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How Flock Cameras Cut Beverly Hills Crime 34% · Your Leo Nation

• speaker-0: Hello, America. Welcome to Your Leo Nation. I am a Chief, but not the only Chief on this podcast. ⁓ we are so excited to have retired Beverly Hills Police Department Chief Mark. Yes, Mark Steinbrook with us. Chief, thank you for joining Your Leo Nation today. speaker-1: Good morning. Thank you, Mark. Nice to meet you. When we were born, I guess Mark was a very popular name because it's ⁓ ubiquitous. speaker-0: Yes. And I want the audience to know that you and I both spell it correctly with a K and not that kind of I won't even I won't use anything disparaging about the C word C words. But anyway, off we go. Or C spelling. Careful with that. ⁓ Mark, listen, ⁓ you and I talked a couple of weeks ago and the topic today is really flock cameras, but kind of surveillance and tools that law enforcement uses ⁓ in general to Listen to prevent crime and to solve crime. And before we get into some of the things that amazing things you did at Beverly Hills Police Department while you were there, to want to give ⁓ the audience a little background, your bio, because you were with LAPD for a long time before you went over to to Beverly Hills. So tell us a little bit about your background. The reason is I want people to understand that you really have a comprehensive picture about. Crime prevention. speaker-1: Sure. Well, thank you for that. So I have a very kind of unusual background, I think. It's been a very mixed career. And I started out when I was seventeen in the Navy as an intelligence specialist. And then when I was in college, I was a reserve police officer in Vermont for the state police and a couple departments, ⁓ Burlington and Berlin PD. So I kind of had that military intelligence police background early on. And then when I graduated, I became a Marine Corps officer. and spent twenty seven years in the Marines, both as ⁓ active duty and reservist. ⁓ I was a MP, civil affairs, had a couple deployments overseas. And the reason I say that is because it it kind of mixes in with my police career. So I'll just say now before I get into my police career, I thought a lot about how we were able to push information on the battlefield to our troops ⁓ way forward in the desert and austere conditions and you know, drone imagery and intelligence information and battlefield ⁓ preparation, intelligence preparation of the battlefield. But yet you come back into law enforcement, I'd come back to the United States, and we had an environment where we could push more technology out to the troops in the field, but we didn't. And it it just it just killed me because I I was like, I'm seeing one thing in the military and another thing in law enforcement. So ⁓ when I wasn't doing the Marine Corps thing, I was a LAPD officer and ⁓ 17 years rose to lieutenant and headed the anti-terrorism intelligence section before I retired. Kind of had did a myriad of things, patrol gangs for a long time. internal affairs. I was the adjutant to a chief and I did counterterrorism for about five years. So mixing those two careers kind of gave me a lot of different ideas about, you know, how we could do law enforcement better in the United States. And then also I took things I learned from law enforcement and I brought them back to the military as well. So all told 40 years in military police service, ⁓ nine years as a chief, four and a half at the San Diego Harbor police. ⁓ also I was assistant chief down there for five years and then I came up to Beverly Hills and was the chief for four and a half years. So that that's kind of my background ⁓ in a nutshell. speaker-0: Well, it's just it's a great background and I said it's comprehensive. ⁓ a lot of different angles you brought back ⁓ to law enforcement in general, but but really specifically ⁓ for purposes of this conversation with Beverly Hills. And I boy were they lucky to have you because some of the things that you and and your your former team ⁓ did there, doing there today, ⁓ after your leadership are really amazing, I think, ⁓ from a crime prevention. and ⁓ from a c crime solving point of view. So before we kind of dive into ⁓ some of the specifics about the system you built, I want to get some of those really amazing stories about crime prevention that you and I talked about offline a while back. I want to address the constitutional concern because this is this is the big topic when it comes to flock cameras and other surveillance systems. You know, there's a lot of concerns ⁓ from liberals, from conservatives, from people in both parties, ⁓ both political, you know, ⁓ philosophies about the right to privacy and the ⁓ big brother world ⁓ that flock cameras and and and systems like that ⁓ you know, touch. What is your take on me ⁓ the the constitutional question about the tools that law enforcement uses, you know, ⁓ talking about ⁓ surveillance systems specifically. speaker-1: So that's a really great question. And I'll say I'm not a constitutional scholar. I I think I understand the basics of the Fourth Amendment. You know, surveillance technology is not new. ⁓ we've had cameras around for many years, both private and public. The the Fourth Amendment gives us the ability as law enforcement to anything that can be seen in plain plain view in a public space is is not does not fall under a private person's life, like their their yard, maybe their garage, the interior of their car even, or their house. So to me, from coming from a law enforcement perspective, using this technology in the public space, ⁓ and there's a lot of challenges and there's a lot of different things, but ⁓ that that you can do to make it better and reassure your community. And we can get into that. But the basics of it is when you're in a public space, ⁓ You're you're in a situation where ⁓ there's no reasonable expectation of privacy from a private citizen. And and being in law enforcement, we can use helicopters with people with binoculars, or we can use camera systems or ALPR readers ⁓ to monitor those public sa spaces. And the goal being not to spy on people, because that's not what we're interested in. We're interested in criminal activity and making sure people are are safe. So, you know, I know there's always that balance between public safety and and privacy. And I think in Beverly Hills, we can talk more about it. We've done a really good job at ⁓ balancing the two. speaker-0: Well, you know you bring up a great point about, you know, ⁓ helicopters, binoculars, and other surveillance tools, whether, by the way, audio as well as video, things like this have been around forever. The difference is, of course, things memor memorialized electronically, digitally. They're recorded. ⁓ when you're talking about ⁓ camera systems and you know audio systems as well. But ⁓ that difference is significant, but that is the only difference when you're talking about being in a public place. There is no expectation ⁓ to a right of privacy. By the way, the right to privacy is not even found in the Constitution. Those those words do not exist in the Constitution. Courts have interpreted that there is a level of you know right to privacy based on some of the amendments and ⁓ and and articles in the Constitution, but the Founding Fathers never specifically articulated that. And I think one of the reasons that is several of the reasons which what you laid out. You can read the Fourth Amendment and it's very clear. You're in a public place, kind of King's X. So with that said, I want to talk about what you led, what you helped develop in the city of Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills Police Department, when it comes to well, a number of the tools that that you use there and they're still using today, of course, very effectively to prevent and solve crime. And I'd like to start with the the real-time watch center there in Beverly Hills and how that works, what it's comprised of, what's it look like physically as far as personnel and and ⁓ electronics. I find it fasting. I read about this. I want you to talk to our audience about it. speaker-1: Sure. So let me rewind it back a little bit. And I'll go back to what I talked about in the military. When I was in Iraq in 2003, I kind of got a firsthand look at drones and how we were using drones ⁓ in Iraq to do route reconnaissance and saw the early models of drones flying ⁓ when I was there and kind of thought to myself, like, well, how long is this going to take to get into law enforcement? And it took a little longer than I thought, but But there are some things, if you go back the last 20 years, why we're able to use this technology in this space. And that's because of the rapid advancement of the internet, of cloud computing. And so kind of a few years later, I was the assistant chief of San Diego Harbor Police, which is a very unique organization because it covers five cities in San Diego. The Navy's there, the Coast Guard's there, we're right along the border. We had multiple camera systems, but Each of each of those agencies had different types of camera systems. So it was hard to kind of see across what other law enforcement and security agencies were doing. But that's kind of was my experimental ground of early early attempts at flying drones, early attempts at put putting camera systems in place where we were had crime hot spots, things like that. And then when cloud computing came along, it made it a lot easier and cheaper to To meld camera systems. So for example, if you have one type of camera system and I had another, and we had our own servers and our own platforms, it was hard to see across each other's cameras. But with cloud computing, you know, you can have basically third-party shareware that allows me to see your cameras and you to see my cameras if we're different agencies. So additionally, cameras became much cheaper ⁓ with technology ⁓ improvements. And and that goes with ALPRs too. So at the Harbor Police, a lot of our crimes happened on the islands that we had, Shelter Island and ⁓ Harbor Island. So looking at it from a map perspective and intelligence preparation of the battlefield, there's only one way in and one way off. So we decided: hey, we're going to put ALPRs going onto each of those islands, and that will help us identify criminals. And also, if we have a crime, look at them for future. ⁓ for crimes that happen and then go back and look at them. The thing was it it probably cost forty thousand dollars per island to put a ALPR on there coming and going with traffic coming on and off at your children speaker-0: Wait, I hate the interrupt, but ⁓ ALPRs, automated license plate readers we're talking about. Just for those of us who are into acronyms, not everybody is speaker-1: People say Flock now, like Flock, but Flock is a company that has ALPRs. Axon has ALPRs, Motorola has ALPRs, Vigilant has LPRs. It's almost like saying Xerox machine. Everybody used the term Xerox, but there are a lot of copier machines. So it it it's it's starting to get conflated the the terminology. But yes, automated license plate readers. But just a few years later speaker-0: Exactly. speaker-1: The the difference with Flock is they came out with an ALPR that was about 3,000, $2,500, $3,000 a year that you could lease or rent rather than a $40,000, $50,000 ALPR that very limited, stationary, cost a lot more money. So for a lot less money, I could push out Flock into a lot of different a lot more areas, a lot more locations. So transitioning to I became the chief of Beverly Hills police at the end of November, last day, last day or two of November in twenty twenty one. My first night on the job, there was a high profile murder of a lady named ⁓ Jacqueline Avant, who was a pillar of the community, gave back so much to to communities in it in the Los Angeles, her and her husband, Charles Avant. And classic gang member gets out of prison early. Drug addiction, easy access to weapons, goes to rob the house and and shoots her in the in the abdomen and and she dies. ⁓ tragic story on so many fronts. But because of of who she was and who her family was, there was you know, first day as chief, I'm out there facing the cameras, you know, the pit, the shark pit, I like to call it, TMZ, CBS, Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, at right under my office. And I didn't know my command staff, I didn't know my city council or my city manager, my boss that well. But when I came back from that news interview, they said, We don't care what you do, you just need to fix this crime problem. And it wasn't just that murder. If you remember right, coming out of COVID and ⁓ the unrest, the civil unrest ⁓ that was occurring. We were getting home invasions, people ramming cars through stores in Beverly Hills, ⁓ robberies, shootings. Just they had never seen that before in Beverly Hills. It was always known as a super safe community. and so they said, We don't care what you do, just solve this. So one, I was able to get the funding to be able to do some of these things, but also the costs for cameras, ALPRs and drones had had come way down. Fortunately, there were already about at that time twenty five hundred to three thousand cameras in the city. And I was driving around with a sergeant and I think I asked a basic question, who watches them? And he's like, Well, nobody watches them. Like if there's a crime a couple days later, detectives go back, they look at them, they follow up. And I was like, that is fundamentally the wrong way to do it. Like we need to narrow the gap between the crime occurs and how fast we can see it, observe it, know that it happened. And then and then take action. So I don't want to catch the criminal weeks later after they've committed three more crimes or ten more crimes in Beverly Hills or other places. I want to catch them right then and stop that crime wave. Because what do we know as police? Very few percentage of the population are career criminals and they commit most of our crime. You know, the numbers vary, but ⁓ very small percentage commit most of the crime. So the idea was You know, I'm gonna take my experience from the military and build a military type command center, like if you'd see on the show 24 or one of these high-speed movies, where we have operators that are watching the cameras, we are flying a drone, we have ALPRs around the city, and I'll tell you why that's important and a reason in a minute, but we're pushing that information right out to the officers in real time and making sure they know where the suspects are, where the victims are, and where they need to go and how the suspects armed if possible, ⁓ very quickly, so that we our response is immediate and rapid and and there's a lot of stuff around that, but we'll get to that. And so that's that's kind of how the real-time watch center was set up and created. So I say as a chief, never waste a good crisis. Yeah. You know, it was a tragic incident, but this could have kept going on if we didn't do something about it. And so People would say to me jokingly, like, ⁓ gosh, I'd just like to put a moat around Beverly Hills, because our criminals typically are not from Beverly Hills. They come in from other places. We had them far away from South American theft groups from Chile, from Venezuela, Colombia, to gangs from Oakland, Long Beach, closer to home, South Central LA. But we had travel tourists come from Texas, Florida, Minnesota to fly in and specifically coming to steal in Beverly Hills. And then take the loot and sell it on offer up or something and get out of town. So we were being invaded by a criminal element that thought they could get away with it there. So one of the things I noted was a lot of criminals were coming in and stolen cars. So the way I look at it, if you come into Beverly Hills in a stolen car, you're only there for one reason. You're going to commit one or multiple crimes. Typically, other than already stealing a car, you're on probation or parole. There's a gun in the car, there's narcotics in the car, there's burglary tools in the car, or there are already ⁓ fruits of other crimes in the car. And we found this repeatedly. So when we were able to stop a car quickly coming into the city of Beverly Hills, we knew one, we stopped other crimes, and this person was also probably had been engaged in other criminal activity. So we essentially put a ALPR at every entrance and exit into the city. And we went from recovering 50 stolen cars the year before to the to the first year we did this, recovering over 200 stolen cars. And it's not just the stolen cars, again, it's stopping the person or people in the car who are committing the crime. Right. So car comes in, ALPR goes off. This was stolen out of Bakersfield in a carjacking. True story. Car comes in, two people in it. Within seconds, cameras are on it, monitoring it, drone launches or has already launched, and And it's on the car directing the officers right in. And the officers can see on their phones where the car is. so now they have a good idea of like tactically how to stop the car and do it safely. And we take those people into custody. That actually happened while I was doing a tour of the real-time watch center, and the people's jaws were just wide open, going, This is right now, this is real time. I said, 'Yes, this is in in real time.' So The the net result after four and a half years was a thirty-four percent drop in crime, a twenty-two percent increase in arrest. And we didn't hide this. We didn't hide it. I got it on the news, I I put it out as many places I can. And then we came up with this card. It was about this big as and we called it a jail card. It had a picture of the drone, a picture of the ALPRs, a picture of the cameras, all the technology we had. And and by the way, if you call nine one one in Beverly Hills, we geolocate your location. And we know where you are. So we already know that, you know, you're calling and you say, Hey, somebody just hit me, and we get right to you, and then you're telling us where the suspect is. We put the cameras on the suspect. But the jail card was every time we arrested somebody, we gave them this card and we said, It's set on it. If you come here, we will use this technology to arrest you. So I wanted people to know that it's not a going to be a safe or easy place if you're going to commit criminal activity. We want you to come eat, we want you to come spend money. We want you to shop and enjoy the time with your family, but you're not going to come here and commit crime. So we set a very hard line. And this was before we got a new DA in LA County. This was before Prop 36. So we were already having a big impact. We had over 600 agencies come to see us across the United States to see what we were doing. And I like to think that's why now there's I think over a thousand or more real-time watch centers. There's a real-time watch center association. They have a meeting this week in I think Phoenix, Arizona. And so this is the new era of law enforcement. Just like when the radio and the carb came about and community policing came about and when Comstat came about under Bratton. Bratton used to say at LAPD, we're on a path to precision policing. This is precision policing. And we can talk about that if you want to talk about it. But there's a huge amount of benefits to precision policing that are going to keep us from keeping ⁓ doing the mistakes that have occurred in the past, but another subject, other subjects if you want to talk about that. So it se feels like I've gone on a long time. So I don't speaker-0: No, I this is why I'm taking notes because you're you're bringing up so many good points. So continue. No problem at all. speaker-1: So one of the things I would say is that ⁓ the mistakes that are getting made or have been made or being made is that we're not educating our communities as to the technology and why we're using it and how we're using it, and that it's new. So we had to build policies along the way to make sure that privacy, you know, was was taken care of, ⁓ oversight, audits, training, all all of that. So that was something we did very early. We so the way the way the center's set up, there's an operator on the cameras, then there's the drone operator, and then behind them are the supervisors. And then you have on the screens what the operators are seeing on their screens and and the drone drone screen. And so first of all, there's that first line of oversight that if if somebody is watching or looking at something they're not supposed to, the supervisor can say, like, why are you watching that? Why are you looking at that? ⁓ speaker-0: Mm-hmm. speaker-1: following a pretty girl down Rodeo Drive. Is that what we're supposed to be doing? No. ⁓ second thing is it's all kept for two years, all the video. So if somebody's doing something they're not supposed to, we can go back and investigate and audit, audit it. there are audits that can be done. Then the training of the officers and the and the staff who are security contractors in Fourth Amendment ⁓ policies and and for the Fourth Amendment and department policies and and regulations and everything. And let me tell you, we're all very concerned about losing the ability to have this technology. So there's a lot of pressure to make sure we're using it correctly. ⁓ so all those things. And then I would bring community members in, I would brief the city council, I would go to meetings and show them what we're doing and how we're using the technology. And once people saw it and and and and got a comfort with it, the That helped a lot. So community education is hugely important. And then telling the stories, you know, I see people going over the data and everything, and like, tell the story. about two years ago, there was an individual that killed four people in four days in LA. He was essentially going around shooting homeless people. Then he did a robbery of a of a person who was going in their house in their garage, shot and killed that person. That night, the sheriffs were able to get a plate, give us the plate. The plate came in, not give us the plate, but the plate was in the data systems. Correct. The plate hits coming into Beverly Hills. Within two minutes, we had officers surrounding the vehicle, took the person down safely, recovered a weapon in the car. It was then linked to the four murders through ballistics. I have to think, why was that individual in Beverly Hills? Was he there to murder somebody? He just murdered four people in four days, so why not make it five in five days? I don't know what his motivation was, but There's so many stories like that where we've stopped ⁓ kidnapping suspects, we've stopped murders, we've stopped people who've done home invasions and robberies, or we've stopped them before they've done anything and arrested them. So the public safety stories that we should be telling or are are how we're using the technology appropriately. And when somebody uses it inappropriately, they're getting fired, they're getting disciplined, ⁓ they're being held accountable. So it's just like with their firearm. If they if an officer uses that tool inappropriately, they're going to be held accountable, maybe even go to jail. Same thing with this surveillance technology. If it's misused, then accountability has to take be taken. speaker-0: Chief, I I I not to interrupt, but just to emphasize, I said you made so many good points here. I almost ran out of ink. I mean it's fantastic because ⁓ I'll start with the last one. And I wrote this down here about basically inappropriate behavior by an employee, you know, by by swarm personnel or non-swarm personnel with the information here. It's not as if ⁓ we have knucklehead idiot cops from time to time, rarely thank God. But with a nation a million sworn police officers, you know, give or take, you're going to have some ⁓ examples of inappropriate and even illegal behavior. It's not the first time it's happened ⁓ with all the tools and all the responsibility that officers have. ⁓ running an ex-girlfriend on a computer ⁓ with CLETS or NCIC, whatever it is, it's happened before. The same types of things can happen. I we understand what these surveillance systems. But this is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You really articulate it so well. You audit when you find inappropriate out of policy or illegal behavior, it is dealt with. It's dealt with immediately. It's dealt with appropriately. And we're talking about Beverly Hills PD. I'm assuming and hoping it's the same thing for other law enforcement agencies. But that is not an excuse to say, well you know what, we're going to get away with the system That immediately identified this ⁓ serial killer that came into Beverly Hills. We're gonna get rid of that system because someone may abuse it. To me, this is juvenile, this is short-sighted, and it's really a red herring. Because if that's the case, if that's your reasoning, we should throw out all systems that a law enforcement officer might abuse in exchange for very little public safety. ⁓ in crime prevention. So I just want to throw that editorial in there and really bolster what you said a minute ago. ⁓ the other thing I want to touch on you you kind of hit this about how this works. The systems are not designed and they're certainly not used by law enforcement just to watch everybody all the time just for fun. The systems are reacting to information that's been input. Is that fair to say? speaker-1: Yes, absolutely. speaker-0: So they they are looking for crooks. They are looking for bad guys and gals. They have want they want information with license plates, with vehicle descriptions, and with individuals. That's what they're looking for. They're not concerned with anybody who is not has not committed a crime, who's not wanted for a crime, it's not associated with a crime. Now, this is kind of rhetorical. But how many innocent people ended up in handcuffs in Beverly Hills because of flock cameras? speaker-1: Very rare, if ever. I I remember one incident where an individual was briefly detained and we were able to tell so fast that that was not the person we were looking for and were able to brush them off and send them on their way. Where before we may have handcuffed them, taken them to the station, cost a lot of liability to the city. And so let me talk about that for a couple of minutes if you want. What year did you come on to law enforcement? We speaker-0: Love to hear it. ⁓ absolutely. Nineteen ninety. speaker-1: Yep, so I'm right about the same time. So you'll remember we used to attend roll calls and we get briefings on what was going on and what our assignments were for the day. And oftentimes they would hand us these sheets, and there'd be a sheet with a grainy photo of a car or a person and a white Toyota or a red Honda or you know a black accura or something to that effect. And they'd say, Hey, this vehicle we think is involved in burglaries in an area. And so we'd go hit that area and we'd pull over every Every one of those types of cars, it's that color with person matching the description. And we would piss off 20 people or more before if ever we got to the right person and made a good stop. So we were the victims of what we had then for technology and and and everything. Now, going back to that precision policing model, I'll take you right to the suspect. I'll show you everything they did before we ever had an interaction with them. And then I'll show you everything the officer did from a drone angle, from a body cam angle, from a surveillance camera angle. You want to talk about procedural justice. we're first of all, it keeps the officers in line. We had very few complaints in Beverly Hills, and the ones we did have, we could investigate thoroughly having all these cameras and everything. And we could show people exactly what the suspect did, which reduced liability to the city. So there's a famous story out of Chula Vista, and I have to give props to Chief Roxanne Kennedy because she literally was the queen, the start of the drones in the United States being used by law enforcement in a ⁓ in a major way. But they tell this famous story about when they first started using the drone: is that they got a call of a man with a gun, and the officer was heading to the call, everything's hyped up as usual. And ⁓ the drone got overhead, and they see the gentleman put a cigarette to his lips and put a gun up to the cigarette and light his cigarette because it was a cigarette lighter that was shaped like a gun. Now, the many ways that could have played out if that individual had stood up as the officer arrived, having this pistol-looking device in his hand, and the officer not knowing that it was a cigarette lighter, could have ended up in a shooting, a death, ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Millions of dollars of liability to the to the city, a tragic case for the family and friends, tragic for that officer if that had occurred. But we had similar situations where suspect had a bat or a knife or a screwdriver, but being able to identify that early and push it out to the officers and where exactly the suspect was, giving them the ability to have standoff distance, to bring the right amount of force, the right amount of tools or the right tools for the situation, huge, huge, huge. And it's hard to calculate, but I'm guessing we saved the city of Beverly Hills millions and millions of dollars by what didn't happen and by showing what the suspects did when we did have a crime. And so that to me is really procedural justice and and it should be the ability to hold the suspect accountable, but also the officers accountable and show the community what the officers have to deal with every day when they're apprehending these dangerous and sometimes violent criminals. speaker-0: ⁓ Mark ⁓ once again I made great point. This goes back earlier, when you talked about the different companies ⁓ out there in this industry ⁓ and how law enforcement uses them. ⁓ and comparing it to the word Xerox now. We say, ⁓ it's gonna Xerox that ⁓ is generic. One of the companies you mentioned is is is Axon and ⁓ People have to realize talking the surveillance society and world that we live in. Axon is one of the largest providers of of law enforcement body cams in the country. Prop prop you can probably tell me it's probably the larger one. Absolutely. The largest by far. And including the California Higher Patrol and LAPD. So it's huge. And but what is that surveillance ⁓ that surveillance mentality, the surveillance reality done? You made the point. It has reduced complaints against law enforcement officers and it has exonerated countless law enforcement officers. One, because the main reason is because cops know that they're they are watching themselves, that the sergeants are watching, you know, the the agency is watching, and it keeps them in line. But it also exonerates him because people will make false accusations, as we know. And ⁓ now we can go back and play the video, say this didn't happen. As a matter of fact, you understand now under California law, you can be sued for this allegation you made against an officer. So this is the reason I bring this up, and you lay the foundation for this, is because, like it or not, this is the society, this is the world in which we live now. For better or for worse, their surveillance exists. The question is is how do we use it best for the betterment of our society and for enforcing the rule of law? I I have to say, I just think ⁓ there's nobody better than I've come across and reading so far and having talked to you than than yourself and what you did at Beverly Hills Police Department and what they continue to do. ⁓ through your past leadership. And they're ongoing. You have a great team still working there. Some people we talked about offline. It's fantastic. It's a model, it literally is a model for law enforcement agencies, as you said, hundreds coming in to see what you're doing, take that model back to their agencies, implement it, and ⁓ prevent crime and solve it the way that's happening in Beverly Hills. Listen, retired chief ⁓ Mark Steinbrook. Where can people find you? 'Cause I know that you actually consult, you actually lecture, you talk about this and other things in law enforcement. How can people find you who are as as intrigued with you as I am? speaker-1: Well, please hit me up on LinkedIn. That's the main main avenue and social media that I do. You can find me pretty easily on LinkedIn and send me a message and and we can talk. And I I love what you just said. I want to go back to that for a second because there's a couple things in there that are that I that I think about. So one is you never hear a chief really say, I have enough cops, I have enough officers. And the world's changing. It's harder to recruit It's harder to get enough people to want to be officers and stay officers 30, 40 years. Tough profession. And so technology can help us lock down places that we don't need to have officers and it can help us focus the officers, the limited resources we do have to where we need them and against who we need them to when you talk about the criminal element. And you s like you said, like it or not, first of all, everybody has a body camera. First time I've I've referred to my phone. But everybody now has the ability to call 911, text nine one one, send pictures, send videos. ⁓ personally, I think we should have body camps for politicians, but that's a whole nother subject. But people are so worried about surveillance, but yet everybody that has a phone has signed away their privacy through many different companies and corporations. These companies and corporations, they know where you live, they know what you shop, they know what you watch, they know where you're going. I'm sure that I'll get ads pop up later on my phones, you know, of anything I've just talked about, ⁓ or news feeds because the phone's listening. And so I find it ironic that people want to want to put down the the public safety folks that are trying to keep them safe ⁓ when they've given away their own privacy on on their everyday ⁓ phone devices. ⁓ so additionally, so going back to there's not enough cops. People will say, well, ⁓ you could do this because you were Beverly Hills. But again, disruptors, disruptive companies that have put out very inexpensive cameras, ALPRs, drones, have given the ability for most agencies to have some form of real-time watch center, some form of use of technology. And different agencies have to decide what works for them, whether it's cameras, drones, ALPRs. I found that the combination of all three, Much like my training in the military, like you you have you hit ⁓ with multiple things. You know, it's great if you have an ALPR, but if you have no way to track it with a drone or on cameras, then you send officers, it's ⁓ the car's already gone. So you you you have to have kind of this ⁓ combined arms effect by using all the technologies together. And it gives smaller police departments or less funded police departments the ability, and there's a lot of different ways to get funded. There's your budget, but there's also grants. There's also nonprofits or donations. So there's creative ways to fund ⁓ these initiatives. But it goes back to the chief has to educate the community. The community has to kind of decide what it's willing to ⁓ do or have and why it's important. So for example, in Beverly Hills, we flew a drone constantly. It just orbited the city. And I had one up all the time. And now we have three or four spread out in boxes that can Launch and recover. Some some cities are like, no, no, we only want it when there's a nine one one call or a certain type of call, the drone launches, goes out, and comes right back. And that that's fine. That's up to the city. ⁓ we had a different model, but that education piece is so hugely important. And I encourage, you know, all chiefs. I mean, reach out to me and I'll tell you some of the things I did or how how I did it. But when we had the technology, we made almost mini infomercials about. cases we had and we would push them out on social media, we would push ⁓ out at community meetings and give our community that sense of like the the officers are out there doing the right things. And ⁓ and we we they appreciated it. So I got very few complaints or concerns about privacy ⁓ in Beverly Hills and and they were very happy with the public level of public safety we brought to the city. speaker-0: Well, listen, I have a lot of friends in Beverly Hills, and ⁓ they definitely are happy ⁓ with what ⁓ you did there and what your former agency continues to do. Mark Stainbrook, it has been a pleasure and it's been an education ⁓ for me. I've really enjoyed this. I know the audience has too, and ⁓ I'm sure in the future we'll have a good reason to bring you back on with your expertise. So God bless you, my friend. Stay safe. And look forward to talking to you sometime in the not too distant future. speaker-1: Thanks, Mark. I look forward to it. Stay safe, everybody. speaker-0: Take care. God bless you from your early ownation.