P&S ModCast 423 - Lessons From the Old Guard - Primary & Secondary Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Because of the help that you've given me during my
career on several different occasions.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
So this is this is awesome to see you guys.
Eh and yeah, this this podcast thing. You know, I'm
I'm an old dude, but amazingly this podcast thing has
taken off. I think I've been on five different podcasts
in the last month. Oh wow, and I quite enjoy them.

(00:27):
And I even enjoy you know, some of the follow
up that's both antagonistic and inconsequential, right, some of that,
and it's it's great.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Uh, let's see here this is and we yeah, we're
live episode four twenty three, so we've done. And they're
not like thirty minute or an hour episodes. We have
had eight hours. We've had so yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
For me though, the best part.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Is they they they might start off, depending on who
the panels are, it might start off maybe a little stiff,
but at the end, this is a this is just
a conversation among friends, and it's so nice to get that.
And there's a lot of inside baseball discussion, which is
just so fun to be able to share this and

(01:19):
concepts that are being shared that people may not be
able to get normally, and that's Actually, that's the topic
that I want to talk with you guys about. And
I still have a couple others that may wind up
jumping on, but the topic is those lessons that have
been lost from the older generation of law enforcement. So, Randy,
about when did you start?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Nine August twenty.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Okay, So you're the generation that you were the guys
that I looked up to, and this is the way
I need to do stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Well, And I was pre Tennessee versus Garner, Yeah, you know, yeah,
I was nineteen eighty two, I believe, and versus Connor
nineteen eighty six. You know, we and I will tell
you that that law enforcement in those days, and you're

(02:12):
aware of this, but for anybody else out there listening,
who's you know, are younger, it was a very different
animal than law enforcement today. And you talk about lessons lost.
As you remember, I also spent you know, besides spending
thirty six years with the Ogden Police Department, you know,
last four as chief, I also spent thirty four years

(02:34):
in the Army National Guard retrips to the war. Started
as a private, retired as a colonel commanding the Special
Forces Group. And I will also tell you historically, and Doug,
you know, can jump in because he's a huge his
historical knowledge, and particularly in your home of leadership. We
do this every generation. We forget every generation lessons learned

(03:01):
in the military. At least we codify them, we put
them in books, we put them on the shelves, and
then we forget where we put them. And a good
example of that is, you know Fallujah one the Marine Corps,
when the Marine Corps learned all those lessons in Huai
in nineteen sixty eight, and the body count in Fallujah
one was horrendous, and fortunately they quickly dusted off the information,

(03:29):
quickly adapted techniques and brought the army and brought supporting
armor and brought a number of other things in for
Fallujah two, which significantly changed the body count. But that's
what we do. Every generation learns its lessons and even
sometimes we pass them on. But I often wonder if,

(03:51):
like I taught at the Police Academy for fourteen years,
I often wonder if we send them but we don't.
Those signals don't get received.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Yeah, And also what kind of reinforcement is set up
and what kind of mentorship is in place.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
As well as as well as what are society's conditions. Yes,
because society plays a huge role, our support from the
public in the courts, Yes, good and bad cases. Yeah,
you know, setting precedent, legal precedent. They changed the working environment.

(04:32):
And you know, in seventy nine through the eighties, Tennessee
versus Garner was a watershed case. Prior to that, my
department had fleeing fellon rule. If you wrote in those days,
it was five hundred dollars if you wrote, if you
kited checks for five hundred dollars over and you ran
for me, I could shoot you.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, there's a felony.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
I talked to when I first started. I started in
nineteen ninety five, and I worked with older guys who
told me about shooting burglars in the old days, Like yeah,
we found a guy in the middle of the night
burglarising a building and yeah he ran forms and they're like, yeah, yeah,

(05:16):
I shocked that guy right between the shoulder blades, you know,
with the previs at a magnum, I mean, was running
away and that was all.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah. My city in the state of Utah's Macin tell
you was the crime capital. Oh yeah. Ever, we had
a sergeant when I came on to PD in seventy nine.
He was a he was a World War Two veteran. Oh,
and he was a detective sergeant. His nickname was Boom Boom,
and the reason is and he was a Navy boxing champion.

(05:45):
He was a big guy. But that wasn't the reason
for his name. The reason was he had shot seven
people who ran from him.

Speaker 4 (05:52):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, can you imagine? Can you imagine that today?
You know I wouldn't work?

Speaker 2 (05:59):
Well, no, now the first one you go to prison.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, I'm sorry, you go straight to prison today. Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
So let's see here.

Speaker 3 (06:11):
I went through the Academy of ninety eight and I've
been in it since and so twenty years difference right there,
right there, and so going through FTO looking at other officers,
figuring out, Okay, who do I want to model myself after.
I was fortunate to have some good examples. But then

(06:32):
at different points in my career I was I was
in a newer agency without those influences, and I had
to go outside and just to find the right people.
That was a challenge.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Well you would have you would have heard of this, Matt,
but you wouldn't be aware of it. But when I
hired on Ogden PD, in those days, according to law,
an agency had eighteen months to send you to the academy.
So they hired you, put you through whatever their training

(07:04):
program was, put you out on the street, and then
waited a period of time to see if they were
going to invest the cost of sending you to the academy.
So I went through in nineteen seventy nine, I went
through a six week FTO program and was out on
my own, and you learned a lot lesson. But keep

(07:25):
in mind this was back when when I heard on
a PD, we didn't have handheld radios yet the radio
was in the car when you turned the car off
and got out. You had no comms. And so I think,
and I know you can't see me neither can you
know the folks that are listening. But I'm not a
very big guy. In fact, when I hired on OPD,

(07:47):
I was the smallest person they had ever hired mail
they'd ever hired on the PD. I was five and
six one hundred and forty nine pounds and today I'm
five to six, one hundred and fifty one. So in fact,
you know, I got a fair amount of disdain from
some because this is the era of cops. I mean,
these guys were giants. But anyway, I was a but

(08:10):
so you learned at least I learned to dialogue with people.
It didn't take me long to figure out that I'd
rather talk to a guy for forty five minutes than
fighting for five. Yes, and I think we were better
at it. We were better at We had a lot
more life experience than most people coming through into law

(08:32):
enforcement these days. You know, we'd worked hard jobs, we'd
done a number of things, and we had a lot
of military vets, a lot of combat vets Vietnam, Korea,
World or two. They had a lot of background, a
lot of experience, and then we just you know, we
did things differently, very very differently, and society itself believed

(08:56):
in US and supported us. And if people, if people
chose to square off with us, they knew they were
going to take an ass weapon and they knew they
were going to jail, and they never complained about it.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
Yeah, yeah, it seems those days are gone.

Speaker 4 (09:11):
Yeah, that's over.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
It almost seems like what you just said.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
And this is one of my favorite things to tell,
both on the citizen side and officers, especially the newer officers,
the ability to speak and communicate and to think on
the fly to to to uh so, And I said
this somewhere else that I kind of had some scripts
that I use on a regular basis, depending on the
depending on the incident. Right, these don't seem to be

(09:37):
things that the newer officers are aware of, and I
urge them, please work on those communication skills. And I'm
not saying that you're you're you're bad at it. I'm
saying we can be so much better. And like some
kind of uh someone even said, uh toast masters would
be a very productive direction to go. And I'm even

(09:58):
thinking stand up, commit a stand up how many type stuff?

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, go to an open mind if that's what you
want to Yes, yes, see any experience where you can
be placed in an uncomfortable setting where you have to
speak to strangers under pressure.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
And you you have to establish that you are in
charge and you have to maintain it. And so one
of the things I use is humor and I yeah,
and going to various calls and that's my Okay, I'm
also six five, I'm a larger person.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Yeah, you're lay bigger in real life. Than when I
saw it when I met you. When I met you
in Dallas the last year, I was like, dang, this
guy's huge.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
And I got to say, your hair was just as
perfect in person as it is in video. But but yes,
I have that, I have that advantage already. But I
don't want to use any physicality. I need to be
able to use my communication because my physicality isn't going
to be creating bonds and bridges with people my interaction
with them.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Will you know, it's really funny. I was right before
we started here, I was just eating dinner with my
wife and I was telling her what the topic was.
You know, she's she was you know, I met her
when I was nineteen, you know, so she she knew
me before I became a cop, and she, you know,
she's been with me this whole time, she's lived through

(11:18):
all of it. And I told her about the topic
and I said, you know, I said, if you could
just take a thousand cops at random from throughout the
United States, totally at random, from today, and compare them
in every conceivable way to a thousand cops chosen at
random from say nineteen eighty, there just is no comparison.

(11:41):
But then my wife said, yeah, she's like, but the
ones today have far better training and far better equipment
than what the guys in nineteen eighty did. I said, no, no,
no doubt about that at all. But I do remember,
to your point, both of you, when I started in
the nineties, I remember going on calls with guys that

(12:04):
just to me just seemed like it was Jedi mind
trick stuff. They would just they could speak, and they
could speak at at you know, this level they could
talk to at this level, they could they knew a
little something about you know, auto repair or autobody work,
or landscaping or you know, they could talk. And a
lot of these guys had experienced a lot of military
guys also, and so it was really interesting to me

(12:28):
to see some of the hardest, toughest, was capable guys
being super polite and super nice to people during certain
calls for service. Uh and and their communication skills were
very finely honed. And so I don't want this. I
don't want ever to come across as if though I'm saying, well,
this current generation is weak, or you know, they don't

(12:51):
understand or whatever. I don't want to badmouth the current generation.
But but I think my wife was right. There's no doubt.
I mean even even that, you know, people have no
exposure to law. Of course, no now, I mean most
cops have far better equipment and training and all of
that now, But there does seem to be something lost

(13:13):
somewhere with life experience, because again, when I was working
in the academy, we would hire people that were stellar,
young people who had never had any job ever, hadn't
worked at murder king, hadn't even mowed lawns like for
you know, over the summer, literally nothing, and have a
college degree. They come from a great family. They're good people,

(13:35):
and they just they're a blank slate and it's not
their fault, but there's there's gaps there, and it's just
it's been frustrating, and you know, and I don't think
myself as being the old guy either. And then I
got to some point in my career I realized some
of these young guys that look at me like I'm
the old seasoned guide. You know, when I started, we
already had computers and and and cameras in the cars,

(13:59):
So I don't that's not really old school. I think
back to those other guys when they started, the had
a notepad and everything's on paper. Yeah, a shotgun with wallet,
you know, wallet stock on it. So my generation is
not the old school either, but even Matt, you and
I are able to see there's a definite gap there
with that understanding of the everyday man, everyday people and

(14:23):
being able to actually relate to it and speak to
them from the vanished point of a cop.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah. And you make some very very good points. You know.
My first shooting was with a Trooper Mark three three
fifty seven carrying thirty eight Special one hundred and fifty
eight game ball AMMO and a Remington eighteen inch standard
wood furniture eight seventy Yeah, you know, copper bead front

(14:48):
site with and you're only allowed to carry it only
held four rounds up the magazine, so that's all you're
allowed to carry. So the fifth round was in the
little box in your glove box, you know. And that's
that's what you had yet yet pistol, you had speedloader,
two speedloaders, you had handcuffs, and you had a twenty
six inch straight hickory baton.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
That's it. That's what we had. And you you know,
not too much. Later in my career, we went to
the handheld motorolas, the first one of the X five
hundreds or whatever they were, and they had a console
you could plug into the you know, into the dash
under the dash of the car. But that's when we
got handheld raiders. But that's you know, all you had.
And then over time in my career, we began to

(15:33):
see you know, conductive weapons. We get first pepper spray
and now you know, as we evolved, we saw those things.
And I was in the Training Bureau for several years
firearms and use of force and DT and all that stuff,
so we saw this stuff evolved. But I will also
tell you to your point, I was chief from January

(15:58):
of twenty seventeen to January of twenty one. I started
in seventy nine. There was a five year break there
before I became chief, but I started in nineteen seventy nine.
I couldn't be the chief of my generation. I had
to be the chief of the modern generation. So all
of those things that I saw and in some cases

(16:22):
struggled with, in terms of personalities, in terms of skill sets,
in terms of in terms of mindsets, in terms of
communication ability, in terms of physical prowess. In terms of
these things, it was irrelevant what I thought or used

(16:47):
to be. What was relevant was to take this force
and accomplish our mission. So I was the one who
had to adapt, not them, and we were very successful
do it. But that's the point. We can talk about
old guys, we can talk about ways, means, we can
talk about what we were better at, in my opinion,

(17:08):
when there were a number of things we were better at,
talking to bad guys was one of them. Yes, but
but it's also irrelevant because we were shaped by different forces. Yeah,
and then are available to the youth today.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Well, I'd love to get your thoughts on on some
of those challenges because they're realistic. Uh and and and
they're not easily just brushed aside. And I remember, for example, uh,
just from from a lower level, a lower level perspective.
I remember being a firearms destructor working the basic academy.

(17:46):
And it doesn't matter to your point, Randy, it does
not matter what my opinion is or was, It doesn't
matter what anybody's opinion is or was on these facts.
They're simply it just it is, this is how it is.
And so if you have a small statute female officer.
This is a real, real incident. A small statue female

(18:09):
officer and she has so much she doesn't have enough
upper body strength to pull that slide all the way
to the rear. And at that time it was a
one size fits all department with handguns we issued. It
wasn't my choice, Hey, whatever, but issue the glock twenty
two forty caliber glock handgun. That's what you got. And

(18:31):
we realized that, you know, the will was there, but
the physical ability just wasn't there. And and so you
can't just go back to the chiefs and tell them, well,
she's an adocurate, she's not suitable, she's no good. We
just need to get rid of her. That's not going
to happen. And that's just correct. That's that's correct. Yeah,

(18:54):
And so you have to work through that well and the.

Speaker 2 (18:58):
Right the the role of the trainer is to produce capable, competent,
and confident police officers. The single greatest trait for success
across generations is confidence, true confidence in your ability to
handle whatever conflict comes your way. That is not as

(19:23):
easy to do as some people would like you to believe.
And if the trainer's focus is on meeting a specific
set of performance standards, which is important. But if that's
the focus, or worse, impressing all the students on how
great the instructor is, you're not going to produce that product.

(19:47):
And so there is no more important entity in a
police department than the training bureau, and unfortunately it's one
of the worst staffed, worst resource in any law enforcement agency.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
Randy, how big is Ogden?

Speaker 2 (20:02):
One hundred and fifty seven sworn two hundred and twenty
five total employees?

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Okay, how I'm just curious. I should have looked this up.
I apologize for not knowing. What's the population of Ogden.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
It's one hundred and ten thousand, but it's it's right
in the middle. It's the middle city for a two
hundred and eighty thousand county.

Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
Yeah, So it's got Ogden's the central city. This landlocked
it's the old city. It's an old railroad city.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:28):
Uh. And then you've got these little suburb communities right
surrounding it. Yeah and uh, and then you've got then
you go north and you get up the Mats area,
the next largest area to the north.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
Yeah. The worst hotel I ever stayed in my life
was a Motel six in Ogden, Utah.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
That's right. The Motel six was a drug and prostitution. Yeah,
I was.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
I was riding a motorcycle.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
That's fourteen fourteen hundred Washington Boulevard, that is, I.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Bet it was.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
It was.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, I was riding in my motorcycle going to Idaho,
you know. And yeah, I didn't have a very good plan.
I was a younger guy and I was finally, finally
as I forget it, I'll just stay I'm going to
stay here. So I went to the Motel six.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
Yeah, and they left the light on for you, didn't
they They sure did.

Speaker 1 (21:21):
And man, they put me up like way up, way up,
you know, in the building. And when I got in
there there was this haze of smoke, marijuana smoke and
and and cigarette smoking the hallway. And I didn't get
much sleep because there was all this shrieking and screaming
and disturbances. And the cops came out like.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
We used we used, we used to run reverses and
stings out of there. Oh yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (21:45):
I was still my twenty I just hit very stupid
of me to even think I wouldn't. I can't even
believe in staying there.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
But yeah, that was that was that was you You
could you could because I was there when it was done.
You could shoulder the doors down and not only did
the door come, the frame came with in the frame. Yeah.
I literally could take two or three steps and older

(22:11):
the door down.

Speaker 1 (22:14):
Wow. That was yeah, So that was Yeah. I hate
to say it, but because I know it's not fair.
That's my only exposure to in Utah. I just I
say it. A Motel six one night, I was like,
yeahy eight years old, there was ma yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
In fact, we had a back about eighty three eighty four,
we had a shooting in the barking lot. Oh I yes,
in the barking lot. Oh did oh yeah yeah so
over a stolen.

Speaker 1 (22:39):
Car, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. You know a lot
of other people, I know, you two guys are from Utah,
A lot of Americans have I think probably a skewed
idea about Utah and crime there and you know police,
you know, and everyone was armed.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:01):
And I'd love to hear you both of your you know,
thoughts on that because it seems to me, you know,
a very wise older cock once told me he's dog
it doesn't matter if you're policing in an Amish community. Uh.
He said, you know, you work as a police officer
where there's human beings. And he said, in about ten years,
you will see pretty much everything that human beings will

(23:24):
do to one another. And he was right about that.
And I spect it's the same you know.

Speaker 2 (23:30):
Well Ogden. And the reason Ogden was the way it
was so and you might have seen this when you
rode your motorcycle through. But Ogden, Utah was the railroad.
So just north and west of US is Promontory where
then the trains came together and they hammered the Golden spike.

Speaker 1 (23:47):
Oh wow. Okay.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
So Ogden's big thing was it was a railroad center.
Any any train that went west to San Francisco or
north along coast switched in Ogden, Utah. We had twenty
seven passenger train tracks. Okay. So our Union station at

(24:10):
the end of twenty fifth Street was one of the largest,
most active in the Western United States period. And so
with that, so Ogden has high minority populations compared to
the rest of date. Because the railroad brought the Chinese brought,
the Irish brought, the Blacks brought, the Islanders. So all

(24:30):
of those you know, came together, and so the city
grew up around providing the services. It's a blue collar,
old blue collar city. We had steel mills downtown by
the railroad yards. We had Chinese laundries, We had opium dens.
We had gambling establishments legal and illegal. We had houses

(24:52):
of ill repute, prostitution houses. In fact, if you ever
get back out this way, I'll take and I'll show
you places here. I'll take you underground to where it's
the still underground passageways under twenty fifth Street, where the
opium dens, Chinese laundries used to be. I'll take in
the basement of one where there's a door that it's

(25:14):
now blocked off, but it used to go under and
behind twenty fifth Street on the north side, which is
where John Moses Brownie's gun shop was, right where he
built his guns hogged in Utah is Browning, right.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
I can't forgot all about that.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah, So you go behind there and originally, in fact,
it was still there when I was because I used
to patrol it. It was one of my beats. It
was called Electric Alley. And the reason it was called
Electric Alley was because strung down the alley right was
one of the few backside street lighting, and it was

(25:53):
also called red light alley because the lights would hang
over the front of the prostitution cribs and they were
literal cribs, I mean eight by eight by eight wow
rooms where the prostitutes would be. And if the red
light above that one came on, it meant she was available.
If it's off, she's not. And the Chinese laundries used

(26:15):
to do all their linen every day, and so they
would go rather than be seen taking linen and laundry
up to the cribs, they would go underground and come
up inside those buildings and take care of the linen
and everything that was related to it. So all of
that so ogden I mean, had very famous in the

(26:35):
nineteen forty three paperback Ripley's Believe It or Not. It's
in the City Museum and it's open to the page.
And one of the questions in Ripley's paperback nineteen forty
three Believe It or Not, it says, what are the
three roughest streets in the United States? And number one
was Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, and number two

(26:59):
was Tube Avenue in Ogden, Utah.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (27:02):
Al Capone reportedly came to Ogden and It's heyday in
the mid thirties and left telling local crime proprietors this
place is too rough for me and those Mormons. Yeah.
So that's what when you say Utah, everybody thinks of

(27:22):
the Latter day Saint Church, right right. But anywhere there's
great good, there is also great evil, and it congregates
here very well.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
So yeah, so that that was Ogden. I mean that's
very violent, very blue collar, a lot of a lot
of activity, you know, drugs from way back before the
turn of the twentieth century. Wow, as part of the railroad.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Okay, so yeah, plenty of police work to do there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah. It was a for a young urch charge the cop.
It was a great place to do.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
It was a great place to grow up.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
Wow. That's really neat. You know, you mentioned, Randy, you
mentioned that part about being hired and then working for
a while before you get sent to a police academy.
Some of my fdos who seemed like old men and
me at the time, but they weren't. They they had

(28:28):
described very similar things here in Texas. One of my
FDOS was actually a Canadian guy who joined the US
Navy when he was eighteen and became a United States
citizen and then relocated to Texas. And then he had
been a cop at a major agency in Texas before

(28:48):
he went to work at this place that I started
at and learned an awful lot from that guy. But
he described a very very similar things talking about the
last what.

Speaker 2 (29:00):
They would do with us was, you know, once they
decided they were going to keep you. And I was
hired on in this kind of a hiring boom that
kind of stretched the limits of this of the agency
to handle all its new recruits because it was a
big budget thing. They had to get the numbers up right.
So I had been on twenty three months when they
finally got me the academy. Wow, I'd already been in

(29:22):
a shooting. I'd already handled homicides, you know, I'd already
been I'd already worked under cover dope.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
So I go to the academy, and Matt will appreciate this.
I go to the academy, and the primary instructors at
the police Academy, particularly for the tactic side of it, patrol,
tax all stuff, were University of Utah cops and highway patrolmen.
Do you think I had an attitude problem?

Speaker 5 (29:51):
I had an attitude problem. I almost got kicked out
of the academy because one of these guys decided to
tell me what I'd done, and I just told them, well,
you'd have never survived the shooting in my city.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
Oh wow.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
And that didn't go over well.

Speaker 1 (30:06):
I bet not. Goodness, what do you think, man, I'd
love to hear your thoughts on because we've seen it before.
You mentioned historical stuff, but it's happening again now. We've
seen police departments, inn the sheriffs ad agencies as well,
but where there's pressure to hire more people quickly and

(30:30):
then depending again on the political and social climate, they're
having trouble staffing, you know, filling positions, and so inevitably
what happens is that standards are lowered in one way
or another. There's many different ways to do that. But
I would love to hear your thoughts on on what

(30:51):
have you seen with that? With with you know, I
can tink I can. I can think of a lot
of things that happened in the seventies and eighties and
various ends, you know, when we know what the results were.
We have a lot of data points in that. And
now I think we're seeing I believe we're seeing the
same thing happen again now.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
So yeah, so yeah, yeah, I've seen this before. In fact,
in the early eighties. The economy crashed in the early eighties,
late seventies, early eighties. I don't know if you remember
the if you guys are old enough to remember the
gas lines in California in nineteen seventy nine, but I
was right when I hired on the PD. The economy

(31:29):
was in tero shape seventeen eighteen percent, yeah, on credit
cards and you know, and on loans and all those
kinds of things, and cities were broke. They were going broke.
They were paying so much an interest rates and bombs
and all that stuff. So so you saw this dip,
and then you saw this rush to hire to refill

(31:49):
slots as as we got into the eighties, and the
economy approved, you know, thanks to President Reagan. And so
by the way, I have very good story about President
Reagan sometimes but anyway, firsthand experience with him. So anyway,
so he saw this rush to hire thing, and we

(32:10):
also saw keep in mind not so much in the eighties.
But along comes the Clinton administration nineties and we see
this shift more towards the social aspect. We begin to
see the emphasis on various groups for hiring. And I'm

(32:32):
not necessarily against it. What I am against is what
you addressed, and that is the lowering of standards in
order to achieve these things. So I've seen this before,
but I had never seen it the challenges of it
like I saw, particularly in the last the second term

(32:54):
of the Obama administration and then first Trump administration, and
then you know, I was police chief through the Biden
you know, the end of the Trump and into the
Biden beginning of the Biden administration and uh, you know
the George Floyd cases, Black Lives Matter. I mean, ogdy

(33:18):
Uta had a three thousand person protests for three days downtown.
People bust in from out of the out of state
professional agitators. Yes, but they didn't get away with anything here,
so they went back to Salt Lake where they could
paint the buildings and break the windows. So anyway, Salt

(33:41):
Lake City is a different environment, yes, truly a very
different environment the Salt Lake City. Most people don' understand
Salt Lake city is a deep blue city in the
middle of a red state, in the red red county. Oh,
it's it's an amazing place. Texas red, No Texas EXAs purple.

(34:02):
So anyway, so anyway, I've seen this before. What do
we do about it? Well, we try and play by
the rules, We try and do what's right, and we
try to accomplish our mission given whatever constraints are put
on us by governing authorities. One of the things I
was always concerned about, particularly when I was an assistant
chief before I retired the first time, was the amount

(34:27):
of federal grants we were taken, and we were taking
bunches of them. Everybody was when you do that, you
tie yourself to the rules that are put forth by
that administration, and they can hold you to it, or
they can ask for their money back. And a lot

(34:50):
of chiefs got caught up, not so much here, but
a lot of chiefs in different parts of country got
caught up in that. Yes, then you saw, you know,
the chain is in the Justice department, the big political
shifts and changes, and you began to see the use
of the weaponized use of consent decrees to tear up

(35:14):
what I believe were some very effective police departments based
on in some cases fabricated and over exaggerated cases and statistics.

Speaker 1 (35:29):
Yeah, yeah, I forget his name. There's a guy that
I followed. I think he's an attorney. I followed the
guy on LinkedIn. He used to work in uh. I
believe he used to work for the DJ in consent
decree work. And he's now one of the most articulate
and well informed people that I follow with regard to

(35:53):
the scam that consent decrees really are absolutely and he
explains how it is literally a grift. It is a
way for social justice warrior types to make a very
good living. Uh. And there's never an end. It never
ends ever, you know, Captain Captain Red Legs, you know

(36:15):
from the Outlaw Josie Wales, as he says, you know,
doing it right, it ain't got no end. They just
it just there's never enough. And once they get these
police departments under these consent decrees, you know, things like
facts and solid data don't really matter anymore. Like you said, Randy,
they can skew data, they can cherry pick data and facts.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
And you know, uh, you look a good a good example, Doug.
You look at Portland PD. Yes, you go back twenty
years and Portland PD was a front runner law enforcement
agency in this nation.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
Right they were.

Speaker 2 (36:52):
They were top notch, They had some of the best people,
they had, they had tremendously good leadership, They had a
significant reputation forward thinking. And then they and you look
at them today. Yeah, and there they've been under consent
degree for how long?

Speaker 1 (37:11):
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
So and they're just one example.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, there's quite a few. And it's uh and I'm
not using the word grifter and scams and you know
all that lightly. It's it's very very real, and but
it does affect the overall leadership. You know, you see
places that used to be sort of you know, quintessential
American cities that have been and I'm not trying to

(37:39):
sound conspiratorial, but they've been taken over by self described socialist,
self described communists who move into really important nodes of leadership,
whether that's in the mayor's office or city manager or
you know, city council or what have you. And and
you know, all you need is two or three of
those kind of individuals in a place, and next thing,

(38:01):
you know, you have a very different Please, chef now
and a very different set of mandates. And I really
hated to see that happen in some really great places
where outstanding instructors, outstanding leaders in some of these police
departments are now saddled with you know, mandates that are
that are just effectively untenable, you know. But you know,

(38:25):
somebody has ten fifteen years in It's not like they
can just quit and walk away from it. So it's
the struggles. As I said, the struggle is real. How
do you live with all of that?

Speaker 2 (38:33):
You know, well, you look at so look at you
look in that circle, particularly the big cities, because the
big cities tend to be very very blue, right, And
there was created I know you've seen it too. There's
created this sort of circuit for liberal chiefs of police.

(38:53):
Yes to move yes, city to city. Yes, they would
blow up one city, and you know, the rank and
file would would have had about all they could take.
The organization had become terribly ineffective. They were non supported,
they were you know, the disciplinary process was focusing on

(39:16):
the wrong people to discipline, and they were destroying morale
and they were destroying cohesion, you know, esprey de corps,
all those kinds of things, and it would reach a
certain point and then they'd get hired and moved to
the next big city where they were. I could I

(39:36):
could name I'm not going to, but I could name
a whole bunch of names, well about six seven names
of chiefs who made that circuit.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
I've got them, all right.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
And what was it? Because it was because of a
liberal left wing bent on on changing the dynamics. But
I'm going to make a prediction for you. Okay, I'm
going to make prediction. Remember this and your listeners, you're
whoever's watching, can remember this. If things continue to go
with the way I think they're going, I think in

(40:09):
the last two years, and we get some adjustments and
some changes across the federal courts and including in some
of the local courts, but mostly the federal courts, and
we get a few more cases up to the Supreme Court,
we're going to shift. I'm saying, we're shifting, and we're
going to continue to shift to the right in a

(40:30):
lot of these areas, particularly in jurisprudence. And I'm going
to tell you then, in the last year of Trump's term,
first last term here, the second term, and if which
I believe. I just don't think the Democrats can get
anything put together between non If jd Vance becomes the
president and continues the direction, none of us are going

(40:53):
to have any trouble recruiting. Yes, you're going to say
complete shift any other direction, and it's going to include
more minorities than we've ever seen before. It's going to
include a rising quality. Yes, because it's going to happen. Yes, Well,

(41:14):
that's it's good. That's all the pots I have.

Speaker 3 (41:17):
I have lack of viable candidates as a topic for
us to talk about.

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Here we are. Yeah, why would anyone today, seeing what
they've seen, particularly in the last four years and across
the Trump years and into the Obama years, Why would
anyone particularly Obama years, because those teenagers that were growing
up in Obama years are now in that realm of
age that we that we hire from the twenty to

(41:42):
thirty year olds or twenty thirty five year olds. Why
would anyone choose law enforcement with all the negativity, with
all the mainstream media attacks, with the whole narrative, and
it was a false narrative, but the whole narrative about
policing being controlled by those dynamics why with any young
person choose to be a police officer. No, but it's

(42:03):
going to come back.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
I really truly hope that it does. You know, I
sometimes feel like a bit of a hypocrite because I
don't want my son to become a police officer. And
my son, let me tell you, my son is a stud.
He is. He's way better than I am. And just
he is, I mean stout. He messes me the other day.

(42:30):
He said, Hey, I just bench pressed three hundred and
thirty pounds, you know, And he's like, you know, I'm
working out still, blah blah blah. He just he's a
really good kid.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
Tell him to get his shoulders ready for the surgeon.
It's going to have twenty five years.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
I keep telling him, hey, hey, let's be careful about
how far we're going, but to wait, you know, as like,
you know, mobility is really more important than that. But no,
I do feel a bit like a hypocrite because I
know that we have to have high quality people to
be police officers, because if we don't, we will end

(43:04):
up like a third world country, or we will end
up in anarchy. So it's we must have higher quality candidates.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Well, let's talk about another piece of that, Doug. Okay,
because you and I you go back far enough, Matt does,
Mat gets close. But I think you when did you start, Doug?
What year?

Speaker 1 (43:21):
Nineteen ninety five?

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Just teny five, So you were right, You were right there.
So in the eighties, in particular and through into the
mid nineties, probably sixty to seventy percent of the federal
agents I worked with deaatf FBI Secret Service. I worked

(43:43):
with a lot of them across task forces and in
other things. I would say sixty percent were former local cops, right,
because that's where the agency is recruited from.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
But in the nineties they begin and this shifty, they
began to decide to grow their own, that those skill
sets that the former law enforcement officers brought weren't as necessary.
But they needed more people that had better understanding and

(44:19):
understanding of accounting and law and a variety of other things.
They needed master's degrees in communication, They needed Middle Eastern languages.
As we shifted from drug problems being local problems to
drug problems being national and international problems, and as the FEDS,

(44:40):
which in my opinion, should never have happened, started, all
of them started getting into the drug world because that's
where the money was. Even for the federal agencies, the
amount of money in the war on drugs, they began
looking for different skill sets. Yes, and now they're in trouble.

(45:02):
They raised their own. The political aspects of it, yes,
that are all involved, all of these things that have
played a part. So, and I know a number of
retired sacks from the FBI, and I've worked with a number.
I've been professionally involved with a number of them, a
whole bunch of agents. I once had a my company

(45:24):
had a contract training all the FBI agents who went
overseas into the war zone and into certain embassies. We
did all their pre deployment training on weapons and tactics
and so on. And so I met tons of agents.
I have friends that came out of the HRT because

(45:47):
the HRT started a program. The FBI started a program
here a while back, a number of years ago, taking
military veterans from certain specialized units and they go to
the FBI Academy, they go to a field office for
a year, and then they go to the HRT. And
so you know, a number of those guys are my
friends from the special operations world. So can you have

(46:12):
this dynamic where the federal agencies which we used to work,
particularly the local connections, used to work hand in hand
with the local agencies, used to recruit from and develop
people from within. The local agencies have created a stovepiped
and separate world for themselves, and they're living in their

(46:35):
own fantasy and I'm watching. I don't know. There was
a former FBI guy that was on one of the
talk shows here a week or two ago. He said, look,
the FBI isn't salvageable. I think you have to take
it completely apart and rebuild a new FBI. I don't know.

(46:57):
I don't know. I said to a friend who was
a sack. This was about, you know, year, a year
and a half ago. I said, you know, look, Mark,
I know that the rank and file agents are good
agents and our you know, and they're good people, and
they follow constitution. He goes, Randy, time out. You're letting

(47:19):
your biases get you. He said, go back fifteen years,
go back twenty years. Where did we recruit our people from?
Where did we start getting We went to Harvard, we
went to Yale. We began building our baby agents from
the financial world, from the he said, where do politics
come mostly into vogue in professions? He says, right in

(47:40):
the middle of where we recruit people, right, he said,
good point. These are not the street agents you're remembering
the eighties and nineties. It's a whole different breed of
FBI agent, Yes, he said, and even I don't like them.
And I spent and he had spent twenty eight years
with the bureau.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
Some of the worst horror stories that I can tell,
uh are specific to FBI agents in the field. Uh.
I won't go into all that here, but I have
seen horrendously dangerous tactics, horrendously dangerous behavior. Uh uh shock.

(48:22):
I mean it would be it would be shocking. I
don't know what the word would be. Perhaps law enforcement malpractice,
perhaps tactical malpractice. I don't know what the word would be.
But it floored me to see, uh, some of these
kind of behaviors. And so you know, I have a
little saying, I said, you know, every FBI agent has
a horror story about some local uh local law enforcement guy.

(48:45):
But I sure do know an awful lot of local
law enforcement agent or law enforcement officers uh and sheriff's
deputies who have horrendous horror stories about FBI agents. Uh
and and and that's it's not just an interagency rivalry
thing it is. I mean, I'm talking about cop stuff
one oh one that they literally do not know about.

Speaker 2 (49:08):
So, and I will tell you from my perspective, because
this happened to me as chief. And as you know,
I have quite a tactical background.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
Yeah and.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
So and I wrote model policies for across the country
and stuff. And so I understand that realm. Well, back
when I was an assistant chief, which was two thousand
through twenty eleven, when I wasn't going back and forth
to the war, we stopped towards the end of that.

(49:44):
In fact, it was while I was deployed we stopped.
My departments stopped, and we're the major agency north of
Salt Lake City. We stopped putting people on the Marshall's
Fugitive Test Force. And the re reason we stopped is
because the Marshal's Fugitive Task Force we're using tactics and

(50:08):
techniques and procedures that violated our own policies with our people. Now,
the Marshal's Office would say to us, well, they're under
the Marshall's policy. Yes, they are, except when a local
officer shoots gets involved in the use of force case,

(50:31):
the Marshal's office turns it back to the agency. That's correct,
So we come back. I come back. I end up
coming back as chief in January of twenty seventeen. I
was gone for five years. The US Marshall a likable guy.
He comes up to meet me and see me, and
I don't know him, but he's a really nice guy.
I like him. He says, look, I need you to

(50:52):
put I need a couple of year experienced guys, probably
swat guys to come on the Marshall's task force. And
I said sorry. He goes what I said, sorry, not
going to happen. I heard you, you know, tactical guy
in this now, really, I said, yeah, I am. I said,
that's why I'm not putting them.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Most That's exactly why I'm not.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
I said, your people are out of control. And by
then you had McTell. You had four or five incredible
incidents across the state, particularly in Salt Lake Valley, the
Marshal's fugitive office getting involved in cases. The public was
turning against us, the courts were angry, and I just

(51:29):
said no, and he was angry with me for the
four years I was chief, and then he left. And
now they've got Justin Martinez, who used to be a
chief here. He's the new marshal, has been for what
a year and a half, Matt, I think something like that.
I have no contact with them.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
So anyway, so it wasn't just in the bureau, right,
But let's talk about another aspect of the bureau. Right,
They still unless it's changed in the last couple of
years since I left the police department. The Bureau for
the longest time, would not record, yes, record interviews.

Speaker 6 (52:14):
Would not allow even audio. They would not audio record,
They would not video and audio record. They would take notes, yes, right,
and then they would write their report. Yes, everybody else
in the US is required. My agent, my state wrote
a law four or five years ago, maybe not more now,

(52:36):
probably seven or eight years requiring you to have body
worn cameras, requiring you to turn them on, to turn
off the body on camera can make you eligible for
a misdemeanor crime.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Right, and the task Force, the FBI Task Force, the
Marshall's Task Force, would not wear body would not a
lie to wear body cameras. So you would have signed
a local guy to a task force, he had to
take off his body camera, right because he couldn't get
chance to get this fed in the right And so

(53:15):
they would show up to investigate. I had two or
three investigations for different federal complaints. They would show up
to interview my officers, and I would tell the FBI agent,
we're going to put you in the interview room and
we're going to record it. And you say you cannot
record my savorment, then you're not talking to my officer.

(53:37):
You're not talking to my officer if you're not going
to record it video and audio, just like is required
of every other professional law enforcement agency in this country.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Correct. We had the exact same tension in my old
agency as well, the exact one. You know, we had
guys on various task forces. Uh, you know, FBI atf
Marshals as well, same same exact issues. And you know,
my take on that has always been, if you really

(54:12):
claim to be about transparency, then why are you not
doing what what you know what every other agency in
the country is doing. Every other police agency in a
law enforcement agency in North America, including the so called
backwater sheriff's offices. They're recording both audio and video. Uh there.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, I don't know of a state that doesn't have
a law a wiring it law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
So what I mean if anybody else is doing that,
the first question that everyone would ask is what are
you hiding? You know? I uh so, you know, Matt,
I know I've showed this to you. You know, I
done some expert witness work. I got hired on a
civil case, a federal federal torque case involving an FBI

(55:06):
swap team. I won't say which city it was, but
it was a Texas city. And the long and the
short of it, though, is that, uh, this particular FBI
Field Office swat team probably had far less experience than
just you know, an average, you know, mid sized police

(55:27):
department swap team got involved in a in a you know,
a kidnapping, you know, ransom thing, but it was really
a family connection thing based Hispanic deal, based on the
on the border. So I'll just run this by both
of you. If you catch both of your primary suspects

(55:50):
in the kidnapping, okay, you catch them at a hotel
with their girlfriends, and you find out that they have
stashed the kidnapping victim at the house of their girlfriend.
And the very first thing that the suspect says to
the FBI agents is, please don't tell my wife about

(56:11):
my girlfriend. What does that tell you about about the
cooperation and male liability of.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
About the risk at the location?

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, please don't tell them, you know, and yeah,
just whatever you do, don't tell my wife that we
stashed the guy with my girlfriend. Right, the FBI did
not listen to one of their best, their primary case agent.
He's a he's a marine, he's a marine combat engineer,

(56:42):
former local cop ten years and he is the guy
that said, hey, just let me take me a couple
other guys and some local guys will go put somebody
in the back door. I'll just go up there and
knock on the door and just talk to him because
they know it's all females in the house right where
they're keeping the guy. He was ordered by his ASAK

(57:06):
and the supervisory special agent to not do that. He
was told, this is a swat operation now, and you're
no longer in the decision making on this. Because they
really really wanted to do a hostage rescue, even though
they shouldn't have, and their scout of the location consisted
of just driving by and then looking at Zillow on

(57:28):
an iPhone. The end of this story is that there
is one man inside the house, and that is the hostage.
He was zip tied and duct taped around his wrists.
He was also blindfolded and duct taped around his head.
As the story ends, the only person that gets shot
in that house is the hostage. The FBI swat team

(57:51):
shot and killed the hostage inside that house, and their
overall attitude on it was, hey, it's a real tragedy,
but hey, we got to go now. And to your point, Randy,
all of those interviews, every single one of the interviews
of every involved agent, none of those things were recorded.

(58:11):
None of them were audio recorded or video recorded. And
and you know, I was hired to work on it.
As I'm reading through all of the notes, it is
very apparent to me, as it would have been apparent
to probably a two or three year any two or
three year police officer anywhere in North America, that those
notes have been skewed in a certain direction, and accountability

(58:36):
just wasn't going to occur.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
You just looking for a reason, Yeah, yeah, yeah, they
were I'm sure they were coached by somebody from illegal
and a team leader.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Very clearly, very very very clearly. So yeah, I you know,
and I know, Grandy, I know you've seen we're Facebook friends.
I know you've seen a lot of the posts. If
there was one thing, if all I've got to if
I could wave a magic wand it only get to
change one single thing about the FEDS, it probably would

(59:08):
be that. Yeah, I agree, record recording these Well.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
You remember when well maybe not, but I remember when
we went to DASH cameras. Yeah, this is back this
is why this is backaways.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Right.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
So this was for me, for my agency, I want
to say, is very early nineties, but there were other
other agencies like iwatrolled ad them, you know, for a
few years before that in the eighties, late eighties. So
we go to DASH and we got officers who are refusing,
you know, they they're they're jumping up and down, almost

(59:48):
throwing a tantrum because they do not want a camera
on their dash. And yet it took not very long
at all for them to realize that that camera was
saving their bacon. Eighty nine out of one hundred times
on complaints and in fact, studies were done right in
the in the nineties and in the two thousands, and

(01:00:11):
the same thing was done with body you know, body cameras.
Officers resisted body cameras, but then body cameras. I forget
whether it was perf or whether it's I ucy here
somebody else who did a who chartered a study that
was done and it said there was ninety nine point
eight nine percent on the side of the officer wouldn't

(01:00:32):
who wouldn't want a body camera accept someone about to
do something very wrong?

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
Correct? Yes, you know. So that's what I meant when
I said I don't think of myself as the old
school generation because when I started, even though they were
brand new, but for me, from my perspective, on day
one I had, I had a dash cam, you know,
and I didn't fully appreciate or undernderstand how to really

(01:01:01):
use it until I had about five years experience. And Matt,
when you had me on to talk about First Amendment
auditors and all that, and you know, it's really learned,
you know, learn through experience. Man, those those cameras saved
me in so many different complaints, and so I cannot imagine.

(01:01:23):
I just can't get over it. And here we are
in twenty twenty five. To have any law enforcement agency,
much less federal agencies, resisting having their interviews and witnesses, suspects,
and victims, et cetera, to be recorded, especially in static
interview rooms. It's unconscionable. It's just completely out.

Speaker 2 (01:01:42):
Ofcate I agree on.

Speaker 1 (01:01:44):
Hey, Hey, Matt, can I so I want to share
a story about Randy. Please. You may not remember this,
but I told you, Matt.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
That doesn't have something to do with the hotel and augten.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
No, No, luckily you did not. Randy probably doesn't remember this,
but he's actually helped me several times in my career.
The very first time I cold called Randy because I
will do that. I will just call people. I was
in grad school and I was working on a project
about mandatory physical fitness standards for law enforcement. And I

(01:02:19):
found out that there was some place out west called Ogden, Utah,
but they had that right, and there was some dude
out there named Randy Watt who had managed to get
that done. Hey, I'm going to call that guy.

Speaker 4 (01:02:31):
And so I.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
Call all around that it ODENPD till eventually a phone
rings and there's a guy that answers the phone. He says,
he this is Randy, and I'm like, hey, you don't
know me, but I'm a police officer in Texas and
I'm you know, I'm in grad school and I'm good
but blah blah blah, and I'm working on this and
I was wondering if you'd helped him with this, and
he did. But the thing I really want to share

(01:02:53):
here because I want to hear Randy talk more about
difficult decisions and leadership. Yeah, is that as the years progressed.
You know, Randy and I had communicated by email. We've
never met, but I contacted Randy doing an extremely difficult
very painful and I use that word in its meaning,

(01:03:15):
in the true sense of this meaning, he's painful, a
very painful chapter in my career. There was a guy
that a very promising, initially very solid guy, very you know,
just a great guy. I sort of recruited him and
mentored him a little bit into the SWAT team. He
was physically talented. He was he was you know, he was.

(01:03:39):
He was a smaller guy, but he was just exceptionally
athletic and capable. This is a guy that came from
a small town went to college on a double athletic
scholarship for football and baseball. Just just just an outstanding guy,
also a likable guy. Just everybody likes the guy, you know,
and he's in eligent. And but as the years pass,

(01:04:06):
he I'll just say, he begins to slip and and
then you know, he moves into an investigative unit, and
ultimately it has learned that not only is he not
doing his job, he is he is almost the anti
anti doing his job. He's saying things you simply cannot say.

(01:04:28):
He's doing things that you cannot do. He has attracted
the attention of the District Attorney's office. He has said
things to members of the DA's office that you just
cannot say. And then we find out not only has
he been shirking his duties, he has been inactivating and
disposing of cases in which there are legitimate and genuine

(01:04:50):
victims of serious offenses. And this has brought to my attention.
At that point, I was a lieutenant, so I'm somewhat removed.
And this is the issue with leadership in American policing,
is that you often know that I wasn't a military
so I don't want to speak over speak. But it's
like it's a military. It's not like it's some guy

(01:05:12):
I've never met. It's not like I've been transferred around
here and there. This is a guy that I've known
for years, many years, and then you find out it's
a very serious problem. There had been some issues ahead
of time. I thought we had them dealt with. I
thought that we had addressed them, and then a year
later we find out that not only is the problem recurred,

(01:05:33):
it's far worse than what we realized. And it is
more painful to deal with that than it is to
discipline your own children and Matt. So I contacted Randy
because and I asked him for his input on it,
because there was a great deal of organizational inertia, and

(01:05:55):
there was controversy about it, and I was being I
was being uh looked at in a negative light by
both line officers and.

Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Some other supervisors, as if I I was the one
who betrayed this man, as if I was head honey,
as if I had turned on UH my own friend,
when in fact I had done everything possible to help
this guy fix himself and he didn't right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:27):
And so I contacted Randy about it. I shared some
documents with him and asked for his input on it.
And Randy actually had a pretty short answer, but it
was like, it was exactly what I wanted and what
I needed, and it was that, yeah, it is painful.
It's very painful, and it's very difficult, but it has
to be done. And and so he was ultimately, uh,

(01:06:47):
he was ultimately fired. He was fired, and it was
it was it was upheld, you know, at arbitration. But
the reason I'm telling the story that I'm going to
be quiet, I really want to hear Randy's comments on
making hard decisions and leadership and whether enough people are
really doing that today or not.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Mm hmm, sure, okay, hard hard, so hard Leadershipship decisions
are not hard unless you make them hard.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
That's true, right, because.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
If you if you have established your baseline values and
then and you have and and and you are skilled
and schooled at knowing the leadership environment and knowing that
you err on the side of the organization not the individual.

(01:07:52):
If you have that baseline foundation, then the decision isn't hard.
You do what's right now, then that's easy to say.
But I went through similar things, uh over time to you.

(01:08:13):
I still remember I promoted to sergeant very young in
my department, and I had my first shift I got
was the graveyard shift, and two friends of mine within
the organization were on that shift, and we were on
two month shifts. And these two friends did me. They

(01:08:36):
did me, and I got a letter of reprimanded two
days off for not supervising my personnel. Yeah, I learned young,
I learned young. I do only I'd only been on
the PD five and a half years when I made
patrol sergeant. I'd worked a number of areas. But and uh,

(01:08:58):
and I go to my first shift, and I remember
a sergeant, one of my mentors, the mentor through my
whole career, through my life. He was a combat veteran
of Vietnam Navy PBR crewman and gunner. I had boats
shot out from under him and the Maykung. You know,
he's just a tremendous, tremendous man still is still is

(01:09:18):
still a close friend. He was my supervisor at different
points in my career, and we were assistant chiefs together
for a little bit. But anyway, I remember him saying
to me when they gave me my stripes, and he said,

(01:09:39):
you can't be anybody's friend. Now, yes, you're not their friend. Now.
In my naive and young younger generation thing, I thought, yeah, yeah,
no I can, and two of my friends you know,
I'm still on probation. The good thing was they did

(01:10:00):
demote me. They just gave me letter of reprimanded two
days off without pay and said learn your lesson, sergeant,
and boy, I learned my lessons. So I learned it early,
and then as I moved on through the ranks and
different things I had, I had phenomenal mentors who had
been in various things, and I learned the lessons. But
I will also tell you that I credit the United

(01:10:23):
States Army with my true leadership developments. Most police farms,
including MIND, cannot do for you what a system like
the United States Army does. I started as a private
and listed in Utah Army National Guard. I've been on
the PD for a month for a year and a half,
went away for a year and a half, went through

(01:10:43):
all my training to become a green Beret in the
National Guard unit, came back and then started going to
NCO schools, and then started going to advanced NCO schools,
and then went to ocs and became commission and officer.
So I had to go through an Officer's bas of
Course and then an Officer's Advanced Course, and then combined

(01:11:04):
Armed Service Staff School and then Commanded General Staff College,
and then I was lucky enough to be selected for
the Army's Resident War College. And when I retired, I
was commanding twenty five hundred green berets. I was a
group commander for twenty five round briefs. So I across
these two careers running simultaneously. I was seeing things and

(01:11:27):
there was no greater commitment. I'll tell you a war story.
I was in Afghanistan December of one to December of
two leading a company of green berets. We owned east
central Afghanistan, and we got in a pretty good, pretty
good fight. I lost one American killed and several wounded,
including one who was medically retired. He lost his eye

(01:11:49):
to grenade shrapnel. And we killed eleven Al Qaeda that
day in that fight, and one of the one Al
Qaeda member was critically wounded but was still alive. And
I had with me an element of Delta force. We
were prosecuting this target in a joint operation, and the

(01:12:14):
soldier that died was a Delta Force member, Sergeant first
Class Chris Spear, while he's a staff sergeant. Then they
promoted himposthumously. But and the guy that was alive was
the guy that threw the grenade that killed Chris. And
so he's laying there with bullet wounds and he's drastically injured,
and my medics, mysef metics and one of the Delta

(01:12:36):
Force medics are treating people. And right now they're treating
you know, Chris, because this happened in the dying end
of the The sergeant major from the Delta unit came
up to me and he looked at me. He says, Sir,
that terrorist is seriously wounded. He's not going to make us.
What do you want us to do? I knew, I

(01:12:57):
mean I knew immediately was asking. But I just looked
him in the eyes and said, treat him. Yeah, there's
no room if you if your foundation, it's your foundation,
there no room for any other decision. So if you
do that early in your career, if you make sure
that you have that solid rock, solid bedrock foundation based

(01:13:19):
on law, policy, ethics, and morality, you'll do the right thing.
They don't. They don't become hard questions. You simply do
them now in law enforcement, just like in lower levels
in the military, every face has a name, and boy
that's hard, it is, but you know, it doesn't change

(01:13:41):
your decision.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
No, you know. I have a little a little document
that I wrote a number of years ago somewhere. Some
other guys still use it every now and then, and
I talk about things that I learned the first couple
of years as a sergeant, and I wish someone had
told me. And one of the very first things on
that list is your true friends are the people who

(01:14:05):
never put you in a position to where you have
to use your authority in the first place, right, it
never put you in that position. And this situation I
was talking about, it was so difficult because it had
become political and had grown legs and grown, you know,
run throughout the agency. But at the end of it,

(01:14:26):
in the end, I knew what had to happen. And
I was speaking figuratively, only figuravely. Here you had the
guy you had to cut his head off. You have
to Yeah, he has to go. He has to go,
There's no question about it. It's just that it was
extremely difficult on multiple levels, emotionally, personally, professionally, politically, and

(01:14:52):
yet we all know what the answer is here. It
has to be done. And I appreciate you letting me
bounce that off of you to just make sure that
I was still thinking very clearly at the time. It was.
That was one of the more difficult decisions.

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
And I think anybody who's been in this game as
a leader for any length time has had one or
two of those. I'll tell you another situation. So back
when George Floyd blm right, so everything was happening. So
I told you that we had this big protest. Three
thousand people gathered on front steps, blocked off the street,

(01:15:29):
gathered well, they gathered in front of our city building,
so we blocked off the street. I brought in people,
but I kept the civil Disorder unit hidden. We did
some things very specifically, and then myself and a couple
of guys walked up to the ring leader and said, hey, look,
you need to understand something. This is ogden Utah, and

(01:15:54):
we've wholeheartedly support you right under the first Amendment to
protest as long as you do it lead right the
first criminal act we see, We're come going to get
you the first kind of spray paint. We see you're
going to the ground and you're leaving here, and you're
going to jail. The first illegal act we see. We

(01:16:15):
don't care what it is. We're not going to allow
to grow or spread. So we're going to just come
through this crowd. Take those people out now here. Over
here at those tables, those tables, well, those are coolers
full of ice water. It's hot. Your people need a drink,
Get a drink. See that that's a medical station. There's
one there. There's one on that corner. If you need assistance,

(01:16:36):
you send your people there. You set your loudspeaker up,
you talk right here. You stay within the confines here,
stay away from the businesses on the other side of
the street. That sidewalk is restricted to you. But you
can have the street and you can have the front
of the buildings. So that's what we were doing. Our
big neighbor to the south was not. Our big neighbor

(01:16:58):
to the south was. The mayor had decided that and
this is what she said. This is what she said
was windows can be replaced and paint can be removed,
and we're going to give them space to vent their feelings.

(01:17:18):
You may have seen it in the Lake City police
car upside down, a woman's squatting on it, taking a
dump in the middle of the street.

Speaker 1 (01:17:27):
Yes, so.

Speaker 2 (01:17:29):
They lose control. But prior to this, you have under orders.
You have the chief of police orders and the mayor
laying down in the public square with his hands behind
his back saying I can't breathe, telling his officers to kneel, thinking,
thinking this will diffuse it. No, it causes it to grow.

Speaker 1 (01:17:52):
You empower it.

Speaker 2 (01:17:53):
So there this is going on, and pretty soon they've
got the full fledged riot, thousands of people in downtown
Salt Lake cities. So they put out an all call
for help. Yeah, all right, So the chief calls me.
I say, look, I'm sending thirty. Weaver County Sheriff sending thirty.
Tell me where to send them, so on and so forth.
If I bring my officers in and the county officers in,

(01:18:13):
bring them into my station. And I said, okay, guys,
look here it is. You're going down there. You're going
down there for one purpose and adds to enforce the law.
Put an end to the right. You know what's right, Yes,
you know what's legal, ethical and moral. That's what you do.
You know our policy. You follow our policy. Do you

(01:18:38):
know what's wrong? You know you do not cross the line,
but you also understand you bow to no one and
you laid down for no one. You if we do that,
if we do that for BLM, then we are duty bound.

(01:18:58):
When the KKK has their rally, we are duty bound
to raise our fist alongside them. And we are a
political So you get so, then Matt can tell you.
So the headline in the paper the next day is
this riot's going on. And suddenly down the street come
Ogden police cars and Weabra County police cars and they

(01:19:21):
said the riot was over in ten minutes, right swept
it off the street. What happened was salt Lake hadn't
they were communicating with my lieutenant who was in charge,
and they hadn't told him how to come in to
go to the rally area to them be dispersed. So
they drove right into the middle of the riot. Well
when they did, they just squared up the cars, got

(01:19:41):
out with with pepper guns, got out with you know equipment,
got in line and cleared the street and then they
could the cars and then so this so the salle
A chief said, uh, city Creek Square, which is a
mall in Downtown's beautiful mall has been overrun. Can you
go clear them all for us? Yeah, we'll clear them

(01:20:02):
all for you, and we did so. You know, you
give your people good guidance within law, ethics, and morality. Yes,
you have high standards for performance for your people. You
make the hard decisions. You have a truly effective, disciplined

(01:20:22):
police department. When you waffle on things, yes, right, what
you permit you promote said as a leadership axiom, what
you permit you promote. So what is the culture of
your organization? In Ogden City? Is a very disciplined police
force made up of high quality people, you know, and

(01:20:46):
still is today. I've been gone for four years. The
chief who followed me, who was an excellent chief, and
he was an excellent deputy chief for me. He became
a chief. He carried on and made it even better
than I made it. The new guy that's come in,
he was a captain for me. Now then he was
the deputy chief for the new chief. Now he's the
chief and he's doing the same thing. You have a
wonderful police department there. It's all about the culture you build.

(01:21:09):
But it starts with the leader.

Speaker 3 (01:21:11):
Yes, a buddy of mine told me a story where
involving Randy. Right after that occurred, was it Salt Lake
officials were asking for identities of specific officers.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Yeah. One of my guys fired a beanbag round into
the back of the leg of a of a person
who was down wrestling with Saltlake cops. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:35):
Yeah, yeah, And I believe his brother is a buddy
of mine.

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
So he was telling me about that, like, oh wow,
so yeah, essentially I told everybody, including the FEDS to
pounce sand Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:46):
Well, and also his dad I was hoping to get
onto this panel. Oh well he didn't. He didn't, he
didn't get Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:21:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
It's also I mean the cop. Yeah well, and when
the when the FBI showed up and said, hey, we
got this complaint. And what had happened was it wasn't
the local FBI and it wasn't the local Utah attorney's office.
What had happened was DOJ in Washington was gathering all

(01:22:16):
the footage from news cameras across the country from all
these riots and stuff and going through them, uh huh,
and looking at things and then contacting the US attorney
for that district sending them the clip and saying, we
need you to look into this and prosecute a police
officer if you find right it was. It wasn't just me.
It was happening all over the country. So I got

(01:22:38):
a call from the chief saying, hey, we've had this
thing and there's you know, it was filmed and it
went and immediately went out from the scene by the
person filming with their camp with their phone camera. Police brutality,
you know, from my guy shooting the guy in the
back of the legs fifteen feet away, a guy who
was wrestling with two down with officers and police brutality.

(01:22:58):
So it went out. So it got up by the
news and it was out there, and of course they're
blaming salt APD. So, but what had happened because we're
a disciplined organization, right right. My guys fired, different guys fired,
thirty forty bean backgrounds, all this stuff. And guess what,
as soon as they came home, after like seven or
eight hours of working, they came home, they sat down,

(01:23:20):
they wrote all their use of force reports. They know,
nobody went home went to bed. They sergeants brought them in.
They brought all their they wrote all the reports, they
did all their stuff right. So the next day Captain
Division Commander walks in offic says, hey, we've got this
this thing happening. What is it? He said, we think
that that thing from the bean background in Salt Lake City,

(01:23:42):
we think it's one of our guys. He wrote a
use of force support here it is. I read the
use force riss. Okay, so what? And so then I
get a call from well, actually, then the chief of
police in Salt Lake is saying, we're investigating. We're unable
to determine who that officer is. Right, We're we had

(01:24:03):
three hundred officers from various agencies. We're unable to invest
but we're going to continue to do our best and
find that officer who may have fired, you may have
used successive force. So I called him. I said, hey,
it's my guy.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:24:16):
Really, how was it accessive? Yeah? He said, I said,
it's my guy. We've investigated. As for our policy, there's
nothing there, so right, and he says, oh okay, And
then he said, if you want you want me to
tell the news, what do you want? He says, no,
he said, I'll take care of it. And then the
next day He calls me back, says, I'm getting my
ass kicked over this. Will you will you release a

(01:24:37):
press release? It says, who's your guy? Sure? I did,
and I've reached the press release and said we've investigated it.
YadA YadA, YadA, no harm, no foul, it's done well.
Then like three days later, I get a call from
the FBI. The sack, the assistant sack, and he say, Randy,
because he knows me, He say, Randy, this is what's

(01:24:59):
going on. He said, it's 't us. It didn't start here,
started in Washington. Says I said, well, come on up.
He said, we're going to want to interview the officer.
I said, you can to record it. He said no.
I said no, you're not interview Yeah right, And I
said but I'll but come on up, I'll give you
all the reports.

Speaker 1 (01:25:15):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:16):
And you know they still haven't So what is that
four years ago, four and a halfears ago, they still haven't
released a statement and the officer clearing the officer.

Speaker 1 (01:25:27):
You know, Randy, there's so many other police US that
would not have done but you did. There's so many
of them would have Oh yeah, they especially some of
those names that you and I could both mention, Uh,
they would be more than happy to just I have.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
To tell you, you know, because you know me, Doug, you
know I go around the country teaching leadership in law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (01:25:48):
Yeah, I have to.

Speaker 2 (01:25:49):
Tell you that I believe that guys like you and
me are the are the vast majority of leaders in
law enforcement.

Speaker 1 (01:25:55):
I believe that too.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
But that that that's very small percentage who are problem people? Yes,
cause so much noise. Yes, because you know, you know
how it works. That's uh that they get the attention,
and everybody paints all law enforcement leaders for all agencies
with that same brush. That's the sad part, because the

(01:26:20):
vast majority of law enforcement agencies, I know are good
agencies with good leadership, mid level executive level leadership, street
level good agencies. And uh, okay, it's are.

Speaker 1 (01:26:36):
There's a strange economy that goes on with these chiefs.
And you know, they're like celebrity chiefs, but they're also
sort of like chameleon chiefs and and and they you know,
and you're right about that, that circuit that there are
a number of them seem to you know, work through. Uh,
you get to a certain level and a certain theosophical

(01:27:00):
bent and and that. Unfortunately, this is my opinion, it's
not Max's opinion. It's not the P and S opinion.
The PERF. There's a lot of PERF influence in some
of that too. I'm not saying that everything comes out
of purpose bad. There's been some great things come out
of that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:18):
I'd say ninety percent of it comes out of there.

Speaker 1 (01:27:19):
Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, though, it's like, how
can we keep seeing these same individuals on these different
committees and boards and exploratory committees and you know, et cetera.
And I'm like, hey, why aren't organizations like you know,
perfect ICP. Again, I can be off base here, and

(01:27:42):
then maybe I am why aren't they doing a better
job of going out and talking to those other chiefs
and asking them, Hey, listen, I know you only work
for a five you know, only work for a five
hundred officer agents here. Maybe you're a you know, you
know whatever, you know, fifty officer agency would love for
you to be on this committee that explores, you know,

(01:28:05):
these topics and policing. Why does it always have to
be It seems like, again I could be wrong, why
is it always like this core group of cities in
the US or a group of certain chiefs. Hey, there's
some great leaders out there that are not being recognized
like they should be.

Speaker 2 (01:28:22):
Yeah, I don't have an answer for you. I will
tell you that over the years, I sat on a
couple of ICP committees for a number of years. Yeah,
and the I c P always believed in this balance.
And so you had guys like me, let's let's say,
guys that are on the right side of right meeting politically,

(01:28:43):
and then they would balance us with guys on the left.
So we got very little done literally, you know, but
we had some We had some tremendous dialogue. Uh. And
and you would see points of view. What was interesting
to me was the wide variety, the wide base of
points of view. For instance, I'll tell you that one

(01:29:05):
of the committees I sat on with I c P
for a number of years was the ICP Firearms Committee.
Oh and we and we worked use of force as
it released to firearms and firearms laws and regulations. A
lot of people don't realize this, but ICP as a body,
when requested, they informed congressional members, they informed presidential administrations,

(01:29:26):
Department of Justice on policies, and those kinds of things.
And it was always interesting to me because I mean,
these are good coppers. I meant, to the guys that
are eased of the Mississippi, I a lot of respect
for him. But they were brought up in a world
of gun control. Yes, yes, theirpreme of reference was I mean,

(01:29:48):
and then you have guys like me pounding the table
about the Second Amendment and so on. And in fact,
we even had I don't know if you remember here
a number of years ago, but that that I that
had been a former HTF guy that or that they
were going to put and he was a gun guy
and they were going to put him in charge of

(01:30:08):
a t F. Yes, he was on the firearms committee.
Oh wow, that guy and everybody, even the left wingers,
hated him.

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):
I can understand why, because that guy was unhinged.

Speaker 2 (01:30:23):
He was unhinged, you're right, and we wrote, we wrote
strong letters of opinion to to congressional people about that
potential appointment because that guy was not right anyway. No,
so I don't I don't have an answer. But here's
here's what I do believe. I do believe that that

(01:30:43):
even such simple things like the dialogue here in this
uh in this podcast can persuade, influence shape Well not.

Speaker 3 (01:30:55):
Only that, but and then the listeners have a better
clue as to this is what Lord or Smith's thinking.
We're not gun grabbers, we're not as a whole, and
we're not Yeah, we don't want to be violating people's rights,
despite what popular media says. That's the last thing I
want to do because that's against my my core beliefs.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
Well, I went through phases, let me tell you. And
you know I'm a table pounding Second Amendment guy now,
but you know I teach a gun site and all
the different things you know I do. Anyway, So when
I first came on the PD, there were there were
consumer farms permits in the state of Utah, but they

(01:31:37):
were issued out by the Sheriff of the Chief of Police.
So they were given only for political patronage. Right, they
were given to friends, they were given to business people, right,
and they were may issue based permits. Right. And and

(01:32:01):
for the first you know part of my career. Uh.
And by the way, you know, I was born and
raised in Canada. I moved here to go to college.
I had two years of college up in Alberta, and
then I might here out of college. Yeah, yeah, my
first you know, yeah, my father went uh father was

(01:32:23):
from Kansas, and he wanted to go to war before
the US went to war, so he went up and
joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was a bomber
pilot and another story, but he ended up staying in
aviation in Canada. And I was born and raised to
US parents. My mom was in the US, so, but
when I grew up in Canada, I mean I bought
my first hunting rifle when I was fourteen years old.

(01:32:44):
I just paid cash and walked in the store and
walked out with it. And Canada wasn't what it is now.
But you had kind of a little different philosophy, so
it kind of you know, came with me. Well, then
you had these you know, guns were kind of tight controled,
and I was one of those cops who, you know,
if we could just keep the gun guns out of
the hands of people, then we wouldn't be using them
in crimes. And but it didn't take me very long

(01:33:06):
as a young cop to realize, Man, I'm getting there
after it's over all the time, you know, and and
and pretty soon that morphed into you know, if that
person that had a gun, you have been raped, had
a gun, they wouldn't have been stabbed. And then it
kind of and then I'm you know, I'm going to
college and working on bachelor's degrees and master's degrees and

(01:33:30):
and I'm learning about more and more about the second
amount of going, you know what. I believe that, And
now you have me today right, a whole different animal.
But I think we all mature and go through phases,
although some people may not. But I'm you know, I'm
a huge belief if I had if I had my way,
there'd be a nasty There wouldn't even be a need
for a national concealed carry law because you wouldn't need it.

(01:33:54):
I'm not afraid. As a police, police tactician, I took
plenty of guns off of people. I took plenty of
bad guys down who were armed. I am not afraid
of a person carrying a gun. Yeah, I was in
four shootings in my career. I am not afraid of

(01:34:15):
a lot of downrange combat. I'm not afraid of afraid
of people carrying guns. If you equip and train your
people right, you teach them the relevant human skills, and
you use strong and solid tactics. If you're doing your
training right, building capable, competent and confident police officers, this
is not an issue. And then you've got stage like

(01:34:37):
ours that have now been costumes for carry But we've
had cfps, we've had we've had teachers carrying concealed weapons
in schools for over eighteen years now and we've never
had a single incident. So you know, there's much to
do about nothing.

Speaker 3 (01:34:54):
So we're going to take a quick little break two minutes,
actually it's one minute thirty eight seconds for some ads.
Grab a drink if you need to quick bathroom break
if it's possible. I see Doug has something. I also
want to talk about responsibilities as a leader when it
comes to standing up for your troops. Yeah, your officers
kind of to carry on with what you said, with

(01:35:16):
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(01:37:06):
how it's done. And of course Doug isn't even here.
This is why we can't have nice things. And his
hair truly is just as nice in person, yes it
is online.

Speaker 7 (01:37:18):
Yeah, So let's talk more because there is this huge
misconception of cops and the Second Amendment.

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Or rights in general, and the good drug cops.

Speaker 3 (01:37:35):
And I truly think that, as you said, we have
a majority. Most every police officer I've ever met wants
to do the best for them, for their community, for
the people they serve. And the idea of violating people's
rights to include Second Amendment, to include you name it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
Uh, it's appalling, well, Doug. Part of it is we
all come from various backgrounds, and there are people who've
been conditioned to believe that gun rights are not truly
gun rights. There are people who've been who've grown up,
whether it's you know, orientation by parents, orientation by schools

(01:38:17):
or colleges, that the right to keep them by arms
is not an individual right. It's a collective right that
belongs to an organized militia. So you've got all those
arguments that go on. Here's here's the deal. For a
law enforcement officer. Those opinions, even your own, are irrelevant.
What's written in the law, How do your local US attorney,

(01:38:45):
district attorneys, county attorneys, how do they view that law?
And then what has your department written in policy about
how you will handle a person's First Amendment rights, Secondecond
Amendment rights, Fourth Amendment rights. Well, you know, we tend
to address in law enforce. We tend to address first

(01:39:06):
and fourteenth and fourth because those are the big ones.
Very few agencies have written a policy on the Second
Amendment and how officers will view firearms firearms possession in
accordance with the law. I did my agency did. I
did made sure that it was you know, there more

(01:39:29):
agencies need to do that because if there's there's there
are two hot button issues in the United States right now.
One is first Amendment, very things like free speech. And
there are a great deal of great many people in
our country believe free states shouldn't exist, right, And the
Second Amendment, which is as as you follow the flow

(01:39:53):
of the founding fathers and you research and you study
these things, it becomes very clear that the Second Amendment
was put in place to protect the First Amendment. They
were very, very clear on how things had worked previously
and how things had been handled previously, even going back
several generations to when they lived in England, their families

(01:40:15):
lived in England and they made their way here or
in France, and all these various situations, and they knew
and understood that the great equalizer across communities was the
right to keep in bare arms. And it ended up
where it ended up. And there are scholars who disagree
and will argue vehemently with me, but they're wrong.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
They are wrong. The historical record is abundantly clear on
that too. You know, in my agency, so before Texas
passed open carry, you could open carry a long gun,
but you could not open carry a handgun. And that's
all been changed now. Well, the agency or the city

(01:40:57):
that I worked in pretty conservative overre all however, a
little bit, a little bit of Dallas, you know, Dallas
area politics involved, et cetera. And here's the thing about
citizens exercising their constitutional rights. Even when someone is exercising
a right that you, as an individual belief, believe in support.

(01:41:21):
When you are a police officer, expect to find people
who are supporting a cause that you also support, who
are also exceptionally abrasive and irritating. And so even if
you're on your side, so to speak, you can personally
disapprove of the way they're going about doing that. And

(01:41:42):
that occurred with regularity in my city. There was a
lot of open carry activists who had cameras at pretty
much every angle you can imagine, as well as on
third parties, and they would go out and intentionally display
long guns and a public place, hoping to have a confrontation,

(01:42:03):
hoping to have a discussion, you know, some encounter with
local law.

Speaker 3 (01:42:08):
Enforcement, and that gets clicks on YouTube one hundred percent
and you get paid.

Speaker 1 (01:42:13):
And you know, I'm not going to say any names here,
but I promise that your listeners know the names of
some of the people who participated in some of these activities.
They're well known on the internet, and they came to
my city as well. And you know, the thing is,
it doesn't matter if ninety eight of your guys and

(01:42:35):
ninety eight of your officers, men and women, both do
everything right. What matters is that two of them messed
up very badly. And that's what goes viral, that's what
gets used up. And so I dismissurprized both of you.
But I had a tendency towards a tendency towards writing

(01:42:59):
diatribes and how to manuals on on how to deal
and I wrote a I wrote an email that I
really wasn't authorized to write, uh, and sent it out
to everybody about how to deal with this stuff. And
the legal advisor didn't appreciate it, and he didn't like it. Uh.

(01:43:20):
And the chief, who was by his own admission, a
very very liberal leftist man from Illinois, even he said,
I think we're gonna take thus right up, and we're
gonna turn it into a training manual, or try turned
it into a training document and training though, and we're
gonna put it out to everybody, and everybody's gonna a

(01:43:41):
sign for it, and and that and that's what ended up.
That's that's what happened. Uh and and and frankly that
stopped a lot of the bs from the two.

Speaker 2 (01:43:50):
Which when when do officers get in trouble. They get
in trouble when they're having to make an in an
individual decision with insufficient understanding of the facts, yes, surrounding
whether it's policy, whether it's law, and and even an
understanding of the facts of how we reach this point.

(01:44:13):
So anytime I'm gonna believe that anytime someone like you
can write guidance that will then be utilized. So you
have a policy manual right next to it as a
procedure manual. Yes, So our policy manual says, we support
and defend the Constitution the United States, We recognize people's
Second Amendment rights. And over you're in a procedure manual.

(01:44:36):
There's a discussion about how we're going to recognize those rights.
And here are some situations that may happen to you
and how you may handle those in accordance with this policy. Yes, right,
and I applaud you for doing that because that is
what a lot of agencies lack. They just don't they

(01:44:57):
just so an officer goes out in he's face with
a novel thing, and he's trying to run this through
the wheels, and he may not have an experience, he
may not have a sergeant within reach, he may not
have someone he can turn to it. He's got to
do it on his own. Okay, so he's gonna he's
gonna make a mistake. We'll correct the mistake. But you

(01:45:18):
could help officers out a lot by preventing the mistake.

Speaker 1 (01:45:22):
Yes, So, Matt. When I was on your podcast previously
with regard to first and auditors and agitators on remember
the one if there was one very clear message that
I continuously gave was to anybody listening, to all the
cops listening, was stop taking the bait. Remember that. Yes, Yes,

(01:45:44):
And on this issue as well, the second Mimen issue.
And it really doesn't matter if it's second Mimen issues,
whether it's a BLM thing, whether it doesn't, whatever, the whatever,
the protests or the demonstration is right, especially when we
use the word agitation, ran to use word agitator, that's exactly.

(01:46:06):
An agitator is a person who is intentionally stirring the
pot in hopes of seeing a particular outcome. They're hoping
to see or generate a negative outcome on a negative area.

Speaker 2 (01:46:18):
It's planned.

Speaker 3 (01:46:19):
They're planning on us, They're counting on you, correct, instead
of make of money.

Speaker 1 (01:46:24):
This this may shock a lot of a lot of
the viewers, but even in Texas where I worked, Uh,
not all the cops are from Texas. They're not all
a bunch of ranch kids from West Texas.

Speaker 4 (01:46:37):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:46:37):
We had guys. One of the guys, one of the
worst examples of what I'm talking about with regard to
dealing with the Second Amendment. Uh, you know, auditors or demonstrators,
was a kid from Michigan.

Speaker 2 (01:46:49):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
We got I mean, we had, we had guys from
every single state in the Union working at my agency,
many of them from the Midwest US, many of them
from the Northeast, a lot of guys from you know,
in the New England area, a lot of guys from
the Chicago Land area. So we bring these preconceived notions.

(01:47:12):
I don't want to use the word prejudice. That's not
the right word. But we we we we all have
cultural bias. Right.

Speaker 2 (01:47:20):
Meanwhile, the ranch.

Speaker 1 (01:47:22):
Kids and I am one of those guys, the ranch
kids from West extions that grew up like around cowboys,
and you know, you know, you know what, what what?
What's the big deal he's got how many guns? How
come that's all? He only has three guns. That's a
big deal to me, Right, It's just nobody they're not
threatened by that. Somebody from New Jersey is really wigged

(01:47:47):
out about the fact that some guy has an AR
fifteen with him. You're like, what, That's not a big
deal to me. So you have to have standards, You
have to have some kind of of a distillation problems
that helps them with a decision making process in the field.
Because it's not about I'm fifty two. It's not about

(01:48:09):
me being this why I'm using the very loosely wise
wiser guy at fifty two periods, it's about the twenty
five year old police officer, right who comes from anywhere America,
who maybe he's not used to having to deal with
bling protesters or abortion rights protesters or Second Amendment protesters,

(01:48:35):
And what kind of leadership and direction has that officer received,
and now that officer is having to make a decision
on the spot. That many people don't understand that about
police officers, they are in some ways almost like a judge. Judge,
they're a street they're a sidewalk judge, there are a
street judge. They're having to make a decision about what's
going to happen here. You go over there, you go

(01:48:58):
over there. It's not easy. It's so difficult for many
of these young officers to make these kind of decisions.
If they don't have proper leadership and a structure and
a framework, we're setting them up to fail.

Speaker 2 (01:49:11):
Absolutely. We had this is a number of years now,
not too many years ago, but we had a an
individual who had two or three followers. You know, he's
your local crap disturber. And what he would do. What
he would do is he would drive up and down

(01:49:32):
the street and he had a scanner and he would
he and or his people, because they would do it together,
and they would pull up behind a traffic stop and
one would get out with a large camera, get on
your shoulder, and he would video and audio record the officers. Well,

(01:49:53):
the first couple of times it happened, officers are in
his face, stay back, get await for me. You have
no right right. So, as soon as we found out
about and of course we have you know, very good
leaders and simply said, all right, look he's got a
first Amendment. Right, as long as he's not one street,

(01:50:13):
as long as he's not walking in the street, as
long as he's not as long as he's legally on
the sidewalk, he can film you, but he cannot obstruct
what you're doing. He can't get in your way. You
don't have to walk around him, these kinds of things.
So we ensured they knew that. Then we couldn't. We
knew who this guy was. Then we contacted him and said,
here's what's going to happen. Here's the rules. Right, here's

(01:50:37):
a twelve foot circle around that police activity. You're not
stepping in it. If you turn on lights that obstruct
my officers, right, you're getting arrested. Right. If you make
them change course to have to walk around you filming,
you're getting arrested. If you hinder the investigation in any way.

(01:50:58):
Here's also what's going to happen. Right, the officer when
they're on a trap stop and you show up, they're
going to radio and another car is going to come.
That officer's going to focus on you. If you do
any one of these acts, that officer's going to handcuff you,
put you in his car, take you to jail. Are

(01:51:19):
we clear. Well, he continued to do what he you know,
for a little while what he did, but he followed
the rules and eventually he wasn't getting what he wanted,
so he quit. But you had that, I mean, the
good thing for us was the first time it happened,
you know, he didn't eat the pavement, end up in handcuffs,

(01:51:41):
and then we had a harder problem to deal with, right,
you know. The good thing was, you know, they had
handed his face stay out of our move back, and
he was putting that out on the news and showing
how officers were obstructing his First Amendment privilege and so
on and so forth, and he had a right to
film these officers in performance of their duties and so
on and so forth. It only took a couple of times,

(01:52:01):
and we took care of it. But you're absolutely correct, Doug.
If we had just let it continue, we would have
ended up with an incident. We would have you know,
the wrong officer, good officer, I'm sure, but at the
wrong time, you know, in the wrong frame of mind,
the guy takes a miss step and the next thing
you know, he's face down on the pavement with handcuffs.

(01:52:25):
And so and so forth. So you know, you get
again you have good, solid disciplined to people and you
create that culture. Leaders create that culture, and then you
go from you know, you go from there, and then
as things happen, you help people by providing information on
how they can do their job without getting caught up
in these traps.

Speaker 1 (01:52:46):
That will be set and they are traps.

Speaker 2 (01:52:48):
They are traps.

Speaker 1 (01:52:49):
May able to do that, very sophisticated traps. Absolutely, you know,
one of the most It was completely inavertent. It was
not planned. I would like to take credit claimed that
I was doing some kind of wonderful leadership thing at
the time. It was completely unplanned. In fact, I wasn't mad,

(01:53:10):
I wasn't angry, but I was pretty pointed giving the
knife hand of them, and the knife fan came out
that I was relatively pointed. But the way that I
did it was almost like a sermon, and I got
my guys fired up, and I was talking about stuff
I disapproved of, things I didn't like. I don't like

(01:53:33):
this guy, I don't like what he's doing. I disapprove
of the way he's acting. And it was completely unplanned,
but it ended up being one of the most effective
leadership things I ever said. Right about the time that
I had these guys ready to go and hunt this
dude down, I said to them, and my opinion on

(01:53:54):
this is completely irrelevant. Yeah, And it doesn't matter if
I like it or don't like it. The fact is
this guy's allowed to do this, and we're not going
to get ourselves into trouble. We're not going to get

(01:54:14):
ourselves disciplined or fired or prosecuted because we allow our
emotions to control our actions. And you know, I was
still I was a sergeant when I said that. I
found out later I didn't. I didn't. You know, I
didn't understand fully at the time. I really didn't. I
didn't understand fully at the time how much of an
impact I had on a lot of guys until years,

(01:54:37):
literally years later, some of those guys who themselves had
become sergeants told me, do you remember the time that
you talked about how you were pissed off about this
and you hated that guy and you didn't like him
and you thought he was you know, this, that and
the other, and then you said, and that's completely irrelevant.
I said, yeah, yeah, I remember saying that dude, that

(01:54:59):
really stuck with me. It really did so.

Speaker 2 (01:55:02):
Back when I was working back in the late seventies,
when I was working on a bachelor's degree, there was
a communication theory concept from the seventies, early seventies, late sixties,
thirty seventies called transactional analysis. You may or may not

(01:55:22):
remember this, but there you know, you have two people communicating,
and they communicate from one of three positions parent, adult,
and child. I remember that, okay. And the risk was
of somebody you're trying to stay in the adult er
parent role, and they call it hooking your child. That

(01:55:46):
person would reach over there and trigger hook your child, right,
And what that was, what it was about, was was
to get you to respond emotion, lady. Emotion is the
enemy of logic and reason because it's in a different
part of the brain, right, Logic and reason is in

(01:56:08):
the frontal cortex, and and emotion is further back in.
And anyway, you get the concept. So if one of
those true skills that we need to ensure, and I
believe that you have to do it through very very
good situational training in academies, is you have to create

(01:56:32):
situations where you hook the cadet, the recruits child. You
get them to respond emotionally, and then you get to
point out. You get to point out where the trigger was.
You get them to you get them to tell you
what triggered that response, and then you what you do
is you equip them ahead of time to know not
to go there. Don't let your child get hooked, and

(01:56:56):
don't get an emotional response, because once the emotion starts,
particularly if the emotion starts to heighten, we're going to
get potentially bad outcomes, including getting yourself injured or killed. Yes,
because you're still not processing information and arriving at appropriate

(01:57:19):
conclusions as to what's truly happening to you.

Speaker 1 (01:57:23):
Right. You know, one of my favorite quotes, and I've
used it many, many, many times, both informally and formally,
is from Carl Sagan, and his quote is saying, is
where we have strong emotions, we are apt to fool
ourselves absolutely, and it's one hundred percent true. I don't

(01:57:43):
know of any other animal on the planet that is
so adept at lying to ourselves as the human animal,
and we man, we are so skillful of lying to ourselves.
And I've been guilty of it myself. And you know,
Randy most of my leadership stuff is based on abject

(01:58:05):
failures on my own part or having, you know, made
made mistakes along the way. Some of it's some of
it's been through vicarious learning watching other people fail. Frankly,
but I have to be honest with you both and
the listeners too. I'm over it now. But there was

(01:58:28):
a phase. There was a time in my life where
I really desperately wished that I had a time machine
so I could go back in time and kick my
own ass about stupid ship that I said and did,
and stupid decisions and very foolish things that I said
to people which were not necessary, and foolish decisions that

(01:58:49):
I made, both as a police officer and even as
a even as a sergeant, especially in the first probably
three years of being a sergeant. But you know, that's
the human condition, I think, and I don't know how
to codify all of that, but I do know that
I think I agree with you completely, Randy. I think
the military has done a much better job of codifying it,

(01:59:12):
writing it down and recording it.

Speaker 2 (01:59:14):
Doesn't mean we always produce great leaders, because we have
produced some failures, but the opportunity to develop yourself is
there I'll tell you a funny story, Doug. You know,
believe it or not, there are people who worked for
me that did not like me. They did not like
my leadership style. She was frying, right, because that's the

(01:59:35):
way it is. But I remember, I remember, yeah, I
remember one lieutenant. I was a division commander, and I
remember one lieutenant sitting down with me, and he didn't
like you. But he said, you know, he says, I'll
give you one thing. You make mistakes, but you never
make the same mistake twice.

Speaker 1 (01:59:52):
Well, there you go, and that's you know.

Speaker 2 (01:59:54):
And you know that that old adage of you know,
a smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man
learned from the mistakes of others. Yes, if we could
get more people attuned to the lessons from others, yes,
we might produce a lot less ourselves. So, guys, I
gotta start wrapping up. I gotta get headed in. But
what a great discussion. And I'm happy to come on anytime.

Speaker 3 (02:00:16):
Yes, So I already have a couple of things that
we're going to need to talk about in the future.
I'm already thinking of standing up for officers, but also
being the leader without a title.

Speaker 2 (02:00:25):
Oh, I being the line officer. Informal leaders are some
of the most power leaders you've got within organization.

Speaker 3 (02:00:32):
Favorite topics, topics.

Speaker 2 (02:00:34):
Thank you so much, guys for a great time.

Speaker 3 (02:00:37):
So and you brought up the quote or a phrase
about learning them stakes of others. I have a so
primiy secretary has a forum. My tagline at the bottom
or my signature is yeah. Some learn from the mistakes
wise men. Wise men learn from the mistakes of others.

Speaker 2 (02:00:54):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (02:00:54):
And then board men create forums to learn about mistakes
they didn't even know existed.

Speaker 2 (02:01:00):
So before we all take off, let me get.

Speaker 3 (02:01:03):
Some final plugs where people can be found before we
go there, I need to say my favorite thing with
every podcast, it's make sure you support those sources that
you have found to be beneficial. If you like what
Randy said, if you like what Doug said, if you
like what I said, find us on social media, give likes,
give subscriptions.

Speaker 2 (02:01:20):
Share.

Speaker 3 (02:01:21):
When these guys are sharing stuff that helps you understand something,
better take that material and share it because there's a
good possibility the content that they are discussing that we're
all discussing isn't super popular and algorithms do not work
in our favor. So you, as a listener, get to
help us by helping spread the word. So please do that,

(02:01:42):
Please give like subscription shares.

Speaker 2 (02:01:44):
Randy. Where can you be found Randy Watt on Facebook?
You can get me there. You can reach out to
me through I am and I'll talk back to you
if I think it's worthwhile. And then you also do lectures.
Do I get around? So so srw Inc sr wn

(02:02:05):
www dot srw inc dot us that's the name of
my company, srw Incorporated, And you can reach me through there,
or you can reach me at Randy at srw inc
dot us. Make sure it's dot us. And now I'm
happy to respond if I can help anybody in any way,
if I can give you documents, if I can share

(02:02:27):
an experience, I'll help anybody who would like some help,
as Doug can attest exactly. Doug is the example here
a living through of that. Yes, and then Doug, these
days you know I'm an X cop.

Speaker 1 (02:02:43):
I primarily work for attorneys. I am desperately attempting to
limit my practice to decent citizens and good cops who
had no choice but to take action in very dangerous
and very uncertain and circumstances. And I think I'm doing that.
I turned down far more cases than I accept and

(02:03:07):
my my schedule for twenty twenty five is effectively full.
I'm not taking on anything else at least until September
October this year. And many of those involved solid good
young law enforcement officers who are who were forced into
bad situations. But you can find me at My website

(02:03:29):
is r d R Texas dot com. And I'm also
kind of an open book if you just search me
on the internet. Doug Daton d e a t o
n do a Google search of me, especially if you
couple that with cops or police or you know, you know,
swat something like that. It'll pop right up. You can
find a LinkedIn my website. You can find articles, you know,

(02:03:52):
different different things of that nature. But uh, you know,
I'm a farm instructor in multiple this month that these days,
I don't really do a lot of that. I'm mostly
about effectively. I analyze things, and I write really long
book reports, and I come and I try to help
you and I testify. But here's the deal. I will

(02:04:15):
not I absolutely will not take cases involving people who
have prior criminal history for victimizing women, children, or elderly
people or who have prior criminal history for sex crimes
of any kind. I just will not do it, and
that's right there on my fee schedule. I just don't
do it. So I'm primarily focused on good citizens and

(02:04:37):
good cops these days.

Speaker 3 (02:04:39):
Good deal, good deal.

Speaker 2 (02:04:40):
Well, it was a pleasure talking to both of you.

Speaker 3 (02:04:43):
Randy, your name has been in circles for the last
twenty something years for me. It's wonderful to finally talk
to you. You as well, and I have to apologize
right now. You're going to have to come back. I'm sorry,
and I've threatened.

Speaker 2 (02:04:58):
Doug with that now. Doug's here the time, and Doug
always a pleasure to talk to you.

Speaker 3 (02:05:03):
Thank you for having me, Matt, so big thank you
to the panel obviously, big thank you to you the
listener reviewer. Also thank you to our sponsors Lucky, Gunnar,
Filster Walter, and lastly the network supporters both on Patreon
at patreon dot com slash Primary and Secondary as well
as Primary and Secondary dot com slash forum. There's a
banner there you can support the network through that. A
lot of things going on with Primary and Secondary. I

(02:05:25):
love being a conduit to help provide good, solid information
from real experience, and so these kinds of conversations are
completely invaluable and I love it because I get to
be part of them and I get to grow with them,
and it's great.

Speaker 2 (02:05:39):
So that is all.

Speaker 3 (02:05:40):
I'm going to kill the feed so I can get
this released as soon as possible.

Speaker 2 (02:05:43):
So all right, talk to you guys, guys, Thank you Anny.

Speaker 1 (02:05:47):
Good to make you.

Speaker 3 (02:05:51):
And I guess I need to hit this do There
we go, here's the end stream button.

Speaker 2 (02:05:56):
Let's see if it

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P&S ModCast 423 - Lessons From the Old Guard

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}P&S ModCast 423 - Lessons From the Old Guard