Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm TBI Director David Grouch and I believe that anything is possible.
I'm Halloran Hilton Hill and these are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
One of the great privileges I have in doing this broadcast all these years is I've made some great friends.
This is one of them. This is the Director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
I am not under investigation just so we're clear.
At least I don't think any of that.
David Grouch, welcome to the broadcast.
Thank you my friend.
I have so much love for you. I just really think the world of you.
That touches me.
We go way back.
Way back.
You were on this broadcast when you were Chief of Police here in Knoxville and we were having, you know, we always had these great conversations about life and leadership and which have been wonderful.
But I remember you saying on this broadcast that as a cadet, I think I want to be Chief of Police and that happened for you.
Now you're the Director of the TBI.
I want to get to where that source of faith or belief comes from.
I don't think I've ever explored that with you and welcome by the way.
Ah, thanks. Thanks for always being a great friend.
You are always there when I need you and called you several times and had you come and share with the team your insights and your knowledge and we're so grateful for that.
You know, I would tell you just my faith really comes from a life of service.
It's something that was ingrained obviously as a child. My parents, you know, I'm raised Roman Catholic now.
Our friend, we have a mutual friend.
Remind us where you grew up.
Oh, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Yeah.
Yeah, so we raised a Roman Catholic.
You know, so there's been several iterations of that over my tenure and we have a mutual friend, Pastor Darrell Arnold.
Oh man, he's great.
He's amazing, right?
So Darrell, when he first started his church, he came and visited when I had gotten promoted to Chief and he and I just connected.
And things were amazing, but Darrell brought in a new kind of focus and understanding to faith for me.
And he's now one of my great spiritual leaders as well.
And so I just, he tells folks that I am a Pentecostal Catholic.
Well, when I saw him get you to do the electric slide at church, I knew there had been some sort of a,
some sort of a breakthrough.
Yes, sir.
So now you're the director of the TBI.
Did you see your life taking this arc?
Not initially.
You know, I thought that, you know, leading a police agency would be the kind of the pinnacle at the local level.
And then doors just started to open.
And I started looking for other ways that I could serve and that I could bring perspective that may not be the same to an even broader area.
And so it led me looking at what else was possible, what else was out there.
And I took some note of the Tennessee Bureau investigation.
Why?
It's a very, very high-level investigation.
It is a very, very high-functioning, very unique organization.
It is the only one of its kind in the country.
Really?
Yes.
And so, while other states...
What's its distinctive?
Right.
So other states have bureaus of investigation, but they either fall under their department of safety or they fall under their attorney general's office.
TBI is an independent agency.
It doesn't fall under anyone.
It is unique in that sense in that once the director is appointed, the director has the autonomy to run the organization without influence of anyone.
And that struck me as a great opportunity to really make a difference and to embrace what I had learned over the years and could provide to an organization that keeps our state safe.
So maybe talk a little bit about what the TBI has done, especially what you do, but how it improves the quality of life and how you've gotten better at it.
You're a bureau of investigation.
What do you do and how does that improve your quality of life?
Right.
So it was a great learning curve.
So I thought I knew what they did until I walked in the door.
So the bureau is amazing.
It has so a number of things, right?
Investigation is just a piece of what the bureau does.
The bureau actually is the repository for all criminal justice information for the state of Tennessee.
So all crime and justice.
It's just a huge data organization.
Huge data organization.
All that data is stored and kept there as well as analyzed and reported on to the general assembly, to advise the administration, to advise the public of what is going on.
And the world of safety.
How big is your staff and budget?
So interesting.
So when I walked in the door, how we had 540 employees, we had a budget of $73 million.
Immediately recognized that it was under resourced.
And there were a lot of people doing a lot of work for a little money and really with limited resources to get it accomplished.
So I went to work right away with the team to fix that.
Today, we stand at an organization of 767 employees and a budget of over $159 million.
And so the administration, the general assembly have been just gracious and recognizing what we have been telling them.
And that is we are a strong organization.
We do great things, but we can be better and we can do more and we can do better.
And that's what we've been working on since I walked in the door.
And that's been amazing.
So it's our repository of information.
The state crime labs.
We run all of the evidence for all law enforcement, all policing in Tennessee.
We run all the evidence and provide feedback on that evidence.
We have, of course, the investigative side of the house.
We train, we do training for all policing in the state, not just for our own team, but for all policing in the state and investigative tactics and techniques.
We, it's just amazing that our team is responsible for approving handgun purchases, for doing backgrounds on professionals, and doing backgrounds for daycare centers and for teachers and assuring that we have the right people in our taking care of our children.
So it's reach and impact. We talk about public safety. This is an organization that has such a touch on the entire state of Tennessee and the safety of our state.
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As I was walking up my communications director, Josh Devines, says, we've put this information out on our social media and there is a lot of feedback coming in.
And they're criticizing us for putting out our thoughts and prayers.
And you see the faces of the kids and the family. You know, they needed our prayer.
What's the number one crime that you are battling in the state of Tennessee?
Well, number one is no surprise, right? And number one is the drug epidemic. And it's changed. The face of the drug epidemic keeps changing. Now it's fentanyl. Such a deadly, deadly poison.
Give me a sense of the scope of the fentanyl problem in the state of Tennessee. Let's start with what is fentanyl and then kind of...
Yeah. So fentanyl is an opioid. It's synthetic. So it's made in a lab. And it has medical purpose. It's a pain reliever.
And so it's wonderful at that. But what we are seeing is not the fentanyl that is made in the corporate laboratories where it's monitored and measured and properly created.
What we have is fentanyl labs that are creating, taking precursor chemicals, mixing them up, not scientists, drug dealers, mixing it up mostly south of the border and producing this drug and then shipping it across the border to infiltrate the drug supply.
So it's in almost every drug out there. Most deadly substance that exists. It has three granules of fentanyl will kill you. And so you can imagine when these fake pills that they're making that look like all of the medications that people have gotten used to taking.
Hydrocodones and soma and anything you can imagine. Everything that exists. They are pressing fentanyl into those pills and they look really, really close, almost identical to the pills that you would get prescribed to you.
And they're selling these and they're mixing them in the supply on the street. And so people are getting them and we're finding people who, what we call opioid naive, that aren't used to an opioid, especially strong acting opioids.
Take them and it kills them on the first time. And so that's the word that DEA has put out is the one pill can kill and one time can kill. And that's the devastating part.
And that's what we've seen in Tennessee is we have had unbelievable death as a result of this poison. And this kills more people in our state and in our country than any other issue that is out there.
Are you making progress?
We, you know, we are and we aren't. We're making progress, I think, in beating back supply, but demand just keeps rising.
Really?
There's work to be done.
One of the things that I've always observed about you that I've admired about you are there is the blocking and tacking the tackling, sorry, the basic stuff of policing and law enforcement, the stuff that you have to do.
But as I remember you, you always were looking at cause. And if you could try to get over here and prevent the crime from happening, instead of responding to the crime, you were ahead of the curve.
And I remember, never forget when you and Darrell Arnold got together and brought all the gang leaders into the church and said, look, let's, we're going to hold up, we're going to press the pause button for, I don't know, for 72 hours, 48 hours.
This is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, but your desire to get to the root of the problem, not just, where does that come from to really get to the people part of what's going on?
So it comes to the, you know, I'm a student of this profession and I have been. It comes to the roots of the profession, right? So Robert Peel, 1829, gave us nine principles for policing.
The very first of those principles is prevention of crime.
Prevention of crime. That's our core of what we do. That's at the core of policing, right?
We, we in policing have really messed this up. And we're the ones responsible for this, right? And so what we've done is we've, we've, we've used the words that don't help us.
We call ourselves the law enforcement profession. Law enforcement is 10% of what we do. It's not who we are. It's not what we do every day.
We've got to re, we've got to reimagine and reimagine and we've got to, we've got to take control of the narrative.
We're in that process. So this past October where I was at the International Association of Chiefs of Police at the conference and we had the leadership guru, I call him, but Simon Sinek came and presented to us.
And Simon said some things that really fired me up and has burnt this passion.
He's, he's powerful. So Simon talked about this narrative that we have. And he said, you know, if we really look at what policing is, now Simon gave us one point to think about.
And that was that the purpose of policing is to protect the vulnerable. And it's not to enforce the laws. Enforcing the laws is a piece of what we do, right?
And so I've expanded that. I call it the three P's of policing. We have three real core functions. Prevent crime, protect the vulnerable, and promote public safety.
Right. And think about the difference. How if, if we train new officers that that's their role, right, not that they're law enforcement, because when you roll up on that first call as a new officer and you've been told you're a law enforcement officer,
your mindset when you get out of that car, I'm going to enforce the law. Right. Regardless of the situation, I'm going to enforce the law. And that's not what we do.
But if we train them the right way, we train them to understand the focus is to prevent crime, to protect the vulnerable and to promote public safety.
They get out of that car the first time. It's how can I help? They're seeking to be a helper. That's, that's our purpose. That's what we've got to change in our profession.
That's that's actually a movement I've been pushing.
I can tell you're a little bit passionate about it. Yes, sir.
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I was, I was watching television. The breaking news comes this school shooting in Nashville. I see all the assembled law enforcement.
And right there smack dab in the middle is my chief, David Roush. You're, you've been through a number of significant things statewide.
This may have been one of the most. What was that like?
It was a tough day. You know, we, we got the car. I'm in my office. My deputy director comes in and says, Hey boss, we've got a act of shooting at a school.
We've got victims. And, and so we went jumped in. I've never been a guy who has an entourage or a, you know, driver or any of that.
And so I jumped in. He jumped in with me and we had it that way. And as we pulled up to the church shortly after the incident had been resolved by the amazing response by Metro Nashville police,
we get there, we pull up and we come upon an officer who was being fired upon by the suspect and he is in shock. And we, we immediately, my deputy director takes him and they go aside and he starts to work with him.
Not long after I was almost simultaneously actually when I arrived, the DA arrived on scene.
And so he and I and the chief immediately gathered and started to talk through what we knew and then decision making immediately has to go in place.
Right. You, you see the trauma. You see the, the, the, the scene and it's, and it's sad and it's tough and it's surreal.
But our role is not to engage at that level. Right. Our role is to start to organize and coordinate next steps. And so we immediately went to work talking about, okay, how are we going to investigate this?
How are we going to, to move forward? And, and there was, it was a team effort. It was, you know, I know, I know both Glenn and John, they're, they're friends and we talked it through about how to move forward.
Right. And, and the decision on how we would do that investigation. And then it was a conversation about, okay, the next steps are, we got that done.
Then it was to figure out, you know, how do we address the public and what messages we need to send forward. And, and so that was, that was an excellent, you know, if you'll call my comments.
And as I was walking up my, my communications director, Josh Devine says, hey boss, he says, we've, we've put this information out on, on our social media and there is a lot of feedback coming on.
And, and they're, and they're criticizing us for putting out our, our thoughts and prayers. And, and that just, I remember that. That was the wrong thing to say to you on that day.
That one got you. Because you saw it. Yeah. You were in there. And, and you see the faces of the kids and the family, you know, they needed our prayer. I'm a strong faith guy.
You told America that day. I remember that. Can you unsee what you saw in that building that day?
Now, now that, that, that carnage that, you know, I've done this for a lifetime and not seen anything like that. And I've seen bad stuff, lots of bad stuff. That was tough. And it won't go away. You know, we just, we do what we can to move past and beyond and, and understand it as best we can.
But this, you know, I tell folks that enter this profession. I tell them all the time, you, you are entering a noble profession that has a responsibility to communities to protect and shield people from seeing the ugly that we see, right?
That's our, that's our job. Our responsibility is to take that on and to protect everyone else from having to deal with that.
I think what I love about your journey and your story and you being where you are doing what you do, it's just great to know that people who really care are in those positions because that creates for all of us the possibility of a, of a safe world where we can flourish.
And I thank you for being there. I thank you for being my friend and I congratulate you on all you have done and will do. And when you get to the governor's office.
I'll wait down you.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you, my friend.
Much appreciated.
My pleasure.