Servers in Naperville’s bars are required to undergo training aimed at keeping them from over serving their customers.
In an expansion of the training, many of the people who monitor the front doors are learning how to tell if that already happened before patrons arrive, and what they can do to keep things from getting out of hand.
The Naperville Municipal Center served as the venue earlier for the launch of Bar Employee Security Training classes. The course is designed to help security workers play a role in minimizing the alcohol-fueled misbehaviors that triggered last year’s adoption of new restrictions for the city’s bar owners.
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“What the BEST program really does is it focuses on the security portion of alcohol security,” said Scott Friedlein, a retired Champaign Illinois, police officer who helped create the program in the late 1990s in the college town. “Really, a lot of the focus is on early recognition of problems, and steps to take to prevent problems from occurring,” he said.
Andy Nosek and five others who work at Quigley’s Irish Pub went to one of the three sessions that took place this month. Nosek, the pub’s general manager, said the class was “a good refresher” for the mandatory Beverage Alcohol Servers and Sellers Education and Training course he took when he joined Quigley’s staff nearly a decade ago.
“It was very informative. They were a little more in-depth, in terms of what to look for,” he said.
Other bars that had staff members at the first trio of classes were Bar Louie, CityGate Grille, Features Bar & Grill, Hotel Arista/SugarToad, Hugo’s Frog Bar, Jimmy’s Grill, Peanuts Bar & Grill, Potter’s Place/Two Nine, Solemn Oath Brewery, Tap In Pub & Carvery, Tommy Nevin’s and The Wise Boxer Pour House, according to an internal city memo.
The course, Nosek said, updated the staff’s identification-checking skills, which for all door employees are challenged by increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting techniques. It also underscored the proactive approach to bar troubles.
“Part of that is being properly trained to defuse those situations that can escalate and get out of hand,” Nosek said.
He and other front-line workers at Quigley’s have a built-in advantage, he said, in the pub’s location on a slope leading up to the east from Washington Street.
“You kind of get a prejudgment, in terms of this guy is having trouble walking up the hill,” Nosek said.
Sometimes, he added, the struggle stems from a physical challenge entirely unrelated to sobriety, or the absence of it.
Knowing which one is going on, and determining which situations call for intervention, is a primary pillar of the training program, Friedlein said. He sees parallels between bar work and the retail realm, and likens the training to becoming equipped to provide good customer service. A lot of it, he said, involves functioning proactively when necessary.
“If you pay attention, you can tell when patrons are becoming agitated,” he said.
The program originated after two Champaign bar security workers were involved in a fight in 1998 with an intoxicated University of Illinois student, who was beaten to death.
“This was obviously the incident that propelled the program into existence,” Friedlein said.
The bar employee’s use of excessive force put him in prison, and today the city of Champaign requires all bars to adopt a use-of-force policy and have their security staff undergo the training, Friedlein said. In other cities, including Naperville, the course is typically optional.
Security-specific training “that includes techniques to de-escalate potential disturbances and difficult situations” is recommended in a best-practices manual published by the Naperville Restaurant Association in 2013, but city officials last year opted against requiring it after city prosecutor Mike DiSanto said it could pose a significant risk of legal exposure.
In the meantime, bars in the downtown area have taken other steps to nip trouble in the bud. Many of them are using GroupMe, a multi-user messaging app that enables the establishments to alert one another when a potential patron has been ejected or turned away at the door.
“It’s brilliant,” said Nosek, who estimated that 98 percent of the city bars are taking part in the electronic conversations.
As for who’s not, he wasn’t naming names.
“You get a good idea, when you’re on the app, of who’s playing a more active, responsible role,” he said.
Friedlein said he wasn’t familiar with the use of GroupMe in bolstering bar security, until he came to Naperville.
“I was personally very impressed,” he said. “What you find is someone who’s going to be problematic at one location, what they do is they go to another place and cause problems, and another, unless they’re arrested.”
While most bars station physically imposing workers at their doors to help keep troublemakers out, Friedlein sees putting the brawn to work as a last resort.
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“We would prefer that security personnel not use force, by any means,” Friedlein said. “But we cannot dictate to private industry what they can and can not do in their premises.”
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