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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
Battleground LIVE: The Science of Life and Death Decision Making | MICHAEL MUSENGO
01:44:59
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- [00:03]
A
Warning. You're about to enter the arena and join the battle to save America with your host, Sean Parnell.
- [00:20]
B
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Battleground Podcast. I have an amazing guest today. His name is Mike Buzingo. He's the director of Force Science Institute. Mike is the real deal. Spent 25 years in law enforcement and on SWAT, and one of my buddies, a guy that we had on this program earlier a few months ago, and somebody that I served with in Afghanistan, has nothing but amazing things to say about Mike, and he's like, you got to get him on the podcast. This guy is. We talk about the evolution of SWAT teams and tactics. This is the guy to talk to. He's nationally renowned. Mike, I am so excited to have you here today. Thank you for making time with us, and welcome to the podcast.
- [01:05]
A
I appreciate. I really been looking forward to this, Sean, so thank you so much. First out of the gate, thank you for what you do. God bless your brother and thank you for your service. Thank you for keeping my buddy alive over there. I got a chance to meet him and then work with him and. And really find some great work for him, hopefully that he enjoyed in Syracuse while I was there. So.
- [01:27]
B
He's a little rough around the edges, though, isn't he? He's a little rough around the edges.
- [01:30]
A
In a good way, though. In a good way. So if you don't mind, I just jump right into a story that you may not remember this, but we corresponded before a while ago.
- [01:40]
B
I remember.
- [01:41]
A
Do you?
- [01:42]
B
I do, yes.
- [01:43]
A
Yeah. Because it was a long time ago, and I was just doing background checks, and Chris was, you know, going through the process, doing his application to get on the team, and, you know, I didn't know him from anything but the academy, and it was just kind of funny. It's like people that you meet, you don't know their backgrounds when they're coming into this, you know, profession, because you're just used to these young kids coming in that, you know, they got great hearts and they really want to do their job. And God bless them for wanting to go out and take on this. This, you know, it's sometimes very thankless job, but every once in a while, I get someone who's kind of got this weird chip on your shoulder. And the culture of law enforcement and traditionalism is like, who's this guy think he is? Right? He never said anything. I mean, he knew how to play the game, right? But he had this aura. I'm like, what is this guy's deal? And he was just quiet and Humble. It's just the way he was. And he wasn't going to let you in and let you know anything about him until you figured it out on your own. So, you know, he was coming on swat, and then I remember, I think I messaged you on, like, Facebook messenger or something like that, back before there was a messenger. I'm like, hey, looking for some background on this? And you were like, I will drive to Syracuse to go to the mat for this guy right now. That's how good of a guy you're getting. I was like, okay, enough said. Thank you.
- [03:00]
B
So I was a little bit worried. I was a little bit worried, Mike, because the first time I met him as a young officer, he punched me as hard as. As hard as he could in my solar plexus. So I wasn't sure that he was. I wasn't sure that he was going to thrive in. And interviewing. Interviewing, like with. With leadership in police departments. You know, frankly, I was a little bit afraid because, I mean, not afraid. I mean, Chris, I. He is like, just the best. I just love that guy. But, you know, when you're in the army, and especially in what we were doing in the infantry, you're really the sword. And it. Even though law enforcement in the. In the army are kind of similar, it seems like you have more of a shield role, maybe not on the swat, on the SWAT team, but the missions just seem a little bit different, you know?
- [03:50]
A
Yeah, for sure, it is. It's. Yeah, it's different. I would just say it's different. Your mission. It can be very confusing on what it is that you're supposed to do most of the time. Takes a while to get used to that, especially that transition from, this is what we need to do. Here we go. You know, what does Jocko say? Prioritize and execute. This is what it is. Here's the job task. It's very clear, and I'm sure in military, and I don't have that experience, that it isn't. Once you get out there, it isn't always clear. But in law enforcement, the expectations from, you know, society, what they expect from you, what your administration, what your expectations about the job are, you'll question whether you were cut out for it, that that's normal. And then, you know, what it does to your home life, how it changes you as far as your priorities and how much you're willing to give of your life into this career. Because it isn't just a job, it isn't just a career. And much like the military, you Never leave it. It's in your blood, it's in your mind, and it becomes part of you until the day you die. So it's a much different, I would say, you know, work environment, right?
- [04:58]
B
Well, yeah. Well, take. Take me back to the beginning for you, Mike. What all of those things that you just talked about, how you're. What the administration expects of you, what the people that you're serving and protecting expect of you, how it affects your family. How did you decide to walk this path early on?
- [05:19]
A
You know, I go back, Sean, and I think about it and you know, after not recruiting, but being part of that process for years, we're bringing young folks in and, you know, trying to show them these are. I want to make these expectations of what this job are very, very clear as early as possible. Because there's a dissonance there, I think, between folks that this is what I think being a police officer is about, and this is what it's really about. And if those things are distant, It's a long 20 years plus. Right. Or they just have to turn around and try to find something else to do. My heart and soul was not into law enforcement when I was young, when I went to college, it was afterwards. I honestly searched my brain and tried to figure out what it was that put me into this direction. And the best I can come up with is kind of almost hokey, but I had a problem with bullies growing up, didn't like them. Wasn't afraid to go at him, even if get my butt kicked, which it did most of the time. I didn't win many, but I didn't. I wasn't afraid to go after him. And, you know, it sounds cheesy a little bit, but I'm trying to think that there was really part of me growing up as if I, you know, it was just an old school mentality. I grew up Italian, Irish, old school, traditional. My parents, the way they raised me is, you know, you stand up for yourself, stand up for others, and, you know, if somebody's picking on you, you stand up for yourself. If someone's picking on someone else, it's your job to stick up for them if they won't. And I just think that maybe that was some of that underlying feeling that I had that made it very natural for me to go in, into this career. Then as I went into it, understanding that it was a higher calling then, you know, I actually realized when I first started, when you get the feeling of what this job actually entails, there's something called priority of life that we talk about. I helped teach that when I was in the, you know, teaching in the academy and helping with new recruits. And I remember listening to that. And that made a lot of sense to me when they talked about priority life. A lot of citizens don't know this when we teach this in our civilian academy. And that's basically where officers need to know when they say, when they take the oath to say, I will do this job, they realize what the priority of life is. And it's like they kind of have like this hierarchy of, you know, there's hostages and innocent people, civilians, and it kind of breaks down. And just before it's the subject that's trying to kill you, that's where you lie. That's right there. And everybody else is stacked up above that, which means you don't get to decide what you're going to do as far as risking your life based on whether you can't put value on human life. In other words, you can't put value on human. You may have to run into gunfire knowing that the person that you're running into gunfire for is the person that was in the backseat of your car yesterday under arrest, threatening to rape your family and spitting on the back of your head. And a lot of times officers don't realize that until they get into the academy. We tell them that, no, it's one of those, yeah, this is what this really means. This is the nobility of policing. To me, it means that no matter what I've dealt with this person in the path tomorrow, I may need to risk my life for, and I'm going to do it. It doesn't mean I'm going to walk like a lamb into slaughter. By no means. But I might have to fight for my life for this person at this moment in time. And to me, that's one of those things that I don't know what about that attracted me to that, But I felt like if you live your life this way, willing to sacrifice for someone that maybe even hates you, what could be more noble than that, right? That sounds pretty cool to me. I mean, anybody can do it for someone you love. I mean, we'd all run into a burning building for our kids, right? Who wouldn't? But would you do it for someone that despises you? If they're in need, yeah, that's what you need. Every officer out there needs to be able to say yes without hesitation.
- [09:11]
B
It certainly sounds like those experiences as a kid, you know, when you were bullied, shaped part of who you became and the kind of person that you wanted to be. Especially when you talk about the way that your parents raised me and my parents raised me very similar way. Stand up for yourself. And if you see somebody else that can't stand up for themselves, you have to get involved and do something about it. Don't just stand and watch. And that's something to me. I, as I, you see, you know, you see these Internet videos that come out of like these fights on trains or in the streets or, you know, in schools and you know, you got one kid getting jumped by four or five others and like a hundred kids standing around just filming with their phones. There's something that's deeply disturbing about that beyond just the actual, you know, fight that is clearly heavily weighted in one direction. If you've got four or five kids ganging up on one. And what about our society is missing? What you just said today, I don't mean to just jump right into what is a very difficult question, but there's clearly something in the. I don't know if it's something that can be applied to the entire next generation. That's not what I'm saying. But there's clearly something. When you see, you know, just people more content to film than to actually serve and protect and do good things for other people, it's a little bit nerve wracking as to what kind of world that our children will inherit.
- [10:37]
A
It is frustrating, it's scary. I always, I mean, try to bring myself peace of mind. It's just like working in the areas of the city that are, you know, very poverty stricken. And it seems like we're always dealing with a lot of the same folks, right, that are breaking laws and causing issues in the neighborhood. What people don't see are what I call, you know, the silent masses that are out there. There are so many good people in these areas that I've worked that are so riddled with crime and poverty. They're quiet, they keep the doors closed, they don't want it, and they mind their business. They go to work, they do their thing. And I think that's, that's something that's out there. The ones that we notice are the ones that hit on social media and those are just those things that pop up. I still think the majority of people out there are willing to do good things and do right when, when the time calls. I also think that people do tend to mind their business an awful lot and not, you know, maybe so much risk it because of, you know, prosecution, ridicule, everything else. It's just, what is the risk, what is the gain? But I have to believe in my heart, Sean, that there's still the majority of Americans out there when, when called upon, will do the right thing.
- [11:54]
B
It's just, God, that, that's so good to hear.
- [11:57]
A
Yeah. I mean, I have to, I have to believe that I look around my neighborhood and you know, all the folks that, that I meet when, in my travels across the nation, training and most of the people I meet, they're just quiet, they're not making noise, they're not all over social media. I go to different towns, I go into, you know, whatever planet fitness or gym I could find and there's tons of Americans in there and they're fit and they're pumping weights. But the most of the people that really make me negative is when I see, you know, the overweight 25, 30 year old dad flip flopping through the airport and it's like, why does that one person stick out? When I go here, I'm seeing hundreds of people, people that are out there grinding every day and they're still. So my point is, I think there's still a lot of great Americans are out there. They're just quiet and they mind their business most of the time. It's just like everything else on social media, we always see the negative things that pop up and that's, that seems to predominate our, our concern and, and rightly so, because we see that and it does raise concern about what's going on with, you know, with America, with young Americans now. Nobody wants to do this. I, you know, I do, I do get depressed that they're in this, you know, 45 degree, you know, selective attention down here all the time. I think we need to all do something about that. I find myself doing it as well. Not outside of that, but other than the intentional deficit, I still think that most Americans out there are still willing to do the good and do the right thing in the face of.
- [13:20]
B
I appreciate, I appreciate that answer, you know, and because I think the human mind does have, you know, does tend to focus on the negative at the expense of the positive. You could see, you know, 10 great things during the day and one negative. And all of a sudden like you're thinking, oh, I had a crap day because of this one negative thing that I saw. And I guess when you're a police officer, you know, I try to put myself in your shoes. You're a young, you know, you're a rookie cop and you talk about the effect on the Family and the stressors that it has on your life. I got to believe that you see lots of negative, but it sounds like you also see a lot of positive things too. And I think it's great to have that perspective that, hey, there's not as much negativity in the world as, you know, that we see on social media. There are lots of good people in this community. And that's precisely the kind of attitude that, that I think, you know, I think is perfect for law enforcement.
- [14:19]
A
It's. Well, it's not as easy for cops, I will say that, because it is. I mean, like average folks and all that what you're being sent to every day is different. But I'll say this much. Depending on where you work and the jurisdiction, the city and all that, what type of things that you're facing every day. I think one of the biggest challenges to law enforcement mental health isn't they usually aren't the officer involved shooting that you got involved in. Okay, Those, those occur. They can occur and you have to deal with them. Whether, depending on the circumstances around it, it can be very challenging for you and your family. I've been through it a couple of times. The hardest thing that like really gets at you, it's not the, it's not the big giant blow to the chest. It's the death by a thousand cuts, right? It's that every day, negative contacts, negative contacts over and over and over again. Most of the people when we show up, they really don't want to see us, right? They spit on the ground. When you drive down the street in the middle of day where I work, you'll look. If you look out your window and watch people walking, you'll see people constantly just spitting on the ground as you drive by. If you let that bother you, it'll drive you crazy. Just remember that's a small percentage of the people that are doing that. So you have to have faith and you have to believe that most people really do appreciate you being there. And whether they do or whether they don't, Sean, you understand what you need to do for the community. They don't need to like you for doing it, and you don't need to get their appreciation. It's one of those things like the pat's on the back or something like that. It's like, they're great. And I'm sure you get this with military too. It's like, I started off, thank you for your service. It's good, but, you know, you don't need it. You know, why you did what you did. We know why we do what we do, and it isn't for appreciation. I don't need to pull over a car and give them Christmas presents to make somebody feel good about what law enforcement does. We already do that when we run into gunfire. So. And, you know, that's. That's one. That's just one example. But we also do it every day when we're calming domestics and we're spending extra time when we're ordering Happy Meals for kids and changing diapers because they haven't been done in a long time. There's a lot of tasks that you do because it's the right thing to do in the moment. And this job, like I say, what this job does, it provides every cop the opportunities to go out and go out forthright and do good things over and over again, even through, you know, all the criticism that you're going to get before that one error that you made or that one miss, you know, calculation in time or reaction time or something like that. All of the great things that you've done, you're there for a reason, and you know it.
- [16:56]
B
So, man, Mike, there's a lot of wisdom in the stuff that you're saying. Was there a moment when you were just a cop coming up where all of this stuff sort of hit home? I mean, surely you didn't walk into the profession with knowing all the stuff that you do? So was there a time and a place where it just. Everything was brought into perspective for you when those two worlds about, like, why you do what you do? How do you describe it? You know, you don't want those two things about why you're joining to be a cop and the reality of being a cop to be too far apart for 20 years. I mean, when did that. When did those two things come together for you?
- [17:32]
A
I guess I think for me and for a lot of cops, at least, you know, I got into it for. I enjoyed the excitement of it. I enjoyed being cast into these situations that normal people you may experience once or twice in a lifetime. You get a lifetime of experiences in one year in this job, depending on if you're working in, you know, an urban environment where there's a lot of calls, you know, 20 calls backed up on a Wednesday in February. You know, there's some jurisdictions where it's like, you're not called that much and, hey, great, God bless you. And that's where it's supposed to be, right? Yeah, but I think, like, the. The excitement of it and all the Novelty and getting to getting engaged with all these people from different languages and different cultures that I had from growing up. I really was just open minded and excited to, to go to work every day. I remember as a young cop like getting dressed my uniform and I remember getting everything tight and you know, my, my gigs tight and straight and everything. And I'm like looking at it and I'm like, I can't wait to go in tonight. Ready? Yeah. We got stuff to do. It's like, come on. And you know, I'm like talking to myself like can you believe you get paid to do this? You know, and it's awesome. And then it becomes work after a while. Especially when you know the overtime is there. And that's great because you want to buy the boat and whatever it is, but all of a sudden I got to pay for the boat. And then there's ordered overtime that you don't even want anymore. And the kids come. So there's stressors that go along with it. The change with it going from this is really exciting work to I want a deeper understanding of this job and what this means not just for me but for my cops and everyone else is. I think Sean is when I became a trainer, when I became a trainer, that's when I had the big, you know, aha moment. The, the gong went off, right? And I really love training. I, I loved not just tr. I love training myself. Like I loved going out and training. That's why I loved SWAT. 27 years on SWAT. I loved going out and working all the tools and whatever it was, tactics. I'm just a real fan of just learning more about tactics and changing and not getting hung up on any technique or any tool and just always learning and growing. But when it really hit me what the important thing was, I was responsible for all the firearms training in our department and the day I took that on as a full time instructor is in charge of that. I was so excited to get that full time training job finally. And then I remember sitting down and it felt like a lead just landed right on my shoulder. And I realized, you know Mike, when blood hits the floor, and it will, it always does. You're going to have to carry this no matter what you're doing. You're teaching all of this stuff with use of force and firearms and all these things. It's on your shoulders. And you get everyone in this department for two days a year. I get one day in the spring and one day in the fall to build some training. Rosetta Stone to pass off to them to say, this is going to carry you through and keep you alive on the street for the next six months. It would take me 52 days to get everyone in the department through one day of spring training. Same thing in the fall. So I've got someone for eight hours on the range, which means about five and a half hours with lunch and cleaning all that. I've got five and a half hours to impact this person's life with this tool and their ability to run this tool in an environment that they are completely unfamiliar with, which is their gunfight, as opposed to a range with paper targets and a distance and a line and a whistle or whatever it is. Right? And I have to do this. And it hit me really hard that if you don't do your very, very best and research and get the most information that you can to build and create this five and a half hour golden nugget for them, when blood hits the floor, you're going to carry that for the rest of your life. Now, I know that it's not enough time. I know I need more. We lean on those walls really hard. But it doesn't mean I throw in the towel and just go, hey, let's go out and qualify and shoot. And I know you guys don't like this. It's raining today and it really, you know, we'll cut the day short because it's Friday. No way. You could not. You had to bring it every single day, the same energy. And if one thing, if you ask Chris about is when I was training, you come out on a Monday on day one or a Friday on the 52nd day. I never had. You couldn't tell the difference in the energy level and enthusiasm of what we were doing and what we were training. It had to be there because it was selfish of me because I didn't want to carry that around with me for the rest of my life. But again, it was what you had to do. And that was, to me, kind of going from that, you know, the player to the mentor mindset and where I started really taking this stuff really serious when I took over the academy. And now I'm responsible for turning civilians into police officers. Then it took on a whole nother level because now we're looking at the full scope of, I'm a young kid, I really want to do this job. I want to dedicate my life to law enforcement. And I have to provide them with this induction. You know, 29 weeks, I think we were up to when I was there of training. That's going to prepare them to get out into this world. And that was an amazing, exciting challenge that again, I stopped looking at how we used to do things. We always done them that way. The Einstein lung effect, right? Because someone before me told me that was the right way to do it, because it worked for me, because I thought it was the best way to do it. And it worked in this one situation and. And started going back to the books and really studying the science of how we learn, not just cognitive skills, but psychomotor skills. And there's a lot of things that we know in science and research on pedagogy and psychomotor skills that is very counterintuitive to how we think we learn. And that's when I started taking this job, this career, really serious, as a clinical profession, as opposed to just going in and punching in, you know, eight to four and out the door. And that's. That's not the way I took it.
- [23:30]
B
Man. How did you get. How did you get selected to. To teach? Because, man, this stuff that you're saying, I got to tell you, there are moments in my life where I just know at the core of who I am that I'm on the right path for. For me, whatever path I was meant to walk, I know when I'm on it, and I know when I'm off it. This sounds like what you were meant to do, like what you. What you were born to do. So when you were selected to train, did you stumble into it? Because, I mean, I don't know how it works for cops, because for sure you have to say you wanted it.
- [24:10]
A
Yeah, I think I gotta. I gotta put it on SWAT for that. So a lot of guys that ended up in SWAT were the ones that kind of, like, made this job their life. So. And it's not, you know, when I say swat, there's a lot of people out there like, oh, yeah, I get it. Knuckle draggers and all that. Like, cool, I'm a knuckle dragger. I'm a knuckle dragger nerd. And. Or as Dr. Lewinsky calls me, a warrior psychologist. Mike, it sounds much nicer. I go, yeah, I tuck the cops. It's a knuckle dragger nerd. So I started off just doing the stuff, right? Learning the tactics, learning the techniques, testing them, doubting them, questioning them, all the tools, you know, whatever weapon systems that we were using to the point where people are looking at you going, hey, man, you're really good at that. Do you want to teach it? So in law enforcement, this is how you usually become a trainer. You find yourself through usually your own time and your own work, something that you really love to do, whether it's grappling or shooting or communication skill, whatever it is, you're doing it on your own time and you get good at it, just like you're learning an instrument or something. So for me, it was mostly guns and tactics. You get good at a domain and then eventually when you're on for, you have a window, you're too young, you're too young, shut up and go away. Then there's a short window where you're viable and then it's really short sometimes. And then you're too old, you're too old. We can't send you the schools you're going to retire in eight years or something. So you've got that window in there if you're lucky. And which I was, you know, on the instructors that, you know, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. My, my buddy Tommy Rathbone, who was running firearms before that, and he pulled me in kind of early and like, yeah, kid, you got some skills here with this. You know, do you want to be an instructor? And that's where, that's where I jump in with my, my real issue with how we do this in law enforcement, and I'm speaking traditionally across, you know, systemically across the nation, some are a lot worse, some are better. And there's pockets of places I hear about every day that are doing some fantastic things. But generally speaking, generally speaking, you get really good at a domain. Somebody taps you on the shoulder or you're banging on the door saying, I want to become an instructor. And then they pull you in. And where the issue is, is when you go from somebody that does something well to become an instructor, there's very little, you know, training there for that. There's mandated training, there's an instructor development course which, where I am in New York, it's two weeks. That's probably the longest there is in the nation. So good on, good on New York DCJS for that. But still that's 80 hours. Most places it's a 40 hour course which is focused on, this is how you build a PowerPoint presentation. This is how you do it. Maybe there's a teach back of 5 minute teach back or a 10 minute. Ours was 40 minutes. Oh my God, what am I going to Talk about for 40 minutes in front of a panel of people that are going to evaluate me? I get eight hours a day to talk now And I'm like, I can't fit enough stuff into this. Eight hours, right? But that's really it. You know, you'll get that course of instructor development and then you'll usually go to like a firearms instructor course, which again, depending on what you're sent to, whether it's the FBI course or a lot of other courses out there. But again, I've been to these courses and I'm not knocking the folks that are putting these on at all. I don't mean it. We're all fighting the same bear, if you will. But what you end up doing is more of the same craft. You end up shooting. Like in a firearms instructor course. You'll shoot for 90% of the course and then you'll call one line. There's really no instruction there. There's no information and material for you to deep dive on, to go into. How do human beings actually learn? How do we learn psychomotor skills? Which means the acquisition phase, the retention stage, the recall, which is memory, and then the transfer, which is, we need to get. Is transferring what we're learning in the training environment into real context. We already have a bigger challenge with that in law enforcement and military, because real context, because they like to parallel this with sports. So in football and in baseball, well, there's rules to these games and everything's set within a certain amount of variability within those games. So you can practice for the games and play the game. The issue is with law enforcement and military, we need even more of that gameplay because anything can happen. It's such scale environment out there. We can't, you know, we can't replicate every situation that you might get into. That's when you have to fall back and look at like leoka. What are the distances, you know, when we're talking about dynamic critical situations, what are the distances that we're getting in fights? What's going on with the type of weapons used? What's you're looking at now are archetypical gunfights. At least if we have only this much training time, should we be focused on that? Plus a needs assessment that I've done on my own agency to see what's going on there. Because maybe what's going on in Leoka with all the data that comes out of that, with law enforcement officers killed and assaulted, maybe that isn't reflective of your particular agency. Is anyone doing a needs assessment based on that? What do they look like? For us, it was around vehicles and doorways. What is your training like? Do you have vehicles and Doorways. A lot of times it was no, we have paper and arrange or we have a mat room. So it can get, you know, I'm kind of going down a rabbit hole here with Alice. But it gets, it gets very complex on how you can at least, you know, going back to understanding that most instructors will go through a five day instructor development course, maybe a five day further developing their own skills they're already good at, and then that's it. You're an instructor, you've got certificates, you're certified and off you go. Now, if you're within a larger agency or mid sized agency, agency like me, you can become a full time instructor and maybe you have time to dive into your own craft. But most of the cops out there come from smaller agencies. I mean there's great, huge departments out there, but most cops are part of smaller agencies like I worked at Salva and Camillus. These small, you know, 15 people, 20 people on there, on the, on the department. And your, your firearms instructor, you're grappling and all. Your instructor, that may be one person, it may be two people. And every day they're out pushing a car, taking calls all day. And then once a year or twice a year, it's like, hey, let's go to the range. It's time to qualify again. And that's the extent of what you get for training. And not again, I'm not blaming it on the trainers. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to gut, I understand the challenges there. But when we talk about the culture of law enforcement, if we really want to make some changes in training, it needs to be done not just in time and money and budgets, of course that's there, but it's in developing the trainers that are there, they want to do the job. And unless they're gone bananas like me and give up pretty much 90% of your home life to sit with a stack of books that I've got over here and over here and study every day to try to get better at this. It's not being provided in any type of formal, structured way within the agencies.
- [31:06]
B
Well, I have to say, I mean, there was a moment, I want to ask you a question about this, but there was a moment for me as a, as a young platoon leader where find myself, because you're right, there's a million and one scenarios that that could be thrown at you. You do the best that you can for, train to train for each and every one you try to train for, especially things that, that you for the unknown. But, you know, you get. For me in Afghanistan, anyway, there was a moment where I arrived, and I'm like, holy shit. These. These. There are people out there that are trying to kill me. Like, dead. They want me dead. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that, thinking, like, they don't even know who I am, but they want to kill me. Was there a moment for you as a young officer on the street? Like, this is. This is like, maybe before you were on swat or maybe it was even after you were on SWAT where you thought like. Like, holy shit, this is for real. And, you know, looking back at some of the old ttps that we have, like, are we doing the best that we can with these ttps? Do they need to evolve? But was there a moment where you're like, holy shit, this is for real. I could die doing this.
- [32:11]
A
Yeah. It was more, I think, seeing the reality of what was occurring to victims. I think that was it for me, at least in law enforcement, because it wasn't that people are always trying to kill us every day. But, you know, it's the fire holding the dead baby in your arms that, you know, was there something I could have done more? There's those always feelings that could. I got here quicker, Could I done something better? As far as those oh, my God moments. With training, I realized that there were holes in what we were learning and then what we were using on the street, it was entirely different what I was using and what I was seeing from other officers, our DT instructors that did. And most of the times when we're talking about the dangerous stuff, it's the tussles in the street. It's the street fights. We do that an awful lot. We don't get in a lot of shootings, thank God, but they do happen. It's the everyday things like that. You worry about actually dying from the beating. And what I've seen on the street is I went through our DT program just like everyone else, and the instructors were very skilled in what they do, but the amount of time we spent in the mat room doing whatever techniques they were showing us with handcuffs and takedowns and all that, I grew up. I was a. I was a hockey player and a wrestler. Now, I never jerseyed anybody on the street, but as soon as I got on the street and things started getting into fights, I intuitively went back to single leg, double legs. And the things that I knew from. From wrestling and the people that didn't have that, it was a real mess on the street when it Came to physicality. So it was the techniques that we were learning in the mat room were not transferring out there into the real world. So that was. That was one of those things like, look, this is real out here, and people will hurt you. They will hurt you very bad. And I've had friends that were hurt, you know, real bad doing this job. We've all got broken bones and broken noses and all that, but that comes with the job.
- [34:03]
B
You know, I've seen some. Some pretty terrible stuff, but it's hard for me to imagine, like, I don't think it's hard for me to imagine, like, jumping a cop, you know, I can't even imagine never doing something like that. But heard stories from Chris and from people like you or. It happens a lot, especially in. In tough areas. When can you walk me through a situation where something like that would happen to somebody, to a police officer? How does it happen? You know, because you hear. We hear every day, you know, over the last, certainly 18 months of cops getting hurt badly or sometimes even killed on the job, and some. And sometimes it's not from shooting. So it has to be, you know, it got to be from other things. So I don't. How can you walk me through a scenario where you'd be in close quarters with somebody where you'd find yourself on the ground? And when you. When you're on the ground, like, what do you do? What are the tactics, techniques, and procedures that you use to survive that get out of it, you know, flip the script?
- [35:08]
A
I would say the most. What I try to teach, and the most important thing, like, going forward, then I kind of walk you through something is. I'll put it this way. I was a big how to guy. I call them clickety clacks. I thought it was really important for us to learn how to work our tools really well. And it's the same thing for grappling. Know your techniques, know your stuff. Your click clacks. Clickety clacks. Really well, if I can. I always believe that because I could draw my gun on my holster and get a round out in under a second. I did this all the time. And it's like, I'm the good guys. I can do this quicker than anybody that I know. If it comes down to it, I'm gonna win. And I think that having cognitive dissonance between what a real gunfight looks. And they're different, right? I've been in a couple. They were entirely different. And then your abilities, it's. It's this, it's this thinking that what I can do on the range or in this closed skill environment is going to transfer into this open skill. The biggest issues that law enforcement, I believe, has when it comes to these, you know, use of force, whether it's lethal or just hands on, is that those situations that occur that we don't see coming. What comes with experience and tacit knowledge, Our ability to know what, where, when and how to look for information. The one thing, there's three big things I love to teach when I teach, my goal now isn't clickety clacks or how to do techniques or how to run your gun or anything. Those are important, don't get me wrong 100%. But it's knowing what, where, when and how to look for information. An experienced person in any domain, when it comes to action reaction, psychomotor skills, whether it's driving, a medical doctor, a surgeon, they know where and when to look for information. They have salient, very good external focus on what it is that's important. What am I looking for? Because that has meaning based on my experience, my tacit knowledge about what I need to do next or my expectations of what might occur. So seeing that punch coming, I always tell people, and I don't mean this jokingly, and I'm not proud of it, but what prepared me for those ambush attacks more than anything else and oh God, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but I'm throwing it out there, Sean. I spent in my later teens and early twenties, me and a couple of my buddies, we went through this period of our time in our life with our favorite thing to do was to go to the. This is before I was a cop. You know, I was young, just growing up. Drinking age was like 18 back then. And we'd go to bars and we get in bar fights. We used to get in brawls all the time. We were arrested, we went out and, you know, it wasn't like we didn't pick on people. It was like we found like characters there that gave each other the not or somebody giving you the old bump. And then here comes the. Here comes the shot out of nowhere, right? The sucker punch. And it got so in tune for looking for these sucker punches all the time that I believe and I've got pretty good science will back this up. Now when we look about context cues and schemas and what that all is built upon through our experiences is that I dealing with subjects or suspects now. And I can get a feeling that's really hard to articulate. It's hard to put down on a report that I had the feeling like this is going south right now. And I. And the thing is, sometimes all it means is I need to adjust. It doesn't mean that I just go ahead and double leg somebody because I felt like they might do something. So that's where I think people get confused. They're like, oh, you guys are forced. You just say, you know, you act first and you know this. No, if you're picking up on something, I can adjust. I can adjust the way I'm speaking to someone. Maybe it means I need to connect with them a little bit better the way I communicate with them and it's going to change their actions or maybe it does. I prepare for that. You know, that blindside shot, that sucker punch was still, you know, I still got caught on the job, but it was less frequent based on my past experiences. So I just think that it's. It's when we don't see it coming, when we know what the game is, when we understand what we're facing, when we're walking into something. Most officers that have some experience do a pretty good job at reading the play and be able to act and react in ways that are really positive, really good. Rookies have a tough time because they don't know the games yet. It's kind of like I explained this like dot to dot. Remember the old, the old books, the old dot to dot books when, I don't know, when I was young, they're probably way long gone now. But you get these books and you'd open up a book and there'd be a bunch of dots on the page with numbers on them and you couldn't tell what anything was. So you got your pen and you started at 1 and you'd go around and you go, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Oh, what's that? You know. Oh, it's an elephant wearing sneakers. So. But you had to follow the dots and the numbers. Well, I've got four daughters, I raised four daughters. They get the dot to dot thing with, with my first daughter and you know, here it is and it's an elephant with sneakers on. By the time the fourth one comes up and she's old enough to do the dot to dots. I open up the book and she's looking at it, daddy. And I look at it and I go, I bet you that's an elephant with sneakers on it. And it's like. Then you have them draw it and it's like, how did you know that? Well, it's pretty much the same thing. You've seen these things before. There's dots out there and you know how to organize them in your brain based on all of your experiences. The rookies don't have this because they get very little scenario based training. That's where they show up. So basically when I explained to cops when rookies get out there, they open up the book. They don't even have dots yet. Not only do they have numbers to follow, they don't even have dots. They scramble that why? That's why rookies look the way they do. And same thing with military when the first time you hit ground and you process everything visually and linearly as opposed to looking at something and having an understanding of what I'm dealing with like your NCOs will do. You look and I'll see a rookie do is they're like this and I would say they're like squirrels on crack or something, right? They look around and they're like this. They're trying to, they're trying to find the dots and put things together. And then when something occurs, that non conscious way of self organizing this information that becomes experience and knowledge now and it's not always right. And if we don't give proper feedback on it, they can. One experience can really throw them off on what to expect next time. So there's a, you know, there's a. It gets into the weeds with this quite a bit. But that's something that I think with law enforcement that, you know the, when you don't see it common. Here's one and I'll walk. You asked me to walk you through. I'll walk through one that we were tasked with doing something I never imagined that we'd be tasked with doing and that kind of threw us off as far as what, you know, what occurred, what should we do, how do we handle this? So were on a SWAT call and it was a call where. And it was a bad call. There was a guy in a house and he was a guy that never caused any problems before. He wasn't a, you know, he wasn't a gangster or anything like that. He was a, you know, middle aged older guy, had had a, an issue with his family mentally, whatever was occurring. Shot and executed his son inside the house. Shot his wife a couple times. Our police officers rescued her a roof and now SWAT's there and we end up spending about a day and a half trying to get this guy out of the house. During that day and a half we had exchanges with him where Me and a few of my buddies went into a basement and he opened up on us down there and we're coming back out. And the only reason we didn't get hit wasn't because of good tactics or training. We just didn't get hit, let's put it that way. Recognize that when you recognize it. We got lucky and, you know, we didn't even, you know, rounds were hitting the cement wall next to our head and we're like, wow, you know, that was really close. But the change was because it's always like, make contact, try to locate, get them to comply. You know, if you get into it, you get into it. But the goal is not, we're not there to rescue any hostages. It's a barricade, is to just try to bring this to a peaceful resolution. When it came to this point where this guy starts pop shotting at us now from the outside, there was one and then in second it incident where it occurred again where we had an exchange through a window. And I'm turning it over to command saying, you know, hey, you know, we got snipers out there. They're really good at what they do. And I'm an entry guy, so I hate paying them compliments. But we have a friendly love for each other, right? And I'm like, but I think this is a good time to turn those guys on and let them do their job because eventually this guy is going to pick somebody off on perimeter, guys get lazy. They an elbow, a head comes out and we're going to lose somebody here soon if we don't do it. And I remember and I'm not. And I'm not here to cast shade on the call. I know the command post. I know how hard these things are. I spent time in them and I don't. I'd rather be boots on the ground. I do not like being in those places. Too many things to consider and things are more cut and dry out there in the field. And that's what I like. But at some point it basically came back to us not as a direct order that they're not going to allow the snipers to do the thing because of whatever reasons they are concerned with. So Mike and you guys, you need to go finish this. And that's when I kind of. It was an unexpected thing because now basically we're looking at going into this place and finding this guy and ending the situation, which isn't what we normally do in law enforcement. Right. It's not a normal. It's to go in and of Course, still trying to rescue. But now do I get into a house where I'm getting close to somebody who's wounded and armed and call out and give away my position after he's already shot at us, or am I just gonna try to get this guy any way I can get him? It was a different game. We never played that game in any scenario. We never played the game of I'm going to hunt you in your house. And that's where, like everything we did in training, you know, I'm going back and going. We never thought we'd be in this game unless it was hostage rescue, which we trained on. And this was. It didn't fit the mold of the things that we were already training and tasked to do. And here it was. I mean, it's not like we got called out every day. We get a handful of call outs a year, and all of a sudden, bang, and we're in one that we've never experienced before. We're in gunfights in angles and offsets of things that we've never experienced before. I always assumed that when the gunfight starts, I'm just gonna come up quick and I see my red dot and everything, it's gonna be over. I remember feeling angry because I'm in the middle of a gunfight and I don't even know where the rounds are coming from. That's very frustrating when you feel like I might die and I have nothing. I can even. I can't even fight. That's. I mean, I'm sure you know that feeling, right? It's like that's one of those. I thought at least I'd have a fighting chance. And I remember, you know, it was probably not the memory in the moment, but afterwards it kind of gets pushed into your memory. That, you know, just frustrating maybe that I didn't train to problem solve in the middle of a conflict. I trained to just act and react. And I need to get back to figuring out how to identify problems and problem solve very quickly, as fast as I can, with whatever time is available for me, and reading my timeline correctly. So those are all considerations now when we're building scenarios and we're conducting scenario based training that we're looking to at all those issues. We're building it. We're in charge of the stimuli when we're building scenarios. So to do that, we really need to pay attention to what our goals are as opposed to just checking boxes.
- [46:05]
B
So did you. How. How did that scenario play out?
- [46:10]
A
Well, it was. It just got a little bit Nasty. And we ended up locating the guy down into the basement. And he, he was already wounded and he ended up going in. And there was a final room where we went in. And we ended up going in, me and another guy. And he ends up, he's behind like a barricade and he ends up shooting and return fire. And then after we peel him out, everything was over and realized that his last shot that hit the wall next to my leg, went through his own head that we didn't even see. So it was one of those. And then, you know, my feelings after were like, I don't, you know, I don't feel bad about our, what we did or what we had to do with it. My frustration was like, why would you try to shoot if you're just angry at yourself and for what you did and all your turmoil in your life, why did you want to take me and my friends away from our families in your own behavior with that, if you're going to do that? Why would you know? So those are questions, rhetorical questions that I run around in my head. And of course the obvious is, could I done something different? Would I done something different? Yes, obviously. We were up for 33 hours before we decided. No sleep, no food. We were up and went in 33 hours straight. No sleep, in the cold when we went into that, you know, that last one. So now I know about the way the brain works and decision making process and all that lack of sleep. And I'm like, oh my God. You know, the sound science tells us we were like blown a 20 or something. If you were to equate that, you know, as far as our decision making the way we were, you know, processing and problem solving, all of us were just, you know, frayed knots. I remember going, let's hurry up and go in there. I'm tired, I'm cold, I don't even care anymore. Let's just go get this done. I remember thinking that. And then afterwards I'm like, God, dude, fatigue makes wimps out of all of us, doesn't it? Huh?
- [47:59]
B
I, you know, it's absolutely crazy. I, I gotta ask, what happened? Like, what. How did this guy with said no, no criminal record, how did he find himself in a situation like that?
- [48:10]
A
The way I understand it is they. He was, he made it through the killing fields under Pol Pot from Campo Cambodia came to the United States. Neighbors loved him. Did a little side job doing laundry in their basement and all that. Very old, old school, traditional Cambodian. And the way I understood it, and I never Fact checked it too much, but it was pretty solid at the time, was that the son came home and said that he fell in love with a girl from a local girl and he was already had an arranged marriage set up with, you know, a girl from Cambodia. And he said, no, I'm not doing that, dad, I'm marrying this girl and, and not her. And the mother took the sun side and he went into the back room, got a rifle, came out, shot him in the head at the table, shot the wife a couple times. She jumped out a window onto a hip roof. And our officers came and rescued her and got her to the hospital.
- [49:03]
B
Oh my God.
- [49:05]
A
Only to turn around and sue us later.
- [49:08]
B
Oh my God. For real?
- [49:10]
A
Yeah, I didn't go too far, but yeah, yeah, it was one of. That's par for the course. You know, there was a lot of gas in that house though. But it was just one call, you know.
- [49:23]
B
With just one call. I mean, my God, how many of these calls did you have to go through in your career?
- [49:29]
A
Well, I don't know. As far as the swap calls, that was probably one of the bigger ones where it was just elongated. You know, two days of really trying to use gas and all the tools we had and obviously biggest negotiators just talking and talking and translators and all that, trying to get this come to a peaceful resolution. And we failed at it. You know, I consider it, you know, we all survived and, and he didn't. But I still, you know, it's, there's things to learn and definitely if somebody passed and we couldn't get them out with all of our tools, it's, it's a failure point, no doubt.
- [50:02]
B
Well, can I ask.
- [50:03]
A
Yeah. I mean our callouts were mostly barricade type call outs and high risk search warrants. We did a lot of other ones. We did a lot of other search warrants that were more drug related search warrants. On our drug unit side, we usually did between 150 to 200 a year. I did that for 19 years. So. 19 years of that?
- [50:20]
B
Yeah, that's. I mean that's, that's two thirds of the year you're getting called out.
- [50:28]
A
Yeah, well, those are more drug related ones. So that's, that's just like our drug unit search warrants. So we had to. Our drug unit team and then our SWAT team, we didn't get as many call outs for that. So it was high risk drugs. Mostly barricades. Barricades were the ones that we, we liked because they were, I don't say we liked, you know, it's great if you never get called out, but right when you get that there was usually the thing we liked about the barricade stuff is there was time that you could take in information, you could have an analytical approach to most of your decision making on them and you could use all of the things and resources that we had. Usually it's time and resources, right? Risk versus time over risk versus need plus time of resource, something like that. And I always use that one because most of the time we had really successful resolutions and a lot of them we'd see them again because there are mental health issues or things like that. But, but they were, we liked them because they were challenging and if we, if we were reading the plays right and we're listening to what the people, you know, what the person needed and what we could provide to get some type of, you know, agreement and some de escalation and try to get them to come down, it felt good, you know, it felt good to get them to come out, resolve it. And you know, they, people come out sometimes they apologize and sorry, you know, and it's like, it's okay, you know, don't do it again, please. Well, I mean -20 out here, here.
- [51:52]
B
Mike, Mike, I, so, okay, so everything you said, I, I, you said that it was a failure point, that you couldn't get that guy out that shot his son and shot his wife. You couldn't get him out alive. You think that's a failure point for you?
- [52:06]
A
I just think that. And I don't think of it like a real negative way. I just think I know what you mean.
- [52:10]
B
Yeah, I know things to learn.
- [52:12]
A
I'll always run those routes on the feedback. Like what could we have done different? What if we were able to get sleep and get some other group in there that a fresh mind on this. And again, it's all hindsight bias, all benefit of hindsight. But you know, if you're not going and doing good ars on it, then you're not learning. Right. So. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's all. I look at it as a positive way to look at it. So error is good, loss of life isn't. But that's the way it worked out. We did a lot of things right. But there were other things. There were may have been moments where maybe we could have done something, but we were in a decision mode at the command post or something. And again this guy may have just, I think back at it now, I don't. That was his decision. I don't think he was ever going to come out alive. But again, if there was, maybe he didn't even know it. There was a way that we could have, we could have done it successfully, you know.
- [53:07]
B
Well, I mean, Mike, you, you worked your ass off for two days trying to get this guy out of there alive. There was a clear escalation of force. It's just clearly had some sort of battle drill to, okay, we're going to try this, we're going to try this, we're going to try this. And then, okay, snipers got nixed, but now it's time to use lethal force. So I have to ask you. So this FBI raid on this guy out in Utah, now I'm again, hindsight bias and all that stuff. This is not, I'm not casting dispersions on any of this stuff, but I found out about this from my buddies all around the country who were on SWAT team that were just texting me over and over again like what the hell is this? And now this guy out in Utah said terrible, terrible things about the President. I don't care, Democrat, Republican, you should not do that kind of stuff. It's crazy. Said some really terrible stuff. SWAT team, I guess they show up at this guy's house with 20 FBI SWAT guys and the guy gets shot and they do some pre dawn raid on the guy. Now look again, like hindsight being 20 20, I don't know what the scenario was on the ground. I just think that this is me. If I were planning something like that, I'd say, okay guys, between 70 and 75 years old, he walks with a cane, he's overweight. I wonder. They had already knocked on his door once so clearly had an interaction with them. Is there a better way? If you thought he was going to be a threat that necessitated a pre dawn raid with 20 people. Maybe you interdict at a grocery store or maybe you wait till he's out in the front porch drinking a cup of coffee and maybe you take him then. I mean, I don't know, knowing what we know, which is again not a whole lot because the situation is developing and body cam, I don't even know if they were wearing body cam. I, I don't know what the hell happened there. I mean, because you talked about a failure point after trying with the guy that shot his wife and executed his son and you worked your ass off to get the guy out alive. And then you see something like this, you go in there. I mean, look, I don't know how I, if, if, if someone kicks in my door at 6am and I haven't done anything wrong. Like, you're a civilian. You got a right to defend yourself in your own home. Right. And a cop sees a gun, I'm getting. I'd get taken out. Right. I mean, I don't. You see what I mean?
- [55:25]
A
Yeah. You don't want to break my door down at 6am it's gonna be not good for anyone, including me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not familiar with it, John, the one out in Utah. Yet my head's been in another job that we're working on lately, so I haven't even had time to get into the news too much. But I can say that you did say one thing that did, you know, sound familiar to me. But, like, I'm sure that they have a threat assessment that they have to go through when they're doing their ops plans. Right. Their op boards and everything. So I'm sure they do. I don't know what exactly. They're. They're all pretty similar of what it is. And then drive the tactics off of that. So. And I was responsible for doing a lot of those things and designing the ops plans, which one of my favorite things to do is do a foundational ops plan. And then I have my guys, like Chris and my main entry guys come in and just get after it like vultures. Pick it apart, tear it, Tear it. Let's. Let's make it good. And. And so we'd always have those, you know, when we'd always, you know, risk versus need over time, plus resources. All right. You plan on doing this, Mike? You got a guy coming in on the second floor. And why. Why are we putting a guy into that? Exposing him. And then, you know, if I didn't have a really good reason, which it was like, because this, this, and this. Like, all right, you know, roger that. Good to go. But there's checks and balances there. But you did say something about the coffee shop and all that. And for us, it was. It was really easy. We always look at it as a progression. I didn't make this up. It was either Open Air Mobile or Stronghold. So we always want that. That route, you know, so Open Air was always the safest. Mobile is the next, which. That's the Babel, depending on what they do in a vehicle. But we had ways of doing things that. For officer safety as well, without endangering the public. Because again, priority life. And then stronghold is the last. I mean, the last option. The. The last thing you want to do is punch a door and start putting people into an unknown, right? That's like, this is my stronghold hold. I know every square inch of it. And I know, you know, depending on what your people from the outside, they're going into an unknown for the most part. Even with, even with intel, even when like informant intel, you still don't know what 100, what's going to be there when you, when you pop that door open. So that was always the last option, was to punch the door and go in through stronghold open airs were great. Now, I'll say this much soon, I know nothing about their operation. Operation, yeah.
- [57:49]
B
By the way, I am. I'm not trying to put you in a tough spot, Mike. It's not my intention to do that.
- [57:53]
A
I'm just going like standard, like, like police SWAT stuff is that there are things that occur that sometimes I'd argue it. I understood. But we'd be doing like, hey, you know, it's the end of this multi jurisdictional drug investigation. We're taking all the bad guys out. We're going to show up at 3 in the morning and we're all getting together and there's like 15 different agencies from local, state and federal. We've got all these different teams and we're going to hit 15 houses and then this one and two, SWAT's doing one, two and three. And the drug units are doing all these other houses because they're lower priority. Those are common. And I remember thinking, okay, we're hitting this place, it's 0500. You know, that's when everything's getting kicked off. We're all going to go simultaneously. So phones aren't crossing and people are dumping dope and people aren't taking off and stuff. And it's like, okay, I got a problem, I got a problem. Because the reason that SWAT's getting called in is because this guy's got, you know, violent history. We know he's got guns, we've got informants, we know he has weapons in the house and that's his place. But instead of going on our terms, we're gonna just go at 5:00 in the morning because that's when everybody else is going. And the swat, you know, commanders would get around and be like, this is BS, man. We are going in. And no, look, we're not going dynamic on this. We're not punching the door. We're going to go non dynamic. We're going to basically like, it's not knock and talk, but there's other things that we do where we're going up and locking the outside down and then coming up and get making contact and tell them to come out, which means go ahead and flush your dope. Nobody's going to die over a kilo or whatever it is, you know.
- [59:22]
B
Right, right.
- [59:23]
A
But that would really anger, you know, it would be upsetting to. I don't say anger. They, you know, the investigating officers that, especially if it's state charges, if you don't get the dope, the charges are, aren't going to be very well. So it's like, no, we really need to get it. So there are these forces that will push a, want to push, you know, the tactical component to go in dynamic as opposed to what we would normally do, which would not be that way. We'd wait. But the other part is as far as open air is if we really need to get in the house and there's multiple people in the house, once somebody leaves, if we pick them off, then we're on a timeline for the house and that'll end us setting up for a stronghold range. So. And again, I'm just talking like general.
- [60:02]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [60:04]
A
Most law enforcement pretty much follows. It's not anything that insightful really that you wouldn't find in any, you know, base one on one basic spot.
- [60:12]
B
I was asking my SWAT buddies like, hey, what's your take on all this? Like, they're the ones sending it to me. And they, their, their response was almost universally, would you be proud of how this raid ended if you were the, if you were the commander on the ground? And I had to say probably not. And then now as information, and I know you don't know a whole lot about it, but as information starts to trickle out, it turns out this guy was like, I mean, he could barely breathe, was like volunteering in his church. I, maybe he brandished a gun when they entered, but he was an old veteran, so I mean, there's just so many variables, man. I don't empathize with you. It's, it's such a difficult job and it is.
- [60:51]
A
And you don't know. Once you open that can, it's like I had a, I had a situation on a raid once where we're going in and it's a drug raid, so it's everyday stuff for us. And yeah, hit the door, we go in and a couple of big guys in there. I remember one took a swing at me, punched the door and I was first one in. He like called off to take. And you would have taken. I still would have been knocked out from that punch. And that was like 10 years ago. Know, I mean he had a good. And I can see in his eyes as he's coming out, he's looking at me with like, oh, it's the police. You know, he really reacted. He had no idea.
- [61:25]
B
He didn't know on the ground.
- [61:26]
A
And I'm like, it's cool, man. It was like I read that like in that moment he just got startled, scared and he swung. I secure the guy and I see a stairwell going up from the living room and I go, there's a second floor. I get stairwell, you know. So I pop back out and I turned the corner just to clear up the stairwell. And just like that, this is when and I tell the story when I teach a little bit. Because as when you talk about experience and schema tacit knowledge. I grew up hunting. I grew up. My first gun was a 20 gauge HR. I still have it. H&R, single shot, 20 gauge shotgun. And I'm a gun guy, so I know what I see. And I remember turning the corner and the. My memory was a flash picture. There was an elderly male standing on his way down the stairs and he's holding a shotgun. I see the barrel coming right at me. Now the rookie, me with no experience or anything could have been would have justifiably just put rounds on it immediately. I'm on a drug raid. I got a guy coming downstairs with a shotgun. My first picture. What I saw when I looked was I saw the gun was open. It was a single shot. It was opened, it was open. And I know I didn't have time to analyze it. Yeah, there was one in there. All he had to do was snap up and bang. And that's. That's a quarter to a half. That's a half a second at best if he's fast. But I remember seeing that and seeing his face was of shock, like he was afraid, deathly afraid, like this. And he was barely holding the gun like this. And that's when I just turned in to drop the gun. Drop the gun. And then it dropped. But it was. There was a moment where I saw what I saw. And that could have been a lethal shooting immediately and justifiable and everything else because I got a gun pointed right at my head about, you know, four feet away from me. But I picked up, I was lucky enough to pick up on some visual information that told me not right, something's not right. It wasn't the typical. It wasn't. And it was a flash picture. So where there was no time for analysis. I had enough to see what I needed to see based on my experience, my schema, it had meaning to me in a moment. And that's where the decision making process falls into the category what Dr. Klein calls recognition prime decision making, or Dr. Kahneman, if you will. System one, decision making, where I see something and you identify it quickly and then you react. And then as time allows, you can go into some type of analysis. So there's things that, once you get into a situation and you're reading, you know, I'm saying is you're already in the house. Now all of a sudden this occurs. What are you seeing? Is there an analysis? There usually isn't time. Luckily, I always say luckily. I grew up around guns and I saw what I saw and it allowed me to take a moment to see more. And then I was able to get back and make the commands and had it happen. So it worked out.
- [64:12]
B
Wow. I. I'm blown away by this. And the way that you describe stuff is. I have to say, man, it is kind of. So I, I think about my evolution as a, as a combat leader and just being in ambushes and getting shot. Again, it's a different thing because people are trying to kill you, you're trying to kill them. Like, that's just that it's, it's, it's almost simpler in a lot of ways in the infantry at night, it's a terrible, tough situation in the infantry. And it's. But it's just. There's just like less variables. Less, Less collateral damage. In the mountains of Afghanistan, somebody's trying to kill you, and if you don't kill them first, you could be, you could be the one dead. So it's. But, but there was an evolution for me where, And I'm just telling you this because as you describe it in clinical scientific terms, I kind of experienced this as a young lieutenant, like doing this looking up and around, trying to look at all this stuff. And it got to a point after six, seven months and hundreds of firefights, it would just like the moment, it would almost like kaleidoscope around you. And I was just. I just understood what was around me. Like, it's like I saw it, it was there, it was part of my consciousness. It was either a threat or it wasn't. And it almost got to a point where I would talk to some of my squad leaders and stuff and just say, it's like, stand strong in that kaleidoscope and just be aware of what's going on around You. Whereas you're right, the guys that come in, they're super green that haven't been there in a while. They're like looking all around. Look at their weapon system, checking their nods, like looking up at the sky. I mean, it's just looking for IEDs. It's just kind of crazy to me that you've broken this down to a science.
- [65:46]
A
Yeah. There's a deep end to it, Sean. It gets better. It's so good. And what you're saying, it makes sense. You have that moment where now, there's. Now once you get into that moment where you start seeing the play pattern, like you're, you're looking and you're seeing and you have this understanding of what's occurring and what you need to do. That's a good feeling. It's like that in law enforcement. Usually depending on your agency, it might take you a year, two years on the job before you get this mindset. And then there could be this bifurcation in the mindset. And here's the bifurcation in the mindset. The one mindset can be when the challenge comes up and here comes the information, oh, no. Oh my God, what am I going to do? I don't want to deal with this. Or this is a challenge. Boys, let's go. Or you know, guys, let's go. This is. What do you got? Bring it, bring it. So the two mindsets are really important. And not that I like to say mindset is everything, but it's not. But it's important is that how you face these things is going to gear where your attention goes. Because when I'm gearing my attention towards a challenge, I'm staying externally focused. And this is huge for me, this. I'm staying, staying externally focused on processing information. When I'm doing that, my heart rate is lower. Everything is, my body is functioning. I'm processing things in real time. For when they start getting into action sequences. Things get critical and dynamic. Firefight, it starts occurring. I'm still picking up and I'm processing. I'm making decisions based off of real time events that are occurring. When my mindset is, oh, shit, I don't own my. When the thought I comes in, I don't. I'm feeling, oh my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do for my guys? All that. The I feeling think of I as internal focus. And when we have an internal focus of attention when we're feeling about what's going on as opposed to acting on what's Going on and processing that usually works against us when we're talking about dealing with dynamic situations.
- [67:37]
B
Geez, man, this is g. I mean, listen, so this is crazy to me as you're talking, like so much of this evolution in me is like coming to the fore. And I haven't, you know, thought about this stuff in a decade. But there were times where you're right, where you're like, what do I do? How do I handle this? What's. And when you're thinking about that. Yeah, it's just, it's not a. It's not a good place to be.
- [67:59]
A
And.
- [67:59]
B
And I remember, I remember that there was this one moment, and this has stuck with me all these years and it's, it's kind of like. It's not like one of the more, hey, we're in a kill zone, what do we do? It didn't make it into outlaw platoon or anything like that. But it was early on in my deployment, I think we had like one firefight and the enemy had like, I mean, they had, they had hit us with rockets or mortars or whatever, but nothing like super bad. But there was always the risk of improvised explosive devices or even suicide bombers, which is a variable that again, you as someone who is a civilian, it's like, it's hard to wrap your mind around that threat, that someone could be strapped with a bomb. And our inclination as Americans is just to try to talk it out, you know, have some clear escalation of force. But I, the squad leader, his squad leader had been to combat before, was really hard edged. We had this guy, I mean, we were out there, we had just investigated this point of origin site where we found a bunch of rockets. The enemy had run away from us. So we were all like ready to go into what you would call, like it's some sort of dynamic. It was a dynamic situation, but we weren't shooting. And this guy, this guy comes out of nowhere and is out of the field of my vision and this squad leader, his name is Jason Sabaki, is standing right next to me and just comes out of the field of. This guy just starts waving his hand. I'm like, My inclination was like, oh my gosh, this is a threat. What do I do? But the moment that I thought that, like this, I'm telling you, this is crazy. I was thinking, and it was not the right. I shouldn't have been, I should have been, I should have known. I should have just been able to react to this threat. The squad leader who had already been there before had his, his, his weapon up at the high ready and fired a warning shot by the guy, right by the guy's head to tell him to stop before I could even finish my thought. But that's. You think about that if he wasn't there and this was a suicide bomber. Because you talk about thinking these things back, like if I would have done this or if this would have happened. I mean, those I thought that I thought for me what could have gotten me killed and it would have happened just like that.
- [69:54]
A
And as a commander, you're supposed to be cognitively engaged in thinking through. So I mean, and there's a little bit of differential. If I've got my guys, like I always had my team leaders for swat, it's like, look, your responsibility as a team leader are what your folks are doing, not what's going on here. That's theirs. And it's hard to do that. But now they've got this, you've got that. So you're, you're telling them to have top down. Control is what we call it. So what that's, that's the term is top down versus bottom up. Top down control is when I'm getting control of where my attention is going. Bottom up is when something, and these terms are used a lot different domains in science, but in the tension, bottom up is when something pulls. So bang, something goes off and my attention gets pulled over here. Now am I driving it? What occurs a lot of times I'm gonna throw another one at you here that's gonna make you go, okay, so what occurs a lot of times is something occurs, bang, it's unexpected, maybe it's some type of ambush. Something that happens very quick and we have a bottom up pull that our attention's on whatever it's supposed to be. And then bang, something happens, whatever it is. And what happens a lot of times when folks that have that oh my God moment, it's right then a strong bottom up pull causes the external attention to go, oh, I see what I saw. And now I go. And now I'm worried about, oh my God, what am I going to do? Oh my God, I'm going to die. The thing about that is it's a very natural thing to feel as a human, right? It's the most natural thing is to go, oh my God, I'm going to die. And I've seen people in shootings that I was in. I've seen people stuck in this place where they're standing with their gun at slide lock, yelling, oh my God. Oh, my God. I had to shoot. And not even reloading because they're inside internally processing what just had occurred while the gunfight still occurring. So they become defunct at processing external information. So let me throw this at you. So they went internal in a real situation that was at that level. And people that will just talk about stress inoculation, we understand it, but it's only the tip of the iceberg. What do we really talk about when we're talking about stress inoculation? So I'll ask you this, Sean. When you went through all of your training, whether it was at the command level, where you're needing to think and process and know about movements and all this stuff, or just your tools training, so your ergonomics with your weapon system, where is our focus of attention when we are learning new skills, whether they're cognitive or psychomotor, which in military police, it's mostly psychomotor skills. Don't we teach to pay attention to where your grip is on your gun and your sight is on your eye, your cheek weld and your charging handle and your mag? And everything that we do in the learning environment falls into the internal focus of attention quadrants. I'm basing this off real science that's called Nidifer's quadrant. Internal, external, narrow and broad. So when we learn, we're learning internal stuff. Internal. So we're taking our brain and its own, always internally processing. How am I acting, reacting with this ergonomic tool, or what am I dealing with when I'm always thinking internally while I'm in the training environment? When I'm out there in the field and I'm in the real environment, what do I know actually works as far as doing well and actually reading is being external, externally focused on what's going on. But everything I'm doing in training, I'm internal. Everything I need to be doing out there in the real world is external. There's a thing called Hebb's Law and Hebb's Law, and a very. The little saying around that is what fires together wires together. So it has to do with psychomotor skills that, like when we learn how to get in the car and push the button on the dashboard or use the key or where our shifter is on the thing. When we do those over and over again, we wire those together through these neural pathways in our brain and they become these motor movements. Right? It's motor learning. At some point, everything that you do is your M4. We get to that level of automaticity where we wired all this stuff together. And if we wire in the wrong things, they can work against us. Right. We know that they're called training scars. Right? We throw that term around loosely, but we're still doing that today. Because what we're doing is we are having in an internal focus of attention in traditional style of training. Because all we're doing is skill development. Thinking about my hands, my fingers, my placement on my feet, my stance, what am I doing with my body versus am I reading the play? What's going on out here while this stuff is running. At this level of automaticity, there needs to be more of the play built into the skill acquisition phases of all training, whether it's military or police. We're talking about psycho motor skills. This isn't something I made up. I got tired of thinking things through and trying to come up with good ideas before the gray hair started because I realized they come back and bite me. And when I teach things enthusiastically and passionately 15 years ago that later on I realized, oh my God, I got that so wrong. I used to tell people that when you reload your mag in the middle of a gunfight on your pistol, absolutely do not try to get the slide to go forward by dropping that, you know, that slide stop. Because that's a fine motor skill. And at 150 beats per minute, you will have no fine motor skills. There's actually no science that supports that whatsoever. We do not lose fine motor skills at 120 beats per minute. There's correlations. They're not causal effects. There's absolutely no science that shows a cause effect between elevated heart rate and performance with psychomotor skills or gross motor skills. I can show you videos of motocross drivers with heart rate monitors on running at 190 beats per minute through complex tasks. You and I both do things very well at 170, 180 beats per minute. That actually we perform better if we're a little bit excited than we do is if we're calm. So these things that we train over time, but the big one is going back to that internal focus of attention during all of our skill acquisition phases in any formalized training that we do and then throwing out into the real situation. So what's the key to that? So I don't just like present problems. What is the answer to that? What is it? How do we address that challenge? And it's bringing the criterion environment into the skill at quality acquisition phases all the way through training. Does that take time? Does it take. Well, mindfully developed scenario based Training and really well developed feedback systems that we know like feedback bandwidth and terms like that that people can deep dive if they want to. Or I'll show you the research on it about how we actually provide feedback in the best way that we can do a little bit kind of pull back off as people get better. You know, there's big deep end. I really love focusing on the internal versus external because I can find now when I watch somebody go through stereo based training or I can watch videos of real shootings, a real conflict where people go, something occurs what brings them internal and then maybe as things calm down they'll get back external again. We'll find that usually the commands that they're saying will fit into one or two polarities that matches right up with this throughout an incident. We're things are non stressful and people are pretty good at communicating what they mean. Those are called alpha commands or alpha speech. And then as things start getting crazy going, they either stay locked down with their alpha commands, very detailed. That's very characteristic of an external focus of attention where the rational part of the brain is predominating over the emotional part of the brain. But we'll see other people going like goofy loops, you know, drop the gun, drop the gun. They just keep repeating the same thing and it's not working. That's more.
- [77:01]
B
Give me, give me, give me an example, give me. Okay, so you gave me an example. So give me an example of, of, of an alpha command. When you, you know, when things are basically chill versus like you're in an actual situation, like what does right look like and what is, what is wrong look like. This is fascinating.
- [77:17]
A
An alpha command is going to be something, a command that is very clear, it's unambiguous, it's very reflective of someone who has an external focus of attention. And the rat rational brain is predominating over the emotional brain. So they're in tune with what is occurring. Sir, I need you to take your right hand and put it on the steering wheel. I need you to do that for me right now. So there's no mistake on the communication of what you want them to do. It can even be a communication, right? It can be a communication of just the way you're communicating with somebody. But it's detailed and it's specific to what's occurring. Beta commands, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. Don't make me shoot you. Don't make me shoot you. There's no detail or you'll see what Sometimes it's referred to like a goofy loop, you know, drop the gun. I'm not going to tell you again, I'm not going to take and drop the gun. Drop the gun. I'm not going to take and drop the gun. I'm not going to take it. So they get in this thing and what's occurring usually is they're, they're seeing something, but they're back inside the brain and they're stuck into a problem solving state, right. They're trying to figure out what do I do next, what do I do next? An internal focus of attention and the long, a lot of times that will also be upon investigation later on down the road they'll find that when they talk to these folks that go through these situations while they're having these very detailed commands and then, you know, shit hits the fan and all of a sudden they go in and get more beta type commands and then if it works out or whatever, they survive it. And then they get more detailed. It also tracks with their memory because what we know about attention is we only remember the things that we attend to, right? That's selective attention, tunnel vision, and that's a whole other two hours of talking I won't get into. But it really is important to understand that when we are more alpha commands, we're more rationally focused. Our memory is more clear about what was occurring when we get that bottom up and internal focus. A lot of times a memory in an interview will be, oh my God, I thought I was gonna die. My life flashed in front of my, my, my face, my eyes. I thought about my kids. I'm not gonna make it home tonight. I, I mean I remember having those feelings on call outs, but they weren't in the middle of the action sequence. They were during the planning stages where we're going to go in here and I don't know if I'm going to see my kids tomorrow because I know I'm going to be right up front. Okay, you good with that? Yeah. Let's go get focused. You got guys depending on. Okay? All right, let's go. You can have those thoughts. There's times that you're going to be in all these quadrants and you can flash around them in a moment. But when it comes to, I need to act and react in something that's occurring right away. Our training should be geared towards trying to build the muscle. As I say, have top down control of your attention, recognizing when something pushed you internally and getting right back externally focused on what's occurring. So you can process information so your decisions and actions are going to be as close to right as possible.
- [80:02]
B
Geez, this is, this is fascinating. And this is all the stuff that you do at the For Science Institute. All things that are, I mean you're working with other law enforcement agencies to, to train other, to train people.
- [80:17]
A
We run courses. Our MOI course is the big train, the trainer one. I also teach about two and a half days in our five day course which is our certification course, analyst course. So we get a mix usually you know, about 40, 40% of trainers and then investigators and that one's based on human performance factors. So that course is really human. So we're looking at things like, and There's a, there's nine instructors on staff, medical doctors, PhDs, peer reviewed papers they've been responsible for. Contrary to what you're in the news, our research is peer reviewed and some of most stringent journals in the country and our partnering instructors with that as well. And they talk about the things I cover like limitations and human performance factors around vision, attention, memory, human error, decision making. We get into context cues and schemas. They look about the physiology around the eye, the brain. A lot of research that we've done on action, reaction times and it's there to, with our research side of the house. So we have three main divisions. Training is where I'm at, our research division there, which is Dr. Lewinsky and the doctors that we have on staff and partnering PhDs and medical doctors doing research all the time and publications and then our consulting division. And that's where the people that are outside law enforcement, they only know us from consulting because some of the high profile cases that you know, our names come up in the background when you know, some officer that was charged had charges dismissed because of the testimony of an expert that went through for science training. And it isn't that, it's, it's, you know, for science. It's the research around the subjects of human factors. So understanding what, how normal slip and capture errors are, what, what is the realistic time frames that we're dealing with and our human limitations as far as action and reaction in a dynamic situation, you know, how fast can things occur? A lot of people don't realize that, you know, if I'm not expecting something to occur and all of a sudden there's an ambush that I didn't see coming. I didn't predict any part of that, that it takes about 300 milliseconds, close to that or approximation at 300 milliseconds a third of a second before my brain even notices a change in my environment. And maybe I can get a flinch response quick, but it's not a organized response. Whether it's productive or not, an organized response doesn't even start after that. And if someone pulls a gun out of the waistband, they can do that in a quarter second and they can fire five rounds in the first second. But it takes most officers about one and a half to two seconds to get their gun out of their holster for one round. How many rounds are you eating before you can even return fire if it's an ambush? And the answer to that is going to be five, six, seven rounds, sometimes before. And that's if they're not hit at point blank range and the ranges that we're getting hit at. So all that data, a lot of that data comes from Leoka, but a lot of the data comes from our ability to perceive and act and react and it lines right up. And some of our research and you know, obviously when things go to court, there's going to be all types of battles in courts and everybody's slinging mud and all that kind of stuff. Which is why I like to stay on the training side of the house where I really like it. I've been in court with all those cases while I was on the job for 28 years. So I leave that to the legal experts on that. But I've done some consultation, I've done some expert work. People do turn to us when it comes to looking at human factors. And as I say, we are here looking at the research and other experts to help educate, we're educating about human factors. To me, when it comes to consultation and expert work, it's really about education. These are some facts, here's some data, here's some things that we may not understand about conflict and dynamic situation when it comes to realistic time frames. What about your expectations of officer performance? Shawn, did you know that if you play high school football for four years, that's one sport with an off season? If you added up all of the practices that you go to and all of the game time that you go to in four years of playing a seasonal sport, you, you will get more time training and game time on the field than most police officers will get in training over a 20 year career, that's you will get more training. If you get a job at Petco to shave a dog's hair unsupervised, you will go through more hours of training in excess than a police officer gets in a police academy. That's, that's traditional across the board.
- [84:46]
B
Yeah, I. Well, so what's your take on, you know, politicians who will say in a use of force scenario, well, did you have to, did you have to take them out? Why couldn't you just shoot him in the leg? You got it. All the stuff that you've seen and all the stuff that you're out there teaching, you got to hear that stuff and just be like, God, these people are idiots. You have to think that. I. I'm saying that. You don't have to say that.
- [85:11]
A
I'm saying that I look at it a couple of ways because sometimes I'll get. And I would get calls back on the job from, like, the DA's office. They're just looking to understand. And it's like, can you help us understand this? And I'm like, yeah, I got some good research on it. But there's, you know, there's a lot of things that people really oversimplify when it comes to looking at these types of dynamic situations. And it does get frustrating when you hear things like, well, you know, they dropped the gun and the officer fired two more rounds. And, you know, they should have been able, should have, could have, woulda. And those are all hindsight bias. We know that there's research out there that says, even if I'm looking at the difference between a green light and a red light, and I'm firing at a target, as soon as the green light turns to red or whatever color changes, something just as simple as that, I'll still fire two rounds before my brain sees the change, and then I can stop the behavior of this. Okay, that's a, that's called a closed loop because it's closed loop motor program versus an open loop motor program. So I start to get feedback that something's changed, and now my body can change. So we have, we have research that'll show that, you know, there's a minimum amount of time, but that is if the person's getting the feedback. What if someone is in a gunfight and they're firing their gun going, oh, my God, I'm gonna die. Are they actually reading that person, gun dropping or falling, or the play pattern, or are they firing with their eyes going, oh, my God, I'm gonna die now, Then this thing is over with. I've seen cases where the gun entire gunfights of multiple rounds last, you know, less than 2 seconds, 3.75 seconds. And an officer was asked 187 questions about 3.5 seconds in their life. During the middle of a gunfight where another officer was shot. And they're supposed to have detailed play by play information. We know in research that human memory, memory doesn't work that way. It doesn't slow things down. Like we watch a, you know, a game day on Sunday where we can slow things down and start picking all these little details apart. What if we're internally focused? Our memory about that is very clouded. What if we're looking at the gun and we can't see anything else because of tunnel vision, which most people, including in military and law enforcement were trained like I was, that that's a really bad thing and we need to train people to avoid that. There couldn't be anything further from the truth. Tunnel vision is actually called selective attention. The information that we can't process during that period is called unintentional blindness. The thing we know is that with experience, we know where we need to focus our attention. That usually works in our favor. That's why we can see that it's a gun and not a cell phone. On the amount of times that we can't count. We can't quantify how many times officers didn't use a certain force or didn't because of information they picked up, because their attention was there. The problem is we can't quantify when these things work out for us. They can only quantify when it didn't work out, when it worked against us. So, yes, the give and take to that is, yeah, you can't process a lot of information around that most important thing. That's inattentional blindness. That's the downside to tunnel vision. We can't have external and broad and external narrow intensely at the same time. Doesn't occur.
- [88:11]
B
God.
- [88:11]
A
There's situational awareness from before and after, but when someone's actually going to bring that gun or whatever it is, up we go, boom, right there. And it's exactly where we should be, externally, narrowly focused on the action. So I can act and react to that. And again, all these things, trying to build it into training is important. But does it get frustrated that we're constantly trying to educate people on this and it isn't mainstream education or mainstream understanding by now. I don't think it's ever going to be, Sean, because even people that have done this job for many years go up through the ranks and when the pressures and all of a sudden they become deputy chiefs and chiefs and again, I admire most chiefs I've worked for fantastic at their job. Again, the unsung heroes and masses that are out there really fighting the good fight out there. But there's people who come out and look at a situation and because of the optics look so bad, automatically negligence and then culpability just gets sucked into there like leeches. And it's like, until you really understand what happened, what this. This person was going through in the moment, we have to reserve judgment. It's very hard to do. It's hard for me. Even when I'll look at something on the news, go. And it's like, really, wait till you get all of the files and the three gigs of information on and start peeling that onion away. And then especially talk to that officer about what they were seeing and perceiving and thinking in the moments where that occurred.
- [89:32]
B
There's such a tendency in our culture today to blame the officer or not. And without really fully understanding the scenario, which is why I was so careful talking about the FBI thing, there's just a whole lot of stuff I don't know. You know, it's just, what do you think about? And again, like, I'm not. I don't want to put you on the spot or any of this stuff, but, like, what do you think about the defund the police stuff you said earlier in the interview? On one of the first things you said, this is a thankless job. Is that something that you go into thinking like, hey, people are never going to fully understand what I do, but I don't do it for them. I do it for myself and the people around me that wear this badge on their chest. Does that. Does the defund the police stuff, does it bother you?
- [90:16]
A
It does, but I look at it like, these are just phases that our country goes through. It's new for us that are in this role right now, but it's not new for the profession. Right. The terms are defund or whatever it was. But, you know, law enforcement's gone through. Older guys are still around, can talk about times in the 60s and the 70s where, you know, this is your fight now, guys. But we went through stuff too, and it always seems like it's much worse now. And I don't know. I mean, I feel like it is too, you know, And I'm. I'm hoping that the pendulum is going to swing because that's the way things occur. Things happen for a reason. Has law enforcement gone out and have we learned how to be more accountable to ourselves or each other? I'm hoping that there's going to be a silver lining to all of this. When the pendulum does Swing the other way. To me, what I'm hoping for are people are going to realize that if we want to improve what's going on out there in the street, we need to invest properly into building better police officers. We need the resources, we need the training, we need the culture to change from a training perspective. And that's it. I mean, the other part is like, if you got into this job because you wanted to wear the, you know, the cape and get the pat on the back, like, you know, you know, thank you, Lone Ranger or Superman or whatever it is, it's the wrong job for that. It is.
- [91:37]
B
Wow.
- [91:38]
A
It has to be an intrinsic motivation. It has to be a sense of duty. It has to be a sense of, you know what? I like this job more because people don't like me for. Kind of makes it niche. Like you just don't understand it to the point where I'm gonna still come and help you whether you like me or not. And you, if you can affect people on a one to one basis because there'll be people out on the street holding the sandwich boards and yelling and then you're there at their house at night tending to their child or dealing with them and getting somebody out of a house or fixing a situation and solving a problem for them that they cannot solve themselves. And we do that consistently millions of times across this country every single day and every single night. Nobody says boo and nobody says thank you and we don't, I speak of myself here. We don't need it. We don't need it. We don't need to thank you. We don't need the pat on the back. Just like when people, people say thank you for your service. It's like I appreciate it, but isn't why I did it, isn't why we do it. We do it because it's the right thing to do. And we know we're going to get cast into situations that most people will never have to face. And we're going to have to go over and over and over again into these situations where our split second decisions are going to be held out and magnified and slowed down and picked apart. And if we don't have people are willing to do that, then I will, won't have, you know, then I have a loss for where the society is going. But we're still going to have people that are willing to go into this job and go out there, do this thankless job, understanding that you're not going to get the pats on the back. There's a Lot of things that you're going to be dealing with for the rest of your life. And as far as wellness and mental wellness. But we do need strong Americans to come out here and do this job. And they're there. They're there. We need more.
- [93:19]
B
Well, I have to tell you, I mean, you know, you talked about training and investing in building better police officers. I couldn't agree more. And what I've noticed over, over the last few years now is that the defund the police movement, it was, it made people, good people hesitant to join. I mean, in Pennsylvania, which is where I'm from, like, I've got so many friends who are police officers or even working as state police or even working on the FBI. I mean, so many people that are great, great human beings that look at the way that our leaders, again, on both sides of the aisle, this isn't, I'm not, I'm not getting overtly political here, but on both sides of the aisle, like the Monday morning quarterback things. And now we've got a recruiting crisis of, for, for people, for the state police here in the great state of Pennsylvania. And it's primarily because people, people don't want the headache, I feel like. And, and I think that's a problem.
- [94:16]
A
It's a tough time for us, our classes. When I was running the academy, we were, I would say, look, we got to shut the door at 50, 50 recruits. Other than that, then I get the time on the range and the cars. It gets really challenging sometimes. We'd stretch it out to 60 because we'd get some fall off, some, you know, people that didn't make it through. And it was still pushing it. We'd have up to a thousand people looking to get into the job. And we're going through our phases of hiring on those. We never had to recruit anything. The last academy I just went and did a couple days on decision making. I think there were nine recruits. And that's regional. That's not just our city. It's regional. I'm not there now. The other folks are. But still going to our New York State directors meeting, they were still touting that Syracuse Academy is probably one of the best or the best academy in the state still because of what we've done with addressing these issues of, you know, combating block and silo type training, interleaving and this ecological dynamic approach to training with constraints, led approach. And any people that are out there listening to this, that are on the finger, on the pulse on that, just, they just got all excited and the Heartbeat just went up a little bit. But, yeah, we're doing that stuff, too. And still we've got nine, so. So, yeah, it's hit us. It's hit us. And, you know, honestly, I can't blame them. The other thing that we found, and I've seen this as I travel, Sean, is some of the. Some of the. You know, you've got your city agencies, like where I worked in Syracuse, you've got these agencies around, whatever, Cleveland, and you have your main cities where there's. There's cops working there, and then you've got your outskirts and the towns and villages where you have smaller departments, smaller communities, and there's a lot of people that are getting hired by the bigger cities, and then they're bailing and going out to the small. As they open up, they're. They're trying to get out of that environment because. And one thing is, you know, like I said, the amount of. They're so busy. They're so busy, they can't. I mean, I remember days you can't even. You're like, I can't answer one more call before I have to find a bathroom. I have to urinate. I can't. I've been holding it for the last six calls. And you can't go and stop when your buddy's got something going on over here and you got to get there. It's that busy, and it's tough. So it really wears you down. I talk about this once in a while, that the idea of what, like a good cop? Like you're feeling your own feeling about. I had a good day at work today. I did a good job. So what is that all about, right? What is. What is it that makes you feel good about your job today? And. And, you know, it's. You mean doing something good for someone, that always feels good, right? Somebody appreciates you. Yeah, the pat on the back, it's there. Like I said, I appreciate it. You don't need it, but it does feel good. What's changed over the years, as I've seen, is thoroughness, especially when I work for smaller departments. I work for a couple small departments for a short time. Being really thorough, putting your time into something, making sure you cover all your bases and the way you talk to people and everything else was good. You followed up on your stuff and you did a good job for somebody. So at the end of the day, they're like. They really went out of their way. For me, it felt really good to do it. When you work for a city agency, and like I said, I wasn't joking. Your 20 calls backed up on a Friday in February with 2 foot of snow and a blizzard. Still 20 calls backed up in your territory. What makes you, you know, that good? The good cop, if you will to be, is the one that can knock them calls down before they turn the car over to the next shift. So you're trying to be efficient, but you're also trying to get these calls knocked out. You go in there. Yes, what can I help you with? Good. Not a police matter. Sorry, you know what I mean? It's just cops end up being at the expense of our own how people view us. They end up being very curt about the business end of what we do and what we're engaged while we're there. Because just cleared 10 calls and I've got 15 more to go before I turn this car over to the next guy who I appreciate and I'm not leaving his territory all messed up because I was spending 30 minutes talking someone so they feel good about the police when I couldn't want to. Three more calls. So there's a lot of things about the culture inside of the day to day that a lot of folks aren't aware of either that the cop isn't just being mean or anything. They're just, they're really trying to get to more people, people to serve more people and get that job done, to turn the car over. So just little things that a lot of people aren't aware of, you know.
- [98:33]
B
Well, Mike, I could talk to you forever, but we've already been talking for an hour and 45 minutes. Can I have you back at some point to talk more?
- [98:40]
A
Oh yeah, absolutely. I got all kinds of stories.
- [98:43]
B
Well, I want to hear them. I want to hear them. And, and now that I'm doing this, I do this nightly show at 5. It's a live stream where I would love to have you back on, on that show as well to just get your feedback about some of these, you know, tactical situations. Just like what happened. I mean not, not get political just to give me a breakdown of what, what's going through the minds of these officers when they, they enter scenarios like this. Okay, so how can people help you? Is there something that this audience can do for the Force Science Institute or you personally?
- [99:16]
A
I just say check us out, you know, go on our website, www.forscience.com and like I said, whether you're in the investigation side of the house or training, there's information there, consultation is there. And then the research part you can look and see the publications, the peer reviewed publications that are out there. As far as research in the past, what we have, things that we're working on will be coming out on there as well. Follow us on LinkedIn and a lot of times. We just finished a study in Mesa, Arizona and had a few papers peer reviewed and published recently with the use of eye trackers during dynamic situations, which I'm telling you Sean, this is really something that, you know, a lot of times when we're doing research on this, we're looking for certain things that we're testing and measuring and then we'll get a lot of other data and we found some really neat things that I'd love you guys to get exposed to once everything's out with the video. But eye tracker is on officers during your situation along with body worn cameras. And you can go into court and you can talk about how a body worn camera is not what the officer's actually seeing, it's just a representation of capturing information. But when something doesn't turn out well and a jury's looking at that, it's like I can see it. Why isn't that officer? What do you mean they're not seeing it? That's their camera, that's what they're seeing. And now we have eye trackers on that are basically they're able to show on a screen with a video of a real situation that's a real scenario, I should say, that was built up with an action sequence to it within a half a degree of visual angle, error of where that officer's focal vision was as they're moving around, surrounding around the scene. So as they're doing that, we have it synced up with their body worn camera side by side. And now you get to see the difference between the body worn camera and the eye tracker all synced up in the the same timeline. And they're two separate movies. You've got here and you've got the officer looking at someone's face over here. And I think it's just, it's nice. Again, it's not like we don't look at it as like ha, here it is. It's really like this is, this is a representation, the video format of what we're trying to explain about attention and vision and how we process information, our ability to, to see these things. And it's just a real good visual of being able to see that along with all the other data that they went through with the research and all that and how that came out. So A lot of good research coming out. So again, our website's there. Go on the training on that. And you can see there's breakdown of the instructors and our instructor cadre with all the PhDs, the MDs, the knuckle dragger, nerds like me that are just cops trying to. I always say my job is to work with the researchers and the scientists, and my part is application. So there's always been a chasm between what's going on in the halls of academia and what's actually occurring out there in the real world. And I don't care if it's military police, you name it. Some places in sports, they've been able to take what we know about learning, more learning, and apply it immediately into Division 1 of Professional Sports. In law enforcement, it seems to get farther and farther away. So my job and what I really like doing is being very, very aware of the research and, and spending a lot of hours understanding that, talking to PhDs and reading it and then applying it to law enforcement. So it's the rule of thirds. Like, what is it? That's the research. So what? Why is it important? And number three is, what's the application? Can I use it in training? Can I use it to understand something about investigation? So to me, it's all about education and trying to get people smarter about where we're looking and what we're doing and convincing folks to give us more time and give us the proper resources to train our trainers so they can. So they can, you know, train our cops to not just go home at night, but to do our jobs more effectively.
- [102:53]
B
Man, this is going to help a lot of people. And I've got a lot of law enforcement people from all around the country that watch and listen to this podcast, and I hope that they're paying attention. And some of this eye tracker stuff that you're doing is genius. God, that's genius. Especially. Especially being able to put people in the shoes of officers and tough situations. Mike, I can't thank you enough for giving me your time. I can't wait to have you back. You're a smart, smart guy. But thank you for coming on and we'll talk to you soon, my friend.
- [103:24]
A
Thank you, Sean. I appreciate it. To all my cops out there, stay safe, keep your head up. And I hope I did right by you guys in this session. So take care of yourselves out there. Thanks, Sean, so much. It's been an honor. I'll call, come back anytime. Let me know. Give me a couple days advance and I'll flip this camera on and we'll. We'll get chatting some more.
- [103:41]
B
You got it, brother. All right. Thank you.
- [103:43]
A
Great. Awesome, man.
- [103:45]
B
Okay, everybody, that is it. Mike is, I have to say, one of the most interesting guests that we've ever had. We're definitely gonna have him back. I'm definitely gonna have him on Battleground live and live stream anytime time there's a police incident. I don't think there's anybody smarter. As always, like, subscribe this episode on Rumble. We stream exclusively there now since YouTube banned us it. Listen to this podcast. Share it with your friends. We need your help. Go to official Sean parnell.com get battleground apparel. We just launched the Battleground Apparel Company. We love it. The motto of the company is never quit, never surrender. It's. It is a. It is a clothing line for American patriots who love this country. So if you love this country, Battleground Apparel is for you. As always, thank you so much for watching this podcast. God bless you all and God bless this amazing country that we live in. Take care.