'What's my role?' Orlando mayor speaks candidly about response to Pulse massacre

ORLANDO, Fla. — Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer was asleep in bed when he received a startling phone call at 3 a.m. June 12.

“’Mayor, this is Deputy Chief Bobby Anzueto. I have to inform you that there has been a shooting at the Pulse nightclub. There’s an active shooter, there’s multiple casualties, and it’s now a hostage situation,’” Dyer recalled hearing when he answered.

He was in Washington, D.C., Tuesday to speak as part of a panel examining the role of social media when responding to terror attacks. Dyer gave a frank, candid description of the day.

“My first thought – I’m a dad – the next thing I did was call my 26-year-old son to see where he was,” Dyer said. “And I don’t know that he’s ever been to Pulse, whether he frequents there or not, but I just wanted to be sure.”

By that point, a police liaison was already on the way to pick him up, Dyer said during the discussion put on by D.C. think tank New America.

The city had prepared for active shooter situations, but nothing had prepared them for the Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 dead and 53 wounded, he said.

The first thing Dyer had to do was to figure out, “What’s my role?” he said.

The first few hours

He and his staff did not want to step on the toes of law enforcement. They didn’t want to endanger the public, but at the same time, they wanted to tell residents what was going on, Dyer said.

“If you don’t provide as much information in a concise, accurate way, then somebody else is going to fill in those gaps and probably with not accurate information,” he said.

The decision was made to funnel all information posted to social media through the Orlando Police Department’s Twitter feed, making it easier to control the city’s message, Dyer said.

By the time he held a press conference on the attack, hours had passed, and Dyer recalled the backlash he got for not speaking sooner.

There was a reason, though, it was still possible the shooter had planted explosives in his vehicle parked next to the Orange Avenue club, he said.

“We still thought that there might be explosives in the vehicle, and we did not think that we would instill confidence in the public if we came out and had a press conference, and his car blew up in the background,” Dyer said.

Dealing with the rumor mill

The city did address certain rumors through the OPD Twitter feed, something that fellow panelist and CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem applauded.

“What you guys did on Twitter was really important, which is, you acknowledged that you understood that there was that rumor mill,” she said. “So you didn’t look like you were stupid and didn’t know that everyone else was talking about (the rumors).”

"If you don't provide as much information in a precise, accurate way, then somebody else is going to fill in those gaps and probably with not accurate information," Dyer said.

New America senior advisor and former assistant U.S. Secretary of Defense Sharon Burke addressed the rumor issue as well, saying once bad information is online, there’s almost no way to stop it from spreading.

“One of the things that’s happened in the way that disasters and attacks are being communicated right now, it’s immediate, and the echo is profound,” she said. “And sometimes, how that story gets told and spread, it’s not always right information, and it’s not always helpful information.”

After word of the shooting got out, politicians flooded the area, Dyer said.

Some were reassuring, while others made the situation worse, he said.

“One of our congressmen comes walking out, and he’s got the mic, giving a lot of disinformation and a lot of heated, political rhetoric,” Dyer said, not giving a name. “And it was like, ‘Remove him from there so we can get down to business.’

It wasn’t helpful to us or anyone else.”

Shooter’s obsession with social media during the attack

Burke made a point to note the way the Pulse nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, used social media himself as the attack was ongoing.

“All throughout the attack, by the way, he was using Facebook, and he was posting to Facebook,” she said. “He was Googling himself and seeing if he was trending.”

Facebook took Mateen’s messages down as they were posted, but there was really no way to know who saw them or how many people they reached, Burke said.

“He was, all throughout the attack, broadcasting and trying to shape his own story,” she said.

How to tell the public

It was about 5:30 a.m. when Dyer and other officials sat down to lay out how they were going to tell the public what had happened.

“We actually had a little discussion about whether the FBI or police were going to lead out, and we pushed back and said, ‘No, I have to lead out, because I’m the person that they know,’” Dyer said. “What we wanted to do was convey accurate information … we wanted to calm everybody down and instill confidence that we have this, that we’re in control, and we wanted everybody to know they were safe.”

It was initially reported that 20 people had been killed in the attack, and Dyer remembered the moment he was told the death toll was more than twice that amount.

“So, I had to come out and tell everybody that it wasn’t 20, it was 50,” he said. “And at that point, I knew that I had to keep my calm and keep my cool, because if I broke down, that was not going to good for anybody.”

Orlando stays strong

While Orlando is a place familiar to people around the world, the people who live here aren’t, Dyer said.

What made residents stand out was their actions and what they posted online, he said.

“You saw Orlando and its residents in the course of Pulse and the aftermath of Pulse,” he said, pointing to the city’s commitment to diversity, openness and equality. “And that’s who we were on that day. It wasn’t something that we needed to form and tell people, it’s who we are.”

It was that commonality that guided what city leaders did and said the day of the attack, Dyer added.

“From the very start, we came out and what became our guiding principal was we’re not going to be defined by the hate-filled act of a demented killer. We are going to be defined by our response,” he added.

Cox Media Group