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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show veteran Californian law enforcement officer and the man behind Policing in America
podcast, Tom Datro.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Tom's early life in Chicago,
his journey into law enforcement, the impact the defund the police movement has had on
his profession, fitness standards, the recruitment crisis, addiction, gangs and so much more.
Now before he gets this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Tom Datro.
Enjoy.
Tom, I want to say two things to start.
Firstly I want to thank our mutual friend, George Ryan for bringing us together and secondly
I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you, sir.
It is truly it's an honor.
I'm super excited to be here and yeah, I think we are we all love George.
So thank you, George, for making the connection.
So where roughly on planet earth we finding you today?
That's awesome.
I love how you were to that.
So I'm going to be in California.
I'm going to be in Southern California.
Brilliant.
Well, I would love to start the very beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
You know, this will be this will be a little bit profound for me and I know that seems
like a strong word.
I just lost my mother.
Actually it was unexpected.
She ended up having a stroke on October 10th and by October 14th she had succumbed to that.
So forgive me if I get a little bit emotional.
I haven't really I've been processing this.
You see I'm wearing her Fitbit right now because I'm not ready to give it up.
So here's the deal.
I was born in the south side of Chicago to a 17 year old single mother.
She was a bit of a wild child.
I was born in 1971.
So Chicago is a very rough part of town, especially the south side.
Really don't know my biological father that well.
He's actually passed away.
He passed away some years ago.
Never had any kind of relationship with him.
I am his namesake.
His name was Tom.
So I'm a Tom Jr. but really never knew him.
I think my mom and him were together for enough to put me on this earth and that was about
it.
My mom would remarry later on but that wasn't a healthy relationship either.
So that kind of came and went.
Grew up in the south side of Chicago where my grandmother at a young age, to give you
an idea of the value system that I was around, said get yourself a good city job as like
a trash collector or a curb breaker and that's how you're going to make it kid.
Just get yourself a good city job.
And you know we weren't the kind of family we come from very very modest means food stamps
and government cheese and all that.
We didn't have big ambitions.
We didn't have big hopes.
So to kind of traverse the storyline to where I am today, it's quite the story for me.
I fell, I think they kicked me out of high school.
I think they were like you're done.
You're so bad.
Get out.
We don't want you here anymore.
Probably graduated high school with a 1.9 GPA.
I tried to join the military.
I had asthma so the Marines wouldn't take me back then.
The army wouldn't take me.
And I had a huge fear about being stuck on a boat in the middle of the water.
So I never even thought about the Navy.
In hindsight, should have joined the Coast Guard or should have joined the Air Force
but I didn't know any better.
I fumbled around life just trying to figure out who I am and what I'm supposed to be.
I got into fitness early on.
I was a spin instructor.
I got into mixed martial arts because you grew up in the, before it was called mixed
martial arts actually, just got into a bunch of different martial arts.
Went up in the South Side of Chicago as a young punk.
You got into fights all the time.
And it just, you know, you want to learn to defend yourself.
So I was always a bit of a scrapper.
Not anymore.
I want to buy someone dinner.
I don't want to fight anybody anymore.
Those days are behind me.
Through a whole series of events, a whole different series of events, I found myself
in the world of academia.
And I ended up completing an undergraduate degree.
I did get a master's degree and I did finish my doctoral work at the University of Southern
California.
So any fellow Trojans out there, fight on.
I joined law enforcement and I've been 22 years now in law enforcement.
Again, through just a whole series of different events, found myself on the West Coast and
got in with a very large, prominent West Coast agency and I've been there for the past 22
years.
I started later in life in my policing endeavor.
I was 31 years old.
So that's an old guy in the academy.
And I have always enjoyed learning.
I just knew I never know enough.
And I knew that I never know enough.
So I always enjoy trying to learn more about just everything, whether it's religion or
physics or automobiles, whatever it is.
And I'm, you know, I know so little about every of these topics, but I did notice something
in policing and I'll start to kind of take this broad perspective and start narrowing
it down.
It felt as though we were training our police officers like the way we train grammar school
students.
I remember standing up in class, reading from a book, two or three paragraphs, and then
I would sit down.
Somebody would stand up next to me and that's how we learned about the laws of arrest.
And that's how we learned about the penal code.
And sure, when we learned tactics, it was a little bit more kinetic, but the training
was very just heavy lecture, no input, not at all the Socratic method of, you know, they
just assume you don't know anything coming into this job and we're going to teach you
everything.
And it was always a, I don't even want to call it a passion.
It was almost like an imperative of mine to change how police officers are trained, to
make them think you're not just a law enforcement officer, you're a problem solver.
Because if you look at everything through the lens of enforcing the law, you limit your
cognitive capacity to solve a problem.
It just opens it up for you cognitively.
So the better part of my career, the latter part of my career, the last seven years I've
been in training and education within the department, I still dip my toe in the pond
of operations.
I still get out there a little bit, not nearly to the extent that I once did.
And I've been traveling around the country and even around the world to some smaller
countries that are trying to professionalize their police agencies, teaching them how to
actually think about being a police officer.
Not this binary thought of do this, don't do this, break the law, don't break the law.
Society writ large has dropped a lot of problems on the doorstep of policing.
We'll take mental health and homelessness as two options.
Yet we don't learn a thing about those in the academy.
But if we learned how to think and if we learned how to solve problems, then irrespective of
what falls on our doorstep, we just might be able to handle a little bit better than
we do now.
I've been talking a lot.
I'm going to pause, sir, and see if you have anything to say.
No, no, absolutely, I'm going to take you all the way back to the South Side of Chicago
though.
What was the environment that you were surrounded?
What were some of the negative pulls that you were working against?
And then what was your relationship with law enforcement at that age in that community?
God, such a great question.
Everybody around me was a single parent household.
I grew up in an apartment building.
Everybody around me had financial insecurities.
There were people who had houses, little bungalows, but there was not opulence.
You had lower middle class, which is probably where I'd put myself, and then middle class.
We were never starving, but we had government intervention to help.
We always had heat and electricity and whatnot, so I don't want to oversell it.
But times were very lean.
It was a rough part of town.
It was, think of it almost like the West Side story, the 33rd Street kids had a rivalry
with the 37th Street kids, and the 31st Street kids, you didn't walk down that way.
It wasn't gang.
It was more like gang light.
It was just groups of kids that grew up in this little section.
And Chicago, especially back then, was very segregated.
So it was segregated by race in general.
We had the white neighborhoods and the black neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods.
But then even in those white neighborhoods, you had the Italians and the Polish and the
Irish, and even they didn't stray too far from their own little nests.
I look back fondly on those times.
You play in the alley.
You'd get a refrigerator cardboard box that somebody would leave, and people would put
kids in this box, and you'd roll it down the alley.
You know, we had crazy weather in Chicago, so you'd have these incredible snowball fights
and football games where the 33rd Street kids would play the 37th Street kids in football
when it would snow.
So there was a lot of camaraderie.
Chicago didn't get ultra-violent, I'd say, until like the 90s.
That's when people were starting to get shot for Air Jordans.
And by that time, I'm already late teens, early 20s, so the youth aspect is gone.
You know, I was in that Bridgeport neighborhood.
And I mean, just rough.
James, I'll give you an example.
I was eight years old.
I remember walking into my grandmother's little apartment.
I'm crying because I got punched in the face by Bobby Sugalowski.
And she said, what is going on?
And I said, Bobby Sugalowski punched me in the face, and I'm crying.
And I remember Grandma, who was a tough little Lithuanian immigrant, pinched me with these
brittle nails that were like prehistoric.
And I said, ow, why would you pinch me?
She said, you go back out there, and you don't let anybody punch.
You go back and fight.
And I walk outside.
And I walk up to Bobby Sugalowski, and all the older guys are around.
And I said, my grandma said, we got to fight.
And so we just start, as eight-year-olds do, right?
We're not skilled fighters.
We're just slapping the hell out of each other.
And then the older guys broke it up and said, all right, it's a tie.
It's a tie.
You go, then we're both crying.
And my grandmother waited, and I went in and I cried.
But that was the lessons of a Lithuanian immigrant.
You don't just get punched in the face.
You're a tough Chicago kid.
You punch back.
And if you get beat up, you get beat up.
But you fight.
And so that was Grandma's kind of mentality.
Yeah, man, I was back there recently.
My mom lived and passed away in the exact same neighborhood.
She spent 72 years in this neighborhood.
This is what people do in Bridgeport.
And I'm sure it's like that in Boston and some of these enclaves in New York City and
Philly.
She grew up across the street from the church that we had her final service on.
It's just the way it is in the south side of Chicago.
I'll pause, see if anything comes up that may be Peter curiosity.
Well, let's go back even further with the generations.
What do you remember about your grandmother's immigration story?
Because there's so much depth to this genealogy of the guests that we come on.
It's so interesting.
You know, it the way we categorize our life experiences today was so different than how
they did it 50 years ago.
They just didn't share as much.
You know, Grandma was brought here by her mother on a boat.
But I don't know much about it.
Life had so many challenges.
We didn't sit around at night talking about a lot of stuff.
There was always some problem to be solved, whether it was, you know, the food fridge
was a little bit light or the gunshots in the neighborhood, whatever.
There's always something.
My mom's, you know, relationships and then the brokenness of it or the abuse of stepdad.
So there really wasn't a lot of time to learn.
I wish I knew more about my grandmother's story.
She's a one Adele Adele stack, wonderful, wonderful woman.
Tough, tough as nails.
Her husband served proudly in the World War two, and he died due to complications coming
home from the war.
God, I don't know.
I know her father was killed in Chicago.
He was stabbed to death for loose change in a neighborhood not too far from where Bridgeport
is.
I think it's now it was called Back of the Yards.
That's the name of the neighborhood, Back of the Yards, and it's where the stocks, the
stockyards are.
So this is where a lot of men would just, you know, take all the beef and the cattle
and they would slaughter the cattle and, you know, chop it up and everything.
So he was one of those kind of hard men, but I never met him.
I never knew him and grandma never talked about him much just from the fact that he
died young.
I don't I don't know a lot of my family tree.
You know, grandma was all I knew, and I didn't have any connection to my biological father's
side because he was gone.
So it really starts with my grandmother and it kind of ends with my mom.
And they were both Bridgeporters.
And I just know grandma was brought here very, very young, maybe one years old from her from
her mother, who I honestly I'm embarrassed to say I don't even know her name.
I don't know my great grandmother's name because my grandmother never spoke about her too much.
What about the interaction with law enforcement when you were a young man?
What was the relationship?
Were they walking the beat?
Were they ruling with an iron fist or a lot more kind of community minded?
Yeah.
Thank you for the reminder.
Terrible.
Hated them.
Hated the cops.
Absolutely.
They were Chicago police were heavy handed.
They were arrogant.
They could do whatever they wanted.
They were like they were like the palace guards that were, you know, because they served the
king they could come and go and do whatever the hell they wanted.
They used to look down on us because we were Bridgeporters.
We were the dirty South Side kids.
We would be playing football in the street and they would drive down the street and say,
give me that football.
You can't be playing in the street.
They would say things like street cars, sidewalk people, and they would take our football and
just leave.
It was no wonder come Halloween or winter we would throw stuff at their cars.
We would line up and wait for them to drive and throw snowballs at the cars.
Or on Halloween we would throw eggs at their cars.
Like it was such a contentious relationship with them.
I'm sure there were good cops.
And we were punks, but we weren't like in the grand scheme of things.
We were just kids without dads running around raising havoc, but we weren't breaking laws.
We were juvenile delinquents, but we showed up for school.
We would stay out past curfew.
We would run through people's gangways.
We would ding dong ditch, you know, that kind of stuff.
Low level, low level, we weren't like bad kids.
We never hurt anybody or would jump other kids.
Just a rowdy group of little bandits running around raising hell.
But in our way, you know, we still loved our mom and grandmothers.
Every parent could hit every other kid.
Like that should be known.
Like Jimmy Spall, a good friend of mine, firefighter, Chicago firefighter.
Jimmy and I were in the apartment and we were doing something, we were playing with matches,
you know, in the bathroom, putting stuff on fire in the bathtub.
Mrs. Spall, who I still call her Mrs. Spall to this day, would come in and hit both of
us.
You little sons of a bitch.
And shoot, and that's it.
Like I didn't think, oh, that's abuse.
I wouldn't go home and tell my mom Mrs. Spall hit me because my mom would hit me for doing
something that Mrs. Spall had to hit me for.
And my mom could hit other kids too.
So that you think of like that kind of environment.
But we hated the cops.
They were not mentors.
They were not, they wouldn't stop and play catch with us.
It was, it was, I never wanted to be a cop.
Never.
It's just by a strange, all my buddies grew up and became firefighters, cops, curb breakers,
mail carriers.
We all, they all got civil service jobs.
And I went into academia.
I tried to leave that world behind.
But when I would meet my buddies and hear their stories, I got romanticized by it.
So that's when I had a little bit of a career change and went into the civil service and
policing.
But please, I haven't thought about these memories since I was a kid.
So it's fun to even think about it.
There's any, anything else that comes up.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's, this is why I love the, the, the, the early years of anyone.
There's so much gold there, especially in the family members as well.
You mentioned that the police officers seem to not be mentor material.
You were raised, you know, with a single mother.
Who were the role models?
Who were the mentors that you encountered that took a 1.9 GPA high school kid into the
world of academics?
Yeah, you know, these are interesting questions, James, because I don't look back fondly at
like an inspiration or somebody that motivated in hindsight, I admire my mother and hindsight.
I admire my grandmother because they did the best they could with the hand they were dealt.
Excuse me one moment.
Excuse me.
But there wasn't this sort of, you know, like Yogi on the mountain or this mentor.
It was fumbling.
It was just fumbling through and making mistakes and hitting dead ends that just said, I got
to try something different.
I'm, I'm so tired of being broke.
I'm so tired of not being able to go anywhere.
I'm tired of having to use credit cards to buy groceries for my mom and then just defaulting
on the credit card.
You know, like I just got so tired of that life that you see people join fire departments
when they're 20 and a half and they, they start to get into a little bit of money and
their life starts to change a little bit.
So I think my group of buddies, my South side buddies, just you either got out.
And when I say got out, some of them still live in the neighborhood.
You either got killed, something happened to you.
You drank and drove or you got into some crazy fight or you got into prison or you just fumbled
your way through and figured out how this worked.
And we would mimic that.
Oh, Ricky's a runner at the board of options downtown.
I'm going to do that.
Or so and so's delivering, they're cutting cable back then when we used to have cable
systems and you'd climb up the poles.
So and so joined the fire department.
So you just fumble through and find your way, whether it's divine intervention, a little
lot of luck.
I just sort of fumbled my way to the North side of Chicago, which was the yuppie area.
This was the more pretentious, the busy, it was the white collared compared to the blue
collared.
And I think my first exposure was at DePaul University and just seeing these like young
minds walking around and people talking, I loved it.
I loved the campus.
I loved just walking around feeling like these people were so superior, like they were just
so smart.
And I kind of just got sucked into that.
So maybe I had a propensity for education and knowledge, but I never got to realize
it because I had so many problems.
As a kid, I never got to just come home and study.
When you were struggling in school, I was a straight C student in school and I've talked
about in here before when I went to fire school, EMT, paramedic, I was a straight A student.
And for me, it was just I needed that tactile element needed to make sense.
You tell me, oh, memorize it because you have to.
It just doesn't work in my world.
But if you show me how this mathematics works in the hydraulics of a hose and friction loss,
now all of a sudden it makes sense.
What was that kind of aha moment or that shift that you had from struggling in education
to thriving in education?
So OK, so I think it was twofold.
I was always a very shy, insecure kid.
And growing up just not having as much and whatnot, you carry these around you.
But in the north side, I could sort of redefine myself.
I wasn't Tommy Detro, the kid without a dad whose mom is going to the church to get the
food bank.
You know, I got I could shed that nobody knew me.
And I remember just like sitting in classes.
I would just walk in.
You could just walk into the classes and just hearing things.
And one particular time there was some mock.
These kids were going to be they wanted to go to law school.
So there were probably political science undergraduates.
And I happened to be in this area and they needed volunteers just so they could practice.
They were going to say, here, you're a witness.
Sit over on that desk and they're going to cross examine you.
And I really had nothing.
It was just a warm body that they can talk to.
And I remember bantering back and forth.
You know, my brain remembers it as the character in Good Will Hunting, where that tough kid
was real smart and was able to tell everybody, like, how about them apples?
But it wasn't.
They handedly outmaneuvered me intellectually.
But I was able to talk back and forth.
And kids were asking me, like, I call them kids.
The students were saying, hey, what are you studying?
Where do you go?
That was really funny what you did.
And I remember having to lie.
Oh, yeah.
I'm studying this or I'm studying that.
I just completely BSed myself.
And I thought, they think I'm smart.
Like, they think I'm smart and they like me and they invited me to this next little thing.
And I'm never going to see them again because I don't have class and I can't be there.
And so what I ended up doing was I ended up getting a job at DePaul University back in
the early 90s.
And my job was loading paper into these huge printers because back then there were no client
server type of instant information.
You'd have mainframe computing.
So the accounting section had their mainframe and the accounts payable had theirs and the
human resources had theirs.
And at the end of the day, they would upload their data on these big reels.
I would take these reels, put them into a machine, and then they would create a report.
And my job was to load the reel, wait, when the report was ready, go to some keyboard
and say print this out and literally stacks of paper.
My job was to open a box of paper and put in these printers.
That was what I was doing at DePaul University.
And they only did it at night.
So I worked from like nine o'clock at night till three in the morning.
And it was a part time job.
And I just kind of hustled.
And I would do these reports.
I remember I would stack them neat ways and whatnot.
And I knew if I could get full time, if I could get a full time job, I could get school
for free because you're an employee.
So I just kind of hustled in the middle of the night.
And one day they said, well, if you want to do this full time, like we'll just hire you
as a nighttime employee.
And I grabbed it.
And I just loaded paper.
And then the morning I would deliver all these reports to all these various departments.
And I was charismatic and funny because I could redefine myself.
Well, I applied and I started going to school at DePaul, which was funny because they said
you're not allowed to take these classes.
You don't have the GPA.
You would never get accepted into our university.
And I said, well, I mean, I'm an employee, so I get school.
So we're going to have to work it out.
So DePaul had to send me to all these like pre-college level classes to learn English
and learn math.
You know, you have like level 100 classes, level 200 classes.
I was doing classes like 08, 09, like there weren't even 100.
It was like 90 level classes or 80 level classes to learn grammar and whatnot.
And that's how I kind of got into it.
And I realized like, I'm not a dummy.
Like I'm not brilliant.
You know what I mean?
I'm not going to Harvard anytime soon, but I'm not a dummy.
And I can do this.
And I would just study at DePaul at night.
I would read the books and I would just little by little chip my way.
Okay, I finished that class.
I chipped my way.
I finished that class.
And I think that was the realization for me.
That's how my academic journey started.
I was a hustler.
I figured out how to get into university through a back door, loading paper into printers.
So what did you end up majoring in?
What was your focus?
So DePaul had a degree called human computer interaction.
This was before Y2K.
And DePaul was on this, on the forefront of this technological revolution that was coming.
So I did a lot of courses that were exposing me to, I think back then it was just how to
psychology classes, I think it was a psychology major, but with an emphasis on technology.
And I'm sure, because this is going back 30 years, I'm sure the technology I was learning
was like C plus computing and uploading of files.
It was just so, so very basic.
And I was just chipping away little by little.
And what ended up happening was I applied for the agency that I'm with now because I
applied to a bunch.
I was going to go to Chicago and I was applying to all these agencies.
And the one that picked me up was this West Coast one.
They picked me up very quickly.
So I moved.
I shot out there.
So I had to put my education on hold.
But I was really becoming an academic at that point.
By this time, I had been going to school part time for three and a half years.
So I had really embraced how to study and how to take notes.
And I was becoming a good student, especially because I could scaffold it.
I was only taking one class a quarter.
So I could really dive into that class and get good at it because I was just going so
slowly.
I started the endeavor with policing.
And then once there, that's when my education really skyrocketed.
That's when I finished my degree.
That's when I got the master.
So the degree I got now is just in criminal justice management because I finished it out
here.
But I knew that was going to be a stepping stone.
And then the master's is in public administration because I wanted to see how civics works on
a large scale.
I didn't want to just get a master's in organizational leadership or something because it was too
narrow.
So I wanted to see public.
How is this public sector is so big?
How does it work?
And then the doctorate is in education because that's where my passion was.
So just to take you through all three, but if we want to go back, we'll do that.
Yeah.
No, I think that's the front door.
The law enforcement community is a good place now.
With this unique lens that you had, the upbringing on the South Side, this educational journey,
describe to me your perspective as far as that community when you entered almost 20
years ago.
Yeah.
The community for policing, right?
For policing, yes.
So this was something that was very at home to me because I don't want to oversell it,
but it was poverty.
It was.
But people think of poverty and they have these images of kids that haven't eaten in
six days, but it was poverty.
We're at the poverty line, but I don't want to oversell, but it was.
So I'm used to these neighborhoods.
I'm very comfortable there.
So when I started working in some of these downtrodden neighborhoods that are often described
as underserved or marginalized, boy, I felt right at home.
Like I knew the plight of these individuals.
And it always struck me as interesting how a law enforcement community, writ large back
then, sort of looked down on the community, these dirty people, these criminals.
Everybody here is a criminal in some way, shape, or form.
Gosh, it reminded me of my Chicago cops.
And I did not have the same perspective.
And from day one of probation, I felt like a round hole in a square peg.
And I would share this with people and they would, the advice was always just get off
probation, play the game, get off probation, and then you could be the kind of cop that
you want to be, but you got to get through probation.
And I just started dealt with it.
I mean, I remember being in people's houses and cops with dip in their mouth, like looking
around and like just spitting in the people's apartment, like rubbing their foot in the
carpet.
And I'm thinking, what is going on?
Like that is insane to me that we would do this.
Like I'm here to truly change the lives of people and make it a better existence.
But there was, it was very, it was a poor taste in my mouth with it.
Because I was expecting a bunch of, I don't know what I, I think I was expecting a bunch
of heroes because this wasn't Chicago PD.
Chicago PD was the breeding ground of all the ass hats in policing.
But I'm going to a good agency.
I'm going to a professional agency.
And yet I saw a lot of the same sort of uneducated, uncouth, blue collared arrogance that I was
surrounded by.
And I mean, for the first year of probation, I wanted to leave and people would say, just
stay, just stay.
It's a good job.
You're going to be able to do good things, but we got issues.
Nobody's perfect.
And, and then, you know, so you stay, you grind it out and you stay and then you become
off probation.
And then I got to police the way I wanted to police.
I got to talk to people the way I wanted to talk to.
And I don't know, I have a lot more empathy for the asshole gangster as they're told,
because my brain sees a punk who's doing terrible stuff, but I can't help but think, did his
mom take prenatal vitamins when he was in the womb?
What kind of coping mechanisms was he taught as a kid?
Like of course you're an asshole gangster.
Look at where you're growing up and look at who your role models are, because your parent
is in jail.
Your dad is not even alive.
But when I would talk to these kids, James, this is something that's interesting.
And I'm digressing a bit.
But when I would make an arrest, I would, I would, I remember driving and I would open
up the window behind.
I would say, can I talk to you young man?
Because remember I'm 33 years old at this point.
And I would say, like, do you have any brothers or sisters?
Yeah, inevitably.
Yeah, I got younger this, that and the other.
Do you want your younger brother to be in the gang?
And James, when I say a hundred percent hit ratio, I'm not exaggerating.
One hundred percent of the time they had an answer that was akin to this.
Stop no.
Like that visceral, right?
Like or, or hell no or something.
But it was like that.
And I said, well, you're part of it.
Yeah, but I had no choice, man.
I don't want my little brother to be part of this.
But I'm bullshitting.
Like it was visceral, which made me think they're not proud of us.
They just felt as though they didn't have any other option.
Now, the case could be made that everybody gets to make their own choice.
And at a certain point, you're an adult and you're going to choose your path.
But you can't discount the factors along that path that keep nudging you along the way.
I really think if I was born in the South Side of Chicago, six blocks south, and I was
hanging out with the 37th Street kids and not the 33rd Street kids, the trajectory of
my life would have been very different because the 37th Street kids got in jail.
They died young.
Some of them made it out, but some of them just their lives were nothing to speak of.
And really, like it's a six block difference with me.
And that never fell short on me.
So I definitely have more of an empathy.
Now today's cop is very different.
I think we've traveled a long way and we have community policing and you have cops now being
recruited from the inner city.
So I think today, if anyone's listening, like I get it, I'm not trying to paint a picture
now.
It was 20 years ago, 22 years ago.
So the distance we've traveled and the ground we've made in policing has been very profound.
It's been very good.
But let me pause.
Well, that underlines something that I talk about a lot.
That whole ivory tower, we all get to make decisions.
I call bullshit on that.
And the great kind of analogy to use is if I grew up in inner city wherever and a bodega
was the only place that I even understood what food was, am I going to make the same
decisions about my nutrition as James Gearing, who was an English boy who grew up on a farm
that had an orchard and a vegetable garden and chickens and all the things?
Of course not.
So the environment dictates your decisions.
Your environment dictates your level of discipline and motivation and all these other things.
So to jump on and say, well, if you just woke up at five and went for a run, took an ice
bath and ate a salad, you could be like me.
I couldn't disagree more.
So when we look at the world of policing, it's always a one way mirror.
It's always what are the police doing wrong?
No one's ever saying why are the streets of America so fucking dangerous?
Why are the schools of America so fucking dangerous?
Because they don't have this problem in Oslo or Lisbon or Tokyo.
So there are numerous countries full of human beings just like us who do not have these
issues.
So if we're not looking at why have we got to the problem, and I would argue that prohibition
of drugs is a massive part of this.
Ironically, Chicago, we know the name Al Capone purely because of prohibition.
So that epic 80 year longitudinal study of failure has shown us that when you put addicts
in prison, you create this incredible crime issue.
So let's expand on that a little bit more.
What needs to change so that gangs aren't the most powerful influence of a lot of young
men and women's lives?
Yeah, this is great.
And the variables that if I could wave a wand, you know, I've often said this to my inner
city folks, if I wave a wand and I create an algorithm program that takes racism out
of policing, that's it.
Like, it just doesn't exist in this matrix that we live in.
The day to day police citizen changes very little.
You will have things that change on an individual level, but writ large, you're not going to
get the kind of profound change if you instead say every police officer needs a four year
degree and every police officer needs to have that degree in psychology.
Or like, like that's a big intervention where I could stop getting 20 year old kids that
are just getting indoctrinated into something that is my experience only just my anecdotes
experience, because I spent 20 years in this particular division, and that's all I know.
And I'm going to impart that knowledge on them.
So I love that your question is like that.
I would the big intervention number one, and you mentioned Oslo and I love Oslo, Norway.
The thing I would do is first of all, we have a system of punishment.
And I think we need to seriously look at that and say a system of true rehabilitation.
When you go to prison in America, you come out a better criminal.
And we I would truly I've been trying to become an educator in the prison system because I
want to show people there's other ways of doing things that you have value, but we don't
treat them like that.
And now I understand that's not very popular.
And I understand that there are some very bad people.
So let's take the outliers out, let's take these quote unquote evil people that are that
are unrehabilitable and just taking the general convict like we can make this person better.
They haven't had any investment in them.
And could you imagine the system we would have if you went into this penitentiary?
Your punishment is you don't have any freedom.
Like there's your punishment.
You don't get to come and go, but you are mandated to get an education.
Education is an optional.
You're going to wake up and you're going to go to school.
And then when you go to school, we're going to figure out where your aptitudes lie.
And here's a list of things that you're going to study.
We need mechanics, we need plumbers, we we need people to help society move.
And there are it's hard to say this, but there is going to be hard to hear this.
I should say there are brilliant people sitting behind bars are brilliant people.
There are people with incredible skills that are sitting behind bars, writhing away because
they chose.
They made a bad decision.
And we need to stop looking at this as like a zero sum.
One bad decision shouldn't be the marker of the entirety of your existence.
Now, there are some bad decisions.
I know everyone's going to go to the most extreme.
Everyone's going to go to the person that flies a plane into the World Trade Center.
Like I'm not talking about the most extreme.
I just mean in general, we as a society, maybe.
But where does that start, James?
Maybe that starts with we have we have a pretty good safety net with food and security.
There's very few people starving.
OK, so we're feeding our people.
But maybe we need to start educating our youth on things like human interaction, how to build
relationships, how to oh, oh, how to resolve conflicts.
Training mechanisms.
We learn that's not an innate thing.
Right.
Little kids see each other and they hit each other.
And we say, no, no, no, you don't hit.
We teach them how to cope.
But your instinct is to hit or grab.
And we guardrail them through this.
Maybe we need to learn how to teach our youth how to cope with struggle, how to cope with
loss, how to cope with things so that as they get older and the inevitable challenges that
life is going to throw at you, become more manageable.
And I think that will be a neat place to start because we could we could say we're going
to take our prison system and turn it into true rehabilitation.
And you know how you get out of prison?
Not these mandated sentences, but show us how far you've come.
Let's incentivize you that we will take years off of your your your punishment if you complete
these degrees, volunteer at these places and show that you could become a complete productive
member of society, show remorse and all these things like we could incentivize that while
at the other level, we're teaching kids how to cope with certain things that aren't just
fighting and respect and my neighborhood.
So those are two ideas that are just kind of big.
Tell me what you think.
Like scalable or just pie in the sky?
No, I mean, you're preaching to the choir.
I had Tom Eberhardt on who's the governor of Bastogh prison.
That was the superintendent, they call it.
And it's an island right off Oslo.
And it looks like a housing community.
Looks like my housing community where I live.
So they have lost their freedom.
And there's everything from petty criminals through to murderers in there.
And their whole philosophy is they have that I forget the guy's name.
I don't think he's worthy of mentioning anyway, but the one that killed all those young people
in that camp in Norway, he's locked in a box.
So Norway has that too.
But just like you said, the other huge percentage of people that have just been led down the
wrong path, crimes of passion, whatever it is, they have to pay an atone for their sins.
But their whole ethos is one day they are going to move next door to you again.
They are going to come out of prison.
Do you want the person who became a better criminal or do you want the person who was
rehabilitated?
And so their whole philosophy is they live together, they cook, they clean, they go to
work, they study.
And they teach them to be a functioning member of society rather than using taxpayers money.
They create tax again.
So I absolutely adore that.
And Tom's been on on his own and he's been on with one of the prison governors from the
Northwest, that they're trying to put this and you start to hear this now, the Norway
model, they call it, people are realizing that this is what you need to do.
And I think it's the Philadelphia model is basically just lock them in a cage.
They're realizing that it doesn't work.
You know, and I know I'm I saw that you had a podcast on this, but I was researching the
stats recently, because obviously all this toing and froing of last week and you know,
the politics, we we are 4% of the world's population and our incarceration, arguably
is more now of 20% of the world's incarcerated, especially if you include juvenile detention
centers and jails, it's almost 25%.
So when you look at that system, clearly, as I said, with the fire service and the way
we do our hours, if it worked, we'd be like, yeah, we have point zero one percent of the
world's incarcerated people.
We are.
It works.
We're not going to do it again.
But it doesn't work clearly because we have so many prisoners.
So this is such a beautiful opportunity.
And like you said, remove the analogies.
I hate that.
Oh, you know, the food stamps.
Yeah, I know a guy has got an escalator on his on his front lawn and you know, he uses
it.
Yeah, he does.
But how many people have food stamps got through and they're back on their feet now and they
went to school, you know, whatever it was.
Don't negate that because of that.
Oh, yeah, but story.
And it's the same with this.
Are we Norwegian?
No.
But does that mean that we discard this incredible philosophy and that we can start applying
it here and rehabilitating, as you said, the lower tiers and then maybe working up and
working up?
And yes, there are some that are so broken, sadly, and it's tragic.
We failed them that they are now past the point of rehabilitation.
They have to be kept in a box.
But all these other people, these people, I've had people on the show that became firefighters,
that became Navy SEALs that made a mistake were given the opportunity to grow format
and now they're wearing a uniform.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
We have a out here in California, many of the inmates are firefighters.
They bring them out and to help with the firefighting line like that should count for something
that should count.
And I what it's going to take is a paradigm shift.
And I don't know if it's rooted in religion or if it's rooted in just our sense of what
justice is, but it's going to take a paradigm shift to say you committed a crime and and
there has to be some repercussion.
We need to disincentivize that to an extent.
But we doesn't mean you're not a good person.
You can still be good people do bad things.
And bad people do good things.
It is not this monolith or this binary idea that everybody just makes the best choice
all the time.
There are so many factors that come into somebody's cognitive ability to be able to see the potential
paths on their future if they choose one or the other.
And that just that just isn't innate in us.
That's taught to us.
And it's oftentimes learned through many, many mistakes.
It would be interesting.
I think if I were to change society, oh, gosh, do I start with the inmates or do I start
with the children?
Part of me would just go with the kids first and then simultaneously put all my energies
and efforts there and then simultaneously then put the efforts towards this rehabilitation.
But how do you take a system that is based on punishment and completely?
Where do you even begin to do this?
I love that Norway model to see were they ever hard on their criminals.
And then was it just a radical change where overnight they said, we're not doing this
anymore or was it an evolutionary thing where over decades they did little changes?
Yeah, I'm not I have to go back and listen because I'm sure Tom talked about that.
But I know Bastoy and there was another one were kind of like the first ones to do this
full model.
But I think they did start shifting and even, you know, again, they didn't have the levels
of violence that we have because culturally, you know, look at education, you look at many,
many areas, the health of the nation, you know, they do things very differently than
we do.
So we've got a lot we can learn from them.
Go ahead.
Please, if I may, can I and one thing, too, I think we fail with our country, our counties,
our cities and our townships.
We we don't frame our problems properly.
And when we miss, for example, we have a homeless population here in Southern California.
That is, you know, to the tune of like 80,000 people in the county, it's a lot of people.
And it is often framed as a housing crisis.
And that doesn't do service to these people who are suffering from mental illness and
who are suffering from addiction.
Their problem is not that they can't afford a house close to where they work.
Their problem is they most likely had a mental illness that they were coping through addiction.
And then those two things fed into each other, and now they're an unproductive member of
society that we enable by allowing them to camp on the streets because we have a housing
shortage.
Like, and then when we try these things and they don't work, we need to be able to say,
well, hell, we tried that didn't work.
Let's try something else.
But we don't.
It's like we double down because we're scared of failure.
Like how many times are the Wright brothers fail?
Right.
They failed over and over.
And now we got, you know, planes whipping through the world.
But it was through failure.
They didn't just double down and say, well, no, no, no, this is how it's going to work.
And they kept doing the same model.
They tweaked it and tweaked it and tweaked it.
We don't do that.
Or at least I don't want to make it sound so like we don't do that enough because I'm
sure there's people that do it.
But we don't do it enough.
We need to not be so afraid to fail.
We need to not be so afraid to we need to not excoriate our politicians when they change
their mind.
Like, I want you to change your mind.
I want you to change your perspective.
We call them flip floppers.
Yeah, I want flip floppers.
Imagine, you know, do we call doctors flip floppers because they no longer put leeches
on people like, oh, you're a flip flopper.
You're supposed to give them a good bleeding, but now you're going to change it.
Like, no, we want doctors to change their minds.
I want to use leeches again.
There's an application in surgery for leeches these days, too.
So they've come around again.
How interesting.
I suppose like in certain instances, right, they have a space.
But when somebody has, you know, the flu, we don't want to give them a good bleeding.
So we learn how to use these things well, you know, in the right context.
But my goodness, James, like, let's get out there and crack a few eggs.
You know, let's let's crack a few eggs and let's stop getting.
Let's stop judging people just because they tried something that didn't work.
At least they're out there giving it a shot.
Let's talk about drug prohibition.
I had a really interesting kind of journey and it was through my mom.
Ironically, I started the podcast and quite early on she called me one day and she's like,
did you hear what they did with drugs in Portugal?
Because she'd moved to Portugal about five years before I moved to the States.
And I had no idea.
So you talk about, you know, was there a slow kind of movement in Norway?
Well, Portugal, there's something extremely democratic, which is, you know, again, when
you, you know, when you sit here, hear people talking about in America and we're the only
free country and all this stuff, you know, you look at some of these incredible progressive
nations around the world, I would argue, you know, they've got a lot more democracy than
we have at times.
So they had a lot of their soldiers.
I forget which country it was, but one of the Portuguese colonies and they had a war
there.
So the Portuguese sent soldiers out there.
I think this was in the 90s, maybe early 80s.
Anyway, they came back and a lot of them were addicted to opiates and they kind of, you
know, began this, this crisis, this addiction crisis.
And at one point they had the worst addiction levels in Europe from what I understand per
capita probably, because it's quite a small country.
And their leadership said, look, the way we're doing it isn't working.
And they had, you know, again, the, you know, the lot of traditional models and the war
on drugs was forced on them.
Like it was the rest of the world.
And so one day they said, look, we're going to try something different.
But what they did, and again, going back to this kind of piecemeal half ass thing, they
didn't like Oregon, oh, we're just going to decriminalize.
They decriminalize addiction, but they took the money from their war on drugs and they
poured it into mental health counseling, addiction counseling, job creation, housing, and less
than 10 years later.
And if this was opposed by a certain group, it was passed by a majority.
A year after they started seeing success, all their opposition had joined in support.
It was amazing.
Nine years later, they went to the lowest addiction rate.
And all they did is they went, like you said, they went all in, they asked the people, they
explained the situation.
They said, look, this is what's happening.
We've tried this American model.
It's not working.
You know, arresting addicts clearly isn't working.
And so not only did they bring it down incredibly, and they still have addicts, of course, it
doesn't, you know, fix everyone.
But now law enforcement and the court system was freed up so they could focus on the drug
dealers and the smugglers and then all the other bad people.
And so it's been incredible watching that.
When I look at the origin story of prohibition, which started here in the U.S., it was Harry
Anslinger on the back of the epic failure of alcohol prohibition.
And it was job justification.
And it truly was racism.
He was a screaming racist.
And so when you look at Reefer Madness and all the things that happened from there, we've
got an 80 year study.
If this works, we would have almost no addicts.
We certainly wouldn't have gangs because they were born out of criminality.
So clearly we have an issue.
And again, just like Norway, I think with Portugal, there's an opportunity to truly
adopt that model.
But that doesn't mean just decriminalizing it without putting all these things in place.
You have to help the person.
An addict is a mental health patient, not a criminal.
So that's James Gearing's perspective, my own personal journey.
But I saw the ripple effect of this in uniform for years and years and years.
What is your perspective of prohibition and contributing to the issues that we've been
talking about so far?
It's such a great, thoughtful question.
I.
OK, so let me see if I can make this like a running jump.
Patient goes to a doctor because they have an injury and the surgeon wants to cut you
open.
The physical therapist wants to give you therapy.
The homeopathic person wants you to do these sorts of things.
It seems like when we take these problems and we put them into the box of law enforcement,
well, we'll solve this problem.
We'll just make it illegal and we will put everyone in jail.
And then that doesn't work.
And then we do it with social services.
And then their thought is, well, the reason why they're shooting up on the streets is
because they don't have a house.
And so what I think is happening is you have too many individual.
Cooks in the kitchen, not creating a you need a team of people to look at this and you need
you need private sector to come in and start doing things.
You need the public sector.
You need the education to come in and start doing.
We have to we have to address this on a way that is very complicated.
What Portugal did, I'm sure, was no easy feat.
And they probably stumbled along the way.
Now let me ask you real quick, how big is Portugal?
Is it like one of the US states?
Yes.
If yeah, probably one of the smaller states.
Yeah, it's interesting little place because it's almost looked down as like a second world
country in Europe.
But actually, when you look at the health of their people, even what they did during
covid, I mean, there's a there's a lot of middle of the road, common sense elements to the
Portuguese.
And I think it's an incredible culture.
But yeah, it's not it's not a very large country.
Right.
So you're able to get your public servants and your civics and your governance can get
their arms around this.
And I think with us, because of our structure, this federalistic way, Florida is going to
look at this very differently than California.
But what we could do is have coalitions that say, look, Florida, you're going to do it
your way.
You see it from this lens.
But we're going to we're going to honestly track you and we're going to see if this is
working and California, you're going to and we're going to actually track you.
And we're going to we're going to take the best practices of what's doing what's happening
in Texas, what's happening in Florida, Oregon and California.
And we're going to really work together.
But we're almost competing with each other.
The health and wellness of our nation, the criminality of our citizenry, it shouldn't
be a competition.
It should be a collaboration.
And we're not collaborating enough.
It feels like we're just competing.
Well, Florida is better because we have we dropped our homeless rate.
But like, where did it go?
What happened?
Tell me.
Like, I really want to know genuinely.
And like California says, well, our interventions worked.
We're not criminalizing drugs anymore and there's less people in jail for drugs.
OK, are they still addicted, though?
Are they still addicted and walking around or did they get clean?
Like we don't look enough at these things and we tie them to political people whose
careers depend on us voting them in.
So there is an incentive for them to skew the data almost.
And I don't know what this is.
Maybe we need a private sector element to come in and judge the efficacy of all these
different things, because it just seems like there's what I would call perverse incentives
to make their program, whatever their program is, look like it's working.
And now we're just bickering all the time and we're fighting.
I don't know if.
Gosh, I the idea of prohibition, like making all drugs illegal, like, OK, like that's
that's fine.
This is a dangerous thing.
And we want to disincentivize disincentivize some people.
But we know that it's they're going to make their way into society.
So how do we treat them?
I can't tell you in my early years as a police officer how many people I arrested because
they had crack cocaine on them and like they were doing nothing.
They were sitting in an alley and we were driving by.
We saw someone lighting up and it's like, oh, that's a felony.
Let's get them.
And I'm a young cop.
I don't know any better.
And I just arrest this guy who's quickly trying to get as much crack into his body because
he knows he's being arrested.
So he's trying to get as much as he can.
And we come up and he puts his hands up like he's not fighting.
Arguably, he's just dying in an alley by himself.
Like am I should I have arrested him or should I have gotten him to a treatment center immediately?
Like what would have been the better option society, societal wise?
I don't want him in the alley smoking crack cocaine because of a variety of things that
could happen.
But was my very was the very best option.
If I ask, you know, chat GPT, like run the algorithms and what is the best option for
society?
Because all I did was take him with his addiction, put him in a box where he's going to get released
soon afterwards.
Like we're not getting him treatment.
We're not helping him.
Whatever whatever little life he had left in that alley, we've taken him from that and
it's been poached by somebody else.
So whatever little stuff he accumulated is now gone.
So I'm going to release him back in a society with nothing.
Maybe he had a few items that were keeping him alive.
And I don't know, a little little burner where he can make food or maybe had some food that
was stashed away.
That's gone at this point.
So now what does he do?
Does he go steal?
Like, oh my gosh, James, like it's such an ineffective intervention.
But that's going to take a profound look at what we should frame the problem.
What are we trying to do?
Are we trying to punish people with addiction?
Are we trying to help them?
Are we trying to figure out why this person is experiencing homeless or why they're homeless?
Or are we just going to get them a house or an SRO, a single residence occupancy?
I think we need to dig deeper and it's we're going to have some bumps along the way, but
we should look at Portugal.
We should look at Oslo.
We should look at all these other places, but we don't.
I think because of our arrogance, because we're the best and we don't do those things.
The arrogance I think gets in the way.
I think the storytelling again has just has to be if it worked, things will be better.
Show me a graph of 50 years.
Which way is that line going?
I mean, look at obesity.
If the way that Americans work, the way that we do things, then we wouldn't have this 45
degree line that spans both sides of the aisle as we get fatter and fatter and sicker and
sicker.
Look at the mental health.
Look at the consumption of opiates.
We consume 75% of the world's opiates at 4% of the population.
This is the thing now.
I think there's such a great opportunity because sadly in the 80s with the crack epidemic,
it was kind of a certain group of people that were subjected to that.
A lot of people could stand on there.
Again, they're every tower looking down at the addicts while they have five beers and
drive home.
Now we've got this fentanyl crisis, this opioid crisis, the circumnavigated race, socioeconomic
scale, everything.
If there's ever a time to really turn the mirror around and say, this is you, this is
us, it's now.
I think this is an exciting opportunity.
Yes, there is a large crucible of things ahead of us, but as they say, every waterfall begins
with a single drop of water and we need to start having that conversation.
We should start looking at the civic resources that are out there and maybe better utilizing
them.
I'm here in my line of work to enforce the laws, but there's so many things a police
officer does, just like a firefighter.
A firefighter fights fighters, sure, but they do so many other things and they're allowed
to do so many other things.
Nobody gets mad at a firefighter when they see them at a park playing with the kids or
the kids are at the firehouse climbing on the trucks.
That's community engagement.
That's giving kids hope.
All those things permeate society.
When you have a system like law enforcement where you have a division that's allowed to
go play in the park with these kids, but not every cop can do that.
Only the cops that work this division can go play in the park.
These cops got to enforce laws and these cops got to do these things.
We need to structurally look at how we're doing this and broaden our officers and our
public servants, broaden their capacity to serve because there's people that have good
ideas.
There's people that have neat concepts.
There's people that have really unique experiences that can lend itself to solving these complex
problems because simple solutions to complex problems will always underwhelm.
Let's start looking at and allowing us to be a little more complex and not just distill
it down to this crime's out of control, homelessness is out of control, whatever, like this hyperbolic
language.
Let's start reframing and let's start using language that's a little bit more accurate
in how we describe these things.
Homelessness is something that I think drives somebody into addiction.
There's a sense of hopelessness.
Can we address the hopelessness issue?
Not the homeless issue, the hopelessness.
Maybe we start looking at it from that perspective and we start to see things that we were missing.
Will Barron Even with the horrendous school shootings that
we have, it turns my stomach that every single time within a few hours, all it becomes is
this gun conversation.
It will spit in the face for every parent that lost a child or every classmate that
watched their friends murdered or every teacher that whatever it was.
It's disgusting and there's a multi-layered element and obviously mental health is a huge
part of that conversation.
As long as we just keep reducing it to a second amendment conversation, we're deliberately
fertilizing this from happening again and again and again.
This all ties into that hopelessness, that mental health conversation, that sleep deprivation
conversation.
I mean, all these elements are contributing as well.
If we don't look at these as a nuanced problem, then we will, as we have seen, Columbine was
in the 90s, we will see decade after decade of our children being slaughtered.
It nauseates me that my son has to rehearse his own murder at school.
You and I just had to worry about fire alarms.
I loved it.
It got me out of maths.
I used to be a mathematician.
I was very good at maths.
But now they have to lock the classroom, hide under tables on the pretense that one day
one of their fellow pupils or a former student or whoever is going to walk into a school,
try and kick in their classroom door and slaughter them as they cower under these tables.
That doesn't move people to want to actually change.
No, you're not taking my guns away or I'm taking all your guns away.
We need to grow the fuck up and actually have a proper conversation about that too.
Yeah, it's interesting.
So let me ask you though, like we are a very interesting species and there's more of us
now on this planet than there's ever been.
Do you think with the influx of just humans, we're going to inevitably have more of these
outliers?
If there's five million people on the planet, you probably have a lot less of these people
who are going to do horrific things.
But if there's five billion people on the planet, you've now exponentially increased
that population of those folks who are, I want to be sensitive, but let's just say for
the lack of a better word, that capacity to do evil is greater in them.
Some people would say deranged or whatever, but the capacity to do evil is just in that
person.
We have so many people, James, like how do you get your arms around this?
You grew up, you know the world more so than I do from a living perspective.
Do you have violence in other countries or is this really exclusively an American phenomenon?
You have violence depending on the environment, so for example Sierra Leone, where they had
all the boy soldiers, I had one of them on the show, Ishmael Bay, amazing guy.
When you are growing up and you have this tribal conflict and you're taught to go slaughter
the Tutsis or whoever it is, in that particular, I think it was Rwanda, but if that's your
environment, those are your mentors, the Crips, the Bloods, the Tutsis, whoever it is, then
that becomes normal.
So again, I think it's environment.
I think that very, very, very few people are truly physiologically broken.
The chemistry is just completely off.
If you look at the history of shootings in the US in schools, like pre-1990s, it's very
recent, it's almost non-existent.
You've got the Texas tower shooting and a few other isolated incidents, but apart from
that, it's isolated.
If you look at the amount that our population has grown, it doesn't even come close to the
explosion of violence that we've seen.
Even as we touched on, I have people on the show that are older that got in gangs when
they were young and they were just gangs, kind of like you talked about in Chicago.
And now here we are and you've got, ever since the late 70s, early 80s, you have this mass
gang warfare that kills thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
So I would argue that there is a large percentage of this that is preventable, but we are creating
isolationism.
We are creating psychosis through even the way that we teach children, which I would
love to get to in a little bit.
But you look at the school shooter, let's profile that for a second, usually a young
white male, isolated, bullied, usually on psychiatric meds, usually a video gamer.
When you read Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's assassination generation, he breaks down contributing
factors.
I believe that that same child born into a loving environment would never ever even think
about doing that.
So I think absolutely a lot of these are cultural and they are preventable.
But if we're just talking about guns, then again, we're like, shrug shoulders, just wait
for the next one to come on.
Well, I think that's unacceptable because if it is preventable, we need to do as much
as we can.
You can't get all of them, like you said, but imagine if you stop 90 percent of these
ever happening.
How many children be walking around today?
And I've had survivors of the Parkland shooting and some other groups of people that were
witness to it, either responded to it or were in the classroom or like one of them, her
boyfriend was one of the ones that was killed in Parkland.
He would still be here.
Joaquin would still be walking around today if we'd actually had the guts to start addressing
some of this.
But he's dead because people just argue about guns.
Could we have saved him?
Who knows?
But we damn well could have given it a hell of a shot if we'd had the proper conversation
at the right time.
Yeah, I would love to be able to see the graph that shows the correlation or the relationship
between some of these societal cultural factors.
Is there a relationship with the family structure?
If they're the breakdown of the family as the family breaks down, do rates of violence
go up?
It was poverty, you know, like all these things I'd love.
But God, that data is so disparate and you really have to go in and because you're going
to have a preconceived notion as to why you think this is.
And you have to you have to figure out a way to say I'm not looking to confirm my bias.
I really just want to see where this data leads me and where it goes and have a bunch
of different people talking about it.
And then we got to start running some.
We have to run some experiments.
You go to any prison population.
And what I find interesting is ask them, all of your prisoners, how many of them believe
in God?
Like the prison population is not full of atheists.
A lot of them are believers.
Yet how many of them had no no family structure?
Well, the vast majority of them have had very weak family structures.
OK, well, that that should count for something like I want to know more about that.
I want to know why you believe there is a higher power and that there is an afterlife
and there's moral issues.
But yet you still did this immoral act.
What about because to me, if I had that strong belief, I would think, my gosh, I don't want
someone that's always watching me to see me do this.
But how is it that that big belief was overshadowed by a lack of mentorship or coping mechanisms?
And I think we're missing an opportunity to really learn at the expense of simply punishing.
We should be learning from these things and seeing what are the trend lines of an inmate?
What are the James, can we say the profile of an inmate in their their histrionics?
Like what is this person?
How young was mom when they had them?
Where did they grow up?
Did they did they have hospital access?
Did they have nutritious food?
Like all those things should matter and they should all be put into it.
I wonder if the advancement of AI will help us maybe model these things better because
we're so limited in our thinking because we're so siloed.
I'll just pick on Christians for a moment just because it's something that we see a
lot out front.
Culturally, like you said, how can we all see them there?
Let's say the Hispanic gangs, the gangbangers adorned with the Virgin Mary tattoos.
I mean, I scooped many, many of them off the floors of Anaheim.
How could they do that?
Well, I would argue as well.
Well, let's take a step back.
How could someone who declares their deep faith to Jesus also think that Narcan is wasted
on addicts and they should just shoo the homeless off to a different area?
So I don't see that same compassion and kindness in our supposed air quotes regular people.
So there's a difference in my opinion between religion and being a good person.
And I see a big disconnect in a lot of people.
How many people with a fish on the back of their car drive like a fucking asshole?
You know what I mean?
If we're really going to stand on the ivory tower.
So I think culturally, every single one of us has to take a look in the mirror.
And I love that phrase, you want to change the world, start a home.
Would Jesus be about locking people in boxes?
Would Jesus be about stepping over the homeless and complaining that they're in the way of
your Macy's store?
Pretty sure he wouldn't.
Would he have an issue with sex workers?
Or was there they're actually anointing their feet?
You know, so I'm not a Christian.
I'm a spiritual person, but I don't subscribe to any religion.
But I see a huge amount of hypocrisy because the reason we haven't seen a lot of progressive
initiatives is the same people that come out of their holy buildings actually work against
the very things that I would argue Jesus Buddha, you know, Mohammed, whoever would actually
subscribe to which is compassionate, proactive solutions to these problems.
How do you get these children to have a safe pregnancy, to be born in a loving household,
you know, to be nurtured, to be mentored by all the community?
You know, that's how you change this issue.
But we have to look at ourselves rather than just be pointing fingers at others.
You know, James, it's very eloquent.
And your point is nice.
It's concise and I completely see it.
I'm wondering if this isn't a flaw in our own CPU, if you will, in our brains.
We tend to catastrophize as a whole.
We tend to have a availability heuristic.
The most recent data tends to drive our decisions.
I talked to many police officers whose their their phrase, you know, on the side of the
car, it says to serve and protect or to protect and serve.
But their internal motto is all cops go home at night.
And boy, I've always had issue with that.
And I might get some pushback on this, but I I actually hate that phrase.
I hate the phrase that says, well, all cops want to do is go home at night.
Well, so does everybody.
So does the Amazon driver.
So does the surgeon.
So does the subway worker.
Everybody wants to go home at night.
Why do we have to say it?
And really, you know, I never hear say this.
We call ourselves paramilitary.
I never hear an army ranger.
I never hear a Navy SEAL say we know at the end of the day, SEALs just want to come home.
Like no, you know what they say?
We don't leave anybody behind dead or alive.
Like it's a foregone conclusion.
Like that's who they are.
And if they're going to go through the door and die, just don't leave my body here, please.
Like, but yet in policing, we say this like, well, I go home at night.
And then I think what happens is you have these little phrases.
And I'm picking on policing for the moment.
But you have these phrases, which, by the way, never heard a firefighter say that.
And I make that point to my cops.
I never hear a firefighter say, well, you know, there was people in the building.
But at the end of the day, these firefighters, you know, they just want to get home with
their families.
They never say that.
So whenever somebody tells me, well, everyone loves a firefighter, I always say, well, because
they never say all they want to do is go home at night.
So let's stop shooting ourselves in the foot.
But if we have these phrases like this, now everybody I see is a potential threat now,
which not only are they, they're already a potential threat.
Everybody's a potential, I get it.
But now I've already shaped my worldview that not only are they a threat, but they might
stop me from going home tonight.
So I'm really not going to look at them as anything more than someone that's going to
stand in the way of me and my family.
And my compassion goes down.
My empathy goes down.
Everything goes down because you potentially want to take everything that is important
to me and rip it away.
And I think you combat that by just being ready.
Spend time in the gym, spend time on the range, eat the right foods, get the right sleep,
be prepared for whatever comes your way.
But yet the nobility of my particular profession, I argue, is in the hardships of it.
I am willing to stand on a line and protect people that want to yell at me.
Like that's noble, right?
Like you want to swear at me and I want to make sure no car hits you.
Like that's, it's kind of a contradiction, but I'm not worried about going home at night.
If that was truly my biggest concern, I would have chosen a different career where accountants
go home at night regularly, all the time.
They always make it home.
So I think how we talk about ourselves sometimes will influence how we are trying to solve
these problems.
And we need to start looking at people, not just as criminals, but as fellow citizens.
And whether it's in the judicial system or at the executive level, or even in the legislature,
how we write our laws, how we write our codes, how we as a society, like we need to have
more town halls that really say, look, as a society, what do we want to do?
What do we want to do about this?
Whether it's the school shooting or the homeless encampment.
Like I think we need more civic engagement with thoughtful people.
And it feels like we're a little bit selfish here, you know, not in my backyard.
I'm sure you've heard like the NIMBY folks.
I want all the homeless people, just don't put them here though.
Good God, no.
Like put them somewhere, but not by my, not in my backyard.
So I think we as a society need a little bit of a self-reflection exercise and not just
put it in the hands of the politicians so that we can blame them when things go wrong.
Like I think we need to do our part.
You know, I'm sure you do this, James.
I was in Anaheim and I was training a bunch of police officers about two years ago.
And I'm walking down one of these streets and all these people are coming home from
Disney and it's just, you know, it's families and Anaheim is a beautiful city.
And there is a homeless man talking, howling at the moon.
He's barefoot, he's dirty, and he's just walking up and down the street looking at cars for
change and everybody, like everybody's ignoring him.
And like it, it affected me so much that the world had just shut this guy out.
I go into CVS, I bought a pair of socks, I bought two pairs of socks.
I bought like an Anaheim cheesy sweatshirt.
I bought some flip flops and I just got some random food.
I maybe spent 60 bucks and I walked up to this guy and I said, hey man, I'm sorry to
bother you, but here's some stuff that might help you.
And he looked at me and he said, hey, do you think you could get a blanket?
Like it's getting really cold at night.
And my heart broke for this guy.
And I said, there's a couple of shirts in there I think are going to help you.
And I just walked away and I don't like, I think we need more of that.
I'm not trying to say that I'm some holy guy.
It's just, how did you have thousands of people that just spent thousands of dollars at this
event, not look at this person and say, we, can we all give five bucks to this guy?
Anyway, I'll give him $2 and get this guy some kind of help.
And the world at writ large wrote him off.
And I'll tell you what, James, he may have been 30 years old, you know, and maybe I provided
for him a little piece for one night or two nights.
I don't know.
But how is it that so many people just walk by and not want to do anything?
And every time I see something like that, I am compelled.
I feel like it's an imperative as a fellow human to want to help this person in some
way and not look at him as like a pigeon or a rat.
But I don't know where that comes from though.
Maybe it's because my humble upbringings have me a little bit closer to him than, than maybe
others.
I don't know.
What are your thoughts on this?
Because I'm sure you see it too.
And I'm sure you help people too.
Yeah, well, I think this is what's so sad is I would argue that the lens that you have,
the lens that I had as a firefighter paramedic is such an invaluable perspective on how the
world is actually doing.
And I would argue even more so the fire EMS because, you know, the number of times I've
gone down, OBT in Orlando, for example, and, you know, the sex workers and the pimps and
the drug dealers, they're all waving at us because they know that if it all goes south,
we're the only ones that are there.
You guys obviously there are absolutely trying to protect them, but you're using the law
and that's obviously not very popular when you're a criminal.
So it's a different dynamic.
But for us, we're it.
So collectively, first responders, our lens on how the world is actually doing, which
is why I wrote the books that I wrote just to try and give this lens, you know, and I
wanted to make it into my most recent one into a TV show because to show these people
what we actually see, how society is doing, how we can help to put hope back in.
But but that same innate compassion that I think drives most of us into uniform is what's
missing in a lot of these areas.
And I think you could you could argue the messaging, especially in America.
I mean, you look at you mentioned CVS.
Well, what was always going to be across the road from a CVS or Walgreens?
Because in America, the monopoly is the holy fucking Bible of business.
Oh, don't don't have a pharmacy on one side and then one on the other side of town.
Let's put one right next to him so we can shut them down and destroy them because destroying
camp competition is everything.
You know, if you're not first, you last.
So we don't have that community messaging or our news stations are divisive.
And it blows my mind because I've said this a thousand times.
Fox and CNN are the same exact blueprint, you know, divided screen for assholes or arguing
with each other and each viewership swears that the other one is a devil and there is
the second coming of Christ.
So there's so much division, so much nastiness, so much anti-community in the messaging.
But if you look, we're also Americans are some of the most kind, compassionate people
and they donate some of the largest amounts of charitable donations of anywhere on the
planet.
So I believe Americans are good.
But I think that selflessness and that nastiness finds itself on the screens in the messaging.
And that is what skews the very thing that they're learning in their holy buildings on
whatever day they go to it.
Yeah, it's it's yeah.
For all of our faults and for all of our shortcomings, boy, we can mobilize like we can help one another
and we could help the world.
But yet there is this arrogance that everybody has the same potential to just pull themselves
up by their bootstraps and everyone has the same.
Like that guy, he just needs to, you know, get his shit together.
And there's plenty of there's plenty of places he can go.
But not if he doesn't know.
Not if he has no clue and his brain is his his cognitive processing is so compromised
because he has nothing, whatever little joy he could get out of life is through a pipe
or a needle.
And he just doesn't know any better because that's where his existence has been for so
long.
Like we would never let a child walk around like that.
If there is a six year old barefoot walking around the streets looking dirty, the society
grabs them and says, what is going on?
Everything stop.
Like so.
OK, so there's a line here.
Where does that line go?
Are there 15? Do we do it?
Probably if they're 20, maybe.
But they're 30 like, fuck them.
They're done.
Like, why do we just write them off?
And it's I think it's what we perceive as their potential ability.
But the 30 year old that has had the terrible existence who hasn't who what at one point
maybe was an eight year old walking around, but has figured it out for a decade and now
is 30 year old, we just think they're going to pull themselves together.
And we do need a mechanism to capture those individuals.
You know, cops don't like any infringement on our day to day.
We're going to put the Department of Public Safety and they're going to answer calls
for mental health and cops are like, good luck with that.
We'll see what happens when the guy comes out with a knife.
Sure.
When the guy comes out with a knife, we may need to be there.
But maybe just maybe this is one intervention where we don't shoot somebody that really
just wants to be shot by us and we could take that person out of our officer involved shooting.
Maybe just that one person because we do this department.
We can't be so cynical, I think is where I'm going with this.
We shouldn't be so cynical.
We should be open.
We should be open because if we're in law enforcement and verifying and public service
in general, you should be the opposite of cynical because you're trying, you're voluntarily
getting into a sector that is trying to better society.
And we should embrace that.
We should be creative and look at things through the lens of hope.
And you know what?
Let's try to do this.
Let's give it a shot.
If it doesn't work, we got to learn something.
But I don't know.
I feel like you say it is there is this competition.
I mean, good God, cops.
I don't know if you guys do this, but like if I see a CHP officer, it's not uncommon
for a cop to say, oh, there's AAA with a gun.
Like why are you?
It's just an officer that patrols a different sector.
But like we talk shit about them.
Do you guys talk shit about like Glendale or like I don't think so.
But in policing, it's like that.
It's amazing how siloed the first responder professions are because, yeah, I've seen Anaheim
is a great example.
They have a thing called North Net where we would train with Orange and Fullerton and
all the surrounding agencies.
And that was a really good rapport.
But I would argue there was a lot of humility.
And this is the big thing.
Now fast forward to coming back to the East Coast.
I've stood in front of a trailer park when I was on a rescue, our fire ambulances, as
there's a transformer fire that's about to light off all the trees around it.
And these are old, old, old style caravans arguing with my dispatcher for them to send
the Orlando fire station that I can see with my own eyes, but it's across the dotted line.
And they're like, oh, that's not our jurisdiction.
I don't give a fuck who just send the people that are closest because these people need
help and we don't have any water.
I can try some IV bags, but it's not going to work.
So this is what's crazy is that in a good area, yes, you do have camaraderie and there
might be a little kind of bragging rights, but overall, you're all on the same mission
in a bad area.
Oh, the transport EMT, transport medic, the same damn patch that I got on my shoulder.
Have they seen as much maybe as far as the horrible shit that we see?
No, but they still went to the same school and got the same piece of paper.
So that whole PD not talking to FD or city not talking to county, that is inexcusable
in the first responder professions, inexcusable.
Agree.
Yeah, we, yes, inexcusable.
I think that sums it up perfectly.
We need to get rid.
This is again, public service should be about collaboration, not competition.
And you got a fire truck 300 yards away or there's one three miles away.
It doesn't matter.
It shouldn't matter at all.
You know, it's interesting, James, I've been, I've heard this a few times on some podcasts.
The airline industry seems to have some kind of secret sauce.
You don't, they don't say things like fly Delta.
We're so much better than spirit.
You know, like they don't do that.
They just say fly Delta, the friendly skies, fly American.
We'll get you there.
Fly spirit.
You know, we're fun, but they don't.
They collaborate on so much when there is a problem and an airplane has an instance
or a situation, all the airlines work together.
And if there's an instance because an LA County sheriff does something, other agencies say,
well, that's the sheriff's, they're fucked up.
We wouldn't do that.
Sure we would.
We just haven't done that yet.
Or we haven't done it this year, but we push things off as where I think other industry,
they work together because if one plane crashes, all airline in this, all airlines can suffer
from this.
We saw what happened when one Minnesota cop had a very bad decision.
We saw how that reverberated throughout all of policing, yet we don't want to collaborate
with each other.
We just want to silo everybody and say, well, that's not us, but other industries work together.
It would be amazing to see if we worked with surrounding agencies truly as partners and
not just competitors, what we could accomplish.
Because I think we waste a lot of bandwidth, energy competing with other people instead
of collaborating with them.
Well you mentioned Minneapolis.
So that obviously was a very pivotal moment when it comes to law enforcement and obviously
the probably I'm so sure some good things that came out of that and obviously with some
very evident poor decisions and politicizations are made as well.
So talk to me about that event through your eyes and let's kind of unpack the pros and
the cons that you witnessed following.
Wow.
This was, it's all starting to become a blur.
Because if I can, just before the George Floyd murder was the COVID experience and the city,
all cities around everywhere just like shuts down.
So just to give the listener some kind of a visual of this, and I'm sure some of the
officers had some experience, it was April and Los Angeles is a ghost town and we're
doing random patrols because all these businesses now are ripe for break-ins.
So people's cars are getting broken into, the opportunists come out.
So a lot of us have been just dispatched to just do patrol, just to be a presence because
so many places were getting hit.
And I recall one family heading their garage, they saw people in the back like in the garage
and they don't want to go outside.
And so we go there, I showed up first and the people are gone.
They tried to break in, but they're gone.
And I remember talking to them through the glass.
I'm wearing a mask, the family's wearing a mask behind the window.
And this little kid comes up and puts their hand on the window.
And I look and I put my hand on the window, I'm like, we're going to be okay, buddy, we're
going to be okay.
And they're like, thank you, thank you.
And I just think, nobody captured that, there's no phone.
How many moments do cops like that have or do firefighters have?
So I do this little thing and then it's as if somebody snapped their finger and I'm standing
on a line with the baton with my helmet on, people saying, you fucking racist, I hope
you die, you son of a bitch.
And it was this crazy shift of like the world clapping for the employees that were still
out there.
What was the term they used?
I always thought it was frontline workers.
Yeah, frontline workers.
And there was essential.
It was an essential employee.
That was like this grandiose term.
I'm an essential employee.
So essential workers, people had sweatshirts that said that.
And so here's the thing, Floyd happens and it's all over the news.
And I'm talking with various police officers.
And I remember there was a few colleagues I had and they're like, dude, this is terrible.
That guy's going to get in a lot of trouble.
And this was one of those instances where the plurality of people that I spoke to all
said the same thing.
That guy's in trouble, this looks terrible.
Every now and again, you have controversial shootings or controversial instances and you'll
get like kind of a split.
You'll have cops say, well, you know, you should have just listened or cops that'll
say it looks bad, but it's going to be legal.
This everybody was like, oh, it's terrible.
This guy just made a mess.
He's going to go to jail.
Like everybody was saying it.
And a Baltimore lieutenant that I know said, how's it going by you?
And I said, ah, we're fine.
But we invest so much into procedural justice and community safety partnerships.
Like we're not going to see anything here.
Literally 12 hours later, I was called in and we were on the line and it just, you know,
36 hours later, the National Guard gets rolled in.
So this was for me a very visceral yet surreal experience in law enforcement.
We were overwhelmed.
It was, it was unlike anything I had ever seen.
People that were on the department would refer back to the nineties when like Rodney King
happened.
So there was a handful of people that got to see both of these.
And so they were a little bit more familiar, but it was unlike anything.
And I think it was a, Sebastian Younger could probably write a book on this, like The Perfect
Storm, because I think had everybody just been going on with their life, it might not
have had as much, it would have had an impact, but maybe not as much.
But this was an excuse for everybody to come out that they couldn't come out for months.
Because why are you getting so mad in Los Angeles?
Like we had nothing to do with this.
We condemn it.
Like we made public statements about it.
Like we condemn it fully.
And yet everybody came out and we were overran.
We had to call in the National Guard.
It was, it was 12 days.
It was more than 12 days, but 12 days that we got mobilized where I was just working
16, 17 hour days and they all blended into each other.
Violence was abundant.
It was moments of pure chaos sandwiched between moments of absolute boredom.
You would just have a bunch of people sitting around, tired, looking around, because I was
in the morning watch hours.
I would always, I was a sergeant and I would say, just get some sleep, get some sleep.
I'll keep a lookout.
I wanted to be the good sergeant because so much of my work is on sleep and sleep deprivation.
I was aware of the situation we were in.
So I would say, go in the van, get some shut eye.
And I would rotate people.
But when you had held the line, you had to hold the line.
So like, let's go, let's go, let's get up, let's get up.
And we're going to be on the line for the next six hours.
But in times of quiet, I would make sure everybody was getting their rest.
So I was able to implement some of these things that I teach, which was a neat little experiment.
It forced some conversations to be had that needed to be had.
Like, why can't we just make better decisions?
Like arrogance, contempt a cop kind of conversations and like, stop being an asshole.
Somebody doesn't like you, but once the cuffs are on, the cuffs are on.
Let's go.
Like the big agencies know this and they know how this can go because they've had their
riots.
So they move on from this.
But the little agencies, I guess, didn't quite get the memo.
So they had to have some of these conversations.
And then there was the pendulum swing of defund the police.
And that really impacted police.
To this day, the echoes of that are still there.
Now, nobody says defund the police, but let me just give an example.
Let's just take the Los Angeles Police Department.
They shut down the Academy and they take 150 million dollars out of the budget.
So now you have the Academy is shut down for eight months.
On average, 50 people come every month.
So 100, 200, 300.
So 500 people that are normally going to get put into the department, it stops immediately.
Those 500 people in that eight months in order to make that up is going to take years
to do because you lose them immediately.
So then you have your regular attrition and your retirements.
And then you have people who are just leaving.
So you have this spigot, this pipeline of people that are coming in that just stops.
So now you have nobody coming in and you only have people leaving.
So now there's a big gap and now you're down a thousand officers.
Okay, let's start the Academy back up.
Well now less people want to be police officers.
So now instead of 50, you're only getting 20 that come in the pipeline and you're already
down a thousand, but 50 still leave every month.
So you're not even meeting attrition.
So now you go from a thousand.
Well now you're down the next year, you're down 1300 and the next year you're down 1600.
So we still haven't recovered from just that eight month gap where we stopped everything.
I don't know, it's going to take a decade to get back up to where we were just because
the echoes of all the people that wanted to be cops no longer wanted to be cops.
And then you stop the legacy.
All the people who had family said, don't join policing.
So those people went on to different careers.
And it just, the impact of that cannot be overstated to how bad that is hurting departments
across the country.
So many police, and now you go to some of these roll calls and you barely have enough
police to get by.
And it's like the dirty little secret in policing.
You have places like Chicago that are canceling days off.
I talked to police officers that have worked 160 days straight, right?
There's 300, you have 350 days in a year.
And we are working 160 days straight.
Like this is insane.
That's not tenable.
That's not scalable.
How long is this cop going to work?
Right?
Like you just have so many issues that have come from that.
Now let me just pause because I've kind of talked about that.
Tell me if there's anything more specific you'd like to get into.
No, we're just adding on to exactly what you said because I wanted to get to the recruitment
crisis and obviously we're at a great point now.
And also you and I share this, I think passion is the wrong word, just deep understanding
of the impact of sleep deprivation on the acute and chronic health of the first responder.
Just underline to me, just to make sure I'm understanding it correctly, if you are losing
more the retention side is going, the recruitment side is going, add vaccine mandates.
Now you've got rid of even more people, especially in Southern California.
I've had some of them on the show.
Talk to me about who's holding the line.
This load, this immense load that should have been shared between X amount of officers,
is it now squarely on the shoulders of just those who are left?
So they're being forced to work more and more and more?
Yeah, yes.
The short answer is yes.
They are being asked to work more, much to the chagrin of city controllers who control
budgets, like police officers, overtime now is abundant.
But it shouldn't be, we're working overtime just to make minimums.
And there are shifts.
You work a morning shift, like six in the morning till six at night, and then you have
a mid shift, like 10 o'clock in the afternoon till eight o'clock at night, and then you
have one from noon to midnight, and then one from six at night till, you have all these
different shifts around the clock in policing.
There are some places that just have two shifts, six in the morning till six at night, and
six at night till six in the morning, because that's all they have.
You have places that are borrowing sergeants.
So that like a division will have no supervision at all.
And now you have to have a sergeant from a neighboring division come over and help.
And it is, I hate to be hyperbolic, like the crisis level, but it's certainly a very concerning
level right now.
We are putting through 20 to 30 people a month in various academies around the country,
say an average number, while they're losing 35 to 40.
You're never making up for it.
So every year it's just getting less and less.
And is that causing us to reevaluate what we're responding to?
Like police officers don't need to respond to every traffic collision.
If it's a traffic collision and nobody's hurt and the vehicles, you know, they have damage,
but it's property damage and like, you don't need to show up for this.
It's an accident.
If somebody's drunk or somebody, you know, there's a crime involved, but if it's not,
we show up to a lot of these things.
I mean, think about a city like Los Angeles where there's millions of cars driving around.
There's a lot of traffic collisions and cops show up to these things routinely.
Maybe we don't need to.
So a good conversation has been had to say, hey, we're not sending police officers to
your traffic collision.
Exchange information, handle it.
But this, you know, people think, well, the insurance company needs your police report.
Insurance company have investigators.
They can do that.
They're just relying on us to do it.
So we really don't need to have a traffic collision because there's no crime.
It's just administrative.
So there's a good conversation being had for things like that.
If somebody breaks into your house in the garage and there's no cameras, there's nothing,
you know, some tools were taken, but there's no suspect description.
Like we would go out and spend two hours on that call.
Now they say, unless we have any idea of who this person is, we're not going to spend any
more resources.
Go online, make your report online.
And that's it.
We're not sending police cars for that anymore.
So there's been some instances that have helped us become more efficient.
There's a cost to that, though.
Citizens now are less likely to report crime because they say, they're going to send me
to some portal and I'm going to fill it out.
And then nothing ever happens.
So they're not even investigating in any way.
So then there's some of that issue that happens where there's a lack of trust in us.
We're not capturing all the crime that could be happening.
You're burning out police officers.
You're making people who are already chronically sleep deprived even more so because you're
incentivizing them with money.
So no, I get to work 12 hours overtime, I'll take it.
So they're not thinking about how that's cognitively impairing themselves if something really does
go awry.
And I would also say we're short even with the civilian side of it.
So like somebody's got to change the brakes on these police vehicles.
Somebody's got to change the oil in the cars.
We have mechanics.
We beat the hell out of our vehicles.
You need quality mechanics just as one example of an incredible civilian community that helps
keep policing going.
Dispatchers, the people that take the 911 calls, they are being worked to the bone and
they're done with it too.
Calls for service have not come down, but expectations have come way down, which is
kind of sad.
So it's not uncommon for somebody to post a meme on Instagram that says like 911, 20
minutes, and they'll say, been on hold with 911 for 20 minutes.
Like that's unacceptable.
Somebody calls 911, you need help now and you're on hold for 20 minutes.
Chimney Christmas, this is becoming a problem.
So I do think we're coming out of it.
I think more people are starting to apply to be police officers.
I think the rhetoric around it, we just had a big political, you know, to do here in the
States, a presidential election and really policing was not mentioned at all.
Nothing, nothing about that, which all of us were shocked.
We were just like, wow, like it's like, and that's fine.
We'll take that.
We'll take no one way or the other.
So I think we're in a trend.
I think we've hit rock bottom and there's nowhere else to go but up at this point.
Anything?
I don't want to talk too much.
Go ahead.
You're good, you're good, I've got a thousand things I want to ask you, but just to underline
something because I agree with you, I'm an incurable optimist.
Every problem is an opportunity for a solution.
Angry optimist with a foul mouth, but optimist nonetheless.
But I think to really underline the true magnitude of the problem, contrast the demand for one
position in your agency when you were applying, who you were testing against, a number of
people versus what you're seeing in 2024.
So as I recall, for every 250 applicants, one was accepted 22 years ago.
So the odds were not in my favor and you had to be an exceptional candidate and all this.
And I think now that number has dropped to about 75 applicants for every one acceptance.
So there's still some degree of standard, but the level of recruit I'm being told, I
haven't had this firsthand experience, but I'm being told by people who have no dog in
the fight and they say, we are taking people that probably shouldn't be here.
We're not taking people that want to be cops.
We're taking people that need a job.
That's how it's explained to me.
And you had these conversations like, what do you want to do in your career and where
do you want to go?
And you hear things now like, I think in 20 years I get my pension, so I want to be 20
and out.
Like those are the phrases you hear.
Like we never said that.
We want to work SWAT and I want to be a captain and I want to work every this and that.
But nowadays you hear things like, I don't want to get prosecuted.
I don't want to go to jail.
I want to get my 20 years and I want to be done.
Which is so rare of a thing to hear from my generation.
They're also being brought up in a different climate.
I didn't know the police commissioners.
I didn't know the city council members when I was my first 10 years on the job.
These young kids, I call them kids, these young officers, they know everybody.
They're following the TikToks and the Instagrams and they're all in the memes.
We were told, don't broadcast that you're a cop when I was coming up.
Keep that quiet.
Keep it quiet.
These kids are just holding up phones and taking pictures like serving and protecting.
It's almost like a novelty.
I don't want to generalize because there's still good people coming and there's still
people that want to help others.
But if you were to ask the trainers the differences in what you see in the recruit, here's how
one said it to me.
He said like this, take 10, take a sample size of 10 recruits.
One is like your Navy SEAL.
You always got one.
That's just amazing.
One is a complete jackass and I don't know how they got into the department.
And then eight are good cops.
They're average.
You got one exceptional, you got one ridiculous.
We still don't know how he got in.
And then he got about eight people that are about average.
He said, no.
He said you still have the one.
Okay.
You still got your exceptional.
But instead of having one weirdo, you now got three.
Like how did these three people get in?
And now you got four average people, five average people.
He said, so just the caliber is just getting slowly squeezed out.
You used to get eight people that were going to be just good average cops, one exceptional,
one goofball.
Now you got three goofballs.
You got five people, six people, four people, and then one exception.
He said, so the goofballs are increasing.
The regular folks are getting smaller and you still got your exceptional folks.
I guess that's, I hope I said that right.
Just in generality, that's kind of what they see.
The average getting smaller, the negative candidates getting a little bit bigger and
still one exceptional.
I mean, this just, it illustrates the way that things are happening.
When I tested for Anaheim, I've talked about this many times, this was the actual written
test.
It was a thousand candidates in the conference space that we were testing, a thousand.
I think there was 30 spots total, two classes of about 15.
And you hear now, like locally, the city that I live in, I think it was them saying they
only had three people apply.
And this is not Anaheim, obviously it's Ocala, Florida, but it's just night and day.
And what worries me in fire, but even more so in police is like you said, hopefully that
one weirdo might have been squeezed out in probation at least.
You would have got rid of him or her.
But now, lowering standards and then, oh, they have this background or there's this
reason that we need to keep them.
I've seen it, you know, doesn't matter whatever the category is, a lot of places because of
the crisis with hiring, they won't get rid of anyone.
They might be an absolute shit bag on probation, but they still stay.
Now that person's behind the wheel of a car.
Now that person's got a gun on their hip.
Now that person's a chief, you know, and you think you have problems before.
So I couldn't agree more.
I think we are the lowest of the low, but that is a beautiful opportunity to turn it
around.
In the fire service where we have struggled immensely is just the ill health of the first
responder.
And we're in a recruitment crisis and we haven't had a George Floyd incident.
You know, London Fire Brigade was kind of pulled through the coals over Grenfell and
they did nothing but heroic actions.
But you know, the US, we haven't even had something like that in our fire brigade here
of our fire service.
But what has happened is to give credit to this young generation.
They are incredibly smart and they research what are the hours?
What is the pay?
What is the time off?
You know, what is this mandatory overtime I hear about?
What is the cancer rate?
What is the suicide rate?
What does it do to relationships?
And they're looking at this now going, that sounds a bit shit.
I really want to serve, but I'm going to go join the military or do something else instead.
The beautiful thing is there's a revolution that's just kind of started here in Florida
where departments are realizing, just as you pointed out with PD, we are bleeding overtime.
So there's your money.
You're already spending it.
It's already pouring out of your budget.
So if you take that and front load it and add another shift, it would be the 24 72,
we'd call it, a 42 hour work week because no one has any idea that firefighters work
56 hours a week before mandatory.
It's absolute insanity.
Put that back to where you value the health of the individual, put some fitness standards
back, you know, all these things that you can do, have a higher mental health counselor
within your department.
Now all of a sudden these young people go, this looks amazing.
You know, there is, there is quite a lot of time off now and they take my fitness seriously.
They take my mental health seriously.
You revolutionize it.
And what you're seeing now in Florida is like almost every week I share a new department
that's going to it or, you know, has gone to it already.
And that is it, the proactive solution to these problems.
So that's my profession.
I'm going to give you that magic wand again.
You're king for a day.
How do we turn this around on the law enforcement side to get the young people, including underserved
communities where there are potentially some phenomenal police officers in there that maybe
never had the opportunity to do it because either a, every cop they met was a shit bag
like Chicago when you were a kid or B, there's a financial barrier.
How do we create this?
So diversity comes through mentorship and we can actually create an environment that
gets young men and women excited to wear the law enforcement uniform again.
So you can do all the fun advertisements you want.
You could do all the commercials and that.
I think your best recruitment tool is your cops in the neighborhoods they serve.
I think that is your best way to convince people to do this job.
And when you have a number of cops who are disgruntled and upset and they just feel undervalued,
they are not advocating for this job.
So if I had my magic wand, I guess I got to keep like the five whys, like why are they
disgruntled because of this?
Why, why, why?
And I would keep going.
I would need to make some internal adjustments.
We need internally to stop being obligatory with our rhetoric and say, thank you for being
here today.
Uh, we're going to do this and this and we're done.
We got a few words from the captain and the captain comes in and says, thank you for being
here today.
Uh, let's stay hydrated and let's be safe.
Like stop with the obligatory rhetoric and start making it very specific and unique.
When you say, I want to thank everyone for being here.
Why?
Cause this is a really tough time to be a police officer, but yet you folks are still
showing up every day and I cannot tell you how impressed I am.
If I was in your shoes 20 years ago, I don't know if I would have the courage, tenacity,
whatever it is.
Like build them up a little bit.
Build them up and remind them you're not told enough.
Uh, you're, you're, you're never going to be told enough, but society needs you.
And when I, when I try to talk to my own cops, I try to impress upon them.
The nobility is in the hardships.
The nobility of this profession is in the hardships.
It's not when it's easy.
It's Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill and tomorrow that rock's going to be at the bottom,
but you're the kind of person that doesn't care.
And you're going to keep pushing that rock up the hill.
So I try to impress upon them that this is why you're here because you are the person
that can do these things.
So I want to touch them emotionally and viscerally.
I think we need then we treat them better.
So we're not going to mandate they work overtime.
We're not going to hammer them for little things.
Um, there's a use of force and I got to watch the body worn video and I look at it and one
officer takes a seatbelt off 30 seconds too soon.
Let's not give that officer an action item.
Let's just make it a Sergeant counseling and say, look, I understand why you took your
seatbelt off.
Just be aware these traffic collisions could happen at any time.
So you took it off about 30 seconds and you guys were still doing 70 miles an hour at
a major.
Just how about we wait till that car slow down and then get that seat, but just counsel
them.
Don't make it an action item with a comment card and say, per the policy, you shall not
like, show them that you care about them.
Not that you're trying to enforce the law or you're trying to enforce the policy.
I think we need to be a little bit more mature and have a little more grace with how we course
correct officers and behaviors because they're only getting the seatbelt off.
Why?
Because I want to jump out of the car quick.
Okay.
That's not bad.
I want you to jump out of the car.
I just don't want you to go through the window right before you get there.
So you know, you could talk to them like that.
And then, so that's my magic wand.
I want people in positions of authority and leadership to not look at them as capital,
like human capital.
I want them to look at them as human resources.
Without them, there is no policing.
There is no, the command staff is, is important, but if all command staff disappears, radio
calls still get answered.
But if all cops disappear, command staff ain't going on answer radio calls.
So let's put that emphasis where it belongs at the cop level.
Let's treat them like we actually care about them because that's how they're going to
treat the community.
If they don't feel like anybody cares about them, they're less likely to want to care
about the community.
They look at this more as a job.
And then I would probably change the way we train our cops.
Stop training them to enforce laws, start training them to solve problems.
Because now when they show up to a scene only looking at it through the lens of law enforcement,
there's a lot of frustration and they feel that frustration.
But if I teach you to solve a problem, whatever comes your way, whether it's a man with a
knife or whether it's a neighbor who's working on their car in the driveway that's keeping
people up at night because they keep different hours.
Like, OK, they're not breaking the law, but it certainly is a problem.
And let's see if we can avoid this becoming a neighbor dispute that turns into a big fight.
Let's start solving problems.
I think I would do those things.
Treat them better internally, teach them to be problem solvers, and then really value
them from the inside out, if I could.
There's a lot of different things I'd add to that, but those are the big three that
I would put a lot of time, energy and attention towards right off the bat.
Beautiful.
Well, we've been talking for two hours, so I want to be mindful of your time, but we're
going to have to do another episode because we haven't talked on fitness or sleep deprivation.
So if you're up for it, I'd love to do a second round.
If for people listening right now, if they want to reach out to you or find you online,
where are the best places online?
Yeah, where are the best places online?
Yeah, thank you for even offering that.
So I'd run a little podcast, it's just called Policing in America with Sergeant Tom.
You could find that on any of the podcast platforms.
And there's also Policing in America podcast at Gmail.
So you could leave me notes or emails, ideas, questions.
I would love to come back on, James, and talk about the whole sleep deprivation issue that's
been the body of work.
I think that's a major component in policing in general.
And just to give a little teaser, the trucking, the rail car, the shipping, all these other
industries have sleep mandates.
And just think about this, next time you see a cop driving down the street, Harvard Medical
School says at any point in time, 55% of our nation's law enforcement are operating in
a chronically sleep deprived state.
That would be unacceptable if we said that for surgeons, if we said that for air traffic
controllers, for pilots, we would be outraged.
But yet, we just accept that cops are running around with guns, batons, hopped up on caffeine
and dip, trying to solve the complex problems of our society.
I'd love to talk with you more about that too, in round two.
Well, we'll definitely make it happen.
I'm going to schedule that with you in a minute so that we can put the two together and it'll
be a part one and a part two.
But for now, I want to thank you so much for being just such a wealth of information.
We've kind of unpicked some really interesting social side and obviously looking in the police
officer's uniform as well.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
It was absolutely my honor, James.
Thank you so much.