In The Trenches Video Series
Securing Churches and other Houses of Worship
SCW has helped countless houses of worship secure their building from security cameras to access control. In this episode of In the Trenches Roundtable we discuss how to secure houses of worship.
Our speakers today are:
- > Micah Shearer
- > Matthew Nederlanden
- > Ben Larue
- > James Campbell
Micah Shearer:
A house of worship is a large organism. It's a large community. There's a lot of moving parts and players,
Matthew Nederlanden:
But it is unique in the fact that so many of its operational elements are done by volunteers.
James Campbell:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of In the Trenches: Roundtable. Today, we're going to be discussing houses of worship. This is going to cover churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, and everything in between. We've got our awesome panel here as usual. Say hello.
Micah Shearer:
Hi.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Hey, everybody.
Ben Larue:
Hey, everyone.
James Campbell:
And so security in houses of worship is a big topic. I guess my first question would be what are the first questions that potential house of worship clients are going to be asking? What are some things that they should be asking, I should say maybe, Ben?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, it's definitely a good place to start. I think, for us at SCW, the way that we approach these type of conversations, really understanding what the primary need of the campus that we're going to be working on is. That could be a variety of things. It could be looking at access control solutions. It could be looking at surveillance solutions. Heck, it might even be looking at sourcing a fence from somewhere. It really just depends on, I think, the facility and where the facility's located, but that's generally where we like to start. I don't know if, Mike or Matt, you have any thoughts or-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah. I also like to ask what sort of ministries that they offer. If you are a church that has a gymnasium, for example, and you do a sports ministry-
Ben Larue:
Or a day care.
Matthew Nederlanden:
... yeah, or a day care, you're going to have very different threats. In the same way if you have a homeless ministry, you're going to have different threats. Knowing what sort of activities occur on a campus is also important.
Micah Shearer:
And that will also feed into who is coming and going and when. Some church buildings are really quiet in between days of worship and some are not.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And some are very active community centers that even have meeting groups that have nothing to do with religion.
Ben Larue:
Exactly, yeah, and that circles back to facility layout and location. Some facilities are single-building, rural environments and some are multi-buildings spread across city blocks. Yeah, there's definitely a lot to unpack [inaudible 00:02:29].
Matthew Nederlanden:
A lot of variety.
James Campbell:
What do security cameras do for a church, especially one that maybe does a lot of that outside-of-service services?
Ben Larue:
I think it can serve a few different areas for houses of worship. First and foremost, I think it gives them better line of sight into what's just happening generally speaking, not only for the days that people are there and present, like worship days or fellowship days, but also for liability reasons. It's a big thing in this community unfortunately, and ...
James Campbell:
Anybody else have anything else to add on that or ...
Matthew Nederlanden:
I would go back on the liability side. The church service itself usually is very low risk, but things like, if you have a school on campus or if you have a day care, there's risks there about is everybody treating the children okay? If you have a sports ministry, there's questions about liability, about injuries. If you're running a homeless ministry, there's liabilities about violence and violence protection. I think one of the first things to do is divorce the religious services from the other services that the church is doing, especially when you start thinking about liability coverage.
Ben Larue:
Yeah, definitely, vandalism is another area that we see a lot with churches, or houses of worship, temples. They experience this more frequently than other sectors of business that we work with, at least in my experience, and so having exterior cameras, cameras that might have active deterrent features, things like this can help mitigate some of those worries and thoughts as well.
James Campbell:
And, going into a little bit of the installation of these cameras, churches, like you said, vary from brand-new, city-block size to buildings from the 1800s. Micah, what are some of the things you're going to be looking for when you are potentially installing for a house of worship?
Micah Shearer:
Yeah. Houses of worship add a lot of additional complexities because, though sometimes you are dealing with a single smallish building in a rural area, more frequently you're dealing with multiple buildings. Typically, they've been there a very long time. They've also often been added to over time, remodeled multiple times. Because your facilities team is typically volunteer or committee perhaps, you're often dealing with knowledge that has been passed through a lot of hands, and different strategies. There's just a lot to unpack about what is physically happening with the building, what is network to what infrastructure is already in place.
A lot of the early conversations around a church or a house of worship or a temple revolve around trying to understand what's already there and what's already happened. And then you're working through the complexities of is it a historical building? Can I run cable through a wall? Does everything have to be surface-mounted? If you're dealing with access control and you're retrofitting, retrofitting electrified hardware into a historical door is a lot more complicated than a newer, more modern building.
I would say just expect that it's going to take a little more time, a little more work. We've done some really interesting, complex projects in some really old buildings, so there's always a way, but expect that you're going to have to be more creative. It's going to take some more time to really figure out the right way to do things. There's also, often, because it is a community space with community input, you end up with a lot of stakeholders in terms of who care about where the cable goes and what it looks like and what the door hardware looks like, and then you have logistical considerations around how you get the work done that can sometimes be unique. It can be a sensitive space where you have to be cautious about who's going where during what times. Again, all that comes back to lots of complexities. We can always figure it out, but it's going to take more time.
James Campbell:
That's awesome. Yeah, that's a lot of great information, and that's, I think, the key point is we can figure it out, we can work within those parameters and make sure that you know what you're doing, or if you're doing it yourself, we can give some advice on how to deal with multiple buildings and subjects like that.
Micah Shearer:
We see a lot of DIY installation projects in churches, because, again, it's community and, lots of houses of worship or worship communities, they don't have tons and tons of money to spend on something like cameras. And having folks from the community do some of that labor is definitely something that happens, and that's where a team can help with expertise and planning and problem-solving, and then the technical support team, as well, with all of that networking side of things. We're able to come alongside different iterations or different strategies.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. And just to piggyback off of what Micah said there, I think a lot of the installation, whether it's decided to do it yourself or it's through an installation services team, like the one SCW would have, I think it's very important with this community to be thinking ahead as far in advance as possible, meaning, if we're thinking about doing renovations to the facility, maybe HVAC renovations, well, when people in other trades are in the building working is a good time to do other work and service as well, right? If we're updating the computer lab for the child program after school, it might be a good time to also run cable for cameras. There's things that you can do to help prepare yourself for other trades. I just think it's important for those communities to be thinking about future endeavors as much as possible when they're doing this work.
Micah Shearer:
Yeah, it does strike me that the future considerations are also going to be more intense in a house of worship because, a lot of times, when you're dealing with a traditional commercial space, how long is somebody going to be there? Probably not 150 years, so you're not thinking quite as long term, whereas a lot of these communities have been in this building for that long already and expect to continue to be in that building. I imagine you're having some different conversations about planning for the future than you necessarily would in another commercial space.
James Campbell:
Great info. Going into cameras more, a little bit more specifically, I know, Ben, you mentioned active deterrence cameras, which allow you to set up something where it will give warning messages or show the warning lights and a couple of other options we have for that to try to prevent maybe vandalism or something like that. But are there any other particular camera models that we see a lot of interest in from churches? PTZs, that one that we hear a lot from them? Or usually some of them might have big parking lots and stuff like that and actual operators during certain days too, but, yeah, any particular models that you think of?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, definitely. I think you took the words right out of my mouth. PTZs would probably be the most common outside of traditional fixed-lens cameras, absolutely, mainly for many of the reasons you mentioned, large parking, lots, sweeping areas. A lot of houses of worship will have activity fields outside. They might want to see what's going on out there, and PTZs in the interior spaces, in sanctuaries, to be able to potentially work in conjunction with their AV department. Yeah, definitely, I would say PTZs, very common, and then, yeah, the newer camera models with the active deterrence are definitely rivaling PTZs in most popularity.
James Campbell:
And you mentioned AV department. That is a question we get a lot from churches is, "Can I use these cameras to livestream?" And I know there's probably a bunch of different levels of ... some people have a single camera that they livestream with and some people have a full production. But do you have any thoughts on that, on doing security cameras with that or ...
Ben Larue:
Definitely. At least from my perspective and my experience, it's always best to leave that job to the equipment that's designed to do it, meaning there is specific web camera or web capability cameras out there to help livestream easier. That's not to say it's not possible. Yes, our cameras have RTSP streams. Yes, it's 100% possible to get these streams to be able to live stream, and many houses of worship do it. There's just other alternatives that are specifically designed to do that and we should explore those and use those as much as humanly impossible before using surveillance as a [inaudible 00:11:50].
Micah Shearer:
Would it be fair to say that the user experience is going to be very different? If you're using something that's designed for that purpose, the user experience is designed for that purpose, and so it's a lot easier for multiple people to utilize it. When you're taking a security camera and you're basically attempting to modify it to serve a purpose it's not really designed for, there's a little more barrier to entry to understanding what you're doing, and then, as that moves from person to person over the lifetime of that system, we find people get lost in it essentially. And then you add the issues with sound. Security camera microphones are not designed for that AV production quality. Will you get sound? Yes. Will it be what you really want it to be to allow somebody to remotely participate in the service? Probably not. It becomes a matter of understanding the limits and the capabilities of those systems and making a decision based on what you want to prioritize.
Matthew Nederlanden:
The type of microphone there in a security camera is omnidirectional. Yes, it might pick up the speaker's voice, but it's also going to pick up all the noise of people shifting in their seats and things like that.
Micah Shearer:
Coughing and ...
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah. It's not going to be a very clean viewing experience like you would think about when you think about livestreaming and comparing that to TV. It's not going to be that experience.
Micah Shearer:
And I also imagine the acoustics just get tricky because you're dealing with these big old buildings that are designed sometimes before microphones were a thing, and so where you're placing that camera to get the view that you want may not work acoustically at all.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. And, Micah, you just made one of the best points that I often try to help our house of worship clients understand a little bit better, that, if you begin to start thinking of these devices, the devices that we specialize in, which is traditionally surveillance and security equipment, if you start thinking of these devices and uses for other things, then the placement of the camera begins to shift, right? Is that actually the best placement for security purposes? Likely not. And we see that often inside of sanctuaries where people are choosing to mount cameras in places that, from a security standpoint, doesn't make very much sense. But they're trying to think of it as, "Oh, well it could be for security and possibly this." And what I'm saying is that we would advise against. That think security first and foremost. It does have the ability to livestream, but-
Micah Shearer:
You're going to sacrifice something. You're going to sacrifice angles of view and coverage and, if that's not why you installed that camera in the first place, you're going to end up being disappointed.
James Campbell:
I think that puts a bow on that part for sure. And, in general, I think is this a fair assessment for churches? You obviously need exterior cameras. You want placements around the building for all the reasons out there, and then inside as well. Is it, most people, do they initially think about having cameras inside or are they mostly exterior, or how does that usually split out, and should they be thinking of both?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, most of the time, houses of worship are thinking about the most coverage for the least amount of dollar possible, and most people perceive that as exterior or basic entryway coverage and things of that nature. But I would say plan ahead again and, if it has to roll out in phases because that's what maybe we can afford with the budgets and what have you, then that's okay. But, yeah, you need to be thinking about interior coverage probably in places you wouldn't think of before, right, in the nurseries, in the Sunday school classrooms, things like this, where Matt just pointed out, houses of worship rely heavily on volunteer service and those volunteers can't be vetted probably to the tenth degree.
Matthew Nederlanden:
It's not as easy as you think to vet the volunteers.
Ben Larue:
Right. Right. And we've also seen the news articles.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah. And the other big risk that I don't think that we can avoid when we're talking about houses of worship is a rise of things like Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, where the purpose and the type of people who are gathering are themselves under target, and so that's general concern of just a stranger coming in and wanting to target this specific group of people is another really big threat that really not many other institutions have. You don't have a business and say, "Oh, I'm definitely going to be able to target Jewish people here," in a way that a synagogue has that risk and attracts people who are anti-Semitic. And so that's another thing you've got to think about is targeted violence against a specific class of people.
James Campbell:
Very unfortunate, but very true. Cameras, I think most people understand why you need them and what they do for you, but let's talk about another product suite we offer, which is access control. Can somebody give me a nutshell on even what access control actually is?
Micah Shearer:
Controlling access.
James Campbell:
Yeah, there we are. Perfect.
Micah Shearer:
The system whereby you control when doors open and close under what conditions, typically based on credentials that are assigned to individuals, either through a fob or a card or even, in the case of the system that we use, your phone.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. I think access control, similar to cameras, can help houses of worship understand who is on the property at any given time. More specifically, with access control, you can know exactly who is in what area of the building at a given time. I think that's increasingly important on days where you would have service, where most of your campus would be open-door policy, access control control can help limit or segment some of those sections of your facility, right? Maybe only the sanctuary is open door, but, anything else, you need credentials to get into the back. That would be an example of how you could roll out access control.
I will say that, yeah, everything we've talked about today is fantastic, but it only works if it's used in the right way or the right access is granted to the proper people, right? I think that's very important in this type of environment. As Micah alluded to earlier, these decisions are usually made in committees. That doesn't mean every single committee member should be a super admin on the account and that should be very clear. That is where I have experienced the most discord with houses of worship after implementing a solution like this.
Micah Shearer:
One of the advantages of a lot of modern access control systems, including the one we use, is that you can get granular on those permission sets. If you need the administrator to be able to add users, but you don't want her to be able to change the access levels of certain user types, that's something that you can do. And you can also really drill down to, well, this user can come in during this time, or this category of users can come in these doors during these times, but not these other doors during those other times. That ability to get granular about your user-level permissions and your administrative-level permissions can make a big difference.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And, depending on the denomination, you may have very differing ideas on how something like the collection is taken and, in certain denominations, that's going to be more likely to be cash basis. I think, if you're not a religious person, you might think of a church building as just this big meeting hall, but there's also all these other offices, one of which is going to be your accountant, or other finance type department, that is going to be holding oftentimes a lot more cash than you might think. And so, yes, you're not really going to use the access control on the main sanctuary doors where you're letting all the people in to hear the service, but you are absolutely going to use it on significant other parts of the buildings, especially where the more administrative functions take place.
James Campbell:
And I think, to add on to that, you think about the ones that have school services and everything like that that need to have electronic equipment, AV equipment, we just talked about, can be tens of thousands of dollars, you want to protect that in areas as much as possible. Big question about the sanctuary doors, have you guys seen anybody using access control in that situation or is that generally still open-door policy?
Ben Larue:
Yeah, open-door-ish. I have recently experienced a client who gated, used access control on the exterior doors to the sanctuary, and then there's a lobby or vestibule in between the exterior doors, and then the doors to the actual sanctuary. The doors to the actual sanctuary weren't gated or accessed, but the exterior-facing doors outside of the vestibule were. But, again, they have it set so, as soon as Sunday rolls around, the door automatically unlocks and then re-locks after.
Matthew Nederlanden:
We saw-
Micah Shearer:
Oh, I was going to say-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Go ahead.
Micah Shearer:
... you do have to be, and this should be a given dealing with any professional installation group, but when you're dealing with a building that houses assemblies, there are a lot of life safety codes that come into play in those main doors. If you are going to lock those main doors when folks are inside, obviously, you've got to have proper egress settings on all of that so you don't end up in some tragic situation where folks are trapped inside.
James Campbell:
Yeah. The key, it sounds like, you need to make sure, obviously, they can get out, but also outside, the locking is for the people outside of the building, not necessarily locking you in. I just want to clarify that just because it may not have been-
Matthew Nederlanden:
This is just to keep people out.
James Campbell:
Yeah, keep people out, not keep you in.
Matthew Nederlanden:
If you all remember, around 2015, there was a shooting at a historical Black church in South Carolina, and this sort of event, which is, again, a white supremacist basis, Neo-Nazi person came and shot up by this historically Black church, and we did see a lot of people moving towards that, once the service has started, we are going to try to control the access a little bit better to prevent this sort of thing, is going to a policy of having a doorman, that the door is locked, and we're letting people in that we know and recognize once the service is started. People are always going to be late, there's going to be some people, but, for certain minority communities, that risk is higher.
James Campbell:
And talking about that doorman position, that's a guy standing, there being like, "Yep, that's Steve. Let me let me in. I know him." Access control can almost allow you to maybe take that burden off of somebody and you give Steve a key card and, if he's late, he can still open the door because he has access to the lobby area we see on a lot of churches being built. There's definitely ways to protect that, I think, as well. That's a good way of doing it without necessarily investing in access control is having a doorman.
It, actually, allows us to get into this next section, which is about general security, because having these products is great, but I think the doorman was a great example of a good security tip that doesn't require extra equipment, requires a volunteer. Do you have any other examples of that that you guys have seen through our experiences?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Basketball courts can be especially problematic from a liability standpoint, and a lot of churches have basketball courts, especially if they're doing some sort of sports ministry, and there's basically two designs for that. The first design is indoor gym and the second one is outdoor. If it's outdoor, putting a fence around it is going to be a really good idea, and having hours that it's open and not open, because that's usually going to be some sort of requirement from your liability insurance. This is something that they're going to want to try to limit those to certain hours so that they know what they're insuring. Typically, a fence around a basketball court, the area where people are playing sports, is going to be a really good idea.
Ben Larue:
I think the implementation of welcome centers for volunteer staff on days where you're going to have the largest populations of your community present, so days where worship might take place, you're going to have tens, maybe twenties, depending on the size, maybe hundreds of volunteers, and having them have a dedicated place to check in to make sure they have the proper credential for the rest of the facility and understand where to leave when the service is over. Things like that, I think, are extremely beneficial to implement.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Also, this really helps retention. One of the biggest things for churches, reasons people [inaudible 00:25:50] come back is feeling like people weren't friendly to them. You have a welcome center, you're helping retain the audience you want to keep, but you also can provide some basic safety training, how to identify if somebody potentially could be a threat.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely. And it gives, I think, the community a place to also turn to if something were to happen throughout their experience there on site, right, "Something is happening, do I have somebody to turn to?" I think having that welcome center can be that outlet. In addition, I would just say really the biggest thing I've seen that's easily implementable is funneling egress during these days where there's volume of people, so having only certain doors, maybe certain bathrooms, unlocked, certain areas of the facility should stay locked, but if you can limit the amount of exterior egress that you're opening that day of, it can help mitigate a lot of the issues of losing track of somebody.
James Campbell:
What about a security plan too? Is that something, I'm not sure if we can speak to it as in depth, but what does that usually entail? Is that something where, if an emergency happens, whether that's a security reason or even a weather-related one, what you do, any insight into that?
Micah Shearer:
Similar to any other large facility, you're going to need your gathering points, your designated where do you go in this type of event? Probably one of your obstacles is, again, it's community, it's turnover, it's volunteers, and making sure that an ever-changing group of people is always properly trained, I imagine, is a struggle. Maybe the solution there probably lies in ownership, having some clear sense of who is responsible for maintaining the security plans, who is responsible for ensuring that, as people move in and out of different roles, they are properly trained on what those security plans and procedures are.
James Campbell:
It sounds like maybe you need to know who's doing it, backups in case they're not there, everything like that, seems so ... just a question-
Micah Shearer:
All good organizational management. A house of worship is a large organism. It's a large community. There's a lot of moving parts and players,
Matthew Nederlanden:
But it is unique in the fact that so many of its operational elements are done by volunteers, and so that is more of an organizational challenge. It's having a business with very, very rapid turnover, and so there is a retraining aspect for all of those things.
Ben Larue:
Right. As we're talking about a lot of this stuff, these plans to have in place are very important, but, as Micah alluded to, having a single entity be the owner of this, maybe having that person be on staff, can help ensure that a lot of this stuff gets followed through on.
Matthew Nederlanden:
And, to follow up on that, one of the things that I see in churches a lot is they take somebody who usually has some sort of law enforcement background and try to put them into that role, and that's got some really good ideas to it. Certainly, the ability to assess threats is going to be better with a personality like that. But a big part of things like access control and security cameras is in fact also networking, and so oftentimes those committees that a church is forming to evaluate what their security protocols can be often have not very realistic expectations about what the technologies can do and how to best set them up.
Micah Shearer:
Where we see it work well is when that person with more of the physical security, law enforcement background works in partnership with somebody who has more of a networking and IT background, who can work together to figure out what physically can be done in the space. And, as an organization, we have a lot of expertise on the networking, the IT side, that we can bring to bear, but it is certainly easier if there's somebody within the decision-making group for that house of worship that has enough of that expertise to understand what we're trying to do.
James Campbell:
I think that even goes into talking about who you pick as your security camera or security vendor in general, making sure that you trust them, make sure that, whether you're doing it yourself or you're getting professional installation, that you feel like you're going to be able to get assisted if something's not quite working right, because if you are using volunteers for this situation, you can't always expect the level of expertise on this product, unless you get lucky and somebody happens to be a security camera expert
Micah Shearer:
Truth be told, we get a lot of calls from folks who are basically saying, "Yeah, we put up these 15 cameras we got on Amazon and they don't work most of the time, and the cabling looks terrible," and sometimes in giant, giant historical buildings and historical facilities and you've got cabling that is doing the job, but the way it looks belongs on one of our videos where we make fun of people's cabling jobs. So we end up coming in with somebody who's finally like, "All right, this is not working. We have to do this professionally."
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah. And that same lack of quality control goes into the same operations when you're utilizing the system. The administrative controls over the people that I gave access to last year, do I still need them to have access, often don't get updated when we're relying on volunteers. And so somebody might have changed churches or might not be going here or whatever reason, and we haven't removed their access from really sensitive locations, and that can be very problematic. The administrative functions are purely IT tech base, and, again, often that buying committee that the church puts together is a group of previous LEOs and nobody's really actively managing the system and so it gets out of control because they never remembered to remove 10 years of volunteers.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. I think Matt makes a good point. Yeah, definitely, right, just because there's somebody heading up the security plan and maybe the policies and procedures and things of that nature doesn't mean that that person also has to be the person that manages the day-to-day of it, of the actual systems. That's a good point, definitely.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah. And you should have both sides represented inside your buying committee, the person who understands the physical security background, the LEO, and the administrative IT professional, who's going to manage the system.
James Campbell:
Great. Well, do we have any final thoughts that we want to end this with or, no, we all feel pretty good, got our piece in? All right. Well-
Matthew Nederlanden:
I'll give an NPR wrap-up. 50 years ago, a church could easily survive with no security whatsoever. Those days are long gone, especially if you are doing the sort of ministries such as schooling or childcare or feeding the homeless or a myriad of other things that often church buildings are used for. These things need to become the norm, and we are seeing that transition happening, both on the physical security side, the IT side, and even in the cybersecurity side, which we didn't really get into a ton even in this video. But all of those threats are starting to really be present for churches in a way that, again, 50 years ago, this really didn't happen.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think that's a perfect way of saying it. It's an unfortunate reality that we have to deal with, unfortunately, the world we live in now. We are an expert in this. You can certainly give us a call if you're looking for video surveillance, access control, other products that can help secure your house of worship. Give us a call. We're happy to help, number's up here. Want to thank our awesome panel for this discussion and their expertise on this topic, and we will see you on the next In the Trenches: Roundtable. Take care.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Thank you.
Micah Shearer:
Bye.