Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

Heroes Behind the Badge · Aug 27, 2026 · 36m · transcript

Part 1 covered what D.A.R.E. teaches now. This half is about the people who teach it, and about the criticism the program has carried for forty years.

Frank Pegueros — retired LAPD captain, President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America — starts with something simple and easy to miss. For most parents, the officer in their child's school is the first police officer they have known as a person rather than as a uniform arriving on the worst day of their life. That officer becomes a known quantity in the community, and Pegueros argues that is the whole mechanism. He describes officers who took the school…