. It it really does come down to coordination and communication. So I think that's a a really important point. Something else that I feel really strongly about is that operational planning doesn't equal public readiness, right? We have jurisdictions that have invested real resources into preparedness. They've built policies, they've done the training, they conduct assessments, uh, they run after-action reviews after significant incidents. Um, that work really matters. Uh we have to be prepared to learn from our failures as well as our successes. And, you know, I'm also a huge proponent of studying the near-misses as well. Um, you know, that nothing is an accident. Everything is the result of a series of conditions and decisions. Um, but a well-run after-action review in and of itself doesn't necessarily translate into public confidence. Um, you could have the best incident command structure in the country. And if the communication coming out of your incident is fragmented or delayed, the public isn't going to know it. Um, what they're gonna remember is the confusion.

Eric Kowalczyk 13:09

Yeah, you know, you you were in a position for uh a pretty significant portion of your career where you were able to see the effort and energy and intensity that went into shaping policies and just shaping training into uh defining those expectations. And I'm curious about there's another point that you made that I want to pick up on, but I'm I'm curious from your perspective. I think I I started my law enforcement career in in 2002, and I was being trained by people who came on the job in the 1980s, who were being trained by people who came on the job in the 1960s, right? So there's this uh 40-year sort of institutional memory that goes into the training that I receive uh in the first year uh of my career. Uh and then I look at how training has evolved and how expectations have evolved over the last quarter century. And I have to think that the public safety professionals are better trained, better equipped, better prepared than I think they've ever been in history. And I'm just curious uh about your view of that.

Deborah Spence 14:25

I think that's very true. Um, you know, and sort of how long have I been doing this? About 25 years. I think, yes, I've seen a generational turnover uh in policing. And the departments that I visited and talked to and officers that I've gotten to know. Early in my career, there were conversations about is policing a job or is it a profession? And I I think that's been answered. The the skill set, the experience, the um expectations that are placed on police officers, the broadening of uh issues that they deal with in communities and the expectations that communities put on them has really uh raised the the level of what is the based line of policing in this country. And uh not to take away from you know any of the 20th century predecessors of today's officers, but um I think it is a very different job. It's it's a lot more complex, it's a lot more in the public eye, and threats and challenges that they face are bigger with more serious implications than ever before.

Eric Kowalczyk 15:28

Yeah, and and this isn't to say that there still isn't um opportunity for additional training or reform or tightening of relationships with communities and better understanding of communities' needs and expectations. We know that that's still uh a part of this evolutionary process. Uh, but as we're looking specifically at like these response to lone wolf attacks or a mass coordinated attack, whatever it is, um the standards and the way in which law enforcement is trained is light years ahead of where it was a decade ago, certainly a decade, uh 20 years ago. For me, the biggest the real gap here is exactly what you said at the beginning of this uh uh part of the conversation, which is that the operational planning, the training, the intensity of what officers and organizations are thinking about and planning for doesn't mean the public is ready for the same event. And it certainly doesn't mean that they know that that training is taking place, that uh the the thought and the detailed planning has gone into into some of these things. And that's that's kind of a uh holdover of an old mindset that's still there, right? About not talking about what's taking place, and it's disconnected, I think, from where we are actually as as a society. And and while uh I certainly don't think that we have adapted to the speed of social media in the norms of our communication yet. I think that this um I talk about this a lot when I'm when I'm doing training. We for thousands of years had a method that we communicated with, and it was slow and it was considered and it was deliberate, and it was often involving, you know, papyrus and clay tablets, right? Uh, and maybe a song by the campfire. And then in the last hundred or so years, we get the advent of electronic uh technology and telephones and TV, and that starts to speed things up pretty significantly. And then we get into social media where it's uh the at the tip of your fingers is access to global news. We haven't established those societal norms around what that means. The challenge that that represents for both police departments, public safety, first responders, and for government leaders is that the operating paradigm of confirm everything, cross all the Ts, dot all the I's before you ever say anything doesn't match the lived reality of people being able to access global information at the touch of their fingers. And that gap is is not just a nice to have, it's a necessity that public safety organizations need to be thinking about because you lose your community trust in that silence. And what you're actually creating with the rise of AI and technology is this ability for misinformation to spread, miss and disinformation to spread at speeds that we've never had to encounter before. I mean, this is within the last couple of years that miss and disinformation in and of itself is a new act of threat that we have to deal with.

Deborah Spence 18:48

Yeah, I think back to even, like I said, seven or eight years ago, and what we were talking about in terms of uh planning for mass casualty events and the communications discussions focused around um, you know, family notification, reunification, formal press statements. And if agencies now are fully trained up on that, they're already behind the ball again in terms of how communication and news works. Like just that it's it's actually really hard to think back even to 2015. And you know, smartphones were not ubiquitous at that point, right? There none of the AI tools that exist were available to the public. Um, so it's a it's a very different world in a very quick turnover. And there's a lot of law enforcement agencies to train and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, not to mention other first responders, um, in the country, and to continually update that training and make sure that all of their preparedness plans and strategies are up to date, is is a lot of work and hard to do.

Eric Kowalczyk 19:57

As soon as you said 2015, of course, for me, 2015, I flash back to my time in Baltimore and what was happening. Um, and it's wow, the cognitive dissonance, it's really easy to to think about in some ways in my head that that's it was yesterday, but then I do think about our use of technology and the way it's totally different in in a 10-year period. You know, we've we've we haven't built the systems to respond to perception, even though everybody needs them.

Deborah Spence 20:31

Yeah. Just as a side note, in 2015, I had a BlackBerry.

Eric Kowalczyk 20:37

Right? Can you imagine like an analog keyboard? Nobody would even know how to use that anymore. Uh exactly. But that wasn't that long ago. So so I guess my question for you is as you're thinking about, you know, in this conversation, we've talked about what the threat landscape looks like and how it's constantly evolving, it's constantly uh um changing, and that the threat landscape doesn't just include, you know, those physical acts, but now we've got to contend with mis and disinformation as an as an equally viable threat landscape. What does preparedness actually look like for you?

Deborah Spence 21:15

So for me, I think of it in four phases. So I'll walk through the operations of each one. Um, first is anticipation. And this is the threat modeling, the work that happens before anything occurs. Um it's like looking at your community, at your infrastructure, your event calendar, um, your known vulnerabilities, and really asking yourself as an organization, where are we exposed? And not generically, uh, but specifically. The analysis that needs to be done there should be driving resource allocations and uh your mutual aid agreements and your training priorities, right? Second is alignment. And this is where I think agencies fall short. A lot. You can have a great policy on paper, but if your team isn't aligned on how to execute that under pressure, if there's ambiguity about who's in charge, who communicates what, who has authority to make the calls, that policy becomes meaningless the moment an incident starts. So leadership alignment really has to be built before the crisis and not sorted out during it. Activation. This is the operational response itself. And the standard here has to be there can be no surprises internally. Everyone on the team should know their role, their lane, their escalation path. This activation phase is not when you should be drafting procedures. And then the fourth is the aftermath. And I think this is where work either compounds or corrodes. The agencies that use after action reviews as genuine learning tools rather than as a compliance exercise, they're the ones that get better over time. So reform has to be real and it has to be visible to the people who serve under that leadership. And I think altogether this is really about saying that preparedness is a system. It's not just a plan.

Eric Kowalczyk 23:12

I like that a lot. I'm a comms pro, right? So I'm listening to you and I'm like, fora is that should be a thing that 21 CP brands, because that's that's really good. If and and as you were talking, I was kind of mapping how we approach uh uh we we use phrases like before, during, and after the crisis, or uh delivering targeted and ethical information to the right people at the right time so they can do the right thing, right? But if I was to map our approach onto what you were talking about in those four A's, uh, I think the first one was anticipation that you said. Um for for me, that's the crisis pre-plan. That's just doing the hard work that nobody wants to do because it's long and it's hard and it's complicated, but sitting down and really doing that probability-possibility matrix and mapping out what is the likely scenarios that you're gonna face and doing those initial holding statements, thinking about your communication modalities, thinking about uh who's going to be the person delivering these messages. That's really in that uh that same vein as um uh and almost and well, it really should be done at the same time and in the same room as the people doing that that threat modeling. I was I was taking diligent notes as you were talking, and so when it comes to alignment, you talked about I think both internal uh and external alignment with your um with your stakeholders and uh neighboring partners. And I think here you said that nothing should be a surprise, uh, which which I really liked. And that same thing holds true for the community, right? Nothing should be a surprise. They should understand how you're gonna commute with K with them during an emergency, how they should be getting information, that you're building that relationship over time, that you're that trusted source of news and information, so that when the whatever the crisis, and notice that I said when the crisis happens, because it's not an if, it's a when. When the crisis happens, they know to turn to you. Everybody focuses, understandably, on the operational response and and you know what boots on the ground are doing and what what what that looks like, but at the same time, there's an anxious and a concerned uh and a scared public, and we can't forget that. And the media is certainly going to amplify that. Uh, I've got video after video of reporters saying we haven't heard anything from insert public safety organization here, right? Uh, so that real-time communication is just as important. Uh, I think we've hammered that point home. It's 2026, it's not 1986. Real-time communication is is as important in your public safety strategy as anything else. And for us in communications, and I I I'm gonna go out on a little limb here and say for you in the work that 21cp does, certainly we respond after the fact, right? We will come in, we can do the reviews, we can do the the the clarity and and the the work to reform, but this is a holistic before, during, and after effort to maintain public trust. And that is accomplished in how you manage those first 10 minutes of the crisis. It's how you manage the first 10 minutes of getting information out to your community, but it's all the work that you did before. And if you're not ready, if you're not prepared, if you're not doing that work, then when the crisis happens, you don't have a foundation to respond from. So I love your four A's, I'm gonna borrow them. Uh they work really, really well.

Deborah Spence 26:56

You know, this reminds me that I think policing is such a reactive profession, right? That's what it does, it responds to calls. But there is such value in taking the time to do this planning work and this preparedness work and the training. It's gonna save you time and energy and money when that crisis really does hit. And and I think you're right. I think, you know, many years ago we published a book out of the cops office called Uh Preparing for the Unimaginable. And I think nowadays it's not that it's unimaginable, it all is imaginable. Uh, and you need to assume that something is going to happen in in your community at some point and make sure you're ready for it.

Eric Kowalczyk 27:38

You know, we've been talking for a little while here, and I appreciate everybody hanging in with us. I think that this conversation is is super important. I might be biased uh because this is what I do, and I go into these communities where where trust is broken. You you all go into communities where trust has been broken. Uh, and so we see the the aftermath of both operational failures and and trust failures and and what happens. I like to think about the future and I like to think about hope and opportunity. And for somebody who's who's listening to this as we as we wind our way towards the end of this conversation, uh for somebody who's listening to this and they feel like maybe they're ready, they feel like maybe they've done some of the work, some of the planning, some of the training, maybe they've got uh good relationships with their community. What is it that if you if you could have five uh seconds with them or 30 seconds with them that you'd want them to be thinking about or to be actually looking hard at and having an honest dialogue with themselves about?

Deborah Spence 28:45

I think I think at the end of the day, preparedness is an act of accountability. It's the commitment that you as an agency leader are making to your community before they need you. So it's not about when the cameras are on, it's before. You know, the agencies and jurisdictions that do this well, they've really made a decision that trust is something that they build in advance, that they build a little bit every day. Um, they do it through training, they do it through transparency, they do it just in their daily interactions with their community, um, showing them that you take them seriously. And then when something does happen, they don't have to scramble for that credibility. They they already have it. So ultimately the question isn't whether something will happen. It's whether you've done the work so that your community believes that you're ready. And that can only be done day in, day out, thoughtfully and deliberately.

Eric Kowalczyk 29:50

I know well enough to know when somebody's dropped uh a really, really strong truth bomb into the room. And that to me feels like uh a great place to end this uh conversation. So um thank you for sitting down with me and letting me sit down with you and having this this conversation. I think there are so many rooms and spaces where conversations like this take place, but aren't necessarily happening out in the open and transparently. And so for all of those people that don't have access to those rooms but are thinking about these things seriously and thinking about uh what the next five to ten years looks like, uh, I I love that we were able to have this conversation and be able to share it with people. So thank you for for that.

Deborah Spence 30:42

Thank you. This was a great idea. We should do it again sometime.

Eric Kowalczyk 30:45

I'm here for it.

Deborah Spence 30:47

If today's conversation resonated with you, we'd love to connect. A big thank you to Eric Kalalchek and the team at Connection Point for partnering with us on this episode. You can learn more about their work at teamcp.co. For everything 21cp, reach us at info at 21cpsolutions.com or by phone at 844-767-2172. New episodes of the 21cp pod drop regularly. So be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the loop on everything we're working on. Our theme music was composed by Rachel McCullough. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. We'll see you next time.