#129- "Minneapolis: The Story They Won’t Tell"

This week, we’re exposing what’s really happening in Minneapolis. Minnesota FOP Spokesperson Kevin Rofidal joins Force Science’s Brian Baxter and Von Kliem for a hard-hitting breakdown of post-2020 policing—what changed, what didn’t, and what the public still gets wrong.

We dig into burned precincts, shattered morale, and neighborhoods left without a true police presence. Then we move into the reality of split-second decisions: distorted body-cam angles, “apparent threat” in the eyes of the law, de-escalation mandates that don’t match real human performance, and the myths surrounding “officer-created jeopardy.”

We also pull back the curtain on the latest ICE operations—doxxing maps, non-cooperation, political pressure, and how all of it impacts officer safety and community stability.

If you want a straight-from-the-source look at modern policing in Minneapolis, this is the episode.

Listen, subscribe, and share with someone who thinks they know the full story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

You know, the ice agents that have been deployed into Minneapolis, they're mothers and fathers, they're football coaches, they're people. And they signed up to do a job. And you might not agree with their job, but uh you you can't just treat them like they're some kind of foreign invaders. And they're even uh when you have Governor Walls refer to these ice agents as Gestapos or Nazis, it it takes a toll.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Welcome back, viewers, watchers, listeners. I'm your host Tyler Owen. Had some tech technical difficulties, but man, we've got a packed house today. Hopefully, have a really good show. Uh conference registration sponsorship has opened up for us. Soon to have released, will be our conference registration for you that are going to attend. It's going to be there in Dallas. Gonna be a good time. You guys are more than welcome. Brian Baxter with Force Science, Vaughn Clem also with Force Science. Vaughn flew down today from Virginia.

unknown 0:53

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Flew in. You're gonna flew back today. And uh, man, I appreciate you coming down. Yeah, of course. Brian's just up the road. He's an old Texas boy, it's not far for him, but three just three hours. Yeah, it was just a little short trip. Yeah. Well, we do have a special guest in the house today, besides Forest Science. I made a phone call Friday to the Minneapolis, or excuse me, Minnesota FOP state president, and said, Man, what in the hell can Texas do to help out uh the messaging with uh everything going on in Minnesota, Minneapolis? And I was put in contact with the state spokesperson for the FOP chapter of Minnesota and also the Lodge 6 president, Kevin Rafidal. Right? Yep. I pronounced that correctly. That's good. And he jumped on a plane quickly and uh came on down to Texas. We're gonna hang out for a couple days and kind of go over some things. But man, you've got an interesting story, and you're gonna talk about some current events that are going on right now in Minneapolis. And uh, you know, it's really important for you to be here, and we we greatly appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

It was a tough decision, 10 degrees in Minneapolis or up to Texas.

Minnesota FOP Backstory And Mission

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Yeah, it's 70 degrees today, and it's probably what, 48 tomorrow, and back and forth. But uh anyway, but us together are gonna have this joint conversation about what's going on in Minneapolis. Uh let's let's kind of kick off Vaughn and Brian, for those that don't know, have been on a previous episode to give their backstory. Vaughn was a Topeka, Kansas police officer, and then Brian Baxter was a retired is a retired DPS uh trooper. What was your rank when you left? I was uh assistant chief. Your assistant chief, pretty high up there with DPS and their training division now as the chief executive officer for Forest Science. So anyway, can't I cannot thank you enough for coming on today. And uh let's kick off with kind of your career and how you got started to where you're at today. You're retired now, but you're also the logistics president. So let's kind of go back to where you started in your law enforcement.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

So I started as a uh police officer in Farmington, a little small town just south of Minneapolis for two years. Then I went back to Edina where I had grown up, became a officer, and eventually retired as a sergeant. I worked canine, worked SWAT uh training, just different stuff at uh Edina. Edina is a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis and about uh 50,000 people. So pretty good size. You know, it's it's a decent size. It's uh it's a very affluent community, and so like a lot of our criminals are from Minneapolis, St. Paul, and they come out to Edina and commit the burglaries and the fraud and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Yeah. As we say, there the crime does not have city limit signs, and so they kind of they're gonna commit crime over here, they're gonna go into your city and and and do the same thing. Uh what prompted you? Did you were you always involved with the FOP in the leadership aspect?

SPEAKER_01 3:24

I was. Years ago, we had uh two officers that were wounded real bad. They helped us with the fundraiser, and I really saw the value in the brotherhood and sisterhood.

SPEAKER_02 3:31

You know, it's funny you say that. It's almost like you don't recognize the need for it until you see it yourself firsthand, right? And I think that's a lot of us have have had situations, whether it be with DPS or Topeka, you know, uh, you know, whether it be the legal defense or just the fact of needing an association to step in when an officer is critically injured or injured severely, you know, that's when you kind of step in to see the really the benefit of uniting and being part of that of that association. Because let's face it, we look at it now from a legal perspective of having legal coverage, but FOP wasn't really founded on that. It was founded more on the brotherhood and and being there for each other in times of need. And that's kind of what it sounds like kicked off yours. Exactly. So you are the large sixth president. Uh you were boots on the ground during the 2020 uh George Floyd riots and protest. Let's talk about that real quick because I think it's a good segue into what's going on today in that environment. Uh kind of give us an idea of, man, what it was like day in, day out. Uh us being in Texas, we we we tasted some of it uh here, especially here in Austin, but we weren't we weren't near as involved or as it wasn't as serious as it was there in Minneapolis.

Working The 2020 Riots In Minneapolis

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Well, it's certainly not a uh proud moment for you know for our city in terms of the uh the the the politics with it, but also just uh uh some of the some of these restaurants and you know, Minneapolis was was kind of a nice place to to eat and dine, and now it it isn't. And uh a lot of these places have closed and uh people are out in the suburbs and stuff. But during the riots, we we were working, you know, until four o'clock in the morning, then come back at eight, and you know, basically did that for a week. And at some point we were really we were concerned about our city, and so we did not go into Minneapolis and help out much uh because we're being a first-ring suburb. We were having uh jewelry store looted, we had a bank looted, uh pharmacy, uh, we had a vehicle dumped with bloody clothes and windows shut out and looted stuff inside. And so we had some of our own problems, and our our city did make it very clear like whatever happens, we don't want that to happen here. And so we're we had detectives uh driving in Unmarks, and we had SWAT you know on standby, and and so uh it was a challenging time. And so uh we did have a lot of interaction with uh the officers that were uh you know in Minneapolis State. I remember Edinha is only a few miles from the fifth precinct the night it was surrounded, which would be the night that it was well, the night after the third precinct burned. And I remember hearing the radio traffic uh when they were you know uh escaping out of the precinct as it was on fire.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

How would it feel? I mean, you're you're in the neighboring has it always been that crazy? I mean, you know, and I and I and I I I mean this lovingly. Austin's always been historically known as a very political city, or or uh a city that's always been different than the most you know across Texas. Has it always been like that across the state, or did you see a change in the culture uh from when you started to where it is now?

SPEAKER_01 6:22

Well, it was a huge, huge change. And I remember when I retired, I was telling the young officers, like, it feels like the 60s, even though I wasn't a copter in the 60s, I wasn't even alive, but just buckle up and ride through it because it's gonna get better. And I think we had in 2020, we had a whole generation of young people that never knew what it was like to be scared. They didn't know 9-11. If they were even born, they were too young to remember it. And so I think people were feeling a little emboldened, and then all of a sudden, when when they're scared for different reasons, now it's for for riots, uh, the tone changed a little bit. And I think in the areas where you appreciate the police, it increased in that appreciation because these people were scared, but then also in the places that were hostile, uh, that increased and the rhetoric uh increased.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

So yeah, I let's just let's go back because I've I've still I still have, and this is probably not a popular uh opinion to have. You look at the George Floyd situation, look at the officers that were involved, and it looks bad, right? I mean it does not look good on camera, but you go back to his training and you go back to the situation, and I always ask myself, had he not resisted, it probably wouldn't have ended the way it did. Fair enough? Um, and I'm not going to go too much detail about that specific case, but when an officer receives that kind of training, how could that affect in the courtroom? And I'm just trying to try trying to wrap my brain around the fact that what DA in their right mind would would prosecute a cop for receiving training that ultimately later on called some kind of asphyxiation. Yeah, so there's layers on that. We we don't know.

Training, Cause Of Death, And Video Limits

SPEAKER_03 8:04

And if and we can segue into something else, but it it it's No, it's I I think I think you hit it on the head. So to say that uh this guy received training consistent with that, one of the things we're looking at when we look at cause of death, when we're looking at uh holding someone accountable for the death of someone else. Right. First thing he's got to prove cause of death. Correct. And that's challenging in and of itself. So the next thing you look at is if there was a cause of death, was that cause foreseeable? Was it reckless? Was there a criminal intent? But if it wasn't intentional death, was it reckless? Was it so far outside of norm that any reasonable officer would have known what they were doing was going to result in death? When we look at that, and then we look at police training, we have a really hard time saying, well, this was foreseeable, and how do you prove foreseeability, or how do you negate foreseeability? We say, Well, hey, dear officer chauvin, how many times have he used that exact same technique? And how many people died under your under your knee? And if you've used that same technique a thousand times and nobody's died, it's very, very difficult to show foreseeability, right? And so when you look at a specific case, you go, okay, if this is not foreseeable, if this is the maximal restraint technique, I think is what they called it, if this is something we actually train officers to do, what was different about this case that somebody ended up dying? Yeah. And you can't really answer that without cause of death, without understanding cause of death, right? Improving cause of death. Right. In that case, there were so many complications that added to that question, right? What was the role of of COVID? What was the role of of a uh compromised uh a compromised health system, right? For all the variations, whether it was respiratory or or otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 9:48

Um but to go back to his training, I mean, but but to go back to his training, he wasn't and in all the camera angles, you we can't see how much pressure's being applied to that neck. And that's the most irritating thing, is that they it was the perfect storm at the perfect opportunity. It was on the heels of COVID or right in the middle of it, was it not? Right in the right, and everybody kind of wanted to get out. Lord knows we didn't want it to, you know, explode that way, but it it it's it was frustrating because at that point in time, on the law enforcement union side, on the labor organization side, we got hit in the mouth because we didn't control the narrative. We weren't coming out in in bolt somewhere, but we hadn't set that tone of kind of where we were or or where we should be. And so you look at the where he was squatting down over George Floyd, and then there's the camera angles, and it just it told it told a not exactual factual story.

De‑Escalation, Human Performance, And Policy

SPEAKER_03 10:38

Yeah, you know, so you hit that on the head. So when we investigate these cases, one of the things we're looking at is how much reliability can we put on the camera itself, on the video itself, I should say. And what we consistently start with is videos, I say videos are liars kind of tongue in cheek, but what I mean to say is videos as features, not bugs, are will capture the event different than the human eye will. They do that intentionally because of the lenses, right? So you'll get barrel distortion or a fisheye lens, which expands the scene. Um, it's so bad sometimes you'll see a police officer pointing a gun 90 degrees from where the suspect with the with the weapon is because the video has stretched it so much. And we use that to kind of show people like you you don't believe your eyes when you're watching a video. Yeah. We start when we analyze videos with the idea that videos as they come off of a body cam are not fit for the purpose of time, distance, speed, or angles. The exact thing that we're going to put it out into the community, put it in front of our executive leaders, put it in front of prosecutors, and say, I need you to judge the reasonableness of this officer's decisions, which will necessarily mean you're going to be looking at time, distance, speed, and angles, crossfire considerations, where the knee placement was, how fast did you throw someone to the ground, um, how fast was someone running? An uninterrogated video isn't as isn't fit for that purpose. Right. And yet that's precisely what we use it for. So my initial pause when you asked and asked the question is because we sort of have to unri unwind and think, okay, what do we know about that case versus what are some of the outstanding questions still? Um the video did not tell us enough to have an opinion about knee placement. Right. But knee placement, even if it was on his neck the entire time, would tell us nothing about whether that is something that could even cause death under those circumstances. And so we've I'm I'm hesitating because I'm like, okay, well, your theory is that if it was on his neck, okay, he killed the guy. Well, that was not demonstrated. And I think if you look at a case like that, one of the things they'll look for is you know trauma to the neck. You know, and it and they in that case, I think multiple um multiple autopsies, including, as I understand it, micro, like micro-slicing tracheas to see if there's any even even micro trauma. Um and I don't think in that case they necessarily were were able to show the knee placement either to buy the video or from the subsequent um forensic like examination, medical examination. So now you go back to your question and why I kind of hesitated. Like, how do how does our training affect it? Well, that's a completely unrelated question. The training might have been perfectly fine. Yeah, no one showed that the training was deficient, or the training was particularly reckless, or that the training, even if applied 100% in accordance with the training, was somehow going to result in death or foreseeable death. And then I go back to uh my first point, which is one of the ways we show that is hey officer, how many times did you do this technique? And like we do this all the time. And do people die? No one's ever died. You go, okay, well, then I won't say it's foreseeable that what you did was was going to cause this guy's death. Um, and so you gotta then again ask and unravel what are all the complications then that this guy died from, and what role did the officer play? And did that role rise to a level of criminal or civil liability? Um, and the the country has been having that debate ever since we started learning more and more about uh the actual facts of that case.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Yeah. When it talks about training too, let's bring up one thing that's never nobody's ever talked about is medical training. And that is in Minnesota, state law is you have to every police officer has to have medical training and every police car has to have first aid kit. And so in Minneapolis, I know that they give them a box of band-aids and a blanket to cover up a body, and that's about it. And if they come in and they're already a first responder or an EMT, they won't support them to continue their certifications, they just give them the CPR internal stuff. So if you think about how much money Minneapolis has paid out uh in damage from the riots, but also in lawsuits, how many AEDs could you have bought? You you get them in a grocery store, you put them in a swimming pool, but they're not in the back of Minneapolis cars, police cars. And so then the the leadership in Minneapolis is real quick to point the finger at the officers, but what responsibility do they have on that? Why aren't they training these people? I know Minneapolis police officers that carry advanced medical gear out of their own pocket. And so then if you take uh, you know, it's not just for cops, it's saving other lives. Take take that incident out and say, how many people have died in shootings and car accidents because they didn't train, they didn't give decent equipment. And uh, if any other agency would have been there, whether it's Metro Transit or Hannepa County, I'm sure they would have pulled out an oxygen bottle and an AED, and that whole situation would be different. So, you know, you gotta look at that that part of training too, and that's on leadership, and that's on the city leadership, and that's on the police leadership.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Well, and I think that when we all started, and I don't want to make the name anybody's age in here, but I think that the American police officer in this current time, right now, the ones that are graduating today are the most trained in our profession that have ever been. Agreed? Because of mistakes that we've seen with other departments and other law enforcement agencies and other things that have transitioned or gone on before us. And I think that if you don't evolve, uh then then you're not you're not you're not progressing. And I think the the current American police officer is the best trained uh for different situations. That's just my personal opinion.

Defund Fallout And Officer Morale

SPEAKER_03 16:18

It's a uh you know, interesting because a lot of if if we thought those situations resulted in good training, now that's another part of where we focus is are they getting good training? The topics of training have certainly expanded. Correct. So they're doing implicit bias, they're doing uh de-escalation, they're doing and a lot of these these uh responses or reactions to some of these big events certainly have flooded the countryside. One of the things that we would note is when we talk about honest accountability and training, that if you're gonna hold an officer accountable to this new training, the training has to be something that is capable of not just being retained for an exam, but it needs to be transferred to the operating environment. So if we look at, for example, communications training, de-escalation, and persuasion, right? Three different types of training that we can sort of push together. Um we now have officers out there who will end up with two hours a year of de-escalation training. Now, by comparison, I was a crisis counselor and I had to have over a hundred hours of supervised crisis counseling, persuasion, communication training to talk to someone on a phone, right? And that was in crisis. And so, yes, I do agree that today's police officers have gotten a much broader range of training. One of the things we're really focusing on, and it is it's agency by agency by agency, because some of these agencies are doing phenomenal work. I mean, they're really invested in it. Um, and so we're looking for what are they doing and ensuring that, hey, this is a topic that we're all having to deal with now. And so we want to make sure all the agencies are getting, I won't call them best practices, but but are getting good training that allows us then, to your point, hold them accountable for their performance on the street.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

So I use de-escalation because it's one all the time where you know, we're like, well, the officer should have de-escalated. Well, that sounds great. It's like a sort of a magical incantation of some magic words you say, and and the expectation is that ex de-escalation for cops is a choice. You either chose to de-escalate them or you chose to use violence. Well, you know, we know that's not everybody's able or willing to be de-escalated, right? And not everyone even has the skill set to de-escalate because when when we're told the officer should have de-escalated in court, um, because you know, I was a cop in Topeka, and then I became an attorney for those who don't know. Um, and now I'm a litigation consultant, so I've been an attorney. Someone asked me the other day, why do you call yourself a senior attorney? And I was like, I guess that's a great question. I said, maybe because I've I've been doing it for a while. And she goes, What, since 2002? I thought, is that not long enough? Yeah, can I be an intermediate attorney? I mean, what's that? Right. Right. But but when we're looking at this from a litigation consulting standpoint, and I'm in court, and they're saying the officer was reckless and decided to use violence instead of de-escalating, we have to pull them into the deep waters of those types of subjects and say, okay, well, let's look at his de-escalation training. Oh, looks like he gets two hours a year. Can we as a community actually hold an officer accountable to failure to de-escalate when his skill set is built on two hours a year? Yep. And so, yes, I I agree there's a lot of phenomenal training going on out there. We hope we're providing some of it. Yep. Um, but I will agree wholeheartedly that the breadth of topics that they have to understand and know is much more than what we ever had to. The integration of law, policy, uh, physical skills training, communication training, medical training now is all having to be integrated at a much higher level or should be uh in in ways that we didn't necessarily have to concern ourselves with, but we do now.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Right. I did want to touch on something that speaking on the heels of training, you know, right after the George Floyd situation happened, they Minneapolis, Austin, a lot of cities across America went through a defund stage. Okay. And then you look at the aspect of that some looked at his training as a as that resulted in George Floyd's death, that's argumentative, uh, or that's arguable that that did not happen. But what was frustrating again was that now you had the heel on the heels of all the riots in George Floyd, now Minneapolis comes in and defunds. So does Austin. So does what other cities across America? Like San Francisco was one of them. Uh I can't remember all the all the cities, but to your point about training uh and equipment, how what was the morale like there in the area of Minneapolis? Uh you've got this pile of rubble that's been left from all these protests and riots that went on for several weeks, if not months, and then they come in and defund them. What was the morale like after all that took place?

ICE Operations And Local Non‑Cooperation

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Well, you know, the the morale was it was challenging. It really was. Uh just before all that went down, the the city was starting to attack what they call warrior training. And, you know, for those of us that, you know, earlier in the in our career, it's how to survive when you've been shot, how to not just lay down and die, how to fight through that. And even in some of our medical training, we were there started to incorporate scenarios into that. So you practice putting detertiquet on. Well, the city of Minneapolis said no more warrior training. And so they started to cut that out. Well, then the union started to fund it. And the union said, All right, we're going to keep sending you to this officer survival training to to teach you how to stay alive and how to, and so that was already starting to uh degrade the morale anyway. And so Minneapolis and St. Paul are it's kind of the tale of two cities where St. Paul, they're kind of loved by their community, the the it's two, three generations of police officers, many. Minneapolis, this goes back for decades. No matter what they do, the media just doesn't cut them any slack. And likewise with their city council, with uh uh you know, the the activists, and so uh it's it's such a difference between the two. And so then you come back to the to the morale, and you know, a lot of officers, if they were 20 years on the job and they've got a bum knee, they think, well, you know what, this place doesn't like me anymore. Uh maybe I won't keep climbing and out of the squad car with a with a bad knee, or or you know, and so you saw some some disabilities going out. You saw some PTSD stuff. The state came in and kind of changed the rules too. So they they said, All right, you go out on this disability, you'll have health insurance until you Medicare kicks in. And then all of a sudden they they come back to the people who have already retired and they pull the rug out and they say, We're gonna give everybody a, I think it was a 1% raise, all the retirees, but we're taking away the medical coverage. And so these are people, and then now they're they're having to go back and improve every few years. They have to sit down with another exam, see if there's uh whether it's uh on the PTSD stuff, whether it's still an issue and whether they want to keep paying this. And it was like they changed the rules on it. And so you have a lot of stuff going on there. The the the challenge to the qualified immunity, uh, it was all started in Minnesota, and you know, it was kind of ground zero for the defund the police. Part of the defund the police wasn't taking money away from the cops, it was so that they could go fund their NGOs and all these, you know, violence interrupters and uh the and and all these other uh private groups, and they needed money from somewhere. And so that's where it came from or where it was going to come from was the defund the police. At the time, the chief actually took a position against that, and then later after he retired, the mayor still reprimanded him for uh there's a policy that says he can't, I don't know, do anything the mayor doesn't agree with or something, uh, to the effect of like you you he's not supposed to take a position on political stuff. So even after he's gone, really that's and that was that's that was why he got termed, and then you look at the current he already retired, and then they disciplined him with I think a day off or a letter letter reprimand, something some kind of discipline after he was already gone, and that's that we're not done, you know, screwing with people, yeah, you know, even when they're long gone, and that kind of even with the the PTSD disabilities.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

That's interesting because the current police chief, uh I couldn't tell he was political or not, because I've seen him on the CNN about every other day just voicing something, and it's very political. Very, yeah. Uh so this is all in 2020. It's it it seems, you know, things were things were kind of bouncing back, and it did take some time, uh every bit of a year. I mean, well, I tell you, I say that. You had the defund movement, but it seemed like Minneapolis Police Department began to is state things were kind of working their way out.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Agreed? To some extent. I I think a lot of it was the the leadership, their their federation did a good job of standing up for you know, speaking up and saying this is not what's happening, this is what's happening. And uh they they've still had challenges, you know, with hiring. Uh the city of Minneapolis has done nothing with the third precinct. So here we're coming up on six years. It's a it's a shrine for them. It's a it's a burnt-out building with a fence around it that they can uh the the third precinct, instead of having the officers working in that neighborhood, they're coming from downtown. And so the people who hurt are the residents there. So if you uh are get done with roll call and you need an emergency call comes up, they're coming from a uh building that they're stuffed into downtown and they moved them around a couple times. There's really no real plan moving forward to rebuild that precinct. So you have the whole southeast part of Minneapolis that does not have a precinct, and when they're patrolling it, and they used to have shifts of of 30 people, they're down to like eight people sometimes, and sometimes they're they're coming in in a in a precinct, and I saw the other day, I think three people showed up to work, and it's because they're working them nonstop, but also uh there's no there's no precinct there.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

That's wild. That's wild. Before we kind of segue into what current events are right now, how how involved were there any and I I know we can't talk about the cases specifically, but uh were y'all asked to kind of weigh in on on any of the Minneapolis use of force situations back in 2020 or earlier than that?

Doxxing, Park Bans, And Public Interference

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Uh not not that that would really contribute to the conversation at all. I got you from a hands-on in the weeds perspective. Gotcha. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Um yeah, so we're we're talking about the Minneapolis situation that's kind of improved a little bit, and then current events happen, and then we have this uh the the immigration situation going on. Um can you kind of give us a leading up to what the events took a you know took place with Ms. Good, uh the situation in Minneapolis and why you know they why you feel like they were focused on that area?

Vehicle As A Weapon And Use‑Of‑Force Law

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Well, where do we start? You know, it's it's it's uh Minneapolis is a uh it's a very diverse area, and uh they've some of the stuff that so ICE came in and it when I started on the job and for years uh we worked with ICE. And back when it was called INS, now it's ICE, we've always worked with them, and it's been done kind of quietly, not very publicly. And a few years ago, you started to see city councils starting in Minneapolis, but also some of the suburbs, where they're coming out with positions saying uh we do not cooperate with ICE, we don't have force immigration law, you know, we don't ask immigration status. And my first thought is, well, we used to. So what changed? Don't make it sound like we have never done that before. Right. If we arrested somebody in the middle of the night for domestic violence and we'd bring him into jail, and we we suspected that he's an illegal alien, we'd call the 1-800 number, the toll-free number for law enforcement, call ICE, give all the data, they'd punch this stuff in, we'd hand the phone to the person, and even in whatever language, they still found a way to interview him over the phone. And then if they felt that they wanted to detain that person, they would say, Okay, we're gonna fax a detainer to you into Hannip County jail. And then when we'd send that person down the domestic violence and they were on a detainer, the jail honored it, it was a different sheriff than it is now. Uh, a lot of this, I think, a lot of these problems wouldn't wouldn't happen if uh if if he was still a sheriff. Uh, but basically, we did cooperate with ICE in Minneapolis did at one time. And so now all of a sudden there's this shift. And so politically, then you you come out with the governor walls and mayor fry saying, you know, referring to ICE as Gestapos, and now now you get the political rhetoric, uh, and you know, that they're monsters, they're kidnapping people up the street. This is a federal, uh, this is a federal occupation in our state. And so as the the hostility ramps up, and the governor did this in 2020, and the mayor did this. I remember in 2020, uh, the night after the third precinct burnt down, finally the the news people and even the left-leaning news was calling them out saying, Where's the mayor? Where's the mayor? You know, and finally the mayor comes out for a press conference, and he looks like he just got wit woke up on the couch, and he his hair is kind of and and they uh one of the very liberal reporters call yells out to him, says, What's your plan, mayor? And he says, Plan for what? And as the city's on fire. And it literally, it was it's the same rhetoric we saw in 2020 of let's let's uh let's say we're not gonna incite violence, we're gonna call for peace, but let me take a couple of cheap shots. And you know, whether it's the governor or the mayor, uh they're they're they're still doing it. And they've toned it down a little bit since Tom Holman arrived, but uh, and there's there's a little bit of cooperation starting, but uh that that's what started it all.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

So for those that don't know, what happens typically is that ICE has been they will identify a target, uh a high value target or a target so you know on on some of these lists that are you know repeat defenders, drug dealers, homicide suspects in other countries, they show up to serve these warrants. And have here in Texas, and Brian, please jump in at any point in time, here in Texas, they would typically call the local jurisdiction and or state police. And what we would do in Vaughn to your point, you you mentioned this earlier, it's so important for SWAT teams to have perimeters, and it's for the safety of everybody, not just the law enforcement's on scene, but to to make sure everything is calm and collective, especially within the inner perimeter of that scene. And so what'll typically happen is when those arrest warrants or situations are going on, local jurisdictions will assist uh whatever federal agency it is. It could be FBI, it could be it could be ICE, it could be the U.S. Marshals. And so that didn't happen. And and and those phone calls, we we were hearing rumblings that those phone calls were occurring, and they were being told, no, we're not going to assist because of the perception, and it became very political. And so then the situation, and I'll let you kind of pick up on on the blow-up and the major incident that took place with Miss Good.

SPEAKER_01 30:39

Well, I think when you talk about the the rhetoric and the temperature, uh it it's hard to call and cooperate with somebody that just called you a Nazi Gestapo. Right. And so when you set the tone there, then you know, and for years, the officers in whether it's in Minneapolis or a suburb or the troopers, we've worked well with the other federal officers. And and so then when you get this leadership problem where uh they're creating where you're not allowed to work. And so we had something, I think it was right uh right around January 9th, where there was an ice raid, it was uh they started to get the ice agents started to get surrounded. They called for help. Minneapolis, they were trying to get through to Minneapolis, then they finally called the sheriff's office. The sheriff's office responded. There was, I think, one Minneapolis officer on scene, and then the assistant chief got on the radio and said, No Minneapolis officers are allowed to go, and if you're there, you're to leave right now. And so luckily the sheriff's office is big enough where they were able to contain this area until things calm down, but uh until they could get out get out of there. But again, it comes back to that perimeter and that cooperation. And so then you lead up into, you know, when you look at the last couple weeks, these incidents, I don't look at like every little angle, and you know, that's kind of your your specialty. I look at like what was the overall picture? What was going on here? And when when the the mayor is uh and the governor are saying, All right, uh, we are creating a website, we want you to do everybody start recording these people and get in get in their faces and don't back down. And those are words from the gov Governor Waltz. Get in there because we need to document this, because when this is done, we may want to look at criminal charges. So they're telling people to go do this, and they're they're encouraging, which is kind of, and I'm not gonna put myself in their shoes, but when one politician's telling them go get in their face, and other politicians aren't, you know, what what do you believe? And obviously, you know, common sense says don't go and and interrupt, but you I I look at the what's the temperature of the whole situation.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

Yeah, so let's let's kind of go back on that morning. Uh ice came in, uh, they were doing a warrant service, I believe, and then shit kind of went haywire. Back to your point about you know identifying where they were at, which is a city, repeat that again, a city funded right program that citizens are asked to identify ice on a like a mapping system.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

So it started out first with the governor saying, just take video, everybody, and now it's turned into as of this morning, the city of Minneapolis, the park board, has a website for you you could report ice sightings, and they start to docs it out and they're putting pins on there where it's at. So Minneapolis passed a an ordinance that I don't think is even constitutional. It says ice cannot stage in city park. And so if they are, we want your video, and every time they pull in there, uh, you know, the the people are up in their faces, and and so now there's actually taxpayer-funded city website as of this morning, Minneapolis Park Board, where you can dox the agents in. For a little while it was a start tribute in the big uh uh media in Minneapolis that is far left that was doxing where they where the officers were working. Now the now the city's doing it.

Officer‑Created Jeopardy vs Honest Accountability

SPEAKER_02 33:46

So it kind of leads out to our point is that there was a warrant service that was taking place. Uh I can't speak on whether whether or not Minneapolis was contacted or not, but there was a situation that took place where in the goose shooting. Uh she was told multiple times to stop. She looks like she had contact with an officer, spoke with him, she continued past him, and then I had a conversation the other day from a 25-year Texas officer uh that told me this. He had no right to stand in front of the vehicle. This is a cop telling me this. He had no right to stand in front of that vehicle and engage with the driver. And that to your point about the videos. Every angle that I've seen on the videos, he wasn't he didn't place himself there. She she was attempt attempting to leave after the officer was continuing to tell you know, tell her to stop. And we at TMPA have said this from the beginning is that let's wait for the facts to come out. There was there was multiple opinions that were already made the day that shooting came out. Vaughn, can you can you kind of give us some insight on some of the angle of the uh abuse of force situations there?

Sympathetic vs Synchronous Gunfire

SPEAKER_03 34:54

Yeah, so we can start with um uh there is actually a good news story to if you go up a little bit higher. Um this site that has gotten confused. Why do not why do cops not stand in front of cars? You know, we were talking about this earlier. Where did that come from that a cop can't stand in front of a car? Well, if you look at the total number of shootings throughout a year, a a portion of them is going to be police officers shooting at drivers of vehicles where that vehicle has placed them in threat of serious body injury or death, right? And so over the years, if you look back in in LA, a good friend of ours, uh Greg Meyer, uh, was actually in charge of a task force to reduce the number of lawful police shootings. And that is the critical part that people keep forgetting. We have been training cops to not stand in front of cars for officer safety reasons. We've trained cops to not stand between their patrol car and the suspect vehicle because that backs up in the for officer safety reasons. We then started training cops to, when you can, when you have enough time and you've thought about it, prioritize getting out of the way of the car because one, we'd like you to not get hit by the car. That's an officer safety thing. But it also meant that we understand that you could legally shoot that driver if that driver poses a threat of death or serious injury, but we're gonna do what we can on our end to reduce the number of those lawful shootings. Well, over time it started to be, well, we're gonna write that into policy. We're gonna not just put it in our training, we're actually gonna write it in policy. We're not just gonna prioritize it from an officer safety standpoint. We're going to not we're gonna put it in policy and then we're gonna communicate to everybody, hey, look, we've reduced the number of police shootings of vehicles, which is a good news story. Yep. That good news story, that effort by law enforcement to be adaptive, to say, look, I can't control the number of people going to try to run over cops, but to the degree I can get cops to jump out of the way faster rather than shoot, we're gonna reduce the number of lawful shootings. There's there may be trade-offs to that. All tactics are risk benefits and trade-offs. So every people are immediately thinking you could legally shoot them, but you're not required to. If there's another way by which you can get out of the way, we're just asking you to consider it when you can. It's the sort of sort of thing where they talked about shooting someone in the leg. Cops are always like, well, I'm not legally required to shoot them in the leg, but if there's a circumstance where I can give a warning shot and I might shoot somebody in the leg, there's nothing that says constitutionally that's illegal, but we know there's a lot of good reasons, there's a lot of risks in doing it. So it's just a tactical discretionary thing. So there's some agencies. I remember uh was uh one of the chiefs, former uh ICP uh president, he was teaching his agency that, hey, warning shots are okay, they're not illegal. That's all he was saying. They're not illegal. So if you want to shoot somebody in the leg or give a warning shot in the right circumstances, I'm just telling you, you have the authority to do that. Um but then everyone jumped on him and said, Oh, he's teaching warning shots, he's teaching people to shoot people's legs. He's like, No, I'm just saying it's not illegal to do it. So now let's fast forward back to standing in front of cars. We've had people who have weaponized that in the in the way that they're saying, now if you do stand in front of a car, it's unreasonable. It's it's reckless, it's unreasonable, and we're gonna go back to the denominator. And I'm I'm writing an article on this right now, writing it on the plane last night. Um, one of the things that I noticed as I was trying to think about this, you know, more deliberately was well, wait a minute, they're saying it's unreasonable from an officer safety standpoint to put yourself in a position that you foreseeably know is dangerous. Well, okay, cops have to put themselves in dangerous situations all the time. Sometimes there are tactics, particularly SWAT tactics, where you intentionally put yourself in front of a vehicle. Um, so the your officer's placements is purely tactical, which is discretionary, right? So what they start to do is they say, look, the best departments in the country train their officers not to stand there. The there are certain associations across the country who have model policies that really discourage officers standing in front of uh vehicles. Um and so they point to those things and say these are best practices. Deviating from a best practice is against generally accepted police practices, which they just manufactured, by the way, and therefore reckless. Now you see the leap they went from we're gonna do it because it's discretionary, it's it's it's good for us, and there's some trade-offs, but we're gonna try it to reduce the number of lawful shootings to now if you do it, if you stand in front of a car, it's reckless. It's unreasonable. So I thought about that for a second. I thought you keep calling it unreasonable, and from a constitutional standpoint, we use the word reasonable in a very specific way, right? The reasonableness is that balance between the intrusion on the individual is balanced against the the government interest being served, right? That is a what we call a term of art. That is a legal term that has very specific meaning. What these people who are now trying to indict police officers and hold them accountable when they stand in front of a car, they're trying to say if you had not engaged in that reckless conduct, you would not have been in a position where she could have run you over, and therefore you created the jeopardy. And so we your audience is probably familiar with the idea of officer created jeopardy. It's a purely academic theory, has not been recognized in courts, um, and yet it keeps being advanced and talked about as though it's a real thing. Right. So what they've now done is they've conflated reasonableness from a tactical standpoint, like who would stand in front of a car where you reasonably suspect a guy's going to run into you? Also, a very different question because how many times do cops stand in front of cars and people don't try to run into them?

unknown 40:43

Yeah.

Apparent Threats And Split‑Second Judgments

Immigration Target Lists And Media Narratives

SPEAKER_03 40:43

Or stand behind cars or beside cars. So when you talk about the denominator, thousands of times do we stand in front of cars and people do not try to run us over? We can't therefore say when a cop stands in front of a car, he it was foreseeable, so much so that it was reckless and it provoked the driver to drive into. Um, the people who are who are trying to confuse the issues and weaponize this issue against police officers to hold them accountable, which we which we refer to as dishonest or corrupt accountability, because we want to hold officers accountable, but we want it to be honest accountability. The people that are doing that, they know what they're doing. It's intentional, it's an intentional weaponization of it, it's for political gain. Um, and we have to confront that in court now on almost every single case that they're now criminally indicting officers against. Because as you mentioned earlier, one of the things from the police reform movement was this effort to eliminate qualified immunity. Well, you might be able to mess with qualified immunity at the state level, but that's a federal concept. It's a concept that that yeah, it's a it's a federal concept. So, and it's a civil concept. So, what the academics did um right around the same time, just before uh 2020, actually, they started writing articles like how are we gonna get around this pesky qualified immunity thing so we can hold officers accountable. Understanding their idea of accountability was if an officer shoots somebody, they need to go to prison. If they don't go to prison, we're not holding them accountable. Yeah, right. And so in our world, and in fairness to the most honest people who want to contribute to the conversation, I do understand even in these latest uh Minneapolis shoots, most of the population, and I I train attorneys, I train judges, I've trained politicians, they have no idea what police powers are, they have no idea what the limits of police power are. Now, a lot of civilians who've never been to law school and have access to AI and the internet are becoming pretty good lawyers themselves in their own right. But the when when people watch a police shooting and they're like, well, the cop shouldn't have done that, he shouldn't have done that, or for example, how many how many people have we convinced now in Minneapolis or any place else that all if you don't want to get out of the car, if an officer tells you to get out of the car and you just utter the magic words, I want to talk to your supervisor, you're free. One just happens to show up. Yeah, yeah, well, you don't have to get out of the car then. You're free to stay there and wait as long as you want. Or they what they don't realize is that in America, the Supreme Court has already said that police must maintain unquestioned command at the scene of investigations, and that both officers and community are safer when police don't let people come and go freely from the central point of their investigations. Now, why is that critical in what what we're seeing um in some of the across the across the country right now is when we were growing up as cops, you know, and we'll go back to the nineties, two thousands, but certainly um we would do the perimeter for a SWAT team or if we weren't on this team at the time. And and if if somebody came in and started whistling or hooting like an owl to give away the the The tactical movements of a SWAT team as they were trying to approach a residence, they got arrested, right? That's interference, that's obstruction, right? And there was no question about that. And then they were later found guilty of those charges. Yeah. Um, compare that with what people believe they are authorized to do now as civilians. And so we now have massive populations of people who do not realize that technically, when an officer tells you to do something, so long as it's related to a legitimate law enforcement purpose, you have to comply immediately. Yep. Or they're now have probable cause to arrest you in many jurisdictions. Um, I say many jurisdictions because I learned a long time ago as a legal advisor that there's some jurisdictions it's not an arrestable offense to disobey a police order uh unless you do it with violence. In my in my city, in my state at the time, not only was it an arrestable offense, but we had three different offenses we could arrest you for uh for for disobeying a lawful police order. And so right now, there's a lot of pushback against the police, and a lot of this stuff we're seeing on the internet and a lot of this analysis that it's just out of pure ignorance. They just don't know. Right. But then you get people setting them behind a podium and saying and reinforcing that ignorance, right? Intentionally or otherwise. But then you have a whole body of people out there who are weaponizing that intentionally. They're taking advantage of that that naivety and they're trying to use that in court with jurors, leading them to believe that if one I heard recently that's maddening, a professor got up on the stand and said, Well, this officer's conduct was predictably. Now, what is the legal standard for predictively counterproductive and who gets to decide that? Where's the citation for that? Yeah, what was it? And so I but here's why, you know, we used to just roll our eyes. I mean, prior to the the tsunami of police reform, which by the way, I apologize. I think it came out of the DC area, uh George Washington University. Um, when the academics were having these discussions, it wasn't getting anywhere. You can go back and look at all of their theories and all their academic efforts to reform police. After thank, thank, uh, well, thank uh Minnesota and the George Floyd event, they got all the backing they needed. And there was a tsunami of support for police reform. And so they took these academic playbooks and they just put them into state statutes, they put them into policies. You uh Ellison, I mean, his his guiding principles on use of force, if you read it, it was just a every single police reform uh proposal ever made was just kind of dumped in that thing. Uh, and then you guys, not you personally, but your folks from your state would call us and they're like, okay, well, here's our new guidance. Can you guys help us interpret this and understand how do we operationalize this? And we we look at it through this lens of honest accountability, which I mentioned earlier, which requires two things. Um, first, it the guidance has to be clear enough that an officer can predict the lawfulness of their own behavior, right? So when we're talking about policy, it has to be clear enough that we know whether what we're doing is right or not. And the second thing is the expectation on officers' performance can't be beyond human performance capabilities. Right. When I'm reading these guidelines that were given out to Fortunately, your state, um I'm like, this is beyond human performance capabilities. Humans can't do this. And by the way, many of these terms have never been defined. I don't know any officer is going to know what that means. Um, and so the answer was, yeah, you you're kind of stuck with it. You're kind of a test case at this point. This stuff we say has not the contours of reasonableness, as we know it, because people are like, well, reasonableness is a vague term. I go, yeah, but the contours of reasonableness are sort of crystallized through years of case law, right? We can all kind of get an idea of in certain circumstances what's reasonable, what's not. But if I tell you must use the minimum force necessary and only as a last resort, and only when proportional, and only when it's when it's uh consistent with community uh in advancement of community trust, you're like, yeah, I no idea what that means. How can you, in a split second, be able to balance all of those vague concepts? Uh, but that was the point. The entire point was to sort of get it to be so difficult to actually make a decision that you sort of incentivize police to stop making decisions.

SPEAKER_00 48:34

You know, we in Texas, we had a unique opportunity to look at a lot of that proposed legislation that was going uh that was going up to to become a law or not. And one of the things I remember reviewing, I was on a uh legislative review committee at DPS, was uh part of a a big omnibus bill that that had all of the components that Bond's mentioning. You know, somebody looked at all of the proposed reform ideas and and just put them in a big list and said, make this a law. One of the things, there was a lot of things in that uh in that bill, but one of the things was officers have to stop using force immediately when the threat horizon changes, when the behavior stops, or when the person stops uh posing a threat, they have to stop immediately. And that's a good example of what Von mentioned about honest accountability. I have no doubt that the person who wrote that legislation had the greatest intentions. Right. We all want one human being to stop coercing, physically coercing another human being as soon as they can. But it didn't say as soon as you physically can, it said immediately. And we know for human performance science, a person can't stop doing anything immediately. Everything we do takes time. It takes time to perceive something, to uh to orient to that thing, to make it make sense, to come up with a decision and then and then perform based on that decision. All of those things take time, and it also takes time to stop doing something that we've decided to do. So that was a that was a good example of of a of legislation that was beyond the limits of human performance capability. Uh and it also, you know, one of the examples I give is uh of that crystallization that Bond mentioned. The expectation when we approach an intersection and the light is red is that we stop. That's been operationalized, it's been it's been trained uh in your driver safety program, it's been part of the driver license exam, and it's been part of what we've been doing for for decades. And we know as drivers, if the light's red, our expectation is to stop. So the expectation is clear and unambiguous. In addition to that, it's not beyond the limits of human performance because if you're approaching a green light, it doesn't go from green to red. Every light you're gonna encounter is gonna go from green to amber to red to give your uh your human performance limitations time to perceive that change and and behave accordingly. So it that's a that's a key point of what we're trying to normalize is the concept of honest accountability. We're not just holding people accountable for some ambiguous definition of accountability, there has to be meaning behind it, and we have to be able to humanly uh comply.

Politics, Policy Goals, And Reform Agendas

SPEAKER_02 51:17

Well, and and to the point about the whole code shooting is that when you look at the different angles and you and you you you're seeing boots on the ground or hearing what's on the ground, what they're talking about. From a use of force standpoint I'm trying to be very delicate on how I asked this. From a use of force standpoint, I from a labor union standpoint cannot see where he was unjustified in using deadly force. He was being struck, he was trying to step out of the way as the mirror is coming, and we talked about you know the delay and and and the use of force. It just seemed and I'm I'm I'm sitting here thinking, and it goes back to the the George Floyd. It's almost like they wanted Miss Good showed up that day as an agitator. She was trying to serve her mission and she did not want to be told no. She was content, she continued to be resistant and not obeying commands. She continued to agitate ICE by showing up to different scenes. And and the at the end of the at the end of all this, had she done what she was told to do and ordered to do, then she would still be alive today. I can't justify the officer's actions or statements that were made after the fact. Some of those can be damning, uh, but there's a lot of emotion involved and a lot of things that are said after an officer-involved shooting that I think anybody would be understandable to. And they're gonna make they're making a huge deal out of that too. But I can't see from a use of force standpoint any wrongdoing on any of the angles.

SPEAKER_03 52:53

Yeah, you gotta, you gotta, I think the simplest thing to look at is to Tim was take it out of that case. And the first thing is, is a vehicle capable of inflicting death or serious violent injury? Just do the pure legal analysis. The first question is, was it would it have been reasonable for a person in that officer's position, would it have been reasonable for the officer to perceive that vehicle as a threat of death or serious violent injury? Yeah. Understanding from a legal standpoint, which is divorced from emotion, divorced from what from from picking a team, um, reasonable people can disagree, and the law recognizes that. Um that the the judgment of a threat assessment is made in split seconds. Yep. And it's not something you do an evaluation of. You recognize it when you see it, based on all your prior training, education, experience, and this guy knows the dangerousness of a of a vehicle. Yeah. We all do. Like that's that's not at all in serious question in the courts. There's that that the idea that a vehicle poses a threat of death or suspicious injury is overwhelmingly well settled in the law. Not even a close question. The second question was then what is a quality of force that would be reasonable to stop that threat? Right? So those are the only two basic questions. Now, what they've added to the complication is well, should he have been there in the first place? Okay, that's irrelevant. Right now, the courts do not concern themselves with that because also understanding this, the ones who are advancing that and saying that it's unreasonable, remember, unreasonable has to apply in the context of the Fourth Amendment. Correct. There has to be a Fourth Amendment trigger, and we all know as cops that the trigger is a seizure, right? So if it's pre-seizure conduct, it's not going to arise to a constitutional violation. Yeah. No matter how outrageous he is, he could have been saying what he wanted, he could have been engaging, you know, whatever he wanted to do in that period, which he wasn't. Um it's pre-seizure conduct, right? That it is not going to then take, you can't take pre-seizure uh constitution, well, yeah, just pre-seizure conduct and turn it into a constitutional violation because you disagree tactically. Yep. And here's the other point about tactics. It's not only pre-seizure conduct, but again, the placement of yourself and cops know this across the board is a tactical decision, which is a discretionary and and it doesn't have to be necessary. It's by definition, if something's discretionary, it's not necessary, right? It's not absolutely required. Um, and so they're made they're doing that intentionally. So when when the lawyers got together and kind of looked at this, we're like, a a very similar fact pattern, you would just say, this isn't a close call from a legal use of force standpoint. This is not a close call. Um, and unless you start having to add, well, he shouldn't have been standing in the first place. And we noted that too. We talked earlier, you know, he's standing to the corner, and I hate even having having to demonstrate this, but her car's angled away from him, and when she backs up, she angles it towards him and then accelerates into him. So the the question was who put him in front of that car at that moment, right? But it wouldn't have mattered anyway. So that becomes a distraction, and all these distractions about want to do an after-action review.

SPEAKER_02 56:11

But that's the but that's the problem that that I've got from a labor union standpoint, a labor organization is at what point do you think society, I'll tell you who put him in front of the car, she did. Right. You know, and uh at some point, society, whether you're far left, far right, or in the middle, we've got to say, we've got to come out and say it, right? If if had had she stopped doing what she was, she was given multiple orders, she refused. That ultimately ended her life. Her decisions, continued bad decisions by her is what ultimately caused that use of force situation to happen.

Cooperation Across Agencies And Safety

Prosecutorial Posture And Releasing Footage

SPEAKER_03 56:47

Yeah, well, you don't uh well you say caused um the courts will look at it as a subsequent intervening event. Yeah, like no matter what the officer did, the intervening event was the assault, right? And so there's sort of a break in that kind of causality thing. You so much of this is a distraction. It's such an academic argument that when we find ourselves engaged with it, we're actually lending it credibility. We're pretending that officer created jeopardy is a thing and we're ignoring suspect created jeopardy because officer created jeopardy as a theory has gotten so ridiculous that now the experts are arguing if you well, if you stand in front of a car, you've caused them to accelerate into you. If you leave cover, you've caused them to shoot at you. If you, and I see you laughing, I'm gonna tell you why I know laugh anymore, but uh if you stand too close and they hit you in the face, well, you shouldn't have been standing so close. We now are sitting in criminal court with officers sitting next to us as def criminal defendants, having to defend against that stuff. And the people holding them accountable are jurors who imagine that if a professor or a lawyer comes in or a police expert comes in and starts saying these things, they don't know that they're just making it up as they go. Yeah. Right. And so we start lending it credibility. Now, this is an important thing that I think Brian and I want to make very clear because we, as trainers and as former supervisors, we think there is a massive role for after-action reviews to look at tactics, to constant net uh we have a culture of constant narrating improvement. Every tactical engagement can be improved in hindsight. We know that, right? And that's why we have the after-action reviews. What are our lessons learned from us? What is what we have to be very clear on is drawing a very clear line between a tactical after-action review and legal criminal or civil liability, right? Very different things. One should be very, very difficult to accomplish, right? And the other one, the tactical after action reviews where your sergeant gets to bop you in the back of the head and say, Yeah, don't do that, you know, and or or some version of that, right? Um, but so again, where it gets muddied is we're we're sitting here trying to argue, you want to sit here and have a have a tactical after action review, we can do that, and we can we can all sit here and every one of us would have something very meaningful to add to that discussion. Yeah. But that is that is not the same thing as as uh demanding performance that is above the legal standard, which is reasonableness, right? So when I hear, well, he's engaged in conduct that's that's uh predictively counterproductive, I'm like, well, where's that in the law? That you must engage in conduct that is predictably productive, otherwise you're unreasonable. And it's a it's this idea of reasonable people can disagree. You don't need consensus on reasonableness. I just need to know that what there was a reasonable basis for what you did. Right. And then the flip side is that no reasonable officer could have believed what you did was okay. In order to hold an officer accountable, what the law says is you you had to know what you did was unreasonable, and it had to be so clear that what the law says is it had to be beyond debate. So when I'm there's a there's a podcast out there, uh two cops, one donut, and their audience is really more for community members. And what they've ended up with is a nice population of community members who don't necessarily like the police at all, or certainly they don't start out that way, but they have a bunch of cops on there. We've been guests. Uh I don't know, have you been? I have not yet. Uh we'll get them on there. Uh, but um I went on a few times, and what what is interesting to me, and I think it's critical for people to understand, is he these civilians not just have a difference about our tactics, if they talk about tactics, they have opinions about our tactics. Reasonable people can disagree about tactics and the predictability of the cost, benefits, and trade-offs. And different people can decide those trade-offs aren't worth it to me. Yep. And the cops are like, well, they are worth it to us for the following reasons. And the community is like, those are different priorities for us. That's the discussion. That's where it's robust and fun and and insightful, actually. You go, actually, that's a good point. But what ends up happening is a lot of people don't understand the legal standard is one of reasonableness, and that tactics are about trade-offs, and that all of our tactics, operations, and strategies have to be aimed towards a specific operational goal, right? If you have a very different operational goal than me, of course my strategy operations and tactics aren't going to make sense. So, to your point, when when we started to see all this uh tsunami of police reform after uh George Floyd uh death we were seeing a lot of veteran cops being pulled off the table. They no longer had a seat at a table. They weren't allowed to do to manage policy. Um and they were calling, like, hey, I've 30 years, I've been on a policy, I've told I'm not allowed to sit there anymore. And I said, Well, and then they would start rattling off to me all these proposals and how they didn't make any sense. They just they they want cops to do this and cops to do that. It doesn't make any sense. And I said, Well, it makes sense if you understand what their outcome is, their goal. Yep, right. And they all had various goals. Some were quite uh admirable, right? We want to just reduce the number of people get shot. Great, right? But what we what we ended up seeing was there was a clear set of goals we we categorized as traditional law and order interests, right? The stuff we grew up in, like common sense stuff that most Americans believe cops are there for crime prevention, crime reduction, crime detection, uh efficient administration of justice, evidence collection, rule of law, all these things that were like, yeah, that's that's what cops do. And they would have a very different set of goals on the other side, which was more relative to uh social justice issues, right? Right. And that's an important conversation, it's important part of the voice in the conversation. But if you were analyzing all these reform proposals to the lens of traditional law and order interest, they would make no sense to you. If you analyze those same proposals through the lens of social justice outcomes and social justice goals, then they make perfect sense. And so that's what I love about some of these, what we're seeing in some of these riots and protests is they are angry. They they do they are they are righteously indignant and righteously angry in their estimation because what the cops are doing is a wholly inconsistent with their worldview, wholly inconsistent with the set of goals that they they believe should be prioritized. And we sit back and we like, well, these are just traditional law and order goals, these are just tactical responses. We've been doing for decades, but they don't know that, they don't know the history, they don't know where they're at politically, and that's why I think that's what makes it actually more dangerous because they think they're the good guys, many of them. And I think you could probably point out the I think the most sophisticated approach that is that not all of the activists have the same motivations. There's a variety of motivations that we're seeing out there, um, some more righteous than others, but they're all there together.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:24

Um well, and speaking of activists, this kind of spurred up the good shooting, stirred up some activists to to frequently go up to Minneapolis to stir the pot, to be agitators. And this last shooting, uh, I've seen video of two hours before the shooting, and then I saw the shooting itself. Uh let's talk about that. Let's talk about this. Is it called sympathy fire? Is that the legal term for the what is the legal term for for what I'm referring to?

Numbers From ICE And Jail Cooperation

SPEAKER_00 1:04:53

And you know what I would I would dance around the issue of whether or not there's a legal terminology for it. But some people I I think what you're looking for is sympathetic gunfire. Yep. And uh what we like to refer to it as is synchronous gunfire. Because in many cases, uh the the the concept behind sympathetic gunfire is something like you're shooting, so I'm gonna shoot. Yep. Your gun's going off, I'm gonna get some too. My brain tells me there's a threat because I hear well, I would argue that would be synchronous gunfire. Okay. If we're basing our force response, in this case firing a gun, on our own perceived threat, then we just happen to be shooting at the same time as someone else. We're not basing uh, you know, that would be kind of a misattribution. If if I hear your gunfire and I think that's incoming gunfire, I could misattribute what you're doing for for an incoming threat and then make the decision to return. And I don't know that to be the case. I haven't seen any of any any official documents. I'm not I'm certainly not applying this to to either the pretty or the good short. Uh I'm just discussing the two concepts. And the reason I've split in those hairs is because when we say sympathetic gunfire, it sends the message that uh one cop is shooting just because the other one is. Right. You're shooting, I'm gonna shoot it. 100%. So synchronous gunfire means they're shooting at the same time, uh, you know, give or take a half second or a second between start times, and then uh their decision to shoot is based on perception. That perception can sometimes be based on a misattribution. Gotcha. We've got some cases that we use in our our studies where an officer is is offset from another officer who's firing, and the second officer sees muzzle flash, sees glass breaking, sees smoke, and interprets that as incoming gunfire on his partner, so he returns with with deadly force. Uh that's synchronous gunfire. He made a decision based on what he perceived, although what he perceived was miser misattribution. Right.

Social Media, Messaging, And Support

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

Well, I I think what's critical in what Brian's talking about too is the law allows you to respond to apparent threats. You're not required to only respond to actual threats because we're it's a reasonable belief standard. Correct. So if you are if you're doing a threat assessment and then your buddy fires, is it reasonable to you for you to infer that his firing meant he also sells something that threatening and that's the final straw you needed to complete your decision? It would be absolutely reasonable to consider the fact on top of everything else that your partner also perceived it and fired. Yep. So that's just that's asynchronous and also incorporates the fact that he fired. And that and the law allows for that because it's an apparent threat standard. Um the other thing is if it was the if it was your officer's fire and you thought it was from the suspect, as Brian described, the law also allows you to respond to that. You are later, after the fact, determined that it was in it was inaccurate, right? However, the law doesn't require you to respond only to actual threats, it actually responds to reasonable beliefs and and apparent threats, of which and and I think uh um the example I had to use with an attorney that they very quickly was guy, a guy is uh coming out of the car, officers yell out of a van, it's a crash. Um so one officer is stuck on one side because he can't get through the crash, the other officer on the other side, and the driver sneaks out the over the back seat and gets out the back. They thought he was trapped in there, so they had him contained. He goes in the backseat, comes out the back passenger door. But he comes out, and now this officer doesn't see a gun, but he hears them yell, gun, gun, gun, drop it, drop it. Is he allowed to infer that the guy has a gun? Yes. Okay. Now so the guy is walking back, he starts sprinting back to the back of the van to interrupt a guy, to intercept a guy who he now reasonably believes has a gun, was just previously involved in a shooting. The officers on the other side start shooting him, start shooting the suspect. So now can you also add to the fact that does the guy still have a gun? Is he an armed threat? Does that actually on the scale add to reasonable belief that other officers are now engaging him in gunfire? A for a gun you haven't seen, right? Um, he runs around the back, the guy's back is facing him, the guy is still upright, and he's still fighting, and this guy puts rounds in. Well, what the guy the officer didn't see is when the other officer shot, the guy had spun and dropped the gun. So he's actually shooting an unarmed guy at that precise moment. And the question is, could an officer, could a reasonable person have believed, had a reasonable belief that he was presently armed and dangerous? And the answer was overwhelmingly yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:43

And uh and the flip side to that is the officer who doesn't have the perception of the weapon being taken out of the equation, let's not even talk about the second weapon that could be present. Right. The the one that was obvious has been taken out of the equation. The officer who has that information available stops shooting, decides not to shoot. So it's equally unfair to say and unreasonable to say, because this officer who was on the same scene wasn't shooting, right, that it's unreasonable for this officer to have been shooting.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:14

But hell, the scary thing is at what point I'm we've mentioned the word reasonable. What a reasonable person. And I go back to some of these lunatics that are up there, these agitators that are in Minneapolis, some of them aren't reasonable. You know what I'm saying? And I've always kind of thought that it jokingly to my mind, but I mean, at what point society itself is like, what a reasonable person. Well, that's subjective in itself. I mean, honestly, let's just call it what it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:41

But anyway, that's reasonable. Reasonable is supposed to in it. So the difference between reasonable and honest. So reasonable is supposed to be an objective test. You have a belief. Is it reasonable? It's dependent on whether objectively you had you had reason to believe it. And you added a third use of reasonable, right? So I earlier I said there's fourth amendment reasonableness, and then there's tactical reasonableness. And then our own law says a reasonable belief, meaning is there objective evidence? So that is a third way that concept is being used, yes, and and and kind of all married together to answer that one question. Was the threat assessment constitutionally reasonable? Right. Versus was the use of force in response to it constitutionally reasonable?

Conference Details And Closing Rapid Fire

SPEAKER_02 1:11:24

When situations like this happen, like the George Floyd effect, the Ferguson, uh, it really scares me because you have these young officers out there that are are scared, they are aware of the situations going on on a national level. And they the fear of having the legal battles of trying to defend themselves or a third person, it's scary. Let's face it. I mean, to a vet, it's scary. And I always get nervous around these times because I I don't want any law enforcement officer to lose her life in the Ferguson effect. That we went through that in 2016 of oh my God, I don't want the legal battles of having to use a force because my gun's out and having that. And I'm always nervous after events like this.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

Well, maybe some encouragement. I had this, we were on a board meeting called the other day. There were some younger officers on that board, and uh we were talking about this, and they're like, What are you talking about? They're they weren't even tracking Minnesota, they weren't even tracking the ice story really because they're going out every day working. Well, yeah, and he's like, I'm just going to work. He's because we were asking him, like, what how do you think this narrative should be? And what are you guys facing? And they were like, I mean, yeah, we have an idea that something's going on, but you know, we're we're going to work. We're still executing warrants, we're still kicking down doors, we're still going to domestics, we're still stopping cars. And that's what I thought. I was like, Good. That's awesome. Yeah. Um, and I I even laughed at the George Floyd one the first time because I thought uh you knew it was intentional and you knew it was political, maybe not in Minnesota, but as the national epidemic. Because I'm like, I'll use Topeka. Why on earth does Topeka Kansas care what happened in Minnesota? I would if you're the police leader in that, well, you go, yeah, that we we don't have that technique here. Any other questions?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:04

Like, yeah, it's like you know what's crazy is that just the other day, just down the road, just south of Austin, a search warrant was being conducted on a on a narcotics house in San Marcus. Okay. And because their tactical unit or narcotics unit was wearing a semi-green colored uniform, agitators showed up right at this two-hour long. They they kicked, they they kicked the door, made a tactical entry, they secured it, and they're conducting their uh their narcotics investigations, and these agitators showed up. And you know, listen, I love you being here, and we're gonna help anything we can to facilitate the messaging up in Minneapolis, and you're doing a hell of a job. But that shit in Minneapolis is not gonna tell we have some pop political figures in Texas that are just are gonna back us. And God helped men and women of Minnesota for not have for having a governor that does that's spineless. But here in in Texas, we we're not gonna tolerate it, you know. And and the other day we had a post kind of go viral, and all I put was is that Minneapolis tactics don't work in Texas. And it was over a Dilly, Texas uh immigration run situation. But anyway, to my to your point is that this is you know hundreds of miles away or a situation we're dealing with in San Marcos, Texas, because people assume that that's what's going on.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:25

And so one of one of the big differences just based on personal experience, you know, I've never lived through something like you're living through. Absolutely. Uh what I've enjoyed through my 30 plus years in law enforcement was cooperation at so many levels, uh, with the feds, cooperating with the state, vice versa, state cooperating with county and city, and vice versa, and and you know, Corpus Christi, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, El Paso, uh San Angelo, all the places, Medland that I've worked, uh, we've always enjoyed that cooperative relationship where if we on a crimes against children task force, for example, were going to execute a search warrant uh on a child predator, we could call the local police department and say, here's what we're gonna be doing in your town. Uh A, can you help? Yeah. Uh, what can you offer? Do you have any intelligence on this neighborhood? What do we need to know? What should we know? And and so we had that back and forth that not only informed the operation, but it helped the operations go more smoothly. And it also gave the locals opportunity to protect their town, to protect the people in their town. And and I always thought that was key. Uh that, you know, no data that I have behind this, but felt like it always made everything go more safely. 100%.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:40

And and to your point, can you speak on real quick the current environment? You know, we're being told different things on the media, but boots on the ground intelligence. What what is what is what is the police chief saying and and and and what is the messaging from him down to boots on the ground in Minneapolis as far as assisting ice?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:58

Well, uh I it may have changed today. Uh I'm gonna read something here in a second, but uh it's been don't cooperate, and the chief has taken the same message as the mayor. When you talk about and you and it's fascinating to listen to you two kind of analyze these cases and the case law and the reasonables, and but the important thing to understand in Minneapolis, the prosecutor doesn't care. She doesn't care what the law is. Mary Mariarty is she she says, I I want to be involved in this for transparency. It has nothing to do with transparency, it's time to hang another cop. Yeah. And and so it's important to take those steps, like you're talking about looking at the different angles, looking at the interviews, looking at cell phones, whatever, uh, to get a better picture. But for when you when you have an incident that goes down and you're 30 minutes later, the mayor's not even waiting for a press release to be written. He's already in front of a camera and and you know, yelling and and uh yelling and calling ice names, and then it's backed by the governor, uh, that's the the environment there. And so, you know, that reasonableness is important. It's also, you know, we have to dial things back and slow things down. You know, in in our state, we have a law that uh as soon as it's practical, they they release the body cam footage and officer involved shootings, and that's fine, except for the fact that we need to slow things down, and we need to tell people no, you're not gonna get all this data right now. You know, everybody wants their pizza in 30 minutes, they want everything FedEx, they want it right now. And if you want it, do you want it now or do you want it good? Uh, you know, do you want it to you want us to be accurate in this? And so with the boots on the ground, uh, just gonna read if it was on X today. This may change things. Is this Liz Collin, who's a great reporter up there? Borders are Tom Holm announces the federal government now has unprocessed unprecedented cooperation and collaboration at county jails in Minnesota. Holman announces they'll draw down 700 federal personnel. Uh, and then she goes on to say that Holman says so far they've detained 14 people with homicide convictions, 139 sexual related offenses, 87 sex offenders, and 28 gang-related offenses. So this isn't just grabbing dishwashers. Right. This is these, and one other thing too that that I know from talking to people at ICE is that they have issued final deportation orders on many of these people years ago. And they were from countries like Laos or Burma, where they didn't have agreements to take them back. So we had nowhere to send them. And now all of a sudden those political channels have opened up. I don't know the details on it, but now they can take them back. So those are the sex offenders, the rapists, the the murders that they're going and rounding up first. And so their hearings have already been done. There's no more appeal, and it's really easy to grab them, put them on a plane, and send them, you know, to new state to process and then overseas. And so that's where it's starting. But as far as I'm hoping, hopefully with this latest uh message on X that some of that might be turning around, uh going back to the county sheriffs. It was up to each county to decide. And then Keith Ellison, the attorney general, came out and said a few weeks ago, issued an opinion and said, I don't think the sheriff has the authority to decide that it's got to be the county board. Well, there's no there's no law that he just that that was basically what he wanted to have happen. And it depends where you are in the state. Some of the sheriffs are very cooperative and some aren't, and some of them are being pressured, you know, by outside influences. But uh that cooperation hopefully will be getting better now.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:22

Well, and to your point, I think I think we can all agree to this is that the information that I've received, probably along with you guys, is that they are working off a target list. I'm not gonna deny that. Some areas are working off a target list that they've received information on such and such or XYZ on these targets that they know for a fact are convicted murderers and rapists that have come over here from different countries. What you're hearing and what mainstream media is highlighting or focusing in on is that Pablo, the construction worker that's providing for his family, is being targeted by ice, or they're being picked up by ice in the in the droves. From my information of me talking to actual ICE agents, it's collateral damage. Is that they go to some of these communities that are very welcoming to illegal immigrants, and in their process of their investigation in the same home as Target A, that's when they're locating these other people. And I think it's important to highlight that because number one, there is a process to get into this country legally, and then we're not going to make this into an immigration podcast. That's for a separate day. But it's just collateral damage, and it's unfortunate that media outlets, which we all can, you know, say that we trust media outlets, right? Because we learned a valuable lesson in 2016 and continue to see it today. But it's just unfortunate that the media outlets are focusing in on that small a margin, a percentage of the immigration situation and inflaming uh what's going on in Minneapolis.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:46

Well, it's it's it's always a I mean, Homan's does a great job of coming. He does a great job. And he's, you know, he's saying, well, hold on a second. First of all, anyone who's here illegally and is deportable is subject to deportation. So if you think that because we're prioritizing the worst of the worst, which is makes sense from a resource management standpoint, from officer safety, and to sort of even try to garner community support, you thought that would be a good thing. He's also very clear, like, yeah, all those other ones too, they're they're fair game, and and we're not gonna run from them either. They were elected on that mandate, is their position. But we keep finding ourselves, even as an industry, sort of backing us at well, yeah, but as long as it's not the ones who aren't criminals, and they're like, no, we're gonna get them too eventually.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:30

Yeah, like Homer stops my living eight. He's like, can you keep back on on the key word you just said? Illegal, right? It's an illegal immigrant. It's e here they are here illegally.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:39

So anyway, it is resource prioritizing right now, and and and again, it goes to the political question. If you don't agree with the political outcome, um then the strategy operations and tactics are irrelevant. Correct. Don't want you doing what you're doing. And so the complaining is the is the the issue is not the issue, you know, as they'll say, is that is we're gonna complain about tactics, but it's really not about your tactics. We're gonna complain about the operations, not about the operations, and we're gonna complain about your strategy. It's not about the strategy. We don't like your end goal. And then when you what's terrifying to me is why don't you like the end goal? What's your motivation for uh for resisting the deportation of illegal immigrants? Right. And that's where I think it gets varied. And you just have a lot of people with very different motivations. But I found this interesting. I had to do a continuing legal education class the other day and was on immigration. Um, so I thought it's pretty tight. Because you're an intermediate law attorney. Yeah, because I'm an intermediate attorney. Um uh but I was like, they are so 100% detail oriented, they know every exception, every timeline, they know every every piece of minutiae on on uh the rule of law, procedural justice. Do not fail to, as you say, cross your I's and dot your T's. Um because um they will appeal it. They will make sure you never get that deportation done. And I was like, you guys are like just amazing attorneys who are taking that playbook, that those rules and using them to their greatest effect. Now compare that to what they're asking on the other side, which is I can't you get you to comply with a lawful police order. Right, right. I can't get you to recognize a we did actually get a warrant. You complained about that. You didn't like the administrative one, so we got a full, you know, uh, you know, Article 3. And so I just I just laughed. The issue's not the issue. We're all here talking, we can talk, and you you brought it up. Um, a great point is one of our strategies is to leave the political stuff out in the political ethos because we don't know the motivations. Right. Because the industry itself, who we're committed to, can't agree at the at the highest levels. The executive leaders of our own industry can't agree with one another what should be the priorities.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:59

Well, and that's a great point that that I kind of want to bring up just real quick, is that I personally, we've me and Brian have had this conversation here in Texas. A lot of the sheriffs, and I can't speak on Minnesota, but a lot of the sheriffs run all these on these Republican or Democratic tickets. And it's like you you you process that, right? And and it's the state law on and federal law, it's written in black and white, it's not in red and blue. And I think we as a society have kind of gotten wrapped up into this political party affiliation, and we don't look at the law itself. You're seeing that in Minneapolis right now. It's so far left and so far Democrat. Well, then it put you take officers in Texas, they're like, oh my God. Look at look at the mayor of of uh Houston. Um, I can't think of his Whitmeyer. They because they saw a D in front of his name and he was quote unquote a Democratic senator, there was so much hatred towards Whitmeyer. Man, that guy is so pro-law enforcement, you would not and that's my point is that if you're pro-public safety, it doesn't matter what party you're at. And I'm that's where I think party affiliation should be removed from any legal position across the nation. Sheriff, judge, JP, that shit is should be thrown out. It's black and white, it should come down to legal uh and not really party affiliation. Anyway, make my point.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:14

Yeah, well, that's and that's a tough one because it it goes back to uh you know, even at like the judicial level, yeah. Party affiliation of your judges. Well, are you gonna be a strict constructionist where you're right reading or you're gonna be interpreting that constitution in a manner that's consistent with your political beliefs? And if you're the if you're on one side, you want you want a judge who agrees with your political views so that they're putting these cases in a consistent uh yeah. I mean it's we're not gonna have heaven on earth. No, no, we're not.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:44

I do in Wimberly. I just want to throw it out. I was gonna say San Angelo's pretty close. Yeah. Yeah. But we love Texas, so anyway. Man, is there anything else? How can people support you and and and and the lodge and the Minnesota and the men and women of uh of your state?

SPEAKER_01 1:25:59

I guess give us a follow and just share the you know, share the message. You know, I think we're starting to get more into X, and what we find there is you can find the truth if you want to. Yeah. And and instead of just being fed what somebody wants you to see, you know, you're seeing these citizen journalists, uh, for instance, where they're going out, they're doing solid work and exposing stuff. And, you know, we didn't have that avenue, you know, a few years ago because the media would tell you what you wanted to hear. When you talk about the media real quick, in Minnesota, we had a situation where IC is chasing somebody, he goes into a home under construction, climbs up really high. By the time they get him down, he's hypothermic. And the news story was, you know, they're they're doing raids raids on construction sites. Well, it had nothing to do with the construction site, but that was the message that went out first. And then you're trying to backpedal from there to get the real truth out there. And so uh, you know, we have alpha news in Minnesota that isn't online, but it's really the only place that is where I I believe you can get the the the truth. The truth. And uh, you know, the other stuff, and that's also I think the future of media, whether it's a podcast like this or uh something small, I don't think these hundred million dollar TV stations are the thing of the future. I think it's gonna be uh a good reporter, whether they're left or right, doesn't matter, with a good camera and a meeting internet connection.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:20

And you know, we've seen up there even in 2020, like some of the good people that captured some of the images in the video, whether you liked it or not, were you know, boots on the ground coming out of a coffee shop and not a not a big satellite truck, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:33

Yeah, and to your point about social media, it's so imperative for the for for you patrolmen out there, patrol officers uh or detectives or anybody in law enforcement or law enforcement supporters, when you see a new story come out, or not a new story, but um a labor organization or labor union push out a force science training that's law enforcement related. I'm gonna tell you this right now. Social media historically has been anti law enforcement, and we saw a shift in that about a year ago. Our social media has brought Blown up. And I encourage you and I beg you, simply hit the like button. Don't just scroll over that law enforcement. Because for whatever reason, about a year or two years ago, social media in general, Facebook specifically, told a good friend of ours in law enforcement that they were told to push that information down, close the algorithm on law enforcement, because we don't want that getting out. And that's enforcement. And so we collectively in the law enforcement community, if we help each other out by simply hitting the like button, dropping an emoji or a comment on one of the social media things, it it it helps our algorithm and spread our message. And to your point, when we can't push our own message, we're allowing somebody else to control it for us. And so we've got to do a better job of helping each other out across the nation of different law enforcement situations. So go on their page and follow them and help them out. We're going to work together here in the next couple days while you're in town. I cannot thank you enough for coming down. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we got some couple of rapid fire questions here in a minute. Before we do, for science conference, let's talk about that real quick. September 22nd through 24th at the embassy suites in Round Rock. Y'all have had a large number of people who have submitted uh to be presenters at the conference. It's going to be fascinating. What are we looking forward to?

SPEAKER_00 1:29:10

Man, I tell you, it's going to be on for the books for sure. We've got a whole, we've got some huge dames uh with presentation proposals that we're going through right now. Uh uh content is going to be second, and uh the obviously the population is gonna be great. We're gonna have a whole bunch of law enforcement folks there. Uh our staff is gonna be there. We're gonna have a three days of of information that shapes what we do and informs what we do and shares stories and case studies and experiences and lessons learned. I'm I'm excited and looking forward to it. I know we're all looking forward to it. It is gonna be the 22nd through the 24th of this September, which is coming right up. It is, man. Uh, in Round Rock. I remember we started talking about this, it was not only in a different year. It just is gonna be toward the end of that year. Yeah. No, it's coming up quick, and and uh we're excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:00

Well, be looking for that. Our TMPA members that are are uh signed up on our eblast and our in-source magazine. We're gonna be helping you guys push that information out, promoting you guys, our members to go to the Force Science conference here in Round Rock. I'm sure we're gonna be there uh in some form or fashion, uh, whether it's the happy hour or whether it's in the conference itself, and we're damn sure gonna be at the Force Science to support them guy. You know, those men and women of uh Force Science, you guys are good partners with us, and we really appreciate it. Rapid fire questions. Kevin, you ready? Go for it. What is your favorite cop movie or line from a cop movie? Uh probably Adam Twelve. That's good. That's good. What's your favorite cop car you ever drove? You know what? I had a Chevy Tahoe when we were running Tahoe's for a while. You know, that's that's a hard argument there. The room and and the balance of a Chevy Tahoe. Uh, I'm a big crown vic guy, but you know, that's okay. We can we can I can I can ask you that next time. You can do your do your research. Favorite drink of choice when you're hanging out, uh relaxing and not in the uh chaos of the current situation in Minneapolis? Uh West Coast IPA. That was very quick. There was there was no thinking on that.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:05

This is man, uh, anything else you want to cover? No, thank you. This is this kind of support from around the country. And you know, the men and women up there that are knee deep in this stuff, they need to hear from not just uh law enforcement, but the the people that support them, you know, uh thank a cop. Just you know, and it goes so far when you're uh you you've seen it, when you're working in in uniform and you're at a gas station or whatever, kids come up and want to say hello to you. It's just you know, you don't need to buy them a cup of coffee, just say thank you. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Anything else?

Sign‑Off And Thanks

SPEAKER_02 1:31:35

You guys good? No, man, thanks for having us. Yeah, well, sorry if we walked through some tech technical difficulties. Um, and you know, I appreciate you guys sticking around for all that. So, of course, man, thank you. Yeah, all right, you guys take care, stay safe. God bless you, and as always, may God bless Texas. We're out.