We'd like to take some time and make space to address an incident that occurred last month between one of our staff members and a member of the public in our neighborhood. The incident resulted in physical contact between our staff member and a person who was tagging the outside of the bar with graffiti during business hours. This incident didn't proceed as it should have—we never have, and never will, condone physical confrontation as a solution. But beyond the incident itself, this also became an opportunity for us to institutionally reflect on and address our philosophy for handling difficult encounters.

As a small business and employer, we're responsible for setting a standard of conduct for what we want to see in our neighborhood and for holding our team members to that standard. We believe that everyone in our community deserves kindness, respect, and mutual understanding: we strive to lead with those principals every day, and to offer a safe, positive environment for everyone to enjoy. Last month, we fell short, and we're grateful for the call to improve. As a team, we are taking strides not only to learn from this, but to grow and to do better, individually and as an organization. We believe in learning from our mistakes and affording that opportunity to others.

After careful consideration and extensive internal and external review, the Alembic team took the following steps in response to the incident:

• We conducted an investigation and interviewed all available witnesses
• We determined inappropriate physical contact was used as a method of deterrence 
• We failed to appropriately respond when confronted immediately after the incident. We failed to listen and appropriately respond to a witness’ complaint or employ deescalation techniques which would have included alternatives to calling the police.
• We re-assigned the employee involved in the incident to non-customer facing activity until specific conditions for continued employment were met including successful completion of professional deescalation training
• We updated our policies to include methods of deescalation which are alternatives to police involvement and scheduled professional deescalation training for all members of our team

We feel the responsibility of our position as an anchor business in the neighborhood and we welcome the opportunity when confronted by our mistakes to learn from them, and continue to do better. Thank you for your patronage and for sharing the life of this place with us.

Sincerely,

Alembic team