William M. Dugann
Developer of the A.C.T. Protocol. More than fifteen years in curbside management and compliance operations, starting as a parking enforcement officer in 2011.
Why A.C.T. exists
I started writing parking citations in 2011, and over the years that followed I watched the same encounter play out more times than I can count. An officer is finishing a citation, or a crew is securing a boot, when the owner comes back to the car, and within seconds the officer is standing at arm's length from someone who has just learned the afternoon is going to cost them. What happens next depends almost entirely on what that officer was taught, and in most operations they were taught very little that fits the moment.
In 2021, while finishing my bachelor's degree, I was given an assignment on workplace violence. I wrote about parking enforcement because it was the work I knew, and I built the framework from experience and reasoning around three questions: what am I looking at, what will I do about it, and how will it end. Only afterward did I compare it with established models like the OODA loop, PERF's Critical Decision-Making Model and Verbal Judo. The overlap was real, and it told me the questions were the right ones. The answers had to be different, because those models assume authority the parking officer does not have.
Since then I have moved from field enforcement into supervision and operations management, and I have used A.C.T. to shape field training in my own operation. Publishing it is the next step, so that officers and the people responsible for them everywhere can use it, test it, and argue with it.
Credentials
- Two master's degrees
- Professional certifications from the National Parking Association and the International Parking & Mobility Institute
- Recognized subject-matter expert by NPA and IPMI, including IPMI's legislative policy cohort
- Contributor to the NPA Certified Parking Professional study guide on citation issuance, adjudication and de-escalation
- Currently studying law