July 12, 2025 • 46 mins
On today’s episode of The First Responder Playbook, I sat down with retired Secret Service agent Brad Beeler. We unpacked the real-world lessons from his 25-year career, covering everything from effective communication and the power of active listening, to the critical role of polygraphs, and building trust in high-stakes situations. Brad also shared leadership wisdom around never stopping your personal growth, learning from mentors, and why resilience and continuous training are game-changers for first responders. No matter your industry, these insights are gold for anyone looking to level up their leadership and communication skills.
Want to be a guest on The First Responder Playbook: Insights on Leadership and Training? Send Brent Colbert a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1748037097521814b71b1b454
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Guys, welcome to the first responder playbook. I am joined today by
retired Secret Service agent Brad Beeler. Brad, I'm not
gonna do you justice, so I'll let you give your own intro today. No,
I really appreciate it, Brent. Thanks for having me on. No. Small town kid.
Got enamored by the Secret Service during an internship that I had with them in
St. Louis. And I was there for protective visit as part of the
(00:22):
internship. And I think I was more drawn to the agents than I was the
president. And the more I got to see the men and women, what they did
under very, very difficult circumstance. Zero fail mission
was definitely drawn to it. So 25 years later, here I am.
Started in Chicago, St. Louis, Columbia, South Carolina, where
my duty assignments 25 years in and then 17 years
(00:44):
in the polygraph program. And our polygraph program is a little bit different. We
test our applicants, but we also reach out to the local communities and try to
leverage our skill set to help them out for all they do for us. We
couldn't do our job without what they do for our protective investigative
mission. So about a thousand cases
of child sexual assault, murder, those types of things. So in that
(01:06):
course of time, learned a little bit about communication, what to do and unfortunately, what
not to do. And that's kind of where I'm at right now.
Awesome. Are you originally from Missouri? Yeah, I'm originally from about an hour
west of St. Louis, and so grew
up a Cardinals fan. And, you know, the good thing about going to grad
school there is I got to work some research projects in
(01:28):
criminology, and St. Louis has its crime problems, much like several
other, you know, Kansas City, Detroit, Memphis.
So I got to see a lot of interesting kind of case studies
firsthand. I don't hold it against me, but I'm
a big New York Mets baseball fan. And so actually, St. Louis is usually
the closest NL team to go watch. And I love going to Busch Stadium.
(01:52):
It's beautiful. Yeah. Well, we grew up, you know, growing up in the 80s,
I always thought the Mets were pond scum. Yeah, right. That's what we were.
I and. And tied in a little bit. I was. I'm a huge Keith Hernandez
fan. Yeah, that was the one that was the one that got away.
I think he was having some personal issues, and you guys took advantage of us
(02:12):
and definitely fleeced us on that trade. Yeah, I.
We actually go to St. Louis every year. We go to
Ielita Conference. Yeah. In St. Louis and
such a beautiful city, but it's a rough city for sure.
And yeah, they definitely, you know, they definitely have seen the
industrial base since the 50s pull out and as a result,
(02:35):
just a lack of resources and schooling and other things. There's definitely
some, some issues in St. Louis, but the men and women in the St. Louis
Police Department and county police department that I got to work with a lot
are amazing given all the challenges that they have.
Absolutely. So you, your original duty station once you got
Secret Service was Chicago. Yeah, Chicago. Big
(02:57):
arch rival of pretty much everything St. Louis. But as far as being able
to have a place to start, it was a great opportunity because Secret
Service, a lot of people don't know that we have such an investigative arm. That's
where we were started in 1865 with counterfeit
electronic crimes now, computer fraud, those types of things. So
that's kind of where I got, you know, my, myself kind of
(03:19):
learned and grew up a little bit as an agent and then got into
polygraph there. We also do protection when you are in your field
office assignments. And then I went my permanent protection assignment, which was
George Herbert Walker Bush. So I did four years on that detail,
then went to St. Louis where I got back into polygraph. And then the
last eight years I spent at the national center of Credibility Assessment, which is
(03:41):
basically the Federal polygraph school in South Carolina where I taught interview
interrogation to all the federal agents that kind of came through that school. So the
graduate good part was, and I'm, and I'm sure you're, you know, a big believer
in this, is that anytime you can surround yourself with other law
enforcement, any type of training, you, you tend to pick the good, the bad that
other people are doing and kind of, it's like a buffet. And I was blessed
(04:02):
to be able to see how other people were doing good things, to try to
put together a, a good baseline of what we think are best
practices. Absolutely.
What's your, what's your probably favorite story that you can tell from
being either in Chicago or, you know, being on hws,
you know, detail. What's your favorite story? Man,
(04:24):
just how they're normal people. I mean, from a protective standpoint,
just, you know, these people get up and they put their shoes on like everybody
else. And when you're on a smaller detail, like a former president detail,
I mean, obviously Trump, when he had his former detail was huge, but
especially 20 some years removed. 41, but we call him
Bush 41, he was much more laid back and, but just a great
(04:46):
American hero. I mean, literally got shot down at the age of 18
in World War II and just CIA director, vice president,
obviously just an amazing background, but just such great people. They wouldn't
travel on Christmas because they wanted the agents to be with their families.
I was a rescue swimmer and a boater on his detail. So we got to
know him just a little bit. He was always on the water when he was
(05:08):
up at Kenny Bunkport and just great, great human beings.
I just vividly remember him calling the owner of the
Cardinals on our behalf. And there were two or three Cardinals fans
on our, on his detail. And we're up
at interleague for the Red Sox, the Cardinals were. And he got us
tickets right behind home plate. So my son was 4 years old. His first baseball
(05:30):
game was right behind home plate and at
Fenway. So it's just, you know, you hear a lot of stories about
politics and that's one of the stories that, and there's many, many
more of how good our protectees
are. We're very blessed. I had a blessed career in that
regard. Awesome. I love that.
(05:53):
I think that the Secret Service, a lot of times
people just kind of look out there and say, man, that's just like the
mountaintop you're never going to see and interact. I've actually really, truly only
interacted with the one time. And it was, I was new
at a municipal agency in Oklahoma and it was during the Hillary Trump election
and there was a guy that had threatened
(06:16):
Hillary Clinton online. And so he showed up
at our police department, he said, hey, will you guys go out here with me?
I need to make contact with this guy. And my field training
officer at the time was very familiar with him. And I think the guy had
some mental problems. And I'll never forget, I just,
you know, I'd been a cop probably three or four years at that point, but
(06:37):
I was new at that agency so I was still trying to figure out how
they operated everything. And Secret Service agent
says, hey, like I don't have to agree with anything that,
that she says, but my job is to protect her. And
if you show up with any weapons, I will take care of the threat. And
a lot less diplomatic way than I
(06:59):
just said it. And I just start, I started cracking up and I
looked at my FTL and I'm like, I can't say that, can I? And he's
like, no, absolutely not. Yeah, no. It's interesting you bring that
up because 99 of my career has been very boring. Sitting in a stairwell or
working pretty non descript cases. But that 1%, you see some pretty interesting
things. But we couldn't do it without the local men and women
(07:20):
that are bringing the investigative cases to us.
But also, I mean, imagine, you know, any
protective visit of any size. The majority of the people
are state and local law enforcement that are there in those outer perimeters that are.
They're the ones that are really at risk. I mean, obviously, you know, this is
the one year anniversary of Butler, so that was a little bit different. But it
(07:41):
just goes to show you, when that communication breaks down between the locals and
the Secret Service, you obviously have. Have problems there. So
a lot of lessons learned from that. And hopefully, you know, it's my
former agency now, but. But hopefully we can learn from those lessons and hopefully that
will never take place again. Absolutely. So how did
you decide that you wanted to originally get involved in polygraphs?
(08:05):
Yeah. So community, the communication journey started for me when I was a little
kid and that my best friend still to this day, I met at 15 and
he's deaf. And it really taught me about how to
communicate and how important communication is because he would only see
the words. He never saw. The soundtrack. He never saw. He never.
It'd be like if you watched a horror movie and you didn't hear the music
(08:26):
right before that bad thing happened. Right. He went through life having to do
that. And so I learned sign language. But more importantly, I realized you had
to be present in a communication and in a conversation.
And that kind of stayed with me throughout my career. And when I
saw the men and women in our polygraph program, what they would
come out of a room with, whether it be with an applicant, because we do
(08:48):
test our applicants for national security issues. And then also what we
would do is we would test, once again, a lot of the local cases. But
what they would walk out of the room with as far as the admissions, I
mean, they were selling jail and they were very good at it, and it was
impressive. And that a lot of people, there's, you know, both sides of the fence
when it comes to polygraph. But if done on the right person at the right
(09:09):
place, at the right time, with rigid quality control, where it's not like a
Jerry Springer type thing, right. Where it's very regimented
in the right circumstances, it's a great tool. And I always like to give the
analogy it's kind of like a mammogram. Mammograms are not perfect. They're about
85 effective. But my wife's living proof, having been a cancer
survivor, that they work and they lead to further tests.
(09:32):
So polygraph should be done the Same way it should be part of an investigation,
it should not be the investigation. I like that you clarified that
because, you know, you always hear like
the good. You hear the pluses from officers of the use of them.
And then the public, you're like, well, they're not that reliable. And so I like
that you clarified that in that it's not the be all
(09:54):
end all, but it is a good tool to move forward in an investigation.
Yeah, just a tool. Another analogy I like to give is it's kind of like
a smoke detector. You know, people are like, well, a smoke detector doesn't detect
fire. Well, you're going to get some misreads if you had a smoke detector in
the kitchen. Right. Because there's going to be. You're going to be cooking. But if
I've got a smoke detector in the right place of the house, like a bedroom,
(10:14):
wouldn't I want to know if that's going off? Yeah, it doesn't detect fire, but
it detects 500 degrees and smoke. Well, that's probably.
I'm going to need to get out of that room or it's going to shape
my investigation. So once again, it's all about where we utilize it.
And that's sometimes where the problem is, is that sometimes polygraph is used in the
wrong place or political pressures forcing it to be used. And
(10:34):
that's when you hear the horror stories about it, is we tend to
really be very rigid with how we apply it. And when it comes to
applicants, the vast majority of derogatory information
that's of good adjudicated purposes comes from a
robust polygraph program. And for anybody afraid of a polygraph,
the key thing is just be honest on your application forms. If you're honest on
(10:57):
those application forms, you get a night's sleep, you get food in your belly, you
come in and you bear your soul. Chances are you're going to have a positive
outcome with that polygraph. Where most people have problems is they jump on the Internet,
they see 2 million hits when they Google it, and most of them are bad
and they try to mess with the polygraph or they left that one thing
off their application form. When you leave one thing off your forms, what are you
(11:17):
going to be thinking about during the test? That one thing and it becomes
that. Moheld becomes a mountain. So just don't do that. Just be honest, bear your
soul, and chances are you're going to have a good day. Yeah, it's
funny you say that. I've been through two polygraphs. One, I think Went
very well. And one, I think went terrible. The very first
time I went through one, I'll tell a story. I don't
(11:40):
have a problem saying it. When I was, like, 12, I'm gonna date
myself a little bit. But we went to the mall during a science
fair to, like, pastime for my younger listeners. They had
shops all together, and you went. Hung out, and
there was a little pretzel shop in there, and there was a long line, and
I grabbed a bottle top, and I waited, Waited. And I. To be honest with
(12:02):
you, I literally just walked off and forgot because I've been waiting in line so
long. And I went back to pay for it. The line was long, and I
never did. It's only thing I've ever taken, you know, truthfully, in my
life. And I went through my first polygraph, and I put it
on there, and he said, hey, I'm detecting. The way I'm asking my
question is throwing you for a loop. And he.
(12:23):
He reworded his question. He's like, all right, moving forward. And that was the only
issue I ever had on my first one. The second one I went through.
And. And I don't. You know, you make
a good thing of saying, hey, get a good night's sleep. I don't. After being
a cop for 10 years, I don't sleep very well. Right then I had to
drive, like, two hours. And so, like, they put me in this little tiny room
(12:44):
that was nothing in there. And, like, I'm trying not to fall
asleep during this thing. And, like, we get done. And he's like, well, I just
don't think you're being totally honest, but I'm gonna move you forward.
And I'm like, dude, I've never even had a speeding ticket in my life. And
so I don't hold any ill will. Like,
whatever. I mean, if. And I told the guy said, if you don't think I.
(13:05):
If you think I'm telling. Not telling the truth, then don't move me forward.
Like. And so I do see the benefits of
it, but I also can see that, like, hey, your external factors in your
life, like, either not sleeping or just being stressed out,
like, it can throw it off a little bit. And so I don't. I'm not
negative towards polygraphs at all. Like, it didn't work out for that reason
(13:28):
for that job. And, like, if that's the worst thing that happens to me in
my life, I'll be okay, you know? Yeah. Sometimes people have
an experience like you did, and I won't get into polygraph and how
it works behind the scene. But I have a strong indication that you passed
that polygraph. But, you know, a lot of agencies,
what they'll do is they'll polygraph five times as many people as they're going to
(13:50):
hire. So somebody will, you know, they just didn't get the job because they're
only hiring two people and there's 50 applicants. And
it's just assumed that it was polygraph that kind of kept them from doing
that. But yeah, kind of what you're, you're talking to me right now. Sounds like
you, you did better in that polygraph than you're giving yourself credit for. But
I will say it is, it is important to get sleep because, you know, cops,
(14:12):
we, you know, when I was in protection, we would work, you know, 24
hour shift work, you know, 8 hour shifts or 16 hour shifts, whatever you were.
And a lot of times what happens is that we would call you to set
up the polygraph and your schedule would already be out. And you want this job,
you want to try something new and you're like, I
work till midnight or I work till 2, or you know what, I work till
(14:33):
6am the test will be at 10. I'll go home, I'll get a power nap.
Well, that's a problem. So what I would always do is I would tell whoever
I was testing, dude, I will work around your schedule, but I can't test you
unless you get a solid eight. You know, I can't test you unless you get
something to eat. Well, what are people doing nowadays? Intermittent fasting, you know, whatever
the case may be. Right. So they're not going to break their fast till noon.
(14:54):
They got a polygraph at 10 o', clock, they haven't eaten for 20 hours.
And yeah, you need blood sugar. So as far as that,
I would say any listeners that are going to take a polygraph, definitely break your
fast, get something to eat, get well hydrated. You know, even
if you got to go down and get a hotel, you know, the night before
just to get your mind right. You know, sometimes people have a new, new kiddo
(15:16):
in the house, a new baby in the house, and they're not getting much sleep.
That's something to definitely let your polygraph examiner know so that they can work around
your schedule. Because I want you to be fresh. I want everybody I talk to
to pass a test. And if they didn't pass, it's because they made a conscious
choice to be dishonest with me. Yes,
I love that. So you get into
(15:37):
the polygraph and you start learning more about active communication. How do those
two commingle? Yeah, so part of it is
once again going back to what I just said as far as trying to get
people to pass is I want to put them in the right headspace so
that if there's something on their mind that they're worried about, it may be
really important to them. Like, you know, I'm sure you've been in
(15:58):
situations, Brent, where if you've been on the road, you've pulled over a 16
year old for going 10 miles an hour over, 12 miles an hour
over, not that big of a deal. You shoot, you may have even given a
warning. But when you come up to the car, they are freaked out. Their world
is over. They're going to have to tell their mom, right, that this is going
on. And then there's other people that they're going 127 and a 55
and they're like, hey, what's the big deal? You just.
(16:21):
People's experiences are different. So I want to come
in and I want to get there, get a baseline of where
this person's at. You know, is there a heart rate? 120. Do I need to
slow down here a little bit and get them to calm down? We. Or are
they calm, cool and collected? San Diego weather type situation? They're
just, just like this. That's perfect. So that may, maybe I can shorten
(16:42):
down this initial interaction. Plus, what are some of the things in law
enforcement we have to do immediately? We gotta read Miranda. I mean,
so what I see a lot of times the problem is, is you first put
handcuffs on somebody, and the next thing you know, you see it on cops a
lot. Hey, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you do, that person's in
fight or flight, they are going to err on the side of caution. That's not
(17:03):
the time to be reading the Miranda. We want to get them, let them decompress.
And I want to maybe get their head right by being, look, here's what I'm
going to do. I'm going to read you a bunch of things. You may have
seen this on tv, movies, those types of things. But before we get into that,
I want you to know that even if you do choose to talk to me
at that lower present, at any point here, you can change your mind
and say, brad, you know what, I don't want to talk to you anymore. I
(17:24):
like to give people choices. I like to play fair. I like everything to be
video Recorded, right? I mean, sunshine is the ultimate
disinfectant. And, Brent, you're probably maybe on the cusp
of being old enough, right? When dashboard cameras came in
versus when we didn't have them, right? Everybody was freaking out, right? Like,
oh, my God, how many times does that help somebody on a DUI
(17:46):
where somebody said, you know what? Brent said this to me, or
he did that to me or he touched me here. Whatever the case may be,
let's check the tape. I'll give you a good example of that.
I don't know if you saw this on the news. About a month ago, there
was an Edmond, Oklahoma, police officer was on a traffic stop, and
a guy that was fixing to go to prison for sexual assault charges just came
(18:07):
up and pepper sprayed him and attacked him. And he wasn't even involved in traffic
stop. But what helped him? As soon as they started
fighting, his body cam fell off. Yeah, but he had an in car dash
camera, and it saved his bacon, you know? And so
I've always laughed at those type of people that, you know, these
tools that can help them out in their career, and they're like, oh, if you're
(18:30):
doing it right, it ain't gonna hurt you. If you're doing the right thing, it's
not an issue. And the same thing happened with body cams, right? Oh, my gosh,
they're gonna catch us in the bathroom. No, they're not. You can turn it off
when you go to the bathroom, right? Like, it's. But it saves
us so many times. Plus, it makes us do our job better, right? We
can. You know, a football team, what do they do on
(18:50):
Mondays? They check the tape and they say, hey, we did this bad.
We did this good. We need to do that in law enforcement, too. And then
now that we're doing more and more of that during interrogations, we can get
rid of bad practices, right? Threats guarantees reconstruction
of memories. All these things that we know lead to
false confessions. We can see them and be like, dude, don't do that.
(19:12):
Right? So if you're doing the right thing, you know, I
always say the moment that video goes on, you're creating a movie for the
prosecution. It's either going to be a good movie for the
prosecution or it's going to be a horror movie that the defense attorneys are going
to love. So just do the right thing. All right?
So as far as, you know, primacy, I'm a big
(19:35):
fan when I talk communication of horns and halos in that,
from an officer safety standpoint, we use our Eyes. And we use our ears
more than anything in that within a second, we're trying to determine,
is Brent, if I'm coming up to the car, is Brent a threat
to my well being? Right. And. And we. We're trained
on certain things to see or when I'm in a interaction, is that person, you
(19:57):
know, are they. Are they pine off on their body? Are they making a fist?
Are they clinching their jaw? Are they furrowing their brow? Okay, I might want to
take a step back. Right. I may want to get my taser ready. You know,
we're used to seeing those things. But most of my interactions,
you know, the frontline men and women that are in roles
like yours, that's the most threatening position in law enforcement. Being on a domestic
(20:19):
violence call, being in a Secret Service agent. I've got eight
layers of people that come before me, Right. So I.
So many things are sanitized before me. So I'm definitely not the best
person to ask when it comes to first impressions from an officer safety
standpoint. But when it comes to first impressions in an interview
room, I want to be able to focus on some of those other senses.
(20:41):
So. And what I also want to do is how many scammers or how many
good criminals out there are very good at making first impressions. Ted
Bundy was. Many others were right. You're going to know that when you
pull over certain people or you're interrogating certain people, and they are just. They are
so slick, right. Such make such a great first impression. And
we got to be careful about that because confirmation bias kicks in and they
(21:03):
made a great first impression, and we're like, oh, they're good to go. Or somebody's
just nervous. You know, law enforcement sometimes hits us
at a very significant life event, right? In that
not everybody is used to being. Interacting with law enforcement. So
they may be nervous, they may be doing something that makes you feel uncomfortable, and
you have such a bad first impression at them that all of a sudden they
(21:25):
become your chief suspect. You saw this in the Amanda
Knox case, where the Italian police saw that she was acting strange.
Well, her roommate had just been killed. She's in a foreign country, and they
viewed that immediately as she's guilty. Sometimes we do this on 911 calls
where that was just a weird 911 call. You know what? I think he killed
his wife. Or maybe he did. But it's when we jump to those conclusions
(21:47):
that are. Are so problematic. So I know I'm kind of going on a riff
here, but when When I think first impressions, I think handshakes,
they got to be dry, they have to be warm. So what I'll do is
I'll. If I'm seated, I'll have my hand under my leg and that'll warm my
hand up and I'll make sure that it's dry. I'll put antiperspirant on my hands.
That's just a daily ritual of me. You'll never get a wet handshake from me
(22:09):
because those are the two things that science says are the worst handshake, right? A
wet, cold, clammy handshake. So that's not going to happen. And it's not a shake,
it's a hold. Too many people are sitting there just shaking like this, right?
It's just, you just give a quick one second hold while you're looking in their
eyes and you disconnect. But if you do those things, if you dress
professionally, another big thing for me is Brent. And I'm sure you've
(22:30):
seen this after Covid, A lot of, you know, in uniform,
you have a uniform. But when we are in our personal time
or if we're doing an interview after hours, we tend to,
we've lowered the threshold of how we look professionally. And
you're not going to want a surgeon. If a surgeon came in wearing flip flops
and shorts, doing a consultation, how comfortable would you feel with
(22:53):
him or her being your surgeon? Probably not so much.
So that level of professionalism attire is very important in that.
I love that. I. I'll tell you a quick story.
When I was a newer patrol officer, we had a big
casino in our town. And you know, criminals go to casinos.
And I'll never forget I had a sergeant. I love him to death, but
(23:16):
he, every night we went to breakfast at 3am like that was his thing.
Like, don't work around that time. And this car passed me, had a
headlight out, and I was like, man, it's getting close to breakfast time. I don't
want to hear him gripe, tail lights out. I'm like, all right, well, they're getting
stopped and so light them up. We're getting onto the
interstate and he slow rolls me. So clue number one,
(23:38):
we finally come to a stop. I go up, make my approach,
and kind of like you said, your first impressions, you're going to pick up
things sometimes good, sometimes bad. He's
just nervous. He's got prison clear prison tats all over his face.
And so I'm thinking, okay, this guy's just nervous because police but As
I start watching his body language, he's got a death grip on the
(24:02):
steering wheel. And I'm like, okay, that throws a red flag up for me.
So as I tell him, you know why I'm stopping him? Hey, I need to
see your driver's license. He won't answer me. He's
just staring straight ahead. And I'm like, okay,
red flag number two. And so as I'm looking in the car,
I see it was actually a legit Indian tomahawk,
(24:24):
like, blade, everything stuck in between
the driver's seat and the console. And so I'm like,
hey, man, like, with the way you're acting, you're not answering
my questions, you're not telling me, like, you got an id, you won't look at
me. That weapon right there, like, hop on out.
And he was so nervous. He had never put the car
(24:46):
in park. And he actually put it in reverse.
And as I'm telling him, he lets off the brake and it starts going back
towards my patrol car. And I'm yelling at him like, man, stop. You're about to
hit my car. Stop, stop, stop. And he's just so nervous,
his body froze up and he couldn't put it in park. And he finally like,
you know, maybe like that far away from our car, puts it in parking, like,
(25:08):
thank God. So my partner shows up about this time
and he gets out of the car finally. And I,
I said, hey, do you mind patting him down for weapons because there's a weapon
in there. And I, I, he pats him down.
This, unfortunately, Oklahoma is one of the liberal medical marijuana
states there is now, but this was before it was legal. And he pats
(25:29):
him down, he's like, hey man, what's that big bulge in your pocket? And
he's like, oh, that's my marijuana partner. He's like, okay.
So he pulls it out and it actually ended up being a trafficking amount of
methamphetamine. Oh. And he had been out of prison
doing a 10 year bid for robbery for 10 days, you know,
and it was, it was key to me
(25:51):
as a patrolman that my first impression was that he was nervous because I'm stopping
him. Correct. But as I took the totality of
everything in and I kept building upon my initial stop, you know, the
way he's acting, it wasn't adding up. And
you have to pay attention to the way people interact with you verbally, their
body language, everything. Because those clues matter in
(26:14):
a life or death job. Yeah. When you, when you go into it
thinking a certain Way, it's very hard to knock yourself out of that. I
worked a homicide case. It was a missing person presumed
homicide case in Illinois. And it involved a biker gang, the
outlaw biker gang. And I didn't know that much about the outlaws or biker gangs
in general. This is pre Sons of Anarchy, so I didn't even have a Hollywood
(26:36):
version of, of bikers. And there were two
suspects. They were both best friends and they were both dating the
missing female. One was a 1 percenter. I mean, the ATF
agent working the case said, this guy's got bodies on him, he's killed people.
We just have been able to, to bring him in. So the guy's a hangar,
doesn't even have a bike. He's just doing chores around the house,
(26:57):
you know, to basically try to get in good and become, you know, a
probationary member. But he's maybe 5, 620 pounds,
dripping wet. The other guy's 6, 4, about 250, has a look
of Satan. So I think, you know what? I'm going to start polygraphing
the small guy. He might have seen something. We'll break him, maybe flip
it into the, the 1 percenter. Well, the, this
(27:20):
guy fails, and I keep talking to him for about five hours I'm
talking to him and he keeps saying, that's not it. And I was going along
the lines of, you must have saw something. You're afraid of this guy. I get
it, let me help you. So on and so forth. And
luckily two detectives that weren't involved with the case were watching and they're like,
man, he keeps saying, that's not it. I wasn't picking up on it. I had
(27:42):
tunnel vision. Right. There's no way this guy could be a killer. I stepped out
of the room. They said, hey, you mind if we step in for a few
minutes there in maybe 27 seconds. I think that was the exact amount of time.
And they said, you keep saying that's not it. What is it? Oh,
I, I killed her, cut her up in six pieces and threw her in the
river. You know, I just,
I could not view him as a killer and I could
(28:04):
not get off of that original, original impression. So that's one thing
as investigators and, and law enforcement, you know, street cops, we need to be careful
of, is making that, that first assumption. Because assumptions are
many, many times wrong. Absolutely.
You know, I think you, you touched on a very important topic, especially like when
you're interviewing people, the importance of having an outside person
(28:26):
viewing it not in there, because they pick up on things that
you may not see or are not picking up on at all.
And like, you may miss a giant clue like that, like you
said. And let's be honest, every police officer has probably
done that at some point in their career. It happens. Yeah. And
that. I love that you. You touched on that because that's so important.
(28:49):
How many times are you in an interview or you on a stop
and you forget a question to ask and, you
know, you. I wish I would have asked that. That's why we always do all
our interviews with two individuals in the interview room. Okay.
We may have somebody watching as well, but they're mirroring my body
language, which is always open. Okay. I don't want closed body language.
(29:10):
I don't want arms crossed, legs crossed. We call those anchor points. I
basically want a slight lean forward with a clipboard. I don't want to be across
the table. I want to be on the same side of the table. Table. I
want to be able to see their complete body. When we talk about body language,
it's not detection of deception that you get from body language. It's either
stress or not stress. But I do want to see level
(29:30):
of reception to my message and especially with the lower body, you know,
are their feet facing the door? Are they facing my partner? Many times
I've had partners where for whatever reason, I have a female partner and she's a
female. Maybe it's a shaken baby or what we call traumatic brain injury case on
a kid. I may be the embodiment. You know, I'm a bigger guy. I'm
bald head. I may be the embodiment of her domestic partner who's,
(29:53):
you know, assaulting her. So she may relate better to my
female partner. So having that other person in there is almost like a cheat
code because you can have another avenue to connect with somebody.
And also I may be rationalizing, minimizing, projecting
when I'm theming them in an interrogation. And I don't know really
what's working because I'm. I'm. I'm so busy cognitively putting
(30:15):
my words together. My partner sees the nonverbal level of
reception, and they're like, wow, he or she really liked that or didn't
like that. And what we. The problem that we have in law
enforcement interviewing is we're afraid to bring that other person
in because we're so. We have a lot of type A's in law enforcement, as
you know, and we're afraid. We're afraid our partner is going to step
(30:37):
in and like, I'm in the middle of a train of thought, and they step
in. So what we do is we do a call to the bullpen. And what
I mean by that is, if I feel like I'm running out of steam and
I want to the baton, I'll touch my watch. And my partner knows, hey, I'm
about to pass the baton to you. Or the secondary in the room
typically is my air traffic controller, metaphorically, because let's say we're
dumping the phone or we're searching the phone or something was found in the search
(30:59):
warrant. Or somebody outside the room looks something up and they're like, that's. That's BS
what they're doing is they're not communicating with me because the most disrespectful I can
think I can do when I'm talking to you is, do what? Look at the
phone. They're talking to the secondary, and they're saying, hey, guess what?
Boom, boom, boom. And then my partner can hit his watch
or do whatever, whatever sign they want to do. And then I know, you know
(31:20):
what? I need to pass the baton because there's some new information that came into
this, and we look seamless, and we don't look like we're stepping on each other.
So I'm a big believer in having the second person in the room and. But
having to find roles within that. I
love that. So let me ask you, what are some
ways to. When you're. You're. You're doing these active
(31:41):
listening things? Because I think a lot of people think they're
active listening, and they're not. You know, they hear. They hear
what people are saying, but they're not hearing what they're actually
saying. How to. How do
you recommend, like, people get better at actually listening?
Well, do it in your personal life, for one is that many times we turn
(32:04):
that switch off when we get out of work. And I know I'm guilty of
it sometimes, right? My wife of 27
years will probably say that sometimes as well. But, you know, active listening,
it's. It's a. It's a moniker that a lot of times we hear it. And
it's, it's, it's. It's. Oh, yeah, I actively listen. It's
mirroring back the last three words of what somebody says. It's giving those
(32:24):
minimal encouragers. Right? It's using mimicry.
Okay. When I say mimicry, we hear mirroring. We hear body language mirroring.
But I am not going to do things immediately while you're doing it. Like, if
you cross your arms. I'm not going to immediately cross my arms, things like that,
but I may cross my wrists. Okay, on the same side, or you
cross your legs at the knee. I may slowly cross them at the
(32:45):
ankle because ultimately I don't want those anchor points. But
I'm going to subtly mimic because people like people that are like
them. We've heard that quote before. Right. And also
I go back to DALE Carnegie almost 100 years ago where he talks about, to
be interesting, you need to be interested. And so I
want to have some curiosity. I want to feign interest,
(33:07):
even if there's times where, and I'm sure you're the same way,
where you're talking to people and you don't really want to hear this story. Somebody
walks up to your car and they start telling you a tall tale and you're
like, oh my God, right? You'd rather be at your 3:00am Breakfast. Yes.
But I learned long ago, when I was in graduate school, I was a snot
nose kid. But the best paying job we had in our
criminology department was working in the
(33:31):
city jail in St. Louis and interviewing arrestees on their drug use
habits and gang affiliation. And I had very
little common with the men and women I was speaking with. But
it's amazing when you go from inquisiting to being
curious and you're like, really? Tell me about that, you
know, oh, that's so interesting. You know, when, when your eyes
(33:53):
light up and you turn them into the teacher. I learned how to
make crack. I learned how to make moonshine. I learned how to be the world's
best pimp. According to the person telling me this, I would learn all these
things. And then you put that in your, your own data set and then you
can use it later on in your law enforcement career. But after talking to about
a thousand of these arrestees, it's amazing. Everybody has something
(34:15):
to teach. Everybody has a passion. Everybody, everybody has an addiction. And I don't mean
that in a bad way. My, my addiction's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I love it.
I've got to have my fix, right? So you got to find what's that
person's fix and then you got to sit back and
listen. And when I say listen, it's, it's not
interrupting. So if I said, hey, Brent, what are you doing this weekend?
(34:37):
Oh, I'm running a 5k. What's the worst thing I could do right
at that moment is say, oh, I did a 5K.
I just took the spotlight off of you and I put it on me. But
how many times have we seen that happen? Right? Yes. Let me,
I want you to bathe in that. Oh, dude. What is it? Oh, it's going
to be down at the, you know, down at the port. Oh man, that's, that's
(34:58):
awesome. And good weather for it. You know, how long you been training for it?
Like, your eyes are going to, you know, light up, your dopamine
is going to be hitting, your serotonin is going to be hitting. You're not going
to have cortisol, so you're not going to be stressed because you're talking about something
that's a struggle for you, that's a challenge, that is something that you look forward
to. And then at a certain point I may say, yeah, I was fortunate enough
to be able to do one of those as well. But I, I always hate
(35:22):
that when you're talking to somebody and they try to one up you with their
experiences, let them bathe. You know, I don't know if you deer hunt or if
you turkey hunt or do anything like that, but it's. What's the first
thing that happens when I go deer hunting and I kill a 140
inch deer and I'm so happy. Blah, blah, blah. What does everybody do with
their phone? Oh, I look at what I killed. Yeah, right. Dude,
(35:43):
walk me through the hunt. Tell me about it. That's, that's
just something in life where we're all narcissistic at a certain point and
to me, active listening is just letting them have the spotlight and
you subtly guiding it with those little head nods. Kind of like when
you're, you know, when my mom calls and she's telling me certain things and
you know, you, if you don't every 10 seconds be like, huh,
(36:06):
what's she gonna do? Did I lose you? Are we still connected?
This is the non verbal version of that. You just have to give them those
little minimal encouragers and oh, you know, raise that eyebrow. It's amazing when you raise
that eyebrow or you're doing a, you know, a affirmation
statement or like an intentional, you know, like
you, you people want to correct other people. So you're like, oh man, I heard
(36:27):
that was really hard. Oh, it's not that hard. Blah, blah, blah. That's when you
get the snowball rolling and people, you have
valuable conversations. Absolutely. I, I'm working on my
coaching certification right now and a lot of those topics are same thing
that we do in coaching and I think those principles are
so great. Especially for first responders that
(36:50):
work on a shift and for, like, shift supervision. How often
do we want a supervisor just to ask, like, hey, how's your day going?
How's everything going? Like, you know, and they
don't. They treat you like, you know, the hands off. We don't want to
interact with you. And, like, there's so much more that can be
gleaned on a shift management level if you just
(37:13):
pay attention and listen to your officers and learn a little bit about them and
say, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Like, you know, and just
kind of those small affirmations and you can make the world to
that person that's on your ship because, hey, Sarge took five minutes out of his
time to listen to the, you know, big bass I caught today at the river.
Yeah. You know, 100. And it's, you know, granted, law enforcement, you don't
(37:35):
always have Saturday Sundays off. But the analogy would be, I always like
to ask on Fridays, what are you doing this weekend? And on Mondays, what did
you do this weekend? And if you know your chief, if your
lieutenant asks you those questions, don't just say, I'm going
fishing. Oh, man, where you going? Right? Or, I'm barbecuing.
What are you firing up? What kind of grill you working with? Oh, you got
(37:55):
a green egg. Oh, my God, those are awesome. Dude, I heard you could almost
forge steel in those things. Like, how hard is it? Like, where'd you. You know,
it's amazing where that conversation can go and
the connections that can be made as a result. Don't just stop with the first
question. It's what the next question is. Absolutely.
I want to touch on how did you get into writing a book
(38:17):
that seems like the holy grail sometimes for a lot of cops was,
man, how do you get an article published? How do you write a book? Like,
how did you go down that road? Yeah, so I just been
keeping really good journals over the last, you know, 15, 20 years and,
you know, being blessed to work a lot of major cases as far as
homicides and sadly, a lot of child sexual assaults and how to deal with those
(38:39):
child sexual assaults. I. I can't remember. It's probably two years ago, I
was talking to another author who's written a lot of books, and I was just
telling some stories, and the author was like, you know what? Like,
what you're telling me now is, like, you're engaging in difficult conversations,
and there's no impetus for people to talk to you,
give you information against self interest. Like that would help
(39:02):
parents, that would help coaches, that would help, you
know, teachers, that would help supervisors.
And so what I did is I just tried to take it from start to
finish, soup to nuts. How do we prepare? How do we, you
know, I'm a big believer in you. You would never take off on a plane
if you didn't have a flight plan. So what's my plan with this
(39:23):
conversation? And I'm sure you're the same way. You know, before you jump on a
podcast, you try to research the person you're talking to, or it's going to be
a pretty boring podcast. Right? So we don't do that, though, in
too many times. There's a good part and there's a bad part. The good part
is I will do that. I will look at someone's Instagram, at their
Facebook, at their, at their social media profile, because I'm
(39:44):
not trying to manipulate them, but I'm trying to find areas to avoid and areas
to maybe go into and that I want to almost create that
mythical social media stream.
I mean, if we're, if we jump on Facebook and we type in
bass or we type in turkey or we type in deer or on Instagram, whatever,
what's going to be the next thing that's going to slowly start coming into our
(40:06):
feedback? Right. Fishing, lures, boats, whatever the case
may be. Right. And it's doing that because it's trying to create the
perfect stream of information. We have to do the same thing when we
talk to people. And some of that's just going to come naturally from follow up
questions. But if I can go into the start of that conversation already
equipped with, you know, let me, let me use this example,
(40:28):
Brent, what's your favorite genre of music?
Red Dirt. Okay, so you, I. And you're
gonna have to help me there. When I say, when I say type of music,
we're talking. Is that country? Yeah. Red Dirt country. Yeah. Okay. All
right. You got a lot of Red Dirt out in Oklahoma, right? Yes. Okay.
So that's more specific than I would usually get. Usually people would say country, and
(40:51):
then I'd say, who's your favorite artist? They'd say, George Straight. And I'd be like,
dang, George Straight, that's 40 years. You're not really tightening that front
sight aperture. Right. But if I ask you what's your favorite
song? And you give me whatever it is. The Cowboy Rides
Away by George Strait. That is very specific. Right. I'm front sight
focused now, and I have an idea of what makes you tick
(41:13):
musically. Right. So I take that metaphor, and I try to do it with all
someone's likes and interests. And a lot of times we'll do a search warrant. And
what I'll do is I'll be in the backside of the house, and unbeknownst to
them, I'm walking through their house, it's a search warrant, and I'm seeing
who's their favorite sports team, what's their movie collection,
what's on their computer. Right. What, what
(41:34):
Bible chapter did they just read last night. And all that information
goes up here. Now, that's the good part of it, because I'll use that, you
know, investigatively. But what's the bad part of it is that the men
and women out there that are on dating sites, do we not think
that people that you meet are not going on to
your social media and creating the mythical
(41:57):
perfect person to interact with? And
you're gonna meet them and they're gonna, oh, my God, he knows me. Oh, my
God, she's the greatest, right? She might just be a socially
engineered construct of that perfect person. And we see that in a lot of
dating scams. When I was getting out of the Secret Service, the dating scams were
just going through the roof because these scammers in
(42:19):
India, Africa, the Philippines, wherever in the United States were,
you know, getting a picture now using AI and just
basically finding your interest in going on eharmony or whatever.
And you just naturally, you're like, oh, my God, they're perfect for me.
So that's the negative side. Absolutely.
(42:40):
And it's unfortunately, I think it's only going to get worse.
Correct. So if somebody wants to
buy your book, where can they get a copy of your book at? You know,
the hard copy is not coming out till February of 26,
but it is on Amazon. It's us through Simon and Schuster and Mad
Hole Books. Very, very blessed to have some people help me out. So throw
(43:03):
it in your cart, keep it there for the next five months, and then, you
know, pull the trigger on it next February. But you can definitely find me.
I'm on LinkedIn. BradBeeler, 1865. Same thing on Instagram.
And then BradleyBeeler.com will be up in a couple weeks.
It's. I'm learning. I'm an old guy, so I'm learning all this new search
engine optimization, website development. Got some good
(43:25):
people, but, you know, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks when it
comes to this new world that we live in. Brent, awesome. Well, to
wrap up, I want to ask you one question, looking back on your
long career, what is the one piece of advice you'd give somebody
wanting to get into the first responder field? Okay,
so after they get in, I would say definitely get into
(43:47):
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Okay. So I focus on the
after part because I think that's so important
is that there are so many gyms out there right now that offer
discounted memberships, half off, whatever the case may be. Shoot, some are offer
free, you know, memberships. Yes. I have gotten
so much more confident my 10 years training where
(44:10):
if something did pop off, I would feel a lot more comfortable. And the amount
of physical interactions that I've got in pales
into comparison to the average beat cop who
is making contact with people maybe every shift. And
we see sadly a lot of the lethal interactions are that turn lethal or
even that turn violent many times happen as a result of our men
(44:32):
and women that maybe are a little tentative, you know, and they're
going to the toolbox too quickly, you know, they're going to their tool belt, you
know, a little too quickly or going further down that tool belt because they
don't feel comfortable physically. Maybe they can't help their partner out because they don't feel
comfortable physically. And I truly believe this is the 100th year
anniversary of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is that
(44:54):
it is not the end all, be all. It is not perfect. But in the
law enforcement capacity where we can't strike people, you know,
unless there's certain sets of circumstances, use of force, continuum. But
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu we can almost do in any situation. So I would say after
we get on, definitely that. And then I would say as far as Brent,
people that are getting into the first responder field, whether it be as an emt,
(45:15):
whether it be as a firefighter, whether it be as a local cop, is
listen to those sergeants, listen to those people that have been around
20 years. I mean if we had two, three hours on this podcast, I could
tell you some stories of what I've learned from those gray haired men and women,
right? Is that too often we come in who, what am I going to learn
from this, this old person, right? You're going to learn a lot. And
(45:37):
also realize that 25 year career is truly a
marathon and it's not a sprint. So take your time, acquire
those skills and just when you think you've got it figured out at the two
or three year mark, realize you don't know nothing, right?
You know nothing. Sometimes the most dangerous
officer out There is not the one that's the brand new person, right?
(45:59):
It's the one that's been out a couple years that think, I'm good, I
got this sorted, right? They maybe put themselves in a situation that
somebody else wouldn't, that that rookie would be like, I ain't, I ain't. I'm not
doing that. I'm calling for backup. So I would say
have a good wolf pack or friend around you that can do a little
self assessment, and that could be mentally, you know, if you're going through a hard
(46:20):
time. I know working a lot of the child sexual abuse cases that I
did, it was nice to have some people that said, hey man, Brad, you're, you're
working a lot of these cases once you take a step back. So having the
people that are there for you to make sure you're mentally good because we have
way too much suicide in law enforcement, but also having the self
assessment to realize there's certain things I need to tighten up with. Could be my
(46:40):
marksmanship, could be my self defense, it could be my legal
acumen, whatever the case may be, but always keep training. Get 1% better
every day. And if you do that, after 25 years, you're going to be pretty
damn good at what you're doing. Very true. Brad, thank you so much for
joining me today and you're welcome back anytime. Thanks, Brent. Appreciate it. Have
a good day.
Guys, welcome to the first responder playbook. I am joined today by
retired Secret Service agent Brad Beeler. Brad, I'm not
gonna do you justice, so I'll let you give your own intro today. No,
I really appreciate it, Brent. Thanks for having me on. No. Small town kid.
Got enamored by the Secret Service during an internship that I had with them in
St. Louis. And I was there for protective visit as part of the
(00:22):
internship. And I think I was more drawn to the agents than I was the
president. And the more I got to see the men and women, what they did
under very, very difficult circumstance. Zero fail mission
was definitely drawn to it. So 25 years later, here I am.
Started in Chicago, St. Louis, Columbia, South Carolina, where
my duty assignments 25 years in and then 17 years
(00:44):
in the polygraph program. And our polygraph program is a little bit different. We
test our applicants, but we also reach out to the local communities and try to
leverage our skill set to help them out for all they do for us. We
couldn't do our job without what they do for our protective investigative
mission. So about a thousand cases
of child sexual assault, murder, those types of things. So in that
(01:06):
course of time, learned a little bit about communication, what to do and unfortunately, what
not to do. And that's kind of where I'm at right now.
Awesome. Are you originally from Missouri? Yeah, I'm originally from about an hour
west of St. Louis, and so grew
up a Cardinals fan. And, you know, the good thing about going to grad
school there is I got to work some research projects in
(01:28):
criminology, and St. Louis has its crime problems, much like several
other, you know, Kansas City, Detroit, Memphis.
So I got to see a lot of interesting kind of case studies
firsthand. I don't hold it against me, but I'm
a big New York Mets baseball fan. And so actually, St. Louis is usually
the closest NL team to go watch. And I love going to Busch Stadium.
(01:52):
It's beautiful. Yeah. Well, we grew up, you know, growing up in the 80s,
I always thought the Mets were pond scum. Yeah, right. That's what we were.
I and. And tied in a little bit. I was. I'm a huge Keith Hernandez
fan. Yeah, that was the one that was the one that got away.
I think he was having some personal issues, and you guys took advantage of us
(02:12):
and definitely fleeced us on that trade. Yeah, I.
We actually go to St. Louis every year. We go to
Ielita Conference. Yeah. In St. Louis and
such a beautiful city, but it's a rough city for sure.
And yeah, they definitely, you know, they definitely have seen the
industrial base since the 50s pull out and as a result,
(02:35):
just a lack of resources and schooling and other things. There's definitely
some, some issues in St. Louis, but the men and women in the St. Louis
Police Department and county police department that I got to work with a lot
are amazing given all the challenges that they have.
Absolutely. So you, your original duty station once you got
Secret Service was Chicago. Yeah, Chicago. Big
(02:57):
arch rival of pretty much everything St. Louis. But as far as being able
to have a place to start, it was a great opportunity because Secret
Service, a lot of people don't know that we have such an investigative arm. That's
where we were started in 1865 with counterfeit
electronic crimes now, computer fraud, those types of things. So
that's kind of where I got, you know, my, myself kind of
(03:19):
learned and grew up a little bit as an agent and then got into
polygraph there. We also do protection when you are in your field
office assignments. And then I went my permanent protection assignment, which was
George Herbert Walker Bush. So I did four years on that detail,
then went to St. Louis where I got back into polygraph. And then the
last eight years I spent at the national center of Credibility Assessment, which is
(03:41):
basically the Federal polygraph school in South Carolina where I taught interview
interrogation to all the federal agents that kind of came through that school. So the
graduate good part was, and I'm, and I'm sure you're, you know, a big believer
in this, is that anytime you can surround yourself with other law
enforcement, any type of training, you, you tend to pick the good, the bad that
other people are doing and kind of, it's like a buffet. And I was blessed
(04:02):
to be able to see how other people were doing good things, to try to
put together a, a good baseline of what we think are best
practices. Absolutely.
What's your, what's your probably favorite story that you can tell from
being either in Chicago or, you know, being on hws,
you know, detail. What's your favorite story? Man,
(04:24):
just how they're normal people. I mean, from a protective standpoint,
just, you know, these people get up and they put their shoes on like everybody
else. And when you're on a smaller detail, like a former president detail,
I mean, obviously Trump, when he had his former detail was huge, but
especially 20 some years removed. 41, but we call him
Bush 41, he was much more laid back and, but just a great
(04:46):
American hero. I mean, literally got shot down at the age of 18
in World War II and just CIA director, vice president,
obviously just an amazing background, but just such great people. They wouldn't
travel on Christmas because they wanted the agents to be with their families.
I was a rescue swimmer and a boater on his detail. So we got to
know him just a little bit. He was always on the water when he was
(05:08):
up at Kenny Bunkport and just great, great human beings.
I just vividly remember him calling the owner of the
Cardinals on our behalf. And there were two or three Cardinals fans
on our, on his detail. And we're up
at interleague for the Red Sox, the Cardinals were. And he got us
tickets right behind home plate. So my son was 4 years old. His first baseball
(05:30):
game was right behind home plate and at
Fenway. So it's just, you know, you hear a lot of stories about
politics and that's one of the stories that, and there's many, many
more of how good our protectees
are. We're very blessed. I had a blessed career in that
regard. Awesome. I love that.
(05:53):
I think that the Secret Service, a lot of times
people just kind of look out there and say, man, that's just like the
mountaintop you're never going to see and interact. I've actually really, truly only
interacted with the one time. And it was, I was new
at a municipal agency in Oklahoma and it was during the Hillary Trump election
and there was a guy that had threatened
(06:16):
Hillary Clinton online. And so he showed up
at our police department, he said, hey, will you guys go out here with me?
I need to make contact with this guy. And my field training
officer at the time was very familiar with him. And I think the guy had
some mental problems. And I'll never forget, I just,
you know, I'd been a cop probably three or four years at that point, but
(06:37):
I was new at that agency so I was still trying to figure out how
they operated everything. And Secret Service agent
says, hey, like I don't have to agree with anything that,
that she says, but my job is to protect her. And
if you show up with any weapons, I will take care of the threat. And
a lot less diplomatic way than I
(06:59):
just said it. And I just start, I started cracking up and I
looked at my FTL and I'm like, I can't say that, can I? And he's
like, no, absolutely not. Yeah, no. It's interesting you bring that
up because 99 of my career has been very boring. Sitting in a stairwell or
working pretty non descript cases. But that 1%, you see some pretty interesting
things. But we couldn't do it without the local men and women
(07:20):
that are bringing the investigative cases to us.
But also, I mean, imagine, you know, any
protective visit of any size. The majority of the people
are state and local law enforcement that are there in those outer perimeters that are.
They're the ones that are really at risk. I mean, obviously, you know, this is
the one year anniversary of Butler, so that was a little bit different. But it
(07:41):
just goes to show you, when that communication breaks down between the locals and
the Secret Service, you obviously have. Have problems there. So
a lot of lessons learned from that. And hopefully, you know, it's my
former agency now, but. But hopefully we can learn from those lessons and hopefully that
will never take place again. Absolutely. So how did
you decide that you wanted to originally get involved in polygraphs?
(08:05):
Yeah. So community, the communication journey started for me when I was a little
kid and that my best friend still to this day, I met at 15 and
he's deaf. And it really taught me about how to
communicate and how important communication is because he would only see
the words. He never saw. The soundtrack. He never saw. He never.
It'd be like if you watched a horror movie and you didn't hear the music
(08:26):
right before that bad thing happened. Right. He went through life having to do
that. And so I learned sign language. But more importantly, I realized you had
to be present in a communication and in a conversation.
And that kind of stayed with me throughout my career. And when I
saw the men and women in our polygraph program, what they would
come out of a room with, whether it be with an applicant, because we do
(08:48):
test our applicants for national security issues. And then also what we
would do is we would test, once again, a lot of the local cases. But
what they would walk out of the room with as far as the admissions, I
mean, they were selling jail and they were very good at it, and it was
impressive. And that a lot of people, there's, you know, both sides of the fence
when it comes to polygraph. But if done on the right person at the right
(09:09):
place, at the right time, with rigid quality control, where it's not like a
Jerry Springer type thing, right. Where it's very regimented
in the right circumstances, it's a great tool. And I always like to give the
analogy it's kind of like a mammogram. Mammograms are not perfect. They're about
85 effective. But my wife's living proof, having been a cancer
survivor, that they work and they lead to further tests.
(09:32):
So polygraph should be done the Same way it should be part of an investigation,
it should not be the investigation. I like that you clarified that
because, you know, you always hear like
the good. You hear the pluses from officers of the use of them.
And then the public, you're like, well, they're not that reliable. And so I like
that you clarified that in that it's not the be all
(09:54):
end all, but it is a good tool to move forward in an investigation.
Yeah, just a tool. Another analogy I like to give is it's kind of like
a smoke detector. You know, people are like, well, a smoke detector doesn't detect
fire. Well, you're going to get some misreads if you had a smoke detector in
the kitchen. Right. Because there's going to be. You're going to be cooking. But if
I've got a smoke detector in the right place of the house, like a bedroom,
(10:14):
wouldn't I want to know if that's going off? Yeah, it doesn't detect fire, but
it detects 500 degrees and smoke. Well, that's probably.
I'm going to need to get out of that room or it's going to shape
my investigation. So once again, it's all about where we utilize it.
And that's sometimes where the problem is, is that sometimes polygraph is used in the
wrong place or political pressures forcing it to be used. And
(10:34):
that's when you hear the horror stories about it, is we tend to
really be very rigid with how we apply it. And when it comes to
applicants, the vast majority of derogatory information
that's of good adjudicated purposes comes from a
robust polygraph program. And for anybody afraid of a polygraph,
the key thing is just be honest on your application forms. If you're honest on
(10:57):
those application forms, you get a night's sleep, you get food in your belly, you
come in and you bear your soul. Chances are you're going to have a positive
outcome with that polygraph. Where most people have problems is they jump on the Internet,
they see 2 million hits when they Google it, and most of them are bad
and they try to mess with the polygraph or they left that one thing
off their application form. When you leave one thing off your forms, what are you
(11:17):
going to be thinking about during the test? That one thing and it becomes
that. Moheld becomes a mountain. So just don't do that. Just be honest, bear your
soul, and chances are you're going to have a good day. Yeah, it's
funny you say that. I've been through two polygraphs. One, I think Went
very well. And one, I think went terrible. The very first
time I went through one, I'll tell a story. I don't
(11:40):
have a problem saying it. When I was, like, 12, I'm gonna date
myself a little bit. But we went to the mall during a science
fair to, like, pastime for my younger listeners. They had
shops all together, and you went. Hung out, and
there was a little pretzel shop in there, and there was a long line, and
I grabbed a bottle top, and I waited, Waited. And I. To be honest with
(12:02):
you, I literally just walked off and forgot because I've been waiting in line so
long. And I went back to pay for it. The line was long, and I
never did. It's only thing I've ever taken, you know, truthfully, in my
life. And I went through my first polygraph, and I put it
on there, and he said, hey, I'm detecting. The way I'm asking my
question is throwing you for a loop. And he.
(12:23):
He reworded his question. He's like, all right, moving forward. And that was the only
issue I ever had on my first one. The second one I went through.
And. And I don't. You know, you make
a good thing of saying, hey, get a good night's sleep. I don't. After being
a cop for 10 years, I don't sleep very well. Right then I had to
drive, like, two hours. And so, like, they put me in this little tiny room
(12:44):
that was nothing in there. And, like, I'm trying not to fall
asleep during this thing. And, like, we get done. And he's like, well, I just
don't think you're being totally honest, but I'm gonna move you forward.
And I'm like, dude, I've never even had a speeding ticket in my life. And
so I don't hold any ill will. Like,
whatever. I mean, if. And I told the guy said, if you don't think I.
(13:05):
If you think I'm telling. Not telling the truth, then don't move me forward.
Like. And so I do see the benefits of
it, but I also can see that, like, hey, your external factors in your
life, like, either not sleeping or just being stressed out,
like, it can throw it off a little bit. And so I don't. I'm not
negative towards polygraphs at all. Like, it didn't work out for that reason
(13:28):
for that job. And, like, if that's the worst thing that happens to me in
my life, I'll be okay, you know? Yeah. Sometimes people have
an experience like you did, and I won't get into polygraph and how
it works behind the scene. But I have a strong indication that you passed
that polygraph. But, you know, a lot of agencies,
what they'll do is they'll polygraph five times as many people as they're going to
(13:50):
hire. So somebody will, you know, they just didn't get the job because they're
only hiring two people and there's 50 applicants. And
it's just assumed that it was polygraph that kind of kept them from doing
that. But yeah, kind of what you're, you're talking to me right now. Sounds like
you, you did better in that polygraph than you're giving yourself credit for. But
I will say it is, it is important to get sleep because, you know, cops,
(14:12):
we, you know, when I was in protection, we would work, you know, 24
hour shift work, you know, 8 hour shifts or 16 hour shifts, whatever you were.
And a lot of times what happens is that we would call you to set
up the polygraph and your schedule would already be out. And you want this job,
you want to try something new and you're like, I
work till midnight or I work till 2, or you know what, I work till
(14:33):
6am the test will be at 10. I'll go home, I'll get a power nap.
Well, that's a problem. So what I would always do is I would tell whoever
I was testing, dude, I will work around your schedule, but I can't test you
unless you get a solid eight. You know, I can't test you unless you get
something to eat. Well, what are people doing nowadays? Intermittent fasting, you know, whatever
the case may be. Right. So they're not going to break their fast till noon.
(14:54):
They got a polygraph at 10 o', clock, they haven't eaten for 20 hours.
And yeah, you need blood sugar. So as far as that,
I would say any listeners that are going to take a polygraph, definitely break your
fast, get something to eat, get well hydrated. You know, even
if you got to go down and get a hotel, you know, the night before
just to get your mind right. You know, sometimes people have a new, new kiddo
(15:16):
in the house, a new baby in the house, and they're not getting much sleep.
That's something to definitely let your polygraph examiner know so that they can work around
your schedule. Because I want you to be fresh. I want everybody I talk to
to pass a test. And if they didn't pass, it's because they made a conscious
choice to be dishonest with me. Yes,
I love that. So you get into
(15:37):
the polygraph and you start learning more about active communication. How do those
two commingle? Yeah, so part of it is
once again going back to what I just said as far as trying to get
people to pass is I want to put them in the right headspace so
that if there's something on their mind that they're worried about, it may be
really important to them. Like, you know, I'm sure you've been in
(15:58):
situations, Brent, where if you've been on the road, you've pulled over a 16
year old for going 10 miles an hour over, 12 miles an hour
over, not that big of a deal. You shoot, you may have even given a
warning. But when you come up to the car, they are freaked out. Their world
is over. They're going to have to tell their mom, right, that this is going
on. And then there's other people that they're going 127 and a 55
and they're like, hey, what's the big deal? You just.
(16:21):
People's experiences are different. So I want to come
in and I want to get there, get a baseline of where
this person's at. You know, is there a heart rate? 120. Do I need to
slow down here a little bit and get them to calm down? We. Or are
they calm, cool and collected? San Diego weather type situation? They're
just, just like this. That's perfect. So that may, maybe I can shorten
(16:42):
down this initial interaction. Plus, what are some of the things in law
enforcement we have to do immediately? We gotta read Miranda. I mean,
so what I see a lot of times the problem is, is you first put
handcuffs on somebody, and the next thing you know, you see it on cops a
lot. Hey, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you do, that person's in
fight or flight, they are going to err on the side of caution. That's not
(17:03):
the time to be reading the Miranda. We want to get them, let them decompress.
And I want to maybe get their head right by being, look, here's what I'm
going to do. I'm going to read you a bunch of things. You may have
seen this on tv, movies, those types of things. But before we get into that,
I want you to know that even if you do choose to talk to me
at that lower present, at any point here, you can change your mind
and say, brad, you know what, I don't want to talk to you anymore. I
(17:24):
like to give people choices. I like to play fair. I like everything to be
video Recorded, right? I mean, sunshine is the ultimate
disinfectant. And, Brent, you're probably maybe on the cusp
of being old enough, right? When dashboard cameras came in
versus when we didn't have them, right? Everybody was freaking out, right? Like,
oh, my God, how many times does that help somebody on a DUI
(17:46):
where somebody said, you know what? Brent said this to me, or
he did that to me or he touched me here. Whatever the case may be,
let's check the tape. I'll give you a good example of that.
I don't know if you saw this on the news. About a month ago, there
was an Edmond, Oklahoma, police officer was on a traffic stop, and
a guy that was fixing to go to prison for sexual assault charges just came
(18:07):
up and pepper sprayed him and attacked him. And he wasn't even involved in traffic
stop. But what helped him? As soon as they started
fighting, his body cam fell off. Yeah, but he had an in car dash
camera, and it saved his bacon, you know? And so
I've always laughed at those type of people that, you know, these
tools that can help them out in their career, and they're like, oh, if you're
(18:30):
doing it right, it ain't gonna hurt you. If you're doing the right thing, it's
not an issue. And the same thing happened with body cams, right? Oh, my gosh,
they're gonna catch us in the bathroom. No, they're not. You can turn it off
when you go to the bathroom, right? Like, it's. But it saves
us so many times. Plus, it makes us do our job better, right? We
can. You know, a football team, what do they do on
(18:50):
Mondays? They check the tape and they say, hey, we did this bad.
We did this good. We need to do that in law enforcement, too. And then
now that we're doing more and more of that during interrogations, we can get
rid of bad practices, right? Threats guarantees reconstruction
of memories. All these things that we know lead to
false confessions. We can see them and be like, dude, don't do that.
(19:12):
Right? So if you're doing the right thing, you know, I
always say the moment that video goes on, you're creating a movie for the
prosecution. It's either going to be a good movie for the
prosecution or it's going to be a horror movie that the defense attorneys are going
to love. So just do the right thing. All right?
So as far as, you know, primacy, I'm a big
(19:35):
fan when I talk communication of horns and halos in that,
from an officer safety standpoint, we use our Eyes. And we use our ears
more than anything in that within a second, we're trying to determine,
is Brent, if I'm coming up to the car, is Brent a threat
to my well being? Right. And. And we. We're trained
on certain things to see or when I'm in a interaction, is that person, you
(19:57):
know, are they. Are they pine off on their body? Are they making a fist?
Are they clinching their jaw? Are they furrowing their brow? Okay, I might want to
take a step back. Right. I may want to get my taser ready. You know,
we're used to seeing those things. But most of my interactions,
you know, the frontline men and women that are in roles
like yours, that's the most threatening position in law enforcement. Being on a domestic
(20:19):
violence call, being in a Secret Service agent. I've got eight
layers of people that come before me, Right. So I.
So many things are sanitized before me. So I'm definitely not the best
person to ask when it comes to first impressions from an officer safety
standpoint. But when it comes to first impressions in an interview
room, I want to be able to focus on some of those other senses.
(20:41):
So. And what I also want to do is how many scammers or how many
good criminals out there are very good at making first impressions. Ted
Bundy was. Many others were right. You're going to know that when you
pull over certain people or you're interrogating certain people, and they are just. They are
so slick, right. Such make such a great first impression. And
we got to be careful about that because confirmation bias kicks in and they
(21:03):
made a great first impression, and we're like, oh, they're good to go. Or somebody's
just nervous. You know, law enforcement sometimes hits us
at a very significant life event, right? In that
not everybody is used to being. Interacting with law enforcement. So
they may be nervous, they may be doing something that makes you feel uncomfortable, and
you have such a bad first impression at them that all of a sudden they
(21:25):
become your chief suspect. You saw this in the Amanda
Knox case, where the Italian police saw that she was acting strange.
Well, her roommate had just been killed. She's in a foreign country, and they
viewed that immediately as she's guilty. Sometimes we do this on 911 calls
where that was just a weird 911 call. You know what? I think he killed
his wife. Or maybe he did. But it's when we jump to those conclusions
(21:47):
that are. Are so problematic. So I know I'm kind of going on a riff
here, but when When I think first impressions, I think handshakes,
they got to be dry, they have to be warm. So what I'll do is
I'll. If I'm seated, I'll have my hand under my leg and that'll warm my
hand up and I'll make sure that it's dry. I'll put antiperspirant on my hands.
That's just a daily ritual of me. You'll never get a wet handshake from me
(22:09):
because those are the two things that science says are the worst handshake, right? A
wet, cold, clammy handshake. So that's not going to happen. And it's not a shake,
it's a hold. Too many people are sitting there just shaking like this, right?
It's just, you just give a quick one second hold while you're looking in their
eyes and you disconnect. But if you do those things, if you dress
professionally, another big thing for me is Brent. And I'm sure you've
(22:30):
seen this after Covid, A lot of, you know, in uniform,
you have a uniform. But when we are in our personal time
or if we're doing an interview after hours, we tend to,
we've lowered the threshold of how we look professionally. And
you're not going to want a surgeon. If a surgeon came in wearing flip flops
and shorts, doing a consultation, how comfortable would you feel with
(22:53):
him or her being your surgeon? Probably not so much.
So that level of professionalism attire is very important in that.
I love that. I. I'll tell you a quick story.
When I was a newer patrol officer, we had a big
casino in our town. And you know, criminals go to casinos.
And I'll never forget I had a sergeant. I love him to death, but
(23:16):
he, every night we went to breakfast at 3am like that was his thing.
Like, don't work around that time. And this car passed me, had a
headlight out, and I was like, man, it's getting close to breakfast time. I don't
want to hear him gripe, tail lights out. I'm like, all right, well, they're getting
stopped and so light them up. We're getting onto the
interstate and he slow rolls me. So clue number one,
(23:38):
we finally come to a stop. I go up, make my approach,
and kind of like you said, your first impressions, you're going to pick up
things sometimes good, sometimes bad. He's
just nervous. He's got prison clear prison tats all over his face.
And so I'm thinking, okay, this guy's just nervous because police but As
I start watching his body language, he's got a death grip on the
(24:02):
steering wheel. And I'm like, okay, that throws a red flag up for me.
So as I tell him, you know why I'm stopping him? Hey, I need to
see your driver's license. He won't answer me. He's
just staring straight ahead. And I'm like, okay,
red flag number two. And so as I'm looking in the car,
I see it was actually a legit Indian tomahawk,
(24:24):
like, blade, everything stuck in between
the driver's seat and the console. And so I'm like,
hey, man, like, with the way you're acting, you're not answering
my questions, you're not telling me, like, you got an id, you won't look at
me. That weapon right there, like, hop on out.
And he was so nervous. He had never put the car
(24:46):
in park. And he actually put it in reverse.
And as I'm telling him, he lets off the brake and it starts going back
towards my patrol car. And I'm yelling at him like, man, stop. You're about to
hit my car. Stop, stop, stop. And he's just so nervous,
his body froze up and he couldn't put it in park. And he finally like,
you know, maybe like that far away from our car, puts it in parking, like,
(25:08):
thank God. So my partner shows up about this time
and he gets out of the car finally. And I,
I said, hey, do you mind patting him down for weapons because there's a weapon
in there. And I, I, he pats him down.
This, unfortunately, Oklahoma is one of the liberal medical marijuana
states there is now, but this was before it was legal. And he pats
(25:29):
him down, he's like, hey man, what's that big bulge in your pocket? And
he's like, oh, that's my marijuana partner. He's like, okay.
So he pulls it out and it actually ended up being a trafficking amount of
methamphetamine. Oh. And he had been out of prison
doing a 10 year bid for robbery for 10 days, you know,
and it was, it was key to me
(25:51):
as a patrolman that my first impression was that he was nervous because I'm stopping
him. Correct. But as I took the totality of
everything in and I kept building upon my initial stop, you know, the
way he's acting, it wasn't adding up. And
you have to pay attention to the way people interact with you verbally, their
body language, everything. Because those clues matter in
(26:14):
a life or death job. Yeah. When you, when you go into it
thinking a certain Way, it's very hard to knock yourself out of that. I
worked a homicide case. It was a missing person presumed
homicide case in Illinois. And it involved a biker gang, the
outlaw biker gang. And I didn't know that much about the outlaws or biker gangs
in general. This is pre Sons of Anarchy, so I didn't even have a Hollywood
(26:36):
version of, of bikers. And there were two
suspects. They were both best friends and they were both dating the
missing female. One was a 1 percenter. I mean, the ATF
agent working the case said, this guy's got bodies on him, he's killed people.
We just have been able to, to bring him in. So the guy's a hangar,
doesn't even have a bike. He's just doing chores around the house,
(26:57):
you know, to basically try to get in good and become, you know, a
probationary member. But he's maybe 5, 620 pounds,
dripping wet. The other guy's 6, 4, about 250, has a look
of Satan. So I think, you know what? I'm going to start polygraphing
the small guy. He might have seen something. We'll break him, maybe flip
it into the, the 1 percenter. Well, the, this
(27:20):
guy fails, and I keep talking to him for about five hours I'm
talking to him and he keeps saying, that's not it. And I was going along
the lines of, you must have saw something. You're afraid of this guy. I get
it, let me help you. So on and so forth. And
luckily two detectives that weren't involved with the case were watching and they're like,
man, he keeps saying, that's not it. I wasn't picking up on it. I had
(27:42):
tunnel vision. Right. There's no way this guy could be a killer. I stepped out
of the room. They said, hey, you mind if we step in for a few
minutes there in maybe 27 seconds. I think that was the exact amount of time.
And they said, you keep saying that's not it. What is it? Oh,
I, I killed her, cut her up in six pieces and threw her in the
river. You know, I just,
I could not view him as a killer and I could
(28:04):
not get off of that original, original impression. So that's one thing
as investigators and, and law enforcement, you know, street cops, we need to be careful
of, is making that, that first assumption. Because assumptions are
many, many times wrong. Absolutely.
You know, I think you, you touched on a very important topic, especially like when
you're interviewing people, the importance of having an outside person
(28:26):
viewing it not in there, because they pick up on things that
you may not see or are not picking up on at all.
And like, you may miss a giant clue like that, like you
said. And let's be honest, every police officer has probably
done that at some point in their career. It happens. Yeah. And
that. I love that you. You touched on that because that's so important.
(28:49):
How many times are you in an interview or you on a stop
and you forget a question to ask and, you
know, you. I wish I would have asked that. That's why we always do all
our interviews with two individuals in the interview room. Okay.
We may have somebody watching as well, but they're mirroring my body
language, which is always open. Okay. I don't want closed body language.
(29:10):
I don't want arms crossed, legs crossed. We call those anchor points. I
basically want a slight lean forward with a clipboard. I don't want to be across
the table. I want to be on the same side of the table. Table. I
want to be able to see their complete body. When we talk about body language,
it's not detection of deception that you get from body language. It's either
stress or not stress. But I do want to see level
(29:30):
of reception to my message and especially with the lower body, you know,
are their feet facing the door? Are they facing my partner? Many times
I've had partners where for whatever reason, I have a female partner and she's a
female. Maybe it's a shaken baby or what we call traumatic brain injury case on
a kid. I may be the embodiment. You know, I'm a bigger guy. I'm
bald head. I may be the embodiment of her domestic partner who's,
(29:53):
you know, assaulting her. So she may relate better to my
female partner. So having that other person in there is almost like a cheat
code because you can have another avenue to connect with somebody.
And also I may be rationalizing, minimizing, projecting
when I'm theming them in an interrogation. And I don't know really
what's working because I'm. I'm. I'm so busy cognitively putting
(30:15):
my words together. My partner sees the nonverbal level of
reception, and they're like, wow, he or she really liked that or didn't
like that. And what we. The problem that we have in law
enforcement interviewing is we're afraid to bring that other person
in because we're so. We have a lot of type A's in law enforcement, as
you know, and we're afraid. We're afraid our partner is going to step
(30:37):
in and like, I'm in the middle of a train of thought, and they step
in. So what we do is we do a call to the bullpen. And what
I mean by that is, if I feel like I'm running out of steam and
I want to the baton, I'll touch my watch. And my partner knows, hey, I'm
about to pass the baton to you. Or the secondary in the room
typically is my air traffic controller, metaphorically, because let's say we're
dumping the phone or we're searching the phone or something was found in the search
(30:59):
warrant. Or somebody outside the room looks something up and they're like, that's. That's BS
what they're doing is they're not communicating with me because the most disrespectful I can
think I can do when I'm talking to you is, do what? Look at the
phone. They're talking to the secondary, and they're saying, hey, guess what?
Boom, boom, boom. And then my partner can hit his watch
or do whatever, whatever sign they want to do. And then I know, you know
(31:20):
what? I need to pass the baton because there's some new information that came into
this, and we look seamless, and we don't look like we're stepping on each other.
So I'm a big believer in having the second person in the room and. But
having to find roles within that. I
love that. So let me ask you, what are some
ways to. When you're. You're. You're doing these active
(31:41):
listening things? Because I think a lot of people think they're
active listening, and they're not. You know, they hear. They hear
what people are saying, but they're not hearing what they're actually
saying. How to. How do
you recommend, like, people get better at actually listening?
Well, do it in your personal life, for one is that many times we turn
(32:04):
that switch off when we get out of work. And I know I'm guilty of
it sometimes, right? My wife of 27
years will probably say that sometimes as well. But, you know, active listening,
it's. It's a. It's a moniker that a lot of times we hear it. And
it's, it's, it's. It's. Oh, yeah, I actively listen. It's
mirroring back the last three words of what somebody says. It's giving those
(32:24):
minimal encouragers. Right? It's using mimicry.
Okay. When I say mimicry, we hear mirroring. We hear body language mirroring.
But I am not going to do things immediately while you're doing it. Like, if
you cross your arms. I'm not going to immediately cross my arms, things like that,
but I may cross my wrists. Okay, on the same side, or you
cross your legs at the knee. I may slowly cross them at the
(32:45):
ankle because ultimately I don't want those anchor points. But
I'm going to subtly mimic because people like people that are like
them. We've heard that quote before. Right. And also
I go back to DALE Carnegie almost 100 years ago where he talks about, to
be interesting, you need to be interested. And so I
want to have some curiosity. I want to feign interest,
(33:07):
even if there's times where, and I'm sure you're the same way,
where you're talking to people and you don't really want to hear this story. Somebody
walks up to your car and they start telling you a tall tale and you're
like, oh my God, right? You'd rather be at your 3:00am Breakfast. Yes.
But I learned long ago, when I was in graduate school, I was a snot
nose kid. But the best paying job we had in our
criminology department was working in the
(33:31):
city jail in St. Louis and interviewing arrestees on their drug use
habits and gang affiliation. And I had very
little common with the men and women I was speaking with. But
it's amazing when you go from inquisiting to being
curious and you're like, really? Tell me about that, you
know, oh, that's so interesting. You know, when, when your eyes
(33:53):
light up and you turn them into the teacher. I learned how to
make crack. I learned how to make moonshine. I learned how to be the world's
best pimp. According to the person telling me this, I would learn all these
things. And then you put that in your, your own data set and then you
can use it later on in your law enforcement career. But after talking to about
a thousand of these arrestees, it's amazing. Everybody has something
(34:15):
to teach. Everybody has a passion. Everybody, everybody has an addiction. And I don't mean
that in a bad way. My, my addiction's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I love it.
I've got to have my fix, right? So you got to find what's that
person's fix and then you got to sit back and
listen. And when I say listen, it's, it's not
interrupting. So if I said, hey, Brent, what are you doing this weekend?
(34:37):
Oh, I'm running a 5k. What's the worst thing I could do right
at that moment is say, oh, I did a 5K.
I just took the spotlight off of you and I put it on me. But
how many times have we seen that happen? Right? Yes. Let me,
I want you to bathe in that. Oh, dude. What is it? Oh, it's going
to be down at the, you know, down at the port. Oh man, that's, that's
(34:58):
awesome. And good weather for it. You know, how long you been training for it?
Like, your eyes are going to, you know, light up, your dopamine
is going to be hitting, your serotonin is going to be hitting. You're not going
to have cortisol, so you're not going to be stressed because you're talking about something
that's a struggle for you, that's a challenge, that is something that you look forward
to. And then at a certain point I may say, yeah, I was fortunate enough
to be able to do one of those as well. But I, I always hate
(35:22):
that when you're talking to somebody and they try to one up you with their
experiences, let them bathe. You know, I don't know if you deer hunt or if
you turkey hunt or do anything like that, but it's. What's the first
thing that happens when I go deer hunting and I kill a 140
inch deer and I'm so happy. Blah, blah, blah. What does everybody do with
their phone? Oh, I look at what I killed. Yeah, right. Dude,
(35:43):
walk me through the hunt. Tell me about it. That's, that's
just something in life where we're all narcissistic at a certain point and
to me, active listening is just letting them have the spotlight and
you subtly guiding it with those little head nods. Kind of like when
you're, you know, when my mom calls and she's telling me certain things and
you know, you, if you don't every 10 seconds be like, huh,
(36:06):
what's she gonna do? Did I lose you? Are we still connected?
This is the non verbal version of that. You just have to give them those
little minimal encouragers and oh, you know, raise that eyebrow. It's amazing when you raise
that eyebrow or you're doing a, you know, a affirmation
statement or like an intentional, you know, like
you, you people want to correct other people. So you're like, oh man, I heard
(36:27):
that was really hard. Oh, it's not that hard. Blah, blah, blah. That's when you
get the snowball rolling and people, you have
valuable conversations. Absolutely. I, I'm working on my
coaching certification right now and a lot of those topics are same thing
that we do in coaching and I think those principles are
so great. Especially for first responders that
(36:50):
work on a shift and for, like, shift supervision. How often
do we want a supervisor just to ask, like, hey, how's your day going?
How's everything going? Like, you know, and they
don't. They treat you like, you know, the hands off. We don't want to
interact with you. And, like, there's so much more that can be
gleaned on a shift management level if you just
(37:13):
pay attention and listen to your officers and learn a little bit about them and
say, yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Like, you know, and just
kind of those small affirmations and you can make the world to
that person that's on your ship because, hey, Sarge took five minutes out of his
time to listen to the, you know, big bass I caught today at the river.
Yeah. You know, 100. And it's, you know, granted, law enforcement, you don't
(37:35):
always have Saturday Sundays off. But the analogy would be, I always like
to ask on Fridays, what are you doing this weekend? And on Mondays, what did
you do this weekend? And if you know your chief, if your
lieutenant asks you those questions, don't just say, I'm going
fishing. Oh, man, where you going? Right? Or, I'm barbecuing.
What are you firing up? What kind of grill you working with? Oh, you got
(37:55):
a green egg. Oh, my God, those are awesome. Dude, I heard you could almost
forge steel in those things. Like, how hard is it? Like, where'd you. You know,
it's amazing where that conversation can go and
the connections that can be made as a result. Don't just stop with the first
question. It's what the next question is. Absolutely.
I want to touch on how did you get into writing a book
(38:17):
that seems like the holy grail sometimes for a lot of cops was,
man, how do you get an article published? How do you write a book? Like,
how did you go down that road? Yeah, so I just been
keeping really good journals over the last, you know, 15, 20 years and,
you know, being blessed to work a lot of major cases as far as
homicides and sadly, a lot of child sexual assaults and how to deal with those
(38:39):
child sexual assaults. I. I can't remember. It's probably two years ago, I
was talking to another author who's written a lot of books, and I was just
telling some stories, and the author was like, you know what? Like,
what you're telling me now is, like, you're engaging in difficult conversations,
and there's no impetus for people to talk to you,
give you information against self interest. Like that would help
(39:02):
parents, that would help coaches, that would help, you
know, teachers, that would help supervisors.
And so what I did is I just tried to take it from start to
finish, soup to nuts. How do we prepare? How do we, you
know, I'm a big believer in you. You would never take off on a plane
if you didn't have a flight plan. So what's my plan with this
(39:23):
conversation? And I'm sure you're the same way. You know, before you jump on a
podcast, you try to research the person you're talking to, or it's going to be
a pretty boring podcast. Right? So we don't do that, though, in
too many times. There's a good part and there's a bad part. The good part
is I will do that. I will look at someone's Instagram, at their
Facebook, at their, at their social media profile, because I'm
(39:44):
not trying to manipulate them, but I'm trying to find areas to avoid and areas
to maybe go into and that I want to almost create that
mythical social media stream.
I mean, if we're, if we jump on Facebook and we type in
bass or we type in turkey or we type in deer or on Instagram, whatever,
what's going to be the next thing that's going to slowly start coming into our
(40:06):
feedback? Right. Fishing, lures, boats, whatever the case
may be. Right. And it's doing that because it's trying to create the
perfect stream of information. We have to do the same thing when we
talk to people. And some of that's just going to come naturally from follow up
questions. But if I can go into the start of that conversation already
equipped with, you know, let me, let me use this example,
(40:28):
Brent, what's your favorite genre of music?
Red Dirt. Okay, so you, I. And you're
gonna have to help me there. When I say, when I say type of music,
we're talking. Is that country? Yeah. Red Dirt country. Yeah. Okay. All
right. You got a lot of Red Dirt out in Oklahoma, right? Yes. Okay.
So that's more specific than I would usually get. Usually people would say country, and
(40:51):
then I'd say, who's your favorite artist? They'd say, George Straight. And I'd be like,
dang, George Straight, that's 40 years. You're not really tightening that front
sight aperture. Right. But if I ask you what's your favorite
song? And you give me whatever it is. The Cowboy Rides
Away by George Strait. That is very specific. Right. I'm front sight
focused now, and I have an idea of what makes you tick
(41:13):
musically. Right. So I take that metaphor, and I try to do it with all
someone's likes and interests. And a lot of times we'll do a search warrant. And
what I'll do is I'll be in the backside of the house, and unbeknownst to
them, I'm walking through their house, it's a search warrant, and I'm seeing
who's their favorite sports team, what's their movie collection,
what's on their computer. Right. What, what
(41:34):
Bible chapter did they just read last night. And all that information
goes up here. Now, that's the good part of it, because I'll use that, you
know, investigatively. But what's the bad part of it is that the men
and women out there that are on dating sites, do we not think
that people that you meet are not going on to
your social media and creating the mythical
(41:57):
perfect person to interact with? And
you're gonna meet them and they're gonna, oh, my God, he knows me. Oh, my
God, she's the greatest, right? She might just be a socially
engineered construct of that perfect person. And we see that in a lot of
dating scams. When I was getting out of the Secret Service, the dating scams were
just going through the roof because these scammers in
(42:19):
India, Africa, the Philippines, wherever in the United States were,
you know, getting a picture now using AI and just
basically finding your interest in going on eharmony or whatever.
And you just naturally, you're like, oh, my God, they're perfect for me.
So that's the negative side. Absolutely.
(42:40):
And it's unfortunately, I think it's only going to get worse.
Correct. So if somebody wants to
buy your book, where can they get a copy of your book at? You know,
the hard copy is not coming out till February of 26,
but it is on Amazon. It's us through Simon and Schuster and Mad
Hole Books. Very, very blessed to have some people help me out. So throw
(43:03):
it in your cart, keep it there for the next five months, and then, you
know, pull the trigger on it next February. But you can definitely find me.
I'm on LinkedIn. BradBeeler, 1865. Same thing on Instagram.
And then BradleyBeeler.com will be up in a couple weeks.
It's. I'm learning. I'm an old guy, so I'm learning all this new search
engine optimization, website development. Got some good
(43:25):
people, but, you know, it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks when it
comes to this new world that we live in. Brent, awesome. Well, to
wrap up, I want to ask you one question, looking back on your
long career, what is the one piece of advice you'd give somebody
wanting to get into the first responder field? Okay,
so after they get in, I would say definitely get into
(43:47):
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Okay. So I focus on the
after part because I think that's so important
is that there are so many gyms out there right now that offer
discounted memberships, half off, whatever the case may be. Shoot, some are offer
free, you know, memberships. Yes. I have gotten
so much more confident my 10 years training where
(44:10):
if something did pop off, I would feel a lot more comfortable. And the amount
of physical interactions that I've got in pales
into comparison to the average beat cop who
is making contact with people maybe every shift. And
we see sadly a lot of the lethal interactions are that turn lethal or
even that turn violent many times happen as a result of our men
(44:32):
and women that maybe are a little tentative, you know, and they're
going to the toolbox too quickly, you know, they're going to their tool belt, you
know, a little too quickly or going further down that tool belt because they
don't feel comfortable physically. Maybe they can't help their partner out because they don't feel
comfortable physically. And I truly believe this is the 100th year
anniversary of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is that
(44:54):
it is not the end all, be all. It is not perfect. But in the
law enforcement capacity where we can't strike people, you know,
unless there's certain sets of circumstances, use of force, continuum. But
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu we can almost do in any situation. So I would say after
we get on, definitely that. And then I would say as far as Brent,
people that are getting into the first responder field, whether it be as an emt,
(45:15):
whether it be as a firefighter, whether it be as a local cop, is
listen to those sergeants, listen to those people that have been around
20 years. I mean if we had two, three hours on this podcast, I could
tell you some stories of what I've learned from those gray haired men and women,
right? Is that too often we come in who, what am I going to learn
from this, this old person, right? You're going to learn a lot. And
(45:37):
also realize that 25 year career is truly a
marathon and it's not a sprint. So take your time, acquire
those skills and just when you think you've got it figured out at the two
or three year mark, realize you don't know nothing, right?
You know nothing. Sometimes the most dangerous
officer out There is not the one that's the brand new person, right?
(45:59):
It's the one that's been out a couple years that think, I'm good, I
got this sorted, right? They maybe put themselves in a situation that
somebody else wouldn't, that that rookie would be like, I ain't, I ain't. I'm not
doing that. I'm calling for backup. So I would say
have a good wolf pack or friend around you that can do a little
self assessment, and that could be mentally, you know, if you're going through a hard
(46:20):
time. I know working a lot of the child sexual abuse cases that I
did, it was nice to have some people that said, hey man, Brad, you're, you're
working a lot of these cases once you take a step back. So having the
people that are there for you to make sure you're mentally good because we have
way too much suicide in law enforcement, but also having the self
assessment to realize there's certain things I need to tighten up with. Could be my
(46:40):
marksmanship, could be my self defense, it could be my legal
acumen, whatever the case may be, but always keep training. Get 1% better
every day. And if you do that, after 25 years, you're going to be pretty
damn good at what you're doing. Very true. Brad, thank you so much for
joining me today and you're welcome back anytime. Thanks, Brent. Appreciate it. Have
a good day.
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