On January 8, 1993, at closing time, seven people were killed at a Brown’s Chicken and Pasta restaurant in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. The bodies of the two owners and five employees were found in the walk-in cooler and freezer. According to the Associated Press, the robbery netted less than $2,000.
Walter Gasior was Palatine’s deputy police chief. He was also the department’s spokesman, and that put him in the middle of everything. Fourteen years later, David Snowden, founder of the research network Cognitive Edge, and the consultant Mary Boone opened a Harvard Business Review article with what those days asked of him. There were grieving families. There was a frightened town. There was a police department that had suddenly become extremely busy, and still had all its ordinary work to do. And there were the media, who, in Snowden and Boone’s words, “inundated the town with reporters and film crews.”
“There would literally be four people coming at me with logistics and media issues all at once,” he recalls in their article. “And in the midst of all this, we still had a department that had to keep running on a routine basis.”
Snowden and Boone sorted his work into four piles. He had to act immediately through the media to stem the panic, keeping the community informed. At the same time, the department had to keep running routinely and by established procedure. He had to call in experts. And for days and weeks afterward, he had to keep calming the community.
That last pile, they wrote, “proved the most challenging.” Parents were afraid to let their children go to school. Employees were worried about safety at work.
Snowden and Boone imagined two ways he could have got it wrong. If he had treated the town’s fear as routine, he might have told people to carry on, which would not have reassured anyone. If he had treated it as a question for specialists, he might have brought in experts to declare the town safe, “risking a loss of credibility and trust.”
What Gasior did instead, by their account, was set up a forum where business owners, high school students, teachers and parents could share their concerns and hear the facts. The authors’ reading was that he let the answers come from the community rather than imposing one.
The killings themselves stayed unsolved for years. In May 2007, a jury found one of the two men charged guilty on all seven counts of first-degree murder; the other was to be tried separately.