Tangle - Former police officer Randy Shrewsberry on reforming police

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

On today's podcast, we sit down with Randy Shrewsberry. Randy is the founder and current Executive Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. He is a former police officer, Crash Reconstruction Investigator, and Certified Fire & Explosion Investigator. He has spent over 30 years in both the public and private sector criminal justice field and has attended basic police training in Ohio, South Carolina and Indiana as well as 100’s of advanced training in investigations as well as other specialized areas in law enforcement. Randy has been a lecturer on criminal justice matters and has been admitted as an expert in the State of California, State of South Carolina, and the State of Indiana in Criminal and Civil court.If you're not yet subscribed to Tangle, you can do that here: https://www.readtangle.com/If you want to see more of Randy's work, go here: https://www.trainingreform.org/vision--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some reasonable debate, and independent thinking without some of the hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and today I'm very excited about our guest, Randy Shrewsbury. Randy is the founder and current executive director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform. He is also a former police officer, crash reconstruction investigator, and certified fire and explosion investigator.

He spent 30 years in both the public and the private sector criminal justice field, and he's done all sorts of basic training, police training in Ohio, South Carolina, Indiana, as well as hundreds of advanced trainings and investigations and other specialized areas in law enforcement. Randy has basically done it all. Randy, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate the time. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

There is a ton we could touch on, but I think maybe the most interesting place to start would be just to hear a little bit about your organization. I think from my readers' and listeners' perspectives, when people talk about police reform, I think a lot of people imagine activists and abolitionists and criminologists and op-ed writers, and not a ton of people's minds immediately go to former police officers. So you certainly have an interesting background. I'd love to hear about why you started the Institute, what you guys are up to, and what your mission is. Sure. So we are the nation's only nonprofit advocacy organization that addresses reform through how do we educate police officers

in the United States. And it came about, we're heading into our fifth year, and it came about, you know, with my career as a police officer, I attended three different training academies, you mentioned the intro in Ohio, South Carolina, and Indiana. And even early on, I was able to recognize that, you know, I was woefully unprepared for a lot of what my job was, and that there was a clear disconnection from what I was being trained and what the realities of the job were. And I'll talk a little bit, you know, about that more later about things like fear-based training and, you know, this kind of warrior training. So, again, a little bit over four years ago, I started the Institute because one of the things that I recognized is,

is that when we see incidences of deadly use of force cases, especially when it's revolving around individuals who are unarmed or for which there was a clear alternative for how a situation could have been handled without use of force. I recall the legal principle that police officers' actions are justified, both legally and I would say morally, that it's justified based around what their training and experience is. And my view is that it doesn't matter what job we have, right? I mean, whether you're a journalist, a CEO or a janitor is how we're trained is central to how

we'll end up performing. And so I started the Institute with a couple of things in mind is one is, is that we needed to re-look at training, right? The training models in the United States have really never been fundamentally changed is what really kind of one big intersection in the late 1950s and early 60s when militarization and SWAT training was introduced. But for the most part, you know, we've added a few hours here and a few hours there, maybe, you know, some changes in technology or classes like mental health response or implicit bias. But for the most part, the training curriculum, despite its expansion on some hours, has been pretty static.

So I knew that number one is that we needed to just kind of have this re-examination of what would police training be in the 21st century if we updated the curriculum. But in order to do that, we had to do a couple of things. And first and foremost, just research. We had to really have a good understanding of what is the state of police training in the United States. And we identified three really major areas. First is untrained police officers. So we have police officers who are working today in 37 states, which allow the police to be employed to work autonomously with, you know, full powers of arrest, full powers to use deadly force prior to going to the training academy. And this is insane in our view, right? I mean, that would be like you going to the doctor or going to the

hospital and the nurse going like, I'm going to nursing school next year, right? I mean, if you live or you're visiting in one of these 37 states, it means that if you call 911, or if you're being pulled over by the police, or you have a police interaction, the reality is, is that you don't know if that officer has even been trained. They go through what's called a pre-basic training, which is, you know, maybe a week or two, which is largely around learning firearms, a little bit on the law, but then they have maybe up to a year, some states it's two years, for which they can go to the academy. So this is a clear problem in our view is that there should just, you know, not be an instance for which a police officer is dealing with the public or is even being asked to, right? I mean,

because one of the things, if I can back up just a second, I think it's important that we talk about while we are an advocacy organization, you know, seeking reform, this isn't one-sided. You know, these issues in police training impact the police as well, which I'll talk about a little bit more. But as an example with the untrained officers, right, we have had a few instances where there's been deadly use of force cases. But the most recent event was a South Carolina police officer last year who was killed on a traffic stop who had not been to the academy yet. So thankfully, the legislators in South Carolina are looking about closing that loophole. So we hope they will and others follow suit. The second is that police officers, generally speaking, just aren't trained long

enough. And so I always share this anecdote is that I learned this on a date with a hairstylist when I was down in South Carolina. And she was telling me about what was required of her from a training perspective and what was required on a continued basis to maintain a cosmetology license. And I sat with my mouth open over my salad because I was shocked that what she was describing to me, and by that time I had been to two academies and still had not had to complete the same amount of training that she did to be a cosmetologist. Now, we've done further research in this, and we know that A, South Carolina isn't anecdotal. This is the case in every single state in the United States. Cosmetologists are from a regulatory

labor outlined by the state is that they're required more training. But this is also plumbers and electricians, nursing, a couple of states, even massage therapists. So there's a clear disconnect. When we look at this as a labor regulation about certification from the state, how long should their training be? from the state, how long should their training be? And so we see that on average, anywhere from six to eight months is the average what police officers are required. Now, to add on to this is that when we look at our international counterparts, and the Institute has looked at over 100 nations across the globe. We only have three countries for which require less training than us. And that is Iraq and Afghanistan, for which we train their police

officers. And the third is Papua New Guinea. So when we look at, you know, Australia, New Zealand, you know, we're talking about a four-year program. Germany's, you know, three-year program. Across the Nordic countries are four-year programs. There is just simply not enough time and six or eight months to train over 50 different topic areas that officers have to learn. And to put this in perspective is like, I always give the example about law, right? It's in their name, law enforcement. So it's the thing we would think that they would be spending the most amount of time on. So police officers are given just a

little bit over about a week and a half of training relative to law on average. So a week and a half, relative to law on average. So a week and a half, that requires them to learn constitutional law, federal criminal law, federal transportation law, state criminal law, state transportation law, local laws and ordinance, and civil liability and torts. There's just no way that somebody can adequately understand the law in a week and a half period. When we see attorneys, you know, having to spend years to be able to get this concept, I'm not saying that every police officer should be an attorney, but you would think that when we look at the primary responsibility of police to be law enforcement, that this would be, they would be given the time to be able to adequately be able to learn even just the basics of law.

And so the third point that we look at is that what we believe is the wrong focus on training. So when we look, when we do a breakdown on what police officers are focusing on in their training, if we include physical fitness, which arguably is about use of force, that means that about a third of their training is focusing around force. Primarily, this is on either the prevention of being killed by homicide or the utilization of deadly use of force or maybe even some less than lethal weaponry. Now, the issue becomes, and we all want officers to be protected, of course, but the issue becomes is that this becomes the overarching emphasis of what their training is. So if we look at a third of the training to be around use of force, but

we're only spending maybe eight hours on de-escalation or four to six hours on alternatives to arrest, then there's just an enormous imbalance. The other really big issue is that this is not what is most dangerous to police officers. So when we look at how police officers die in the United States, and I always say, take a second and just imagine in your head how many police officers you think, your guess would be, may die by homicide each year. The answer is around 50, give or take a few. Now, don't get me wrong, 50 is too many, right? And it's 50 too many. But we see an equal number of deaths

by traffic accidents, but officers are only given about a week's worth of training on emergency vehicle operations. they're three to five times more likely to kill themselves than to be killed by someone else, though they most get no training on self-care or identification of PTSD or depression. And if they do, it's generally no more than a day to, I think it's the most I've ever seen. If we look at last year and probably this year as well, it's heading in that direction this year as well, but last year, COVID killed more police officers than all other causes combined. But there's no extensive training on reducing the transmission of a deadly disease. So not only do we have this third of training that's going to use of force, and this was something that was in my experiences, is that it's also integrated in almost every other area of the training.

And the example that I give is with report writing, right? So officers are taught how to fill out the boxes, right? What questions to ask, what information is needed in order to complete a successful report. But simultaneously, they're also being taught how to stand, right? Is make sure that you stand with your, you know, right side or your strong side, pivoted backwards, be careful about handing an ink pen, you know, to someone because they might jab it in your eye or jab it in your neck, for which, you know, maybe in a jail setting that's happened,

but I have no circumstance that that's ever happened, you know, in a regular patrol function. So when, when there is this overarching emphasis and you watch video after video of police officers being killed or, you know, being seriously injured, and then we have this kind of militarized regiment that's inside of the training, you know, training. My line is that if we train them like soldiers, dress them like soldiers, and equip them like soldiers, then

we can only expect them to behave like soldiers. And so our view is that as we re-examine what the curriculum needs to be is that, yes, officers need to spend a lot of time in learning about how to protect themselves from homicide, of course, but they also need to learn about how not to kill themselves or how to deal with the stresses that policing comes with and learn balance on things like de-escalation or dealing with the community. So there's a ton there that I am interested in scratching at. But I guess, you know, one of the things that strikes me listening to you as a former police officer, I can't help but wonder, I mean, what's the response like,

you know, if a cop or someone who's responsible for training police officers was maybe sitting in the room with us right now, would they agree with you about this stuff? I mean, what's your experience like when you go to police departments? Are they saying, you know what, you're right, we can do a little bit better? Is there momentum or energy for that? Or is there pushback on this as, you know, being framing the police in a really negative light? There's two camps. And I wouldn't say that they're equal, I would say that the vast majority would be in some agreement or largely be in agreement with me. I think that normally where, where there may be some split is around the idea about,

you know, this warrior versus guardian training, right? This is that, you know, a lot of especially diehard officers, you know, believe that this militaristic approach is what is keeping police officers safe, despite there's no evidence of it that we have been able to find that, you know, police departments that have more what is called stress training or more tactical training, or militarized, I'm sorry, not tactical, actually makes officers, you know, any more safer than those that are more academically driven. Now, that being said is that I recognize, you know, what their concern is. However, one of the things that I would say is, is that, you know, we, we can dispute a little bit about, um, uh, about what exactly the curriculum needs to be a focus on,

but I get no pushback on the need for, for more training, right? The problem is, and this is our primary issue. So like when I'm asked about why is it that cosmetologists get more training than the police? it's very simple. Cosmetologists aren't being trained by the state, right? This is a fiduciary issue. This is a budgeting problem. And unfortunately, one of the areas that gets hit very often, so like when we talk about defunding the police, what often gets hit are training programs. And so what I hear more than anything is from police chiefs or

academy commanders or down to just the instructor level is, yeah, they want to do more. They want to have more training or be able to expand the existing training that they have. They just simply can't afford it. And there's not a lot of political will, unfortunately, to push to make that happen. So our solution is simple, is that what we believe is that we need to decouple police training away from the state, away from it being tax-funded training programs. And this exists in law enforcement already. When we look at the DA's office or prosecutor's office, if I want to be a DA, I don't go apply for, you know, to the County of Los Angeles and say, Hey, I want to be a DA. And they say, great. And I'm going to send you to your

undergrad and then send you to law school and then, you know, and pay you during that time. Of course not. I have a responsibility to go get my education. They may have programs like tuition reimbursement or, you know, some sort of benefit that allows me to recoup some of that cost. But it isn't the responsibility of taxpayers, right, to pay for my education. And when we look at public safety, police and fire are the only two professions that I'm aware of, at least, that the state has a responsibility and or taxpayers, when I say the state, I mean us, right? Each one of us as taxpayers have a responsibility to pay for. So if we decouple this and make it, you know, we'd like to see it a bachelor's degree program, but at minimum, you know, a two-year associate's degree

program for which the curriculum can be expanded and doesn't have constraints for taxpayer funding, doesn't have constraints for taxpayer funding, then we can look at this and have an honest assessment about how do we need to expand it without the concern about whether or not a politician is going to sign on to it or not, because this might require some sort of appropriations. I want to say this back to you. I think this is really interesting and I want to make sure I understand correctly, but the vision that you're sort of hoping for is one where a police officer, an aspiring police officer is going to a university that is providing police specific training, getting a degree in policing, quote unquote, paying their own money, two to four year degree, the same way we structure something like law or teaching or whatever.

And then they are going to apply at departments with that degree. And having a certain kind of degree like that is going to be necessary in order to be hired at this department. Exactly. And so the major pushback that we hear about this is that, is this going to reduce recruitment, especially among people who may be struggling a little more on the socioeconomic ladder? And here's what we know. What we know about college-educated police officers, just any college degree, not even necessarily college education for criminal justice. But what we know is that folks who have a college degree as police

officers perform better and they stay on the job longer. There's less deadly use of force instances. There is less civil liability. There's less criminality inside of policing. And so there becomes a huge savings to the state to transfer this that allows them then to have programs like tuition reimbursement or scholarships for which that they can give, especially folks that may have, you know, some challenges paying for college otherwise. A professor at Cal State University, Christine Gardner, did some work, Dr. Christine Gardner, did some work on this about examining, you know, did recruitment levels drop when there was requirements for college education? And the answer is no, it doesn't. What it does is it expands the pool. So I hear this all the time. In fact, I was on a panel just recently in which a union representative

said, you know, I can barely get folks now. So, you know, adding a college degree on top of that's going to make it even harder. Well, that may be true based on the pool of candidates that they have now based around what the job is now, right? And the reality is, is that not all, but many police departments, if you look at their recruiting pages, many of them look more militaristic than the Army's, you know, hiring pages. And so that's who you're attracting, right? And I understand the pushback from police officers when there's outcry about their performance. They're doing what they were hired to do, right? In many regards, they're doing exactly as they were trained to do. And then there becomes this confusion as to, well, wait a minute, you know, I signed up on a website for what showed me in military tactical gear, maybe showing me rappelling out of a helicopter as a website that I saw just recently. So that's what they're signing up for. But if we professionalize policing, you know, as an educated career for which they're given the ample time to be able to understand the

complexities of criminal behavior. Why does crime exist? What are the historical problems that policing has had within the community, especially communities of color, balanced with learning about de-escalation, about dealing with people in mental health crisis? learning about de-escalation, about dealing with people in mental health crisis, then I think that then that is going to bring about a whole new pool of people that will ease recruiting problems. How did you experience this as an officer? I'm curious. I mean, I imagine that you witnessed some of these issues firsthand, and that is what inspired you to sort of pursue this work. I don't know if there's like a story or two that comes to mind for you that kind of illustrates some of the issues that you are trying to address now. But I'm curious to hear, you know, from your on the ground firsthand experience, because I write and read about this issue a lot, but I don't, I don't hear from police officers a ton about, you know,

critical reflection of their time on the forest in my experience. So what, one of the things I think is important is, is that because I do have criticisms of American policing and where we are at today, that some of it has gotten worse even since my time. I think I've been out of this for 12 or 13 years in the public sector, but I've been in the private sector. And I think it's important first and foremost to acknowledge that we are asking police officers to run towards danger for which the rest of us are running away from, right? So I never want to minimize, you know, when we see mass shootings like we did in Indianapolis, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, that meant a team of officers had to run towards a situation for which somebody was just slaughtering other human beings, right?

So I think that, you know, in reflection is, yes, it was important for me to understand. And it's important today to recognize those officers who continue to do those things. However, the first story that I will share that really, you know, I see in hindsight, especially was the level of fear that I had as a police officer, especially in the first couple of years, right? And I'm not exaggerating as I tell this story. This is verbatim exactly what happened. Daily, I worked overnights for the most part. Daily, I would, on my drive home, I would get about halfway home

and I would flip U-turns in the road, or I would turn down side streets or dead ends or residential areas that were off the beaten path. Because I was told that the bad guy, right, quote unquote, the bad guy, would follow me home and kill me, kill my family. You know, there's an underpinning of stress that goes along with this idea that at any second, someone is out to murder me. Now, you know, we know that I don't believe that policing even, either they didn't make it into the top 10 of jobs

for which are killed by homicide on the job. If they did, it was really close around the 10th. But it is this, there was just this constant refrain, constantly of, you know, conversations, trainings, debriefings that all circled around this idea that at any moment you can be murdered. Now, and the story about, and I did this, you know, kind of U-turn for a couple of years, you know, the first couple of years of my career. And I've since learned that there's been no officer for which this has happened. There's been police officers who've been killed at their homes, but not because, you know, someone followed them at the end of their shift to their house to kill them. So I saw pretty early,

and I especially see it now, is where there's this emphasis of training on what was possible versus what was probable. And then when we examine what's possible, well, it's endless, right? I mean, there's an endless possibility of ways that somebody could die or die by homicide. possibility of ways that somebody could die or die by homicide. The other issue is, and I wrote an op-ed that was published on Huffington Post a couple of years, you can still Google it and find it called, I Was a Racist Cop. And a lot of this was, you know, not at the time that I was doing the work, but in reflection, that I really realized that the emphasis for which my job was not on prevention of crime, which there's really not a lot of evidence that the police prevent a whole lot of crime, some by visibility. But

other than that, modern policing today doesn't really prevent crime. But we didn't really do much of anything in the way of crime prevention. We did very little in the way of investigating crimes. And I now know like, you know, there's 500,000, literally 500,000 unsolved homicides in the United States. We see sexual assault clearance rates. Chicago released their data last year. That was like less than 10%. We see on average only 60% clearance rates. There's not a class that you could take for which you're going to pass at 60%, right? So what instead there was, and what I described about this intersectionality of racism inside of the criminal justice system was this kind of proactive policing where our focus really was on petty events and a lot of, you know, policing of poverty, right, where we were pulling

over poor people because poor people were most likely to have a suspended license or, you know, maybe an unpaid traffic ticket. And so therefore they have a warrant. I started out in Ohio at a department with five police officers, right? The department doesn't even exist anymore. They've since disbanded. And I always laugh and say that my sergeant was also the school bus driver, right? So he had a dual job. There was no need for a police department in that town, right? We would go days without one single call for service. So what our job was, was, you know, this proactive policing of what were really kind of fishing expeditions of pretextual stops, pulling somebody over for a headlight violation or, you know, some sort of minor event in hopes of, you know, maybe finding some dope or, you know, someone with a suspended license or a warrant or something like that. And so as I progressed through my career, the very last agency that I worked for in Indiana was, I think, either the largest or second largest in the state. And

while there were certainly more calls for service, it still, for the most part, was about the same thing, right? Is that the emphasis overwhelmingly was on petty crimes, emphasis on property crimes, minor property crimes like theft or vandalism, quality of life policing, which is like dealing with panhandling or homelessness. The LA Times, I think, recently did a study of 911 calls here in LA and found that less than 10% of what police officers are responding to are crimes in progress or violent crime. So that means 90% of the calls for service that they're doing are things for which aren't chasing the bad guy or, you know, solving rapes or murders, but dealing with, you know, whether or not someone is a nuisance for standing in front of the 7-Eleven, you know, begging for change or whether or not someone's sleeping on a sidewalk and those kinds of things.

Let's talk about that 10%, though, that is. I mean, you know, I mentioned to you before we got on the show that I had Alex Vitale on a couple of weeks ago, and he talks a lot about the abolition of police. And you said, and I'm hearing a little bit of it now talking to you, that oddly enough, there are intersections for where you guys land on this. I'm interested in what role you think police should play in society. I mean, I guess that question sort of has the pretext that you don't think that we should abolish the police. And maybe you can correct me on that if I'm wrong. But I'm curious, like, you know, what's the vision for you in terms of why we keep police around and what we want them to be doing? So I'm not an abolitionist. I mean, I think in a utopian circumstance thumbprint of policing in a handful of different areas. police have a role in schools. I think we need to end the war on drugs and treat drug addiction as what it is, a public health crisis. It's a failed policy. It's a racist policy. It's never

worked. It's never going to work. I believe that we need to do reinvestment in the community. We know that three predictors of crime is poverty, education, and mental health. So these are all things that are preventable. Isaac, when you asked earlier, like, what are some of the things that, you know, I noticed when I was in my very first academy, a instructor said, whatever illusions you have about policing, dismiss them, because what you really do is deal with the three Ds, the drunk, the drugged, and the deranged. And, you know, not the most politically correct term today, but his point was probably about the most accurate depiction of policing that I've ever heard. But one of the things, even at a time when I was far more conservative than I am today, that struck me about that is that these are all issues that we can get ahead of, right?

We can get ahead of addiction issues. We can get ahead of mental health problems. We're not going to solve them, but we can mitigate them for sure. And what we know, and we've done this for 40 years now, is that what we've done, regardless of where you sit on the war on drugs, the one thing we have to agree on is it hasn't worked. Now, I'm not advocating that we have Randy's cocaine store at the corner, but I also don't think that locking up an addict makes the community safer or has a net positive impact on our society. or has a net positive impact on our society. When I hear about defunding, I don't know. I mean, when I just see the raw numbers of policing, you know, like the budgets of, you know, a billion dollars or, you know, one and a half billion dollars,

I think it's in New York. You know, that seems startling to me. But my issue is more about allocation, right? Is what is the priorities of the police department? And so I'll give two examples about here in LA County, right? There's 25,000 unsolved murders here in LA County, right? But we see, or I'll give three examples.

We'll see one, our helicopters flying around, which are about 10 grand an hour. That doesn't seem like a good use of funding. We see detectives, property crimes detectives, who are setting up bicycles, right, chaining them to a pole in a poor area, and then doing surveillance to see who comes and steals it, right? I don't think that's a good use of funding. And then the third, I just, in fact, I just saw a video about this the other day. And this is the second time I've seen this of where there's these sting operations near like bar areas where an Uber driver or a Lyft driver will drop

someone off. And these undercover officers will run up and say, hey, I forgot my phone. Will you give me a ride home? And I'll just pay you cash. And then when the Uber driver says yes, then they bust them for the violation of taxi regulations. Now, here's what I say. Could you imagine that your wife or your husband or your mom or dad or your child was murdered and that murder has gone unsolved and you see things like this. You see that the police have said, this is what our priority is when we're spending 10, 12, maybe 15% tops on investigating crimes and the rest is this silly nonsense, right? I just don't think that, so when I talk about abolishing police, I don't care if there's five times the amount of police, if they're investigating crimes,

if they're truly bringing justice to people who are victims of crime. My dad always said to me, don't put more on your plate until you finish what you have. So the idea that, you know, we're out chaining a bicycle up to a pole to see who's going to steal it when we probably have a clearance rate of 30 percent of all other property crimes anyway, just just seems nonsensical to me, yet alone the abysmal violent crime clearance rates. violent crime clearance rates. So, I mean, when you say it like this, it's all, I mean, again, I felt this way talking to Alex too and reading his book. I mean, it strikes me as so obvious. And I asked him this question and I'll ask you the same. I mean, then why is it the way that it is? I mean, what the hell are we doing? When you're in LA County, why isn't the mayor sitting down with your organization to talk about how to change policing? What's the holdup? If you're saying that a lot of police agree about how we need to change the training, all these things are there. I mean, is it just the culture war? Is it the politics of it? I mean, what's going on? Well, the answer is yes to each of those.

There's pushback from the unions, of course. There is a lack of imagination, right? I read something on Twitter not too long ago, and I wish I knew it was so that I could give them credit because I cite it quite often, but someone said, you know, when we talk about reimagining public safety, think of this. Think about driving down the road and you have a taillight out, right? Instead of an armed police officer pulling you over to write you a punitive citation, which, you know, you may not even be able to afford to pay, which is going to create this spiral effect of an unpaid ticket, a suspended license. You might lose your job because on and on and on. What if we had a highway worker help you change the bulb?

Doesn't that solve it? And so I feel really good that we're having these conversations about this. Now, where, you know, Alex and I probably separate is that I think that he sees where that this can be done in much broader ways where I don't. I mean, I still think that, you know, when we talk about like response of individuals with mental health crisis, I think that the police is always going to have a role with that because very often, or, you know, maybe not proportionally very often, but by raw number very often, you know, these are folks who may be violent. So when we talk about like, let's stop traffic stops, as an example, you know, we saw Dante

Wright, you know, that event started over an expired license plate. If the police themselves very often push back on this idea that, hey, why don't you just focus on moving violations, right? And stop, you know, headlight violations, expired tags, these kinds of things, because they view that as, no pun intended, but kind of handcuffing them and being able to do the work that they are used to doing, which, you know, they use these for the most part, they're pretextual stops, right? Yeah, you might need to let someone know their tags are expired or headlights up. But the reality is, is most police officers will tell you that, you know, most of these kinds of stops, not all, but most of them are really because they want to see if somebody

has a warrant or has a gun or has dope or, you know, a spent license or whatever it may be. So when we propose the idea, and there's a few departments that are picking up on this, but when we propose the idea of, you know, that we just need to stop or limit this interaction, and this is just in one particular area, then they feel a little shackled about whether or not they're able to perform their job. The other thing too is that we have a deficit of the acceptance of scientific consensus sometimes in policing as well. Like when we talk about the war on drugs, as an example, I've been a part of an organization.

It was formerly called LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which is a collection of police officers or former police officers who are against the war on drugs. You know, like I said earlier, pretty much any officer would agree that this is a failed policy. then it's very difficult for them to see a world for which that, you know, everything's not just going to go to hell if they're not out enforcing somebody with a little small bag dope, then that means that simultaneously we're advocating for, again, Randy's cocaine store. And that's not true. Now, the other reality is, which we saw in Ferguson, Missouri, but that's a microcosm of a lot of jurisdictions in the United States, is the current model of policing is good money, right? Fine generation, court costs, that employs a lot of people, that keeps a lot of budgets flowing. And not just

directly in the institution itself, but there's a lot of residual. When we look at CCA and the GEO group, these are two private prisons in the United States, right? If you remember a few years back in Arizona, there was the show me your papers bill, I think it was AB5, is what it was called, right? That was heavily pushed by, you know, two for-profit private prisons. And not that I think private prisons, I think they're problematic, but I don't think they're a major problem in our justice system. So we then now have outside influence of people who are wanting to, you know, do tough on crime or keep things kind of status quo.

But what I would say, you know, especially relative to training is what, you know, without going through all of the points again is exactly what I mentioned earlier is, is that while it continues to be a responsibility to the taxpayer, then there's always going to be resistance. Got it. Let me add one more thing is because some of this is cyclical is, is that we

have to also understand that tough on crime has always been a big payoff politically in the United States. Now it isn't as much as it once was, but used to. Someone like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, the DA, or George Gascon here in Los Angeles, who's talking about ending mandatory minimum sentencing or enhancements. arguably the entire nation knows that we need to have some reforms. When that used, even the struggles that they have now, that would have just been absolutely, you know, a deal breaker. They would have never been able to have the conversations of saying, okay, locking up someone for a little bit of dope, is that the right path? Because then they would be viewed as soft on crime and they'd never get elected or reelected. So I guess with all of that being said, I mean, where do you think we are in this right now? I mean, what's in front of you guys? What are you focused on as sort of like, you know, the next couple of steps? What I will say is that first we have to accept this is not going to be a fast

process. And I think this is one of the problems that I have with the abolish movement is that it assumes, and I don't mean that in a condescending way. I'm sure the advocates in this know that it's an uphill battle, but the platform assumes, not the individuals, assumes that we can flip this around pretty quickly. And in some areas we can. So like I mentioned earlier, you know, there's 18,000 agencies in the United States. Half of those are departments less than 10 people, right? So if I were to look at like abolishment as an example, that's probably where I would start, right? Is do we need all these little tiny departments for which their major function is revenue generation?

From a training perspective is that, you know, we, of course, want to work in the midst of a campaign to, we want a federal prohibition, actually, against untrained police officers being able to work. I mean, again, it's just absurd and the arguments for it hold no water. I think there's no one on this planet who had the choice of an untrained police officer or a trained police officer to show up when you call 911. Someone's going to pick an untrained officer, including the police chiefs or sheriffs who are advocating to be able to keep this loophole. For us, it is that, so a lot of our work is research-based now because, again, because this has never really been re-examined. And in some

areas we knew would take a while, in some areas we didn't realize the length of time that it would take because there was either a lack of data or, you know, the complexities that we want to make sure that we consider. So our organization, we have what is called a community impact team. And so one of the things that we want to make sure is, is that when we sit down and have a curriculum recommendation, as an example, that number one, it's science-based, it's data-driven. But number two is, is that we want to make sure that anyone who could be impacted by this, which is everyone, right, is that this is an area that impacts all of us because we all rely on this in our system, that they have a seat at the table,

right? Not all the seats, one seat doesn't, you know, there's not one that gets more seats than the other, but everyone has a voice to be able to examine this. And so we have a very large group that, you know, when we say, okay, you know, does implicit bias training work as an example? It's one of the things that we're looking at. And our early information is it doesn't, not in its current form. But then we have to explore further to say, okay, maybe this eight-hour class of implicit bias training isn't working. NYPD did a report recently, you know, showing that they didn't see any meaningful change in officer behavior after they took implicit bias training. But what if it was a 40-hour class,

right? Or what if it was a month long as part of, you know, a college curriculum course? Would it matter then? And so we have research programs such as that. We have research, ongoing research right now, which is a longitudinal study on measuring what are police officers' perceptions of threat. And again, as I mentioned at the earlier onset of the show, is that we see that officers have a heightened belief of how many police officers are killed every year or what circumstances for which police officers are involved in when they do encounter a violent response. But we're also looking at things of like a program that we have what's called Greater Danger

is that how do we reduce police violence, or I'm sorry, police suicides, right? How do we tackle this issue with substance abuse and alcoholism and domestic violence that we know is rampant inside of policing? And is there training components for which we can counter some of this? You know, of course, I believe yes, because I think that most everything can have a training, Of course, I believe yes, because I think that most everything can have an influence from training. The challenge that we face, though, is that someone emailed me the other day and said, hey, remember, culture eats training for lunch. And I don't disagree with what he said.

So we have to have buy-in from the politicians. We have to have buy-in from the police administrations through policy. What I would say is that there is a greater optimism today than at least I've had in my lifetime. So from the ashes of the horrible events around George Floyd's death is is that I think, you know, this has reawakened a conversation about training. And one of the big issues that we face about training is that this has been a broken promise for decades and decades and decades, right? Anytime, you know, from, we go back to Rodney King, right, is that, you know, immediately out of the gate, we have police, you know, administrators saying, well, we major program that, uh, that we're conducting, you know, we're probably a few more years out is a 21st century curriculum recommendation that says here is a scientific backed, uh, data-driven curriculum for which, uh, which we know that works either from,

uh, current experiences here in the U S or perhaps, you, you know, and, you know, one of our international counterparts have been able to utilize it effectively. Randy, if people want to keep an eye on your work and follow some of this stuff, where's the best place to do it? Sure. Our website is trainingreform.org. And we're on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And it's at Training Reform on each of those platforms as well. All right. Randy Shrewsbury, the current executive director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform.

Randy, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you, Isaac. I appreciate it. Today's podcast was produced by Tangle Media in partnership with our friends over at Impostor Radio. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to give it a five-star rating, share it with your friends, and go check out retangle.com for more. Thank you.