Downtown Columbia bar training employees to spot dangerous behavior
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
A Columbia bar has partnered with a national organization to help its staff members recognize unsafe behavior.
Fieldhouse/Willie's on Broadway -- a popular spot for college students in the heart of downtown -- hosted bystander intervention training. The training is being led by Haleigh Harrold, the executive director of SAFE Bar Network. SAFE Bar Network is a national nonprofit focused on partnering with bars and other venues to increase safety.
The SAFE Bar Network training focuses on teaching employees of bars and other places the skills to notice unsafe behavior and to intervene. As a result of the training, 97% of participants know at least one way they will prevent harm and increase the safety of patrons, the organization says.
In the meeting Monday, Harrold stressed to the employees of the bar the importance of being aware of the people around them and their behavior.
"If we can focus on the small behaviors that happen early in the night," she said. Those can be things like getting in someones personal space, asking personal questions, making sexual jokes and being obnoxious or annoying then we know that will prevent larger situations from happening at the end of the night."
The University of Missouri Police Department released a statement last September warning the public to be aware of predatory drugs being added to drinks. At the time, reports of students having their drinks spiked were on the rise quickly. According to Christian Basi, the director of the news bureau at MU, it was unclear if cases of drugged drinks were on the rise, but complaints from numerous different departments raised concern. Now this year, he has seen a decline in these complaints rising to him and his department.
However, Jennifer Hickam, the interim executive director of True North, which is Columbia's domestic and sexual violence victims shelter and services program, had a differing opinion. Since Aug. 1, Hickam said that there has been a significant rise of people contacting either the organization or checking into hospitals as victims of sexual assault, exhibiting signs of drink tampering. She does not have numbers to back these claims up, however makes these conclusions based on context clues case by case. Some of these include the fact victims have periods of time that are missing from memory that do not correlate with the amount of alcohol consumed. Another is when checked into the hospital, victim's blood alcohol content doesn't match with the level of intoxication they are experiencing.
"There are some drugs that won't show up on tests after an hour," Hickam said. "You cannot give consent for a drug test while intoxicated, so by the time they can legally consent, the drugs are out of their system."
Included in the statement are resources for those who were victims of date rape. These resources include The Office for Civil Rights & Title IX and the RSVP Center at the University of Missouri as well as True North Columbia.
According to the Office for Civil Rights & Title IX from 2020-2021, there were 121 reported cases of sexual exploitation, misconduct and assault in the MU community. According to Hickam, True North has served over 800 victims of domestic and sexual assault each year.
Check back for updates to this developing story.
