By JAN LARSON McLAUGHLIN
BG Independent News
After the racist attack on customers at Waffle House in Bowling Green, citizens asked city leaders to help prevent similar incidents from happening again by offering training to late-night employees on how to deal with hate incidents.
So the police division came up with the training, and scheduled the first class for 40 employees last week.
But only two signed up – leading the class to be canceled.
“It’s disappointing to us that we had to cancel,” Bowling Green Police Lt. Dan Mancuso said. “The community asked for it. We took the time to put it together.”
Mayor Dick Edwards said he was also disappointed.
“I had hopes there would be more interest,” he said. “I hope it’s not because of a lack of interest in the topic.”
Citizens went to City Council earlier this year to suggest that local businesses ought to have zero tolerance for discriminatory and hate incidents. But first, local employees needed to be trained to deal with potential problems.
So the police created training component to add to the regular Late Night Establish Employee Training. The new portion focuses on prevention and mitigation of violence and discriminatory conduct.
The incident prompting the new training occurred March 31 when two high school seniors were reportedly met with racial slurs from two other men when they entered Waffle House. One of the men allegedly told the teens that President Donald Trump would deal with immigrants like them.
Before leaving the restaurant, the men taunting the teens reportedly went over to their table and began beating them. Three employees and a customer told police the two victims did nothing to provoke the attack.
Bowling Green Police Division arrested Jacob Dick, 22, North Baltimore, and Zachary Keller, 21, of Custar, for felonious assault and ethnic intimidation.
After that, community meetings were organized by La Conexion in an effort to come up with preventative measures to keep similar incidents from occurring in Bowling Green.
“Yeah, we’re disappointed. We had meetings about this on multiple occasions,” said Police Chief Tony Hetrick. “I wrote the training and set up the class.”
But the training won’t be wasted, since the police division plans to make it a part of all future training for liquor establishments, the chief said.
And while community members asked for the training, police can’t require that anyone attend, Hetrick said.
“We can’t mandate training for anybody,” he said.
The police traditionally offer the LEED training for night businesses in the fall, so that may have led to the low turnout, Hetrick and Mancuso said.
“We’ll try to put it out again in the fall when the students are back,” Mancuso said.
Beatriz Maya, leader of La Conexion, is hopeful the new police training will be better attended in the fall, which is it customarily held. She is pleased the training will be a standard part of the LEED training in the future for late night workers in Bowling Green.
La Conexion is also hoping to team up with Bowling Green State University to offer some type of training in the future for the public on bystander intervention and micro-aggressions, Maya said.
