Latest / APD Pod Squad / Season 2, Episode 18; Capt Joe Silberman, Sgt Scott Muse, Senior Police Officer II Nathaniel Smith, and Property & Evidence Manager John Perez.

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 18; Capt Joe Silberman, Sgt Scott Muse, Senior Police Officer II Nathaniel Smith, and Property & Evidence Manager John Perez. · APD Pod Squad

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: This is the APD5 squad.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Rick Rice, and coming up in this episode, Captain Joe Silverman of the Criminal Investigations Division, we're going to recap some of the recent big cases that were assisted by technology like LPRs and drones.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_04: We'll get to know K9 Unit Officers, Sergeant Scott Mews, and Senior Police Officer 2 Nathaniel Smitty Smith.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: Sergeant Mews leads the unit, and Smitty is getting acquainted with K9 Hardy, his new partner, and property and evidence manager John Perez.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_04: His prior law enforcement experience with another agency provided him with a solid foundation for his current job with APD.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_04: He also provides a valuable service, assisting with Spanish translations for our media releases.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_04: He's also a diehard hockey fan like me, so we'll get into that.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's all coming up on season two, episode 18 of the APD Pod Squad.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_04: Joining me now is Captain Joe Stilberman of the Criminal Investigations Division, and you guys have had some impressive wins lately.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_04: Some great work by your detectives with an assist to technology.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_04: First of all, Captain Silberman, thank you for joining me.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for having me, Rick.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about some of these cases and how technology came to play a big part.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_04: There was two rape cases.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_04: One was local, and the other was a cold case assisting the folks from Charlotte.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_04: Let's start with the local one.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we actually had two same weekend, same area but unrelated that the Family Justice Center team flipped very quickly, unusually quickly for the type of case it was.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: We take these kind of assaults extraordinarily seriously.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: While there's always a lead detective that manages that case that sort of leads the investigation, they have a super supportive team.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And part of it is they know who to ask to tap in when they need to.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And both detectives did an extraordinary job in their cases.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell So what kind of technology played a key role?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell License plate readers.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Being able to know who's coming and going.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And while this is new technology sort of in the law enforcement realm, it really just supports an old investigative technique.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And all all investigative techniques fundamentally are a century old.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: All our new technology sort of supports the canvas.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Knocking on doors and asking, hey, who did you see in the neighborhood who is here was one of our first techniques.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And really nobody pays attention to anything anymore.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that's become the human intel uh has become a lot harder in that respect.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But the advent of technology of cameras in places and advancing our cameras with license plate readers has really just supported that ancient technique and they used it and they used it to great effect.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: They got a license plate, they got a car.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: That led them to a registered owner of the car who definitely wasn't our suspect.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they did basic investigation and they found that uh the registered owner of the car was a woman.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she had been assaulted by her domestic partner that morning.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he stole her car.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And while Charlotte was looking for the car and taking her assault report, she was strangled to, and firming up their own warrants, he had come to Asheville and he committed an assault here and then fled back to Charlotte.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And they actually pulled him over along the way because he was going some outrageous speed.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But he ends up they end up seizing the car, they get it back to its rightful owner, and he's sitting in jail under the Charlotte charges.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when our people find out about this, we contact Charlotte.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh great relationships with other agencies across this country.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so Charlotte Mack, in hearing that their case was bigger than they thought it was, uh then tags in for us and starts doing work in our case remotely, sending us what they have, but also making contact with him and getting statements from him for us.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And we're able to firm up Aaron, work with the survivor, and confirm the identification that came essentially that uh the seed that grew from the license plate reader ID.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And once all that was in effect, we were able to get our own warrants for second-degree rape.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, like I said, back in the day, you know, maybe when there was less people around and people would notice vehicles where they didn't belong or whatever, it would be somebody telling you that.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_04: Like, yeah, I saw a blue Chevy such and such traveling this road at what time did you get a license plate?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_04: I I got the first couple of letters.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_04: Now we have the technology, the license plate readers that can do that for us.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's essentially a surveillance camera, but it's connected to a certain level of intelligence.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell That's a big win.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I mean for the victim to know that that person is now no longer a threat to them.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's usually and he he victimized two people in uh a day's time.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so this was this is a big win for everybody to have this person at least, and it is temporary, but have this person like temporarily on hold.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big win for all our safety.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_04: We've talked a lot about technology lately.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's been in the forefront.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: People have seen it in the media, it made its way to City Council because of an RTIC grant that was paused, and we've spoken with Chief Stepp and some others about this.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_04: And we would like to highlight some of these instances where that it has meant that somebody has been caught.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_04: Because people wonder.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_04: They're like, Yeah, well, what are you doing with this anyway?
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_04: What are you getting with this?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So but this is nothing new.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And with the advent of cameras, now at first they're easy to spot, right?
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: The camera was essentially the size of like, you know, a rocket launcher attached to a pole, very conspicuous, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_07: Yeah.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: The footage was usually pretty grainy and terrible, right?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: At night it was unusable.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: But even when I got into this job, part of the canvas that I was taught to do as a young detective was still walk around and look for cameras.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Where might there be an outward pointing camera?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they were usually hard to find, like if something happened in front of a gas station.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you had something pointed at pumps where you would you'd get something good, but a lot of times a house camera's pointing at the house.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's filming their own street because in the end nobody has really like an an outward interest to surveil everybody else, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But we would do those canvases.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And over time in my career, you started to see cameras getting smaller and smaller.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then as a detective supervisor, you know, cameras would be were real small in that I'd tell people like, okay, go door to door and see who has a nest camera, one of the little doorbell cameras.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we've made cases off of those before, off of uninvolved people who because it is pointing towards the road.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes uh it will switch on and with movement and catch something, and even if it's just telling us a car drove past here at a certain time.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But the game changer came when uh somebody had the foresight to put all that together with uh some level of computer program or computer intelligence to say we're gonna we're gonna put one that looks for cars and it just memorizes vehicle tags and tells you when they were here.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: It became the perfect witness.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it tells you what it tells you.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell you who's driving the car.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: That still requires that a human to investigate, but it definitely tells you that that license plate was probably there.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you have to lay eyes on it and make sure, did it did it read one of the numbers wrong?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is it is it proper?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the first thing we do.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I couldn't tell you a false positive uh has not come to mind.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that we still scrutinize heavily, but each time it's like, yeah, there's our car.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: The one that sticks out in my mind, we had uh uh multiple homicide on Leicester Highway at a recording studio.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it was uh he's a sergeant now, but Brandon Schope was in light duty in CID at the time.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we had hours and hours of footage from different places.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: We had done the canvas, we had picked up footage from here, there, and everywhere, and there was just so much to look over.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, our lead detective was in the field, he's doing interviews with people, and we had a few people dead in an apparent robbery, tons of witnesses, but spotty on what everybody saw and remembered, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: There was some conflicting things, it's just the human aspect of what you could recall in trauma and under stress, right?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: The camera doesn't have that problem.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: It records what it records.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: If it's a grainy camera, it's a grainy camera.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not, it's not.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's honest in what it has.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so we stuck Brandon w watching all this footage.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he combs through it, combs through it.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: He gets the best stills of our suspects he could get.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they're little things like who's wearing what, who's how tall, who has like a distinguishing feature that's noticeable, like a t he's got some kind of tattoo over here or something like that.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: He eventually finds suspect vehicle, right?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: No tag.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think he found a tag, or maybe it was a partial, but he starts looking at the unique identifiers of the vehicle.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, front end damage here, like a uh a bumper sticker here, like and the vehicle becomes unique from that all that damage.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: It uh it's become its own fingerprint.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he gets up with the lead investigator and they go hunting and they find the vehicle.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out to be an incredibly important piece of evidence.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now you've got license plate readers.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: The license plate readers now actually do that for you.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: You could say, like, hey, we need to like look for things with roof racks and bike racks and unique damage in places and bumper stickers here, here and there.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it will give you that unique vehicle that you as the investigator, the human aspect, could look over and say, like, yes, this is relevant, or no, this isn't what I'm looking for.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But just an incredible resource.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_04: Captain Joe Silverman uh joins me now, Criminal Investigations Division.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_04: I'm one of the last ones, probably on my block or in in the city to come on board with the ring cameras in the front.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone's got them now, right?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_04: Which is which is awesome because you can see what's going on in your neighborhood.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_04: We have a very safe neighborhood.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_04: We haven't caught any crimes.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_04: We have caught some bears and some other things on our on our camera.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_04: We mostly got it for deliveries and things of that nature.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_04: See when things are being delivered to the house uh in the world of porch piracy and all of that.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_04: But these cameras are everywhere.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_04: They're in businesses, they're in homes.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_04: And some of the people that seem to object to cameras at the Asheville Police Department recognize the value of them in their own home.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're we're trying to show them the value of it to the Asheville Police Department with a lot of guardrails.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's important that we communicate with guardrails and the the ethics that we have in place and the scrutiny that we do internally, well beyond uh what the the bare minimum that the law requires.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's something fundamental to us as Americans, right?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And and our personal freedom.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I it it's really on us.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: We need to communicate properly and explain how we use these to people.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: But in the end, there's it is more benign than people.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I I get the picture.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's there are people who think that there's this nefarious watching that's being done.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: We scrutinize that.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just like we have access to a lot of personal information.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And especially in my house and at my rank now, like one thing I'm over is the scrutiny of who's using systems and who's accessing it and for what, and is it appropriate?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And there are layers in place, just like there are layers in place for the cameras.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell So we'd mentioned the one win that you actually rolled into another win.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about a cold case.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So at the same time, we're juggling our local offender and Charlotte.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've actually been trying to help out their cold case unit.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um they popped up a couple months ago, I think it was in October of last year, and they said, hey, we have uh genetic we did genetic genealogy, another like wild miracle of science for police.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: They did genetic genealogy on a sexual assault for an unknown offender.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was a burglary breaking and entering to a home where a woman was assaulted and man in a mask, just the horror story that uh a lot of women like fear.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And a terrible event for that person.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: These cases, just like in our house, these cases don't die.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they get shuffled here and there, and we're always trying to to throw new spaghetti at the wall.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Charlotte did that, and they got a genetic genealogy hit.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: It requires human eyes.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They had a follow-up on it, and uh they had a pool of potential offenders or suspects, and they were able to whittle that down into one person who was in Asheville.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so they popped up here and they said, Hey, we have this guy.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: He we believe he's in Asheville.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know where.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's potentially unhoused, and we need you to acquire his DNA, but we don't want to show our hand.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to legally acquire it, so he has to discard it, and you have to find it.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: It has to be, you have to be able to confirm it's his, and we don't want him to know because we're gearing up for an interview and we don't want, we would like to get him in his most genuine state.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_04: Very cloak and dagger type stuff.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's honestly like it's not unusual.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is like not a unique tactic.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that is like, oh, of course, one of those to us.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like we understand the uh when you do your offender approach, when you approach for an interview, you want to really control all aspects of it, the environment.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: So honestly, it wasn't an unusual request.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: But we get it, and uh, I happen to be briefing the uh other divisions, just we'll mention bigger investigations or especially outside investigations, and I mentioned that.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a lieutenant from another division who said, Hey, I know that guy and I know where he might be.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he gave us a lead.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I have a street crimes unit, they're proactive detectives.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, they start circling the area looking for ways to conduct surveillance and not get caught.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's difficult because it's it was a smallish community with a lot of eyes around, and so new things will stand out.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they laid eyes on him but had to pull back or they'd be made.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so their solution was well, we just put a drone up in the air.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Our offender was on public property, and so he put a drone up in the air, and it wasn't long before we saw him starting to smoke a cigarette.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, okay, we'll see if he keeps the butt or if he doesn't, and he didn't, he flicked it.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so he keeps on walking, the drone stays with the butt because that's all we really want, and films a detective walking up and bagging that butt for us.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Charlotte was down pretty quick.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were shocked at how quickly we were able to do it, and we gave them that cigarette butt.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was wondering about it for like a month or two, but I know these things like DNA testing takes a while.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it takes a while.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we end up forgetting about it.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they pop up one morning and say, Hey, it's confirmed.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: We got our warrants in place, uh, serious warrants.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Hey, you know, we'd like for you to get them, we'd like for you to bring them to an interview room, and we'll hustle up there because we're gonna execute a warrant for his DNA.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, not unusual that you want to confirm it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't go off just the cigarette butt alone.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: That gets you to the next step.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it's enough to get warrants for his arrest, too.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so we said, okay, we hit up that unit again, and they started uh their surveillance and were able to pick him up in an about an hour and a half, and Charlotte hustles up.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_04: So how old was that case for them?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell, it was a cold case from 1999.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_04: 1999.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Eric Eric Lee uh Howard was the guy's name.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell And so he's in custody obviously now in Charlotte.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So he never even went to the Buncombe County Jail.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: They uh transported him back to Charlotte Day of Aaron.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: So what is he looking at, charges-wise?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell It's pretty serious.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh first-degree burglary, first degree kidnapping, second-degree sex offense, two counts of second-degree rape, and then an attempted second-degree sex offense.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell So how old is the guy now?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_04: He's got to be in his 40s, 50s, 60s.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell He's got to be in his fifty I he's born in 77.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_04: So that makes him about 49, 48, whatever it happens to be.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, so he's looking at a long time behind bars.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_04: Hopefully, maybe most of the rest of his life based on what the guy's done.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_04: That's great work there.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_04: Another piece of technology and a piece of that technology puzzle, the drones, doing some great work there helping you with that.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's a surveillance camera.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's all it is.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a surveillance camera?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you choose when it is.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's got limitations in that.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's got a battery, so if you don't mind it, it will fall out of the sky.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a surveillance camera you can put where you want.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: With that, there is a pretty big asterisk next to its use because we can't put a surveillance camera anywhere.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have to be very, very careful where you put it.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the layers that are in place there, and there are a number of them, we don't just like throw the drone up in the air willy-nilly.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: The supervisor knows about it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: They know why we need it for that.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: They know what we're doing, and there's a plan on its use.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_04: Specific purpose.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Very specific purpose.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we are in contact with our beyond the bare minimum of the law, which we do get broken down for us.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: The city attorney put together a document that's really helpful, that keeps us up to date, and we constantly review hey, do we need to make any changes?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But internally, we have a what is beyond the bare minimum that the law sets.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: What is the ethical use of this item?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: How would we want this used?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're not outside a society, we're members of it too.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're very careful.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: We train on it and we scrutinize its use, and there are audits in place for its use.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell One more big win uh before you take off.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_04: And I appreciate you coming in, Captain Joe Silberman.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: We had a huge bust that was part of a uh bigger case, but it led to the largest fentanyl seizure in the history of Boncombe County.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know which one you were gonna do.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: The large fentanyl seizure, or we had the jewelry heist.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: We got a lot of stuff going on.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: We made uh we made both of those using tech.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_04: Let's hold on to the jewelry heist because that one looks like it's gonna go a little further.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll I was gonna say that one's not done yet.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that one's not done yet.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_04: So it looked like we're gonna that one's gonna go a little bit further, but yes, technology with that one.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: The fentanyl seizure.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd been using TIP 411 for a while.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent program, interesting concept.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is a one-way blind reporting system.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So you could fire off tips.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the trouble with what we had been using, which was you call in tips, is people don't necessarily trust that their phones won't be tracked, which our tip line, we weren't doing that.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: But also a lot of our tipsters, they're not experts in the law.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: They aren't familiar with the investigative process.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: The information they would give us would be limited or incomplete.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they wouldn't know what they you don't know what you don't know, and they wouldn't know what they were sitting on.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there are all these little elements to uh our tradecraft, and there are little fine points to elements of the law.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what our TIP 411 does is it allows a one-way blind but two-way conversation in that a detective could fire back, hey, this is great.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: You don't happen to know X, Y, and Z.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe they know X and Y.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that gets that detective a little further.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: It adds credibility to the tip.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so it's it's gonna be a little extra in a search warrant, maybe, or it's gonna lead that detective to a database they might not have checked, or change the way they search, or uncover uh something hidden that we might not have gotten to.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's led to many cases getting solved.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, that area, the area where we made that bus, Gash's Creek, we'd been working for a while, notoriously hard to work.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh very, very hard to not stick out like a sore thumb, very limited in where we could set up and how we could set up.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were having a lot of trouble with it.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: We did try uh drone for a while, not very effective.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Again, we're limited by battery and distance, sort of falls out of the sky.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Your launch area calls a ton of attention to itself and it does make noise where it's at.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: So over a crowded city with traffic, you could hide that thing in uh in a sleepy uh rural neighborhood, sticks out like a sore thumb.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what Gash's Creek Road is.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's rather rural.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we're having a lot of trouble around that, and uh we uh were working some of the TIP 411 information and it led to uh surveillance, which led to a vehicle stop, which led to a vehicle seizure, and we actually put it on ice.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't think there was anything in that car.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: We seized like an RV and some other things that we figured like, okay, our our evidence, the good evidence is going to be elsewhere, not in the small car.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so we chip away of that for the first day or two, and as we're moving through executing search warrants, we get to the small car, and there's just our offender who is wrapped up in jail under other warrants, but that's where the offender kept his treasure.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of it, too.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of it.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_04: So multiple guns.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Six to one half dozen or the other.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was you know, he was hiding death in that car.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: Fenton all his poison.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's just as dangerous as guns.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: I watch it kill people all the time.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: The guns, again, totally respect people's rights and the Constitution.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: I avail myself to them too, but it's responsible people.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are in the drug game uh pushing poison out, yeah, we don't want you to have guns like this.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want you to have guns, period.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_04: So this is another great example of the community directly contributing to uh a positive cleaning up their community of this, quite frankly.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_04: We put this little note on the end of all of our press releases.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_04: It's like if you have information about this, use TIP 411, or if you know of crime in general, use and I'm sure it becomes white noise to some people and others have probably said Hey, does anyone even use it?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_04: Well, yes.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they they totally use it.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as a matter of fact, part of my role as supervisor during homicides is I look and I see like, hey, how many leads do we have?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: We have I try and get personnel in, as much as I could throw at the problem.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: But then I look at like how many leads do we have?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: So not only do you need personnel, but you need they need to be gainfully employed.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: They need work to do.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if the work starts looking thin.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Where I'm worried it's going to get thin.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's where I see, like, hey, what could I share the public?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: How could I blow on these embers and start a fire?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll call uh the PIO sometimes at 3 a.m.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: to say, like, hey, check your email.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: I need you to push something out now in the hopes that somebody will see it first thing in the morning and get on that tip line.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll have, you'll have detective supervisors that just are constantly like pulling out their phones, hitting refresh, hoping we get a tip in.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And more often than not, it works.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Yeah, we've seen it work.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_04: And we saw it in this instance where community members saw something and they said something, something that we ask all the time.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_04: And it works when you have a system like this, too, like you mentioned, the two-way communication that's also anonymous.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell Yes.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's really handy when people talk back.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, we have to triage them.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: We get a lot of tips.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what gets you closer to the, I mean, obviously there's a level of exigency and we consider other factors like amount of violence in the area and things like that.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: If we have enough where, hey, this is, we're able to validate this in these different ways before we even leave the building, that gets you close to the top of the pile, right?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: Having just a lot of juicy information for us to uh sink our teeth into definitely makes it a lot easier versus, hey, I have this tip, it's probably good, but I'm gonna have to burn like a couple staff hours into getting what we need, or we have this one we could just go now.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it just becomes uh a staff management puzzle.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell Captain Joe Silberman, thank you so much for coming by, sharing some of your stories.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_04: We're gonna hold on to that uh jewelry heist and have you back in here soon as that one continues to develop.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well Detective Boyanovsky would be good for that one.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: He has uh done amazing work in that case.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell Well, he's got hit the ground running in your department.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: He started off as an intern, and he he got that one with all of the scams in the apartments, and now this one.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Detectives working the sexual assault were interns too.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's becoming par for the course now, but uh detective Johnson, Madison Johnson, who's second generation.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: I worked with her dad in CID.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: She's second generation detective.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she is just an outstanding investigator and absolutely hit the ground running on that, just basically tapping in whoever she could to get her the intelligence she needed.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she put it all together and she did it in basically a week.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And these kind of cases, the expectation is hey, don't hold your breath.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be, you know, charge-wise, month to six months sometimes.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: We maintain a large cold case.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's heard of the sexual assault kit backlog.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um we send her kits to the state, and sometimes it takes a while to come back.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it comes back really quick with no hit, and you have to wait months or years for a hit.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: She did what she needed to do to get the elements of probable cause together, to have a judge say, Yes, you've got a warrant.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_04: Your team is doing some great work.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_04: Keep it up.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_04: Captain Joe Silberman, thanks for joining us.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Red.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_04: I'm joined now by Sergeant Scott Mews and Senior Police Officer Nathaniel Smith.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: Call him Smitty.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_04: We just had a brief conversation.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_04: There's uh there's no middle name, there's no shortening of the name.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_04: It is just please Smitty, right?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's it.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_04: And so we're here today to talk about our canines.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_04: Smitty, you've got a new one.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_04: Sergeant Mews, you're in charge of the unit.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_04: How long has that been the case?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: Twelve years.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: I've been in it for twenty-one, over twenty-one.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: I'm in my twenty-second year of it.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I've I've been here twenty-five years, so most of my entire career has been canine stuff.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: Smitty, how about you?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I am going to my ninth year.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: Flown by.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_04: Flies by, doesn't it, though?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_04: And how long have you been with APD?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_04: Have you been with the canines most of the time?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_04: So almost the whole time.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_04: No, so what I know is it's a coveted position.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: It is.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone seems to, whether they know it or not, have even been a part of it, they want to be a part of the canines because they think, oh, I get to play with a dog all day long.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_04: Which obviously it's a lot more than that.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_04: It's way more than that.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_04: So let's let's get into this.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_04: I know you've got a a new canine, Smitty, and we'll talk about uh Hardy here in just a few minutes, but let's talk about the unit in general.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_04: First of all, these dogs are highly trained.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_04: They are.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_04: But they're part working dog, but they're also just part dog dog, good boy, right?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_03: We try to pick a dog with a good temperament.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_03: So he can be a dog at home, he can be a work dog at work, and you have to have that switch.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: They're always on the go, always on the hunts.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: They don't make good pets per se.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_03: But if you know how to handle the dog, you can allow him to have a little downtime at home and just chill and not be, you know, feeling like he's got to search, search, search, and do this and do that.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_03: Uh mine loves the couch.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_03: He piles up, eats his ball, falls asleep.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: He has a um a stuffed frog.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: He's had a stuffed frog for a very long time.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's the only toy he won't tear up, and he sleeps with it like a little baby.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: How many times have we had to replace that though?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: It's the same as the same frog.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_03: For whatever reason, he will not tear up his frog.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: Everything else, he eats the squeaker out of it.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_04: But he is he's kind of semi-retired, almost fully retired now, right?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: So that's Yago, right?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_04: It's Yago.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_04: That's a Malawasso.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_04: There you go.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_03: So how old is Yago?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: 13 and a half.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_04: So that's, you know, he's just kind of he's just wants to chill at this point.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: He does, but he's got that mental kick going on where he thinks he needs to be part of something.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: He gets upset if he doesn't get in the car to go with me when I go places.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I bring him to work.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: He chills out in the office, visits everybody, and uh he's a good PR tool.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: He's he's super chill, likes to pet, get petted on.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_04: So with Iago's time kind of as a working dog winding down, and your career with the APD is kind of winding down, that's the last dog for you, right?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_03: That's gonna be the last one for me.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: The time it takes to to create what I like in a dog.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: Two less time to go for me.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I think I'm two years away.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_04: Because obviously you guys you grow a personal attachment.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it it it's hard to describe that attachment.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: I spend all day at work with this dog.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Smitty does too with his dog.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: And then you go home and you feed the dog, you give it if it needs medication, you've got to give it exercise, it can't be pent up all the time.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_03: Provide vet care, do all the different things with it.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: It's just like another extension of your family.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's like having another kid at home.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: And unfortunately, you know, a dog doesn't live forever.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_04: So this the sad part of it is at some point they're going to pass.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: They are, and it that's the saddest part.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's hard.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'm on my third one, and I've got a good long working life out of each of them.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: But it's uh it's a difficult time.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm I'm nearing that now and I see it coming.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_03: I know it's coming, and it's uh I'm trying to prepare myself for that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_03: But how do you prepare for that?
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_04: That's kind of tough.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_04: Smitty, I know that not too long ago you lost one.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: Bolo.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: That was bolo, right?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_04: Canine Bolo.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_04: Eight eight years.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_04: Eight years with bolo.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I've had dogs, we've had all kinds of pets before, but I've never had that connection where you guys have them where you're you're with them all day long.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_04: You know, all day, all night.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm sure this is a question a lot of people ask.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_04: I kind of know the answer, but let's let's get it out there.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_04: You you live with the dog.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_04: The dog lives with you.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's your dog for all intents and purposes.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_04: So you need a little bit, I would guess, land a little bit of land, I would guess, right?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_04: A little bit of place for them to be outside.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: I have over an acre, so they have a good running area, play to run area.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_04: Is there anything at your house that almost serves as like a training thing in the backyard, like where he needs to, okay, let's get outside and do something with you because you need some.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_02: So wherever he goes, whether it's home or work, he's gonna try and do something working wise.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_04: So canine Hardy is Smitty, your newest canine.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, sir.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_04: And you've had him for how long?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: Almost about a month right now.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_04: A month?
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_04: And and they get professionally trained.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_04: These dogs go through intense training, isn't that right, Sergeant?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_03: They do.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um these dogs from the time they're born, they get selected by somebody and they determine do you have the right drive and all the different things they look for.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so this dog, from the time it's a little puppy, goes through a variety of exercises the first year of its life to get used to slick floors, dark rooms, jumping on things, hunting for things, and usually start that with food because it's something the dog wants, he needs.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_03: And so you teach him to hunt for food, and then you can kind of develop that into hunting for a toy, and then in its lighter stages, uh, right before Smitty gets the dog, the dog learns the toy and the odor get paired together.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: So you can have a bomb dog.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: I have a narcotics dog.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you have to pick what odor, you can't obviously do both.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so that dog, its whole life, is being trained to do something, whether it knows it or not.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: We just make games out of it.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the whole key to successful training is the dog thinks he's playing a game.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: I'm looking for a toy.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: That's all the dog cares about.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'm looking for my food or my toy.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: They don't care if they're a bomb dog or if they're a drug dog.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't matter to them.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: They just know one of those odors creates the fun thing in my life.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think Hollywood has lent us to believe that the dogs know there's a greater mission, but really it's just a game.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's just a game.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: And that even goes into the apprehension side of things.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: We teach that with a a little tug, and then we work that to a sleeve and to a full suit, and it's just a game.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: It's just something fun for the dog to do.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's a lot of fun for the dog to do, but they're not aggressive, they don't view that as an aggressive exercise.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you come up and shove me, he's gonna think that's part of the game, and you might get a little more edge out of the dog, but uh, it's just a big game.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's something to grab a hold of and chew on the dogs.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: Love to chew to chew on things.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_04: So Hardy, your newest canine, is a melanoir?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_04: He's a shepherd male.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, so he's a mix.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_04: So there are certain dogs that seem to have the right temperament and size, of course.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_04: You can't have like a little toy poodle.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_04: That's not going to do you any good.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_04: Although chihuahuas have an edge to them.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_04: At least they think they do.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_04: You could I'd like to see a canine chihuahua at some point.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_04: Put it in my pocket.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: But so Malinois are very a popular breed.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_04: German shepherds, and we even have a lab, right?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_04: So are those predominantly are those the breeds right there, or are there different ones as well?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: Some others.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um what's uh Dutch Shepherd?
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: Dutch Shepherd, and the pointer.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_03: Some people are doing the German short short hair pointer now, which is fun to watch because they actually point when they find their odor.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's really, really kind of neat to see.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: You want a large breed dog, large chest, bigger lungs, longer snout, uh, more scent receptors that way.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you need a dog that's over 50 pounds to take down a human if you're going to do any type of bite and apprehension work.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: But you want that dog that has a hunt drive, a play drive, and then you can manipulate his natural drives to do things that are helpful to us as humans.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's maybe I was hoping you would bring Hardy with you, but now looking at the size of this room and the size of all of us, it's probably a good thing that he wasn't here.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he is.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of things you would enjoy.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_04: Would he mess up the foam on the wall and the things that you're doing?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: We'd tear into that pretty good, wouldn't it?
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_04: So you said you've had him for about a month.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_04: What have you learned from him so far about him?
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_02: He's he's very high energy compared to my last dog, Bolo, who he was high energy, but not as much.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_02: Because obviously, Mals have very, very high energy in Shepard.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: So that that aspect of the Malawa is what I see a lot in him.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And like I said from earlier, like he he loves to work.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: He's Sergeant Tate, like he's he loves to search.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like it we can be in a very small room, and he'll in his mind he's like, I gotta search for something.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_02: So it it is is a good thing, because you know you got a dog that always wants to work, but some days you're just like, I just need you like chill.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: Just go in the backyard and relax.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Be a dog.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_04: So let me ask you this.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_04: Is the dog do they kind of determine what kind of a dog they're going to be early in the stages?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like the trainer's like, oh, you're gonna be a drug dog, or oh, you're gonna be a bomb dog, or oh or it can they all just kind of qualify for any of that?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big misconception.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: Odor is odor.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't matter if it's bomb odor, uh narcotics odor, uh human odor.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh they have dogs now that hunt the uh the little chips that I don't know like a computer chip.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: Cell phone dogs.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: They can smell a computer chip?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's some chemical that you use to process those that you can teach a dog to smell.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: Same with cell phones.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: There's something in a cell phone you can teach a dog.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of the gels have those.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: So odor is odor.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: So what you want for that is a dog who will hunt and who will not stop hunting.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: And there's some drills that you can do to test that and see, you know, will you hunt for things?
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then what happens when you get bored?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Do you stop hunting or do you just keep hunting and hunting and hunting?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's the dog that you want to be an odor detection dog.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the particular odor you choose is determined by whoever's gonna use the dog.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: I could have picked out his dog and made it a drug dog just as easily as we could make it a bomb dog.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't matter.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_03: We just know that he'll hunt until he dies.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's all he wants to do.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so when you look for that, that to me, I like that in a bomb dog.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: One that's really crazy about it because their searches are typically way longer.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: A narcotics dog, you're gonna search a car or maybe a small house, or maybe a hotel room, a bag.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_03: This dog has to do that.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: He's got to do something like the Civic Center, uh, the Ramsey Center over in Silva and help those folks out.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the parade route.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's a long, long, long search.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_03: So you want a dog who doesn't get bored, he'll keep at it and stay with it.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_04: Does the training continue for the dogs even after they're it's just it nonstop, just like it is for officers?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: I've I have put in so many hours since I've gotten this dog in training.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like it is it is unreal.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like those first stages, especially like getting a new dog, like you put in so many hours of training.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Just because one, you want to build a bond with the dog.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, you need to know the dog's highs and lows, what they're good at, what they're not good at.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: So those I would almost say like this first six to twelve months of dog training is the most crucial part of being a canine handler.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because you're putting in so many hours of training.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_04: Did you have dogs growing up?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_04: I'm gonna guess yes.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, yeah.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: I I love dogs.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've always been a dog person.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: I've pit bulls, because you know everybody else give that pit bulls are dangerous.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: I've every dog I've owned of my own has been a pit bull.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_02: Until I became a canine handler, I didn't have my first shepherd, and now I love shepherds.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: So shepherds and pit bulls are my and mouse, because now I got a mouse.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_04: So you're welcome.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, thank you.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_04: Did you grow up in Western North Carolina area?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in South Carolina, town called Georgetown, right between Charleston and Myrtle Beach.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_04: I am familiar with it.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_04: I've actually been there.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_04: I lived in Charleston for about three years.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_04: Uh so I know that area pretty decent.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's a beautiful area.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_04: Not too far from the beach.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_04: Nope, not too far.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_04: Got a couple golf courses nearby.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_04: A lot of golf courses.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's it's the big thing down there.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_04: How about you, Sergeant?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_04: Where'd you grow up?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: I grew up in Waynesville.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: So local, lived here my whole life.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_03: Always had dogs ever since I was little.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_04: What kind of dogs do you have?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: My first dog was a bird dog.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then I got a um a puppy who was a half-working German shepherd who accidentally mated with some other Norwegian elk hound.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_03: Accidentally?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: I think they did it on purpose.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: They probably did it on purpose.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: Their owner did not allow it, but it happened.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_03: And uh so I was able to pick up one of those puppies, and that's kind of that's kind of what got me into the breed of the working type dogs.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: After that, I had another bird dog, and um when I came here I had no interest in having dogs, and then one was assigned to the shift I worked on, and I fell in love first shift.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, that that is amazing.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: And just watching that dog work and do the different things it could do, I was blown away.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I thought I've got to do that.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: And so that became my career mission.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I had no idea that it would be my whole career, basically.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: It's addictive.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_04: I had dogs growing up, but my wife is a cat person.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: Oh yes.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_04: No chance of a feline division because cats are pretty much useless.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_04: They're not gonna do anything for you.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm destined for that and at least until I can retire and have some time and have a dog.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Because you gotta have time, dude.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: They take up so much time.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_04: I mean in a good way, because they're your companions.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_04: As well as, you know, your your co-worker and all of those things.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_04: But I mean, it is, especially for you guys, it is nonstop.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_04: What what what happens when you go on vacation?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_04: Do you take the dog with you?
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_04: No.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_04: I try to give him to Scott.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_05: Give him a scott.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_03: Trade off where we can.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could take the dog.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: It's just very hard to find somewhere that you could have a working dog, but you need to relax as a handler too and not have that burden of this dog.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I hate to say the word burden, but it can be a burden if you do it 24-7.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_03: So it's nice to have a vacation.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: We take really good care of each other and we'll babysit each other's dogs and give them the exercise and the training that they need and keep them, keep the dog motivated.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: The dog doesn't take a day off.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: He doesn't want a day off.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_03: He wants to go, go, go.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: So we just give them things to do and keep them happy and exercised and make their little brains work, and that gives the handlers some time to go away and do something for themselves.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_04: Sergeant Scott Mews and SPO Smitty join me right now talking about our canines.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_04: So the dogs, you kind of alluded to it right there, they can have other handlers.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like they they get attached, obviously, to one, like yours hardy to you, and obviously Yago to you, but other members of the department can also use the dogs and they understand.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: Well, not necessarily.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_03: They there's a certain bond that you have to have for the dog to actually listen to you.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: I could teach you all the words that control the dog.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_03: He might listen to you for just a minute, and then he's gonna be like, Who is this guy?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not listening to you.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: I don't understand.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: I get that a lot around here, actually.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_03: So, no, there has to be a bond, and because we all train together a couple of days a month, we have the bond, some bond with with each of the dogs.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: Now, like Bolo that he had before, not keeping Bolo.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_03: Bolo did not like me.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_03: There was some type of of hatred he had towards me that I can't figure out.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but every other dog I'm fine with.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: So we just pick whoever the dog tends to like the most and who's willing to help out.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_03: But it's it's a it's a responsibility you've got to think about before you do anything, before you add a family member, before you move, before you do anything.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_03: It's um it's a lifestyle change.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: Just the same as when a person becomes a police officer, the lifestyle changes a little.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: And when they become a canine handler, it changes a little more.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: It's um it's a quite the commitment.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_04: Is this where you plan on remaining the rest of your career spending in with the canines?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_04: Or is there something else you want to do within the department?
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, one day I'd like to be a supervisor, but I I find my home at Canine.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm now part of the ERT, so I found my home there.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm right now I'm I'm in a good spot where I always wanted to be.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_04: So dogs can be funny too.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_04: Is there a funny moment that comes to mind with either of yours?
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_04: Is that just kind of something they did like in an inappropriate moment or something along those lines?
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: Not hardy yet.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm pretty sure that day will come.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_02: I know my last dog, Bolo, I know he ate my lunch one day after while I was on a call for service, which I was very hungry that day, and it was like two o'clock in the day.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: So I had went and got a chicken sandwich from Bo Jangles on Airport Road.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: When I got done with the call, I was like, well, I'm gonna go have lunch.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: I quickly realized my lunch wasn't where I left it at before I got out of the car.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_02: I looked back in the kennel, and the only reason why I I normally keep his the kennel door closed, but while I was at Bo Jango's, they didn't want to see him, so I slid the door open so they can see him.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I guess I didn't close the door back all the way.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, while I was on that call for service, I guess he found his way into the passenger seat, stole my sandwich, ate it.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_02: But he did leave me the tomato, so that that's a story I always tell, and people always kind of get a crack out of that one.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you can't blame the dog for that.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I couldn't be mad.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was mad, but I couldn't.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_04: Well, at the time, get another sandwich for that.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I had to go get another one.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_04: How about you with Yago?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, with Yago, he recently I've had to put a baby gate in the office because if I let him range freely, he will find whatever doors open.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_03: He's brought me a boot, he brought me uh another sergeant's jacket the other day that was hanging on his desk.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh anything that smells like a human being, this dog thinks, so I'll have to bring him to dad.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: And he'll go retrieve it, bring it back, and then he looks at him like, Where's my toy?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_03: Where's my toy?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: He loves to retrieve.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: So that's that's been an ongoing battle with him.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um I've I'm on my third dog.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_03: My other dog on a traffic stop, Boris, the dog I had before, scared me to death because my siren starts going off on a traffic stop, and he decided to do the same thing.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: He opened the door to see what was going on, stands in the middle, and he's manipulating the lights and siren, and it's just it's kind of funny in the moment.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's a good way to get somebody out of a ticket, I suppose.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, just go.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_04: Just I gotta deal with this dog here.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_04: I got things with the dog.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_03: They're they're all really funny and have their own little quirks and personalities, which and they're all so different, which is kind of neat to see.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_03: You would think they would be, you know, kind of all the same militant way or something, but they're not.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_03: They're all very disciplined, but they're all just quirky in their own way.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_03: So we have another couple of dogs coming our way, I understand.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_03: We do have another one coming.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_03: Uh he should be here in about 30 days or so.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: We have a canine process that's open.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the applicants have their name in and they're going to be interviewed fairly soon.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: So, how many people applied for that?
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_03: I believe three people applied to the city.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: Just three, I expected more.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many restrictions about how long you've been here, your living arrangements, the commitment to the dog.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: We ask you that you commit to the working life of the dog, which can be, in my case, y'all goes 12 years in.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_03: Uh that's a long time to commit your your career.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_04: So a lot of people think they want to be a part of the canine, but maybe they don't realize the commitment.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's the responsibility.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: It was like when the camera's on, you see all the glamour, and when it goes off, people don't see the behind the scenes of what it takes to get there.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then when you start telling people about it, they're like, Yeah, maybe I'll think about this.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like, because it's it's a lot of work.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it it sounds like a great idea to have a dog, but it's not just having a dog.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_02: I tell people it's a 24-hour job, 365 days a year job.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of training, a lot of work.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_03: My dog threw up in the car this morning.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_03: You know, who's gonna clean that out?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_03: That would that would be me.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think that'd be you.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody tells you that.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_04: You know, we don't advertise that part.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's a good point to end on right there.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_04: That's uh let's end with that right there.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_04: So, Sergeant Scott Mews, Smitty, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_04: Thanks for having me.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_04: Joining me now, welcome to John Perez, Property and Evidence Manager.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_04: Welcome, John.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Rick.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love being here.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for the invite.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_04: You've got a little bit of history in kind of this universe, right?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_04: Weren't you in TV back in the day?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: I started, believe it or not, I started when I was 16.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: If I may tell you the quick version of this.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was in high school and I was the sports editor of our high school paper.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_04: And where's that?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: This was down in West Palm Beach, Florida.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: The editor of the paper was a senior, and he was getting ready to graduate and go off to college, and he worked at the local NBC affiliate or station there in West Palm.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Hey, they're looking for somebody to replace me.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: And are you interested?
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, sure.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it was for more of like a production assistant, you know, kind of a gopher thing.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I went and interviewed and got the job.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: I was 16 going on.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Just about going on seventeen.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: And this was back when you know people remember back in the day when stations at like midnight or one o'clock would go to color bars, they'd sign off.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is going away.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is like 1982.
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I remember that growing up.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_04: It's crazy.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_04: We'd go to like a this black and white photo, and at least in our network, it was a picture of a Native American.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_04: With like a weird-looking diagram with black and white and whatever.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_04: And then and you do the national anthem.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_04: And then it would just sign off.
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_04: And then that's it.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_04: That's what we'll see you tomorrow.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: You're done.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's it.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I went and interviewed for the job and I got it.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it was on the weekends.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I I ended up working every day because uh it was only a Saturday-Sunday thing.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it was, believe it or not, you're gonna laugh at this.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was an assignment editor position on the weekends.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_04: For a 16-year-old kid.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_04: What did you know about it?
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: I I was like, what am I doing?
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: So so you they, you know, they would have like the assignment editor during the week would have like a folder and just a community events and story ideas and things.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And my job on Saturday morning was to come in and look at the folder, and then I had two reporters and two cameramen, like a daytime and then a night beat.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I would assign me, a 16-year-old, would assign stories.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, I need you to go out in this.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: We had police scanners, so I had to do police checks, I had to call all the police stations uh during the morning and say, Hey, did anything happen last night?
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, Oh, yeah, well, we you know, like occasionally you'd say, Oh, we had a homicide or something.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was after the fact.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you would send a crew out and at least get some footage of the street or just something and get an interview with the but it was I couldn't believe that a 16, 17 year old.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of got thrown into that and I had to learn on my feet and then run into teleprompter and stuff.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it also ended up going to the morning show.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now back then, the morning show was only a half an hour.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now you look at news in the morning, it starts at 4 30 in the morning and runs up till seven o'clock when the national people take over.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_04: Hours and hours worth.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a half-hour show.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I would get up at four in the morning, go to the station, which was locked.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: They had they gave me a key and an alarm code.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: I would open the door, turn the alarm off.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: That was the only car in the parking lot, start making the coffee, rip the wires.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you remember back in the day we had the teletype wires.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to rip all that and organize it for the people when they were coming in the anchor and the producer, and then make my police checks and have everything ready.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'd run the teleprompter and then I'd go to school.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as we went off the air at seven, I'd drive to school.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_04: That is just absolutely I mean, in in a way, it sounds similar to a job I had in uh Evansville, Indiana, uh, that I actually had to drive to Illinois an hour through cornfields because it was in the process of uh an LMA.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_04: So it had been purchased and they were building new studios.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_04: And so I moved to Evansville, but like, oh yeah, for the first six months or so, you got to drive to Illinois.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's like basically kind of like a glorified trailer was the stuff and it was the same thing, right?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_04: In the middle of nowhere, had to pull all the teletype, yeah, do all this all by myself, and you'd hear noises.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_04: You're always like now I was a little more than 16 at the time, but uh to get a start like that.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_04: It was crazy.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_04: Nobody gets a job like that anymore.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's unheard of now.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_04: You can't with no everything doesn't exist.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it's just a different time.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_04: Even back then, it's pretty wild.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, yeah, I got a buddy that wants Hey, they're looking for somebody.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think I might know a guy.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_04: But that's a great start.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_04: That's a great origin story, you know.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_04: And so you continued to pursue that what in college?
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: I just I stayed with the station and uh went through you know high school, graduated, and then in college, uh I stayed local for a little bit, and then I ended up getting a job down in Miami uh and then commuting every day to God, what was the station?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Univision was the Univision station down there.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_04: I mean you started at a big market with a big station, which is unheard of.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had a separation, a coup call you call it, when a bunch of people left Univision and they started their own network, which now is Telemundo.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is going way back.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so the guy that hired me said, Look, this is a freelance thing only, so uh for now, so don't quit your job.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I stayed at the station at NBC.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: I would say, by steering that.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Jeez.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_04: Don't quit your job.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_04: We're not sure how long you got it.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I I would still do my thing at the NBC station in the morning, and then at and then I took c I was in college, so I took a took a year off, and then what I did was at seven o'clock in the morning, when I finished the morning show there, I'd get in my car and drive to Miami and then work a full day down there.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_05: Oh man.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I was doing that for several months, and then they finally hired me full time.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: For the national news, I was doing some assignment editing, and then I did some satellite because we'd have reporters from all over the world setting their feeds for their stories.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that was pretty it was pretty interesting.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I did that for a year, and then they left for California, and I'm like, I don't want to move to California.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna stay.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_04: What brought you to Asheville?
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm from Jersey.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: I like the cold weather.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: I know people look at me kind of weird.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_04: No, I I mean I get it.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_04: I'm from Buffalo, so I I I always tell people that.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_04: When I lived in Charleston, it was the most miserable I had ever been in my life.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_04: The heat and humidity was just soul sucking.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's brutal.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so when my parents my parents immigrated in the early 60s here from Cuba.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they were fleeing communist Cuba at the time, and they got here, and my dad got a job in New Jersey, so that's where they moved.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was born in 1965, and we were in New Jersey for till the mid-70s, and then they just decided to move to Florida.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: Then my mom couldn't take the the cold weather.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_04: So why did they go to Jersey instead of Florida for the first?
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_04: Because there's a huge Cuban population.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: There was, but not at that, not at that time.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: If if you know it's funny, I look back at history and Miami really wasn't a lot of a lot of Hispanics back in the 60s.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_04: So that's been more recently.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, over the course of you know, going into maybe the late 60s, early 70s.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: But my dad was a worker and he he wanted to get the first, and he had some front, they had some friends in New Jersey that had also had a while.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: They had already been here a little bit, and he called them, he said, Hey, there's I got work up here, and my dad's like, I'm going where the work is.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we were up there, I was born up there, and I still have a you know, a big, you know, I still have family up there.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm a jersey, you know I always consider myself a Jersey guy.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a Jersey guy.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: But we moved to Florida in 1976, 77.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I basically grew up down there.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't like the heat.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: I just, you know, it was it wasn't for me.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: I always liked to change the season.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: I met my wife, who actually worked at the NBC station.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: She actually had a 36-year career there.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: And her family had ties to Jackson County.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we started dating, and I came up with her for a family wedding.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's the first time I'd ever been to Western Carolina.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as I saw it, I was like, oh my God, this is beautiful.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: I wanna, I want to live here.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: So for 30 plus years, we were coming up and spending holidays up here and whatnot.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I kept telling her, someday I want to move up here, someday I want to move up here.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: So when we got to the point where we retired, our decision was we're gonna figure out a way and we're gonna, and so we ended up getting a house up here, and we're 20 in 2022.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: I retired and she retired, and we moved up here full time.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm on my fifth year, and I still drive commute back back and forth from here to my house, and I'm still looking around, pinching myself.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I can't believe I finally live here.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_04: So you retired and came here, and clearly you are now not retired, right?
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I gotta do something.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_04: You unretired.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, unretired.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_04: And uh so what made you think of this type of work?
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_04: This is nothing like what you did before.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of funny because I've I've talked to some people that work here and they've made this drastic career change and they moved they did one thing and then went to the other.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_01: And and I get that, where people say, wait a minute, y you worked in broadcasting and then you just decided to go into law enforcement.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, Yeah, I know it's kind of a weird transition, but and you can probably attest to this, you know, towards the end that business just got so corporate.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_04: It wears you down too.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: It just wears you down, and I'm like, you know what, I'm just kind of tired of this.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: I need to go do something else.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I did have a lot uh a bunch of my friends who were in law enforcement, and I started kind of picking their brain, and and I thought, you know, that's kind of an exciting line of work.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: I know it's dangerous, but and a lot of them were trying to talk me out of it, but you know, I had my sights set to it.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was 30, I went to the police academy and um got a job, and uh I guess the rest is history.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's it's been a wonderful career.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: I loved law enforcement.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: I I and I wish I would have started it earlier.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: But as far as coming here and doing the property stuff, when I was uh I retired, I I was fortunate enough to kind of work my way up and retired as a captain.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: But when I was a lieutenant in criminal investigations, we had property.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was over that for a little bit.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_05: Okay.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: So when this position, when I was looking for something uh to do up here, I said, hey, look, Astral PD's got a property position.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sort of familiar with that.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: Every agency is different how they do things, but I figured, well, I got a little bit of a head start because I kind of know what it's about.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh yeah, so I applied for it and you know, I here I am.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I I mean I feel your history.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's kind of it's not as weird to you or to to me as maybe to people on the outside that uh they kind of choose a profession and whereas they may move a little bit around within that.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_04: They're still in the same universe that they started, right?
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_04: Whereas you were broadcasting, I was broadcasting, and then you take a complete just left turn and just go to somewhere else.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, in my case, it was started by running a brewery after a quarter century in radio.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_04: You know, that was a complete change.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_04: And then I came back into broadcasting, but having left once, it kind of told me, yeah, you can just do this again.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_04: And just translatable skills being what they are.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's uh I've been here for a little over two years, obviously not as long, but completely different.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_04: But still some of the things you acquired are usable.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_04: I'm going from the other side now, instead of being a member of the media and talking with people like police departments and public now I'm the other way around.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_04: But I get the relationship stuff, right?
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_04: And I get all that.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_04: And so it's just turning that around.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I I I like to think that over the course of my five years, almost five years here now, I've gotten to a point where we've really has have established that relationship with the officers.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know sometimes I'm sending them emails saying, Hey, I need you to come in and fix this.
• 54:31
  SPEAKER_01: But they do now uh just in general stop by and you know, on their way in or out, and they stop for a second and then wave and or we'll talk sports, you know, or something, or something that's interesting.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Or so it's been it's been a a a nice transition in that when when I first started here, they're like, Who's this, who's this guy?
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and then so I I've tried to and and the staff that we have down there also they do a great job.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're we're kind of behind the scenes.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: If there's an if there's a if there's a unit in this agency that's really behind the scenes, yeah, it's us.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_04: I was just about to say that actually.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_04: It's like no one talks about property and evidence until there's something wrong.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_04: It's almost like being an offensive lineman in football.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_04: If they don't say your name, that means you're doing your job.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: You're doing a new job.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: You blocked that person, but if somebody gets through and sacks the quarterback and there you there you have it.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_04: If there's a piece of evidence missing in a case and it's vital to that, you're gonna be pretty famous in a hurry.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: It is really it can get really stressful down there.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now I mean, knock on wood, we we haven't had any problems, but uh which is wonderful, but but there's still kind of that moment where you're like, okay, so what happened to this?
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and and you research it, and okay, you know, we found it, it's here.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's just miss you know, it was moved to another location or something.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: But it is nerve-wracking.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're kind of you're in that boring is good.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: Boring is wonderful.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you and I have talked about boring.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: We like boring.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, boring is great.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: We don't like excitement.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_04: Big fan.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_04: Huge fan of boring.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_04: I I mean, because if you're bored, that means nothing's going on that's really wrong, and that's great.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Come in Monday morning and leave Friday, and what was your week?
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was boring, and that's great.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_04: Loved it.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_04: There is times you say to yourself, Oh, it's been slow or whatever.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_04: We're like, but as soon as you say that, that's the jinx.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's funny.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: We when I was on patrol, we used to we used to have, I'm sure it still exists everywhere, but you know, you'd be a car to car with uh with your partner, your zone partner, or something, and they would say, Man, it's been and I'm like, Don't say it.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_04: Don't say it.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_01: Don't say it.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: And but somebody would sometimes slip it in there, and sure enough, within a couple hours, the radio alert tone, and it was just all heck was breaking loose.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: Talking about the no-hitter, man.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's your fault.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_04: You don't do it.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_04: This is all you this we're you brought this on with you, Bobby.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_04: Yep.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_04: So property and evidence is exactly what it sounds like, right?
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_04: Is very you guys handle all of the and uh it's almost like a in some ways it lost and found too.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_04: You've got people you've lost and found items.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_04: Heck, we had a a prosthetic leg that was quite the story a couple of years ago.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_04: I that was a fun one to tell.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was yeah, that was an interesting one.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: We had everyone's wondering, how do you lose a leg?
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: When you walk around a warehouse, you kind of look for something that's kind of odd.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: And really at that point, the only thing that you know, people would say, What's the weirdest thing you have?
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I would use the kitchen sink kind of saying because we actually have a kitchen sink from a very old case.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd say, you know, everything but the kitchen sink, we have the kitchen sink.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: Until then, until that officer came up to the window one day with this prosthetic leg and we just looked at him.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: We all kind of looked at him and we're like, You've gotta be kidding me.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he just kind of shook his head and said, Nope.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: That was an interesting one.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: So for a little bit, that was kind of the the odd the odd thing in the warehouse.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I mean we're gonna assume that it wasn't on the gentleman's leg when he lost it.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_04: So you know, so it could be lost a different way.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_04: It could be stolen, it could be something else and somebody they're very expensive.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Extremely expensive.
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_04: And that was a custom one, too.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, that officer did uh a really good job with the uh, you know, because there's serial numbers on there and talked to some the local uh prosthetic folks here in Asheville, and they kind of were able to trace it.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_04: It turns out that universe is highly regulated and they keep track of everything, kind of like you.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh a lot of you're dealing with a lot of stuff, I guess is the best way to describe the job.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: We have just set the 60,000 items in that warehouse.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: And and it varies from evidence where our officer classifies it as evidence, to it could be found somebody knocks on the door and says, Hey, I just found this wallet out on the street.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that we we take it.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we and we do our best to try to locate that person and say, Hey, we have your wallet, come get it.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, it's a lot to manage, but we have a wonderful system down there.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's a system that was established prior to my arrival.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I'm very proud to say this, but you know, we are a gold standard with regards to statewide property and evidence, and we're credited, as you know.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a reason for that is because the agency's gotta adhere to certain standards and the security, custody, and control, you know, it comes in, it leaves the same way it came in, you know, and and we take a lot of pride in that.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_04: As I'm sure you know though, it wasn't always that way.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't it was a pretty big issue we had.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_04: Uh it's been now over 20 years.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_04: I was living in Asheville at the time when I remember that.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_04: And so that's you know, it takes a long time to regain trust, and I believe it's been done.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: It has.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, interesting, I I uh just a little comment that was made.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I was um uh they do the Citizens Police Academy and uh Captain Brown um has property and evidence as a part of the segment of actually I think it was like a week ago or so.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: I I had my little segment and uh explained all our security, what we do.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: We have a two-person rule, you know, not one if I need to go to the back, I have to I have to have another person with me in a uh one of the other texts to scan the thing, the door to get in.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: Things like that.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I was explaining little things like that.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm assuming that this lady was privy to the all that that happened way back when.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, you know, after the presentation, she goes, you know, I feel much better now that you said all that stuff because I was a little worried because of what happened way back when.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's nice to see that that's what's going on right now at APD with regards to property.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, no, that's that's a good that's a good sign that you know people are noticing that.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_04: And that you you've done your job, essentially.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's just like, listen, I and my team have done our jobs if we've regained the trust of the community after something like that.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_04: Did you mention as when you were giving your presentation that occasionally you'll get things in there like human things?
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_04: I remember uh it was wasn't that long ago.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_04: It was last summer, I believe it was.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_04: So you guys are kind of it's the first floor, which is weird.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_04: This building's weird.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_04: I call it the basement.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_04: That's what I call it.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_04: But it's the first floor.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_04: And it is if you come in from the back of the building, it's the first floor.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_04: But it appears to be the basement in a way.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: I I was a little bit of a maze it was a maze for me when I first started.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, for everyone.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: I have to go to the public information desk.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's on the third floor.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, okay, hit the elevator.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: Go what where am I going?
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, you've got one elevator in the front that goes up two two floors technically, but it goes from the third to the fourth.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_04: You're like, what?
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't there's a lot of half things going on here because this is of the building itself.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_04: It's over a hundred years old, and it wasn't always this, of course.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_04: It was an open-air market and had all these different things, and they could have remodeled it like eight times.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_04: But I remember walking down right past your office at one point, and I'm like, what is it?
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_04: That's happened a few times.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, that's that's a dead body.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_04: Why was it still in there?
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_04: Well, it's it's then I saw the hazmat tape.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: We so we we have drying cabinets that are accessible to forensics and and officers that bring things that are wet or you know, they have blood on it or whatever.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it sits in the drying cabinet for a week or two.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: But apparently the one that you're referring to that one was a homicide and um they had some clothing in there and immediately I mean had people from like upstairs coming down and going, What is that smell?
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we're like, Well, it's this, and so we had to call.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's a company that we called out, and they sealed the door, and we had some fans and things, and we were able to, but it gets in the air events.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh gosh.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh god.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_04: The only comparison that I had it too is one time in a crawl space center, one of the houses I owned, there was a dead critter.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I it's you know the smell of death.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_04: I hate to say it, but it is very recognizable.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_04: There's nothing like it.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when I was on patrol and I get called for a welfare check.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we haven't seen her or him in a few days, the mail's popping up.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: Before you open the door, you know, you're like, And you're like, uh you're in your car driving, they're going, I think I know what this is.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: Sure enough.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_04: So now you mentioned obviously your your family being from Cuba and and all of that, which kind of ties in nicely to uh one of your additional jobs right now.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_04: So not only are you the manager of property in evidence, but based on the retirement of Sonia Escobito, which was just a few weeks ago.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_04: Great person, and we wish her the best.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_04: Uh and the turnout for her retirement is evidence of the respect that she has garnered around this.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_04: She's so great.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_04: Like half of the force was here.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: I told her I said, You've got to come back at some point.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, I might come back maybe.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_04: So she was our our Spanish translation approval person for uh I guess uh two, three, four, five months, whatever it was, which is something we only recently started doing, uh basically this year.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_04: I think maybe in December or something along those lines.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_04: Which I think is a great idea, right?
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_04: So the Spanish community can see the press release without having to go get somebody that's big.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_04: Translate it.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_04: You know, translate themselves or do whatever they do within the thing.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it's right there for them on our social media.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we don't put it in our releases that we send out to the local media, but we do indicate a Spanish translation is available on our social media.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_04: And so we need someone AI is great, right?
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_04: And it is.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_04: And it does a good job, but not perfect.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_04: So we need someone that knows the language to take a look at it and make sure that this is this good?
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_04: So the process goes, I write the release, it goes through all of our approvals, and when it is finally done done, we attach the Spanish translation.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Google Gemini, or whatever it is, right?
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_04: So then I've got to get a hold of you and say, John, here it is, the Spanish translation.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_04: How's it look?
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_04: And I think so far one of them has been accurate.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_04: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: They're pretty good.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you just kind of massage a couple words here and there, but I think overall it's it's been pretty smooth.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_04: Aaron Powell So what is the biggest thing they get wrong?
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: Masculine feminine in the world of It's the masculine feminine, the A or the O.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: Occasionally it's the for some reason the they'll put a comma.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when we were talking about pounds and things, they'll put a comma next to the number.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, well, that should be a period, because then it looks like it's sixteen thousand as opposed to but little things like that.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's overall it's it's been really it's it's good, but just little tweaks here and there.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we need a human to look at it, right?
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_04: And it ain't gonna be me, because even though I took three years of Spanish, that was in grades 10, 11, and 12, which would make it about 40 years ago.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_04: And as you know, if you don't use it, it's gone.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_04: You lose it.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_04: And and I was actually relatively fluent, basic fluent, not not like I could just walk into Madrid and just be able to speak with everyone.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_04: We had a program where we would go to local elementary schools and we would give them the basics.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_04: So you teach them the numbers, the colors, the things like that.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_04: And so it got to be I was pretty decent at it.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm telling you, just a couple of years later, it's gone.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I can now tell you a couple of colors, a few numbers, and if someone is speaking it, I'll pick up a word or two.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_04: But I couldn't get the general gist.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_04: So you're fluent.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm fluent to some degree, but the thing about Spanish, there's a bunch of different dialects.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like one particular nationality may say might not be the same way another nationality says it.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_04: And it's a regional thing, even within a country as well.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_04: I spoke about that with uh Sergeant Martinez.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_04: So he's from a very specific part of Spain.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and and other dialects come from other parts of that country, and it's not that big of a country.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_04: To be honest with you.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_04: Beautiful country.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and he loves going back there for the food and everything like that.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_04: But he told me, he goes, There's dialect changes.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: There's dialect changes, there's like there's certain words that is very common.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: I found this out like the hard way, I guess, but uh unintentional.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's certain words that mean different things where you use a word that's very common, but then another nationality may look at that word as something more vulgar, if that makes sense.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you always have to be careful who you're speaking with or and kind of keep it basic, because especially when you're talking about speaking with another Spanish person.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_04: Well, and then there's slang too.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_04: And it's kind of I mean look at here in America.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_04: I I mean I can't keep up with the what the kids are saying these days, like the the generation alpha or whoever they are.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_04: It's it in even just regions of our country.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_04: Let's take the example of okay down here, y'all.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, well, where I was from in Buffalo, it was you guys.
• 1:06:53
  SPEAKER_04: We would say you guys.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_04: We could even be talking directly to a female or a group of females, and I would still say you guys.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_04: That's just what you say.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_04: Pittsburgh would say yins or yins guys.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_04: There's histories to all these things we won't get into, but they just do.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm sure other parts of the country say other things.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_04: So you take another language and they're gonna have the same thing.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: The South, the North, yeah, it's it's it's a dialect, it's a slang, and it's it's hard to keep up.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_04: Mm-hmm.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: You it's hard to keep up, so you just kinda try to stay in your lane and and you learn as you go.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had a hard time when I was working down in Miami because you have uh the Cuban population, but you have the Mexican population, and and so it's it's the w i if you're writing something, it's not well, you don't say it that way, you say it this way, and you're like, all right, I didn't know that.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you kind of teach me the way to do it.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_04: So do you have friends and family that you speak with in in Spanish or no?
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah, some, not a lot.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like I have an aunt in Puerto Rico and I talk to her once in a while and whatnot.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when I with my mom, I'd lost my mom last year, but my mom, that's all we spoke, was Spanish.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, and my dad, and you know, so I at home growing up, we st we spoke Spanish.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, my parents knew how to speak English, but it was more comfortable for them.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I'll tell you one f uh funny thing that I I always could kick myself, how I didn't learn Italian.
• 1:08:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I was growing up in New Jersey, I lived in a predominantly Italian name.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: All my friends were Italian, and we were going, I was going to their houses for dinner and stuff, they would invite me over.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_04: So you probably picked up phrases in Italian.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_01: A little bit here and there.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you know, Italian and Spanish have some similarity.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_04: Very little romance languages.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_01: But sometimes you pick up somebody speak you know, if somebody's speaking Italian, you pick up a word and you're like, oh, I know what that is, because that sounds kind of Spanish.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so I could always kick myself.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, man, I could have learned Italian.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up all around it and I just was kind of lazy about it.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_04: But you would have had another one.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_04: Tool in your tool belt there, right?
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_04: Property and evidence manager John Perez is with us now.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_04: Another reason I brought you in here is because right now, today, as we speak, record this, and it's just about to end, is National Hurricane Preparedness Week.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_04: Now, for most people around here, that is gonna mean uh stocking up on batteries and water and all those.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_04: But if I say the word hurricanes to you, what's the first thing that comes to your mind?
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's oh man, it's there's a lot of things that come to mind.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um If you say anything other than hockey, you you're lying.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's funny, I towards the like last couple years of my career down into the sheriff's office, I was the EOC coordinator for the department.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: So around actually we're in May now, I would have probably started in April.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: Preparing all the agency for June 1st, man, it was a thing.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: Every year we we had to make sure all our equipment was ready.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I was spending time in EOC a lot during those those storms.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we had a few quite a few of them when I was down there.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of those things that you you get used to.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's funny.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_01: I talk about um one of my co-workers, she's from Kansas, and they deal with tornadoes.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I lived in Joplin, Missouri, which is right there in Tornado Alley.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_04: We had one rip right through my apartment complex one time.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and um those things are fierce.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's crazy.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And they just had a bunch of stuff going on the last couple weeks ago.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, hurricanes let you know they're coming.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: At least I was gonna say, at least hurricanes, you kind of have a feeling of weeks sometimes you know they're coming.
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_04: Tornadoes are out of nowhere.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_04: Scary.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a lot of preparedness, but at least you kind of get a heads up.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in California you got the earthquakes and you're like, it just happens.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I I will say that as far as hurricane season, I'd almost either take hurricane season because at least you know it's coming, or at least you can get ready for it.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_04: Let's talk about the other kind of hurricane, though.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_04: Uh as it's also not just Hurricane Preparedness Week, but uh Stanley Cup hockey season.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man, I'm I tell you what.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_04: Even your lanyard is the Carolina Hurricanes.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_04: That's right.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_04: We talk about hockey a lot because we're some of the hockey.
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_01: You are my sports psychologist, by the way.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: I need to tell people that.
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_01: I see Rick in the gym.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's a Sabres fan, I'm a Hurricanes fan, but whenever we make eye contact after like the night before a game or the day uh the day after a game, I'm ear pods come off and we're like, uh huh.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_01: What'd you think?
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_01: What happened there?
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: What happened there?
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_04: But your team, you haven't even lost a game in the Stanley Cup playoffs looking good.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_04: If we get to play in the next round, and by the time this thing is like released, we'll probably know.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_04: That'll mean we're still alive.
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_04: And as a growing up hockey fan in Buffalo, which is a hockey town, we went 14 years for some people that don't know this and don't care.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_04: But 14 years without the playoffs is a long drought for a diehard fan to not have playoff hockey.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_04: And so this year the Sabres are back, had a great year.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_04: And so hopefully it will be Buffalo and Carolina in the Eastern Conference.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And we are still going to talk to each other during that state.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, we will.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not one of those guys.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, although I I kind of do remember the last time we played and you guys went to the Stanley Cup.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_04: Uh you know, who but who remembers things like that?
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_04: Who hangs on to stuff like that?
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, our entire defensive corps got injured and we were pulling up guys from the minors and still eating in the third period of Game 7 and ended up losing and you guys won the standard.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_04: But nobody But you're not holding on to it.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_04: We let these things go.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_04: We just let these things go.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_04: But uh good luck to water under the bridge.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_04: Good luck to your team until they play my team.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was looking at that bracket.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, man, if Buffalo beats Montreal and we win the series, I mean it'll be an interesting conversation we'll have in the gym.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see what happens.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_04: We'll see what happens there.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_04: Well, thank you so much.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:12:26
  SPEAKER_04: Enjoy the conversation.
• 1:12:27
  SPEAKER_04: Property and evidence manager John Perez.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_04: Go Sabers.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Go, go, go hurricanes.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 1:12:34
  SPEAKER_01: You caught me off guard there.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: I did, didn't I?
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_04: That does it for another episode of the APD Pod Squad.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you to my guests, Captain Joe Silberman, Canine Unit Officers, Sergeant Scott Mews, and Senior Police Officer 2 Nathaniel Smitty Smith, and Property and Evidence Manager John Perez.
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_04: And of course, thank you for listening.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_04: Couldn't do it without you.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_04: If you've got a question or a topic you'd like discussed, or someone you'd like to hear from as a guest, don't be bashful, call 828-250-8800 and leave a voicemail.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's 828-250-8800.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_04: You can email too.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_04: That's APD Podcastfeedback at AshevilleNC.gov.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's a long one, so I'll say it again.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_04: APD Podcastfeedback at AshevilleNC.gov.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_04: Listen and subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts and don't miss a single episode.
• 1:13:26
  SPEAKER_04: Do us a favor, leave a five-star review.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_04: Help get the word out.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_04: Tell a friend.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Rick Rice, and this is the APD Pod Squad.