Law Enforcement Evolution: Trends, Challenges, and the Future

Music. So, you brought up this article talking about the seven top trends in law enforcement.

And while we might not get to all of it, there was some good info in here that I thought was fascinating, but I'll let you kick it off and get into it. Yeah, I was reading this article. It's an article that was written by a PhD from the University of San Diego by the name of Eric Fritzvold. I apologize. Don't brutalize me if I mess his name up. But it's in the article, he speaks about the trends when it came to law enforcement.

And I thought, you know, when looking at them, I thought this would be an interesting, almost bullet pointed conversation that we could have, because there's a lot of these that we have kind of touched on, some of them we've touched on in some detail. And then there's other ones that we want to talk about in the future. And when it comes to law enforcement trends, I feel like law enforcement is forever and constantly changing with the times.

And so very rapid evolution that happens based on a lot of different things. So when I was looking at the article, it talked about the factors that prod that change kind of along. One of them being, and we've talked about this a lot, public perception and the scrutiny that comes along with what people think about law enforcement, how people believe we should perform the job, even though they've not done it. What is their perception of law enforcement based on current events that have occurred?

There are times where law enforcement is really highly regarded and there's other times where law enforcement is not so highly regarded. Then looking, the other thing that's also synonymous almost with public perception is the media. And that prods a lot of change in how things are done based on what the media splashes on the screens in order to get ratings.

And that's the part that is really one of those things that you sit back and go, huh, because the media really splashes it on television for their own. They have their own agenda, but their agenda particularly can drive how things affect the way law enforcement conducts business. The other thing is anytime you have new leadership, that person is going to bring their ideals of what law enforcement looks like and what they think should be an acceptable way of performing the job.

Culture changes within law enforcement itself and within the community at large that they happen to be patrolling. Those are things that will rapidly and sometimes based on one or two instances change how law enforcement will be deployed or how law enforcement will be done. And lastly, I think would be technology. Those are kind of the factors that we see consistently. But the article goes into talking about some specific current things that might be propelling change.

So those are some of the ones that I think we've seen for a number of years where people might say the perception of law enforcement is just kind of a more recent thing that started to happen. And people have always had their perception of law enforcement. The media has always impacted how we do our job. Leadership, culture, all those things have affected. And so has technology from...

The advent of law enforcement when they were doing it on horseback to, you know, fast forward to the 60s with how law enforcement was used and then moving through the 80s, et cetera, et cetera. There's constantly these things that ebb and flow that affect law enforcement.

But this article specifically named some additional trends that I thought would be neat to dive into. Yeah. And not to go too deep on it, but I'm going to leave it super vague, but I'll go backwards.

Technology typically i think i heard it said somewhere law enforcement is usually 20 to 30 years behind the curve on that and it's typically has to do with budget so you know whether you're state police sheriff deputy or city your budget you have to basically petition for a budget you got to pay salaries you got to pay for all these things so a lot of a lot of times it doesn't leave a lot of room for ai body cams new car i mean whatever i mean the expenses are

high and so it kind of all of that kind of ties into public perception if your public's fucking hates cops for whatever reason whatever area you're in they're not going to want to give you more money they just like to shout you know whatever political slogans or hashtags or whatever the fuck it is but like at the end of the day real talk you know boots on the ground that's cops that have to deal with that shit typically

even if they have no fucking clue how to deal with it exactly and then if they do something well or they do something wrong again we have that issue we'll have an instance where it starts affecting, how do we patrol? What do we need to start doing? Maybe we need to train officers different. Maybe we need to get them to be more, more, you know, culturally competent.

It's, you got to understand we deal with every culture and sometimes it can be a little bit more difficult to make sure that you're up to speed on everything that you have to be up to speed on. And I ended up saying that like, you know, if we mess up, we got to own it.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't, but I'm saying is we just need to be aware of all the pieces to the puzzle that are there and another trend that i guess you could say as a cultural trend in the u.s is you see these people wanting to basically go out and confront and engage law enforcement with these minute you know sections of the constitution or whatever it is where you know it's typically right to bear arms so some fucking guy or

girl whatever will be out walking around on the streets with a you know a fucking assault rifle on their back and basically you know what they're doing. They're videotaping. They want to force a reaction. It's like, dude, the cops are just trying to deal with normal shit, and here you are. What really irritates me, because you've had cops that react poorly, and you have cops that are. Very well versed. They've dealt with this before. They present themselves well.

But it's like your stupidity and that bullshit that you're doing, now they can't go respond to a fucking burglary or a kidnapping or a traffic crash or some medical emergency because they're having to sit here and talk to you for 20 minutes so you can get clicks on YouTube. Fucking asshole. Like that's the shit I hate. It's like cops should know the law.

Cops should know the Constitution. I'm not saying that. But you going out of your way to force them to interact with you, you're a fucking asshole. And it's not because you're just I want to express my right to.

Listen fucker, fine But like there's a time and a place for that I actually have a job that I get paid for by the citizens And now I can't go do it because I'm dealing with your stupid ass Because you're scaring people Right, and that's the thing That's why we're here, because you're scaring people That's the only reason, That's why I'm here, I'm not here to mess with you dude But you're forcing this interaction When we otherwise didn't have We didn't have to do it And that's

where it's so funny, and this is down a bit of a rabbit hole But like that blurb, when we talk about factors that probably change them, one of them being the media, the media has changed, though. It's not just turning on the news and having a news reporter report. The media is now social media. The media is now any Joe Schmo that has a phone because they now have a camera. They can record whatever story they want to put out there. And they're no longer limited to just their YouTube channel.

They can put it on various social media platforms and mainstream media picks these stories up a lot of times and they do become something that affect how law enforcement changes the way they do things. Yeah, that's because there's actual real fucking crime that goes on. So when you gin up bullshit, it's outrageous to me. And then the other part that you see is like, because now everybody has a fucking camera and a recording device on them.

They'll be like, oh, my God, there's a fight, you know, whatever on the street in the Walmart, whatever. Where are the police? Well, listen, they can't be 700 million different places. You know what I mean? So that's the other part. So it's like you can't win for losing. No, it's not so. So anyway, sorry. No, you're fine. I, when I, when I looked at this article, I thought this is something we can have an in-depth conversation about.

And that's why I don't know that we'll get through going over all of the trends that we're talking about in this article, because I think some of them, they, there's no way for you to talk about them without talking about him a lot. We'll just put it that way. Yeah, fair enough. But like I said, at the beginning, the article is, is in my opinion, it was interesting because it talks about the things that propel change, like we just talked about, but it includes some additional things.

So it talks about technology, but it goes into a little more depth of now there's a lot of new tech out there that even five years ago, three years ago. Wasn't even on the radar of law enforcement. And we are running behind, like you said, law enforcement is typically behind because of budgets and money, because they are a governmental entity and it's not a private sector job that they're running behind.

So there's so much new tech that it talks about in this article that I found to be really super interesting. The other part that I would say is quasi new is the agencies and how transparent they are because of the fact that we are working to create a little more, you know, a little more trust when it comes to law enforcement. The level of transparency that agencies have is a lot deeper than what we ever had in the past.

I think there was, and there's some good and bad with that. I think it came out of when situations have occurred that are not right and law enforcement has closed ranks and not done what they should have done, it required then when those things were exposed, well, now we don't trust you. So you got to show us everything.

And so the level of transparency they talk about, and this is another thing that currently, this is some of the things that are a more, many of the departments are utilizing to drive how they're changing and what they're doing at their agency.

The other thing that kind of goes with that is improvement of public relations, making sure that the public is perceiving what we're doing as being good, improving our police and community relations and our, our, community-oriented policing, those kind of things, because we want to make sure that we not only are listening to you, but we're showing you how transparent we are by coming out and talking to you even before there is an issue.

And then connecting the last thing that they talk about a little bit more in this article is the connection between education and enforcement. And I think that also goes along with those things with making sure we're not only enforcing the law, but now we are now picking up the ball with making sure we're educating people before a law has been broken so that we can ensure, going back to the transparency part. Making sure that they know, listen, this is the law.

This is how we're going to enforce it. And we're giving you all the information before we actually do something. Yeah. And you know what? I just don't want to lose it. But you talk about social media and I understand what you're saying because they're pushing it out. They're trying to push out programs, push out policies. And I get it.

I'll give you just a quick sidebar. I didn't actually get to do it, but I was trying to serve a subpoena on a young lady and she was, she traveled all over the place. She was like a Instagram and influencer. So she was always bouncing around. She had 14 different phone numbers. We were trying to figure it out, but I'm like, I can see her going live on Insta right now. Why can't I serve the subpoena via Instagram? And it caught, everyone had to pause for a second. And then we had an actual

thorough discussion about it. We ended up not doing it because it's like, well, whose account? How do they, how's she going to know it's real? I was like, well, How is she going to know if it's real from an email? Like, don't we have like a DOJ Instagram or an agency Instagram? We can serve it through that. Hey, you've been served. You can see she's live right now. It was a whole thing. That's interesting. Well, it sort of is we didn't do it,

but I'm like, why not? You need to adapt to what's going on. She's not answering her phone. We don't even know which phone she has because you can change numbers now. There's apps out there now where you could have 30 different phone numbers. It doesn't matter. But social media, like that is your account. You're a blue checkmark. I can see your face. You're live right now. I could say, hey, you're now served.

Here's a subpoena to show up in court. It's funny. There's thought. It's food for thought. I can see that in five years from now, that's going to be a way of life. It will be because we're moving away from a lot of face-to-face stuff. Like the idea of having someone drive to your house and serve you with a subpoena, that's going to go away. Well, I think it should because it's also safe here if you don't.

I mean, how many times do people get hemmed up doing the civil side where you're serving subpoenas? Or eviction orders or whatever it is, you're going into a bad spot. Whereas I could just say, hey, he's on Facebook Live now. Boop, hey, you're served. Yeah. That would be fun. I can't wait when that does become, because I feel like it is, be the first person that gets got like that. At least on their Facebook live watching it.

Well, I tried and I was shot down, but I was like, you know, I love pushing the gray. Of course. The policy doesn't say I can't do it. It doesn't. But it's going to, again, you know, the wheels of justice, it's going to take a probably lobbying written and how it needs to be done.

It's going to be a lot. But I think that it's definitely going to come because we're going to talk about it later on but when you we have next gen supervisors coming into play nowadays and for them this is a way of communicating yeah no and they they communicate with their fucking subordinates with via like apps and shit yeah so it's only a matter of time before that is a reality oh you know what man yeah so you just remind me of something else the media and this

is again one of those things where i dealt with it in real life. So in the media, you always see like, oh, this lawyer, you know, this administration, you know, Trump's lawyer, Obama's lawyer, whatever. They're not adhering to the subpoena. They're doing all these things. Well, that's all political shit. And, you know, pretty much you never see anything happen to these people. Well, now you transition into real life, not political DC life.

And people are like, I ain't going to go to that shit until you have a bunch of agents going boom, boom, boom. Hey, you're coming with us. But I thought I didn't have to go.

Yeah, you're not him, bro. You're not the one. You can't say no. You can't say no So it's like there's confusion, There's a lot of confusion Thanks to things like that It's crazy I actually dealt with that in real life All I didn't know you was for real for real Yeah I was for real That was for real for real That's hilarious Let's keep pushing, The article talks about specifically Seven trends and like I told you I thought

this would be a good almost like bullet point conversation. Like I want to talk about one. I'm going to hit the points that I think and my thoughts, and I want to hear your thoughts on it because I think it's going to be interesting. I think because of the way the article lays it out, it's very interesting. So it'll lead us into being able to have some deeper discussions later on. The first one that it hits on is community policing.

And I'll tell you, community policing is not new. This is something that started back in 1994 with the Department of Justice. They created an Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS is what they called it. And it was strictly the whole idea. It was supposed to have three different parts with it. Community partnerships, allowing people to take part in the problem solving, so not just cops showing up and doing what cops need to do, and setting up community

policing systems. So setting up ways that the community can be part of the process. So that was what it was supposed to offer. The other thing that it was responsible for, the idea behind when it was created in 94 was funding. To push funding out to local agencies on the county, on the state level, with the tribal police, with all of those different entities, push money out to those individuals so that they could learn, they could pay for, and that they could have access to training.

They could teach strategies of how to do community policing. They can give them those kinds of things and then provide them with the hiring or rehiring of law enforcement officers to make sure they could bolster their force. So none of this is new. It's just reinvigorated. And I would tell you, it's reinvigorated mostly out of complaints and the fact that the community at large, a lot of them aren't trusting law enforcement.

So the idea of community policing being a new trend, I wouldn't say it's a new trend. It is a reinvigorated trend because in my career or my time being involved in the law enforcement world, I've watched the pendulum swing from both sides. In, you know, 94, it was created because it came after on the heels of a lot of things very similar to like George Floyd. Back in 90, it was 91, we had Rodney King that occurred.

And there were several other instances that occurred. So in 94, they created this community policing. Well, now, slowly, the pendulum started swinging, the funding probably started to be depleted, because when I got hired on in 2000, I remember distinctly getting hired on. And we got a ton of money at the agency for us to have community resource, I'm sorry, yeah, like CRDs is what we call them, community resource deputies.

They weren't civilian people that went out and did the job. They were full-fledged law enforcement officers, and their all-day, everyday job was to go out and make connections with the community. Go to neighborhood watch meetings. Go to business watch meetings. Assist business owners with setting up business watches if they didn't have it. Assist neighborhoods if they didn't have neighborhood watch. Go out into the community and figure out what were the needs of the community.

They did a lot of social service type stuff. If they were trying to raise money for a basketball hoop, for instance, at the local community park, the CRD would be integral in making sure that we did different fundraising opportunities for that. Because the idea was if we can make the community at large be better, it was like the broken window theory that I'm sure you've heard about, you know, when you're studying criminology.

But the idea is if I can fix the community, make it look better than people having, they have more pride in their community, and therefore we're going to have less crime, and they're going to be more apt to help us when crimes do occur. So our CRDs, that was what they did all day. It shifted over the years of less of that and more of the sheriff's office did certain events that they would do every single year.

They'd go out to the community, they'd get money, they'd do the events, they would smile and kiss babies, and then they would go. But when it first started out, it was very much what they're really probably pushing for now. Well, over time, as things got better and we no longer felt the value in the service, the money that was being dumped in was a lot less.

We went from having every district had, it was probably 10,000. CRDs. Then it got whittled down. Well, we're going to cut that number in half. Then it became, well, we'll have one or two CRDs and then we'll have squad CRDs. So I was what they call a squad CRD. So part-time I would come in one day out of the month and I would come in and work a different shift so that I could go out in the community and meet people and do a bunch of, you know, logging on my computer where I got out and talked

to people and did that kind of thing. But I only did it one day out of the month. And then eventually that went away altogether. And And they said, that's something that's handled by the department. We have a division that was our community resource division, and they did it all. So I think what's happened now is the pendulum is swinging back because, again, we've had some of these instances that are considered heinous to occur.

And now we're trying to go, OK, we need to we need to create community policing. It's just a matter of reinvigorating. Yeah. My only issue with community policing is I think it takes a certain or special type of person to be able to do it well. You need to be able to speak, communicate. You need to understand the community that you're talking to. It helps that if you're from the community, but that's not always the case.

But a lot of times I've seen what you're talking about be implemented by somebody who, well, let's just say they're not well liked by that community and it doesn't work. They have to trust you. You have to be, you know, you have to be trustworthy about it. You have to back up what you're saying. You know, a man of your word, woman of your word, whatever. If you say you're going to do something, you better fucking do it.

And if you can't, you need to explain it. And a lot of times, like you said, you're dealing with a lot of bullshit complaints, but every now and again, you find that nugget. And again, sometimes you have to go through the bullshit complaints to get to, hey, I actually want to help this community. Let's get to some real problems. And I fully agree. I think, go ahead. No, I was going to say, this is one of those things where in theory, it's amazing.

But in practicality, it's hit or miss. I've seen it done very well. And I've also seen it done, well, it was actually a detriment. Yeah. And I think part of that detriment happens because when the program was put in place, we had all that money being dumped in. You had officers that went to the classes that were put on by cops from the DOJ. We had the officers that went to those. Well, once the money started to trickle away, the agency didn't want to pay for individuals to go to that class.

Because again, we don't see the value in it. Unless it's something that I can tangibly say, when we do this, we get this, I don't see the value in it. So we would say, you know what, you can just train that CRD and let them know, kind of let them know how to do it. Well, how I do community policing is going to be very different to how Tyler does community policing versus how BJ or like you said, they're all going to be different people.

And so learning to do it properly was not being done because it was getting watered down as it went from one person, you know, the telephone game, as it gets passed down the line, it's coming out as a different version every time it goes down the line. So that was part of it, the lack of training for this type of service and the assumed idea that as a law enforcement officer, you already know how to do this.

You know how to be part of the community. I heard that when they made me a CRD, the squad CRD. I did it part time and I was told, you know how to talk to people. Well, I do don't know how to talk to people, but What is the measurables that you're trying to get at by putting me in this position? What is going to be the measure of success in this position? I had no idea. Nobody told me that. And that's where I think it's critical because you're putting

people in this position. It should be a special person. It should be someone who has excellent communication skills. It should be someone that can speak with people that come from various walks of life, that is not only speak with them, but be comfortable with speaking with people from various walks of life, have an excellent ability to problem solve, an excellent ability to be able to motivate people because that's what you're doing. You're trying to motivate the community to be part of it.

The idea with CRD or with community-oriented policing, the idea was to have everybody working together to reduce crime and everybody working together to create safer neighborhoods. So if I don't know how to motivate you, how to communicate with you, how to get these things done, it's not going to be useful. That's the reality. No, very true. So that was one of the first things that it talks about. And I just thought it was very interesting because it talked about it being

a trend. And I thought, when I think trend, I always think this is something that's new. And it's not. It's trending right now. And I will tell you, it'll probably trend for the next probably seven, eight years.

And we'll probably see the same thing that happened when it trended after the last time we had a situation like this until agencies step up and start saying, even though I can't necessarily see the value, we're going to continue to put forth the effort because there's going to come a time where something else is going to happen. That's the reality in this business. Yeah. No, for sure. If it's okay, we'll jump into the technologies. I think we touched on social media.

We've actually had, I think, almost a whole episode on body-worn cameras. We did. But the facial recognition software, this is something that I think it's come and gone and come and gone multiple times because there's just issues with it. And I think one of it is potential racial bias. Mm-hmm. Privacy concerns, things like that. But once again, I hear you. It's definitely coming back hot and heavy, especially in New York, Boston, Chicago, DC.

DC, see the funny thing about DC, it is everywhere. They are constantly, they are able to find, they are constantly scanning. I mean, it's unbelievable. So it's one of those things where I think it is incredibly important, but I also understand the privacy issues. Hey, if I'm not a criminal, why are you trying to record my face. Right. I don't want that, you know, and the idea is like, well, other people say the other side, well, if you're not, what's the big deal?

Because I haven't done anything, so I don't feel the need to have my, you know, like you said, why do I have to be part of this if I have never done anything?

But in the grand scheme of things, when you're talking about any technology, whether it's the facial recognition, the body cams, the idea of making the job easier is what technology, that's why more technology is always being integrated into this job, And the facial recognition, even though it does have that, the other side of it is you have the ability in a large crowd situation or something like that to be able to quickly evaluate, do you have a potential threat?

Do you not have potential threats? With AI now, you can basically, I might be being a little dramatic and fantasy driven here, but people can start hacking into things. Bad guys can hack into things. So if you're doing all this facial recognition and you are a good guy, but bad guys are trying to find you, will they be able to piggyback on that system to find you? Also with, you know, you've seen AI stuff where they're resurrecting people from the dead. I saw a Michael Jackson video.

You know what I mean? And then, you know, the, I'm actually, you know, again, I try not to be too controversial, but the Pope and they're, they're basically putting him in the rap videos where he's, this is why he was elected Pope and they got him doing raps and stuff. I mean, what I'm saying is it. You can tell it's AI, but what happens when we get to the point where you can't? Well, I will say we're already there.

I mean, there are people, when we're talking about like maybe that, but there's a lot of AI that's been used for a while to take my face and make it generated to look like a little kid to talk to, to get on a kid. So there's a lot of stuff you can do with AI.

But when you look at the grand scheme of things, where they're utilizing it in law enforcement now is to be able to forecast crime and to be able to mine large amounts of information in order to get to the end result, like I said, to be able to forecast what crime is going to occur or be able to predict how we should deploy our resources and things of that nature. I think that it's inevitable. We're going to be using artificial intelligence

when it comes to law enforcement. That's going to be a given. How in-depth I think we utilize it and to what level is going to be something that I think we're going to have to be very scrutinized. We're going to have to use a little bit of scrutiny and a little bit of a, you know, have a little bit of a more, an eye that's really looking for what could go wrong. Because it could, like you said. Yeah. Well, and again, this is where I think the information is good.

And I can understand the predictive policing using AI and stuff like that. I don't think it's going to quite be like minority report where they're like predicting crimes before they occur type deal. But just like you know I remember Chairo Chairo was like hey it's Friday I need you guys in this area we basically would saturate the areas around the cash checking places because the.

Migrants and stuff who were cashing their checks they were getting robbed as they were trying to walk back home and there had been a slew of robberies always on Friday between the hours of 6 and 8 da da da da but that was because, He was going through looking at police reports saying, hey, what is this spike? What is the nature of the crimes? He was doing that on his own, whereas AI could just say, hey, look, during this time in this area, these are the crimes we're getting.

Then there was also the Lord of the Flies incident where it was like, holy hell, we've had a 400% increase in vehicle burglaries and thefts in this area. What the fuck's going on? It ended up being a trove of teenage kids and even minors, not even teenagers, like 11, 12 years old, that had all kind of congregated in this abandoned apartment complex, and they were just stealing to live, so to speak. I mean, again, AI might be able to help, say, in this certain area. See what I'm saying?

So I think it can assist in those types of things as opposed to just having some very savvy, aware supervisors, because that's probably a supervisor level. Well, I don't know when I was a street deputy that I'm sitting there going, all right, let me see all the reports that occurred last week. No, I was not doing that. Right. And in truth, you don't have time to do that. It's one of those things that, you know, you had a different, you had different marching orders.

As a supervisor, you should be doing those kind of things. And that's where, like when you're saying AI is offering this amazing shift from how police do their job from being reactive to proactive. Well, proactive policing is not, again, it's not new. It just allows us to do it at a higher level because we have the ability to mine data from massive amounts of information versus 10 or 15 reports that a human being can read. So when deployed like that, I think it's going to be very useful,

but it's not a new concept. It's just a matter of allowing us to do more with less again, which is what all law enforcement agencies are trying to do because we do have less. I was going to gloss over GPS because we all know what the fuck GPS is. But this article says there's GPS bullets that you can shoot into a vehicle and remotely track its bullets. I've never seen that. I'm fascinated by it.

I can see instead of having somebody like sneak attack and like put a tracker on a car, you can just shoot it. Put like a dart. I don't know. I mean, I don't know what it looks like. Toyota Highway Patrol is using those for cars that are running from them.

They are utilizing them to tag the car. so then the helicopter is able to then follow it they're not necessarily chasing the vehicle let's fucking go i love it great i mean to me i like the idea on that because the hope is that we created a safer environment for the enforcement officer because now they're not having to drive 150 miles an hour to keep up with whatever idiot is running from them and the hope is that then when

the idiot thinks that they're not being chased they slow down and so therefore they're not putting civilians at risk yeah and i'll and i'll say this about the the high speed chases i'm not gonna lie it is fun but then when you're done you're like that was stupid i could have fucking died and for what for a burglary for a robbery like what are we doing yeah now this is me saying i've already done it a few times and pitted cars i did all that stuff and

i felt like a fucking hero but then i would go home and i'm like looking at my kids going that was really fucking stupid i shouldn't have done that yeah and we've all done it like we all got into this job realistically to turn on lights to drive fast to do what it is that we do however when you look back like you said the risk it doesn't a lot of times outweigh the reward quote unquote you know what i'm saying.

And i mean it's not a new concept either i mean years ago there was a case where over here it was in one of the pinellas county jurisdictions was chasing a vehicle vehicle was there was two vehicles in the chase, one vehicle that was in the chase that was a law enforcement vehicle was paralleling and did not realize that there was a car that was crossing in front of him that ends up hitting and killing two teenage girls. Oh, it's not when you look at it over the grand scheme, it's not worth it.

And even even to the level of I can tell you, I was involved in a chase where we were chasing these kids who had stolen a vehicle. They were teenagers, teenagers, stolen vehicle. They're running from us. We're chasing them because, again, like I said, we've all done it. And they end up turning down a road where there's construction going on. And what they didn't know is there was a dirt mound that was probably three stories high and ran into it with never hitting their brakes.

And I remember thinking back and I was like, over a car, like people have insurance. I don't care that these kids did something wrong. Yes, they were quote unquote suspects, but at the end of the day, they died because of a car. You know, if we could utilize GPS applications in those those situations, I think those are a good usage of that tech.

Now, where I don't necessarily, and we've talked about this before, but GPSing your officers a lot of times just so you can get on their asses, I don't agree with that. I think that GPSing your officer's car, I think it's a necessity.

I think it's what's going to happen. It's like body cams. It is what it is. There's some good to it so that we always know where you're at. But I think when agencies deploy it out in a manner that kills morale, it can become problematic. But there's, in looking to, I know you said you wanted to gloss over it, but there's so many other, there's applications now to be able to keep up. And you would have liked this with your parolees and your people on probation.

The system to be able to keep track of them is much more sophisticated based off of GPS nowadays than it was back when they were wearing bracelets that they could literally, their dude down the street would reprogram them for them. Those kind of GPS applications, I think, are beneficial. No, no, I said I was going to, and then I got to the GPS bullets. But no, you're absolutely right. And again, like you said, you're officers so

you know where they are. That's a good thing, especially when you're trying to find them on a call. But moving into Next Generation 911, I think I left when 911 was able to receive text messages. I didn't realize they had adopted two videos and photos. That's fucking game changer. That'll actually help with a crime is occurring. What kind? Let me show you.

This is what's happening. I mean, that's pretty, instead of having somebody who, and again, I know we joke as cops, like, oh, these fucking witnesses, these citizens, they don't know how to describe what's going on. It's like, bro. It's a high stress thing. They've never done it before. And I don't know how I would be if something traumatic is going on in front of me. How the fuck do you describe it? Instead, I could just go, boom. You know, we've all heard it. Picture says a thousand words.

The video, I mean, shit must say a million words, I guess, because you get the atmosphere, the climate, what's going on. I think that's great. I think it's great, too, because I think, like you said, with witnesses, they say witnesses are the worst witnesses because they are under stress. You will get five different versions. He was wearing a purple shirt. He's wearing a red shirt. because your mind plays tricks on you when you're under stress.

That goes for even those of us who train for being in stress-filled environments. It still plays tricks on us about what we see, heard, felt, interpreted in those situations. So having the ability to send videos and photos. And the other piece I thought was, I remember being on the road, dispatch gets the phone call. So you have a dispatcher that takes the call.

Dispatcher then sends the information over to the actual person that's dispatching me, the deputy out, then that person feeds the information to me. So it's gone through at least two or three hands sometimes by the time it gets to me and things get left out because the dispatchers, not on purpose, but they have to filter information as to how much they can give us just because they're limited on what they can put on the screen or what notes they could type or whatever.

Now they don't have to worry about that. You just tag the video in the call or tag the picture in the call. How amazing would that be and how much more information do you get when you're en route to a call? Yeah, both sides, actually, because one, if it's an actual crime or whatever, you get a lot of information live that's happening. Also, if it's something fucking stupid, like that stupid stuff calling 911.

Don't call me with a shit. Don't call back. So I think this is, like you said, a game changer. I am just curious to know how many agencies have adopted it right now, because I'm I am pretty Be positive. It's expensive. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So that's things, again, comes back to money. Yeah. I think this is one of those things where agencies that have it probably are getting grants, probably getting federal funding.

And the reality is, is federal funding and grants and things like that are limited to usually your very small agencies. So the agency that has 50 cops in it, they usually have the best tech in comparison to the agency that has 3,000 cops because outfitting 3,000 cars versus 50 is a big financial difference. No, for sure. Sure. But I mean, bomb, bomb, bomb robots and stuff. I've heard about that. I'm not seeing anything in here.

I mean, infiltrate spaces where our officers are not safe for officers. I've seen some of that. But again, I kind of had this talk with BJ. He goes, it's a $400,000 robot. They don't want you to send it in for some idiot to shoot it with a rifle. And now you got to buy another $400,000 robot. So it's one of those things where I think it's a good idea, but. In practice, it's a good idea. When are you going to let them send it in, though? Like, that would be my question.

If we, why are we spending $400,000 on a robot that you're never going to actually let us deploy in the appropriate manner? Thank you. Yeah. Otherwise, we could take that $400,000 and let's dump it into Next Generation 911, then, if you're not going to let us, because that's something we're going to be able to use. Yeah, or hire five more deputies. Exactly. If you're going to spend the money

on the robotics, you've got to take the risk. Because for that matter, then I would say, well, you're paying deputies every day, so don't send them out to scary calls because God forbid if something happens. Yeah, fair enough. It's insane to me. So I think that having robots, and I think as the price of robots and technology and that kind of robotic technology goes down, because I think it is, we're watching every single day that they're making humanoid type robots.

And so the ones that are the rovers and, you know, if you rewind back probably 15 years ago, what is it, the lawnmower robots? You would never see those in people's, you know, the average family's yard. Now, they're reasonably priced and people are buying them. It's no different than when cell phones personally came out. Originally, only doctors had cell phones. And then it was like, oh, people who had a lot of money.

And now homeless people have cell phones. so there will come a time where the the pendulum will swing and it will be more economical for those things but i think regardless of how much it costs if we're going to spend the money let's absolutely utilize it as it's appropriately supposed to be used don't say every time we pull it out it's four hundred thousand dollars let's send a human being instead what's the value on the human just yeah what are we doing yeah no shit right

no shit right now yeah go ahead Drones. I was going to move into drones because to me, I feel like robots and drones kind of go synonymously. And this is something when I started in law enforcement, we would have never in a million years thought that we would have drones as an option available to us. I think right about then we were starting to hear about them being utilized in military applications, but they were also humongous and they were incredibly expensive.

So the idea to now realize that almost every department probably. Out there has drones and they have entire units dedicated to drones now is interesting and incredible. And I think that the idea of all the different ways that you can apply drones in situations is constantly evolving as well. And one of the things that's absolutely going to make the job easier, this is a personal example here in my neighborhood. Believe it or not, I actually live in a very decent area, but we're very rural.

And we had a guy that was running from the cops. He had come from another neighborhood and traipsed across all kinds of cow pastures and whatever else and landed in our neighborhood. He cut to our neighborhood, went to another neighborhood. Long story short, he kind of pinned himself down in the woods and they sent a drone in to fly the wooded area and found him.

And I'm thinking that's awesome because back in the day, we would have had to have a team of us get shoulder to shoulder and walk those woods, you know, dusk or whatever time to try to find this individual. And now the likelihood of this being injured or worse is increased exponentially, whereas there they were able to put the drone up and call him out using the drone. Yeah, or a canine or helicopter and all that stuff. No, I actually wrote this down. Let's let's let's stick into that.

Let's try to find somebody who might have more expertise on drones. But I got to be careful what I talk about. But because drones are being heavily used in the security side of law enforcement, for sure.

There's a lot of fucking cool shit. You can do a tethered drone where it could just fly over like the district and it has a certain range. You have drones that you could basically wear a bracelet or a backpack or a fanny pack, throw it up in the air, and it will follow you at a certain distance away from you recording and searching with you.

So like, you know, thinking about it like canine, if they're tracking, that way it's recording and it can notify you, hey, you know, heat temperature over here or whatever. Or you can get a live feed so you can send the drone out and say,

hey, he's over there. Boom. There's so much cool shit you can do with drones and then just thinking how to articulate this let's just say there are drones out there now and i don't know how secret this shit is and i don't think it is but one of the issues with drones is they're usually pretty fucking loud and they are kind of big well there are drones out there now that will fit in the palm of your hand they're about 80 to 100 grand and you

can navigate them through a house and it could be flying in the same room as you and you don't hear it wow and it's it's it's audio and video recording and then on top of that you have drones that carry payloads so on the bad guy side right yeah you know so there's a lot of shit that drones is a huge one i think we need to we should we should table that have somebody come in and talk about it you know the funny thing though is when you think about the reason why law enforcement

has to create all these technological advances is they're responding to something so there is you know you got to think about that other side as we you know start utilizing these other things do bad guys do too and how do we one up our technology along the way. This is where, like I told you in the very beginning of this conversation, I was thinking about the different things that drive changes in law enforcement.

It's what we respond to. Yeah, that's so that I guess that's what I'm trying to say. That's what I'm saying. I could talk about this for like two hours, but I don't want to because there's so much that can be done with drones. There's so much already being done with drones. Right. On the proactive side, but also on the reactive side. And it's a really cool topic. So I'd like to bring maybe I mean, because I could talk about it, but I could talk about it from a user standpoint, not like, hey,

this is going into it and this is where it's going. Yeah. And because it has become such a big business tech within law enforcement, there's companies that are strictly dedicated to bringing the technology and upgrading technology and making better technology for the application of law enforcement. You know, having the opportunity to talk to someone and really dig into the why, the how, and all the things that they can talk about for super intriguing, I would say.

Last thing they kind of talked about in the article when it came to tech was intelligence-led policing, which basically just takes policing in and puts problem solving with it. It puts information sharing, it puts accountability, and you put all those things together in an effort to kind of focus on what, again, pinpointing where crime is likely to happen. How could we better deploy our resources?

Because the idea is we have limited resources. So instead of sending it kind of as a shotgun blast, how can we pinpoint it so that we're actually hitting the areas that need to be hit? There's a lot of, you know, people one way or the other. Some people would say, well, then you're over sometimes policing certain areas, things of that nature.

There is the opportunity for that to happen. But I think we have to be aware of if you're in an area where there is higher crime, the response is going to be where we're going to patrol a little bit more in an effort, though, just to decrease the crime. That's the absolute effort. So intelligent-led policing is right there for me with community policing, the community-oriented policing piece.

It's not a new concept. it's something that's been out for a while there's numerous books written about it so it's not a new trend but i think it's a contributing trend when you put it with all the other things you know but they don't fucking talk about it in training because again here i am wrote you know i don't know if you call it a thesis whatever the fuck you call it for a master's program a thesis is for phd i'm not a phd so i'm not

trying to say that i am but i wrote my master's paper on this thinking i dude i'm on to some hot shit here and then frank's like yeah we were doing that 25 years ago. I was like, God damn it. The thing is, you don't know what you don't know, and nobody ever talked about it, ever. And nobody ever then labeled it as intelligent let's play sync. They just did it. This was just part of what they did. So it doesn't knock what you came up with.

I think that you came up with a next-gen version of it because of the way that you wanted to deploy it. But this is something, law enforcement has for years used intelligence to figure out how are we going to do it. You know, it's one of those things that we we weren't just driving around in our cars haphazardly. And I think that that gives the impression that that's what was happening. So going over. I'm very motivated. Well, I'm very motivated on making law enforcement more efficient.

Not that I'm going to be the saving grace of this, but there's got to be a way to make it more efficient to be focused solely on criminals. Again, sometimes I feel like I'm making these stats up, but I swear I heard them. It's something like 4% of the population commits 96% of the crime. Yeah.

And if your law enforcement should be focused entirely on that 4%, but again, it's like if you don't know and you're not being taught and you're not being trained and there's no policy, no program, whatever, you're kind of figuring it out on your own the best you can. And there's got to be a better way. Yeah. Or they never figure it out. And I think that that's one of those things that that goes back to SDLE or whatever governing agency creates the instructional materials for the basic recruit.

They are watering it down to a level as if these people are not smart enough to comprehend those things or assuming that when they go to respective agencies, they'll get those things. Whereas we really should be trying to set them up for success by giving them all of these things that are going to make them a better. And that's the reality. Fair enough. So I would pose to you, when I was going through all these tech things, I thought about one of the things at the end.

With all the technology that we're incorporating and all the different ways that we can streamline our job and make it easier, what are your thoughts on, does it counteract the community-oriented policing piece that we talked about just previously? No, not at all. Because, again, it depends on kind of what you said. What does my success look like? What does success look like for that? Are you just trying to have me go out and catch bad guys?

You know, that could be done in a multitude of different ways. Community-led policing, it's where you're engaging the community and what are their needs? How can we best serve you? How can we be more transparent? How can we build that trust?

So you're trying to interact with citizens in a non-law enforcement capacity, meaning like the first time you engage with the law enforcement officer, which is usually when you get pulled over for a ticket or something like that, or you get arrested or you get stopped or you get detained or some crime occurred and you're a witness. Let's make it a safer, more calm environment where it's like, hey, we're all humans. We are part of this. We are part of the community with you.

We want to see it build and grow. And that will help. Maybe mitigate or maybe put some kids on another path i mean i can't tell you how i think bj even said you know his engagement with his school resource officer which i think is an aspect of community policing he kind of kept him on a path where he didn't he could have gone down a different road right because bj he's just from the from the area where a lot of his friends went a different path for me i ended up leaving a

lot of my friends are either dead or in prison for the stuff that they did and it's those encounters that you have those positive encounters with law enforcement.

Professionals you know that come in and you're like okay they're not scary they're not bad they're not trying to hurt me you know so i think community-led policing if that is your measure of success that's what it should you see what i'm saying like that's that's what it should be but again that's hard to measure it takes a certain type of person a certain type of demeanor the high-speed low drag fucking guy is not going to be the

one to do it the old guy who doesn't give a fuck and just wants to get his retirement it's not going to be the one to do it it's got to be somebody who believes in that mission? The reason why I pose that question is because I feel like I'm looking at it from the perspective of the new recruit that's walking through the door now to get trained. And they are highly versed on the tech.

They know how to do everything on social media. They have no reservations when it comes to body cams or facial recognition. They are gung-ho when it comes to wanting to have artificial intelligence and GPS. And they would prefer people to text them or send them pictures when we're talking about a crime. But the community policing piece of it requires them to speak to people and build those relationships. And some of them struggle.

And why I thought that would be something that would be concerning is because agencies are not dumping money into the community resource deputy. That is their primary sole perspective. And that's what their measure of success is. They're dumping it on the shoulders of the patrol deputy, of the high speed, low drag guy, of the old guy that's sitting under the tree that doesn't give a shit.

They're dumping down the shoulders of the brand new guy who wants to care, but his plate is so full he doesn't know how to. So that was the reason why I was like, how, and this is a, I guess an existential question that really maybe we can't answer. How do we take those people that are probably going to have the idea of community policing dumped on their plate with them and make it manageable for them? I don't know. Yeah, you're reminding me, and I don't, well, I wouldn't use the

same anyway. He was an older deputy in D1. Well, you might know his name, but he was really involved in the homeless stuff, meaning homeless shelters, hospitals. He knew all the homeless camps. He knew a lot of them by name. He knew a lot of their issues. He would go and talk to them and try to figure out what's going on. As a new deputy, that's a waste of time.

In my mind, as you start to get into law enforcement and you got a lot of crimes and a lot of things that are happening, petty crimes typically, that knowledge is so invaluable because it's like, hey, I don't know what to do with this person. Oh, hey, this homeless, this shelter is taking five more people. You could take it there. You just need so much sleep. I know I'm very well. Boom. You're saving time, right?

Because instead of trying to either arrest this person or kick them back to the street and have to deal with them in a few more hours, it's like, no, boom. Hey, Red, what's up, man? What's going on? What's the issue? Boom. All right, hey, you know, and they also know there's a hierarchy in a lot of homeless camps. And it's like, hey, where's the new guy? Oh, sorry, man. Sorry, Deb. You know, he's new. He didn't know what he was doing.

See what I'm saying? Like, it saves you from having paperwork, wasting time on stuff that, and when I say wasting time, I'll kind of talk about it a little bit, but these are still human beings. And the only option shouldn't be jail or get the fuck out of here. They're human beings, right? If they're not committing a crime, they shouldn't go to jail. You shouldn't try to find the reason to put them in jail because you don't know

what the fuck to do with them. So again, that individual, that's an aspect of community policing, I guess. But that's something he did on his own because he had a passion for it, right? And he connected with churches and outreaches, groups, private sectors. He knew the different barriers. He could make a couple of phone calls and within 15, 20 minutes, boom, hey, we got a bed for you, bro.

You need somewhere to sleep. You need some food, whatever. And he could do that instead of having somebody who doesn't know or that might not be their passion, either try to figure out a way to get this fucker out of here or whatever, right? Because I've heard stories where problem homeless camps or whatever, deputies would basically round them up and dump them in the next county just to get them out of the area because they didn't know what to do with them. To me, that's a little inhumane.

You need somebody like that. But again, that's a special person who has a passion for it. So I don't know how you teach that, but the value is there. And I don't know how you document that value if you're not on the street dealing with it. Because instead of spending two, three hours trying to figure it out, he's figuring it out in 15, 20 minutes to move on to the next thing. Right, right.

So interesting question. I just wanted to close it to you. So the next thing that the article talked about was a trend now, and we've talked about this pretty extensively, was the priority of health and wellness initiatives.

They've gotten away from just sucking up buttercup and going at it with a more holistic approach. I am happy to hear the pendulum has swung there. I'm interested, I would be curious to understand what was the full catalyst because cops unfortunately have not been taking care of themselves for a very long time. Physically, emotionally, or mentally.

We all know the cop that when we got hired on that weighed 400 pounds and was still out there pushing a, you know, a patrol car and you're going, what is this dude going to do if somebody knocks him out? And you wondered, but now agencies, and this has been something probably in the last probably 15 years is where it started, started to take the fitness tests and make them a little more difficult for, I remember when I started, you did like a six minute run and that was it.

That was the only option. That's all you had to do. You did it when you first got hired on. If you gained 500 pounds, as long as you didn't go out on light duty, you never had to do it again. Then it became, well, no, you got to do it once a year. Then it became you had the option of doing that or doing a longer fitness test that was that tested your endurance a little bit more. And if you did that, they gave you some incentive.

You got some, you know, time added to your, you know, some extra PTO time to be able to take off and things like that. And a lot of agencies are moving now to incentivize the fitness test and being physically fit at that point. A lot of the promotions previously were not, that wasn't something that was weighed into the promotional process.

Now a lot of agencies are looking at it that way. I think I know why that one became a priority because the idea of paying a lot less premiums for insurance for people who were unhealthy or people who were healthy became very enticing to law enforcement agencies in general to be able to say, oh, well, this person here takes care of their self. So therefore, we don't have to spend as much money to take care of them. So that was probably why they really started pushing that.

The beauty for you as the officers, typically, they got to pay less themselves in order to insure themselves. So there's a lot of incentive for them to be better. And then the other piece being the mental health incorporation, that we're not 100% there. We talked about that a lot in our episodes, but we're getting to the point where they are doing better with trying to create processes and systems in place to address mental health issues so that cops aren't just killing themselves.

No, and again, I mean, we did a whole mini series on that. I am glad to see that as a trend that's happening.

But if it's all right with you, Mo, I am interested in trend number four, which is expanding opportunities for women in law enforcement. And I just want to say my piece, even though I am not a female, obviously. Well, maybe not, obviously, but I'm not. So a couple of things, questions about, because I think Babino brought this up. Law enforcement agencies have signed a pledge to have all recruiting classes to have at least 30% women by 2030. I have questions on that.

It also makes assumptions that women are typically named in fewer complaints and lawsuits, perceived by communities as being more honest and compassionate, see better outcomes for crime victims, especially in sexual assault cases, and then make fewer discretionary arrests, especially of non-white residents. I don't believe that part, but, you know, these are some things it brought up. But let's touch on number one. Well, I have no issue with having women in law

enforcement. But as Chris brought up, you're seeing no recruiting classes because they haven't hit this 30 percent. So you have this shortage and you're not filling it because you can't get enough email. Yeah. I don't think that is a good way. Obviously, we need law enforcement officers.

But I do think that trying to create a space where they can have more female officers in there, I don't think it's a bad thing, but I don't think it should be something where, you know, oh, well, if we don't have it, we're just going to stop the class. That's ridiculous. In my opinion, I didn't honestly, I didn't realize that that was actually a bad thing. occurring. I think that is a bit counterproductive in that respect.

Typically in law enforcement, the reality is, and I'm sure people know this, that there's a lot less females that do the job than there are men. When I looked at the article, statistically saying it said from 1970 until when this article was completed, which was in 2021, it was only up 3%. And that meant in the law enforcement world that 13% of the officers equal females. So I understand the idea of wanting to create the initiative to push that a little bit more.

I think that has to do with where you're doing the recruiting, how the recruiting is happening, et cetera, et cetera. And I think you got to look at things that way. But to think about not recruiting or not running a class where we're running as short as we are on law enforcement officers, because it's not, we haven't met that threshold of 30%. That seems absolutely ridiculous in my opinion. And I, yes, you are.

And this is actually something we might want to ask Meg, bring her back on, because I can only fucking imagine what it's like in some agencies or whatever, maybe in general, to be one or one or two females in a recruiting class, a platoon, a squad, whatever. And then also, there's all these things, right? You're a female, surrounded by a bunch of alpha or sigma males, whatever the new fucking terminology is. I have no idea. I don't either. I barely know what I'm saying. My kids make fun of me.

You know, either hitting on you or treating you as, Hey, I know you need help because you're, you know, you're a female or there are still, still that mentality where men, there's certain men that don't believe women should be in law enforcement at all. Having to deal with all that being hit on, I'm sure by a million dudes, whether it's cops or, or even just being out in the public because women in uniform, it's the whole thing.

Full thing. It's a whole fucking thing. But on top of that, you're still supposed to hold to the standards. Like you should be able to defend yourself shoot make a rest if you're my zone partner and you were.

And we got to rest two people i got this one you got that one that's just how it is you're still a fucking cop doesn't matter that you're a female or whatever that doesn't matter and so that's that's very it's something that obviously i have a hard time wrapping my head around because i'm not only am i i'm a dude i'm a bigger dude so a lot of those things just kind of, came naturally to me i guess and i didn't think about

it until somebody brought it up to me one day and i was like i never thought about it like i am not one of those guys i think again i think it takes a well just like i think it takes a certain type of man to be in law enforcement it takes a very specific type of woman to be in law enforcement meaning like i said there's been plenty of people there's been plenty of males and females that i wouldn't trust them to hold my fucking shoelace let alone

a gun next to me there's others that i would go to fucking war and would say, stand behind me, guns out, or whatever, side by side, whatever the fuck I'm trying to say, I would go to fucking war with them because I know that they can handle their shit. It's not a male-female thing. It's just a mentality. Yeah. I think that when you, anytime you attack something and just say, we just want to increase the numbers, it's going to be problematic. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about women.

It doesn't matter if you're talking about, you know, we want to increase the number of minorities that are in law enforcement because the reality is, is the average law enforcement officer is a white male. That's the reality. When you just attack that issue, though, with we want to increase the numbers, it's probably going to be in a detriment. I think we need to just think about the fact that we want to hire the competent individuals that meet the requirements to do the job.

If they are females, if they are Black, if they are whatever. That's great. Where you can increase getting a bigger pool of these not average looking officers is by your recruitment procedures. Go places where you're going to encounter individuals that would be interested in said job, you know, so that you're able to make the pool of applicants that are available to you a little bit deeper. And that's where I don't think it's always been, well, we recruit the same.

Where you recruit for the white males is probably going to be a little bit different than where you're going to recruit for minorities or where you're going to recruit for females. And that's what you need to attack versus putting a number and saying, we need to hit a 30% number. And if we don't, we don't run the class. Yeah. Well, let me just say this. It drives me fucking through the goddamn wall when, hey, we're rolling out this new recruitment initiative.

We're going to target college athletes. And everyone's like, shit. So is everyone else on the fucking planet, bro. That's like the number one target for all industries, not just law enforcement, military, sales, corporate law. Yeah, no shit. I've always proposed you should be looking at customer service.

People who deal with people on a regular fucking basis that have to talk to a multitude of human beings that are fucking rude as shit, nice as shit, and you have to deal with and interact with those people. And I also, yes, and I'm like, why are we not looking at those areas? It has never been done. I've never seen it. I would love to see, you know, Secret Service, Hillsborough County, Maine State Police. Bro, go to a fucking Starbucks. Let me tell you something. You want to deal

with a fucking asshole customer? Have someone who orders a half-calf, nonfat, quarter Splenda latte. You have to deal with that bitch on a daily basis. And that bitch means male or female in this regard because both of them do it. That takes a level of patience that most cops don't have. I'm reversing it. And if you're one of those assholes that orders that, make it at home, you son of a bitch. Can I get a decaf with a splash of caffeine, nonfat, quarter pack of Splenda? No, you cannot.

No, you can't. No, get the fuck out of here. Or this doesn't smell nonfat. What the fuck does nonfat smell like? Anywho, I'm just saying, there's a broader pool. That is great. Literally, before I became a cop, I worked at Capital One, and I was an account supervisor, and I took phone calls. Customer service, man. Way more money than they had since, and they would call at me and scream at me.

And what I learned from that job is I had such a limit of what I could grant them and learned how to, you want to talk about de-escalating and because we got dinged when they escalated past us. So that's an amazing pool of applicants that we probably look down on and don't think about the fact that I can train them to do the law enforcement stuff. They're coming equipped to deal with conflict resolution and problem solving and all these things like that.

And you want to talk about increasing your pool. There's a lot of females that do that job. Tons. So it goes back to what I just said. You've got to think about your recruitment strategies and not necessarily put a number on it. Now, it was interesting in the article, it talked about what are the reasons why they're looking to target females. And it specifically says they're highly regarded because of their skills with conflict resolution, problem solving, and cooperation with community members.

There have been studies, and I've read some myself as well, that show statistically speaking that women will spend more time having conversation with an individual before escalating to some type of deadly force or some type of use of force measure. It's funny because when I was reading this, this is a conversation that I've had with my brother on a lot of different occasions because he's an intellectual. He loves to debate and think about and talk about and question different things.

And he's always asked me, Monique, how do you believe that, you know, you see these officer-involved shootings, they in many times involve males and not so much females, whereas females have the ability to utilize the use of force before a male can in a lot of cases, but they seem to not do that. And this is not my words, so don't crucify me when you're listening to this.

This was my brother that questioned this as to why are we not thinking about that or figuring out what it is that women are doing on different calls versus men. My perspective, I think that as women and men, we communicate differently. And I think that women are much more comfortable with elongated conversations, whereas typically men are not. They are bullet point talkers. Men get to the point and once they've completed their point,

they are done talking. So I think that's where you might have a little bit of a difference when it comes to that. I think that is a good thing. But again, I think when we were talking about if you want to recruit more females and you want to maybe have these benefits spread throughout your agency, don't just, if you are going to, first of all, go where you can recruit them.

But once you've brought them in, think about putting them in positions, not just of authority, but putting them in positions of training, putting them in positions of teaching because it's not something that can't be taught. Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Just my opinion. No, no. And again, I kind of want to gloss over the see better outcomes for crimes, for crime victims.

I don't know. I need to see the actual, I don't know, because I think that's just the detective or whoever's working on that and then make fewer discretionary arrests. Again, I'd have to see some stats on that because it's not ringing in my ear or something true. I personally have not looked up stats about that. I have looked up some of the use of force and deadly force stats.

There is a discrepancy there. And it's not just a discrepancy because there's less females and they're doing it with a correlation type study so that it's not just that way. Those are things that I think when you talk about make fewer discretionary arrests and see better outcomes, I think that goes back to the communication thing that you're talking about. No. I don't know that there's something that you could do to show.

Almost disagree a little bit about the sexual assault cases because every sexual assault case I ever worked, they didn't want to talk to me. They wanted to talk to a male deputy. And I think the reasoning was is I didn't offer safety and security to them. You know, a male deputy offers safety and security when they're feeling incredibly vulnerable. So I don't know. I think that would be something that's hard to measure.

But I think some of the other things that are things that we can pinpoint and measure, again, we can use those as being able to move these people into positions that allow them to teach. I think that's a good idea as well. Yeah. I'm going to kind of, so I'm tabling this because this is something else we, and I could probably, you and I could do an episode on cybercrime. I could talk for days on that. So let's table that cybercrime is the thing. That'll be a future episode for anyone listening.

Yeah. Focus on please. Yeah. Well, that's absolutely true. So we could talk about the different types. I mean, 90% of my, anyway, that's 90% of the fed's job is this shit. I swear to God. And we can go into those. I think I'd like to do a deep dive on that. I could talk. So we could talk about a lot about that. For sure. I'll try to make it interesting. Most people don't give a shit about cybercrime. They go to a grand jury, they fall asleep. Yeah, they fall asleep.

They're bored. They don't give a shit. They're, you know, we could talk about that. Until they're a victim. Well, yeah. And then you're really, it's really focused. Trend number six was focus on police accountability. I think we get an idea of what that is.

You know, we already kind of touched on it. I just wanted to be respectful of time, but also this was an interesting one. a new generation of police leaders, because this could swing so many ways. Yeah. But let me get your perspective first, because this one hit me as something I hadn't really thought about. And now that I've read the article, I'm like, this could go, this could be really, really good, or it could swing into a really bad direction.

100%. And that's what, when I read it, that was, I was like, I don't know to be alarmed or be more comfortable. I don't know, because what it talked about is baby boomers are retiring. They're retiring from all industries. But when we're losing them in law enforcement, it's changing the way that leadership is being structured, really. We are combining the fact that we have low recruitment, low retention. Even when we are able to recruit people, we're not being able to keep them.

So now you have these vacancies in law enforcement, quite a few of them, and you have this new wave or the next gen police leaders that are coming to positions now. And they have a completely different way of leadership. Their leadership styles are completely different from what has... Typically been instituted in law enforcement. With law enforcement, we're a paramilitary organization. So it's typically, we give you commands, you do what you're told, et cetera, et cetera.

Not a lot of question and back and forth and that kind of thing. And that is effective. And I want to explain why, because in a high stress situation, I don't have time to explain to you why I need you to do something. I need you to just do it. And we can discuss it in the debrief after the situation and go over the whys, whens, hows, wheres, what could be done different. But if there's something going on, I need you just to react and do what I'm telling you to do.

So there's a lot of usefulness from a command style, paramilitary style leadership that we have. That doesn't mean because we have a command slash paramilitary that it eliminates conversation. It doesn't mean that it eliminates your ability to being able to make decisions. I think in all honesty, when I came on to law enforcement initially, I had way more latitude to make decisions and was given a wealth of trust to make decisions.

I didn't get questioned nearly as much as I did at the beginning of my career as I did towards the end of my career, because now I had to justify every single step of things that I did. Whereas when I first came there, a lot of the steps that I took were assumed and it was trusted that I took care of them. So now we are moving into a more inclusive style of leadership where we're wanting to enable the person to be able to think about what's going on and empower them to make decisions.

And instead of giving them so much of a directive, it's just think about maybe doing this and giving them time to mull it over. There are times, even in law enforcement, that is useful. But I wonder how that translates in those high stress situations that we've talked about in the past where we have a hostage. Holding eight people or however many people hostage, how does an inclusive and enabled and empowered leadership style incorporate when you're dealing with that type of situation?

I think it works great if you're talking about, this is what I got. I kind of don't really know if I should make an arrest or shouldn't. Can we talk about the law that I'm looking at? That's a great idea, but I don't think that it can be, you can't have one or the other, in my opinion. I think you have to incorporate both of those styles.

And I'm worried that if we are moving with the next-gen leaders, if they are understanding the command style of leadership and the benefits that come along with that, where does that lead us? Because the article referenced that we're moving to that style of leadership rather than just a simply command style. I don't think we ever really were a simply command style. I think there was less tolerance for why at a certain point.

And I think that that is what we might be moving away from, or I would hope. But that would be my reservation. I'm like, are we going to be able to see both sides of the coin? Yeah. So some of the stuff I told, like I've talked to my son about is, You know, there's a time and place to talk to your command and question or ask or try to learn. That time is not when shit's hitting the fan or let's put it in law enforcement term, when bullets are flying or you have a barricaded subject or you're on

a crime scene. That's not the time to sit there and go, but why? But why? Well, can you show me? No, you just fucking do it. And then you learn on the debrief. Now, before any of that, and again. Reverend Shiro, when it was downtime or quiet or shit was done, whatever, he would teach us things and have us think and run us through scenarios. And he was, because we were on the learning squad, the FTL squad, we were being trained by FTL.

And he would take, so that's what I would say is more the inclusive side. But more to your point, you can't just have one type of command structure. And what I'm hearing from agencies all over the country is the newer generation are less willing to just basically take what they're saying and do it.

They have to research it they have to google it or whatever they have to well what about this case law or this case i was like motherfucker like we're just trying to get through the day and you're sitting here harassing me about case law from 35 years ago or whatever on top of that kind of what you were talking about something else that's you know people are now growing up where they're not they're not they're not talking to their friends face to face it's all via

chat skype whatever snapchat whatever the fuck it is and so the ability to communicate with somebody face-to-face and then not only do that but also communicate with somebody who's either being hostile emotional or deceptive those individuals don't have the skill set to to differentiate what's going on well he said he didn't do it he's lying to you you son of a like what are you crazy like what's wrong with you well that's what he said bro look at his body language

his faith like what the fuck is going like but see those things aren't being done it's like a it's a social thing that's not really being harnessed because it's such a digitized, you know. World that these, they're growing up. Yeah. That's a hundred percent. It's interesting. And then you make that person, the leader or a chief or a suit, whatever. Right. Right. That's an interesting thing. I'm telling you, I haven't fully flushed

that thought process out, but it just hit me. I was like, Ooh, that's a good idea. That is an interesting problem. It makes me a little nervous because I wonder, the individuals that are being trained, are they picking up the life skills that I feel like are necessary to be a leader in law enforcement? And there are definite skills that are necessary. Now, when we were in law enforcement, I think there were always some supervisors that you would look at and go,

oh, God, that guy's a supervisor or that girl's a supervisor. That's ridiculous. But on a whole, you knew that there was a balance. And I worry if this is going to take it out of balance now because we have so many people that are questioning. But why are we doing this? But why? And I think that a lot of times it can lead to paralysis when it comes to decision making. They get to a point where they're just in research mode all the time to the point where they can't make a decision.

And that can be problematic. I, you know, down to the very basic level, when I would train people, I tell them, this individual, if you know that person has to be put in jail, you have a limited amount of time to make that decision before they start making a plan. And if you don't make that decision quick enough before they start making a plan, they're going to execute their plan. Their plan could be to run away. Their plan could be to fight you.

Their plan could be whatever. But if you get paralyzed at the ability to be able to make a decision because you need to know every single why instead of being able to look at the totality of the circumstances, that becomes problematic. And now you put that person in a command position, and I think you end up with someone who will always have to call somebody else before they can actually execute or act.

And that's a problem because if there's no confidence from an upper level, the lower levels will not be confident either. Yeah. And the other thing is law enforcement can be very cerebral, right? There's a lot you got to learn. You got to police reports, you know, you talk to people, all the things that we've been talking about, you know, on this podcast. But at the end of the day, sometimes you just got to get grimy and sometimes it's time to go hands on.

And guess what? All your cerebral thoughts, feelings, theories go out the window because now you got to take this person who doesn't want to go to jail and put them in handcuffs. So you got to be able to, like you said, that switch has to go off where it's like, we're done talking. This is happening. Put your hands behind your back. And if you don't, I'm going to make you.

That's still part of law enforcement that doesn't really get talked about. No. And I say that from the perspective of what I think both of us and BJ and some of the people we've had on our podcast, they are all very intellectual people. We are all interested in knowing the why and understanding the intricacies and doing deeper dives. But like you said earlier, there's a time and a place for deeper dives and there's a time where we've got to execute.

I, this part of the article, I was, I was a little taken aback a little bit about because it talked about how first century police leaders are because they're moving into this more enabled and empowered approach that they are including things like analytical and problem solving skills, the ability to critically and critically think and resolve conflict. Understanding public safety law, awareness of budgets and being fiscally responsible and all those things like that.

And I don't think, having been in law enforcement for a very long time, that these were ever things that did not get incorporated in my thought process. But even with them being incorporated, there were times, like you said, where we're done talking, we're done thinking about these things, and now it's time to get the handcuffs on. Yeah. Somebody's got to go to jail. This is what's happening. Somebody's got to.

Like, even the hostage situation that Frank was talking about, like, 10 hours, all that. I mean, it ended up ending, but it ended in a very brutal and violent way. Right. Again, you know what, maybe we should talk about that at some point, but we talk about the fitness and the mental health and the knowledge and the training and the experience. Law enforcement can be extraordinarily violent and brutal.

And that's why you need law enforcement. And when you see that shit in the media, again, all the technology, all the facial recognition, all the drones, all the therapy, all that that you could ever, you could have all of it. At the end of the day, there are bad people that do bad shit. If you need cops that have a gun and a badge, they go in and they fucking put that bad person away, meaning arrest them or mitigate the threat.

However you want to phrase it. It takes a certain type of person to do that part. And it gets left out of a lot of conversation. It does, because it's ugly. It is very ugly. So that was the trend that the article covered. I felt like we had to bullet point them all today. And we kind of talked about some of them in a little more detail.

But I thought these are things that we could probably circle back and do some either full episodes or do half episodes on and talk about them with a little more detail and research and things like that. And maybe get some other individuals that could share their perspectives. I'm open if you disagree with what I'm saying. I'm open to hear why and to hear your side of the story as well. No, absolutely. Boom. Music.