Staff walk out of Hollywood climbing gym, saying company kept shooting threat a secret

yikes.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-02/hollywood-boulders-climbing-gym-shooting-threat

My $.02:

1) something about the added perils of corporatizing the climbing community into an industry

2) crazy dude making the threats should have his name made known to pretty much *everyone* in the local community. Kind of baffling, the bit about "eh these arent credible or actionable threats" and "he's been banned from all our locations, so don't worry about it."

Brent,  thanks for posting this. I saw this story posted elsewhere on the forum yesterday but it was already removed when I went back to share it with someone. Hopefully this thread will stay up. The response by Touchstone has been troubling to say the least. 

What should they have done? What should they do?

Touchstone sent an email update about the situation to all members. It provides a different perspective, but not a ton of details:

"Dear member, 
As you may or may not be aware, we closed Hollywood Boulders for a couple of days last week and have limited hours this week. This email is to explain why.
Early last week, a Hollywood Boulders member reached out to tell us they received a text message from another member that included a potential threat of violence. We immediately contacted the police. After reviewing the threat, the police deemed the texts as not a threat to the gym. The police directed us to take no further action and not to alarm our staff and community. We continued to take actions we thought best to ensure our community and staff felt safe—pursuing a restraining order (which, as a business, we could not legally obtain), calling for a wellness check with the hope of obtaining a 5150, and hiring security for all of our So Cal locations. Because no direct threat was made, our legal options were limited, so we decided to engage directly with the individual responsible for making threats. During this conversation, we terminated their membership and made it clear they are now banned from all our gym locations. This person accepted and responded to these actions without dispute. 
Because a lot of information has been circulating online, we want to make three facts very clear: (1) no gym was ever directly threatened, (2) there was never an active shooter, (3) the police never deemed this a credible threat. The entire series of events is all related to personal communication between individual members.
We spent countless hours understanding the facts, working with the police, and making use of the best legal options to ensure the safety of our staff and customers. This is the first time we’ve experienced anything like this, and we know our response wasn’t perfect. Given the tragic state of gun violence in our nation, we understand why some members of our community were alarmed to learn about some details of these events through various online channels.
We are working with staff to ensure they feel safe to return to work so that Hollywood Boulders can resume its regular hours. We love and value our community."

Cherokee Nunes wrote:

What should they have done? What should they do?

Tell the people that work for them that there's been a credible threat? Give them the information and option to not be there if they feel uncomfortable or unsafe?

Are you unsure?

Is that clear?

Quite. Thank you.

It needs to go the FBI if any of these quotes are true: 

that they were “strapped” and “wanted scalps,” as well as a warning to the recipient to “avoid the gym for a while.”

The texts went on to say the gym had “been way too lenient with all the wannabes here. no mas” and that the member “already has a kill order” and “god has spoken.” When the person who received the messages asked, “wdym stay away from the gym? Everything okay?”, the member replied, “i’ll know soon enough.”

“take out the Koreans first so y’all take things more seriously.”

Brent Kelly wrote:

My $.02:

1) something about the added perils of corporatizing the climbing community into an industry

Hot take, as usual.

winter4368 wrote:

It needs to go the FBI if any of these quotes are true: 

that they were “strapped” and “wanted scalps,” as well as a warning to the recipient to “avoid the gym for a while.”

The texts went on to say the gym had “been way too lenient with all the wannabes here. no mas” and that the member “already has a kill order” and “god has spoken.” When the person who received the messages asked, “wdym stay away from the gym? Everything okay?”, the member replied, “i’ll know soon enough.”

“take out the Koreans first so y’all take things more seriously.”

I know I shouldn’t be shocked anymore, but the police saw those texts and determined there was no threat? How the hell do they come to that conclusion, and how the hell does the gym just accept that? “Oh gee, I guess we’ll just ring him up and tell him he’s banned.” Come on. You call your local representatives, the mayor, the police chief, you go to the media if the police won’t listen, you call the FBI, you tell all your employees, you tell your members, and you close the gym until the guy is behind bars for making terrorist threats. 

Hson P wrote:

I know I shouldn’t be shocked anymore, but the police saw those texts and determined there was no threat? How the hell do they come to that conclusion, and how the hell does the gym just accept that? “Oh gee, I guess we’ll just ring him up and tell him he’s banned.” Come on. You call your local representatives, the mayor, the police chief, you go to the media if the police won’t listen, you call the FBI, you tell all your employees, you tell your members, and you close the gym until the guy is behind bars for making terrorist threats. 

Maybe the police have more and better information than you. 

If we closed businesses every time a non-credible threat was made, the “community” and the “employees” would have issue with that as well.  While i hate the fast-foodification of our gyms as much as the next old crusty, i do understand the gym’s dilemma. None of the gyms i went to back in the day had the resources to hire security and do the followup that this gym says they did. If the gym had closed until this was resolved (which as far as i can tell it still isnt), how would the gym workers have put food on the table?  I think the moral outrage i hear in this thread, and just about everywhere else is a pretty naive view of how the world works. Climbing is inherently dangerous, we take calculated risks every time we put on our shoes. Its our job to mitigate those risks. Sounds like the gym did their best to mitigate those risks despite this being deemed NON-CREDIBLE. Not that the police get it right all the time, nor does anyone, but with the limited info presented here, seems like people were trying to work in and out of the system to keep people safe.  A couple quotes taken out of context aren’t enough to convince me otherwise, even if on the surface they seem heinous.  Maybe spend your time calling your local politicians to try and make bullets so expensive that the CREDIBLE threats cant happen. 

"Melvin said in the email that the threats were immediately reported to law enforcement, which determined they were not credible and told company officials to “take no further action and not to alarm our staff and community.”

Although gym owners and upper management were informed of the threats, according to the open letter, staff members did not learn about them until Oct. 25. It is not clear from the letter how employees learned of the texts. Staff asked to see the messages but were unable to get them from management, the letter says, so they walked off the job, causing the gym to close early."

Good for the staff for taking a stand, no pun intended. If I was an employee there I'd have felt completely let down and endangered by management's lack of communication and action. Taking the word of law enforcement as gospel is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've seen all week. It's not their right to decide what the staff and community should or should not know when it comes to allowing for the staff and community to make decisions for themselves that very literally could mean living or dying. 

Jimmy Bricker wrote:

If we closed businesses every time a non-credible threat was made, the “community” and the “employees” would have issue with that as well.  While i hate the fast-foodification of our gyms as much as the next old crusty, i do understand the gym’s dilemma. None of the gyms i went to back in the day had the resources to hire security and do the followup that this gym says they did. If the gym had closed until this was resolved (which as far as i can tell it still isnt), how would the gym workers have put food on the table?  I think the moral outrage i hear in this thread, and just about everywhere else is a pretty naive view of how the world works. Climbing is inherently dangerous, we take calculated risks every time we put on our shoes. Its our job to mitigate those risks. Sounds like the gym did their best to mitigate those risks despite this being deemed NON-CREDIBLE. Not that the police get it right all the time, nor does anyone, but with the limited info presented here, seems like people were trying to work in and out of the system to keep people safe.  A couple quotes taken out of context aren’t enough to convince me otherwise, even if on the surface they seem heinous.  Maybe spend your time calling your local politicians to try and make bullets so expensive that the CREDIBLE threats cant happen. 

So because we are climbers we should risk death at the hands of a psycho co-worker with a gun for $16 an hour?  Is that really the point you’re trying to make?

Feds are aware. I don’t think revoking a membership and telling someone to not show up anymore is quite enough. Let them get to the bottom of whatever ‘private communicate between members’ really was. 

Its funny that “kids these days” choose to lambast their employer on social media, ask for hand outs to subsidize their “protest”, try and get members to cancel or hold their memberships and feel disrespected by the gym they work at, but continue to work and climb there. If you don’t like where you work, or their policies as much as you say you do, quit and get another job.  

I’m not saying anyone should work for any amount at risk of bodily harm or death.  What i am saying is that life is full of risk and we do things every day that have a risk of killing us.

“Most people don't want to take the time to gather all the evidence and facts, and let the resulting truths speak for themselves, and inform critical decisions.” Jerry De Luca speaking about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s thoughts on risk and reward.

Too much of life today is based on our emotions and not data. Emotions that in this day and age are fragile and easily triggered by media, some random out of context text chain, or perceived disrespect. This emotional decision making, based on incomplete data leads to a bunch of people demanding gym owners shut down, or employees walking out in the middle of the day.

The “outraged” then “feel” like they did their duty, or stuck it to the man, when all that really got achieved was a disruption in my gym schedule, negative business outcomes for the gym owners and worst of all a “perceived consensus” that every time somebody says somebody said something, its the world’s duty to upend everything to make us all safe again.

Im afraid, that we are all becoming too afraid of everything, too reactionary rather than thoughtful, and acting like a bunch of know-it-alls when we really know very little, both in specifics to this situation and in general life experience and understanding of how the world works.  

Not every mass shooting starts with a psychotic episode. If you look at the motives of past shootings, most people had reasons, either they were bullied (by society, women) or they were racist.  Something like 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. 

https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/news/mass-shootings-and-mental-illness

We need to start treating people with mental illness  with more compassion and understanding.

Rather than protest the gym, protest our for profit health care industrial complex, for profit military industrial complex, fractured education system, oil, gas and chemical companies poisoning our water, food and air, and a host of other institutions that we allow to profit on the demise of world health.

We get all worked up on a “what if”, but do little about the things actually killing us. 

I lack patience for people at arms length providing goobledegook answers at how they believe people threatened with harm should react.  This is not about “moral outrage” or a bigger empirical question of how people process information and form conclusions.  This is about an employer having information about a threat that it did not communicate to its employee, which they had a right to know about.  There have been at least 565 mass shootings in the US this year (source: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/u-s-hurtles-toward-new-record-for-mass-shootings-says-atf-director/#:~:text=So%20far%20in%202023%20there,people%20are%20shot%20or%20killed.)  The threat of harm cannot be underestimated.  Regardless of whether the police—who are fallible—opined about the credibility of the threat, the people threatened with harm have a right to make their own decision rather than being lied to about the threat.  And yes, withholding information of this nature is the same as lying about it.  If a threat was reported against my childrens’ schools, I as a parent should be able to decide how I respond to that risk.  It’s not the schools place to decide that for me.  

It would be interesting to know how this narrative (and reaction) would have played out if the gym owners had immediately notified their staff of this incident on the day they learned of it, before having developed more information on the person, and the view of law enforcement.

What’s the persons name?

Cosmic Hotdog wrote:

"Melvin said in the email that the threats were immediately reported to law enforcement, which determined they were not credible and told company officials to “take no further action and not to alarm our staff and community.”

I've had an unfortunate amount of dealing with law enforcement around threats of violence. I've NEVER heard them tell a potential victim or target not to "take further action" or express worry about "alarming" anyone else. Cops speak about what they are able to do or not do. They typically don't give a lot of advice about what you should do. Telling someone to "take no further action" would be idiotic and would create a huge liability if it turned out the threat wasn't just hot air and the guy turned up at the gym shooting people. I just don't believe any LEO said that. 

Jaren Watson wrote:

What information do you have access to that the rest of us haven’t seen? There must be additional information to conclude that management is lying.

Why would you say that? I have no special information outside of the public domain.  My comment itself spells out why I think the management isn't telling the truth. I'll spell it out again: Cops don't talk like that. Cops don't tell a company not to "take no further action" and they don't care about it "alarming" its customers. So if the management is saying the cops told them that, I don't believe it.

I believe that law enforcement reviewed the threats and said they weren't credible. Beyond that, I wouldn't expect them to say much more.