How Libraries Harm Themselves with "Crisis Managers" (Instead of Customer and Community Service)

The ongoing Orland Park Public Library (OPPL) child porn scandal is an excellent case study that illustrates how a "crisis management" mentality employed by library staff harms not only the community but also the library itself in the end. Here, internal incident reports uncovered in 2013 revealed that for many years OPPL management was aware of illegal and sexual activity happening in this library (but its director, Mary Weimar, chose not to call the police). This included child pornography being accessed in the OPPL and men masturbating openly and accosting women and children sexually in this facility. This library believed it could keep these incidents under wraps and never expected the reports to be uncovered in Freedom of Information requests.

When the Orland Park community heard about what was going on and spoke out against this, the Mayor called for the library to start filtering its Internet to block illegal content and discourage further crimes. The OPPL's highly-paid spokesman, Bridget Bittman, aggressively lied to the news media in print, TV, and radio interviews as part of a "crisis management strategy" that largely maligned and attacked the library's critics (instead of addressing the child porn, masturbation, and other sexual incidents in the OPPL). The community was concerned for the safety of children in the library, but Bittman shifted into pure damage control mode…then escalated that into outright lies that seem to have been intended to distract the public from the OPPL's own FOIA-able incident reports.

Since the OPPL to this day has no explanation for why police were not called immediately when child porn was accessed in this library, Bittman tried to change the conversation and counted on a complicit media to never ask her or library management any tough questions about the disastrous decisions made in the OPPL.

Bittman later bragged about her public relations efforts at a "crisis communications workshop" sponsored by the American Library Association and held at the Burr Ridge RAILS (Reaching Across Illinois Libraries) videoconferencing location in December 2013, where she (and OPPL director Mary Weimar) taught around 100 other public library employees how to, essentially, cover up bad things that happen in public libraries and scare away critics and members of the public who discover what's been going on.

This is what the ALA calls "crisis management": lying to the public and counting on the fact that most people will believe anything that the library tells them, whether it is true or not. It is shameful. When something terrible happens at a public library, management should own up to its mistakes and take concrete steps to ensure children are never harmed in that library again. Library management should not follow the OPPL example…which was to aggressively lie to the public and lash out childishly at critics, hoping that eventually people would get sick of the story and stop listening or caring.

Public libraries occupy a default place of trust in the hearts and minds of most Americans. That's largely because people coast-to-coast have fond memories of libraries and librarians from their childhoods. Most people remember walking on a class field trip to the local library or feeling excited when signing up for their first library card and checking out some Dr. Seuss or Peter Rabbit. So, it's difficult for Americans to think about the local public library being a dangerous place for children here in the year 2015. This is like imagining the local swimming hole where they played as kids now being infested by toothsome, hungry sharks. How could that happen at the place where they had so much fun when they were young? But, some libraries are just not the safe places they used to be thirty or more years ago and the American Library Association is mostly to blame for that.

The ALA counts on a positive reservoir of warm, fuzzy feelings that Americans have for libraries being an ace-in-the-hole when it's discovered that something bad has happened in a public library. In fact, ALA "crisis management" publications remind library employees that the public will generally believe what library management says, because people's brains (and hearts) default to believing the library. "Why would the library lie?" is an assumption that people have been conditioned to make. Emotionally, people think back to the kindly librarians they remember in the 1970s and 1980s and know that those wonderful ladies would never lie. Certainly they would never lie about sex in the library or anything harming children. So, people want to believe that librarians working in the year 2015 wouldn't lie either and would never allow children to be harmed in a library.

But, library management today does lie…and Orland Park is a case study in that. Bittman was asked by the ALA to speak at not one, but TWO, separate "crisis management workshops." She was forced to cancel her second appearance in October 2014 because reports of her first presentation in December 2013 were made public and her documented pattern of lies became too embarrassing for the ALA. This all included:

* Bittman lying to print media in October and November of 2013 to discredit and defame a mother of two who witnessed a man sexually arousing himself at an OPPL computer; here, Bittman engaged in a strategy of painting the woman who complained as a liar whose "story changes over time." Discrediting witnesses and defaming critics is classic "crisis management strategy" endorsed by the ALA because it allows a library to escape dealing with its problems and instead focus on "killing the messenger." Look for this strategy wherever anyone reports sexual activity in a public library…it's very similar to how for many years rape victims were called "sluts" on the witness stand to discredit them so that rapists could go free. Now, the ALA encourages library management to use this tactic on mothers who complain about dangers to children in public libraries. Kill the messenger. Destroy the witness. Frighten anyone else from ever coming forward so that libraries never have to deal with the sexual behavior of patrons who have been arousing themselves to sexual content on public computers all day.

* Bittman lying on the TV and the radio, claiming that nothing bad had ever happened in the OPPL; here, Bittman strategically counted on the reporters she spoke with not discussing any of the OPPL's internal incident reports that clearly showed that child pornography was accessed and that sexual and other illegal activity had been occurring at the OPPL. The ALA endorses lying to the media and telling reporters that nothing bad happened because it's likely that reporters will just take the library's word on that and not bother to FOIA the incident reports themselves. Reporters are lazy, but they also don't want to dig too deep and find something damaging to a library. When they do get the reports and see what's been happening, most reporters seem reluctant to write a negative story about a library. It appears they feel bad doing it (as if they were tasked with writing a negative story about a favorite teacher or friend from childhood), so they will bend over backwards to avoid talking about child porn being accessed in a place like the OPPL. One reporter candidly admitted that he "didn't want to be the guy who brought down such a nice library by writing about the child porn there." That same reporter said that if he did write about the child porn in the OPPL and the other sex crimes that happened there that his peers at the Chicago Tribune would never let him hear the end of it, because he'd be "the ass***e that went after the library." The ALA counts on this.

* Bittman lying to local media about the many instances of lawbreaking by the OPPL board and management; here, Bittman repeatedly lied throughout 2014 about the various times that the Open Meetings Act and the Freedom of Information Act were violated by the OPPL. Again, the media just printed Bittman's talking points without fact-checking her. This is another thing the ALA counts on, that reporters will assume the library is telling the truth and not perform any due-diligence to check basic facts. The OPPL would break the law, but Bittman would tell the media it was allowed to do whatever it did. A month later, the Attorney General's office would issue a determination that the OPPL had indeed violated the law (just as critics pointed out); Bittman would then tell reporters that this determination was "nonbinding" and essentially didn't matter. When the OPPL was sued in circuit court to compel compliance with the law, Bittman lied again to media, claiming that library management essentially just woke up one day and decided to start following the law (but it had nothing at all to do with being sued). Yah, right. But, again…reporters refused to call Bittman out on this or point out that Bittman's story kept changing over time. This woman is as credible and believable as "Baghdad Bob", Saddam Hussein's old Minister of Propaganda, who famously said on live TV that "no American troops are in Baghdad" during the US invasion of Iraq…just as a convoy of American army vehicles rumbled along a street behind him in clear camera view.

This shameless and amateur lying would be funny if the problems at the OPPL weren't so serious.

Bridget Bittman is a laughable and childish individual who makes faces during board meetings and lashes out foolishly at her critics…but what she's doing as the OPPL's spokesman is truly damaging to the community (and to the library itself). It is simultaneously sad and hilarious that she's dispatched by a public body to represent them as their spokesman. It's more than a little horrifying that Bittman costs taxpayers over $80,000/year in compensation and benefits.

Every time she lies to the media, she's undermining the public's trust a little more. The ALA believes that public libraries have an unlimited reservoir of such trust, but I don't buy that. Bittman, like other "crisis managers" out there, seems to think that the public has a short memory and won't remember month to month what she's said…or what lies she's told. But, I don't buy that either.

Flipping through old newspapers, it's easy to see her "crisis management strategy" for the OPPL is a pattern of obvious lies. When she's burned on one, she shifts to something else…and counts on the reporter she's dealing with that day to spin the story to the best advantage of the OPPL. This is like taking the cards she's dealt and adding a new layer to a house of cards that keeps getting higher and higher with each new level of lies told. I think the ALA tells her that she can go as high as the Sears Tower with all this…but the OPPL's "crisis management strategy" has ratcheted the stakes up again and again in such a way that we've crossed a point of no return where not even the media is going to be able to save these people.

The community in Orland Park wants a leadership change in this library. When that happens, it's likely that the position of highly-paid spokesman and "crisis manager" is going to be reevaluated…right after the new leadership finally addresses the dangers to children in this library and ensures that child porn is never again accessed in the OPPL and that men no longer use this building as a masturbation lounge or a place to stalk women and children sexually.

The ALA's "crisis management strategies" are all based on the assumption that if a public library attacks its critics and uses the media to spread lies that eventually its critics will get tired and walk away. These are the tactics of Saul Alinsky, based on his Rules for Radicals. Attacking critics and alienating them from allies by discrediting them or otherwise assailing them is classic Alinsky. It works in 95% of cases, because the people who are most likely to complain about bad things happening in libraries are working parents who care about their children…and they wither and cringe when attacked by a "crisis manager" like Bittman.

The Orland Park Public Library child pornography scandal is a case study in not only how foolish "crisis management strategy" is in general, but what happens when the advice given by the ALA comes up against a community and critics that are not scared away by these Alinsky tactics. The OPPL is a public library that allowed child porn to be accessed without consequence and has allowed sexual and other illegal activity to occur there…and then believed it could continue business as usual by dispatching Bridget Bittman to tell lies to the media and malign the library's critics.

Something like $300,000 in legal bills and a string of defeats before the Attorney General's office and a judge in Cook County circuit court later, the OPPL is a cautionary tale for what happens to a public library when it ignores the wants and needs of its community and listens to the ALA instead.

It's Just Linda (But It Shouldn't Be)

It's just Linda, but it shouldn't be.
Click to watch Linda in action.

The Orland Park Public Library (located in an affluent suburb of Chicago) admitted last year that child porn had been accessed in their facility…but they didn't call the police and instead allowed the man engaged in this criminal activity to get away. No explanation has ever been given for why library director Mary Weimar, the woman who refused to call the police when child porn was reported to her, kept her job and has continued to mishandle other instances of sexual activity in this particular library. 

The OPPL's incident reports show this is part of a larger pattern, where library staff either looked the other way or refused to call the police when other crimes were committed inside this public facility. The incident reports contain instances where men masturbated openly at computers, aroused themselves sexually in front of passers-by, accosted and stalked women, and approached children sexually. 

I believe that OPPL management purposefully does not call the police in these instances because arrests would make it into the police blotter in the local newspapers and that would be harder to hide than the library's own internal incident reports. Those reports were kept hidden until they were reluctantly produced by the library responsive to Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests. I actually sued the OPPL for violations of our state's FOIA because library management refused to produce some documents and had been lying about the existence of other materials (that they magically produced later, after claiming they didn't exist). Two lawsuits later, the OPPL has finally produced these documents. A yearlong FOIA investigation revealed that time and again the management of the OPPL was always more concerned with public relations and keeping the truth from the public than in stopping illegal behavior inside the library. 

The OPPL is an interesting case study because its director, Mary Weimar, is heavily influenced by the teachings of the American Library Association. The ALA's presence haunts this library and seems to encourage Weimar to do things that are at odds with the best interests of the community that the OPPL is supposed to serve. The ALA is a special interest group and is not accountable to voters, so this creates a situation where taxpayers are harmed by the ALA directing library directors like Weimar to do things that harm the taxpayers' community. 

Weimar made the decision not to call the police when child porn was reported to her in her library. This is in keeping with the ALA's "crisis management" advice of limiting bad press for libraries. In my opinion, this woman should not still have a job as a library director. Not calling the police when child porn is accessed is not a "mistake"…it is a horrific and deliberate act that allowed a criminal to escape and have continued opportunities to commit this crime again. The community is not well-served by a library director electing to keep quiet when three witnesses come forward and attest that a man known to the library director accessed child porn in her library. Weimar should be ashamed of herself, but the ALA has rewarded her with "intellectual freedom awards" and other prizes as an encouragement to continue doing what she's been doing. 

Through the years, employees of the OPPL have complained to Weimar about the sexually charged atmosphere that has been allowed to fester in this library. Specifically female employees have consistently complained about "creepy" men who have camped out in the library's computer section for hours, arousing themselves sexually at the computers. As they sat there exciting themselves sexually, their eyes would drift to the female employees in the area. Then they'd make faces or gestures or would become even more emboldened and take things further. One employee was so scared of one of these men (who had been following her around the library) that she went to Weimar and told her she was scared for her safety and was going to file a police report. Weimar told her that she should quit. 

This is a theme at the OPPL, where if an employee complains about the sexually hostile atmosphere in the library then that employee is told to quit. 

It's shocking that this is tolerated in a workplace. Again, it stuns me that Mary Weimar still has a job and that the Board of Trustees of the Orland Park Public Library has not raked her over the coals for the decisions that she has made in her position. 

In November of 2013, a very brave woman named Linda Zec attended one of the OPPL's board meetings and told her story (link). She, like other employees before her, had complained to Mary Weimar about the sexually charged atmosphere and the creeps who hung out at the library's computers sexually arousing themselves in her workplace. Zec reported that she was told to "like it or lump it." If she wanted to work at the library then she needed to tolerate the sexual activity happening in that computer area. These were not men engaged in intellectual pursuits at those computers. This was not "information" they were seeking. This was an area of the library that management knew was being used for sexual arousal in public, but employees who complained about it were told they should quit if they didn't like what was going on. 

Can you imagine employees in other facilities or businesses being told something similar? 

* A woman working the counter at the DMV. She sees a man sitting in the waiting area on a laptop masturbating. She complains to her supervisor about what's happening. Does anyone think the police wouldn't be called or that the woman would be told she had to do nothing and allow this to keep happening?

* A waiter in a restaurant notices the men at table 69 are watching sexually arousing material on their smartphones. The men look up every once in a while, make eye contact with the waiter, and lick their lips lasciviously. The waiter feels uncomfortable being stared at. The men camp out for hours and every time he walks by, the waiter is given the creeps. Does anyone think the restaurant manager would allow this to happen or tell the waiter he should quit if he does not like this? 

* A clerk at Kinko's is told by three witnesses that a man at one of their computers is accessing child porn. What do you think the clerk would do? Does anyone believe that the Kinko's manager would not call the police? Is there any chance that Kinko's would have allowed the man accessing the child porn to not only get away, but come back the next day with police still not being called?

What's most remarkable about the Orland Park Public Library is how management has somehow convinced employees there that the laws of the United States end at the library's doors. In a strange way, Mary Weimar as director seems to have conned the employees of this library into believing that the library is a sovereign entity, like some kind of embassy, and laws such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and statutes against public indecency and lewd behavior don't apply inside the library. 

This is a problem, because if it is happening at the OPPL then it must be happening elsewhere. I'd wager that libraries under the control and sway of the ALA have this problem. The employees seem to be taught that people who work in libraries are not protected by the EEOA and that members of the public are allowed to masturbate and engage in sex inside a library, because of "intellectual freedom". 

This is madness. 

The doors to the OPPL have large graphics noting that drugs are not allowed inside the library. Firearms are not allowed as well. But, child porn was accessed in this facility and the OPPL and its board has admitted this. They also admitted that nothing was ever done to ensure that child porn was never accessed again here. The OPPL has a clear pattern of not involving in the police when something bad happens in the library that would embarrass the OPPL if it made it into the local paper's police blotter. Employees who work in this building are flatly told that if they don't like this environment, they can walk out through the door and no longer work there. 

This is a problem. To a person, everyone I've spoken to about the OPPL has always asked the same thing, "Why do the employees put up with Mary Weimar?" I don't have a good answer for that. They seem to be afraid of her, for some reason. Maybe because the Board of Trustees knows what she's doing and allows her to keep doing it that the employees think she must be allowed to behave this way. 

The majority of people working in the OPPL are women. Most of the part-timers or lower level staffers are suburban housewives or empty-nesters who thought a job at the local library would be fun. They wanted to shelve books, read to children, get out of the house, and make a little money. These women are not attorneys. A lot of their husbands work for the Village of Orland Park or have family members that work for local government in some way. These are not wave-makers. These are women who by and large do as they are told, show up to work on time, and love the idea of working in a library and getting out of the house now that their kids are either in school or out of the house. 

So, when they are told by Mary Weimar that they have to just accept the fact that men will be arousing themselves sexually in their workplace, these women go along with that. Clearly, they don't like it…but they don't think they have any alternative but quitting. It seems that the OPPL trots out the "intellectual freedom" propaganda and these women, not being attorneys, just accept what they are being told, even though it's all a serious violation of the EEOA. 

No employer can tell an employee that she has to tolerate sexual activity in her workplace. No employee in this country has to work in a place where men are allowed to sit around arousing themselves sexually and even masturbating in a working environment. Sexual arousal and masturbation are supposed to happen in people's homes, behind closed doors….NOT in a public library. 

But, the nice suburban women who work in the OPPL don't know how to stand up to Mary Weimar and others in management that have created this problem. They saw what happened to the women in the past who complained and they know the pattern: if you complain, you lose your job. They want to keep their jobs, so they suffer in silence. 

I think Linda Zec is a real hero for speaking out (link). To date, she's the only former library employee I've encountered who is courageous enough to come forward and talk about how wrong it is for libraries to allow men to sexually arouse themselves at computers in these public facilities. She's the first former library employee I have ever heard talk about how ridiculous it is that libraries look the other way when men abuse the facilities and engage in sexual activity and harassment of library employees. 

It feels like everyone else is afraid of losing their jobs. The reason that the ideological Left and special interest groups like the ALA win so often is because good people are either afraid to speak out or they don't know what to do. They don't know their rights. The ALA is a bully organization that is well-funded and seemingly powerful. A library director like Mary Weimar seems entrenched in her position, with a board that refuses to remove her. 

So, what can an employee who feels uncomfortable in a sexually charged workplace do in a situation like this? It's especially problematic for an employee who needs the job. While a lot of OPPL employees are working there for something fun to do and a little extra spending money, there are others whose families depend on those paychecks. They have to keep on Mary Weimar's good side if they want to keep feeding their children. 

I believe that the ALA counts on all of this. It counts on library employees being somewhat meek by nature and for the majority of them to be older women who don't know their legal rights. The ALA depends on these people being the kind who are afraid of lawyers and who think it takes a lot of money to speak to an attorney or to bring a sexual harassment suit against their employer. 

I am certain this dam will break at some point in the future…and when it does a public library somewhere is going to have to shell out millions of dollars in sexual harassment penalties for doing what the OPPL has been doing and allowing a sexually hostile workplace to fester for its employees. It's only a matter of time. The atmosphere feels a lot like living in the early 1990s before the big tobacco verdicts started coming in from juries, after all those decades when the cigarette manufacturers dodged responsibility for the health damages their products caused. John Grisham's "The Runaway Jury" novel was about a fictitious suit against Big Tobacco…where the first huge judgment against them came in. 

That book was written in 1995 and it was unthinkable that tobacco companies could be wiped out by lawsuits related to cancer. But, by the time that the "Runaway Jury" movie with John Cuzack was made in 2003, the world had changed and of course everyone believed that Big Tobacco was responsible for cancer…and the tobacco industry was paying out millions a year in damages to new cases on a rolling basis to correct decades of malfeasance. 

I believe that public libraries are in for something similar and that places like the OPPL are going to be sued under the EEOA. I think like Big Tobacco that the ALA is going to eventually collapse as well, and that the sexual harassment of libraries is going to be akin to the kind of suit that featured in "Runaway Jury". 

It's just an untenable position for the ALA and library directors like Mary Weimar to insist that library employees have to work in a place where men arouse themselves sexually and masturbate. And no matter how many spokesmen and "crisis managers" a library has, in the age of social media when a library director refuses to call the police when child porn is accessed and refuses to do anything to stop other illegal activity from happening in a public building, then at some point the public is going to rise up against library management. 

What's really a shame is that library employees coast to coast are not more like Linda Zec. Right now, it's just Linda speaking out against this madness. She's one woman (though a brave and articulate one). But, more women who have personally encountered the problems that allowing sexual arousal and activity in libraries has caused need to step forward and speak out. 

I look forward to the day when library employees are all educated in their legal rights under the EEOA and start suing libraries coast to coast for sexual harassment. I doubt the ALA will be able to hold much of any power if that starts happening.

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