Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Col steal, suits of gas light, just trusting him as
a faith shadows seecres lot Doctor Curry last.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Americas graminologist cond sales of the law in the apocyles
a crime break and jage brut the fame.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
And here's America's criminologist, doctor Kerry Myers.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
Howdy, howdy, how do you hope everybody's doing well? This
is doctor Curry Myers, better known as America's Criminologist, retired sheriff,
former special agent, state trooper, also an applied criminologist and
former academic. I was an academic. I spent fourteen years
at benedict In College teaching in the criminal justice department,
but finished up, wrapped up and glad to be doing
(01:05):
this type of work full time now working on public
policy and ethics and police operations. In my book The
Event of fairal Man, I present evidence of a new
criminal arc type that we've seen the last decade or
so emerging in modern society. Often say it shaped by
the dark psychological traits and fueled by the lack of faith, family,
and formation in people's lives. This show digs into the
(01:28):
real issues behind crime and justice in America, from the
front lines to the policy halls with great truth and
good old fashioned common sense. Be sure to check out
my full archive at doctor Currymeyers dot substack dot com.
And hey, don't forget, we're streaming on every major platform.
This week I'll be traveling to the University of Idaho
(01:50):
and have two speaking engagements out there, So I look
forward to being out there this week, and thence'll be
on Wednesday and Thursday evening. So let's get into it.
Like always, we're going to take a hard look at
crime culture and human behavior. This segment of America's criminologists
(02:11):
is brought to you by Real Resilience. That's our eel. Resilience,
a transformative program helping inmates prepare for successful re entry
using inspirational films and guided discussions. Real Resilience teaches practical
tools to build resilience, strengthen relationships, and restore hope for
(02:31):
the future. It's real learning through real stories where positive
choices are modeled, not just preached. Real Resilience because re
entry isn't just about release, it's a second chance done right. Okay.
Crime doesn't emerge in a vacuum. It emerges where institutions weaken,
(02:51):
where accountability fades and where public trust is replaced by
political convenience. That brings us to California Today, we're talking
about out something that rarely gets honest attention, what happens
when nonprofit crime prevention programs themselves becomes vulnerable to corruption, infiltration,
(03:11):
or misuse of public funds. We're also going to get
into other issues that from longtime PD detective. My guest
today is retired LAPD Detective build Done, street level investigator
who watched these systems operate from the inside during one
of the most complicated public safety eras and law enforcement
(03:34):
history for Los Angeles. We're going to talk about what worked,
what didn't, what policymakers across America should learn from those lessons.
Detective build Done is a thirty six year veteran of
the LAPD and one of the most highly commended officers
in the department history, earning one hundred and seventy two commendations,
(03:55):
including recognition from the FBI, the Mayor's office, and members
of Congress. He's worked on LAPD's most demanding assignments, from
Southwest Division during the height of the Crips and Bloods
violence to Hollywood and the turbulent nineteen nineties to the
Crash Anti Gang Units during the Rampart era, and later
(04:15):
the Willshar Gang Impact Team, where he developed expertise connected
to Biggie Small's homicide case. His final assignment was the
LAPD's Elite Robbery Homicide Division and the Homicide Library Section,
and he's also the author of boot An LAPD Officer
Rookie Year. Please welcome Detective Bill Dunn. Bill, welcome to
(04:37):
the show.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Thank you, thank you. Hey, real quick, just so everybody knows,
I'm retired. I'm a retired guy now, so I'm not
speaking for the department.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Oh that's right. I should have put retired on there.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Yeah, No, that's that's fine.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Yeah, well, welcome to the show. Retired detective.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
He's hired.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
It good. You know, I tell guys that retire there's
life after retire. It takes some getting used to, but
there is life after retirement. And I know I've enjoyed it.
But you, I think the key I don't know about
you is to keep busy, and you've got to find
something that you really love in order to stay focused.
Because I've known too many cops that have retired and
(05:18):
just kind of done nothing and it didn't work out
too well for him. So it's important to keep your mind, body,
spirit kind of, you know, continuing to improve through the
retirement years. I don't know what your thoughts are, but
you've been busy because you're writing books and doing these
kind of interviews. But staying busy and staying focused is
(05:38):
pretty important, is it not.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
Oh yeah, and staying physically active. My wife she kicks
me out the door all the time to go hiking
in the mountains and stuff like that. So which you
have to do. It's not just you know, work, work, work,
the physical side. You got to keep that up too.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
All right. Lap D one of the finest police department
in the world. There's always an argument between the East
Coast and West coast, between New.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
York City and LAPD.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
When I have NYPD guys on, they're saying that they're
the best, and LAPD guys come on and say they're
the best. But both of them. Both of them are
very good and have different talents in many ways because
they've experienced crime in different decades. Often, you know, you
go back to New York City and it's a lot
older and been around a lot longer, and Los Angeles
(06:27):
kind of became one of that new hot spring that
developed and burgeoned, you know, kind of within our eyes
over time. What's the environment like when you you know
again back when you first came on, as you first
entered into Los Angeles.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
Wow, Well, when I came on, it was nineteen ninety
and the crip and blood wars were really raging here
in LA. And you would get in the car at
the beginning of watch and turn on the MDT, which
was what dispatched all of our calls to us, and
it would just fill with with all kinds of stuff
and shootings and a lot of craziness. It's funny. I
(07:06):
watched another podcast with an LAPD guy on not too
long ago, and he was talking about a night back
in the day, and it was a really, really violent night,
a lot of shootings. But I ended up by myself
on a shooting scene and everybody else was so busy
(07:27):
that basically I was working by myself picking up shellcasings
and things like that because nobody else had time to
come by and give me a hand. So I had
my car block and Figaro Avenue. Well, I documented everything
and did a crime report and then ended up going
to the hospital and meeting with the guys. But one officer,
(07:47):
just one guy, wow, on a crime scene. But that
did happen. It was rare. But yeah, back in the day,
in ninety one ninety two, we had one thousand murders
a year in the city and it would happen.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Yeah, the violence was on an eighty five in the
Kansas City area. And the violence, you know, we had
the same crips and bloods, although they started you know,
in LA originally and then right then offshoots occurred and
would move out. You know, whatever happens in LA for first,
we're going to see it in a couple of years
in the Midwest. And the violence was incredible all all over.
(08:24):
Crack cocaine and who's gonna Who's going to run the
turf in those areas, but violence everywhere was out of
this world. Is still some of the high highest crime
rights rates that we've seen in America was during those
early eighties and erscy Me late eighties and early nineties
just was crazy. It was.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
It was off the hook. It was just unimaginable. Yeah,
and I think too a lot of it was kind
of glorified because we're we have Hollywood out here and
they watch our every move and write stories about everything
we do. So movies like Colors and Boys in the Hood,
which were about you know, crime in LA when those
(09:02):
went national, we did see you know, crips and bloods
showing up in like you know, Kansas and you know
Montana and all these other places. They were just kids
would just mimic what they would see on the screen.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Yeah, Colors was I don't know about you because you
know the reality of it from but it was a
phenomenal movie.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I actually know a lot
of the guys who were background in that film. The
one guy that Sean Penn is based on Dennis Fanning.
He's actually in the film and I worked with him,
and he's you see him with Sean in the thing.
But that's an l a p D guy. There's probably
(09:44):
about four or five of them in their role call
scene or real l a p D.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
So some of that was actually based on some true
characters in the that was going on. I mean, like anything,
Hollywood will take you know, some executive privilege over it,
but at least was based on some real life actions
that were going on in that time.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
Yeah, I worked crashed back in the day, and I
like to think that we were more the Robert Duval
character than the Sean pan We were a lot more calm.
I was actually a P three, a senior guy in
a crash unit, and I trained you guys and came
in and I know that people go, oh, you were crash,
you know with the Rampart scandal and all that. But
(10:26):
people got to know there were twenty two crash units
throughout the city, eighteen Divisional and four Bureau and Rampart
and one or two others had all the problems and
there are reasons for it, and I won't go into
it now, but those were rogue units. The rest of
the units were really pretty good, you know, fifteen eighteen
(10:47):
out out of twenty two. They passed all the different
tests and they had good officers in them. But that
rampart unit was off the hook. They had serious problems.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Well how many how many officers are in l when
you were on at the height, we didn't have, you know,
we didn't. We've had some law enforcement officers that have
ranks have depleted some just because of the attitude of people.
But at its height, what was lapd as far as
the police officer numbers, do you have an idea?
Speaker 5 (11:17):
Yeah, we were eighty one hundred when I started the height,
which was probably about ten twelve years ago, we actually
were about ten thousand, two hundred. And I just heard
Jim McDonald are chief. He said, I think that we
have eighty six hundred, but if we have seventy six hundred,
I would be shocked, and he has. He has a
(11:38):
really difficult job right now trying to get people to join.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:42):
Yeah, no question, they're just depleted.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Yeah, so if you I mean, when you think about it,
ten thousand officers is a huge department. And you know,
I always tell my students in law enforcement. I told
this as well, But I tell my students, you know,
five percent of anything can be corrupt if you don't
be careful. And I think law enforcement actually has less
percentages just because we have the hiring at least back then,
(12:06):
because the hiring standards that were done. I think it's
gotten a little loose on the hiring standards today, but
back then, when you or I on the hiring standards
were I think significantly different and it probably was got
down to one or two percent where you had people
who had actual criminal intent or turned into criminals. And
that's not much when you think about population density of
(12:29):
ten thousand, So yeah, you know, that's not very many officers.
Just to give context to the folks, So it doesn't
take a couple of bad apples to really, you know,
to infect a small unit, especially if they had the
latitude to kind of go out and be be hunters
on their own.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, some of those guys they got hooked
up in the rap music industry and they just got
pulled down a hole, but they have that personality when
they came on the job. A lot of those guys,
I believe were already just not good people.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Yeah, and there's no question that gangs wanted to infiltrate
oh god. Yeah, med we need to have that kind
of boom would be very important.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
Yeah, I've done when I worked CRASH and when I
worked the Gang Impact Team, I did do investigations, especially
because when I worked the Gang Impact Team, we had
death row records, we had that whole thing, and I
was doing investigations on police officers who were corrupt and
they were a fair amount. It just that that that industry,
(13:36):
the gangster wrap industry, really pulled a lot of officers
in some dark places.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, let's talk a little bit about the
prevention programs, because you mentioned prevention programs to quite frankly,
to most police officers, they're gonna, yeah whatever, you know,
they're going to talk about prevention because people have to understand,
we deal with ninety five percent of the public, you know,
or five percent of the public the time, so we
we have a cognitive bias that's pretty you know, significant.
(14:05):
But what kind of distrust was going on at that
time period with the city's prevention programs.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
Well, when when I worked the Gang Impact Team, because
I was the detective sergeant in the unit, I would
have to meet monthly with a number of different nonprofits
in a big meeting, and they were all geared for
anti gang you know, violence and conflict resolution and all
of that. And there were there were quite a few.
(14:36):
Some of them were good. There were some good ones.
They were doing stuff like, uh, going on field trips
up into the mountains, taking some of the inner city kids,
you know, camping you know, up near right Wood and that.
But some of the other ones, to me, uh, they
were just money drains because the people who were running
them were not all that honest. We did have an
(14:57):
issue one of the people who ran them, she ended
up later having ending up in the news because she
was writing checks from her account, from her city account
to friends, and so you would have that there would
be a mix. The biggest issue with the with the
gang programs was there was no oversight. So you had
(15:18):
people legitimately who really wanted to do good, but you
also had some swindlers who moved in and took advantage
of the programs.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Yeah. Well, you ended up writing a book called boot
LAPD Officer Rookie Years. It's about you. You, I'm assuming
and going into that rookie year. Can you give readers
a rare look at policing from your perspective?
Speaker 5 (15:41):
Yeah. I wrote that book after the Rodney King, you know,
beating happened, because I wanted to really show what it
was like going from being a police officer, I mean
from being a regular citizen to becoming a police officer.
So I started with the very first month out and
then each chapter is a different month as I progress.
(16:04):
You know, your first six months you have to be
with a P three who's a training officer, and then
your last six months sometimes you can work with P two's,
the regular street cops, and sometimes they'll put you out
in the field by yourself, so you're working at what's
called a report car. And just what it's like to
go from through all those different steps, you know, and
back then, I know it's a problem today, but there was.
(16:28):
We had a little bit of hazing going on. So
you would have these old cops, you know, twenty five
years on, ex Vietnam vets who would get a little
bit rough with you, but they felt like they were
toughening you up. I don't think it was malicious stuff.
It was more, hey, listen, this is a tough world,
especially because I was in South Central, you know, right
at the hip of the right, at the tip of
(16:50):
the crip and blood wars. They really felt that they
had to toughen you up. So the very beginning, you know,
they're shooting spitballs at us and stuff like that. But
then as you gain respect from them and as you
go along, they treat you better. And then they're also
teaching you things. They're teaching you how to deal with people.
(17:10):
They're teaching you how to spot problems when you're in conflict.
They're teaching you how to talk to people and talk
them down from their problems, and they're also teaching you
tactically how to respond to things like shootings and progress,
you know, armed robberies. Actually drove into a bank robbery
where the guy's coming out with a gun and me
and my partner we knew exactly what to do and
(17:31):
we ended up taking the guy into custody, no shots
fired or anything. You know, It's a progression, is what
it is. That's really what the book is about. It's
going from being a regular citizen to being a coper.
You're actually a commodity to the city.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
Yeah, I would think it's a little tougher now because
there's such feelings based We live in such a feelings
based world that trying to get a little tough with
people coming on the job now might not go over
very well. Then me take it the wrong way just
because of kind of the world we live in. Hopefully not,
but seems like a lot of people are having trouble
(18:09):
adjusting to that kind of honest words and honest values
that get expressed to them.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
Yeah. The last six years, the unit that I was
working was actually at the Manchester Academy and that's where
the homicide library is located. And so we would watch
the new recruits being you know, they would actually sometimes
they were showing up in business suits. They were that
new and standing on the line and we would watch
them get yelled at and all that, because that's part
(18:38):
of being a police officer. You have to be able
to take being yelled at. And I was hearing from
some of the drill instructors that the biggest place where
they were losing people was in the very first month
because a lot of the people would get upset when
they were being yelled at. And I, to me, that
just shocked me because once you get that job, as
(19:01):
an laped officer when I was young, you get that job,
you're going to keep that no matter what. You don't
care if they yell at you. You don't care how
many laps they make you run, how many push ups
you do. You're going to just stick to it. You
stick to it through that six months. And some of
those people I just could not I couldn't fathom that
they would drop out the first month because they got
yelled at. But there were not a lot, but there were,
(19:25):
and that just shocked me.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Well, and the other thing. Back in our day. I mean,
you would go apply for a job and there you
might be one of a couple of thousand. Oh yeah.
For LAPD was bigger than that. I'm talking about where
I was at. You know, I became a state trooper
early on, and we had a couple of thousand people
applying for about twenty five positions. Oh yeah, because law
enforcement were sought after jobs. You wanted them, so people
(19:49):
didn't leave because they were highly sought after. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (19:54):
One of the issues I see with policing today is
that the pay as far as cost of living, they've
just diverged. When I was a young officer, what we
were making, we could buy a house in La you know,
the pay was outstanding. I forget how much it was.
But for what I could buy, I could buy a car,
I could buy a house, I could go on vacation.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
You know.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
These poor kids today, you know, they can't even buy
a condo or anything. They're driving, you know, an hour
or two each way because that's where the houses are
that they can afford. So that the pay has just
gotten horrible, especially on LAPD. And I don't blame the
department for it. It's just a matter of the budget,
(20:35):
I guess, but it's crazy. It's so bad.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
Well in housing is just out of control. I mean,
it's just it's like college. I had a student contact
me kind of breaking down and said that he had
he had he and his family, he had some in
his family, but a total about one hundred thousand dollars
in debt, and he wanted to be a he wanted
to be a police officer. I just could not believe
(21:02):
being saddled with the weight of that kind of debt
going into career service, and then on top of it,
you've got to try to buy a home. Colleges are overvalued,
they're overpriced, and homes right now are overvalued and overpriced
as well.
Speaker 5 (21:18):
Yeah, I went to UCLA and got a degree, but
when I was there, each quarter was about three hundred
to four hundred dollars a quarter. That was tuition. Now
it's almost it's over twenty thousand dollars a year. So
what I was paying paying, you know, if I was
paying one thousand bucks a year tuition, that that was
(21:39):
a lot, you know. And I put myself through. I
basically worked in the student store and I made enough
money to put myself through that you can't do that now.
And part of that is that whoever is in charge
of keeping college is cheap has not done their job.
It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Well, it's all about free money. It inflates. It's caused
is inflation in colleges if you're handed free money and
then all of a sudden or to some expense, money
that you may not have to repay. I think the
thirty five percent of people who've gotten the student loans
were in a it's in receivership. They're not paying them,
(22:17):
which is incredible as well. So yeah, there's there's a
lot of issues going with it. Well let's look at
the LA bridges funding programming. Well, oh, I wanted to
ask one question. One the world is the Homicide Library.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
Oh, there's actually a TV show because this is Hollywood,
and that's a Ballard show. You know, Michael Connolly's thing
with Harry Bosh and Ballard. Oh yeah, you work out
the homicide.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
The intent of the Homicide Library was to bring all
the old murder books, the homicide books, the case files
into one area and we were going to scan them
all in and then have a digital scanner that could
then turn everything into AI and all that to look
for prime patterns and see if we could solve some
of the old cold cases, because we got thousands of them.
(23:05):
In LA we have literally thousands of cold cases. So
when I first went there, there were probably about a
dozen detectives, but when I left there, there was basically
three of us left, and that was part of the
defunding thing. So the goal of the Homicide Library was
actually to spot serial killer patterns. And you know, being
(23:28):
an old homicide guy, uh and knowing a lot of
other guys like me, we all felt that we had
a lot of serial killers that we were missing. So
we were hoping that we would bring everything together and
be able to spot patterns as well as document and
look for crime trends and solved cases. Is really what
(23:48):
the Homicide Library was for.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Yeah, the importance of evidence based policing by gathering all
of that data and being able to go through it
is extremely important.
Speaker 5 (23:59):
In document we had cases going all the way back
to eighteen ninety five. Oh my, I've actually had the
ability to look through the old cases. I mean, it's
really crazy.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
That'd be fascinating, that would be really fascinating.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
He should do everything by brand jury back then.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Yeah, wow, is it available for the public to be
able to look at?
Speaker 6 (24:21):
No?
Speaker 5 (24:21):
No, well there's part of it that should be. But
again I think it's just funding and personnel, because there's
some really fascinating stuff in the homicide library. I mean
things that uh, just for historians would just it'd be
like a kid in a candy store. Just the old
you know, wanted posters and the old photos, you know,
(24:44):
photos that are the old silver glass slide things, and
just the way they did things back then, and how
meticulous some of them were. I mean, it shocked me
how good some of the detectives were.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
All the pictures that were done on body part, body
and face look, you know, because that battle they were Yeah,
they have fingerprints, so they had to rely on length
of arms and linked the legs and how wide your
nose or how how far apart your eyes were, you know,
people to identify an individual because they didn't have any
DNA and they didn't have fingerprints back then, so they
(25:19):
were I think constantly thinking outside the box on how
do we identify people?
Speaker 5 (25:25):
And most interesting thing is when they would get them
into an interview, if they try and make them swear
on a Bible they could tell if they were telling
the truth or not, because back then that really that
swearing on the Bible thing really meant a lot.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Yeah, well times have changed.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
Oh you see some of these guys. Yeah, it's shocking.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
Yeah, that's that would be fascinating to be able to
go back and go through. So LA Bridges, what what
is that program and what was the what was the
brainstorm behind it?
Speaker 5 (25:59):
Well, it's it's not there anymore. It had a lot
of problems. It was really an attempt to get a
bunch of funding together and it came out of a
larger organization. They had about one hundred million dollars in
it and I think LA Bridge has got about twenty
six million of it.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
And what it was.
Speaker 5 (26:17):
Was the thought that you could take gang members and
kind of rehabilitate them and then put them in the
gang community and have them act as peacekeepers and such,
and they would be overseen by monitors and that they
would help control the violence. They would be like they
would be this almost kind of like gangster un where
(26:39):
everybody could get together and meet and resolve differences. At
its core, that's kind of what it was meant to be.
It never went that way and a lot of the
money just basically disappeared.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
That was that was kind of the mindset. And the
movie Colors, wasn't it. I'm not sure they said the
Bridges program, but there was a couple of actors that
were like former gang members that were going back right, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:06):
Yeah, yeah. When I was when I was out in
the field, is a young officer that we had what
were called youth Gang Services, which were former gang members.
I think they wore yellow jackets and they all drove
these toyotas. For some reason, the city bottom toyotas, and
they would drive around and supposedly deconflict problems. But we
(27:28):
just the rumors that we were hearing was was that
they were probably not doing everything that they were supposed
to be doing. And it is an issue. It's an
issue when you have older men, you know, who are
supposed to be mentors for younger gang members, and all
that they do is they then come in and tell
war stories about what it was like back in the day,
(27:50):
and it just makes the young kids want to be
more like them, which was what they were back in
the day.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
It doesn't work, yeah, absolutely, all right, Well, when we
come back We're going to talk about something even more concerning,
documented cases where nonprofit violence and prevention organizations were reportedly
infiltrated by organized criminal actors connected to the Mexican Mafia
and the Eastern Blocks. How that affected local political influence
in smaller communities outside La. So we will be right
(28:20):
back with retired Detective Bill done lapd Hi folks, Doctor
(28:41):
Curry Myers here to let you know that my new
show is called America's Criminologists with doctor Curry Myers every
Tuesday at one pm. As a former State Trooper special
agent share from a major county, I will offer sharp
insights into the pressing issues shaping American society today. I'll
have guests, news and my insights as an applied criminologist
throughout the one hour show. So criminals and the progressive
(29:02):
politicians that allow them to fester, beware because this show
is directed at you. America's Criminologist every Tuesday and one
pm on k M E T.
Speaker 6 (29:13):
As you know, I have been talking about standing up
for our country, doing something. These big box stores stayed.
Speaker 5 (29:20):
Open, Let the little guys close?
Speaker 6 (29:22):
Will our voices be heard? Does voting with our dollars
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Speaker 4 (31:02):
Hey, my friends, is doctor Curry Meyers America's criminologist. I
have a new sponsor for my show. I mean Real Resilience.
That's r ad L transformative program helping inmates prepare for
successful re entry and uses inspirational films and guided discussions.
Real Resilience teaches practical tools to build resilience. It's really
(31:23):
an important tool, Real Resilience, because reentry isn't just released,
it's a second chance done right. All right, welcome back,
don't forget to visit to all my published works at
doctor Curry Meyers dot substack dot com. We've been talking
(31:44):
with the retired detective Bill Dunn, who's thirty six year
veteran of LAPD. His final assignment was LA'SPD, PD's Elite
Robbery Homicide Division. He also is the author of boot
An LAPD Officers Rookie Year. All right, we're seeing a
lot of this going on in today's world about nonprofit infiltration,
(32:06):
political spillover risk associated with it. What are the warning signs?
What should cities look for? There's, man, there's so much
political crime that is going on in America today, we're
seeing it with all the fraud that now is coming
up as a result of what the federal government's doing
(32:27):
and the Office of Inspector Generals that the various agencies
are seeing. It's actually incredible the amount of fraud that
we're seeing, and unfortunately, we're probably just tipping the iceberg
because law enforcement's probably lucky to catch five or six
percent of it. So, Bill, what warning signs should cities
look for when evaluating nonprofit partners? Because this is getting
(32:50):
out of hand. You've experienced this yourself, you saw it.
What are the lessons learned that you could give to us? Oh?
Speaker 5 (33:01):
Boy, that's that's a really big one, because I I
don't know of too many nonprofits that I really trust
that I've run into while working with the city. It's
it's kind of shocking, But LA, I don't know how
well they're vetting a lot of these programs.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
You know.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Right now, we have this this case with big you,
this guy Eugene Henley, and he had what was what
the gangsters call a mayor's program. A mayor's a mayor's contract,
and the mayor's contracts are like these contracts that come
out of some kind of a fund with the city,
(33:42):
and in essence, the city is paying these games, these
gang leaders not to do crimes, which also then kind
of pushes the envelope. Are the gang leaders pushing their
guys to do crime until they get a mayor's contract.
It's it's really thing, but we have some real problems
with that. The big U case is I think starting
(34:06):
to shed light on that these mayor contracts have been
there for years and a lot of us, especially you know,
who are working in gangs, were against them from the
very beginning because you can't pay gang members to not
do crimes because the ones you pay some and then
other guys in the gang they see that those guys
(34:26):
are getting paid not to do something, so then they
go and do something so that they can then get
paid not to do something. I mean, it's like this, Yeah,
it's like you you're just opening up the floodgates when
you start doing that.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Where's the local media on these things. It seems like
that in the eighties or seventies is something if government
was doing something, some elected official was doing something this nefarious,
that it would be in the paper. And yet it
seems like there's no media anymore that actually covers these
(35:00):
things and brings attention to these issues.
Speaker 5 (35:03):
Well, LA's a one paper town, or was I guess
Now we have the California Post and hopefully that's going
to change things. But we've been a one paper town
since the Herald Examiner left I think in eighty eight.
So as long as you can keep the La Times
politically on your side and keep them happy, they're not
(35:26):
going to write. I mean, we just don't see the
investigative journalism out here that we should. I did actually,
And let me just bring this up because this is
really interesting. David Ono from I think ABC seven News,
he did a report on all the drug trafficking going
through lax. Lax is like the hub for drug trafficking
(35:46):
for the nation if your people didn't know. But that's
the first time I've seen somebody say something about it,
and it's a great expose a I think he did
it about six months ago. Nobody has said anything since,
And to me, that's really shocking because that has been
a problem for decades here and I can show I
can bring up case after case after case of gangsters
(36:08):
moving dope through lax and nobody does anything about it.
It is shocking. It is absolutely shocking.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Well, and then we have the fires that was a
tragedy of Los Angeles, I mean, the lack the money
that went supposedly towards firefighting equipment, water that never materialized.
It reminds it reminds me of New Orleans when the
floods occurred, with all the money that was spent, that
was sent for dykes and mitigation before that even occurred.
(36:40):
And now you get to the point where La where
you had these huge, horrific fires that basically has burned
probably a third of the county and a lot and
many of that portion of the city, And are the
same things happening there where supposedly money is going to
(37:00):
people because we're not seeing any rebuilding. We're seeing delays
because of bureaucracy and government. But you can almost count
on the fact that the city is giving out money
to people to help rebuild and it's never transpiring into anything.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
Yeah, we lived right outside of the fire warning zone
for the Palisades fire. We have a place that's I mean,
we can walk to the Palisads from here virtually. And
I have a lot of friends growing up who lost
their homes and none of them have been able to rebuild.
And the saddest thing about it is some of them
(37:40):
had lost their insurance because of other fires right before
this fire hit, so they were uninsured. But many of
them they inherited homes from the family. That area is
an old area and people were handing homes down and
a lot of them they don't have the financial ability
(38:02):
to build the kind of home that needs to go
in up there because of all the taxing and how
expensive the property taxes are up there, and the permits are. Nobody,
it seems, can get a permit. And that's this shocking
thing is is there We're supposed to, you know, fix
the permitting process, and they have not done that as
far as I know.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
Well, and they lost all that ancestral wealth because if
you have a family, you know, it's still worth a
couple of million, you know more. Uh, And if you
didn't have to pay for it, it's money that you
have that you could sell someday and you know, you
could come out and live in the Midwest like you know,
like a king, you know, if you sold a property
(38:44):
out there for cash and and moved out. So the
the the you know, we we and we saw it.
The reason I bring it up is because we saw
it in Hawaii. We saw corruption with when the when
the the blazes occurred in Maui uh and the funding
that went in to re establish got abused and it
went to these big not for profits and then they
(39:06):
did a slow rule out of being able to even
help people not only rebuild, but even to get have
people get by, help them get by until they could rebuild,
and all of that money was mismanaged as well.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of the big firms coming
in and offering people cash for just their land value
up there, and a lot of people, because things are
taking so long, they're being forced to sell their their
homes for land value.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
Yeah. Now you have rumors that apparently some of that
land is going to be turned into apartment complexes and
Section eight housing and other things like that that's going
to go to, you know, friends of the mayors and
friends of the politicians to be able to you know,
actually not build homes.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
You know.
Speaker 5 (39:53):
And I hear that, and I think, you know, that's
definitely being said right now. But be being a lifetime
Angelino and knowing a lot of the political people, I
have a feeling that you're going to see a lot
of last minute when eighties on that, because I think
they're going to just turn the whole thing into a
big gated community for the ultra elite. It'll be like
(40:14):
some of the big gated communities up on Bullhull and
Drive that are super exclusive and have mansion size homes
on it. So I have a feeling that that could
some of that could be going on there. Yeah, I
don't know, but just just being come here, you know,
I don't trust my politicians.
Speaker 4 (40:32):
No, No, I mean the cop in us. I mean
we still have it even though we're retired. I mean,
we just are. You know, if you have any kind
of federal grant money, there's a high probability a lot
of that's being misspent unless there's significant oversight.
Speaker 5 (40:46):
Oh yeah, I mean, you know, we have all these
big apartment complexes or kindo complexes that have been built
here that are supposed to be for the homeless, and
they're you know eighty percent nobody's there. But are homeless
get money to rent a place so nobody can figure
out where they're chits. You know, they get these you
(41:08):
know papers that say hey here's my you know, my
chip for a one month's rent. Nobody knows where all
that money's going. We have a I mean, there could
easily be circle back money going on there. I mean,
we just we just don't know. But all of our
homeless have the ability to rent a place, and they
should be renting a place and they're not. And then
(41:29):
we also have all of these vacant places that private
you know, developers own and they're getting paid for their
vacant places. So there's a disconnect there that needs to
be investigative. But we don't have that kind of investigative
ability out here anymore. You know, we don't have good
fraud investigators.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Right, speaking of fraud, additional fraud and the fact that
we need in investigators, we have people that are doing
it by themselves as citizens that are recovering, you know,
or taking note on any of the fraud that's going on.
Speaker 5 (42:02):
And I'm really happy to see Mick Shirley out here.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (42:05):
I mean it's because that that whole thing with the
with the Russian mafia out here has been going on
a long time and that's a very you know, heavy thing.
But we have all these different types of mafias out here.
We have them from all over the world. Basically, we're
a united nation of organized crime in.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Oh yeah, I mean you have when the Eastern Bloc fell,
at least at that time back in the early nineties,
after the fall of the Wall, we had so many
people come to America that were you know, they were
either soldiers or former KGB or criminals themselves that came
over and just started doing their work here. And they're
(42:47):
experts at fraud and and strong arm people in order
to get money. They've gotten their hands into many different
things in the machine shops and other kind of organized labor. Yeah,
it's an incredible amount of money that's been What do
you think is going on today with Is there any
(43:08):
kind of significant fraud that people are missing that maybe
no one's been talking about that you think should be
brought into light.
Speaker 5 (43:19):
Oh well, I mean the medical fraud is really bad
because I've had I had a couple of cases that
were tied into some violent crimes and that's a real
difficult one, uh to prosecute out here first because you
need experts on it, and there there are very few
medical fraud investigators with the with the state, and the
(43:42):
DA doesn't like the case it's because they can get complex.
But uh, you know, the gangster the gangs stuff is
still bad. Even though La Bridges is gone. You know,
the amount of money that they're just pumping into it
is crazy. And with most of these not profits, there's
no metric to really hold them against to see if
(44:04):
there actually is any kind of profit from them, if
it does society any good. That's the biggest thing is
how do you how do you measure success in these things?
Generally anecdotally you look at them and you go, there's
no success here. I don't see any any public benefit.
But then somebody comes along and you know, they pull
(44:26):
they put numbers on the paper and suddenly, oh, this
is the greatest program in the world. But it makes
no sense. You know, the numbers don't make any sense,
but they just say that they do. So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
Did you ever run into any environmental fraud and environmentalism
groups that were propping up solar or wind energy or
green New Deal type stuff? I know, you know there
for the longest time, the waste management had huge organized
(45:00):
in connections.
Speaker 5 (45:04):
Yeah, in Sino along a lot of the office buildings
on Ventura Boulevard were filled with those with the windmill
companies that were getting the government money, and they were
they were out there and there's a whole buzz about
you know, people just getting money and you know, they'd
throw up a windmill out in Palm Springs. But the
(45:26):
generation of the energy or you know, I'm not really
too much of an expert on that, but I've heard
a lot about it that that we had a lot
of issues with with people getting government grants and abuse
and the money with power. But that's not my it's
not not my expertise.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
Yeah, what kind of what kind of crimes you think
is the most popular that's going on in LA today
that the public needs to be aware of.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
Oh gosh, any kind of fraud, especially the meta care
fraud is huge out here, and that that's something I
think that Nick Shirley is really he's beginning to, you know,
break that bubble. But you know, we have we have
the underground gambling clubs, we have the underground brothels out here,
they call them casiitas. The human trafficking in LA is
(46:22):
off the hook. We have dedicated groups, you know, or
dedicated task forces trying to defeat that stuff. But it
seems like every time they open an investigation, they find
tons of girls and then they as soon as they
fix that one, there's another one. So and we're also
saying now street level prostitution, which we haven't had since
(46:44):
the nineties. Here apparently I'm hearing the Figaroa Avenue, which
is a really big prostitution track back in the day.
It's now full of girls again. So you know, we
have we're seeing resurgence of the soft primetry. We don't
have the drive by shootings, we don't have the murders
that we used to, arguably because we don't know what
(47:07):
people are doing with fentanyl. RhD was actually going to
start at Fentanyl Task Force because we thought people might
be getting dosed, you know, and murdered that way, and
then that got nixed. That was like twenty nineteen. So
I mean our homicide numbers could even be off because
of that.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
Yeah, you know, yeah, I think our crime statistics are
way off for many reasons. I don't think a lot
of it's getting reported, and in particular California, because there's
a lot of we've decriminalized so many things, and you know,
law enforcement is if you don't have the numbers, you know,
think how many times you found other things associated with
a criminal that you profiled and arrested, profiled in a
(47:48):
good way and arrested, and you found four or five
other types of crimes that they were committed, maybe some
of them serious, as a result of just that one
action of arresting them for something that they did wrong them,
you know, in a street interaction. And they have a
lot of officers that aren't able to do.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
That now, and they recategorize how they view things. You know,
burglaries back in my day are different than they are now.
They'll like, if somebody breaks into a house, if they're
not taking some if they're not caught actually taking something,
we're sometimes seeing them doing them as a misdemeanor trespass
(48:25):
in a misdemeanor vandalism. Assaults. How big is the stick
that's being used now? Back in the day, if you
hit somebody with a stick in bruisedom, you know, that's
that's a felony assault. Well, now what if the stick
some captain doesn't think it's a big enough stick. You know,
we've had that kind of problem. So theiation has changed.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
Yeah, and as you know from working homicides burglaries, there's
a lot of times that that sexual offenders can commit
burglary so they can get in to case the place
and maybe go through people's private information. Sometimes they run
around naked in the house and all that kind of stuff,
you know, and then they try to come back later.
(49:11):
We burglary is such a significant crime that we take
our we it's it's it's a telltale sign of other
serious crime that could happen if we don't be careful
and not and not treat it with the respect that
it needs to be treated. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Well, the house squatting thing, those are actually second degree
burglaries out here. They're all felonies, but for some reason
are most of the departments in California are doing those
as misdemeanors and they're actually supposed to be felonies, or
technically they're felonies in the book, but people that change
the definition. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
Yeah, And I'm amazed by that because people America has
always been known for property rights and respecting ownership of property,
and it seems like that's gotten thrown out the door.
We become like France when it comes to property rights.
And it's a amazing to me that people come in
and take your property, and then it's like, oh, well
I can't do anything. They have rights, they've been there. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (50:09):
Well, these big masks, you know, going in and grabbing
everything and running out of the store with it. Those
are all conspiracies which are basically felonies. But for some reason,
when they catch a lot of these people, they kick
them down to misdemeanors, so that that's a real problem,
and that's just going to keep getting worse, you know,
because the gangs are getting more and more in bold
(50:29):
and they can and they can coordinate these things easy
on their phones, you know, these big takeovers.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Yeah yeah, and then there's so much stuff that can
be sold in the black market now, and when they
go in and shoplift, it's almost like they can turn
around and sell it almost immediately after they they take it.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
Oh, we have we have gangster homes out here that
are basically like little targets, you know. But you have
to be part of the you know, part of that world.
You have to be a dope user stuff like that.
But if you buy your to have a membership for
we have actually before I retired, actually I've been in
homes where it looked like a little target inside the home.
(51:08):
I've actually seen that.
Speaker 4 (51:09):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (51:09):
Yeah, out in the valley.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
That's crazy. That's that is crazy. Underground market yeah, today's
cities and probably cash too, So there's an underground cash market.
Oh yeah, when everybody else is trying to do away
with cash.
Speaker 5 (51:23):
Orshure they just use their food stamps.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
Yeah, oh yeah. I mean when I worked under cover
food stamps was I could you could buy everything from
you know, a person, to to drugs to a car
with food stamps. Yeah, if you had enough of them.
So what are today's cities are they? Are they repeating
the mistakes that were made from the nineteen nineties and
(51:45):
the two thousands? Are they? Is it changed? Are they?
Are we any lessons learned that we're that we do
now or are we just completely missing everything?
Speaker 5 (51:57):
Well? You know, when when I think about the situation
back in the day, if you did a burglary, you
got sixteen months and all the gangsters knew it, all
the criminals knew it, You got sixteen months. Now they
don't know how much time they'll get. They don't whatever judge,
It depends on the judge that you get. So things
(52:19):
become so cloudy to them that they don't have. They're
not thinking too much about what the penalties are. So
our penalties are just so great that there's no it
doesn't prohibit a lot of the crime that we're saying.
You know, it's we're definitely missing the mark on that
the city needs to get. They really need to say, hey,
(52:41):
if you do this, this is what's going to happen
to you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
Yeah, how about we didn't talk much on the politics.
Are you seeing an increase in political crime where money
goes to a politician and they end up spinning it
that gets kicked back to them. Do you see any
of that kind of stuff or do you think that's
going on?
Speaker 5 (53:06):
Well, l A LA itself, you always hear the rumors
of that kind of stuff. We have had issues with
some of the smaller cities along the edges of of
l A. You know, back in the day, you had
some of the guys in the Mexican mafia claiming that
they were running cities and that's stuff. They weren't even
(53:28):
claiming it in the press that they that they had
certain cities under their thumb. Political corruption out here. There
there is no political corruption unit really on the l
A p D anymore. Major crimes is supposed to do that,
but that's kind of gone out the window. Back in
the day, when I first started, we had an organized
(53:49):
crime division that was looking into even the mayor like
Tom Bradley was under investigation. But back then the police
chief had civil service protection, but that went out the
window in the nineteen nineties. Now they basically, you know,
serve it the discretion of the mayor. So if a
chief really does want to look into the mayor's office,
(54:11):
that's their boss. They're basically looking into the person who
holds the you know, their job above them. So is
there a lot of political corruption? I tend to feel
that there is. We definitely are having We definitely are
having the cases out here, but is there really enough
(54:34):
people to investigate anymore? I don't know. Our current mayor
when she first came in, had some kind of an
investigation into her ties with USC and stuff like that,
and it was in the papers and then it went
away and then my chief, Michael Moore, ended up getting
knocked out. I don't know if it was all related.
(54:55):
I mean, that's all kind of my opinion and my view,
but I think the there's a lot that really needs
to be looked at in my city. I think that
I think LA needs a lot of looking into as
far as corruption. Yeah, definitely, that's my opinion, you know, absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (55:13):
Well make sure, folks and take a look at Boot
LAPD Officer Rookie Year from retired Detective build done. Where
can they find your book bill?
Speaker 5 (55:22):
It's on Amazon. Yeah, they can just put in William
Dunn Boot and LAPD Officers Rookie Year and they'll find it.
Speaker 4 (55:29):
Awesome. Great show, Thanks so much, thanks for your service
and I appreciate you coming on. So stay safe and
have a good one.
Speaker 5 (55:37):
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
Thank you you too, folks. That's it for the show today.
We'll see you next week on America's Criminologists. And don't
forget to view all my published works on substack doctor
Currymeyers dot subsack dot com. And hey, don't forget to
use those streaming services. Stay safe, bye.
Speaker 3 (56:00):
M HM.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
Col Steal shows the Camel's Wage just touching Never as
a Fate America's Shadows a secrets line, Doctor Curry lasts
through the Scout America Square, anologist.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Calling to the.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Seals of the law in the atmosphere
Speaker 6 (56:26):
Ca
Col steal, suits of gas light, just trusting him as
a faith shadows seecres lot Doctor Curry last.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Americas graminologist cond sales of the law in the apocyles
a crime break and jage brut the fame.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
And here's America's criminologist, doctor Kerry Myers.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
Howdy, howdy, how do you hope everybody's doing well? This
is doctor Curry Myers, better known as America's Criminologist, retired sheriff,
former special agent, state trooper, also an applied criminologist and
former academic. I was an academic. I spent fourteen years
at benedict In College teaching in the criminal justice department,
but finished up, wrapped up and glad to be doing
(01:05):
this type of work full time now working on public
policy and ethics and police operations. In my book The
Event of fairal Man, I present evidence of a new
criminal arc type that we've seen the last decade or
so emerging in modern society. Often say it shaped by
the dark psychological traits and fueled by the lack of faith, family,
and formation in people's lives. This show digs into the
(01:28):
real issues behind crime and justice in America, from the
front lines to the policy halls with great truth and
good old fashioned common sense. Be sure to check out
my full archive at doctor Currymeyers dot substack dot com.
And hey, don't forget, we're streaming on every major platform.
This week I'll be traveling to the University of Idaho
(01:50):
and have two speaking engagements out there, So I look
forward to being out there this week, and thence'll be
on Wednesday and Thursday evening. So let's get into it.
Like always, we're going to take a hard look at
crime culture and human behavior. This segment of America's criminologists
(02:11):
is brought to you by Real Resilience. That's our eel. Resilience,
a transformative program helping inmates prepare for successful re entry
using inspirational films and guided discussions. Real Resilience teaches practical
tools to build resilience, strengthen relationships, and restore hope for
(02:31):
the future. It's real learning through real stories where positive
choices are modeled, not just preached. Real Resilience because re
entry isn't just about release, it's a second chance done right. Okay.
Crime doesn't emerge in a vacuum. It emerges where institutions weaken,
(02:51):
where accountability fades and where public trust is replaced by
political convenience. That brings us to California Today, we're talking
about out something that rarely gets honest attention, what happens
when nonprofit crime prevention programs themselves becomes vulnerable to corruption, infiltration,
(03:11):
or misuse of public funds. We're also going to get
into other issues that from longtime PD detective. My guest
today is retired LAPD Detective build Done, street level investigator
who watched these systems operate from the inside during one
of the most complicated public safety eras and law enforcement
(03:34):
history for Los Angeles. We're going to talk about what worked,
what didn't, what policymakers across America should learn from those lessons.
Detective build Done is a thirty six year veteran of
the LAPD and one of the most highly commended officers
in the department history, earning one hundred and seventy two commendations,
(03:55):
including recognition from the FBI, the Mayor's office, and members
of Congress. He's worked on LAPD's most demanding assignments, from
Southwest Division during the height of the Crips and Bloods
violence to Hollywood and the turbulent nineteen nineties to the
Crash Anti Gang Units during the Rampart era, and later
(04:15):
the Willshar Gang Impact Team, where he developed expertise connected
to Biggie Small's homicide case. His final assignment was the
LAPD's Elite Robbery Homicide Division and the Homicide Library Section,
and he's also the author of boot An LAPD Officer
Rookie Year. Please welcome Detective Bill Dunn. Bill, welcome to
(04:37):
the show.
Speaker 5 (04:39):
Thank you, thank you. Hey, real quick, just so everybody knows,
I'm retired. I'm a retired guy now, so I'm not
speaking for the department.
Speaker 4 (04:46):
Oh that's right. I should have put retired on there.
I'm sorry.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Yeah, No, that's that's fine.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Yeah, well, welcome to the show. Retired detective.
Speaker 5 (04:54):
He's hired.
Speaker 4 (04:55):
It good. You know, I tell guys that retire there's
life after retire. It takes some getting used to, but
there is life after retirement. And I know I've enjoyed it.
But you, I think the key I don't know about
you is to keep busy, and you've got to find
something that you really love in order to stay focused.
Because I've known too many cops that have retired and
(05:18):
just kind of done nothing and it didn't work out
too well for him. So it's important to keep your mind, body,
spirit kind of, you know, continuing to improve through the
retirement years. I don't know what your thoughts are, but
you've been busy because you're writing books and doing these
kind of interviews. But staying busy and staying focused is
(05:38):
pretty important, is it not.
Speaker 5 (05:40):
Oh yeah, and staying physically active. My wife she kicks
me out the door all the time to go hiking
in the mountains and stuff like that. So which you
have to do. It's not just you know, work, work, work,
the physical side. You got to keep that up too.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
All right. Lap D one of the finest police department
in the world. There's always an argument between the East
Coast and West coast, between New.
Speaker 5 (06:04):
York City and LAPD.
Speaker 4 (06:06):
When I have NYPD guys on, they're saying that they're
the best, and LAPD guys come on and say they're
the best. But both of them. Both of them are
very good and have different talents in many ways because
they've experienced crime in different decades. Often, you know, you
go back to New York City and it's a lot
older and been around a lot longer, and Los Angeles
(06:27):
kind of became one of that new hot spring that
developed and burgeoned, you know, kind of within our eyes
over time. What's the environment like when you you know
again back when you first came on, as you first
entered into Los Angeles.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
Wow, Well, when I came on, it was nineteen ninety
and the crip and blood wars were really raging here
in LA. And you would get in the car at
the beginning of watch and turn on the MDT, which
was what dispatched all of our calls to us, and
it would just fill with with all kinds of stuff
and shootings and a lot of craziness. It's funny. I
(07:06):
watched another podcast with an LAPD guy on not too
long ago, and he was talking about a night back
in the day, and it was a really, really violent night,
a lot of shootings. But I ended up by myself
on a shooting scene and everybody else was so busy
(07:27):
that basically I was working by myself picking up shellcasings
and things like that because nobody else had time to
come by and give me a hand. So I had
my car block and Figaro Avenue. Well, I documented everything
and did a crime report and then ended up going
to the hospital and meeting with the guys. But one officer,
(07:47):
just one guy, wow, on a crime scene. But that
did happen. It was rare. But yeah, back in the day,
in ninety one ninety two, we had one thousand murders
a year in the city and it would happen.
Speaker 4 (07:58):
Yeah, the violence was on an eighty five in the
Kansas City area. And the violence, you know, we had
the same crips and bloods, although they started you know,
in LA originally and then right then offshoots occurred and
would move out. You know, whatever happens in LA for first,
we're going to see it in a couple of years
in the Midwest. And the violence was incredible all all over.
(08:24):
Crack cocaine and who's gonna Who's going to run the
turf in those areas, but violence everywhere was out of
this world. Is still some of the high highest crime
rights rates that we've seen in America was during those
early eighties and erscy Me late eighties and early nineties
just was crazy. It was.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
It was off the hook. It was just unimaginable. Yeah,
and I think too a lot of it was kind
of glorified because we're we have Hollywood out here and
they watch our every move and write stories about everything
we do. So movies like Colors and Boys in the Hood,
which were about you know, crime in LA when those
(09:02):
went national, we did see you know, crips and bloods
showing up in like you know, Kansas and you know
Montana and all these other places. They were just kids
would just mimic what they would see on the screen.
Speaker 4 (09:15):
Yeah, Colors was I don't know about you because you
know the reality of it from but it was a
phenomenal movie.
Speaker 5 (09:24):
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I actually know a lot
of the guys who were background in that film. The
one guy that Sean Penn is based on Dennis Fanning.
He's actually in the film and I worked with him,
and he's you see him with Sean in the thing.
But that's an l a p D guy. There's probably
(09:44):
about four or five of them in their role call
scene or real l a p D.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
So some of that was actually based on some true
characters in the that was going on. I mean, like anything,
Hollywood will take you know, some executive privilege over it,
but at least was based on some real life actions
that were going on in that time.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
Yeah, I worked crashed back in the day, and I
like to think that we were more the Robert Duval
character than the Sean pan We were a lot more calm.
I was actually a P three, a senior guy in
a crash unit, and I trained you guys and came
in and I know that people go, oh, you were crash,
you know with the Rampart scandal and all that. But
(10:26):
people got to know there were twenty two crash units
throughout the city, eighteen Divisional and four Bureau and Rampart
and one or two others had all the problems and
there are reasons for it, and I won't go into
it now, but those were rogue units. The rest of
the units were really pretty good, you know, fifteen eighteen
(10:47):
out out of twenty two. They passed all the different
tests and they had good officers in them. But that
rampart unit was off the hook. They had serious problems.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
Well how many how many officers are in l when
you were on at the height, we didn't have, you know,
we didn't. We've had some law enforcement officers that have
ranks have depleted some just because of the attitude of people.
But at its height, what was lapd as far as
the police officer numbers, do you have an idea?
Speaker 5 (11:17):
Yeah, we were eighty one hundred when I started the height,
which was probably about ten twelve years ago, we actually
were about ten thousand, two hundred. And I just heard
Jim McDonald are chief. He said, I think that we
have eighty six hundred, but if we have seventy six hundred,
I would be shocked, and he has. He has a
(11:38):
really difficult job right now trying to get people to join.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (11:42):
Yeah, no question, they're just depleted.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Yeah, so if you I mean, when you think about it,
ten thousand officers is a huge department. And you know,
I always tell my students in law enforcement. I told
this as well, But I tell my students, you know,
five percent of anything can be corrupt if you don't
be careful. And I think law enforcement actually has less
percentages just because we have the hiring at least back then,
(12:06):
because the hiring standards that were done. I think it's
gotten a little loose on the hiring standards today, but
back then, when you or I on the hiring standards
were I think significantly different and it probably was got
down to one or two percent where you had people
who had actual criminal intent or turned into criminals. And
that's not much when you think about population density of
(12:29):
ten thousand, So yeah, you know, that's not very many officers.
Just to give context to the folks, So it doesn't
take a couple of bad apples to really, you know,
to infect a small unit, especially if they had the
latitude to kind of go out and be be hunters
on their own.
Speaker 5 (12:48):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, some of those guys they got hooked
up in the rap music industry and they just got
pulled down a hole, but they have that personality when
they came on the job. A lot of those guys,
I believe were already just not good people.
Speaker 4 (13:05):
Yeah, and there's no question that gangs wanted to infiltrate
oh god. Yeah, med we need to have that kind
of boom would be very important.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
Yeah, I've done when I worked CRASH and when I
worked the Gang Impact Team, I did do investigations, especially
because when I worked the Gang Impact Team, we had
death row records, we had that whole thing, and I
was doing investigations on police officers who were corrupt and
they were a fair amount. It just that that that industry,
(13:36):
the gangster wrap industry, really pulled a lot of officers
in some dark places.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, let's talk a little bit about the
prevention programs, because you mentioned prevention programs to quite frankly,
to most police officers, they're gonna, yeah whatever, you know,
they're going to talk about prevention because people have to understand,
we deal with ninety five percent of the public, you know,
or five percent of the public the time, so we
we have a cognitive bias that's pretty you know, significant.
(14:05):
But what kind of distrust was going on at that
time period with the city's prevention programs.
Speaker 5 (14:13):
Well, when when I worked the Gang Impact Team, because
I was the detective sergeant in the unit, I would
have to meet monthly with a number of different nonprofits
in a big meeting, and they were all geared for
anti gang you know, violence and conflict resolution and all
of that. And there were there were quite a few.
(14:36):
Some of them were good. There were some good ones.
They were doing stuff like, uh, going on field trips
up into the mountains, taking some of the inner city kids,
you know, camping you know, up near right Wood and that.
But some of the other ones, to me, uh, they
were just money drains because the people who were running
them were not all that honest. We did have an
(14:57):
issue one of the people who ran them, she ended
up later having ending up in the news because she
was writing checks from her account, from her city account
to friends, and so you would have that there would
be a mix. The biggest issue with the with the
gang programs was there was no oversight. So you had
(15:18):
people legitimately who really wanted to do good, but you
also had some swindlers who moved in and took advantage
of the programs.
Speaker 4 (15:25):
Yeah. Well, you ended up writing a book called boot
LAPD Officer Rookie Years. It's about you. You, I'm assuming
and going into that rookie year. Can you give readers
a rare look at policing from your perspective?
Speaker 5 (15:41):
Yeah. I wrote that book after the Rodney King, you know,
beating happened, because I wanted to really show what it
was like going from being a police officer, I mean
from being a regular citizen to becoming a police officer.
So I started with the very first month out and
then each chapter is a different month as I progress.
(16:04):
You know, your first six months you have to be
with a P three who's a training officer, and then
your last six months sometimes you can work with P two's,
the regular street cops, and sometimes they'll put you out
in the field by yourself, so you're working at what's
called a report car. And just what it's like to
go from through all those different steps, you know, and
back then, I know it's a problem today, but there was.
(16:28):
We had a little bit of hazing going on. So
you would have these old cops, you know, twenty five
years on, ex Vietnam vets who would get a little
bit rough with you, but they felt like they were
toughening you up. I don't think it was malicious stuff.
It was more, hey, listen, this is a tough world,
especially because I was in South Central, you know, right
at the hip of the right, at the tip of
(16:50):
the crip and blood wars. They really felt that they
had to toughen you up. So the very beginning, you know,
they're shooting spitballs at us and stuff like that. But
then as you gain respect from them and as you
go along, they treat you better. And then they're also
teaching you things. They're teaching you how to deal with people.
(17:10):
They're teaching you how to spot problems when you're in conflict.
They're teaching you how to talk to people and talk
them down from their problems, and they're also teaching you
tactically how to respond to things like shootings and progress,
you know, armed robberies. Actually drove into a bank robbery
where the guy's coming out with a gun and me
and my partner we knew exactly what to do and
(17:31):
we ended up taking the guy into custody, no shots
fired or anything. You know, It's a progression, is what
it is. That's really what the book is about. It's
going from being a regular citizen to being a coper.
You're actually a commodity to the city.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
Yeah, I would think it's a little tougher now because
there's such feelings based We live in such a feelings
based world that trying to get a little tough with
people coming on the job now might not go over
very well. Then me take it the wrong way just
because of kind of the world we live in. Hopefully not,
but seems like a lot of people are having trouble
(18:09):
adjusting to that kind of honest words and honest values
that get expressed to them.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
Yeah. The last six years, the unit that I was
working was actually at the Manchester Academy and that's where
the homicide library is located. And so we would watch
the new recruits being you know, they would actually sometimes
they were showing up in business suits. They were that
new and standing on the line and we would watch
them get yelled at and all that, because that's part
(18:38):
of being a police officer. You have to be able
to take being yelled at. And I was hearing from
some of the drill instructors that the biggest place where
they were losing people was in the very first month
because a lot of the people would get upset when
they were being yelled at. And I, to me, that
just shocked me because once you get that job, as
(19:01):
an laped officer when I was young, you get that job,
you're going to keep that no matter what. You don't
care if they yell at you. You don't care how
many laps they make you run, how many push ups
you do. You're going to just stick to it. You
stick to it through that six months. And some of
those people I just could not I couldn't fathom that
they would drop out the first month because they got
yelled at. But there were not a lot, but there were,
(19:25):
and that just shocked me.
Speaker 4 (19:27):
Well, and the other thing. Back in our day. I mean,
you would go apply for a job and there you
might be one of a couple of thousand. Oh yeah.
For LAPD was bigger than that. I'm talking about where
I was at. You know, I became a state trooper
early on, and we had a couple of thousand people
applying for about twenty five positions. Oh yeah, because law
enforcement were sought after jobs. You wanted them, so people
(19:49):
didn't leave because they were highly sought after. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (19:54):
One of the issues I see with policing today is
that the pay as far as cost of living, they've
just diverged. When I was a young officer, what we
were making, we could buy a house in La you know,
the pay was outstanding. I forget how much it was.
But for what I could buy, I could buy a car,
I could buy a house, I could go on vacation.
Speaker 4 (20:15):
You know.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
These poor kids today, you know, they can't even buy
a condo or anything. They're driving, you know, an hour
or two each way because that's where the houses are
that they can afford. So that the pay has just
gotten horrible, especially on LAPD. And I don't blame the
department for it. It's just a matter of the budget,
(20:35):
I guess, but it's crazy. It's so bad.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
Well in housing is just out of control. I mean,
it's just it's like college. I had a student contact
me kind of breaking down and said that he had
he had he and his family, he had some in
his family, but a total about one hundred thousand dollars
in debt, and he wanted to be a he wanted
to be a police officer. I just could not believe
(21:02):
being saddled with the weight of that kind of debt
going into career service, and then on top of it,
you've got to try to buy a home. Colleges are overvalued,
they're overpriced, and homes right now are overvalued and overpriced
as well.
Speaker 5 (21:18):
Yeah, I went to UCLA and got a degree, but
when I was there, each quarter was about three hundred
to four hundred dollars a quarter. That was tuition. Now
it's almost it's over twenty thousand dollars a year. So
what I was paying paying, you know, if I was
paying one thousand bucks a year tuition, that that was
(21:39):
a lot, you know. And I put myself through. I
basically worked in the student store and I made enough
money to put myself through that you can't do that now.
And part of that is that whoever is in charge
of keeping college is cheap has not done their job.
It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Well, it's all about free money. It inflates. It's caused
is inflation in colleges if you're handed free money and
then all of a sudden or to some expense, money
that you may not have to repay. I think the
thirty five percent of people who've gotten the student loans
were in a it's in receivership. They're not paying them,
(22:17):
which is incredible as well. So yeah, there's there's a
lot of issues going with it. Well let's look at
the LA bridges funding programming. Well, oh, I wanted to
ask one question. One the world is the Homicide Library.
Speaker 5 (22:31):
Oh, there's actually a TV show because this is Hollywood,
and that's a Ballard show. You know, Michael Connolly's thing
with Harry Bosh and Ballard. Oh yeah, you work out
the homicide.
Speaker 4 (22:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
The intent of the Homicide Library was to bring all
the old murder books, the homicide books, the case files
into one area and we were going to scan them
all in and then have a digital scanner that could
then turn everything into AI and all that to look
for prime patterns and see if we could solve some
of the old cold cases, because we got thousands of them.
(23:05):
In LA we have literally thousands of cold cases. So
when I first went there, there were probably about a
dozen detectives, but when I left there, there was basically
three of us left, and that was part of the
defunding thing. So the goal of the Homicide Library was
actually to spot serial killer patterns. And you know, being
(23:28):
an old homicide guy, uh and knowing a lot of
other guys like me, we all felt that we had
a lot of serial killers that we were missing. So
we were hoping that we would bring everything together and
be able to spot patterns as well as document and
look for crime trends and solved cases. Is really what
(23:48):
the Homicide Library was for.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Yeah, the importance of evidence based policing by gathering all
of that data and being able to go through it
is extremely important.
Speaker 5 (23:59):
In document we had cases going all the way back
to eighteen ninety five. Oh my, I've actually had the
ability to look through the old cases. I mean, it's
really crazy.
Speaker 4 (24:08):
That'd be fascinating, that would be really fascinating.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
He should do everything by brand jury back then.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Yeah, wow, is it available for the public to be
able to look at?
Speaker 6 (24:21):
No?
Speaker 5 (24:21):
No, well there's part of it that should be. But
again I think it's just funding and personnel, because there's
some really fascinating stuff in the homicide library. I mean
things that uh, just for historians would just it'd be
like a kid in a candy store. Just the old
you know, wanted posters and the old photos, you know,
(24:44):
photos that are the old silver glass slide things, and
just the way they did things back then, and how
meticulous some of them were. I mean, it shocked me
how good some of the detectives were.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
All the pictures that were done on body part, body
and face look, you know, because that battle they were Yeah,
they have fingerprints, so they had to rely on length
of arms and linked the legs and how wide your
nose or how how far apart your eyes were, you know,
people to identify an individual because they didn't have any
DNA and they didn't have fingerprints back then, so they
(25:19):
were I think constantly thinking outside the box on how
do we identify people?
Speaker 5 (25:25):
And most interesting thing is when they would get them
into an interview, if they try and make them swear
on a Bible they could tell if they were telling
the truth or not, because back then that really that
swearing on the Bible thing really meant a lot.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Yeah, well times have changed.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
Oh you see some of these guys. Yeah, it's shocking.
Speaker 4 (25:45):
Yeah, that's that would be fascinating to be able to
go back and go through. So LA Bridges, what what
is that program and what was the what was the
brainstorm behind it?
Speaker 5 (25:59):
Well, it's it's not there anymore. It had a lot
of problems. It was really an attempt to get a
bunch of funding together and it came out of a
larger organization. They had about one hundred million dollars in
it and I think LA Bridge has got about twenty
six million of it.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
And what it was.
Speaker 5 (26:17):
Was the thought that you could take gang members and
kind of rehabilitate them and then put them in the
gang community and have them act as peacekeepers and such,
and they would be overseen by monitors and that they
would help control the violence. They would be like they
would be this almost kind of like gangster un where
(26:39):
everybody could get together and meet and resolve differences. At
its core, that's kind of what it was meant to be.
It never went that way and a lot of the
money just basically disappeared.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
That was that was kind of the mindset. And the
movie Colors, wasn't it. I'm not sure they said the
Bridges program, but there was a couple of actors that
were like former gang members that were going back right, Yeah.
Speaker 5 (27:06):
Yeah, yeah. When I was when I was out in
the field, is a young officer that we had what
were called youth Gang Services, which were former gang members.
I think they wore yellow jackets and they all drove
these toyotas. For some reason, the city bottom toyotas, and
they would drive around and supposedly deconflict problems. But we
(27:28):
just the rumors that we were hearing was was that
they were probably not doing everything that they were supposed
to be doing. And it is an issue. It's an
issue when you have older men, you know, who are
supposed to be mentors for younger gang members, and all
that they do is they then come in and tell
war stories about what it was like back in the day,
(27:50):
and it just makes the young kids want to be
more like them, which was what they were back in
the day.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
It doesn't work, yeah, absolutely, all right, Well, when we
come back We're going to talk about something even more concerning,
documented cases where nonprofit violence and prevention organizations were reportedly
infiltrated by organized criminal actors connected to the Mexican Mafia
and the Eastern Blocks. How that affected local political influence
in smaller communities outside La. So we will be right
(28:20):
back with retired Detective Bill done lapd Hi folks, Doctor
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Speaker 4 (31:02):
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doctor Curry Meyers dot substack dot com. We've been talking
(31:44):
with the retired detective Bill Dunn, who's thirty six year
veteran of LAPD. His final assignment was LA'SPD, PD's Elite
Robbery Homicide Division. He also is the author of boot
An LAPD Officers Rookie Year. All right, we're seeing a
lot of this going on in today's world about nonprofit infiltration,
(32:06):
political spillover risk associated with it. What are the warning signs?
What should cities look for? There's, man, there's so much
political crime that is going on in America today, we're
seeing it with all the fraud that now is coming
up as a result of what the federal government's doing
(32:27):
and the Office of Inspector Generals that the various agencies
are seeing. It's actually incredible the amount of fraud that
we're seeing, and unfortunately, we're probably just tipping the iceberg
because law enforcement's probably lucky to catch five or six
percent of it. So, Bill, what warning signs should cities
look for when evaluating nonprofit partners? Because this is getting
(32:50):
out of hand. You've experienced this yourself, you saw it.
What are the lessons learned that you could give to us? Oh?
Speaker 5 (33:01):
Boy, that's that's a really big one, because I I
don't know of too many nonprofits that I really trust
that I've run into while working with the city. It's
it's kind of shocking, But LA, I don't know how
well they're vetting a lot of these programs.
Speaker 4 (33:21):
You know.
Speaker 5 (33:21):
Right now, we have this this case with big you,
this guy Eugene Henley, and he had what was what
the gangsters call a mayor's program. A mayor's a mayor's contract,
and the mayor's contracts are like these contracts that come
out of some kind of a fund with the city,
(33:42):
and in essence, the city is paying these games, these
gang leaders not to do crimes, which also then kind
of pushes the envelope. Are the gang leaders pushing their
guys to do crime until they get a mayor's contract.
It's it's really thing, but we have some real problems
with that. The big U case is I think starting
(34:06):
to shed light on that these mayor contracts have been
there for years and a lot of us, especially you know,
who are working in gangs, were against them from the
very beginning because you can't pay gang members to not
do crimes because the ones you pay some and then
other guys in the gang they see that those guys
(34:26):
are getting paid not to do something, so then they
go and do something so that they can then get
paid not to do something. I mean, it's like this, Yeah,
it's like you you're just opening up the floodgates when
you start doing that.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Where's the local media on these things. It seems like
that in the eighties or seventies is something if government
was doing something, some elected official was doing something this nefarious,
that it would be in the paper. And yet it
seems like there's no media anymore that actually covers these
(35:00):
things and brings attention to these issues.
Speaker 5 (35:03):
Well, LA's a one paper town, or was I guess
Now we have the California Post and hopefully that's going
to change things. But we've been a one paper town
since the Herald Examiner left I think in eighty eight.
So as long as you can keep the La Times
politically on your side and keep them happy, they're not
(35:26):
going to write. I mean, we just don't see the
investigative journalism out here that we should. I did actually,
And let me just bring this up because this is
really interesting. David Ono from I think ABC seven News,
he did a report on all the drug trafficking going
through lax. Lax is like the hub for drug trafficking
(35:46):
for the nation if your people didn't know. But that's
the first time I've seen somebody say something about it,
and it's a great expose a I think he did
it about six months ago. Nobody has said anything since,
And to me, that's really shocking because that has been
a problem for decades here and I can show I
can bring up case after case after case of gangsters
(36:08):
moving dope through lax and nobody does anything about it.
It is shocking. It is absolutely shocking.
Speaker 4 (36:16):
Well, and then we have the fires that was a
tragedy of Los Angeles, I mean, the lack the money
that went supposedly towards firefighting equipment, water that never materialized.
It reminds it reminds me of New Orleans when the
floods occurred, with all the money that was spent, that
was sent for dykes and mitigation before that even occurred.
(36:40):
And now you get to the point where La where
you had these huge, horrific fires that basically has burned
probably a third of the county and a lot and
many of that portion of the city, And are the
same things happening there where supposedly money is going to
(37:00):
people because we're not seeing any rebuilding. We're seeing delays
because of bureaucracy and government. But you can almost count
on the fact that the city is giving out money
to people to help rebuild and it's never transpiring into anything.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
Yeah, we lived right outside of the fire warning zone
for the Palisades fire. We have a place that's I mean,
we can walk to the Palisads from here virtually. And
I have a lot of friends growing up who lost
their homes and none of them have been able to rebuild.
And the saddest thing about it is some of them
(37:40):
had lost their insurance because of other fires right before
this fire hit, so they were uninsured. But many of
them they inherited homes from the family. That area is
an old area and people were handing homes down and
a lot of them they don't have the financial ability
(38:02):
to build the kind of home that needs to go
in up there because of all the taxing and how
expensive the property taxes are up there, and the permits are. Nobody,
it seems, can get a permit. And that's this shocking
thing is is there We're supposed to, you know, fix
the permitting process, and they have not done that as
far as I know.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
Well, and they lost all that ancestral wealth because if
you have a family, you know, it's still worth a
couple of million, you know more. Uh, And if you
didn't have to pay for it, it's money that you
have that you could sell someday and you know, you
could come out and live in the Midwest like you know,
like a king, you know, if you sold a property
(38:44):
out there for cash and and moved out. So the
the the you know, we we and we saw it.
The reason I bring it up is because we saw
it in Hawaii. We saw corruption with when the when
the the blazes occurred in Maui uh and the funding
that went in to re establish got abused and it
went to these big not for profits and then they
(39:06):
did a slow rule out of being able to even
help people not only rebuild, but even to get have
people get by, help them get by until they could rebuild,
and all of that money was mismanaged as well.
Speaker 5 (39:20):
Yeah, we're seeing a lot of the big firms coming
in and offering people cash for just their land value
up there, and a lot of people, because things are
taking so long, they're being forced to sell their their
homes for land value.
Speaker 4 (39:34):
Yeah. Now you have rumors that apparently some of that
land is going to be turned into apartment complexes and
Section eight housing and other things like that that's going
to go to, you know, friends of the mayors and
friends of the politicians to be able to you know,
actually not build homes.
Speaker 6 (39:53):
You know.
Speaker 5 (39:53):
And I hear that, and I think, you know, that's
definitely being said right now. But be being a lifetime
Angelino and knowing a lot of the political people, I
have a feeling that you're going to see a lot
of last minute when eighties on that, because I think
they're going to just turn the whole thing into a
big gated community for the ultra elite. It'll be like
(40:14):
some of the big gated communities up on Bullhull and
Drive that are super exclusive and have mansion size homes
on it. So I have a feeling that that could
some of that could be going on there. Yeah, I
don't know, but just just being come here, you know,
I don't trust my politicians.
Speaker 4 (40:32):
No, No, I mean the cop in us. I mean
we still have it even though we're retired. I mean,
we just are. You know, if you have any kind
of federal grant money, there's a high probability a lot
of that's being misspent unless there's significant oversight.
Speaker 5 (40:46):
Oh yeah, I mean, you know, we have all these
big apartment complexes or kindo complexes that have been built
here that are supposed to be for the homeless, and
they're you know eighty percent nobody's there. But are homeless
get money to rent a place so nobody can figure
out where they're chits. You know, they get these you
(41:08):
know papers that say hey here's my you know, my
chip for a one month's rent. Nobody knows where all
that money's going. We have a I mean, there could
easily be circle back money going on there. I mean,
we just we just don't know. But all of our
homeless have the ability to rent a place, and they
should be renting a place and they're not. And then
(41:29):
we also have all of these vacant places that private
you know, developers own and they're getting paid for their
vacant places. So there's a disconnect there that needs to
be investigative. But we don't have that kind of investigative
ability out here anymore. You know, we don't have good
fraud investigators.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
Right, speaking of fraud, additional fraud and the fact that
we need in investigators, we have people that are doing
it by themselves as citizens that are recovering, you know,
or taking note on any of the fraud that's going on.
Speaker 5 (42:02):
And I'm really happy to see Mick Shirley out here.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (42:05):
I mean it's because that that whole thing with the
with the Russian mafia out here has been going on
a long time and that's a very you know, heavy thing.
But we have all these different types of mafias out here.
We have them from all over the world. Basically, we're
a united nation of organized crime in.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Oh yeah, I mean you have when the Eastern Bloc fell,
at least at that time back in the early nineties,
after the fall of the Wall, we had so many
people come to America that were you know, they were
either soldiers or former KGB or criminals themselves that came
over and just started doing their work here. And they're
(42:47):
experts at fraud and and strong arm people in order
to get money. They've gotten their hands into many different
things in the machine shops and other kind of organized labor. Yeah,
it's an incredible amount of money that's been What do
you think is going on today with Is there any
(43:08):
kind of significant fraud that people are missing that maybe
no one's been talking about that you think should be
brought into light.
Speaker 5 (43:19):
Oh well, I mean the medical fraud is really bad
because I've had I had a couple of cases that
were tied into some violent crimes and that's a real
difficult one, uh to prosecute out here first because you
need experts on it, and there there are very few
medical fraud investigators with the with the state, and the
(43:42):
DA doesn't like the case it's because they can get complex.
But uh, you know, the gangster the gangs stuff is
still bad. Even though La Bridges is gone. You know,
the amount of money that they're just pumping into it
is crazy. And with most of these not profits, there's
no metric to really hold them against to see if
(44:04):
there actually is any kind of profit from them, if
it does society any good. That's the biggest thing is
how do you how do you measure success in these things?
Generally anecdotally you look at them and you go, there's
no success here. I don't see any any public benefit.
But then somebody comes along and you know, they pull
(44:26):
they put numbers on the paper and suddenly, oh, this
is the greatest program in the world. But it makes
no sense. You know, the numbers don't make any sense,
but they just say that they do. So I don't know.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
Did you ever run into any environmental fraud and environmentalism
groups that were propping up solar or wind energy or
green New Deal type stuff? I know, you know there
for the longest time, the waste management had huge organized
(45:00):
in connections.
Speaker 5 (45:04):
Yeah, in Sino along a lot of the office buildings
on Ventura Boulevard were filled with those with the windmill
companies that were getting the government money, and they were
they were out there and there's a whole buzz about
you know, people just getting money and you know, they'd
throw up a windmill out in Palm Springs. But the
(45:26):
generation of the energy or you know, I'm not really
too much of an expert on that, but I've heard
a lot about it that that we had a lot
of issues with with people getting government grants and abuse
and the money with power. But that's not my it's
not not my expertise.
Speaker 4 (45:47):
Yeah, what kind of what kind of crimes you think
is the most popular that's going on in LA today
that the public needs to be aware of.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
Oh gosh, any kind of fraud, especially the meta care
fraud is huge out here, and that that's something I
think that Nick Shirley is really he's beginning to, you know,
break that bubble. But you know, we have we have
the underground gambling clubs, we have the underground brothels out here,
they call them casiitas. The human trafficking in LA is
(46:22):
off the hook. We have dedicated groups, you know, or
dedicated task forces trying to defeat that stuff. But it
seems like every time they open an investigation, they find
tons of girls and then they as soon as they
fix that one, there's another one. So and we're also
saying now street level prostitution, which we haven't had since
(46:44):
the nineties. Here apparently I'm hearing the Figaroa Avenue, which
is a really big prostitution track back in the day.
It's now full of girls again. So you know, we
have we're seeing resurgence of the soft primetry. We don't
have the drive by shootings, we don't have the murders
that we used to, arguably because we don't know what
(47:07):
people are doing with fentanyl. RhD was actually going to
start at Fentanyl Task Force because we thought people might
be getting dosed, you know, and murdered that way, and
then that got nixed. That was like twenty nineteen. So
I mean our homicide numbers could even be off because
of that.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
Yeah, you know, yeah, I think our crime statistics are
way off for many reasons. I don't think a lot
of it's getting reported, and in particular California, because there's
a lot of we've decriminalized so many things, and you know,
law enforcement is if you don't have the numbers, you know,
think how many times you found other things associated with
a criminal that you profiled and arrested, profiled in a
(47:48):
good way and arrested, and you found four or five
other types of crimes that they were committed, maybe some
of them serious, as a result of just that one
action of arresting them for something that they did wrong them,
you know, in a street interaction. And they have a
lot of officers that aren't able to do.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
That now, and they recategorize how they view things. You know,
burglaries back in my day are different than they are now.
They'll like, if somebody breaks into a house, if they're
not taking some if they're not caught actually taking something,
we're sometimes seeing them doing them as a misdemeanor trespass
(48:25):
in a misdemeanor vandalism. Assaults. How big is the stick
that's being used now? Back in the day, if you
hit somebody with a stick in bruisedom, you know, that's
that's a felony assault. Well, now what if the stick
some captain doesn't think it's a big enough stick. You know,
we've had that kind of problem. So theiation has changed.
Speaker 4 (48:50):
Yeah, and as you know from working homicides burglaries, there's
a lot of times that that sexual offenders can commit
burglary so they can get in to case the place
and maybe go through people's private information. Sometimes they run
around naked in the house and all that kind of stuff,
you know, and then they try to come back later.
(49:11):
We burglary is such a significant crime that we take
our we it's it's it's a telltale sign of other
serious crime that could happen if we don't be careful
and not and not treat it with the respect that
it needs to be treated. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Well, the house squatting thing, those are actually second degree
burglaries out here. They're all felonies, but for some reason
are most of the departments in California are doing those
as misdemeanors and they're actually supposed to be felonies, or
technically they're felonies in the book, but people that change
the definition. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
Yeah, And I'm amazed by that because people America has
always been known for property rights and respecting ownership of property,
and it seems like that's gotten thrown out the door.
We become like France when it comes to property rights.
And it's a amazing to me that people come in
and take your property, and then it's like, oh, well
I can't do anything. They have rights, they've been there. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (50:09):
Well, these big masks, you know, going in and grabbing
everything and running out of the store with it. Those
are all conspiracies which are basically felonies. But for some reason,
when they catch a lot of these people, they kick
them down to misdemeanors, so that that's a real problem,
and that's just going to keep getting worse, you know,
because the gangs are getting more and more in bold
(50:29):
and they can and they can coordinate these things easy
on their phones, you know, these big takeovers.
Speaker 4 (50:35):
Yeah yeah, and then there's so much stuff that can
be sold in the black market now, and when they
go in and shoplift, it's almost like they can turn
around and sell it almost immediately after they they take it.
Speaker 5 (50:47):
Oh, we have we have gangster homes out here that
are basically like little targets, you know. But you have
to be part of the you know, part of that world.
You have to be a dope user stuff like that.
But if you buy your to have a membership for
we have actually before I retired, actually I've been in
homes where it looked like a little target inside the home.
(51:08):
I've actually seen that.
Speaker 4 (51:09):
Wow.
Speaker 5 (51:09):
Yeah, out in the valley.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
That's crazy. That's that is crazy. Underground market yeah, today's
cities and probably cash too, So there's an underground cash market.
Oh yeah, when everybody else is trying to do away
with cash.
Speaker 5 (51:23):
Orshure they just use their food stamps.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
Yeah, oh yeah. I mean when I worked under cover
food stamps was I could you could buy everything from
you know, a person, to to drugs to a car
with food stamps. Yeah, if you had enough of them.
So what are today's cities are they? Are they repeating
the mistakes that were made from the nineteen nineties and
(51:45):
the two thousands? Are they? Is it changed? Are they?
Are we any lessons learned that we're that we do
now or are we just completely missing everything?
Speaker 5 (51:57):
Well? You know, when when I think about the situation
back in the day, if you did a burglary, you
got sixteen months and all the gangsters knew it, all
the criminals knew it, You got sixteen months. Now they
don't know how much time they'll get. They don't whatever judge,
It depends on the judge that you get. So things
(52:19):
become so cloudy to them that they don't have. They're
not thinking too much about what the penalties are. So
our penalties are just so great that there's no it
doesn't prohibit a lot of the crime that we're saying.
You know, it's we're definitely missing the mark on that
the city needs to get. They really need to say, hey,
(52:41):
if you do this, this is what's going to happen
to you. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (52:47):
Yeah, how about we didn't talk much on the politics.
Are you seeing an increase in political crime where money
goes to a politician and they end up spinning it
that gets kicked back to them. Do you see any
of that kind of stuff or do you think that's
going on?
Speaker 5 (53:06):
Well, l A LA itself, you always hear the rumors
of that kind of stuff. We have had issues with
some of the smaller cities along the edges of of
l A. You know, back in the day, you had
some of the guys in the Mexican mafia claiming that
they were running cities and that's stuff. They weren't even
(53:28):
claiming it in the press that they that they had
certain cities under their thumb. Political corruption out here. There
there is no political corruption unit really on the l
A p D anymore. Major crimes is supposed to do that,
but that's kind of gone out the window. Back in
the day, when I first started, we had an organized
(53:49):
crime division that was looking into even the mayor like
Tom Bradley was under investigation. But back then the police
chief had civil service protection, but that went out the
window in the nineteen nineties. Now they basically, you know,
serve it the discretion of the mayor. So if a
chief really does want to look into the mayor's office,
(54:11):
that's their boss. They're basically looking into the person who
holds the you know, their job above them. So is
there a lot of political corruption? I tend to feel
that there is. We definitely are having We definitely are
having the cases out here, but is there really enough
(54:34):
people to investigate anymore? I don't know. Our current mayor
when she first came in, had some kind of an
investigation into her ties with USC and stuff like that,
and it was in the papers and then it went
away and then my chief, Michael Moore, ended up getting
knocked out. I don't know if it was all related.
(54:55):
I mean, that's all kind of my opinion and my view,
but I think the there's a lot that really needs
to be looked at in my city. I think that
I think LA needs a lot of looking into as
far as corruption. Yeah, definitely, that's my opinion, you know, absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (55:13):
Well make sure, folks and take a look at Boot
LAPD Officer Rookie Year from retired Detective build done. Where
can they find your book bill?
Speaker 5 (55:22):
It's on Amazon. Yeah, they can just put in William
Dunn Boot and LAPD Officers Rookie Year and they'll find it.
Speaker 4 (55:29):
Awesome. Great show, Thanks so much, thanks for your service
and I appreciate you coming on. So stay safe and
have a good one.
Speaker 5 (55:37):
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
Thank you you too, folks. That's it for the show today.
We'll see you next week on America's Criminologists. And don't
forget to view all my published works on substack doctor
Currymeyers dot subsack dot com. And hey, don't forget to
use those streaming services. Stay safe, bye.
Speaker 3 (56:00):
M HM.
Speaker 1 (56:01):
Col Steal shows the Camel's Wage just touching Never as
a Fate America's Shadows a secrets line, Doctor Curry lasts
through the Scout America Square, anologist.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Calling to the.
Speaker 1 (56:19):
Seals of the law in the atmosphere
Speaker 6 (56:26):
Ca
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