[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hello, friends, loyal listeners and bears everywhere. Welcome to the Sound Barrier, Northeast State's official podcast. I'm your co host today, Thomas Wilson. We're coming at you today from the entertainment technology studios here on our lovely Bluntville campus entertainment technology program, of course. Putting this together for us, as always, is doing an awesome job here today with my co host, Mackenzie Moore. Gent. This is the first episode of season number six, six seasons of the Sound Barrier, Northeast State. Can you believe that? Well, you better believe it because it's true.
Today in studio with us, we are joined by Northeast State Chief of Police Andrew Mitchum. And Chief Mitchum is going to talk with us today about campus safety, student safety, and just generally the things that the police force seeks to do to try to keep our campus safe and keep everything coming along. Chief Mitchum, welcome. Great to have you here today.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Thank you, Tom. Thanks for having me here.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Good to see you. If you don't mind, would you care to introduce yourself and share a little bit about your background and how you came to Northeast State?
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, yeah, thanks for having me here. I think this is a really good opportunity.
But yeah, so my name is Andrew Mitchum. I'm the Chief of police here at Northeast State. I've been with northeast State for 12 years, recently took the role as Chief of police about a year ago. So I've been enjoying the position and definitely seeing a lot of the changes that we're able to make at Northeast State. Make the campus safer.
[00:01:39] Speaker C: Great. And speaking about making the campus safer, it's Campus Safety Week.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: So could you tell us what is Campus Safety Week and why is it an important initiative here in our community?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So Campus Safety Week has been something that I have been thinking about for several years now.
Obviously a couple years ago it was a vision. This came along the lines of, you know, we really needed to do something to start bridging the gap between law enforcement in our community.
I've given several talks, several lectures, especially at new student orientations, talking about how Northeast State Police Department really has the opportunity and has the time to be able to build that rapport with our community and reach out to our students, staff and faculty better than what some other agencies can.
So this was a vision to start out with several years ago. And I really wanted to bring this into our community so we could be better.
Ultimately, Campus Safety Week is really a community policing based event.
We've decided that we wanted to do a week long week just dedicated specifically to, you know, how can we raise safety awareness programs or raise Safety awareness across our community. And that's the particular goal for it. In addition to it, we are really harping on the idea of building the relationships with our community.
So a lot of the events that we're planning in Campus Safety Week are involved around conversations.
So these are opportunities where students can come to us, ask us any questions that they want.
We can have that interaction with the students with no particular agenda defined. So this is really the idea of it. So ultimately, Campus Safety Week is to one, raise awareness, bring recognition to safety procedures that we may have on campus, and. And overall build relationships.
[00:03:36] Speaker C: Yeah, and I love that. I love that community aspect of it, because a lot of the times, you know, when you think of.
Not a lot of the times or for. I'm not speaking for anyone in particular here, but there seems to be that gap, you know, between students, law enforcement of any kind, and just kind of doing away with that intimidation. You all aren't here to write tickets. You're here to keep us safe when it all comes down to it. So bridging that gap is definitely, I think, just a really good thing for our Northeast State community, just so students know what resources are out there. And so with this Campus Safety Week, what kind of events are planned? Throughout the weeks, you have discussed conversations between law enforcement.
What type of law enforcement agencies will come to campus? What kind of conversations will you all be having?
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah, so we've got a packed week.
We have decided that we were going to do something for. Especially for this first annual Campus Safety Week. We've got something planned every single day this week. So Monday through Friday, we've got something going on.
Some of the things that we brought in or kind of the idea of what we wanted to do was we wanted to provide seminars so an opportunity to have training sessions with different. Either Northeast State Police Department or with outside external agencies that we're inviting into campus.
We're also doing things. So we. I've kind of mentioned before. The conversation is a big piece. So I wanted to have an opportunity to have open forums with each other, either us or some law enforcement agencies that are not specific to Northeast State.
That's gonna be a really cool thing that we do on Tuesday and Thursday of this week where we bring those law enforcement agencies in. They're gonna be in an area where the students frequent, commonly frequent, and they're just gonna be there just to have conversations. They're not gonna have any. They're not gonna be recruiting. They're not gonna be trying to promote a particular program that they're doing. It's just there so students can ask those particular officers questions about what they do. If they got a question about, hey, something's going on here. Can you explain what exactly happened in this particular situation? That's an opportunity for that.
We're also doing demonstrations. So in addition to having the seminars and being able to have the conversations, we kind of like to show off some of the things that we get to do too. So a couple of demonstrations that we're planning on doing is we're bringing a K9 team in. I think Kingsport Police Department is bringing their K9 dogs in for.
For a quick demonstration.
Monday we had the FBI came in for a quick financial crime seminar, but we also brought in ETSU police and Tennessee Highway Patrol with some of their safe driving and distracted driving simulators.
In addition to that, we also had a seat belt convincer on campus that was a huge hit.
Plus, we also set up a golf cart course with quote unquote, beer goggles. So we had an opportunity to kind of see what an impairment driving situation would look like in golf court. So overall, it's been a really good thing. But those are some of the events that we brought on campus.
[00:06:47] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. We had the opportunity to stop by yesterday's events and it was just very kind of harrowing just seeing the simulator from the ETSU police and the crashes involved when, you know, you're on your phone texting and driving. And you had said to me, you know, before we even started this episode that, you know, distracted driving, being on the phone is almost the same as having blood alcohol content of 0.08.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Almost like just attention wise, not impairment wise internally, but just the attention that you're able to pay to your surroundings. So that's very. I don't know. And it makes sense. So stay off your phones when you're driving.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. The. There's been case studies that's been done on this and it. It places distracted driving and texting, texting and driving right up there with a. Above the legal limit of a blood alcohol level while driving. So it's definitely an important point to point out.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: We mentioned for camps and Safety Week, a lot of the students were out there taking advantage of the golf cart course, the seat belt convincer, which was very effective, popular, very fun to watch also because really, even that small space, you really get the sense of impact and the laws of physics on display there when they happen to your body.
How else do you like to involve students and staff in kind of safety training and awareness Kind of going forward.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So we've got a couple different things that we do to involve students and staff. Obviously there are some things that we have to do that are regulation.
So we do require faculty and staff to take an annual active shooter training class each year. I think that that is a really good way to get that information out to the students. Because while the campus police is really good at having conversations with students across campus, students interact with the faculty and staff every single day, even more than what they do with the police department.
So we've kind of made that, taken that stance where we require faculty and staff to actually take an active shooter class each year.
Particularly for the idea that once they own that knowledge, they can pass that along to the students, whether it's a five minute conversation at the beginning of their class, at the beginning of the semester, to set a game plan. But that's one way we involve them. We also do things like. I've conducted ALICE training several years and while ALICE training is an active shooter response class, that's mainly a lecture, we also have a scenario portion of that class as well. So I always try to, if I'm going to do an ALICE class lecture, I always try to set aside some time to set up a scenario based training as well. So we can tell you to run, hide, fight, but I think it really drives at home when we actually put you into a scenario that, hey, you have to use these particular skills to manage the situation that you may possibly find yourself in at some point. So I think it's a really good opportunity to, to not just do what I say, but it's a really good opportunity to kind of bring everybody together where we can actually be involved in this particular situation and see how this training actually applies.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: Definitely. And thank you all for continuing to keep Northeast state community college campuses safe, secure and riding off of that. What are some maybe common safety concerns or just concerns in general that you might hear from students or even faculty and staff, if any?
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yes, I think the obvious one right now is active shooter threats. That is a major thing and unfortunately they are increasing across the country over the past couple years we've seen a significant increase in an active shooter threat on college and school campuses.
Just in the past few weeks we've also been experiencing something that I haven't seen until recently is hoax calls.
So I think at the beginning, before the start of this semester, there were, in the Southeast, there were four hoax calls, or what they're actually being classified as swatting calls now that have been occurring at college and campus university. So I would say the active shooter threats are probably one of the most prevalent that we're getting asked about.
But some of the other ones that we hear is just your normal stuff like suspicious behavior, maybe things that are occurring off campus that students want to make us aware of so we can know how to respond. If that were to come about, they'll bring that to our attention. But yeah, definitely, I think active shooter threats are the biggest concern. Right behind that is suspicious people, suspicious activity, I guess I should say.
[00:11:32] Speaker C: And how does the department address this, address these concerns year round? And I guess you kind of already dived into that with the Alice training courses with staff and faculty.
But are there any other ways that I guess you keep these concerns at the tip top of, I guess prioritize them year round?
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Absolutely.
So I think every faculty and staff member that's attended convocation the past couple years have heard the statement or the goal of enhancing safety and security across campus. That's been something that's been pushed down from the senior leadership of the college. Something that I definitely stand behind.
So what we're doing is we're developing a plan to really focus in on how can we make our security stature better at the college.
So we've been able to do that by a couple different ways.
The biggest thing that we've done is increasing our police personnel that are available on the campus. So the biggest idea with that is we've got somebody there that can help somebody there that is trained to be able to respond to that particular situation and, and has the authority to apprehend an individual that's causing harm or they were able to actually get in, take care of that particular situation.
So people is a big thing. That's actually one of the most important parts of law enforcement and a police department is you gotta have the people to do it.
Outside of that is training.
So another part of it is we make sure that our officers are highly trained in anything that they could face here at the college. So annual active shooter response training. They are training the Clery Act.
Clery act is a federal regulation that we have to comply with.
In addition to that, they are, they're focusing, they were trained on first aid, cpr.
Anything that they may need, they may face in their job. We try to make sure that they have the highest quality training for that outside of personnel and training programs.
So we do things like bringing technology onto campus that's going to put us into a better position. We provide training to the faculty, staff and students.
We also try to Stay on top of the best practices in the field. We typically do that by.
So one of the big things that I attend is I attend a bi monthly meeting with all the chiefs across the state. So I'm a part of the Tennessee association of Chiefs of Police.
So we meet in Nashville about once every two months.
And that meeting is specifically to talk about what's going on in law enforcement across the state. So that's where we get a lot of our initiatives, a lot of our ideas on how to actually handle some of these situations. Plus I get to talk to other chiefs to find out what they're doing in their jurisdictions.
Prime example.
You know, I work for Northeast State where we're a smaller college compared to some of them across some of the four year universities across the state. But I get to sit into a meeting with Chief Sean Patterson at UT Knoxville every couple months and I get to bounce ideas off of Chief Patterson, Chief Tipton at etsu. I text with him regularly to find out what they're doing, what they're seeing on their college campus. So we're not just focused on our initiatives here at the college. I'm taking a lot of this stuff that we're seeing come about here at the college. A lot of this is being taken place from other four year universities and major universities across the state.
[00:15:06] Speaker C: It's very beneficial to learn from other what's working for them, what issues are they experiencing, how do we address these? I mean, because anything can happen anywhere. So it's really nice to have those resources.
But speaking of resources, what are some safety resources or just campus security? Safety resources that are available to students that they might not know about?
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so that's a really good question.
So I kind of give this spill. At our orientations we do the police department does things naturally that maybe some people may not be aware of. So a lot of the stuff that we do is no questions asked, escorts.
We can unlock your car if you lock your keys in. We can boost batteries if you have a dead battery. So those are some of the main things that we've kind of publicized over the years. But some of the new things that's come about that that students may not be aware of, especially the new incoming freshmen, may be some of our programs like our Rave Guardian app.
So Rave Guardian is an app that we use that creates a two way communication platform between the police department and our student body.
Now you do have to sign up for the NESCC alert system, which is the school's mass notification system, to use this. But once you do that and you download the Rave Guardian app from your favorite app store. It will automatically populate your information into it and then you can start using it immediately. The Rave Guardian app does some really cool things. So it allows you to call 911 with the press of one button. It allows you to call the campus police department depending on which site you're at with the press of one button.
It also allows you to text with the police department. So if you see something that you don't necessarily want to make a phone call or you don't, you can't make a phone call. You can actually use that app to send a text message and notify us that way.
So outside of that, we also. The app will also let you set a safety timer. So I like to explain the safety timer as a virtual escort.
So if somebody knows that they are parked at the bottom end of the parking lot and it's going to take them five minutes to walk to their car, they can set a safety timer through the app for five minutes.
If they get to their car before five minutes and deactivate the app, nothing happens.
If they set a timer and they tell that app to contact either a friend or family member or an official guardian, which is the police department, and that timer expires, it will automatically send a notification to let those particular people know that something's going on. We may need to reach out and check on them. So that's some really cool things that the Rave Guardian app and I think is a really good tool that some students may not know exist.
[00:17:53] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:17:54] Speaker C: I didn't even know about that one. That's a good one to have.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: You mentioned you, you communicate a lot with some of the other police chiefs on campus, different campuses, different municipalities around in the region.
What kind of partnership does Northeast State have with other local law enforcement agencies or emergency responders when it comes to maybe an event happens or.
I have a follow up question about this, but just what kind of partnerships do we have right now?
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah, so we've got a very good relationship with agencies that have concurrent jurisdiction with Northeast State campuses.
We consistently network with those particular agencies and we also attend training.
So a lot of times where if Sullivan County Sheriff's Office, Kingsport Police Department, Bristol, Johnson City, any of those agencies have training that they're offering, they always reach out to us and our training officer in the department say, hey, we've got this. If you want to send officers, you're more than welcome to come.
So we are taking the same training that all of the Other municipal law enforcement agencies, municipal law enforcement officers in the state are attending as well. We are held to the same standard that they are as well. So all of their in service that they are putting on for their officers, we, we get to attend because that's part of our continuing education as well.
So training is a big thing. We always attend to it. Networking.
We encourage any law enforcement agencies that's in the area to stop in, to come on campus and just say hello, meet our officers.
I think it's a really good opportunity. Plus we get more law enforcement officers on campus, which is always a good thing to kind of point that out. It's not uncommon to, to me maybe leaving at the end of the day after I finish my shift. When I leave the campus, I'll see one of the Sullivan county cruisers in the back parking lot, just kind of hanging out, doing reports, stuff like that. That's what we want to see. We want to have that relationship with them so they know that they're safe on this campus. And plus it provides additional presence for us as well. So that's a couple things.
Obviously I mentioned tacp, that's a big thing.
We attend.
I've got four and I just re sentenced a new application for four new officers. I've put four new officers in the Tennessee Law Enforcement Training Officers Association.
So while I'm working with the chiefs of police across the state, I'm sending other officers to kind of network with some of the other training officers across the state so they can bring this, their knowledge back to campus across from that. So overall, to answer your question, we have a very good relationship with external law enforcement partners and that's something that we just want to see grow over the next few years.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Excellent, excellent. My follow up on that is when it comes to the crime, the active shooter problem, which is a pretty sobering problem across the nation, schools, workplaces, everywhere, what is like the flow of shared information among law enforcement agencies like across the state, across the region?
Has it improved, has it gotten better over the years during your career? And how do you kind of hope to see that improved specifically to detect things like hey, we're seeing a trend in this, be it on the ground, on a campus or on a school site or online.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: Yes, a great question.
My answer is that it has improved exponentially over the past few years.
We I'll kind of go, I'll kind of make the statement that for the longest time law enforcement always felt like they were five years behind because we were a lot of our jobs were reactive and we were having to just deal with things as they happened. And a part of that was, was information sharing across agencies just wasn't happening.
Over the past few years we've gotten really good support through the FBI, through the Tennessee Bureau investigation. And they have been, have come through and actually developed these databases for us to be able to provide information not only to the agencies that are directly surrounding us, but all the way across the state.
So a big part of that is, you know, we do with law enforcement or at Tennessee law enforcement, we are required to submit crime statistics and crime reports to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, who sends that to the FBI for the, what's called the UCR, the Uniform Crime Report. That's a standard across all 50 states now.
So by doing that they've also developed a system that as law enforcement, as a law enforcement agency, we can go into the system where we submit those reports and pull information on what may be occurring in other jurisdictions.
So the FBI has taken that a step further and created a program called the Fusion Center.
And the Fusion center takes a lot of that information that we're submitting to the state, combines it with all 50 states and then we create that database where we can really hone in on what's going on with third party vendors like Thor plus the Fusion Center.
There's a system that I use a lot called Forensic Logic Coplink that's essentially a Google search. So now if I have a investigation that I'm going on and there's something that I need to look up, whether it's a car plate individual, I can actually just go do a Google search into that particular system and it's going to give me all the hits that come up with that particular string of information. So it's huge.
In addition to that, we've created camera networks. I think a lot of agencies are going to something now called Flock.
Flock are, they're cameras that are, that are strategically placed across their jurisdictions. They're what we call license plate readers, license plate recognition, lprs. And that is connected back to the same type of system that hey, if somebody who has a hit on a particular license plate, say it's a, it's a violent offender, crosses One of these LPRs, law enforcement agencies get that hit. So we can start responding to these particular locations quicker than what we used to. So yes, we've gotten exponentially better in that particular situation. And that has actually taken us from being five years behind to really bringing us up to what the best practices and the speed for the current climate is interesting.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:24:40] Speaker C: Berriane, you kind of dived into some technological aspects of that as well with the flock. But coming back to campus, what role does technology play in campus safety?
[00:24:49] Speaker B: So huge.
So we kind of already, kind of already given the idea that, you know, we went several years ago, law enforcement was five years behind.
Now we're getting back up to the present age.
Technology, especially with the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, AI has really boosted law enforcement to probably 10 years ahead of what we have been.
So I am. There's nothing. So I'll kind of caveat with this. There is nothing that's going to replace good old fashioned policing.
Robert Peel, Sir Robert Peel created the nine peeling principles of law enforcement. Those are simply things, ideas of to prevent crime and disorder. The idea that police powers are dependent on public approval.
There's a point that the police are the public and the public are the police. These are all ideas that Sir Robert Peel created back in the 1800s. He's considered the father of modern policing. So going along with that, there is nothing that is ever going to replace old fashioned policing and having that human communication and human contact.
However, we have a really cool tool with AI technology now. And AI technology is what's going to boost law enforcement into the future and really get us to the more proactive stance that we want to be.
We've started using this technology on our campuses. So a big thing that we've been doing is installing a very state of the art camera system.
This camera system has been crucial in solving a lot of the crimes and a lot of the investigations that's been brought to our attention.
So that's been a major part of the technology we've been using.
In addition to that, everybody knows that we're going through an access control implementation right now.
So Shameless Plug. If you haven't gotten your ID card, go get your ID card immediately because in a few weeks you're going to have to have it to get into the buildings. This is going along with that plan that I had mentioned earlier, that we're creating steps and creating layers to our security to make us better.
We're using technology to do that. So between more officers using cameras, access control is going to be a big one. We've also got some other, some programs that's been put into place.
Things kind of like the idea of AI gun detection. So we have that in place now on our campuses. So that's going to be something that's really going to be crucial in putting us ahead of the, ahead of the ball whenever it comes to being proactive in law enforcement. So that's just a few things.
[00:27:25] Speaker C: You all have taken so many steps recently just in ensuring that campus stays safe. So thank you very much, for starters, for that, for all you do.
And what advice would you give students? Just to be proactive in their own safety.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think that's a good point.
We've always said that everybody's personal safety is their own responsibility.
Now we're here. We know what our responsibility is. We know what our job is. We're going to do the best that we can in our field to be able to provide a safe campus community.
However, personal safety also does rely with the individual. So the biggest thing that I can say when you're on campus, just pay attention. The biggest thing is to keep your head up. I know we like our cell phones, we like to text, we like to stay on them. I'm guilty just as much as anybody, but when you're walking across campus, maybe take a headphone out, keep your head up while you're walking, pay attention to your surroundings.
99% of risk awareness or risk reduction is risk awareness. So if you can see that there's something that may be suspicious or maybe a situation that you don't want to get involved in, by being cognizant of what's going on around you, you can avoid that. So that's a big thing. It's just, if you can. If you can stay out of that particular situation, then avoid it.
So, yeah, that's the biggest thing. It's just kind of. Just kind of paying attention to what's around you. I'll go back to if you do see something that's suspicious, say something.
That kind of goes back to the old adage of see something, say something. I think I do believe in that.
There's only a few of us.
And if you see something and don't tell anybody, there's a chance that somebody else didn't either. So if we don't know that it's on campus or don't know to go look for it, it's not going to benefit anybody. So I definitely agree with if you do see something suspicious on campus, say something.
[00:29:18] Speaker C: And you've given various ways to do this throughout this episode through the Rave app, we've got a webpage that directs, that connects you directly to our police officer force, regardless of the campus. Elizabethton, Kingsport, Gray, Blondeville.
So just always good to stay proactive about that.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: What's like the biggest hope you have for students could kind of Walk away with. After participating in.
In Campus Safety Week, what are all the best things you hope to impart to them?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: So, like I said, the Campus Safety Week, one of the main goals is to build relationships. What I hope for students to take away from Campus Safety Week is to be able to build that relationship with the Northeast State Police Department and raise their comfort level with the officers. That way, they can approach us at any point.
We do this to really kind of show that we're not a robot. We're out here. We're humans, just like everybody.
We want to be able to build a relationship strong enough that if people want to come talk to us just to chat, we're fine with that too. Something doesn't have to be wrong for our community to come and talk to us. So that's the biggest takeaway that I really want to see.
I would really like to see the students take away from Campus Safety Week. In addition to that, I mean, just the understanding of the resources that are available. You know, we're bringing all these law enforcement agencies in, kind of talk about what they can do. We've talked about some of the things that we have here on our campus.
Just want to. I just want to raise awareness and to show that.
That we do have resources here for the students, and I just kind of want them to understand what's available to them.
[00:31:02] Speaker C: Absolutely. And I guess we'll end this on just looking ahead. What are some new initiatives or goals for campus safety that might be on the horizon? Not quite here yet, but something that we're considering or something that might be in the works.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I'll kind of start with Campus Safety Week. This is the first year that we've done that. Like I said, this was a vision for a couple years.
I now have a team that I can say, hey, let's think about putting this together, and they just dive in and take care of it. Ultimately, my team is why this is happening.
They were able to kind of get this together, put this together, organize everything, and was able to get this off of the ground. So this is the first year.
We definitely want to continue this tradition and keep this going every single year.
We don't necessarily. At this point, we're kind of still in the midst of things right now, trying to see where can we improve Campus Safety Week, what things need to be changed.
But we will definitely look forward to making some changes and grow from here on into the future.
As far as campus safety, we've got some things that we're looking at.
So there are Some other technology that I'm wanting to bring on campus.
I'm kind of working through a lot of the specific details for that right now. So not at liberty to say what I'm. What I really want to see happen on campus, but I do want to put confidence in everybody that we are looking ahead, looking at other things that we can bring on the campus to keep us safer. So, yeah, we've got some things that we want to move forward to, and I think that all we can do is move forward, continue to grow from here.
[00:32:41] Speaker C: Well, not that I ever felt unsafe on campus, but this has been very reassuring just in general. So thank you. Thank you so much. Chief Mitchum.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Chief Mitchum has. Has some hidden talents.
Do you want to talk about that? Just go to that a little bit.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: We can walk on.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. This is kind of a little light hearted. I know. Chief Mitchum, you also have a few hidden talents, as I understand musically. Is that true? Could you elaborate on that a little bit for us?
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So this was a. This was a sidebar conversation before the episode started, but yeah, we.
We were talking about hobbies. And I will. I will kind of go ahead and put out that I do play music.
I like to play different musical instruments and things like that. So I'll kind of get into my nerdy days on this. But I was part of the band in middle school, high school, and all through college. So I played trumpet, mellophone, brass instruments all through my school years.
But since then I have self taught myself guitar, bass, guitar, drums, stuff like that. So, yeah, I definitely enjoy playing music.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: Wow. Self self taught.
[00:33:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Do you have. Do you have perfect pitch or can you.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Absolutely not.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: I would actually consider myself tone deaf at some point.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Oh, see, I've heard. I've heard that. Well, I've known a couple people who have it, and it's weird, but any. Well, not weird, but it's really impressive. It's a real gift.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Very, very much a gift. And a lot of what I do, what I have is taught, especially from my band days.
I had a band director who beat intonation into my head. So you pick it up at some point. You can listen to the beats in the sound, but outside of that, no, I would consider myself tonal deaf.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Still.
To teach yourself to play music. That's pretty impressive right there. Wow.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Definitely been a stress reliever over the years.
[00:34:34] Speaker C: And not just one instrument or two, but multiple, like, different types.
Like, strings are so different than like trumpet.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Very much like.
[00:34:43] Speaker C: Wow. Okay. Couldn't imagine playing one of those, let alone multiple.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:34:49] Speaker C: Yeah, that was a fun, light hearted way to end this.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: Yeah, a little. Yeah, like so serious and we needed like a little.
[00:34:54] Speaker C: Yeah, something you gotta, you gotta have.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Some way to, to make a little bit lighter.
[00:35:00] Speaker C: So, yeah, definitely about that balance.
So thank you, Chief Mitchum, so much for joining us today on the sound barrier and just diving into the many ways that you all work to make Northeast State Community College campuses safe across the board, safe and secure. We also want to thank Entertainment Technology. We've got Jordi in there recording this entire episode. Shout out to Jordi. Thank you for all the hard work that you've put into the sound barrier as well.
You can visit our
[email protected] TheSound Barrier. Give us a listen.
You can also catch us on any of your favorite streaming services. Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music. I'm probably missing a few, but we're on them all. So give us a listen. And don't Forget to visit NortheastState. Edu again, that is NortheastState. Edu to learn more about what Northeast State Community College has to offer and the various ways that we keep our campuses safe and secure thanks to our police force. Until next time. Time on the sound barrier.
