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When Good Cops Hesitate, Bad People Win · Making Shooters Better

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: In 95% of the officers that were shot or shot at, okay, this is the so we're paring this down to the most extreme violence that could occur against an officer.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Officers that are being shot at or sh or shot.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: In 95% of the time, before that happened, the officers discovered noncompliance.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just make it easy.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Noncompliance.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: You ask the suspect to do something, they refuse, or they do the opposite.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: So what are our officers doing when they get noncompliance?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: They don't think they're going to be assaulted, that's for sure, because they're acting like it's Chick-fil-A.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't hear my order, and they're acting nice and kind.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: This episode is important enough for me to want to change up how we get it started.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Violent crime may be falling, but assaults against police officers are rising, recruiting is collapsing, and experienced officers are walking away from the profession.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Dr.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Travis Yates is going to explain why he believes that the common thread behind each of these problems is really a failure of courageous leadership.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: We're also going to explore the unintended consequences of making de-escalation the go-to response in every situation, why officers are hesitating even when they recognize danger, and also the behavioral cues that often appear moments before an attack.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yates also introduces focus, field observable cues for unknown situations.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is the first evidence-based behavioral recognition framework designed specifically to help officers recognize, articulate, and respond to danger before an unknown situation becomes a fight for survival.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: This episode matters because when society teaches officers to doubt what they see, punishes them for acting, and then wonders why they leave, the net result is the safest people in our communities are going to be the criminals.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: In a situation like that, anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that that is a recipe for bloody disaster.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: This conversation matters to officers because ignoring these lessons may well cost them the chance to go home at the end of a shift.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: It matters to civilians because if we continue voting for policies that weaken, punish, and hollow out law enforcement, the worst moment of your life may arrive with no one left to answer the call.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So for those reasons I thought it was important to change up how we started.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're just going to roll and get into the regular episode.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, my name's Terry Vaughan, and welcome to Making Shooters Better, brought to you by Laser Ammo.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'll talk more about them later.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Travis Yates, welcome to Making Shooters Better.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Terry, thanks for having me.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: So how old were you when you first started shooting, mate?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I've I've heard you ask other guests this question, and I'm I'm afraid that my answer is not going to be as good as many of them, but I didn't pick up a gun and shoot a gun until I uh was selected for the police academy at age 21.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: And let me give you the background on that because it's pretty, pretty interesting.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: My father was a law enforcement officer, and with every guns in the house.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um I just, you know, and I grew up in rural Arkansas where all my friends had guns and they had rifles and they were hunting all the time.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: For some strange reason, I was never really that interested.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe if my father didn't wasn't really a shooter, I mean he had guns for his job, but I never really saw him involved in shooting.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I had a friend of mine when I was in seventh grade get uh shot in a hunting accident, and maybe that was in the back of my mind.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I just but when I got in the police academy, I went to my dad and I went, Hey, I'm about to have to start shooting guns.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Well, come on out and we'll shoot some.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: He said, But I'm not gonna have you shoot too much because I think they're gonna teach you the right way, and that way you won't have any bad habits.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually exactly what happened.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I when I entered the police academy, you know, these phenomenal firearms instructors started teaching me how to shoot.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, I had people that I was shooting with that had shot their whole lives that had actually a lot more issues than myself because I learned the right way from the very beginning, and you know, it was never a great, great shot, but I was always kind of in the upper third throughout my career, and I really enjoyed it.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, man, I'm a little older than normal, but uh, I think it worked out okay.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's funny.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think you probably shot in the upper third because you didn't have any bad habits to overcome.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing how many people over the years I've stumbled across, you know, I've been shooting for 20, 30, 40 years.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and you've been hitting things with that grip.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is amazing just the slight difference in it's it's almost like I almost say it's like golf.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like the slight difference just makes uh it's incredible.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that's why it's so important to have a great instructor.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, it really is.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It makes all the difference.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So something I read that you had said is uh virtually every meaningful indicator of success in law enforcement moving effectively in the wrong direction.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting a reduction in recruiting, retention, morale, officer safety, public trust, and obviously in many places operational effectiveness.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Are these all separate problems, or do you think they're part of sort of the symptoms of like one underlying failure?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell They're not separate problems.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I I really find it pretty amazing that very few people are actually discussing this.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think government in general is really bad about looking at the outcomes and not the ways we do to get there, and they always like to pat ourselves on the back.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I spent 30 years in government, so I sort of understand that.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: But when I step back and I look at the metrics that a private industry, so to speak, would be looking at, law enforcement would be would be bankrupt decades ago, right?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: The the metrics that you should be looking at for success, it's well documented.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows about the recruiting issues, retention issues.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: The crime rates have not been a surprise.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: They spiked as high as ever a couple years ago.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: We've had some a downturn, but of course you've had a downturn.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: You had the highest spike in violence in recorded history, right?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh when you look when you speak to the officers and the morale, my my a lot of my research has been in leadership.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: And when you do that research, you see that, man, it's not great.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, right now, Terry, every person that starts law enforcement, 63% of them will be out of the profession in five years.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And no one's asking why.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I can tell you, you gotta go, well, what has shifted?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: What has changed?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Whenever you see these dramatic changes in any industry, you have to think to yourself, what changed?
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you look at I I was just sort of recent in the news, well, what happened?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: How why did houses balloon up 40, 50 percent?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know what happened around 2020, 2021, right?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, so we have to look at what's changed, and what's changed in law enforcement is leadership.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we led in times of peace for a couple of decades.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I came into law enforcement in 1993, I retired in 2023, and really the first 20 years of my career was kind of, I would consider peacetime leadership, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then about a decade ago, you started seeing these things, you know, whether it's Baltimore, it's Ferguson, or it's the Black Lives Matter movement, or it's the George Floyd.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's so many of them, I could just keep naming them, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how did leadership deal with that?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And predominantly how leadership dealt with that is just agreed with any third party that said we were racist or corrupt or whatever.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you saw, you know, there's been more reforms in law enforcement in the last decade than any time in history without a court decision.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And no one's asking, hey, how'd that work out for us?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is use of force actually down?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, is there less crime?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, no.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: No one's looking at that.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think our leaders were not prepared for what was coming.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, it's not, it's not easy to be a leader in law enforcement, chief, sheriff, middle manager, whatever.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's not an easy job because it seems like you're having to make all these people happy that really have nothing to do with your bottom line, Terry.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the bottom line is crime.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: The citizens in your community could care less what your uniforms you're wearing or what the race of your officers are, or what what they want to make sure is that the kids can go out and play safe.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: And for the most part, in many of our communities, we have failed them miserably.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when you look at all of the studies on what makes businesses operate efficiently, what makes employees happy, it's all about what?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about support, support and structure and systems.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's why cops are leaving the profession.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: No one's going to do any profession where there's no support to do that profession.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I unfortunately I've spent you know the last 10, 15 years studying this and talking about this and speaking on this.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not seeing a lot of self-reflection even to this day.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still seeing, you know, what's the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and over.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it really concerns me.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've got departments right now, Terry, in major cities that are down 20%, 30%.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you look at men, you look at Minneapolis, they're they're approaching a 50% downturn on employees.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: What happens when they're 60% down, 70% down?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to see the first major law enforcement agency go out of business, literally.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the citizens that suffer.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's bloody scary.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: I got a friend who was with the air marshals.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know, one of the primary objectives with being an air marshal is not being identifiable from the passengers, right?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: You want to get on the plane and nobody knows who the hell you are.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And he ended up quitting the job because on one of his um trips, he got pulled off the plane by a supervisor and chastised because he wasn't wearing the right kind of jacket.
• 9:30
  unknown: Yeah.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the lunacy of that.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And listen, it it's really frustrating for me because when I began this profession 33 years ago, it's phenomenal.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: No one, there was no supervisor, no manager, no chief that would ever let the media lie about this this job.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't let a community member get up and say a bunch of lies.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I can specifically remember uh my chief of police pointing his finger at these community groups, calling them liars, and correcting the record.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can remember him saying you're never to speak to that reporter again because they lied about you.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Where has that gone?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: And now we're participating in it, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not gonna take long because the officers, especially this generation, they're not gonna put up with that.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was almost like a sense of like in my in my era, in your era, Terry, like, oh, you want to treat me bad?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in a toxic relationship?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm staying no matter what.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: That was when we were stubborn, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: These kids today, you treat them like that, they're out the door.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So why do you think there's been this shift by leadership, which is effectively making the profession weaker?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, I could probably speak for days on this, but I think if I could barrel it down for your podcast, Terry and your listeners, it's politics.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I think that you can uh how does a chief get selected in many cities?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's the mayor that selects a chief.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Why does the mayor get elected?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: A mayor gets selected being political, and you know, and you politics is driven by the by the a small minority of individuals, you know, who's going to the city council meetings, who's writing the articles in the newspaper, who's doing the negative stories, and so it's the general citizenry that I think that gets left out.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so when they interjected politics into law enforcement, politics has nothing to do with fighting crime.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, your feelings don't matter when it comes to catching felons, right?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And somehow that has gotten mixed in.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're not in Disneyland, right?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would love for crime to be exactly along ethnic and racial, you know, boundaries, and everybody is happy and there's even crime across the entire city.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's not where we live.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: We don't live in Disneyland or Universal Studios.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not the case.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: And law enforcement has to deal with this, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we just have not been, our leaders have not been good at explaining why we have to do what we do.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: There was a reason, Terry, that the violent crime dropped to the lowest records in history in the 90s.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: There was a reason.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, Bill Clinton and the major bill signer, if the cops bill, uh then, you know, President Joe Biden, then Senator Joe Biden passed the cops bill that put a hundred thousand cops on the streets.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Would Democrats do that today?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we we I was there in '94, '95 when 100,000 cops came on the streets.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we had to play the game with the Grant administrator and say, oh, yeah, they're for community policing.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: None of those cops went to community policing.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were thrown in the middle of the worst parts of the neighborhoods to fight crime.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you know who supported that bill, and you know who loved that more than anybody?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: It was minorities.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: The black caucus in Congress supported that bill because they knew their communities were being ravished with violence and drug addiction.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And today you'd get called all kinds of names for even suggesting putting more cops on the street, right?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have not been really good at talking about this.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: The bottom line for law enforcement is simple.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's so simple it's in our name, Terry.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Law enforcement.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's our mission.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's nothing else.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we've gotten so far off that mission.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: I would challenge any of your listeners, if you don't believe what I'm saying, do the deepest dive you can do and find me one police chief that ever got fired for high crime in the last decade.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Good luck.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Hasn't happened.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: You won't get fired for high crime, you'll get fired for fighting crime.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Which is absolutely despicable.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you it so if you've got a leader that's fighting on two fronts, right, they're they're trying to protect their officers, but they're also trying to guard those officers from the politics that have now sort of seeped into with the everyone's feelings have to be protected first before we actually go after crime.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: What does courageous leadership in these positions now actually look like?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you could start with the basics, right?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Which is being men and women of integrity and honesty.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: The problem with that is that gets you fired real quick.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's what these leaders are dealing with.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I could do the right thing.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I listen, I'm a believer, Terry, that uh I'm a I'm a man of faith as well, that we're all inherited with this sense of right and wrong.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Even the most agnostic of you out there listening will admit you know what right is and you know what wrong is.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was put in you by your creator.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: And these leaders know what right is.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: They know it.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh but they they're having a very difficult time overcoming doing what's right because they know it's politics.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't say exactly what makes people happy, what makes their boss happy, it's a mayor or city council, that they're gone.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: These chiefs work at will.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so then it flows downhill.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if your chief is scared, then your officers are gonna be scared, and then ultimately your citizens are the ones that suffer.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I I would just start, you know, I I teach, you know, I teach entire seminars on this topic, courageous leadership.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if you don't have integrity, you don't have honesty, everything else is kind of a wash, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing else you can do that's gonna matter if you don't have that sort of foundation.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we've seen the erosion overall due to politics and the I don't know which way the wind tends to be blowing, but everybody's feeling an hour account for something.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so we it starts off with perhaps mainstream media telling lies about law enforcement as a profession overall, but it doesn't stop there.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like that erosion then continues, and you end up in a situation like we have now where the FBI may be reporting, as of at least 2025, that violent crime has gone down, but assaults against officers way up.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not as if that the politics, the bullshit that goes along with that stops at that particular point in time and everything else carries on around it.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's an erosion across the board, I think, for both the respect for law enforcement and law enforcement's ability to do the job, and then of course, you know, turnover, etc.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: So how can it be that we've got these, we've got less violent crime overall, according to the FBI, and yet the attacks on law enforcement continue to increase?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, isn't that a question that nobody is wanting to answer right now?
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like the law enforcement is listening to this, none of your police organizations are talking about this, you know, the ICP is not talking about this, personal talking about nobody that says they have your back has even told you that in the last 10 years, officer assaults have increased 80%.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: 80?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have never eighty percent in ten years since twenty nineteen.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: They have gone up every single year.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: That we've never had that before.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, stats do what stats do, Terry.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They go up, they go down, they go up, they go down, maybe they go up, up, down, down.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, and since the FBI's been tracking officer assaults, we've never had five plus years of increasingly going up to last year was a record high.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody's talking about this.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so as I said earlier, well, when this happens, when trends happen, because this is a trend, it's not a coincidence, it's never occurred before.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: You got to think to yourself, well, what has happened in recent years that maybe would have caused this.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: I told you it was 2019 when this started going up.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what happened around 2019, 2020, 2021?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: You started seeing all the reforms that started pushing the blame on law enforcement for any use of force that was occurring, no matter the behavior of the subject.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you started seeing this, you know, de-escalation terminology, which is not new terminology.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's what is so insulting to me.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've been do cops have been de-escalating effectively since the turn of the century, right?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've been training this for decades.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: And now all of a sudden you have a couple of police organizations or and millions and millions of dollar grant money comes in that then mandates this training, and you have states that mandate it in policy.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot mandate de-escalation for every incident and expect cops to survive that.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what we've seen.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: De-escalation is good for certain incidents, it's a it's a tool.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I the St.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Louis County chief recently said something I totally agree with.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, it takes two to de-escalate.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of hard to de-escalate when they're shooting at you, which I think sometimes the public's been made to believe by the media, been made to believe by the politicians that anytime force has to be used, the first suspect is the officer that had to use the force.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, it's the behavior of the subject.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: No officer listening to this is bound by any court court uh Supreme Court decision whatsoever to de-escalate first.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because the Supreme Court recognizes in Graham v.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Connor and Terry v.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: Ohio that your life is at risk with split second decisions.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: We're not going to judge you for that because of how risky it is to make these decisions and what could happen if you make the wrong decision.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: You die.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so the courts have not said this, but cities have said this, departments have said this, states have said this, and so these officers are out here for risking their life, and they've been told you better follow policy or else.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: I talked about the fear earlier.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that fear comes all the way down.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you see officers are hesitating.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: Officers are not making the right decision.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to put your finger on why this has happened, that's why it's happened.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I started going down this rabbit hole, Terry.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's about 12 states that pass mandatory de-escalation laws.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, that shouldn't be in your use of force policy.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tactic, it's a tool, right?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's a procedure.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: It should not be in the middle of Gramby Connor and Supreme Court.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, and by the way, you must do all these other rules as well.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why officers are leaving as professionals, why they're at more risk than ever.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there are about 12 states did this.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, about four states actually published their officer injury data, officer assault data.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know that on average, post those mandatory de-escalation laws, their officer injury rate and use of forces increased over 100%?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have a profession that mandated policy changes.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then years later, we discover that everything it said it was going to fix, it reversed.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is increased.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: New Jersey just put th 33,000 cops through called ICAT.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's purse de-escalation training, you know, supported by govern your your tax dollars.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: They put in they've put over$100 million into this program.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, there's been no evidence that it works.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can look at the systematic research on that.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And even though they'll say it does.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they did they took two years to put all the officers through this.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: They just did a study.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Use of force is now up almost 10%, 9.5%.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, so you see, you see sort of the sinister that I'm looking at.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, okay, wait a minute, we're doing what you're saying.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's making the metrics worse.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Then when the metrics get worse, you blame us for the metrics being worse.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, what it's doing is when there are violent people in front of you and you don't act decisively, violent people do what violent people do.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we're seeing assaults go up.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we're seeing use of force go up.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you're seeing injuries go up.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason you haven't seen line of duty desks go up is because unfortunately our emergency rooms are really good at what they do and they save a lot of lives, thank God for them.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the amount of pressure an officer now is under.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Going out on a call, first of all, perhaps backup is minutes, if not longer away, depending on what state you're in.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in Wyoming for a while, and there was definitely a case where one officer was looking after two or three counties, and the backup could be an hour away.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: So now you've got heightened levels of stress going into an encounter.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now you've got to also be worried, well, if this goes sideways, I'm going to be second-guessed by literally everybody who has no experience in a situation like that over what those actions required in the moment.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: It really does frustrate me to think about officers not being able to do the job they know they need to do in that moment.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: In that split second, they've got to make a decision because they've also got to now worry about every Monday morning quarterback coming at them an hour later, you know, in the cool light of day, going, Well, shit, I don't know why you did that.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think what you're gonna what you're seeing in the profession now, what you'll continue to see, is uh a a demographic movement of officers.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna find departments that are supportive, they're gonna find departments that have common sense.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even the political world you're seeing that the the migration of population right into different states.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's when I came on uh the idea of a lateral transfer was unheard of.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: No one would leave a department to go to another department because it's a different pension system, it's a different geographic area.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it it's just people didn't do that.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're doing that now.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing that a lot because it's because if they sense the fact they're not going to be supported, and by the way, it's not don't blame police for that.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: The Gallup's been doing surveys of why people stay at their jobs in the private industry for decades.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And number one every single year is my leadership does my leadership support me.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean law enforcement's no different.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you're they're not being supported by their leaders, they're not staying.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that simple.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the departments that support people, the departments with good leadership, they're going to have a flourish of people coming to them and staying with them.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know the ones that don't are going to be down and they're never coming back.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's that's what really worries me over the next 10 or 20 years, Terry.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: If if you're Phoenix, Arizona and you've been down 700 officers for a t for a decade and that the needle keeps kicking to 750 and 800.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well what happens when you're down 2,000, 1500?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: I I actually think that there's probably some politics behind this where they don't want it solved.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: If people will remember the defund police was a big thing and once again that time error that we all love to talk about 2020, 2021, but that was not politically savvy.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like politicians got unelected because they said the stupidest thing you could ever say which is defund the police.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well since you can't say that anymore what's another way of doing it well let's make this job so difficult and so impossible to police defund themselves.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think there's some of that in some of these cities Phoenix frustrates me because I'm sitting there going what what are you doing?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: What why this is a great community this is a great city.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why can you not staff your department up?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: What and I'm hearing from some reliable sources there in the area it's it's coming from some of the politicians and the politics behind the scenes are sort of strapping their hands to where they can't effectively recruit.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and so I do see some of that.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think there's if a politician can't say defund the police, well they can effect the police in other ways.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: By the way Terry, this this is going to this gonna resonate like if you don't have enough officers, they're filling those beats with overtime you have fatigue you have all kinds of issues that creates additional use of force.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the research will say that right so if your officers don't have wellness and they're not well they're not going to perform well and this creates even more you know viral situations for these politicians to talk about yeah it's true.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the cops themselves are exhausted and they're under perpetual pressure.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the job's tough enough without adding in the the crap that comes with the politics of trying to make the job difficult just to thin out the hurt first shot accuracy from a holster whether that's outside the waistband or carrying concealed inside comes down to one thing reps.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: How many reps are you putting in each week?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you can't draw from either concealed or especially outside the waistband in less than a second and hit your target every single time you have work to do.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when it matters most you're not going to get a warm-up rep.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Laser ammo gives law enforcement and responsibly armed citizens the tools they need to train consistently safely at home or at the department five 10 15 minutes a day could make all the difference in building your draw speed building your first shot accuracy and building your confidence that your performance will be there every single time train more train smarter train with laser ammo go to laser ammo.com to find out more and now back to the episode I I would I would say the job was really fun in telepolitics right I mean I wouldn't even describe it as a tough job it was it was just uh you got to do what people watch T watch on TV every night right but then when the politics came in yeah it became really tough which is why I think you're seeing the profession suffer when it comes to recruitment and retention.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: So do you believe ultimately that some of these officers are ending up getting injured as there's been an uptick in violent crime is it in part because of that additional stress or is it because they're recognizing the danger signals too late or some combination of the two?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well I I've uh I I got into this uh you know pre-attack indicator world uh about 15 years ago because I had a high interest in it.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: I I was as a young officer I was exposed to it by a sergeant back in the day when we were watching old VHS tapes and we were looking at what was going on before the violence.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I uh I've been teaching around the country for many many years and so I I put this in in sort of my class repertoire so to speak and it became really popular.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Seconds for Survival and I started doing a lot of studying and a lot of videos on it.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean I've watched thousands of videos and so I I think I can safely say this to you.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: The reason you're seeing the assaults is from the hesitation from the officers and the hesitation is not from a lack of knowledge.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're seeing the indicators they understand the indicators and people that are listening or watching this when you watch these videos listen to what the officers are saying.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: They're saying things like do you have a gun?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is there anybody else in there?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: When they're saying this they already know the answer.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're not just saying this because they're that they they they know the answer but they're very concerned to make a decision unless they know for sure.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately if you wait long enough to know for sure well you don't you don't catch up to that right you've had you had Brian Baxter of excellent CEO of Force Science here on the show and he can tell you that right if you wait till you see the gun good luck catching up to the gun.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you wait till you see the knife good luck.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think officers are so scared to be fired.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: They're so scared of being the next viral sensation on YouTube that they're willing to give their life up for it.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately I think we've seen that and that's why we need leadership to go, this is grounded in best practice and what we've done before.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: By the way we don't ask we don't ask nurses and doctors and things like that to ignore the signs, ignore the indicators we're going to ask you and we can get into the science later and what we've been studying on it.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: But I believe that's the key.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: We have to get back to if you if you you know we tell scissors all day if you see something, you know, say something.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: But we tell cops if you see it, we'll ignore it and keep de-escalating.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's really maddening to me.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's something to be said for knowing in your gut that something's about to go sideways it's another thing entirely to then actually respond the way you know you need to respond to deal with it.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Much like you've been teaching personal safety for years.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things I always strive to do is to find the tangible evidence of nonverbal signals that will betray potential violent intent ahead of time.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the toughest things is to convince people first of all to trust their gut that their subconscious is working for them but then to fill in the missing information with something tangible so they can read the signs.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: So when it comes to law enforcement they're already now under the gun for avoiding confrontation to the point of trying to continue de-escalation even when de-escalation is obviously not the right course of action how do you take an officer that is in that place and what information do you give them to get them to act quicker?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well this is so timely because we're just in the middle of this right now I've been teaching this class for many, many years and and when I first started teaching this Terry 10 plus years ago people would come up to me after class because this is basic information.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you went to a police academy 20 years ago or you read Chuck Rinsburg's street survival book, you know, you're familiar with pre-attack indicators and intuition and gut instinct as you said.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: So you know 10 years ago a cop would come up to me after class and said hey I really appreciate the reminder you know I'd thought I'd I I'd forgotten about all this stuff and I I got this in the academy.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well we started seeing the last five years is cops are coming up saying I've never heard of this before.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the first thing we have to do yeah and yeah it's it's insane to me.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: But I think what we've done is we've replaced this for that and of course you know what that is right is the thing we've been talking about.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so the first thing we've got to do is get back to that training.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's insane to me, right?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And to do that you've got to be honest with just not only the officers but the public.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to tell the public hey listen you don't want to get shot don't run your car to police officer.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Hey you don't you don't want to get tackled don't run from cops.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean we've got to be honest.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing to me how I keep seeing these politicians, these leaders and even police chiefs that are making excuses for really dangerous behavior from individuals.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know if you you don't want I could solve use of force tomorrow in America if all the citizens would just comply with law enforcement's ask.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now people go oh you say comply or die.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: No I didn't say that.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: But you'd have to be an idiot if you think that not complying with law enforcement was a safe decision, right?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: But nobody's telling them this.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like I mean it's amazing it's and like I said you look at what's going on with ICE right now and all the vehicle stuff it's almost as if the politicians want this to keep happening because they're not saying hey here's a great idea if you have an argument or you don't think that the ICE officer or the officer is doing what's right, the streets isn't the place to argue.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: We've got you you can you know you should do what they ask you should succumb to whatever they say and then we'll get you a lawyer that's what the courts are for.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: The streets have never been the place to to to do what you're seeing out there, but they're being almost encouraged to defy that.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: So first thing we have to do Terry is we have to start training this again.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: But secondly and I think more importantly is it has to come from an evidence based position.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something that I've been working on for a couple of years now because I found out something that should trouble everybody that when it comes to these pre-attack indicators, now we have behavior threat management, right?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: That I know Nikki Burgett was on your show and she's excellent at that but the problem that we've done along for is we've taken uh behavior threat management analysis or analysis of management, we've taken this well researched topic.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's been, I mean it was discovered in the 80s and it was been for the last 25, 30 years, I mean from Dr.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Malloy on to Calhoun it's been studied ad nausea which is awesome.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's helped us when we look at the trying to predict violence on a long-term longitudinal type thread.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know I mean it's you know we do the case studies, we talk to family members, we talk to, you know, we can do these we can pr kind of predict hey who is liable to do a school shooting who's liable to do this who's liable through behavior threat management.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that is built and it's researched on long term weeks, months years to predict violence.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well law enforcement may have a few seconds to predict violence.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I looked at the research on that because I thought well maybe if we can give them the research based training that will help the confidence of the officers I think it's just a lack of confidence a lack of knowing right because let me tell you there are 24 systems implemented around the internationally right now for threat for threat real time threats.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: Doctors have them nurses have them clinicians EMTs corrections they're all research based systems of looking at real-time threats and and making a decision based on behaviors and when they get these behaviors you know you look at the the the the emergency rooms you have things like yelling and screaming and noncompliance and resistance there's about five or six that have been validated through through the research and science to say if you see this there's high likelihood of violence is to come so when these people in emergency rooms see this, you know, whether it's the brossette system or there's a number of other systems they're using, they don't tell them to de-escalate they tell them to leave the area to call security so I think that if we can get to a a science based approach like every other profession has but us.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way I didn't know this Terry I was I was contacted as an expert on a case looking at pre-attack indicators for a for an officer and I so I started diving into the research and I found there was no research.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now you tell me how there's research for every profession out there that's given them a validated system to help prevent violence against those professions and law enforcement doesn't have one.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I it's it's har it's hard to fathom it's hard to imagine right yeah so I did what I think anybody would have done if they would have discovered this I'm I built one and I've I'm I've I've done the research and we're getting we're going to pre-publish now and we're gonna show officers around the country exactly what the evidence shows and so they can have some more confidence.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And here's a shocker it's not going to really surprise anybody because anybody that's worked the streets for a few weeks knows what the pre-attack indicators are, right?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I think if we can continue this science behind it and you look at you look at what Brian's doing over at Force Science, you know that's a that's a section of science, you know, you know human human factors.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well yeah what I'm what we're studying here and it's not just me I've got a lot of great people involved is what's going on before the human factor.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: They study what happens at the moment the force is used and after what this study is is what's going on right before you know the violence is occurring.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm excited about it but also at the same time I'm pretty messed up the fact that cops are dying, cops are getting hurt and nobody, none of the organizations, none of the big think tanks have thought to themselves we should probably study to help officers predict violence.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, none of that has happened but it's coming Terry and we're pretty excited about it.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: So is that where your program focus comes in?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is yeah a focus of it's it stands for Field Observable Cues for unknown situations.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: What we've done with the research we've done so far is we basically copied what they did for nurses and emergency rooms because here's what I I know this Terry.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: I've been around and all this this goes against a lot of the sacred cows of the de-escalation stuff we've been talking about, which by the way is no evidence whatsoever that it works.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: In fact there's plenty of evidence that it does the opposite there'll be there's going to be some resistance there's always resistance to something new although this isn't new.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously it's not new but it's gonna be new to some and so what we did is we copied uh not only the studies and the research we're doing on this but also the index scores that other professions are using.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we call it the focus risk index and so what officers are going to be able to do is not that we want them to do math in the middle of an incident but when they get back and have to document why they made decisions and and what we that's right it's going to help the them articulate because we've got to understand they're writing reports to people whether it's supervisors or managers or chiefs or prosecutors that don't have a clue about any of this, right?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah no that think oh well you didn't de-escalate.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Terry, I had an officer what really made me decide to do this because this was a sort of a a turn in in my in my career because I was doing 100% leadership stuff.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: But what really made me decide to do this I had an officer call me and he said I wanted to tell you about this incident.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: I get quite a few calls from officers and I said tell me about the incident he goes we were chasing a man with a gun.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question on the radio he's got a gun he's running from officers so I'm sitting on a perimeter and lo and behold the guy comes around the corner and we just meet face to face and he goes and what I know at the time and remember and people need to remember that aren't a law enforcement listener to this that they're the courts say you're judged based on what you know at the time.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: We call totality of circumstances, right?
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: What I knew at the time was he's running from us and he's got a gun.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: He said so he saw me I saw him and he starts kind of backing up and looking around it's a sort of a classic pre-incident indicator right you know scanning around and and getting your wide feet and kind of a fighting stance and he starts doing this he said my instinct was I just tackled the guy.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: He said I didn't see a gun in his hand I just tackled him I got him handcuffed gun was in his pocket.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I go that's a great job.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: He goes I'm being investigated for not de-escalating so you hear you have a an officer that's just a perfect tactical situation.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Great great I mean if they would let the guy keep running around with a gun you know what's probably happening right?
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: But no he he he does this great thing because by the way what he did was de-escalation that that that's what they've got they've got all this wrong and so when I heard that story I thought something's got to be done and that's when I just went let's get to the research because what this what they're telling these cops to do today has no research behind it.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: Listen research is a game like everything else and they they'll they'll always show you one study.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I need more than one like show me more than one.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: You better replicate it or it's not science.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so so that's what made us get involved in it.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so obviously we're early on if you're listening to this you can go to focuscertified.com and you can see where some of our classes are and the research has come in fact we've just put we've got our first one about to come out our first published study.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: We got two more in the books about to come out and my goal is is if you look at force science and and all the human factor stuff that's that we're well down the road to that, you know, 20, 30 years of that my goal is this is the beginning of that for this segment.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we don't teach cops with evidence based on how to predict violence, we're gonna keep being victims of violence.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's really the goal.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the officer that ended up being investigated is that was that a direct okay his immediate supervisors or superiors said okay we're going to investigate this or was this pushed from politicians and then it just came down the chain?
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well um it it went up to the supervisor everything was fine but when it got up to middle management, once again middle management upper management they sent it over to the training department which if they had a question about a tactic that's what they should have done but the training department is the one that said this needs to be investigated.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: And let me tell you it is politics because this entire agency has been trained through ICAT which is the PERFS de-escalation training I talked about earlier.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I listen I'm I'm not trashing any training but I have a problem if if they're related if they're saying the train is saying we should investigate people on this because it because this is not de-escalation or whatever it is.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll I I I mentioned that training specifically because it's just happened to be the most popular one out there.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: It was supported by over$100 million of your taxpayer money.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so all these officers like New Jersey has just all been through this training because the training is free.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so the that that entire department was trained through this and from what I understand in that training that training is continually pitching liability and liability and it's really supervision heavy for supervisors in that training.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so just like everyone else seems to be scared you see supervisors in training departments scared saying well we use force and I don't see de-escalation but the problem is is they did see de-escalation.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Tackling the guy that supposedly had a gun and getting him handcuffed without having to use force is completely de-escalation.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes correct so the training is the training is what's driving the investigation that's my problem with it right this is more than just incompetence.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: The incompetence is being built into them through training telling them to investigate officers that do a perfect job there.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you're training an officer and you're trying to get them tuned into entering an unknown situation in an unknown environment what observable behaviors are you telling them to sort of tune into and pay attention to well there's you know there's 20 or 30 that you could talk about right but I'm what I'm what I'm trying to do is is I'm trying to give them the most common behaviors, the things to really pay attention to because you don't want to just inudate them you know with it's it's the O'Hicks law right you can't inudate them with all this stuff.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've tried to pare this down to the most dangerous ones.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I will tell you for law enforcement it gets real easy real quick and here's how easy it gets.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: We went back over five years and looked at hundreds of videos.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: And 95% of the officers that were shot or shot at okay this is the so we're paring this down to the most extreme violence that could occur against an officer officers that are being shot at or sh or shot.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And 95% of the time before that happened the officers discovered noncompliance.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just make it easy noncompliance.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: You ask the suspect to do something they refuse or they do the opposite so what are our officers doing when they get noncompliance they don't think they're going to be assaulted that's for sure because they're acting like it's Chick-fil-A they're acting like you know it's Chick fil A you didn't hear my order and they're acting nice and kind.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean we've seen videos Terry where the call was a man with an armed robbery call of a grocery store the guy's walking down the highway with a bag that he stole from the grocery store and the officer you know so there's no question it's who the suspect is and instead of treating him like a guy that just robbed a grocery store with a gun he's getting out and walking up to him like it's his best friend.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: And shocker it don't go the right way.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what we're seeing.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so if 95% is noncompliance then let's look at the call type.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: They used to a large study out of the University of Cincinnati on the Cincinnati Police Department and ironically those calls matched up with what we found.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: About 94% of the officers that were shot or shot at were responding to a call where it's it's a more tactical call, you know, domestic violence, robbery in progress, man with a gun it's it's not a typical call.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a more tactically call a call that would call for more tactics.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: But the officers aren't acting like it's not acting like it and they're and and and so those are just the the two low-hanging fruit if I could tell any officer hey if if you get a call that's a little more dangerous than a report call, you know it's a failure in progress it's a you know a guy in a grocery store losing his mind it's we all know those calls.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you get noncompliance on top of that.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah stop being Chick fil A turn into Burger King and take care of business right but that's that's the low hanging fruit.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: Then I could get into Terry in one third of the times the officers were shot or shot at the suspect literally told them what they were about to do.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: We call that a declaration in our training.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Now they don't they don't always make it really Easy and say, hey, officer, I'm about to shoot you.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: They don't make it usually that easy.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: But in 28% of the time, the suspects were saying things that should indicate to the officer that something was about to happen.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Things like, and people that watch videos have seen this.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're not going to arrest me tonight.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to jail tonight.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, you know, um, all kinds of statements that are that are, you know, as as Nikki will tell you, are anomalies from what you typically hear, right?
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's happening in 28% of the time.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I can't think of more low-hanging fruit.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can get into 53% of the time hands were concealed.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's not going to shock anybody, right?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so we have a number of this, but but but fortunately, because of the research that's been done and the more that's coming, we no longer have to say, ah, I saw some furtive gestures and this didn't look right.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: We can now have more confidence in what we're seeing and saying.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm hoping it makes a difference.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: I know it will.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: There'll be many departments that they won't have anything to do with this because it's not supported by all the politicians and all the grants and everything.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, if you're a leader and you want your officer to go home at night, that this is something I think that they they need and they've asked for.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm actually shocked it hadn't been done before, uh, that there hasn't been a strong evidence, research base behind this, because what better way to save the lives of officers than to let's let's give them something to let's give them a validated set of predictors of what could occur, you know, just prior to violence.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you advise officers how should how should they respond?
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: If they're in a situation where there is immediate noncompliance, perhaps the it the suspect is immediately verbalized, I'm not going to prison tonight.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: What do they do?
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's it's it sometimes can be difficult because a lot of times this will happen and you don't have an arrestable offense, right?
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's a disturbance call and you don't have enough information to know if anybody's committed a crime or reasonable belief to commit a crime.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so you sometimes you get some of these behaviors and but you don't really have a reason to arrest them.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I can tell you right now, what we talk about in class is we talk about positions of disadvantage and positions of advantage.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing you want to do is you want to put that individual in a position of what we call disadvantage.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe that you're gonna get distance.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you're gonna handcuff them and secure their hands.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_01: Until I can see the guy with the toes kill an officer, the hand's the only thing that's gonna kill you, right?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe at minimum we use our handcuffs as the officer safety device, and you see this a lot.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, for my safety and your safety, I'm gonna put these handcuffs on you, right?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna make us all safer.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe you use handcuffs, or maybe you get distance, maybe you turn them around, you know, maybe you maybe you set them down instead of standing up.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to do something to give yourself somewhat more of an advantage when you start seeing this.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: But uh I say, I say it's simple as this.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Officers will sometimes get concerned.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't really think I have enough to handcuff, I don't really have enough to arrest.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_01: I say, hey man, tell them to stand with their feet together.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you first off, if they don't do it, what does that tell you?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's noncompliance on top of noncompliance.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then if they do do it and they break their stance, so what's the first thing you have to do before you run or fight?
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: You have to widen your feet.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're a law-abiding citizen, you don't mean any harm by an officer, barring probably some disability, you don't have an issue with doing that, right?
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what I will tell them, you know, I say, start off with that.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: But if that doesn't work, you've got to ramp up.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: You you cannot get lulled into this sense of security.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'll give you a quick example.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: In 31% of all these cases I talked about earlier, Terry, this kind of surprised me.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: The suspect was walking away before he shot the officer.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: I said he because about 98% of the time it's a he, right?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what is that?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what I think it is, and it's hard to know because you're not in the mind of these individuals, but what would happen is there'd be an altercation with an officer, then all of a sudden the suspect would just turn around and walk away.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that gives them an advantage in this way.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: First off, when you walk away, your hands are now concealed to the front of your body.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: About nine out of ten times weapons are on the waistband of the individual, usually front part of the waistband or pocket.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, so that does that.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: It conceals your hands.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: But secondly, it almost the officer almost left their guard down.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like the officers were walking up, hey sir, hey, patting them on the shoulder and trying to catch up to them.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when they did that, you know, tragic, tragic things happen.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was really surprised that it happened that much.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's something I've never heard anybody talk about, and I wouldn't have talked about it unless I saw it in the data.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, you do see some of the research in hospitals and nursing homes to talk about pacing.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a form of pacing, but it was more like an intentional walking away, which I thought was pretty interesting.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: So we talk about a number of these things in the training.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're hoping to bring this all online.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if I had my way, Terry, I want to provide all this for nothing to for for the entire profession to see.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but uh I think it can help because if we don't go down this route, I shudder to think what the next decade is going to be like.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think one of the interesting parts about somebody walking away or the pacing that you just referenced is oftentimes someone has already made a decision of what they're gonna do, right?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna go to prison and they're gonna do everything in their power to ensure that they don't go to prison.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the adrenaline starts to flow.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens to our bodies when we have all of the adrenaline in the system?
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of energy.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't feel necessarily like it's a pacing, it's a stepping away.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Letting that energy out.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, getting the energy out.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the decision's already made.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Brian touched on this as well, right?
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the with the cognitively, they've already made the decision of what they're actually going to do, and then now they're walking away as a means to deal with the adrenaline that's in the system over the act they're about to betray.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I I had this uh at a at a range.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: I was teaching, it was a fairly new uh beginner's class for firearms, and somebody, you know, and it does annoy me, but I it was a valid question by somebody who asked, you know, when an officer shoots somebody in the back, how is that even possible?
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_00: How is it even legal?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: And off the off she went.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I tried not to start chewing her ass out.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it was a simple answer.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: I was facing a kind of uprange, so the targets are behind me.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, How quickly do you think someone can draw from concealed and shoot behind them?
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Well, you know, not that quick.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we all know what's about to happen.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, all right, hold my beer, set my timer, and and it was beep, and I'm boom, and I I don't remember the time, but it was sub one second very easily, and it was two shots, center mass at about five yards on a cardboard target.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: And she looked, you know, unsurprisingly, very shocked at how quickly that had gone through.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: She shot CNN loud to her all those times, aren't they correct?
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: And she went, Oh, but the realization that came over her in that moment was palpable.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it it did lend itself to me kind of every time I've taught personal safety since then, I've tried to stress some of um the time constraints or the the variables in these instances where an officer is facing what looks like a person walking away, only to know in the back of my mind, I'm like, oh, shit's about to hit the fan, or it could.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you said something very accurate that maybe we didn't cover the way I should have, which is if you're seeing these behaviors, their decisions made.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's why the behaviors are happening.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's the body that's signaling that that decision's already being made.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we see de-escalation having an opposite effect.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you start de-escalating based on the behaviors, that's not changing, that's not changing what's about to happen because that decision's already been made.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, suspects have uh they have in they have intent, they have capability, they have opportunity.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do anything about their intent, you can't do anything about their capability.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if we can interject quickly based on these pre-incident indicators, you can take their capability away, right?
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm sorry, opportunity.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: You can take their opportunity away.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we have control over.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is if we're going to we're we're telling officers the de-escalation is just verbal and chick-fil-a and talk real nice and don't say these words and say this word.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: They're that their opportunity is still there.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's not taking it away.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes you have to, you have to take early actions, early low levels of force to avoid higher levels of force.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm excited about the first agency that's gonna go through this entire focus training.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're about to have it happen, and we're gonna study that agency before and after.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And as a researcher, I'm not supposed to tell you what I think could happen, but come on, we're all human.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: I what I think is what we're gonna see is we're gonna see, I believe we're gonna see lower levels of force tick up slightly, but higher levels of force drop dramatically, right?
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that should be the go.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, if I got to put you in handcuffs, you know, or I got to turn you around and and set you on the ground physically, but I don't have to shoot you, that's a win.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I think we're gonna see.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: I also think there's an argument to be made that if an if a police officer has gone has gone down that path, has been forced to go down the path of only relying on de-escalation up until you know the point where, okay, de-escalation is now completely off the table because he's being attacked.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is a there's a prolonged period of time where that officer cognitively is set on one path, which causes delay on response time because we can't just switch from this sort of linear argument for de-escalation to, oh my God, it's happening.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I gotta respond.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: There's a delay.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, obviously it will differ from person to person how long that is, but as I talk, you know, my talk with Brian, there's a time period in there where switching gears, you know, the neuroscience to switch and make a different decision and have a different action register as necessary, there's a delay.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's probably also contributing to officer danger and injuries.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no question.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: So um if you're hell-bent on talking like Chick-fil-A until the attack, that's a problem in delay.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if as soon as you see the indicators prior to violence, you flip then, you know, you flip your mindset then.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're already in the mindset if that goes south too quickly, right?
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we're hopeful that as soon as you see the indicators, and we talk about clusters, I know Nikki talked about that, but you know, we don't we we don't want to isolate just one thing.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if somebody looks around once, we don't want to throw them on the ground, right?
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's all in context.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: But these things cluster up very, very rapidly.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, in fact, in our study, and officers that were shot or shot at, on average, 4.8 behaviors before the violence.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: 4.8.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're letting that go.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're let we're seeing almost five things that we should have thought, oh man.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: And we're just, hello, sir, hello, sir, please, sir.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, the the the violent attacks that were thwarted with lower levels of force, it's 1.6 behaviors because the officers are seeing these things and they're immediately putting handcuffs on, they're getting distanced, they're kind of taking precautions.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: Those officers were not attacked or not, we're not shot or shot at.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so we know it's all these behaviors.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think you're exactly right, Brian's right, that we've got to get our mindset shifted much quicker because uh we're almost in denial.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think we're in denial because we're very hopeful we don't have to use force.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course, but we don't work in Disneyland.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you're seeing these behaviors, you need to understand there's a reason for the behaviors.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's definitely a detachment from the reality versus you know the the Disney World outcome where it's all rainbows and unicorns over here, but the reality is we're actually living in this place over there.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it is it's bloody frightening.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and listen, I'm I'm not immune to the fact that there's going to be politics behind this.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's gonna be people to say, oh, you you're giving officers permission to, you know, to use force earlier in any counter versus later.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say to them, no, this is actually giving citizens the right to stay much healthier, right?
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because the unknown, I mean, the Supreme Court talks about it.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: The officers are given wide leniency in making split-second decisions because there's so much unknown.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you start giving off, you know, these pre-attack indicators and the officers have to go hands-on and things happen.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we would rather that not occur at all.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: We'd rather people just not do any of this stuff, right?
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so when officers don't know, uh, if you make them wait too long, the officers are in danger, and if and obviously the suspects are in danger.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's why we're seeing use of force in shootings increase when officers are waiting and waiting and waiting.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: And that research is coming.
• 56:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh we're not at a level yet to be able to pull that off.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is so many departments that are going all in on de-escalation are not releasing their data and information.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: We can't see it.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have to get that from through through FOIA.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I think there's a reason.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: If people want to argue with me, because I know de-escalation has been pushed down, and I said, once let me just make sure this is clear.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm for de-escalation, Terry.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: But we cannot we cannot make this a mandate for every incident because once you start seeing indicators, the decision's made, your de-escalation is not working.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: But if this was so effective, and you think about the hundreds of thousands of officers that's been through this training and all the chiefs that advocate for it, if this is so effective, show me the videos.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: Show me the videos of violent individuals that all of a sudden decided to stop being violence because of de-escalation.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: Show them to me.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not being the jerk about that.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to see them.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Show me the evidence.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to see them.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to see if you upload them on YouTube and brag to your community of where this training helped you.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Please show me.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: To this day, I'm not being shown any of that.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not, because that crap's not there.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the other thing I want to talk about and touch on here just for a moment is I think there's another side to the equation.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we need to train officers and they absolutely need to be trained in how to recognize these behavioral cues that tell you stuff's coming down the pipe and it's going to come down the pipe pretty fast.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: The faster they get there in the recognition thing, then the the the better they will be and the better the suspect will be.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: But I also think there is uh a case to be made for educating the general public, starting perhaps even in the schools, to expose them to the decision-making process, the stress of why telling an officer that, hey, I'm not going to jail today, like arguing a case, not following directions, right?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can train the police and should, to the best of our abilities, in as many fields as possible, de-escalation being one small tool in the toolbox, and then a plethora of others that we add on top.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the without the education for the general public, it's like we're only educating one half of the issue.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it'd be tremendous.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be huge.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, we see whenever they've taken like citizens through the simulators and and do that.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh even the media, you can see their mind just go, whoa, wow, you know, mind blown, right?
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: Which I'm like, really?
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: It took that for you to understand it's important to be a decent human being.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: But um but imagine the lives it would save if it's going to take Congress because uh school districts aren't doing it, no one's doing it now.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: If Congress, you know, when they threw a hundred million dollars at a bunch of officer training, they also threw a hundred million dollars at and mandated that, you know, hey, the schools had to provide this, you know, one or two hours of training to like the DARE program, right?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: And all these programs that, by the way, failed admissibly, you know, all the kids that took DARE were more likely to do drugs, we found that out later.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, some sort of program like that.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because imagine that would make a difference.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because if kids right now they're being influenced by the media, by Hollywood, by rappers, by whoever, and they think that resistance is cool, right?
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: But imagine if they were they were, you know, put in the role of an officer, seeing how difficult it is, maybe put in the role because what we find from when civilians do this is they end up shooting all kinds of people they shouldn't be shooting, right?
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: But there's no question make a difference.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Once again, I think we have to actually ask, why hasn't this been done?
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, this sort of makes a lot of sense.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: How come we're only worried about one part of the equation?
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same, you see it today.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: You never will hear Ben Crump or CNN or MSNBC go, maybe we should act like decent human beings when the cops are in front of us.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like, you know, I love this, I hear this all the time.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: Why should black parents have to give the talk to their kids?
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, idiot, my parents gave me the talk.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: Every good parent should give your kids the talk.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care what color your skin pigment is, you racist idiot.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Every parent should be given the talk to the kids because that's what decent parents do.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've had people get up to the simulator.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like we go to the conferences for law enforcement, smokeless range, VST Pro, video scenario trainer.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we've had officers take the training and they've come in, they've gone through scenarios, and they will draw too late.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: They will wait too late, even when there are nonverbal signals telling them trouble is coming, they're waiting too long.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when we've put civilians in there and said, hey, we're just, we're not really going to give you a whole lot of information about this.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: We're just going to tell you that something bad may or may not happen.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that is enough often to prime them cognitively to be a little on edge, right?
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: That gives a little bit of realism.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then we say, just react to what you see.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: And how many times they've shot someone that pulled out the cell phone, pulled out the keys.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they all have that moment where they go, Oh, I just shot somebody, obviously within the simulation.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the the realization that their decision making was absolutely pants shocks them.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I uh it was it was a case out of Chicago where this kid was running with a gun and he turned around and as he's as he's pulling his gun up, he sort of throws the gun, and the officers in Chicago had 0.883 seconds to discern that decision.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, no human being on the planet could do that, and they ended up shooting this kid and they made a big deal about it.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: They outlawed foot pursuits after that.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you had all these people in Congress, you know, the squad out there talking about racist cops and everything.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: So myself and Sheriff Mark Lamb, we offered them a million dollars to go through our simulator.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: We'd pick a simulator and put right in the front of Congress and then come through a shooting simulator.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: And if they could they could pass that, you know, uh three out of five times, we'd give a million dollars to their charity.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: And we didn't have a million dollars, Terry, but here's a here's a here's a sneak peek.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't pass it because no human can in eight three three seconds, point eight three three seconds.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a shocker that all these politicians that were so, you know, against Chicago police at the time and they pushed all these reforms and they called them all these horrible names.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's a shocker that they didn't want a million dollars just to come do the job that a policeman could do in a simulated environment because nobody took up on the offer.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: So they didn't they know they're full of it, right?
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: This is talking points, this is drama, this is television, this is you know, the error each political side's got about 20% of complete idiots, right?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: So they're they're talking to those 20% and getting them riled up so they can hold up nasty signs on the interstate.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just really insane.
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, adults not acting like adults, people not acting like decent human beings, probably wouldn't be a need for cops if that was the case.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: Read.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think at the end of this now, we can say that you can't recruit your way out of a leadership problem.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can't train your way to out of a cultural problem, and you can't arrest your way out of a recognition problem.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: What are your closing final thoughts?
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: What do you want people to take away from this?
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you've revealed quite a bit already, but what would you want to leave them with?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've got a lot of concerns, and I I think one of the biggest concerns is the lack of self-awareness, Terry.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like the things we're talking about, every police leader should be talking about, every police officer should be aware of, and we should be moving towards solving a lot of these issues.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: We can't even get our major police organizations worth millions and millions of dollars to even look at these issues, right?
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so by not being self-aware, my biggest concern is what's the next 10, 15, 20 years look like?
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot have a city that's that's spending, you know, I'll come back to Phoenix, they spent$98 million last year in overtime to fill the beats.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's not sustainable.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Phoenix isn't the only city.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of cities are doing this.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so what does that look like in a decade?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: What are we going to do to our communities?
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, are we going to leverage AI and then say we don't need these officers?
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then what happens to the, you know, it's the citizens that will always suffer here.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: And my concern is take it one step at a time.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't know what's the saying, how do you eat an elephant?
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I think I don't think that's one bite at a time.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: One bite at a time, right?
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's it.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, we talked a lot today, but what's the first thing you can do?
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first thing you can do is is what Mark Lamb did when everybody, when he was there as sheriff of Pennell County, and every time someone was hired, the sheriff would they walk him in the sheriff's office and he'd set him down, he'd say, I got your back.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, it's a tough job.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_01: You've been trained well, you follow your training, you follow your policy.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: Anything else, I got your back.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: I got you.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you would just do that, that's the beginning of something that you can build on.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: But many of those chiefs still can't take down their their means from the George Floyd era, even though that's been proven to be a complete train wreck, right?
• 1:04:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so we should start off simple, like verbally telling officers, not in some mass email and not, you know, looking them right in the eye and say, I got you.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: You follow policy, you do what your trains tells you to do, I got you.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because these officers have all seen their friends go to prison or being prosecuted for following policy and following training.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: That has happened across this country, right?
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't believe me, I can give you dozens and dozens of examples.
• 1:05:26
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the first step.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know, the training should follow.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: And um so I'd love to just see the first step.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think that would do wonders for the profession, to be honest.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: One baby step.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just start there.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: I also think the argument to be made that that civilians themselves are also responsible and they how they vote, looking at the reality of a situation, not just taking what a politician tells them as this dream um society we'll all live in when everything is rainbows and unicorns, looking at the tr the real consequences of stopping payment and funding for police, what that ultimately will lead to, and voting accordingly.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_00: You want to let your kids go out and play in the neighborhood like we used to well 40 years ago.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean that's if you want that, vote accordingly.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's probably the the one of the few things the political parties can agree on.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like I want my kids to grow up in a nice community.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it's it's amazing to me how law enforcement and leadership is uh doing all making all these decisions because we're trying to build the community trust.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: If these chiefs are really good, they get that little Bill Clinton look and they go, I need to make this decision to build community trust, you know.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: What are you talking about?
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like your job is to reduce crime.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: The way to build community trust is to give your citizens a safe community.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like when I walk into a restaurant, there's nothing they can do to build my trust but make me great food and treat me right.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: No one's doing TikTok dances.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not looking at a TikTok dance from a restaurant and going, man, I really trust that that restaurant a lot more.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: But what are we doing?
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: Because first off, if that's why you're making all these silly decisions, we're already one of the most trusted institutions on the planet.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can look at the Gallup polling, we're in the top three or four every single year.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: The politicians demanding that we change, they're in the teens.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody trusts them.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody trusts the media anymore.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: Why are we kowtowing to groups that most of the public thinks are a bunch of liars?
• 1:07:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the last trust rating is in the 80 percentile of the community that trusts their law enforcement agencies.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_01: So why are we running around trying to ruin the profession based on these talking points?
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Chiefs just you don't even have to have a spine to know this.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_01: Just be able to read, right?
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then you can have a lot more confidence in making your decision.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: Great way to round it up and sum it up.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for taking the time to join me today and share your expertise.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_00: I really appreciate it.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_00: Terry, it's been an honor.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate what you're doing.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love your product and thank you so much.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, mate.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for everyone who tuned in for today's episode.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: Your support is immeasurable.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_00: We uh appreciate it, and we'll see you in the next one.
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.