>> the horror that took place at the lgbt nightclub in orlando earlier this month shook our community and the nation to their core. it also serves as a reminder to the rest of us how much work we still have to do to address the epidemic of violence in our city and to fight back against hate and discrimination. the people of orlando have shown us awe-inspiring levels in the face of tragedy and their commitment to supporting victims and their families gives us hope that love may triumph over hate. our board member, former annual meeting host and most importantly our friend buddy dyer has shown tremendous

leadership. strength and compassion in leading his city through this tragedy. this will be a long and very painful process but mayor dyer knows that we stand with him and is city as they mourn, as they heal and as they grow even stronger. please welcome our friend orlando mayor buddy dyer. [applause]

mayor dyer: thank you so much. that means a lot. two weeks ago today on june the 12th, that was the most difficult day in the history of the city of orlando, but today i could not be more proud of our community and how it responded. we've not been defined by hate-filled act of a radical killer but rather by our collective response of love, compassion, and unity. we are orlando united. on behalf of everybody in orlando, all of our residents, all of our families, i want to start out by saying thank you to all of you. thank you to all of my fellow mayors. thank you to each of the residents of each of your cities. everybody knows that orlando is a place to go and have fun. but when we needed most, your cities came to orlando's aid.

you had our back and unequivocally these have been the worst two weeks in orlando's history and i can't tell you how much it meant to us to feel your thisand your support after unimaginable tragedy. and i can't tell you how much it meant to see your landmarks, bridges and buildings lit up in the colors of the rainbow to let us know that we weren't alone in orlando. on a personal level, i cannot thank you enough for the things that you sent, the vigil that you led, the phone calls and text messages and e-mails that many of you -- just about all of you that are in this room actually made to offer either advice or help or just to say that your thoughts and your prayers were with us. so on behalf of everyone and i will return some of those calls at some point -- on behalf of

everyone that calls orlando home, please allow me to thank you. [applause] so a struggled with whether or not to leave orlando and come to the conference. it's been less than two weeks. well, it's been exactly two weeks since an act of violence terrorized and crippled our city. i know we're going to eventually get through this. but every day brings unexpected challenges and every day i talked to victims and families or residents who remain in a state of shock. it's still so hard for us to comprehend how and why this could possibly happen in orlando. but i'm here with you after what happened to orlando because it's clear to me that we live in a new world, a world that any one of our cities -- any one of our cities could be the site of this kind of intentional, mass casualty event, a world where

each one of our cities needs to be better prepared to respond to this type of incident. and i'm not talking about a hurricane or tornado. i'm talking about an intentional act of violence that takes the lives of our residents and wreaks havoc on our cities. so that's the reason that i feel it's important to talk to you today. it's important that we as mayors begin a larger discourse about how we prepare for and respond to these types of events. i want to stay away from politics and the heated topics that are discussed on the national news. there are a lot of politics in this country that might find a way to prevent these sort of big, big there are difficult issues. it it's going tyke a willing to form parrer inships and to stop

vilifying other americans who don't agree with you, something that our country doesn't seem to do very well lately. i'm going to let others take the lead on that conversation. but what i want to focus on is mayors and our responsibilities. i want to talk about we as mayors what we can do to be ready and what we can do to foster the kinds of community that help prevent incidents and that are prepared to respond to them. the way that orlando responded to this tragedy probably hasn't been perfect. but i'm extraordinarily proud of the way that we did respond. and i'm proud of the way that our residents and our city staff , our city staff stepped up under extraordinary circumstances. i've never been more proud of our police officers, our firefighters, all of our first responders, the doctors that treated the victims that night and then our city employees. i believe there are lessons to be learned from orlando just as

sought counsel from responders from san bernardino. i talked to mayor riley and other places that have been urn this type of attack. our long-term vision is to work with you, my fellow mayors and their staffs to put together a comprehensive formal examination of best practices and that examination will be shared with u.s. conference of mayors for all of our cities. and there's obviously no such thing as an all-purpose emergency manual but by sharing what we have learned we can help our city bs better prepared. i want to offer a few basic insights with hope that it serves as a first step towards a larger preparation. what i want to do right now is take you back to the night of june the 12th.

i'm asleep. it's about 3:00 a.m. in the morning. and i get a phone call. i get phone calls that everyone one of you dread getting and it's the deputy chief. he said mayor, i need to inform you that there's an active shooter in the pulse nightclub. ties. are multiple casual so i called my 26-year-old son to see where he was. he had his phone charged up and was able to answer and telling me that he was asleep in bed which gave me peace of mind to o what i needed to do. the police officer was on the way, picked me up and i picked up the deputy chief of staff who is in charge of communications in our city. and we arrived at the mobile command center which was already occupied by the chief of police and his deputies, the sheriffs

of three counties if fdle florida department of law enforcement and the f.b.i. so when i walked in, i was sitting next to the chief and i thought what are my goals here? my first goal is don't get in the way. second, do not undermine the chief's command, and the third was to gather as much information as i possibly could for communication later on. so they brought me up to speed on what had occurred between 2:02 and the time that i got there which was 3:45ish. so there had been gunfire heard in the pulse nightclub. we had an off-duty officer but he was occupied in a parking lot with another incident when the gunfire started. so he ran to the front door of the club and engaged in a gun fight with the shooter. the shooter went back into the club and in about three minutes we had four swat officers and

several other officers from different agencies respond and knocked through a window for entry and the shooter retreated into a back bathroom where there were hostages located and there was a second bathroom across the hallway from him. so we secured the site in terms of having the shooter secured in one bathroom but there were hostages there. but that gave us the opportunity for additional officers to -- and firefighters to help the victims that were still living, the wounded out. and fortunately we had a level one trauma certain that's about a quarter of a mile down the road and we actually transported about half the victims there in the back of a police officers pick up truck and saved a lot of lives through that. we were rescuing victims and from some of the responding officers we were under the

impression that there were between 25 and 30 dead. so they had all been rescued at that point when we started or we received the 911 call from the shooter who declared his allegiance to the state of islam. and he also made a couple of additional calls to our crisis negotiators or actually it was the other way around. so for the next hour or so, we were in communication with the shooter. and we didn't know it at the time but he was also in communication with another tv station, on social media. so he was pretty active in his communications. and we also had the hostages that were in both bathrooms who were directly in communication with 911 or were texting to somebody else on the outside and giving us information. so we were getting realtime information from the people that were located in the bathrooms.

at one point the shooter says that he's going to put on an explosive vest and he's talked about bombs throughout the course of this and put four vests -- or put vests on four of the hostages that are in the bathroom and send them to the four corners of the night club. he also indicated that there were explosives in his car which was parked in the parking lot. the chief made the decision that point to breach the building. and swat had responded and had a perimeter secured and they put an explosive device on the wall that was the -- to the bathroom that did not have the shooter in. it did not totally breach the wall. so we had a bear cat -- i don't know if you guys have that but it's basically an armor battering ram and they were able to punch four holes into the wall.

15 hostages came streams out with the shooter. kevlar an officer in the helmet that if that shot was two inches lower that officer would have lost his life. and they took the shooter down. the -- at that point, the f.b.i. determined that that was an act of terrorism and they took charge of the investigation to follow. we still are not going to go into detail but there was still the issue of whether the club was booby trapped. so it took a while to secure the crime scene based on trying to make sure that we didn't end up with an explosion. they began clearing and we turned our attention to communication strategy. and i knew going in that communicating with the public was going to be my most important job. we had a couple of hurricanes

come through -- three actually in 2004 and that was the lesson learned there that commune equation the public during a crisis is the mayor's most important job. so our first two press conferences were the most important that we had and there was no question that as the mayor, i needed to lead out at the press conferences because everybody else that was going to be speaking were f.b.i., fdle, unknown in our community and it was important in our estimation to hear this tragedy, someone they knew and someone that they trusted. and there were three things that we wanted to communicate or three ways we wanted to communicate. we wanted to communicate very concise rezztation of fact -- recitation of facts. we wanted to communicate that we had this under control. and we wanted to communicate that the residents of orlando

were safe that there wasn't another incident that occurred that the gunman had acted alone in this instance. and in the very first press conference, we were able to set the tone for the day. we were able to bring some calm to the disorder. i'm going to tell you just two little things. at that very first press conference at the end, the police chief was asked a question by a reporter and the reporter said there are -- we understand there are 20 dead. and the chief said, yes, there are 20 dead. well, we knew that there were more than 20 dead that point. so i turned around and walked. and i said chief, the next time we talk, i have to tell them how many dead there are. my deputy chief our deputy communications director deputy chief of staff walked up and she had just been informed that the total was in fact, 50, not 20.

so when we went time-out second press conference that was the hardest moment i had during the whole process and i had to take very deep breath and a big gulp and say it's 50 not 20. and you could hear a collective gasp from the reporters at that point. so we set the tone. and then there was just a continuum of different things that happened, but the utter most important thing that we did , we cleared the scene at 4:00 by 4:00 in the afternoon. and i had a nice conversation with a medical examiner and stressed out important it was for us to get the victims identified and then make notification. and that guy rocked. he was a superstar. by 7:00 the next morning when i returned to the scene and he got the last of the victims at 11:00, he had identified 48 of the 49 victims and by mid

afternoon we had been able to notify the families of all of those victims as well. and i can tell you it would have been a much different scenario if we had been spending two or three days trying to identify people. so that's just kind of a narrative that i want you to have in mind as i give you what i think are a couple of lessons learned. so i recall on sunday morning how fortunate we were to able to call on our partners in the community of every conceivable sort, the relationships that we had with these partners were product of a lot of hard work. our islamic community and other faith-based leaders, business leaders who got funding in place to help the victims. our law enforcement agencies and the ones that i mentioned, i've never seen a more seamless operation. they knew each other. they worked directly together. and there was no ego involved on anyone. they all did their job.

and i didn't have to go through any intermediaries because well, one benefit i've been mayor 14 years now so the contacts are pretty much in my phone. and as mayor, i think it shows the value of doing the daily work of bag mayor and touching your people, touching everybody. sometimes it's tiresome to participate in all these community events. and i know sometimes it's overwhelming. but i can tell you every ramadan dinner that i've taken part in, every law enforcement convention, every neighborhood meeting, every gay pride parade, every dinner and every u.s. conference of mayors meeting, i've attend over the years has helped me and helped our city forge relationships that we were immediately able to tap into in our response. and you can't create those relationships on the fly. you have to build those over time. second is investing.

investing in preparation. so another realization we had is the importance of investing into tools, the technology, the training of our police and fire departments and training jointly together with all of the surrounding agencies and particularly in this post recession world. there have been times where our local governments were perhaps overly scrutinized or criticized for some of the investments we made and some of the militaryized types of weapons and vehicles that we have but because of these investments we have done mass casualty exercises with our first responders. they were ready to go. and we insured that they were equipped with everything to respond. i have to tell you, i caught a bunch of flack when we bought the bear cat. you can imagine that, right? so if we had not had that bear cat that night, we would not have goten in that building when we did and i'm quite certain

there would have been additional victims. financial readyness is also important. a lot of us took drastic cuts the last several years and having a tragedy like this shows why contingency funds, having them available are important. and finally i'm going to tell you one that you would never have thought of. to stablished the 501-c 3 annle an art program and a neighborhood program so we could receive funds through not for profit. and it turns out that the day after -- disney wanted to give us a $1 million check. we had somewhere where we could take that check and did not have to rely on an outside organization that may or may not have been the means or the type of means that we wanted to do. we have, by the way almost $10

million in that fund in however many days it is since we set that up in the community and the national response to that has just been incredible. and that's another area, new york, boston, we borrowed from you guys, we got the gentleman that did those funds. i think he's actually done seven of the funds. and that's another lesson. there are other people that have done some other part of this. find them. and use them. don't try to make it up on the run. footballly the last thing i want to talk about in the last two weeks is the value of having really, really great people in your organization. i can't stress how important that is because there are so many people that are driving so far out of their lane, i'm not sure they can see the center line. and when you're making hires in our city family, there are many who have a desire to serve and go above and beyond customer service and as the mayor, you

set that tone. 'm a del gaygator. -- delagator. you have to turn them loose and perform. i think we have a culture that 95% of the time anybody that's a decision-maker would make the decisions that i would make. but the other percent of the time i'm going to let you do it. they did it with professionalism and grace. and others put their heads down and did their job and covered for them. and as our c.i.o. said they did better than they had ever done before. so i want to just close with, it's strange to turn on a tv in a place like indianapolis and still have orlando ss -- as one of the lead news stories. it almost doesn't feel real. but at some point the cameras

are gong lead. and the work of picking up the pieces will remain. and i want you to know that work was made easier because of the love and support that orlando and its residence ever see from that. thank you for that love and sup porment -- support. [applause] [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] >> c-span's "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up monday morning, "usa today"'s supreme court correspondent richard wolf on the supreme court's remaining case load and today's expected ortion ruling and mary elena executive director of immigration center on how president obama will affect millions of undocumented workers. we'll talk with heather mcdonald, how a new attack on law and order makes everyone unsafe. e sure to watch c-span's "washington journal" monday morning. next q&a with arthur herman on his biography of general douglas

mccarthy. then britain's decision to leave the european union on world financial markets. after that another chance to see c-span's interview with senator bernie sanders of vermont. >> this week on q&a, arthur and senior fellow -- arthur and senior fellow arthur herman. he discusses his book "american warrior." >> arthur herman, what made douglas mccarter so controversial? >> well, a number of things. i think there was aspect of his personality, his politics and then there's