Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:18] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

Dan: [00:00:37] Hello, listeners. This is Detective Dan. Today on The Briefing Room, we have the last episode of Season 2 and an episode where Dave will go it alone as the host because of his expertise and experience investigating crimes against children. When a child is the victim of sexual or physical abuse, severe neglect or witnesses domestic violence it can have terrible and long-lasting effects on their mental state. That’s why child advocacy centers across the country have become such a valuable resource for these young victims of crime, as well as law enforcement, child protective services, and medical professionals.

[00:01:15] Child advocacy centers provide a setting where children can be forensically interviewed, receive medical care, emotional support, and even testify before the grand jury, all under one roof. While what our guests talk about today applies to their specific child advocacy center, the lessons they share, as well as their services can be applied to similar child advocacy centers across the United States. Dave, I’ll hand it over to you.

Dave: [00:01:42] Thanks, Dan. I’m here with two victim advocates from Kids First. Sarah Stewart has worked with Kids First since 2011, and she’s now their Executive Director. Welcome, Sarah.

Sarah: [00:01:53] Hey, thanks for having me.

Dave: [00:01:55] Nichole Schumann is the center’s Lead Forensic Interviewer. Welcome, Nichole.

Nichole: [00:02:00] Thank you.

Dave: [00:02:01] Sarah, how does Kids First ever become a part of a child’s life?

Sarah: [00:02:05] Well, all of our referrals tend to come from law enforcement or child welfare. So, when a report of child abuse that could be criminal is made, the law enforcement detective or the child welfare worker reaches out to us to help. And so, that’s really how we get involved. We don’t take referrals from parents or families directly, but we do get a lot of calls from them. And if we do, we help them make those reports, so that they can get referred to our services.

Dave: [00:02:35] What can people expect from a visit to Kids First from your perspective?

Sarah: [00:02:38] As you said, it’s not a pleasant situation when people are coming in the doors. And so, sometimes, kids and families are nervous about that. But without Kids First, the alternatives is that they’re going to police stations, they’re going to emergency rooms, courtrooms. And so, most of the parents that we work with, people think child abuse and they think bad parents. While I understand that, over half of the kids that we’re seeing are for concerns of child sexual abuse. And so, it’s not necessarily their parent who did it. They very likely have a protective parent who can bring them in and they have little to no experience with the criminal justice system. And so, they think my kid said this, “Why hasn’t this person been arrested?” Coming into Kids First can be really helpful because they get to meet with law enforcement in a child friendly place.

[00:03:31] They get to meet with one of our advocates who’s going to really walk them through the process. They get to meet with one of our interviewers, like Nichole, to tell their story in a recorded setting, so that they don’t have to continue to talk about what happened to them and they’re not being reinterviewed. They get a chance to be heard, which is really can be really helpful and therapeutic. It’s not therapy. Interviews are not therapy, but they can be really helpful. And then they get a chance to meet with one of our medical providers to be medically examined. That’s not just for evidence purposes. It’s also a really good opportunity for kids, especially in these child sexual abuse cases, which, as you know, most of the time there isn’t physical evidence. It’s a good chance for kids and their parents who are really worried about them to know that their body is completely healthy and everything’s okay.

[00:04:27] They also were doing evidence based mental health screenings, and so we get to see if the kid’s experiencing a lot of trauma symptoms. And if so, we use the screenings to refer to ongoing therapy. And so, the opportunity at Kids First is really to get the situation addressed and assessed by all of the folks. Everybody’s coming to this child and their family to help. And then to also now that we get to offer mental health services, we’re only one year into that to also help that child and their family heal, and so that abuse doesn’t have to define their lives.

Dave: [00:05:02] Okay. For police, how we become acquainted with Kids First is, say, we get a child abuse, a child welfare, a child wellness check, any case where a child is either a victim or a witness of a fairly major crime like abuse or domestic violence. The police get called out that night, “Go handle the call.” They send their reports to various agencies, one of which is Child Protective Services, and typically also at the same time send a copy of that report to Kids First. And a lot of our patrol officers would just say, “Just show up at Kids First at 09:00 AM tomorrow, and they’ll be able to hook you up.” That is not quite how it works, is it?

Sarah: [00:05:48] It’s not. We serve over 700 kids a year. And of course, the services we provide are pretty sensitive, and so we usually have no more than two families in the building at the same time. And so, we do really work hard to schedule those appointments. We used to have drop in spots, but it got to the point where when folks would drop in, they might be waiting here a couple of hours for all of our team members to get here, law enforcement, child welfare and such. And so, it’s just not the most trauma informed welcome. We like to be prepared for them.

Dave: [00:06:19] You said 700 kids that you guys serve on a yearly basis?

Sarah: [00:06:25] Yeah, over 700 kids each year.

Dave: [00:06:27] I think people don’t quite understand how busy your center would be with 700 kids open five days a week. There’s not a terribly large population in the area, probably a little over 250,000 people in our county. And to have 700 cases, you think that’s two a day.

Sarah: [00:06:49] Right. It is a lot. It’s a decent sized population and a geographical area, but when you consider that our center, which is one of the highest volume centers in the state, is seeing 700 kids, that’s really only those situations that really rise to that potentially criminal level. Child welfare is investigating a lot more. Law enforcement is involved in a lot more that just don’t quite rise to that level. And so, 700 kids is a lot for the types of crimes that we see.

Dave: [00:07:22] When a child comes to Kids First, I think most people think who are familiar with child advocacy centers. We think about the forensic interviewing aspect of these advocacy centers. Nichole, can you walk us through maybe a little highlight of your bio, how you got involved in forensic interviewing?

Nichole: [00:07:42] Sure. Well, I started working in the field of child advocacy in Arizona, actually, at a CAC down there and transferred up to Oregon. I’ve been here for 13 years. I’ve been interviewing forensically for 17 years. So, show my age, almost 18 going on.

Dave: [00:08:02] I know that you’ve done a few dozen interviews yourself. I’m guessing you’re in the 3,000s still, or maybe you’ve gone into the 4,000s?

Nichole: [00:08:11] I’m about 5,000. About 4,500 to 5,000, when I testify at court. I don’t want to purge myself. So, I just round and I said, I’ve done a lot of interviews. I average about 300 interviews, 325 interviews a year. And over the course of 17 years, that’s a lot.

Dave: [00:08:26] I can imagine. You’ve probably heard everything.

Nichole: [00:08:30] Every day, I hear something new. So, no. But yes, I’ve heard a lot of similar stories. But there’s those wild ones that you hear and you’re like, “Okay, that’s new. That’s new.”

Dave: [00:08:42] If I’m a parent and I’ve got a child who has to go to an advocacy center next week for an interview or whatever service Kids First can help a child with, if they’re going in for an interview, what can you tell a parent about what an interview or what a morning at Kids First looks like? Nobody wants to go to Kids First, typically. There’s a bad reason for having to go to that place. But once you’re there, what can they expect?

Nichole: [00:09:14] As a forensic interviewer, we want to be a trauma informed, we want to be developmentally appropriate, forensically sound. We’re neutral fact finding in nature. And so, we want to give a chance or an opportunity for a child to be able to tell about events experienced in the past from their perspective, and give them an opportunity to tell about whatever they’re here to talk about in a way that it comes from the child’s voice building that credibility of a child, because children already start out at a lower sense of credibility in our society. And so, we want to make sure we give them the opportunity to talk about what they have experienced.

Dave: [00:10:12] Some folks might have a preconceived notion of what a child abuse interview looks like that I think even– As a patrol officer, I used to go out to some of these acute calls where a family calls us at 10 o’clock at night and says, “Hey, my child has something to tell you. Tell him what you told me 10 minutes ago.” And we have a grainy video of a child being asked something on an iPhone, and I understand why parents do that that they’re trying to start the investigation and get the facts laid out. Can you explain why that might not be entirely helpful on the prosecution end of things, and how you, as a forensic interviewer, are required to structure interviews, so they’re defensible in court?

Nichole: [00:11:04] Sure. Well, caregivers usually have the best intentions. That’s why they’re whipping out their phones and starting to record. [laughs]

Dave: [00:11:12] I agree. I agree with that.

Nichole: [00:11:13] So, they don’t know any better. Sometimes, we can’t un-ring that bell and so we just go with it and use that information. But we’ve done a lot of training that under a certain age, please don’t ask questions, just bring them to the center.

Dave: [00:11:26] What is that age?

Nichole: [00:11:28] About12 years and under. We still want teenagers to come here and adolescents, because some brains are underdeveloped. The way we ask questions are very different from a way a detective may ask questions, because we do a narrative, cognitive interview where when detectives go to the field, they’re like, “Facts, facts, facts, facts” to the point, which is important too, because you need to know that for search warrants and collecting evidence and all the things, but I’m like, “Bring up to me and I’ll get all that information for you.” I often say that to my detectives.

Dave: [00:12:05] I was slow to respond to that when I was still a detective investigating sex crimes and child abuse. But eventually you go, “I’ll just have Nichole get it for me.”

Nichole: [00:12:14] Right. The whole purpose of our interview is not only to understand their statement, but to understand everything going on in their lives that really relate to the abuse they’re experiencing. So, we go above and beyond in just gathering a statement. We understand everything that happened before, everything that happened during, everything that happened after, and then what we call polyvictimization, which is all the things and cooccurring abuse that are going on in their lives. So, we really go in depth in a forensic interview if we can, if we have the attention span, the age, the time, there’s just lots of factors.

Dave: [00:12:54] The verbal development is a big one.

Nichole: [00:12:55] Mm-hmm. It is. Detectives love it when I come and interview a three-year-old or they bring a three-year-old to interview and I get a disclosure. But there’s no context, because a three-year-old often can’t provide context.

Dave: [00:13:11] Like an example of that right off the top of my head is I’ve had plenty of cases where during a custody handoff, you have a child that arrives at the custody handoff and has a red mark on their bottom. The assumption is that that child must have got a whipping over the weekend for misbehaving. It could just be a rash. It could be a little– Maybe they went to the rock slides and the kid fell. But say that it is something that is caused by another human, the context is, “Well, what mood was your dad in when you got this scratch on your bottom?” “Well, he was trying to help me up off the slide.” That’s different than dad was angry. He was punching holes in the wall, and then he hit me.

[00:13:58] So, we do have children that can say, “Daddy got angry,” and some people might jump to, “Well, that’s the context. Dad must have abused the child.” Well, it could be that daddy got angry after the child had fallen down because the dad looked over and said, “I told you not to walk over there.” So, it’s not necessarily abusive. It’s all context. And Nichole, it’s your job to try to tease that out of the child to find ways that aren’t in a leading fashion like, “Oh, your dad was mad, huh? Does he usually hit you when he’s mad?” That’s such a leading and loaded question that I, as a detective, could never defend that in front of a defense attorney. I’m sure you’ve squared off with defense attorneys on the stand. How do you walk a jury and a defense attorney through how you’re asking these questions?

Nichole: [00:14:51] I’ve been doing that a lot lately. We’ve been going to trial a lot, explaining to the jury what we do and how we do it. Like you said, it is all about context, and we have to understand everything that child’s experiencing. And so, first off, we say start by believing and start by understanding, and we walk a jury through what an interview is. So, we tell them what it is. We tell them what to look for in a way, because we’re educating the jury, “This is how children communicate.” And so, once we teach them how children communicate, we basically do a minilesson on the stand and talk about a semi-structured interview, what that looks like, all the elements, and question types, and navigating that, and understanding what they had told us. And then what you were trying to just explain is alternative explanations like, it could be this or it could be this.

[00:15:43] We don’t come to that determination. We just gather info for the team to go out and either corroborate or refute those allegations. So, we describe that to the jury, and we also then play the interview. And so, we are teaching them like, “This is how children communicate, these are things to look for in a scope this is what you’re after.” And then we have the jury watch the interview and put together the pieces. So, we’re not saying this happened to the child or this didn’t happen to the child. We’re saying, “This is how a child typically behaves.” We tell the jury, and then they come to their own conclusion, which should happen in our criminal justice system. So, we’ve got it down in our county.

[00:16:28] So, we don’t have too many defense attacks, especially on our interviews and our process. The attacks come where those cell phones are used. And the parents, everybody who’s talked to the child prior to the interview, they’re attacking that. And so, we want to, like I said, give the child the best opportunity to tell their story in a contained space, so that we can hear from them, because parents don’t know how to question children. They’ll often go very direct.

Dave: [00:16:58] Well, even police officers don’t know how to question children. I used to cringe at some of the reports where an officer says, “I then interviewed the child, and I’m going back to the front page, feverishly going, how old is this kid?” And you’re like, “Oh, he’s six.” What on earth are we doing, guys? [laughs] Like, “We shouldn’t be interviewing kids.” There are just too many examples of cops being absolutely turned around by a defense attorney. When you get in these situations that there’s a reason why we have this defensible process and we’re going to follow it. It’s really easy to get in the, “I just want to know this one little fact before we move on, before I send this kid away.” I know that Nichole used to get frustrated with me. I’d say, “How many times? I need to know the frequency?” And she’d be like, “Dave, you know, I can’t get that.”

Nichole: [00:17:49] No time, frequency, duration with children under 10, please. Because they don’t have that cognitive ability to do so. Their development is not there. It’s an abstract thought process. Children are just learning that at that age, under age 10, and you’ll get guesses. So, if you said how many times? They’ll say a million. That just means there was a lot of times. We have tricks to get at time, frequency, and duration, and that’s by narrative questioning.

Dave: [00:18:22] Right. That it’s not just a direct. Did this happen 10 times, 20 times or 50 times? It’s like, well, what if it’s none of those.

Nichole: [00:18:28] Or, all of them.

Dave: [00:18:30] Yeah, it could be all of them. Yeah, it happened 10 times, 20 times, and 50 times. I want listeners to understand that there’s a certain voice track that we give to children and parents before these interviews, and we really try to hammer home that the child’s in charge of this process that nothing’s being done to them, it’s all being done with them. Can you talk about why it’s so important to make sure the child and the parent understands that?

Nichole: [00:19:00] There is a certain structure to it. The beginning is rapport building, assessing child fdevelopment, and also the reassurance. The reassurance piece is important because we use specific language with certain children to increase accuracy in telling. So, we do some rules depending on the age, so young children it might look differently than teenagers. But that’s where that discussion comes in, that you’re in control, you could stop the interview, you can leave at any time. Sometimes, we use that direct language. Sometimes, it’s a little bit more structured with little kids. We do an, I don’t know, instruction.

[00:19:37] So, if we’re giving the power back to them, if you don’t know the answer, you can say, “I don’t know.” And then sometimes we practice that with them. If you don’t understand me just because I’m an adult, I might get something wrong. If I get it wrong, let me know, or if you don’t understand, I’ll say it differently. So, we give them that instruction, so they have that power back. We’re trying to put that power differential equal because adults are on a higher level and credibility than children. So, we really want to give that power back. That’s what we do technically in the interview with the child.

Sarah: [00:20:11] That’s what we do at Kids First, in general. I think probably the best example is about 22% to 24% of the kids that we serve every year have witnessed domestic violence. And so, in those cases, we’re working with the parent, the survivor who has experienced domestic violence and those kids. We’re calling that survivor and we’re asking often her to bring her kids in for these interviews. And it’s intimidating. They don’t want their child to be part of an investigation. They don’t want them to be interrogated. They also feel pretty powerless, like, their partner maybe was arrested. Charges are being pressed by the state. They don’t really have a choice in that. And so, we look at it as any opportunity to give their power back and to reassure them that we’re not here to interrogate them or to interrogate their kids. Like, this is going to be a supportive environment where they can get resources, where the adult survivor has a confidential advocate just for them to be able to work with them and safety plan.

[00:21:13] Even with our medical exams, they’re asking– First of all, if they want to take part in a medical exam and then which parts they want to take part in, because we don’t want people to feel like a piece of evidence. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. Of course, a criminal case is important. But it’s not everything. It’s not the most healing thing for a lot of families. That’s not going to be as helpful to them as some of these other pieces. And so, making the experience supportive to whatever the family’s needs are is really important to give them power back.

Dave: [00:22:01] Nichole, I’ve seen so many interviews that I understand the standard operating procedure. But for the listener, a huge portion of an interview, the early portion is rapport building and explaining the rules. That’s in child forensic interviewing, that’s in interrogating a suspect that there’s a lot of rapport building. I’ve seen the evolution of a child’s disclosure on many occasions, and there are moments where I’ve been watching an interview with Nichole, and I’ve seen the moment when the disclosure happens. Nichole, how do you build trust with your interview subject, and how do you tease out the information that is going to land on a jury’s shoulders and lend themselves to credibility for the victim?

Nichole: [00:22:56] Kind of a massive answer, because there’s disclosure dynamics involved. So, I always go in like, “Where are they at on their disclosure continuum? Are they active disclosure, we’re ready to go, or are they minimizing, recanting, taking back?” Whenever all those dynamics are at play, let’s say, the offender manipulated or there’s shame and embarrassment or things like that, we do a longer rapport building. We really do. There’s research and there’s best practice. So, the research we follow is like friendly interviewer and making sure that child is heard. We’re just not only talking at a child, we’re talking with a child. We’re saying we’re listening. And so, we really demonstrate that in that rapport building phase.

[00:23:45] I always in my rapport building, they teach us to do an in narrative event practice. And in that narrative event practice, we’re trying to understand a sequencing of events from beginning to end. And so, I really try to hone my narrative event practice, not on something I’m interested in, but something the child is, because you’ll get engagement in that way. So, asking them, “What do you like to do?” “I like to blank.” Or, “What’s the best thing you’ve done this summer?” “Oh, we were just at a party and there was this huge slide and were talking about the slide.” And so, I go through everything. “What’d you do first when you got to the party, then what’d you do?” So, I’m walking them through that event on a neutral topic, because when we get to the hard stuff or the topic of concern is what we call it, they’ll already be able to do that.

[00:24:39] We’ve already demonstrated that they’re able to do that. We’ve practiced it with them. They don’t know we’re practicing and teaching, but we are in the back end and we’re listening to if they have that ability, so we won’t set them up for failure when we get to that topic of concern. So, I know in the front end, they have the skill or they don’t have the skill. And if they have the skill, I’ll use it on the topic of concern. If they don’t, I’ll formulate my questions differently. I’ll go a little bit more direct if I have to.

Dave: [00:25:08] You have to play these by ear yourself.

Nichole: [00:25:10] Always strategizing. That’s why it takes a lot of brain power, and we’re exhausted after an interview. You’ve seen it.

Dave: [00:25:17] I understand. Yeah.

Nichole: [00:25:19] We go in, and we’re not only listening, we’re thinking about what direction we want to go next and how we’re going to get at that direction by what question we’re asking with remaining in these guidelines of we’re not leading a child.

Dave: [00:25:36] And having to actively listen for little flags here and there.

Nichole: [00:25:41] Little flags. I don’t take notes, because I really, truly believe that you should be an active listener listening to everything that child says. And so, I’ve developed cues and tools along my way. I’m a hand talker. So, once in a while, they’ll say something, and they’ll say something about the blue shoes, and I’ll be like, “Blue shoes? Boom. We got to go back to that.” But they’re still going, they’re still going. “Okay, and then what happened? And then what happened?” And then later I’ll go, “Oh, you said blank about the blue shoes. Tell me more about the blue shoes.” I’ll cue back. So, I’m not interrupting. I’m not direct question after direct question. I’m doing a really open-ended narrative, because that’s how you get that child’s perception of what happened.

Dave: [00:26:25] I’ve seen it so many times on video. The actual moment of a disclosure that you’ve spent, sometimes it’s 5 minutes rapport building, sometimes it’s 50 minutes rapport building. But you see how a child, their rhythm and their cadence and how they answer, and then you get to the moment where Nichole will ask some variation of, “I heard something happened,” or “I heard people are worried about you,” or “I heard the police came to the house. What happened? Why did the police come to your house?” It’s open ended. You give the child an opportunity to speak about something. The change in body language when a child talks about the topic of concern, the change in every dynamic in that room, you can feel it even when you’re not in the room. You can see it on the screen.

[00:27:23] I think that’s why it’s so important that we video record these. And then when they’re put in front of the jury, they can see, “Oh, that child was happy go lucky until she asked about this,” and everything changed. The child’s legs folded close together, they put their hands in their lap, they look like they’re in defense mode. Those are all things that you can point out to a jury and go, “Look, you can see it right now. They’re back in it.” That’s the beauty, and I guess the tragedy of these videos that you see it in real time. When you’re in the room and that happens, what’s going through your mind?

Nichole: [00:28:04] I’m just patiently waiting and letting the thought in the process sit, because they’re processing, they’re going through it, and then they’re making decisions like, should I tell? Should I not tell?

Dave: [00:28:16] And you can see on facial expressions too.

Nichole: [00:28:19] Yeah. You could see body language, facial expressions, everything. That’s where that trust comes in. We already built that trust, that rapport building. And so, sometimes, they’ll just go and sometimes they’ll just drop a little bit, right? “Tell me the reason you’re here and then something little..” You might have to go back into rapport building– But I go back into rapport building. I navigate a different way. I talk about things that are meaningful to the investigation. Like, if they’re not ready to talk about the abuse scenario, I always go to the scene, “Tell me where you were. What does the bedroom look like?” Because that’s helpful for the detectives. It’s helpful for child welfare, everybody, where was everybody? We’ll get extra witnesses. We’ll know and understand what the room looked like what was in the room, and that’s great for warrant writing and evidence collection.

[00:29:10] Plus, we’re not talking about the hard stuff yet. We’re talking about things that they know and understand about their own room or wherever it happened. And then we could– It’s continued report building lead into that reason or the topic. And then if they’re still not ready, we go around and do more information gathering about offender, how they met, all those things, and then you get those manipulation tactics that we always talk about knowing and understanding how they got themselves in that situation, and then we can get into the topic of concern or why they’re there.

Dave: [00:29:46] Yeah. I feel like it would be a mistake if I didn’t have you at least talk about grooming to some degree. We had Roo Powell, who does a show on Discovery, I believe, Undercover Underage. She talked about grooming. She does not have a forensic interviewing background, but she does do a lot of online stings, and pretty impressive. I think you guys would enjoy having a nonalcoholic beverage with her one night. [Nichole laughs] Similar drive to help victims, but she talks about grooming and how that cannot be understated in every one of these cases. I just want to hammer home to parents that grooming is a large aspect of these cases.

Nichole: [00:30:37] It really is. There’s a culture shift in our state. We’ve had some case law, recent case law that I made with a DA. That is amazing. It overturned Henley. Henley I and Henley II said that forensic interviewers couldn’t talk about grooming to juries. And so, now there’s Williams. And Williams states that we can, in certain circumstances, of course, and describing the relationship. So, we’ve been going through– I’ve actually been to court in the last month, two months, and I’ve given my testimony at least four times and gone through a hearing to talk about scientific evidence on grooming. We don’t say grooming. Grooming is like the layman’s term. We call it offender manipulation and dynamic disclosure tactics, like, how children tell and how that impacts the telling. But it’s super important, like you said, because you’ve sat in many meetings I know where parents were like, “No, they would have told me. They would have told me. I don’t understand why they didn’t tell me.” What we know about disclosures that they don’t and the reasons why are because of those manipulation tactics. And yeah, it’s been great as far as like a win in the court. So, we use Williams now and it’s been helpful.

Dave: [00:31:58] I love that. To ignore those factors would, to me, be the crime that we are saying, “Grooming is not a real thing. You guys are making that up.” It’s like,” No, no,” [laughs] this is the foundation for 99% of crimes against children. This is what happens.”

Nichole: [00:32:17] Right. It gets really complex, especially when you’re educating a jury about it, because it’s a balancing act. You’ve been to court several times. And the balance is between saying that this person groomed this child, and therefore the abuse happened versus this is the reason why children acted the way they did, because this grooming happened. And so, we have to only use that grooming evidence and or manipulation evidence to talk about the behaviors of children, why they didn’t tell, why didn’t they run away real quick, why did they allow it to go on for years, why did they accommodate to the abuse and allow it to happen? All these factors are difficult for the general population to understand. It really is.

Sarah: [00:33:08] If you’re looking at the dynamics, you’re like, “Why didn’t this kid tell their mom?” The mom seems supportive. Why didn’t they tell their mom? And if they don’t understand the dynamics of grooming, then it might not make sense. And then also just understanding that when offenders are grooming, they’re not just grooming the child, they’re grooming their caregiver and other people in their lives. So, they have a great relationship with that parent, and so then there’s this question of like, “My mom believes me about everything, but she really trusts him. I think this would might break her heart if she knew he was doing this.” All of those dynamics are incredibly important to understanding why abuse continues, why it happened, why it continues, and why kids didn’t tell right away.

Dave: [00:33:52] I used to always give the advice to parents, just have an open line of communication with your kid and make sure your child knows that even if they’re going to tell you the most horribly, enraging, upsetting information that you’re going to handle it with poise and a measured response that doesn’t fly off the handle, those are situations where children feel safe to come forward with troubling information. I understand the mama and papa bear rage that you might get from hearing that kind of information, but it’s so important that you just have a measured, calm approach with your child. That way they feel safe when they feel like they can’t turn to anyone else to tell about something horrible that happened to them. It’s so important.

Nichole: [00:34:43] And it works too. There are cases that come here that are not abuse, but have those creepy behaviors, and we’re still here to listen to that child. I just had this conversation with some parents last week about guess what, the system worked. They went to Erin’s Law and they heard about how to tell and they said, “This person’s being inappropriate, saying sexual things that are inappropriate to me.” She’s 11 saying this, saying that, and she told the system worked. And so, we have those success stories. It’s a slow process, but if we get some education out there, we educate our community. We recently trained many advocates here to do some education in our community. And so, providing that information is power.

Dave: [00:35:56] Kids First is not just a place where kids go to get counseling referrals interviewed and medical exams. When I was a detective, we had the multidisciplinary team. I was hoping you could talk about the role that Kids First plays among the stakeholders in the child abuse realm.

Sarah: [00:36:16] Yeah. I think what I get to see working with centers across the state is that our role can sometimes look a little different than other folks. I think it really goes back to our partnership that we’ve always had with the district attorney’s office and with law enforcement. That has really allowed us to be the convener of the multidisciplinary team. And so, for context, the multidisciplinary team is like that team of professionals, law enforcement, child welfare, district attorneys, therapists, medical providers, and more that come together to support a child and a family, and then also to work on the investigation and evidence gathering.

Dave: [00:36:55] And the focus is to make sure nothing falls through the cracks that we don’t overlook a certain situation, because as we all know, people have fallen through the cracks, victims have fallen through the cracks in the past and to tragic circumstances. I think that’s how we came up with the multidisciplinary team that really it was every two weeks, we talk about every child abuse case that’s gone through the advocacy center in the last two weeks, and you talk to every stakeholder that is involved in that case. I remember around the table we would have veterinarians, we had someone from the library, we had people from the school districts, we had counselors, therapists, doctors, cops, child welfare, we’ve had a judge in on those meetings before. I think about everyone who’s involved in these cases and who might have some input, we had them in these meetings. And truly, that’s from lessons learned from the past.

Nichole: [00:37:59] Our whole goal is to share the information. So, give the story from start to finish, “This is how I received the case. This is what we’ve done, the action. Let’s talk about the forensic interview, their developmental appropriateness, what they said during the interview, and then what did child welfare do afterwards. Is there a safety plan in place? And then what’s next steps? What are the next actions?” So, a DA will look at it and say, “Oh, we should do this. This or this. Oh, there’s other children in the home, let’s get them interviewed” and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about that case again.

Dave: [00:38:34] Nichole, these 5,000 plus interviews, I know you have the biggest heart. Where do all these thousands of interviews, where do they sit with you and how do you sleep at night?

Nichole: [00:38:47] Sarah named it, like, eight years ago, she says I’m a conduit. Meaning, that I don’t hold the information. It goes through me. So, when I’m in the moment doing my job, I’m doing my job much like any other trauma person doing their job. Active listening, remembering everything that child said, so I can go back and direct and ask more questions. I don’t personalize it. That’s one key. I, sometimes, have to re-read my notes or I pull up an interview and I’m like, “Oh, I remember that one, because this, this, and this.” Especially if we’re going to be discussing it at MDT two weeks later, or if a detective wants to consult for a supplemental interview. Meaning, that they need more or there’s more there. So, I have tools and tricks to cue myself as to what the case is. I re-read, I rewatch. But I think that’s why I’ve been able to do it for 17 years is just because I don’t hold on to it.

[00:39:49] Of course, there are those cases. The hard ones are deceased children and homicides are very hard because they’re just memorable, but other things, I’m able to purge. I get to see the end result, and I’m proud of that end result, which is, either going through therapy and the healing and moving on and or fighting in court and going that route and getting end results, which is justice. Not every kid gets justice, but the ones that do are really impactful.

Dave: [00:40:22] Sarah, looking back nostalgia wise, I know that there have been times where law enforcement on, say, a weekend or in the middle of the night, Kids First was always very proactive about letting us know, “If you need us on an emergent basis, just call us and we’ll come open the doors, even if it’s 2 o’clock in the morning.” I’m wondering about those types of situations for you with a follow up on how do you handle these types of cases in your own personal life.

Sarah: [00:40:54] What you’re talking about, like, coming in the middle of the night, we don’t do that all the time. We do it a few times a year. We trust our partners. When they’re asking us to do it, it’s usually pretty important. Those are hard cases. They are usually like a witness to a homicide, or maybe a child death, or something like that that’s just really hard for everyone, it’s hard for the entire team. And so, those are some of the cases that I would say that I remember most. I don’t necessarily think of them as the hardest times, sometimes a little bit, but I also think our MDT, it’s a really good opportunity for the MDT to come together. Although, none of us want to be coming in Labor Day weekend to work on a homicide and we certainly don’t want a number of kids to have witnessed that, it’s the team coming together to support the child and the family and making sure that they’re served in the best, most trauma informed way.

[00:41:58] I always find it really powerful and inspiring as well, even though, it’s really a little dark. I think for me, as an administrator now, not doing as much advocacy, my top moments have been being able to add therapy, being able to have a permanent building that’s ours that we’re not going to get kicked out of, being able to grow our team. Even when you were on our MDT, we did a strategic plan where we did a survey of partners and people said even back then like, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if you could do therapy, if you could provide some of these healing services?” It took us so long to be able to get the physical space, and then to be able to get the funding, and then to find the qualified staff to do it. But it’s really powerful, I think, to be able to see the growth and how that is impacting children and families. That is the inspiring part for me.

Dave: [00:42:58] And these families never get a bill from you, guys.

Sarah: [00:43:02] Never.

Dave: [00:43:03] Everything is taken care of. That doesn’t happen nowadays.

Sarah: [00:43:07] Especially, for quality, medical care, and evidence based mental health treatments, the waitlists for those services are so long. We don’t have a waitlist for our services. We’re referring people, and they get in within the first week. So, it’s just giving them the evidence-based treatments, which is very important promptly. It’s short-term because the treatments work. So, it’s usually 12 weeks maybe at the most, and then their trauma symptoms are reduced. It’s powerful stuff.

Dave: [00:43:37] When it comes to fundraising and keeping a place like this running, how do you guys do it? Where are your funding streams and how can people help?

Sarah: [00:43:48] It’s not always easy. We now have 23 team members. So, even back when we had five to six team members, we still saw about 700 kids a year. And so, it’s not necessarily that the demand is increasing, but the services that we’re providing to each family. So, before we used to provide solely the forensic interview, which is great, but that’s not what necessarily helps the child heal and move on and be resilient and reduce– break that cycle of trauma and violence. And so, we’ve worked really hard to add these additional services, including hiring multiple medical providers, multiple qualified therapists. It’s competitive salaries you have to have people who are working in this field. You know, as a detective, having turnover in our interviewers and in the medical providers, all of that impacts kids. And so, fundraising is really important.

[00:44:39] We also apply for a lot of grants. I spend a lot of time applying for grants, both statewide and federally. We work with our local coordinated care organizations to see for the medical services that we provide to try to figure out an appropriate reimbursement rate for some of that. But the fundraising is a big piece. So, we have some smaller events. And then we also are really reliant on donors, especially for our mental health program. So, all of our services that we provide for families, including the medical and the ongoing mental health services are provided at no cost to children and families, no matter what their income is. We don’t even ask them what their income is. It doesn’t matter to us. So, we provide those at no cost, which means that we have to have someone who funds them.

[00:45:23] So, we look at grants for that. But then we also have a number of donors and business partners who believe in that, and believe in a child’s need and right to have evidence-based treatments after they have experienced abuse. And so, they might give $5,000 a year to help support some of those services to kids, and that is really important. We could not do it without them.

Dave: [00:45:49] And you mentioned the turnover. Staff wise, it sounds like you’re saying that there are times when people enter this job and realize that their job is going to be all about children being traumatized that you have to wear that every single day that you go to work, that it takes a certain person to be able to dive into that every day. I think you two are shining examples of that. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t do what you guys do. Is there a way for people who want to get involved, how might they go about volunteering or being a part of an advocacy center in their area?

Sarah: [00:46:29] Every advocacy center is different, and so they might have different opportunities. I would suggest maybe checking out their website. So, for us, we might have opportunities to serve on boards on different committees to do fundraising. Some centers maybe are hospital based, and so they don’t have any direct client volunteer opportunities, but they might have ways that you can help organize their clothing closet or make resource packets for families. So, there’s a lot of different ways to get involved based on the center. There are also still some smaller centers that are really reliant. They might have three or five staff members, so they are reliant on volunteers to help provide those direct services. And so, reaching out to them and figuring out how to get involved is absolutely what I would do.

Dave: [00:47:12] I’m going to try to bring a little levity to this since it’s heavy topic. Nichole, any weird, odd, holy shit moments in the interview room with a kid?

Nichole: [00:47:25] Always. Kids are unpredictable. I am actually a state trainer, so I had a blooper reel put together [giggles] of kids that did weird things in interviews. And a couple of them, I have kids get in my personal space and you have to just gently direct them. This is my bubble, kind of push them away. I’ve had a kid literally– We have easels and writing and drawing tools and he drew on my back. He started coloring on the back of my shirt. I had a kid almost try and get on my shoulders and I’m like, “No piggyback rides. No piggyback rides.” He was halfway up before I gently pushed him off to the side. Just kids are cute. It’s my favorite thing. I think that’s what keeps me going too is that I love working with kids, I love talking with kids and they’re so resilient. This isn’t always traumatizing for them. Maybe in the moment or telling their story, especially if it’s an adolescent who can process and really go deep and feel the impact, but with littles, that’s why they’re my favorite population to interview is they’re just, “Ah, this happened to me. It was a bad thing” and then, growing and moving forward. But they’re adorable.

Dave: [00:48:40] Nichole, Sarah, it feels like it’s been too long, but I always truly appreciate your appearances on our shows and truly appreciate your friendship as well.

Sarah: [00:48:52] We feel the same. It’s been so great to get to chat with you.

Nichole: [00:48:55] Appreciate you.

Yeardley: [00:48:58] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed the theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:49:23] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[The Briefing Room theme playing]

Dave: [00:00:36] Welcome to The Briefing Room. Today, I’ve got Dan riding shotgun and we are excited for our guest. Detective Robert Weaver has held several special assignments throughout his career, including the major accident investigation team, firearms instructor, SWAT, and domestic violence investigator. But the role he fills today is what we’re interested in. Detective Weaver is a digital forensic examiner at the agency Dan and I used to work for. A digital forensic examiner does what you’d expect. He looks through phones, computers, hard drives, and that sort of thing as part of investigations. He’s the guy cracking the code on that tricky password. He’s the guy recovering the deleted text messages off the phone. His work has been responsible for numerous convictions, including several of my own cases. Welcome to Dan.

Dan: [00:01:26] Great to be here.

Dave: [00:01:27] And a very special welcome to Detective Robert Weaver.

Robert: [00:01:30] Well, thanks for having me.

Dave: [00:01:32] It is great to see you again, old friend.

Robert: [00:01:35] Yeah. I miss you, guys.

Dave: [00:01:37] What are some myths or misconceptions our listeners might have about digital files, devices? I know lots of people think, if you delete it, it’s gone forever.

Robert: [00:01:50] Better delete it with a hammer and some fire. We can recover a lot of stuff off of devices. Everything is connected to the internet now and connected to the cloud. So, in general, we can usually find some sort of evidence somewhere. I’ve had plenty of advanced users. I’ve arrested guys that were former IT employees at a business, he thought he was sneaky, he thought he could do this or that to try to cover it up, but he wasn’t that good, and we were able to recover a whole bunch of evidence that really sunk him and was able to pinpoint him doing something specific at this exact second with this, and really tie it all together to put that nail in the coffin. So, there is a misconception about what’s out there and how to get rid of stuff. I’m fine with people thinking “I’m good. I can erase stuff. I can delete stuff.” It’s like, “Okay, yeah, sure. You go for it. You do you,” but I’ll do me and do my part.

[00:02:52] One of the other big things is the time and the money. People don’t realize how expensive this is, and how much training has to go into this, and how long it takes to really get up and going, and to even process these devices. It can take a significant amount of time. But digital devices are constantly changing. The formats are changing, the software is changing. It seems like there’s a new iPhone every few days. There’s a new iOS version, and the same is true with Android. Android is an open-source operating system.

Dave: [00:03:28] What does that mean?

Robert: [00:03:29] Basically, Android is based off of Linux and Linux is an open-source operating system. So, I can take Linux and I can actually tweak it and do whatever I want with it and make my own version of it. And so, Android is like that where if I’m Samsung, I can make Android the way I want for my Galaxy S7. I can make Android the way I want for my Galaxy S21. And then every other cell phone manufacturer is making their own versions of Android and stuff like that. And so, it becomes difficult because there are bazillions of different versions of cell phones and different versions of Android and the different operating systems. And that’s why it gets so expensive to get these different products and software that are able to break into more and more phones and extract data from newer phones. It’s constant evolution with these devices and it’s something we have to keep up on constantly.

[00:04:30] So, I’m constantly going to training. My new partner is learning that he’s constantly going to training, and so is his wife learning that he’s constantly going to training. [Dave laughs] It’s difficult to stay on top of all this stuff.

Dave: [00:04:45] I wanted you to define what a forensic computer examiner actually does?

Robert: [00:04:51] Well, in general, we don’t say computers anymore because most of the digital forensics we’re doing nowadays is the computer that everybody carries around in their pocket. So, I know guys in this business who just do cell phone forensics. A majority of the devices that I do are cell phones. Every now and then, I do a computer, the imaging and copying the data off, extracting the data and then analyzing the data that’s on there.

Dave: [00:05:19] Dan and I worked for the same department for quite a while and we didn’t have a digital forensics office. We didn’t have an investigator for years and years. And at some point, the department recognized the utility and the resourcefulness of having that kind of position. Did they approach you or did you approach them to get this program started and then about how much training and equipment costs? Does that involve standing up a new digital forensics team?

Robert: [00:05:55] This department actually got into it fairly early. Originally, they were going through the state police. Once that guy retired, he was coming on and voluntarily doing our computers. The cell phones hadn’t really taken off at that point. And then once another version of Windows was coming out, he’s like, “I’m done, forget it. I’m retiring. I’m done. You’re going to have to find somebody else.” And I was kind of the techie guy here at the PD and so they approached me. I have a background that’s in electronics. I have a degree in physics, minor in math, and the emphasis was in electronics. And so, I’ve always been a techie dude, and like computers, have built computers, do a lot of stuff at home, my personal life with technology and so, it just came naturally to do the digital forensics. I love it. I think it’s great.

Dave: [00:06:47] You seem to have a gift. I’ll give you that.

Robert: [00:06:49] [laughs]

Dan: [00:06:51] So, once you guys did start this program, there’s quite a bit of training that you’ve gone through. Give us an idea. You basically have a four-year degree in computer forensics now.

Robert: [00:07:01] Yeah. I don’t know if you guys realized, but we actually brought on a second person because the workload is so intense. We could even use a third person. Even though we’re not a huge agency pretty much, any investigation nowadays has a digital element, even if it’s just an assault or a theft or something like that. A lot of times, you’ll have cell phones that are involved, so that we are bringing on a second person and we’re trying to get him into all the basic trainings, trainings for computers, trainings for cell phones. New things are coming on like drones, vehicle forensics. There’re so many different fields within digital forensics to study and to take classes in. I think I’m over 1,500 hours of trainings that I’ve gone to. Then now on the side, I teach both digital forensics for computers and for cell phones.

Dave: [00:07:54] My question is going to be, how do cases land on your desk? I know one situation is that, frequently in detectives, we had our own little section. You had one doorway in and one doorway out. So, we would see a patrol officer who was just leaving a call or an arrest and would come jogging back to the detective section looking for you to download a phone or ask questions. I know that’s one way that you get cases, but I know there’re several others. Can you walk through how you get assigned a case or how they fall into your lap?

Robert: [00:08:32] Yeah. We actually had to stop that because it was happening so much that it was pulling away from cases, just helping out patrol guys with cell phones and pulling data, because pretty much any call they would go on, someone’s like, “Here. Here’s my cell phone. Here’s the video, here’s the text messages.” The applications that have the messages, just pull it off of there and then they come and try to find me to do that. That stuff can take a long time. I’ve spent on some of the more major cases. I’ve spent like weeks processing one computer. So, we generally don’t get assigned the cases. I know a lot of places around the country, that’s the way they do it. The digital forensics person is just doing the digital forensics, not being assigned the case.

[00:09:16] So, one of the detectives will be assigned the case, and then they’ll talk to me, and we’ll work out either what needs to be done, if there’re search warrants that need to be written. I’ve gotten pretty good at writing search warrants. Sometimes, I’m writing a couple a day. So, I can spit those out pretty quick for them, and go in, get the digital devices. And then unfortunately, the way we do it now, we have to write multiple search warrants for a single device. So, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Dan: [00:09:44] You mentioned writing search warrants, a lot of search warrants. And I remember, as I was on my way out of law enforcement, I had written a couple of search warrants for cell phones and computers. And the feedback that I got from a judge one time was, “Think of a cell phone as a hotel. And each app on that phone is an individual hotel room. And that you would have to write a search warrant for each individual hotel room to get access to the entire phone.” Is it still the same way or have there been some adjustments made and some case law?

Robert: [00:10:21] We go through phases in our particular state. We tend to have some bad case law that really seems to restrict us. Some has come down the pipe that hasn’t been super favorable for law enforcement and there’s starting to be concerns about plain view. So, if I’m in the photo gallery looking for pictures of drugs and I find child pornography, is that stuff going to be admissible? There’s been some bad case law lately about that and I know some agencies are really hands off when it comes to additional crimes that they’re finding when they’re doing these searches. At least, in our jurisdiction, we generally have to stop, write another search warrant to expand the scope of what we’re allowed to look at and then continue on and then sometimes we write another search warrant.

[00:11:12] Working with the Department of Justice, we were trying to get almost like a statewide, not necessarily a template, but just a general setup for how these search warrants should be written, and what stuff needs to be said, what we should be asking for. So, it’s consistent across the board. And then COVID happened and it kind of got by the wayside. But I know in working with other people from around the state, we’ve tried to be consistent with our search warrants, so we can get to as many areas as we can and still be within the scope of our search warrant and try to do things properly, so they don’t get overturned later on.

Dave: [00:12:06] Robert, when we talk about devices, say that the easiest example is a laptop, a tablet or a cell phone, and the police have an interest in that device. There are plenty of times where we get pushback, where people say, “No, you can’t take that from me. That’s an illegal seizure or whatever.” Can you walk through what the legal thresholds are and what power the police have to seize devices and then search them?

Robert: In law enforcement, it’s called probable cause. So, if I have probable cause, basically, in a sense more likely than not that there’s evidence on that device, I can go to a judge and say, “Hey judge, look, here’s my probable cause. This is the story. These are the witnesses and they’ve told me this or they’ve seen this or whatever the evidence is that gives me probable cause. That evidence exists on that device and I should be allowed to take it and open it and analyze the data.” Then the judge would sign off on that and give me my search warrant.

[00:13:11] We do search warrants to seize the devices first, and then I write an additional warrant to actually go in, extract the data, and look at certain data, because you may be allowed to look at text messages, but you may not be allowed to look at someone’s internet history or their pictures or something like that. Or part of the case law that’s come down as time constraints. Like, I can only look at stuff that maybe within the last week. I’m not allowed to look at stuff from two years ago that’s on that phone, because we’ve found devices that have had evidence on them from years prior.

[00:13:48] One distinct one I remember was a microSD card that was from a cell phone. It was from a previous cell phone and there were deleted videos actually on there of that gentleman abusing his foster child. This was from a couple of years back and we found that on there. So, sometimes these search warrants are really restrictive, but once we have that search warrant, I am authorized to go and seize that phone and take it by whatever means I need to take it. And sometimes, in our analysis of a device search warrant, the warrant may actually even say, you are allowed to use force to use his fingerprint or his facial recognition or whatever means reasonably necessary to unlock this phone if need be. And sometimes, we put that into the search warrants to, “If it comes down to it, and I have to hold you down and put your thumb on the phone to open it, then so be it. The judge has ordered it, we can do it and use whatever force is reasonably necessary.”

Dave: [00:14:55] So, to summarize for listeners, if a cop tells you, I am seizing your device, that is not the time to have the argument. That is not the time to start fighting, that’s not the time to try to resecure your phone and put it in your pocket. It is what it is. Fight it in court, but that’s not the time to turn that into getting yourself arrested, for resisting arrest, or tampering with evidence. If the cops say, “Hey, I’ve got probable cause. You’re going to give me that phone.” Just give it to them.

Dan: [00:15:24] Yeah. And to be clear, to seize a phone, say, I’m out on patrol or I’m a detective and I’m working a case, I can seize that phone because there’s a level of exigency. I know that there’s going to be evidence on this phone, and I seize that phone, and protect it in ways that we do in law enforcement, so it can’t be remotely wiped, and then I write a search warrant. I don’t always have to have a search warrant just to seize the phone.

Robert: [00:15:53] No. If I believe that there’s evidence on that device, it’s just that you can almost think of it. It doesn’t have to be a device. It could be a purse. If you know that there’s a gun inside that purse, you’re going to latch onto that purse and hold onto that purse and then write a search warrant for that purse. The same thing goes along with digital devices. The one thing we have seen though in the case law that’s come down the pipe recently is the necessity to write that search warrant almost immediately, because you’re taking something from somebody. If I had gone and seized your house and then sat on it for six months before I write my search warrant, that’s not going to be acceptable. And so, the courts have basically said, “No, you seize this device. It’s very important to this person and so we have to get on it right away.”

Dan: [00:16:45] I really think it shows how adaptive law enforcement is. We’re largely reactive in our jobs, but we adapt.

Robert: [00:16:53] Yeah. You look at some of the staffing levels and when detectives are slashed down to almost a third of what it was, it’s like, “Wow, how are we even doing these cases?” Patrol is short staffed. There have been days where they recruited all detectives to do patrol. I’ve been on patrol where it’s all detectives on patrol because we didn’t have the staff. That’s just one of the burdens that has come about in recent years when it comes to law enforcement is this staffing shortages that we have.

Dave: [00:17:33] Retention and recruitment is a big deal for police departments. It’s a topic we’re going to explore in future episodes. But for today, we turn to Hollywood myths. When someone gives you a computer or a cell phone, in Hollywood, we see that those phones are typically downloaded in about three minutes or four minutes. What’s a realistic timeframe for you going through a device and being able to find evidence? I know it’s not immediate, but I know it doesn’t take a month either.

Robert: [00:18:04] Yeah, it really depends on the device. But in general, back when I first started, cell phones were really small. You could actually dump a cell phone fairly quickly. Nowadays, we have cell phones– I recently extracted data from one that was 512 GB and it takes hours and hours to extract the data. If they’re locked, it may take a little bit longer. Then the analysis starts and you have to start looking through 512 GB of data and look at all this stuff. I think about my phone and the quantity of stuff that I have on my phone is just mind blowing. So, I can imagine, if someone’s trying to sift through all of that stuff to find little gems related to a case, it does take a while.

Dave: [00:18:55] Right. You’re familiar with the Internet crimes against Children Task Forces?

Robert: [00:19:00] Oh, yes.

Dave: [00:19:01] I was hoping you could talk about what their agency does and how you work with them and how cases land on your desk. I’m familiar with the process, but I think it’d be interesting to listeners to know how this stuff sometimes starts at the federal level with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and then filters down to the local level.

Robert: [00:19:24] Yeah. So, we’ll get referrals from NCMEC, as it’s called, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, and they will actually refer cases when child porn is discovered somewhere on– something on the internet. They’ll let our Department of Justice know through the ICAC folks that, “Hey, we’ve discovered some child pornography. We have a suspect that is may be abusing a child or is trading this material.” Even though these children may be adults now or they may live in Eastern Europe or something like that, you still have victims that are out there and so they’re re victimizing these kids. So, they’ve really done a great job.

[00:20:11] ICAC is an awesome group of people and the ICAC folks will receive this information. They might perform some legal demands on different companies to try to figure out where the crime is occurring and then forward that information off to the police agency. So, I’ll get notifications from ICAC that, “Hey, you’ve got a person in your jurisdiction that’s up to no good,” and then we have to go from there. What most people don’t realize is the sheer quantity of people that are out there doing this. It’s absolutely insane.

Dave: [00:20:50] Without giving too much away, I know that you have special technology, and there are times where you can see certain types of activity in real time. I know you’re proactive about just at least seeing what’s out there in our local community, what’s being thrown up onto the internet and what people are pulling down. Can you talk about kind of that scope? We live in a town with, what, 250,000 to 300,000 people between two cities or three cities. I think people don’t quite understand how prolific these people are.

Robert: [00:21:30] Yeah, it’s one of the things I really like doing is doing the proactive stuff, but we’ve been so short staffed. Like every other police agency around nowadays, we’ve been short staffed, so I haven’t been able to really focus on that like I want to. But I can look at my computer right now and pinpoint 45 people in the area just within these two towns that are active with child pornography, and that’s just one system that I have. And then you have ICAC folks notifying us about other people. And so, there’s probably 20, 30 more there. When you start doing the numbers and looking at the ratio of population compared to how many people are active, and these are just the people that we’re spotting. It’s mind boggling.

[00:22:20] Child pornography, sex abuse, child’s sexual exploitation, it runs the gamut of all the different socioeconomic classes of people. We get the random dude in their parent’s basement and then we might catch a guy. I’ve caught a guy that had a PhD in child psychology and worked for the school district at one point. So, you get educated people, you get everybody.

Dave: [00:22:48] The DOJ runs the ICAC system, correct? Throughout each region has an ICAC, but the Department of Justice on the state level handles those regional offices throughout the country?

Robert: [00:23:01] Yeah, that’s where our ICAC commander is. And then they dole out all the different cases and assign them out to the different police agencies and let us know when we have cases that are in our jurisdiction.

Dave: [00:23:13] Knowing that you have reviewed the same types of images and videos that I have in my past, child sex abuse material, child pornography, basically, really horrible stuff. I always think about when I think about the stress it caused me. I’m always like, “There’s one other guy who had to watch that and his name’s Robert and I wonder how he’s doing with all this stuff.” Where does it sit with you?

Robert: [00:23:40] You really have to be good at compartmentalizing to do ICAC child sex abuse cases, especially when you have kids. You’ll watch a video of some child crying and being raped, and you realize, that kid’s the same age as my kid. You’ll see people in this field that don’t last very long because they can’t handle that. I know some agencies have implemented regular psychological assessments. They have to go sit with a doc and see how they’re doing, check in, whatnot. I know that’s something that we are looking at implementing into our new contract is you can get a little bit of a pay bump if you regularly go and see some psychologist or psychiatrist to talk about this.

Dave: [00:24:31] I’m really happy to hear that.

Robert: [00:24:32] Yeah, it surprised me to see that showing up in the contract, but I think it’s a great idea, because I feel like I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing generally. There are days literally I am looking at child pornography all day long, five days a week, sifting through it. You have to describe it, you have to sort it, and do all the stuff, looking for local victims, and things like that. And then as soon as I walk out that door, I’m thinking about dinner, I’m thinking about the game, I’m thinking about my kids, I’m thinking about totally other stuff. I think I’ve done a pretty good job of compartmentalizing it and not turning to something like alcohol, or kicking my dog, or whatever to deal with it, but that’s really what it takes. And knowing your limits, knowing when it is starting to bother you and when you do need to talk to somebody.

Dan: [00:25:25] Absolutely. When you come across these cases, is there some advice that you can give to just regular citizens out there? If they come across a device that has child sex abuse material on it, can you give them an idea of, “This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn’t do regarding the device”? Obviously, we don’t want to delete material. So, can you give us an idea of what people need to do if they come across this stuff?

Robert: [00:25:57] When I think of the last couple of weeks, we’ve actually had where somebody has found something. One of the biggest hurdles is them confronting the suspect. That right there causes so many problems. Not only with the investigation, but from a digital standpoint, because then people start going on to their most of these devices nowadays, whether it’s Apple or a Google device or whatever, a lot of them are synced up and connected. They may be connected to cloud storage. That’s when people start deleting stuff, they start changing stuff, they start formatting things, they try to wipe their devices. They can really wreak havoc on an investigation.

[00:26:39] I know that there’s that urge, that primal urge to go and confront this person, especially if you just discovered they victimized your child or something like that, but you really have to try to refrain from that to allow the law enforcement and justice system to work its process and to deal with the offender, because they can honestly do stuff that could totally ruin and prevent a conviction.

Dave: [00:27:12] I can recall one specific case that I was called out in the middle of the night to and I met Sergeant David. Out on the east part of our city the CliffNotes version is, a group of people at a house party, small house party, maybe six or seven attendees, had come across one of their friends who has passed out, and they got into his phone, and started taking selfies. And then they went into his photo gallery and we’re like, “Ah, that was a bad photo. Let’s delete that one.” But while in there, they see a photo and videos of really horrible stuff involving this man who’s passed out and a child that does not belong to him.

[00:27:51] These folks were, they’re not heavy criminals per se, but definitely it was a group of people that I was familiar with from being in law enforcement that their names used to pop up on cases. Usually, it was around like petty theft or some drug use, minor stuff in the grand scheme. But these folks did the right thing, which I remember surprising me incredibly that night that all these folks who would never want any voluntary contact with the police, much less a detective, called 911 and said, “Get somebody out here right now. Our friends passed out and we have some stuff you guys need to see.” They handled it perfectly. They even tried to get me to look through the phone and I said, “No, no, no, no I can’t be the agent. I need suspect’s consent to go through his phone.” And they’re like, “Well, it’s right here.” And I said, “No, don’t show it to me. I’m just going to go based off what you guys saw, tell me what you saw.” They handled it absolutely perfectly. And I remember scratching my head going, “Even they hate child predators. Okay.”

[00:28:59] A lot of these folks, I had never had a positive interaction with at least two people on this call and they could not have been more helpful. I regained some trust in humanity that day, but they handled it perfectly, saw it, were able to describe it, called the police immediately, didn’t even let the suspect know, “Hey, the police are coming. They’re going to wake you up.”

Robert: [00:29:20] Yeah. Honestly, that’s a perfect scenario is to let us do our thing and go from there. We can put the phone in an environment where it can’t get wiped, and then we can start dealing with him in a way that he isn’t able to access the phone remotely. Pretty much any device nowadays can be wiped remotely, and so we have to combat that and deal with it on every case. So, not letting the suspect know what’s going on or really hindering our investigation is probably one of the biggest things, and then just turning that stuff over to law enforcement. Hopefully, in a timely fashion, we’ve had some that it’s taken them a while to get to us, but it still worked out in the end.

Dave: [00:30:06] Absolutely. Can you recall some of the most impactful cases that you’ve worked in a technology space? Not just doing a major accident investigation, but I’m talking specific to your digital work.

Robert: [00:30:20] We’ve had all sorts of major crimes that ended up being very heavy with the digital forensics. We have a lot of murders that have a lot of digital forensics nowadays and we’re using the cell phones to really put the nail in the coffin when it comes to convictions. We’ll use them to track people. We’ll use them to check where their location was, if we can pinpoint them to where the crime was. There’s so much information now that people, I guess, don’t realize that their phone is keeping track of that when we can get in there and take a look at it after a crime has occurred. It really can make or break a case.

Dave: [00:31:04] Do you recall any moment where you’re sitting right where you’re at and doing the, “Oh, I got you.” Like those eureka moments?

Robert: [00:31:13] Oh, yeah. There’re times where get into a phone, the software doesn’t pluck stuff out for you the way you want it, you start digging and digging and digging, and then you find some hidden data, like, location data. Location data may be stored by all sorts of different applications or whatnot. You may find location data that puts somebody at the site of the murder at the time of the murder, and then you can see them fleeing at a high rate of speed because of their cell phone. They didn’t realize that their cell phone is keeping track of that kind of stuff.

[00:31:49] With things like Apple Watches now and whatnot, a lot of your health data is put onto your phone. So, if I get in a fight, my pulse is going to spike, that kind of stuff. There’s so much on there and you can find these little gems, and it’s awesome when you find these little gems that really sink somebody. It really makes you feel good.

Dan: [00:32:28] Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence. What do you guys see on the horizon as investigators, as being potential problems or potential uses of AI?

Robert: [00:32:40] I know that and they say it’s AI, basically it’s a software that some of the digital forensic software that we use has some sort of AI element to help us with processing these devices faster and more efficiently, being able to go through tens of thousands of images and pluck out all the images that appear to be pornography or people’s faces or weapons. It’s actually surprising how well it works sometimes when you tell it, “Hey, go look through 50 some thousand images and give me all the pictures that look like weapons.” It’ll pull them up and it’s like, “Wow. All right. So, it looks like I need to go to this location on the phone and start looking at the other stuff.”

[00:33:29] It can at least point you in the right direction, if not give you the evidence on a silver platter. So, we’ve seen that. I know that they’re starting to improve some of the other imaging and video processing with that sort of technology. So, I’m looking forward to seeing software improve with the AI.

Dave: [00:33:50] With that said, if someone– You’re familiar with the term deepfake?

Robert: [00:33:54] Oh, yeah.

Dave: [00:33:55] So, there are concerns out there that somebody could just generate a surveillance video that looks like CCTV footage. It’s fake evidence. It’s contrived, it’s conjured, it’s not real. Can we have faith that law enforcement has the ability to see through that type of stuff?

Robert: [00:34:16] Yeah, I would think that for the most part, granted, I suppose someone could sit somewhere in their parents’ basement and tweak a video to the point that it looks legit. Even when you look at the byte level and look at the actual raw data, it’s like, “Oh, man, this thing looks like a legit video.” But most of the evidence we get, we like to get it straight from the source. And so, if I go and I pull it from a digital video recorder from a security system, I can tell it’s coming from there, so I’m doing it myself. It’s not somebody coming and handing me a video that they’ve tweaked, so I know where the source is, which is a lot harder to forge, if you will.

Dave: [00:35:00] That’s typically the patrol officer or detective would be going out to a convenience store at 8 o’clock at night and say, “Hey, can I get the security footage?” And they say, “Well, my manager’s got the password in their office, we can’t.” Can you overcome that? Can you just plug in and do a hard pull of all the data or do you actually need that type of access?

Robert: [00:35:22] Well, it depends. If we don’t want to shut the business down and shut the security system down with most of that kind of stuff, we can just bring it back to the lab and deal with it, I don’t care if I have the password or not. But for businesses, in general, we like to be kind to our businesses, and we want them to cooperate with us, we want them to like us. So, we try not to disrupt their flow of business and shut down their video system or their servers or anything like that. So, we try to work with them and get the passcode, so I can just extract what I want and leave everything up and running.

Dan: [00:35:59] With younger officers, I imagine that when they’re going through the field training program that there is now a section in that book. It’s a huge book. I remember you had to check off all these different boxes in this book. But are there areas of that book now that deal with collecting digital evidence?

Robert: [00:36:23] I don’t know, if they’ve specifically put it in there or if the training officers are just explaining it to them. I know I’ve put out some information out to the troops and said, “Hey, if you’ve got this, let’s collect it this way. If you’ve got this, let’s collect it that way.” There’re ways of collecting these devices that actually make it way easier to extract the data to get the evidence off of there. If they do the wrong thing at the front end, it can make my life so difficult or it could even make it almost impossible to get the data off. So, I know I’ve put some stuff out there. We’re putting together some department wide training, because it’s been a while since we’ve done it, probably been several years since we’ve done department wide training with digital forensics. But we try to do it every once in a while and explain to the folks how we should be handling this stuff.

Dan: [00:37:16] To kind of piggyback off of that, I recall when I was working with you that you quickly gained a reputation as being pretty resourceful and talented at what you were doing, and we had a lot of outside agencies reaching out to you to see if you could help them. Is that something that continues? I know a lot of the smaller departments around our state probably don’t have someone like you. So, are you being farmed out frequently?

Robert: [00:37:44] Yeah, we do. Currently, the sheriff’s office doesn’t have somebody, he up and retired. So, I’ve taken on their digital forensics. And then every now and then, I’m helping out other agencies. It’s a pretty tight knit community. So, if somebody comes to me with a problem, I’ll try and help them out as best I can. Or, if not, I can direct them to somebody, maybe somebody closer that can help them out. Everybody I know in the state that does digital forensics is super eager to help out other law enforcement agencies. So, in general, it’s not a problem to find somebody that’s willing to help an agency out if they need help.

[00:38:21] But at some point, it reaches a point where it’s like, you guys have enough cases. You’re big enough. You have a big enough budget. You need to really look at taking that leap and invest in the money and invest somebody into the digital forensics program. I know it’s expensive, and I know it’s time consuming and all that, but at some point, you got to take that leap.

Dan: [00:38:47] You mentioned money. About how much does it cost to get a program like this up and running and maintaining it? Because there’s training costs, there’s equipment costs, there’s obviously the salary of the investigators who are working that caseload. So, what does that look like budget wise fiscally for a jurisdiction?

Robert: [00:39:08] Oh, you could easily, easily spend $100,000 a year, easily. I don’t want to brag, but I just got a new computer, and it was close to 25 grand for a processing computer just to process this workstation to work on these cases. When you start talking about some of the proprietary devices and software for cell phones or for security systems or for vehicles, some of these things cost $10,000 plus a year just to have them and be able to use them. And some of the equipment can be astronomical.

Dave: [00:39:54] Dan was talking about how you assist others with investigations, but at the same time, you assisted me on plenty. I remember when you were first selected and going through all the trainings, and I was thinking, “Okay, I am going to work him to death because we have all this ICAC stuff.”

Robert: [00:40:12] [chuckles] You were kind of needy. [laughs]

Dave: [00:40:15] Well, I needed you to explain to certain people, the usefulness of having a digital forensics guy. But I remember one particular case that you and I had worked on together. We ended up at an apartment complex. We served a search warrant on the house. I remember it was a family that had several friends. There’re probably five people or six people in this three-bedroom apartment, but I remember we kind of rounded everybody up and said, “Here’s why we’re here”. We read the search warrant. We had this whole family of people in the living room. I remember while it was being read, just scanning the room, who’s going to have a reaction when they hear what this search warrant is all about? And there was one guy in the back.

Robert: [00:40:55] Oh, yeah, you always get that one guy. [laughs]

Dave: [00:40:57] He shrunk, his head went down, and I think both you and I at the same time said, “There he is. We got him. You guys can go back to bed. We need to talk to you.” But the usefulness of having you, the expert on the digital side of that, was these guys typically are pretty super users. They’re usually pretty well versed in software and how to be sneaky about their activity. It’s useful to have a digital forensics person in there who can wade through the bullshit and go, “No, I know that’s not true because you’re not talking to some dumb cop or dumb Detective Dave over there. You’re talking to me.” Those types of situations where you get in the interview room with these guys, do you enjoy that? Is that a moment where you’re looking forward to those types of cases?

Robert: [00:41:52] Oh, yeah. Because there’s some times where it’s like, “I didn’t do that.” And you’re like, “Well, this photograph was taken with a Samsung A32, this model of phone. Do you have one of those?” Being able to really get into the weeds and get those details and all those extra details can really sink somebody. And honestly, we get confessions because of it, because they know they are sunk, and so they’ll admit to certain things.

Dave: [00:42:26] That can be corroborated with evidence.

Robert: [00:42:29] Exactly. And a lot of times these guys, it’s true in all gamuts of law enforcement, they won’t admit to anything unless you basically show them, just point-blank show them evidence that says, “Look, right here, this is you doing this.” And they’re like, “Okay, you got me.” And to do that in the digital world is kind of awesome.

Dave: [00:42:51] Have you ever had any suspects, any opponents, adversaries outsmart you? You weren’t able to break them or figure out what they were doing?

Robert: [00:43:00] I’ve had people that made my life very difficult, but I’ve still managed to find ways to get my convictions. So, whether they try to encrypt a bunch of stuff and then it takes me forever to decrypt it, whether they try hiding stuff and I have to do a bunch of extra legwork to find it or to track stuff down on the internet with different companies. But for the most part, we generally can get where we want to get to for the most part.

Dave: [00:43:34] Is that like a challenge accepted-type moment for you?

Robert: [00:43:38] Sometimes, it takes a while. Sometimes, you’ll have some brand-new phone with some brand-new operating system. It takes quite a bit of effort to finally get into it, but it’s almost guaranteed, eventually, you’re going to get into it. It just takes time and effort and money.

Dan: [00:44:09] Looking back, I remember the San Bernardino active shooters, the husband-and-wife team, where they shot up a Christmas party that he was an employee at. I know that they had a lot of information on their cell phones and that there was a battle back and forth between Apple and law enforcement of trying to get into that phone. Has Apple and these other companies come to the table and talk to law enforcement about, “Hey, in certain cases, we’re going to help you, but in these cases, it’s got to rise to a certain degree before we give you any assistance.” What does that landscape look like?

Robert: [00:44:49] Yeah, Apple’s special. You have to realize they’re a business and part of their business model is based on security. That’s one of their selling points. If they didn’t have security, then their sales would be impacted. So, they’re totally fine with being as secure as possible, even if that means that it’s secure from the government. It almost seems like at some point, the government might have to step in and say like, “Look, you need to figure out a way to allow us into a phone or something like that, if we have a search warrant.”

[00:45:26] I know with that San Bernardino case, Apple’s like, “Ah, sorry, we can’t help you. The way it’s set up, it uses the passcode and causes the encryption,” and blah, blah, blah. They basically said they couldn’t help them. It took a private company, one of the major companies, that does cell phone forensics, to say, “Here’s how to get into it.” They actually helped them unlock it. And then I think there was some sort of action after that where Apple was trying to– They wanted to know how that company had gotten into that phone. It’s like, “Hey, tell us how you did that.” So, that’s one of those things.

[00:46:04] These companies are spending a lot of time reverse engineering these phones and these operating systems, and they get these proprietary ways of getting into these devices, and they don’t want to let that stuff out. And so, they’ll do the best they can to try to keep Apple or Google or whoever from learning how they are able to crack into these devices.

Dave: [00:46:28] I love that. If you’re not going to give us secrets, why would we give you ours?

Robert: [00:46:33] Yeah.

Dave: [00:46:34] It seems like common sense. What advice do you have for parents with kids who are either in possession of or approaching the age where they’re going to get a digital device? What are the things you see when you’re dumping these phones and getting all the info? What can parents do to better arm themselves for what’s happening in 2023?

Robert: [00:47:02] It boggled my mind when I started dumping teenagers cell phones, what was on there, and the amount of stuff that they were sharing, like, personal photos and the stuff they were saying and who they’re talking to and all that stuff. And most parents, they don’t keep up on what the latest chat applications are or what their kids are doing on their phones. My kids are starting to get to that age where I’ve actually given them some old phones to play on and do FaceTime and stuff like that. And so, I’ve made it a point to really be in control of what applications are being installed on there, be in control of the internet browsing, and there’re restrictions on what they can look at and stuff. Luckily, they haven’t tried to push the boundaries yet, but really being in the know of what’s going on that device. And the problem is, once they put their own password on there, their parent is locked out and they can’t get in there and actually see what’s going on on all these different applications.

[00:48:07] A lot of the applications themselves, whether it’s Signal or whatever, a lot of these applications can have their own password. Snapchat have its own password to log in to then be able to see the messaging. So, there can be a couple of layers where a kid can hide who they’re talking to, whether it’s an adult or other kids or whatever. So, you really have to make sure that you can get in there and see what your kid is doing. Honestly, just knowing what your kiddo is doing and maybe having restrictions in there to prevent them from doing stuff and know if somebody– maybe somebody a lot older is reaching out to them or somebody pretending to be their age is reaching out to them.

[00:48:56] The other thing I always tell parents is to really stress to their kids that anything they do in terms of the digital camera on their phone is going to exist forever. If they take a picture on their phone, it better be a picture that they’re okay with the rest of the school seeing, because we’ve had countless cases of teenagers at the high schools that they get a naked picture of some girl and they are passing them around like trading cards. Next thing you know, the entire school has seen that photo. And so, really stressing to kids like, “Hey, any picture you take and any picture you send off to somebody is now going to be out there in the public and everybody’s going to see it.” A lot of times, that’ll scare the kids into not taking certain pictures.

Dave: [00:49:46] I recall so many cases– Dan, I’m sure has heard this on plenty of calls you as well, where a parent asks police, “Do I have the right to take my kid’s phone away? Do I have the right to look in my child’s phone? Do I have the right to monitor what apps? Do I have the right to have the passcode to the phone?” And my answer always was yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Until that child is 18 and out of your house, you’re responsible for them. We have crimes in our state that parents can be charged with for failing to supervise their children. So, if it gets out of hand, then parents can be on the hook for whatever their child’s doing. Do you run into that still where parents don’t understand that they are the king of the castle and the kids don’t run the roost?

Robert: [00:50:38] Yeah, we have a lot of parents that are really hands off and the kiddos become so entitled. “This is my brand-new iPhone 14 that costs $1,000.” It’s like, “Well, did you pay for that? Are you paying for the service?” “No.” But they’re so entitled and the parents just back off and let some of these kiddos really rule the roost. You almost have to start from the very beginning and make sure that the kids understand that, “This is a privilege and I’m letting you use this phone, but I need to be aware of what you’re doing on there. And at any point in time, I can go in there. If you start locking stuff down, then I’m taking it away.” Because if they’re not doing anything wrong, they’re not really going to care if you’re looking at it or whatever.

Dave: [00:51:27] Right. I stress the contract between parents and their kids with digital devices. The main message to parents is, be nosy and take charge of your child’s device. If they’re not playing by the rules, they lose it. It’s a privilege. It’s not life or death. It’s your job to steer your child around the potholes that none of us as adults now. We never had to deal with this back in our teens. So, it’s a different landscape, but we really want to empower parents. There are ways for you to overcome this and reduce your own stress. Just be vigilant. You have to stay on top of it and be observant.

Robert: [00:52:09] Really start when they’re young, so they understand, “This is a privilege and I’m going to let my parents look and I’m not going to hide stuff from my parents.” And so, it doesn’t reach a point where it’s like, “Oh, gosh, I have never looked at my kiddo’s phone, but now that they’re 16 or 17, I’m going to look at their phone.” That’s probably not going to–

Dave: [00:52:27] That’s going to start a fight.

Robert: [00:52:29] Yeah.

Dave: [00:52:30] I think my big takeaway here is the volume of phones that land in your office, and that you and your partner, Justin, download and review. I think it’s really impactful for parents to understand that even innocent little Johnny, he might have some fairly suspicious, concerning, sometimes criminal photos, information, conversations, those types of things. I think it’s an eye opener to parents that just in our little small town that you’re seeing dozens of these a month, probably, you’re getting at least a couple of phones a day, not necessarily from kids. But this is nonstop and this stuff spreads like wildfire.

Robert: [00:53:14] Yeah. If you think about the people that like to prey on kids, they’re going to find the way that’s most effective. If that means I’m going to be super nice, I’m going to offer them things, I might even pretend to be younger than I am, things like that. I think of my kids and they’re naive. They would totally fall for things that, as an adult, you’re like, “How in the world does somebody fall for that?” But kids do. And so, you really just have to be in the know and be nosy about what’s going on in their digital world.

Dave: [00:53:50] Robert, I wanted to thank you for your time. I know it’s precious and I know you guys are stretched pretty thin currently, so I greatly appreciate the time. And please pass that along to command staff there.

Robert: [00:54:03] Yeah, good to see you, guys. I miss you, guys. People don’t realize, and maybe they do. But people don’t realize how much fun you guys were to work with. Honestly, it was a blast. I’m 25 years and retirement is not too terribly far off. I start to think back about the people that I worked with that were memorable, and you two were definitely memorable and fun to work with. We had a lot of good cases, caught a lot of bad guys, and did good stuff, and had fun doing it.

Dave: [00:54:33] Well, we appreciate that.

Dan: [00:54:34] Great to see you again.

Dave: [00:54:37] On the next episode of The Briefing Room.

Forensic Interviewer: [00:54:39] As a forensic interviewer, we want to give a chance or an opportunity for a child to be able to tell about events experienced in the past from their perspective in a way that it comes from the child’s voice kind of building that credibility of a child, because children already start out at a lower sense of credibility in our society. And so, we want to make sure we give them the opportunity to talk about what they have experienced.

Dave: [00:55:07] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

Yeardley: [00:55:10] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed the theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:55:35] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[The Briefing Room theme playing]

Dan: [00:00:37] Today on The Briefing Room, a video goes viral, tempers flare, and images of policing are tarnished. Public backlash against a single officer, a department, or an entire profession can blur the reality of what law enforcement officers are expected to do, be, and represent on a daily basis.

[00:00:57] Yael Bar Tur is a social media consultant who’s helped organizations tell their stories for over two decades. One of those organizations is the New York City Police Department. For six years, starting in 2014, Yael worked as the NYPD’s Director of Social Media and Digital Strategy. As trust in law enforcement was at an all-time low, Yael was charged with not only managing PR crises, but also with using social media to help foster positive relationships between law enforcement and New Yorkers, a massive undertaking.

[00:01:31] Today, she’ll tell us about the highs and lows she faced while working with the NYPD at their headquarters, One Police Plaza. She’ll also give us insight into how social media can be used for good, to build positive relationships between officers and the communities they serve. Yael, welcome to The Briefing Room.

Yael: [00:01:49] Hi, guys. Thanks for having me.

Dan: [00:01:51] I’m Detective Dan, and this is my brother, Detective Dave.

Dave: [00:01:55] Happy to be here.

Dan: [00:01:57] So, Yael, I’ll just start with– That’s not a name I’ve heard every day in my life. [Yael laughs] Can you give us a little background where you’re from and how you got into your current situation?

Yael: [00:02:08] Sure. I am from Israel originally. I was born and raised there. Came to the US in 2007 to pursue the American dream like a lot of people and have been here ever since. And by the way, I was one of three Ls in the entire NYPD, which I think says more about the size of the NYPD than anything else.

Dan: [00:02:26] How many sworn at NYPD?

Yael: [00:02:29] So, when I was there, we had, I think, 36,000 sworn and 15,000 civilian, what I guess most agencies call non-sworn. I was a civilian. And now I think, I don’t know what the civilian number is, but I know the sworn number is a lot lower, probably around 34,000. Because NYPD, like, every city right now, is facing a bit of a hiring crisis.

Dave: [00:02:52] Indeed they are.

Dan: [00:02:54] Yes, absolutely. I think every police department in the United States is going through the same thing right now. It’s been a rough few years. So, you moved here in 2007 to the United States.

Yael: [00:03:06] Mm-hmm.

Dan: [00:03:06] What was your background in Israel before you came to the United States? There’s mandatory service, correct?

Yael: [00:03:12] Yeah, I did my mandatory service. I was in the IDF spokesperson unit, so basically doing communications. I was put in a very sleepy office that was the Foreign Press Office, where nothing was going on. And about a week into my service, the Second Intifada started. This was 2000. It was basically a war, a violent uprising that began with the Palestinians in Israel and, of course, bled over to Israel’s other borders. So, we had journalists coming from all over the world, and us, a bunch of 18-year-olds taking CNN reporters around and not quite knowing what we were doing. It was definitely a trial by fire.

[00:03:49] After that, I got my BA in Israel, my undergraduate degree in government studies and counterterrorism. And then I came to the US. I wasn’t initially interested in policing. I was more interested in counterterrorism security studies. I got my master’s at the Kennedy School with a focus on international relations, but I realized it would be hard for me because I wasn’t an American citizen to get the security clearance. I had met a few NYPD officers that actually went with me to the Kennedy School, and they asked me, “Would you like to do an internship?” And I was like, “Yeah. I love law and order.” [Dave laughs] Everybody around the world knows the NYPD, right? It’s so cool. I did my internship there in 2011 and that was the beginning of that love story.

Dave: [00:04:36] As an Israeli citizen, what was your perception prior to your arrival here about what America was, what police was?

Yael: [00:04:45] So, America, when I was growing up, I grew up in the 1990s, and I was fed a very steady diet of American pop culture, which I love to this day. It taught me everything. I think that’s true of a lot of people. I met a lot of police officers in New York, a ton of foreign-born police officers, a lot of immigrants. And a lot of them, they saw the NYPD on TV before anything else. I think there’s a reason a lot of people from all over the world want to come here.

Dan: [00:05:12] How do you turn an internship at NYPD into a full paying job?

Yael: [00:05:17] Oh, my gosh, relentlessness, arrogance a little bit. [laughs] So, I did my internship there. I was a master’s student at that time in 2011 and NYPD didn’t really have a social media presence. When I went back to school my second year, I offered them to do a graduate thesis. That was kind of the model that we had at the Kennedy School is we would pick a client and build them something. I said, “Hey. Why don’t–? I, together with classmate of mine, “Let us build you a social media strategy.” And they were like, “No, we’re good. We don’t need that.” Kind of kept asking and begging, and finally they’re like, “Okay, come, write your little paper.”

[00:06:02] I did that. It was really, really fun. Got to go back and forth from Boston to New York and really get a good insight into what the NYPD needs and what they’re doing. Wrote that paper and then eventually got hired under Commissioner Zach Tumin, who helped me with the paper at the time. So, there was a new administration coming in, this was 2014, under Bill Bratton and it was a huge earthquake in the NYPD because the previous administration wanted nothing to do with digital communications and outreach. Bill Bratton came in and he brought a different style of policing with him that’s a little more open to trial and error, let’s say, or open to trying new things that aren’t necessarily proven. So, I think I got very lucky in that sense.

Dave: [00:06:51] I imagine knowing cops as I do, and you having experience with them, the stiff arm and the standoffishness is not surprising to me. Were there moments where you’re trying to beat your head through the brick wall going, “Why can’t they just understand the value here”?

Yael: [00:07:10] Yeah, of course they were. I love working with cops. I think that’s why I fell in love with the organization. I think I have a bit of a dark sense of humor, which translates well there.

Dan: [00:07:22] Yeah, the dark sense of humor, actually, it’s a way that we in law enforcement release all the pressure from all the horrible things we see. And it tells command staff and the people that you’re around that you get it.

Yael: [00:07:35] Yeah. I like to poke fun at people, and the NYPD, they say if they’re not making fun of you, they don’t like you. So, once I knew people were ripping on me– I went on vacation. When I came back, my desk was covered with all kinds of memes. Then I knew I was in. But yeah, it was hard to sell. We went from 0 to 100 at the NYPD. So, we went from nothing to launching– This was based on thesis that I wrote, launching a localized digital strategy. So, we have 77 precincts in the city and we gave everyone a Twitter account over the course of a few months.

[00:08:12] This is a department where before that, if you were seen tossing around a football with a kid and somebody caught that on camera, you would get in trouble. And now know person from Harvard is coming in and be like, “Hey, everybody’s getting Twitter.” So, I think part of the reason it worked so well is because we had really good leadership under Bill Bratton, who was very, very open to this. This is more of a personal opinion, but I think some of it is being young and being more willing to take risks.

Dan: [00:08:42] Yeah. So, each one of these precincts has a Twitter page. Who is basically curating that content for each precinct?

Yael: [00:08:51] So, they have a Twitter and they have Facebook pages now as well. The person curating it, at first, we had it be the commanding officer, because it’s a very important thing, and we don’t want them to mess it up. But then we realized that doesn’t work for everyone. We had some commanding officers who are really good at and loved it, and some of them are like, “Just give me a fucking break. I took five shootings. I’m not going to tweet about a kitten now.”

Dave: [00:09:13] There’s some validity to that as well.

Yael: [00:09:15] Completely understandable. The last thing I wanted to do was, we tend to CompStat everything in New York. So, CompStat is something that I think started NYPD, but a lot of police departments do it, a lot of public service organizations do it, where every week they meet and they look at the data, and everything’s very measured. Like, how many assaults did you have this week? Where are you deploying your detectives? It’s really considered one of the reasons that drove crime down and changed policing. But I didn’t want to CompStat social media. There was a push for that and I pushed back. I didn’t want to send them every week a report and be like, “Your tweets are down 25% and you lost three followers.”

[00:10:00] Because the thing with cops, I think [giggles] you would agree that once you tell them to check a box, they’ll check that box, and that’s it. I wanted them to like this. I wanted them to understand why it’s important. My goal was to make their life easier at the end of the day. I said, like, “If you’re doing social media, right, your job should be easier, not harder.” So, we told every commanding officer, “You pick your guy. It could be your driver, it could be your crime prevention officer, it can be your lieutenant. But you know best. We don’t want to tell you from One Police Plaza who should do this. Pick one or two people. We’ll train them.” That’s the only thing we said, like, we need to train them, we need to know who they are, they need to go through us. But you pick them and then we designated them a digital communications officer, which I think we were maybe the only police department to have that designation.

Dave: [00:10:54] You’ve touched on right at the end, the training aspect about having to train folks. I’m relating some of the folks that I used to work with, and I’d be like, “Oh, I’d be okay with him having a phone and a Twitter account?” “That person, absolutely not. [Yael laughs] I don’t want them in charge of any messaging.” I imagine you’ve got to really know your personnel, their strengths and weaknesses, and really position your folks to be successful because one poorly crafted message can blow up the whole department.

Yael: [00:11:29] Yeah. There were times at our peak where we were putting out about 200 tweets a day from all of our accounts. So, a few things go into that. You’re absolutely right. I think one of the things was, if you really don’t want to do this, I don’t want you to– Like, don’t force the guy who hates this. The other thing is we would tell people, it’s not your tech guy. It’s not your– And I say guy, obviously, I mean, guy and girl interchangeably. But it’s not necessarily your computer person. It’s the person who can talk. It’s the person who is more community oriented. We can teach them just like you can teach an officer how to handle a firearm. You can teach them how to handle a Twitter account. Some of our best accounts were people who didn’t have any experience with it before, but they were good at talking to people.

Dave: [00:12:17] That’s not shocking at all. [laughs]

Dan: [00:12:35] So, I think one of the great tools of social media is building a little bit of trust between the police department and the citizens out there who are being policed, hopefully, gently. I think most citizens out there don’t have a clue about what police culture is. Did you see social media as a tool to maybe give you a glimpse through the window of what police culture is in America?

Yael: [00:12:58] Yeah, 100%. Whenever somebody would tell me– One of our digital communications officers would say, “I don’t have anything to post about,” or “I can’t come up with content,” I say like, “You have to remember that everything you do is interesting. You do roll call, it’s interesting. You clean your locker, it’s interesting.” There’s content there that people don’t know about. You’re going up to the detective squad to talk to them about something, that’s interesting. I think sometimes police officers forget that they tend to be very insular and they forget that people on the outside don’t know.

[00:13:34] I give this example of you walk into a Starbucks or a coffee shop in uniform. What happens around you? Everybody stops what they’re doing. I’m like, “Oh, why are the cops here?” Everybody is interested in what you do. I forget who told me the story once. Somebody once said that they were taking money out of an ATM and there’s a guy behind them and he was laughing, and he was like, “I’ve never seen a cop in an ATM before.” So, it is very interesting. There’s content in everything you do. I think people love knowing what a day in the life of a police officer looks like. I can’t stress this enough. It doesn’t always have to be the best arrest that you made. It doesn’t have to be the promotion ceremony, but nobody cares.

[00:14:15] Once you’re speaking behind a podium unless it’s an emergency, it’s less interesting than “Officer so and so was doing foot patrol today and ran into this neighborhood resident who’s been living here for 60 years and they both had a cup of coffee together.” That’s a lot more interesting and humanizes the officer and shows that they are part of the community they serve. It takes down that wall a little bit. And that happens every single day.

Dave: [00:14:42] We talk about viral incidents. I mean, the most noteworthy in recent years is George Floyd. Scenario wise and I hate to give you a hypothetical, but we could use that as an example. I know that you had left NYPD prior to George Floyd’s death, correct?

Yael: [00:14:59] Just a few months before. Yeah.

Dave: [00:15:00] Hypothetically, if that situation happened in New York– I know it impacted every city in the US. I worked plenty of protests myself. But if that type of viral incident happens where you’ve got a citizen who blasts out this video to show injustice, what are the steps that you’re going to do to alleviate the pressure around that situation?

Yael: [00:15:26] Yeah, that’s something we had to deal with very often. Not George Floyd situations, because I really haven’t seen in my career anything of that level. But we did see a lot of incidents of police action, sometimes justified, sometimes unjustified, in New York. I was there during Eric Garner, I was there during Michael Brown, even though that didn’t happen in New York, but that definitely affected public opinion.

[00:15:53] I think what’s important to remember is that, while the public sometimes sees all these names that I mentioned as part of the same process or part of the same structural problem, policing wise, these incidents could not be further apart. George Floyd, police officers that I know, even some of the really salty ones, looked at that and said like, “What the fuck is that guy doing?” about the cop.

Dave: [00:16:18] Right.

Yael: [00:16:19] You can’t compare that to an incident like Jacob Blake, where he was followed by a police officer to his car and shot by the police officer. There was also public outcry, but a lot of police officers said, “Was he going for a weapon?” And it turned out that he was. So, first of all, we need to get the facts. We need to know what happened here. And when it’s something where the police officer is completely at fault and just out of the blue, like, the George Floyd one, there really is nothing to do but bring out that information, say, this officer will be fired, punished, obviously go through trial, and this is not how we act. It’s much harder when it’s those gray area cases. What Commissioner Bratton would call awful, but lawful.

Dave: [00:17:07] Right.

Yael: [00:17:08] If you have to take down a suspect who’s resisting, it’s not pretty. You guys know that. I’ve never had to do that. I’m not sworn member of service, but we’ve all seen four officers or five officers struggle with 150-pound guy, because if you want to put up a fight and not get your hands in handcuffs, it’s going to be pretty difficult for officers to restrain you. So, it’s never pretty, it’s never clean, it’s not like in the movies. It’s our job to explain that. But I’ll say something maybe a little controversial.

[00:17:42] When an incident like that happens, that’s not when you’re going to build that public trust. You have to give out all the information. You have to be as transparent as you can as long as it doesn’t hurt an investigation. But in policing, you have to invest in the bank of public trust, because you’re going to withdraw from it from time to time. You’re going to have incidents, whether they’re completely justified or whether it’s just a cop acting like an asshole, right? Like, sometimes a cop acts like an asshole and yells at somebody and gets reprimanded, but it’s all over the news. Those incidents, you’re going to have to explain, you’re going to have to be forthcoming, but you’re not going to win people over then. You have to do that work every day.

Dave: [00:18:22] Right. I think back to some of the times that I worked where an officer does something that gets live streamed on Facebook or somewhere and you’re watching it going, “Why on Earth would he ever use those words? Why on Earth is this officer continuing to argue with this person when they know they’re being filmed?” You think about things like that and you talk about lawful but awful. I used to think about these situations and go, “Hey, this is something we could get out in front of.” I think some of the older guard in law enforcement was like, “Well, then that’s an admission of guilt, and then we have to worry about getting sued because now we’ve just admitted that we screwed up by addressing this in a social media post.”

[00:19:09] Those are huge obstacles to building trust, when you’re like, “No, actually, we can explain.” Yes, this officer didn’t approach this situation in an ideal way, but there’s no policy violation. Nobody’s rights were violated. It’s an argument. It just happens that one person has a badge and a gun and those incidents go viral.

Yael: [00:19:31] Yeah. And there’s a risk there. I think one of the most important things for me when I’m doing my training is acknowledging to people that there’s a risk. Sometimes people will say, “What if people say mean things to me?” Or, “What if I go viral?” And I was like, “I guarantee you that will happen.” But not being there is a lot worse. People think about social media as PR, but I think, Dan, you said it, well, that it’s more about building trust. I argue all the time that communications, public outreach is a core part of policing today. It’s not a nice to have, it’s something that should be discussed at the highest levels. If you don’t believe that, then ask yourself in your town, how many George Floyd protests did you have against your local police department?

[00:20:20] If you had protests against your local police department in Wichita, Kansas about something that happened in a different state, then you understand why social media is important and why it affects policing. You see it with recruitment and retention, you see it with the way people interact with police. You don’t have to like it, but you have to acknowledge that the reality has changed. We’re past the no-comment phase, right? We just can’t afford to be there. It sucks. [giggles] It’s not like, “Yay, everything’s modern and all the world is connected.” That’s like 2007 social media. But it is what it is and we’re losing every day that we’re not telling our story.

Dave: [00:21:18] The way these viral incidents grow is, it’s a virus. It completely explodes. I think that police in the past have done themselves quite a disservice by not just saying, “Hey, we’re still waiting for facts to come in, but initial review is these things.” It used to happen in police shootings all the time, where the chief would be on TV speaking directly to the people in the 6 o’clock news saying, “Our officer was put in a really dire and dangerous situation, responded, used his training and experience and survived.” More facts are going to come out in the days to come, but at this point, we’re worried about our officer. He’s safe and this person is in the hospital or this person did,” whatever. The facts will come out.

[00:22:10] But you have to address these things upfront before the other side gets the narrative going where they left out 10 facts, because you picked up a video in the middle of a resisting arrest and never picked up what caused that resisting arrest.

Yael: [00:22:26] Yeah. And you see it all the time. I see misinformation. I even wrote a piece about this misinformation about policing all the time to the point where you’re tearing your hair out and be like, “How could CNN run this?” Or, “How could this congressperson post this headline?” I can list so many of them. Just recently, there was the unarmed pregnant woman in Kansas City who was shot by police officers, where there is a photo of her aiming her gun, literally like a photo. And sometimes, you see a headline, Unarmed Pregnant Woman and then under that, you see the photo of her holding the gun and pointing it at the police officers.

[00:23:05] For some reason, with policing and this is more maybe about social media and the media today, but nuanced headlines are not going to get clicks. So, you get people riled up. It’s very easy to blame the police, because it’s a “victimless crime.” I say this ironically, but it’s not like they’re people, right? It’s not like they have morale and feelings about how they come to work every day.

[00:23:30] I’ve met thousands of police officer in my life. Some of them are the best people I know. Some of them are complete assholes. It’s just like everything else. But I guarantee you, none of them wakes up in the morning, puts on their uniform and says, “I hope I kill someone today.” But you still see that. Just the other day I saw a friend sent me in Yonkers, which is very close to here, a viral video that was shared by all these influencers of these cops harassing a little black child. They were just asking him questions and following him and wouldn’t let him leave.

[00:24:00] The comments were awful. It just went completely viral. They won’t leave this little kid alone. And of course, the Yonkers PD came out with the body camera footage and said, somebody called that one said this kid was lost, and he’s walking around alone, the officers were following home because they want to make sure he got home, right?

Dave: [00:24:18] Perspective. Yeah.

Yael: [00:24:20] Yeah. But also, it’s not always the big shooting. Sometimes it’s the most regular job, the most day to day job, like, a lost kid that could turn into, all of a sudden, these cops who are just doing their jobs are everywhere on social media. They’re being doxed, they’re being accused of being pedophiles. I don’t envy police officers for having all that attention turned to them. Obviously, there needs to be accountability. That’s why we have body cameras, but not like this.

Dave: [00:24:48] In years past, cops got the benefit of the doubt. Through our own fault, police have stepped on themselves many times over the years and not had the greatest social media strategy or crisis management strategies. We should accept that and acknowledge it and say, “Yeah, we have to get better.” The frustrating part is those instances are so exceptionally rare in the work that when they get the attention and you’re like, “Well, I mean, I did do these 10,000 other things really well. I made a mistake.” We do so many things from day to day that never get a picture taken that it’s frustrating that you don’t get the benefit of the doubt, like, “Oh, they must just all be out there abusing people’s rights.”

[00:25:40] It’s really important to have somebody who’s like, “No, here’s the actual truth and here’s the rest of the story. Here’s the rest of the video. If you have questions, contact us at whatever.” That kind of message backs up your officers who are out on the street.

Yael: [00:25:55] Yeah, and that’s a really important thing too, because I alluded to it earlier, but what it does to morale and how officers feel about their job is also something that’s almost impossible to measure. But it’s huge, because cops are also on social media and they also see the same videos and the same things, and they look at these officers and they say, “That could have been me.” That’s a really difficult problem. You see a lot of cops being really, really hands off now. I don’t know if you guys have seen this too.

Dave: [00:26:25] Absolutely. It’s the Ferguson effect.

Yael: [00:26:27] Yeah, I’ll give you an example. I was on a ride along a couple of years ago, and somebody called– Two post- I call them post George Floyd cops, right? They came after 2020. Super, super nice. They got a call for a woman who was suicidal. Somebody called and said, “My sister or somebody is suicidal. She lives here and here, and I haven’t heard from her,” like, a wellness check. And so, they go, they knock, and she doesn’t answer, and they knock, she doesn’t answer, and they leave. Because procedurally, that’s what you do. You don’t want to get sued, right? I don’t want to break her door and then I’ll get be a viral video, cops break the door. But back in the day, I’d like to think you guys would break down that door.

Dave: [00:27:12] If we had articulable facts that lent themselves to a determination that if someone’s a danger to themselves or others, we’re kicking the door in a 100%.

Yael: [00:27:22] You can argue that in court. You can argue why you didn’t or why you did kick the door in, but you can’t argue that if you’re a viral video, you can’t argue that if you get fired by your job, thrown under the bus to appease community outcry about something, which is also something we’ve seen. So, I don’t envy these young men and women out there who are really– they come on this job to help people. I think they realize how incredibly difficult it is to do that.

[00:27:51] One of the things, when I talk about public opinion and policing and I used to say that in all of my trainings at NYPD. one day, I thought, at some point some chief is going to come yell at me, but nobody did. I said, “Nobody outside of this room–” This room being One Police Plaza or wherever I was training, “Nobody here cares about your CompStat numbers. Nobody in Mott Haven, the Bronx is looking, going on Thursday morning and checking and be like, “Ooh, grand larcenys are down 17%. I feel safer.” They don’t care. They care about what they see when they leave their house. Are people double parked? Is there trash on the street? Is there a homeless person screaming and throwing trash at you? Everybody cares about that stuff.

[00:28:39] I remember a commanding officer of a precinct in Brownsville, New York, which is really one of the most high crime areas in New York tell me– People come to my community council meetings and they complain about double parking, because that’s this low hanging fruit. But that’s also stuff you see every single day. I teach a lot about engaging, answering people. But engaging is not just answering. It’s also in having your ear to the ground and knowing what people in your community care about. Every good officer, if you wake them up in the middle of night and be like, “What’s that one thing that everybody in your community gets worked up about?” And they’ll tell you. It’s like the speeding in the school zone or the bodega that plays loud music or whatever.

[00:29:24] So, have your ear to the ground. What do people care about? Not just people on social media, because social media, it’s an insight. It’s a window, but it’s not the public. But you know what your public cares about and post about it. So, let’s say, there’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn where people are very concerned about bike lanes being blocked. So, let’s say, this is something that happened. There was a trash can, like, a big sanitation trash thing blocking the bike lane. Every day they would complain, complain, complain, and complain.

[00:29:56] So, the police department eventually took action and they said, “You tweeted. We listened. We worked with sanitation, and we moved the trash can and cleared the bike lane.” That kind of tweet is better than any kitten you just saved from a tree or baby that you just birthed in the back of your car. Those are the things that people really care about. You have to take your victory lap, because they’re not going to drive by there and be like, “Oh, that’s so nice.” A 78 precinct, remove that thing. No, they’re going to drive by and be like, “Oh, somebody cleared the bike lane.” But you have to take your victory lap, and you have to say, “We heard you. Here’s what we did.” That’s something the cops are a little uncomfortable with because they don’t like toot their own horn.

Dan: [00:30:40] Hugely valuable.

Dave: [00:30:40] Yeah.

Dan: [00:30:42] That’s how you connect and engage with people.

Yael: [00:30:44] Yeah. You’re not going to call the press office and be like, “Hello, I’d like to report this great arrest that I just did.” But your partner should. I’d encourage people all the time, if we don’t know, if we and the media people, the social media people don’t know, we can’t put it out there. And also, don’t think about it as something of just patting Dan or Dave on the back, like, just like when something bad happens and it reflects on all police, right? Something in Minneapolis happens and it reflects on the police in Portland. Same thing when something good happens. If there’s a good national news story about something good a police officer does, it reflects on the entire profession.

[00:31:23] I’ll tell you one of our most viral stories ever was a cop in Times Square who– There was a woman from Ireland, a tourist, who was standing in line to get Hamilton tickets, which is like the hottest show on Broadway at the time. She was in line for three days in a row, and she eventually got her tickets, but she was short $20. And she ran outed line, they told her they’re not going to hold the tickets, and she ran out, and she saw a police officer, and she started asking for an [unintelligible [00:31:50], whatever. What does a cop do? He’s like, “Okay, lady, here’s $20.” Because he wants to help her. She wrote a letter to the mayor’s office, and we kind of– I forget how I heard about it, but I’m like, “We need to put this out.”

[00:32:07] That $20 to get Hamilton tickets was bigger than any heroic thing, because it’s unexpected. We expect cops to save people’s lives. We don’t expect them to do like small good deeds like that.

Dave: [00:32:22] They happen all the time.

Yael: [00:32:24] Every day.

Dave: [00:32:26] I guess, for me, personally, virtue signalers really bug me. I’m that way with cops and regular people. So, I think cops look at it sometimes and they’re like, “Well, I’m just doing my job. I got paid for it. I don’t want to throw the virtue signaling thing out there.” Like, “I’m proud of what I did because that’s truly how they feel.”

Yael: [00:32:46] Yeah. And I called up that cop and I asked him– He didn’t know at first– He was like, he didn’t remember. And then I reminded him this happened on this day and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally get what you’re saying.” People on social media can also smell it when it looks like you’re trying too hard,-

Dave: [00:33:01] Right.

Yael: [00:33:02] -which is, a lot of police departments, a lot of social media accounts in general do that.

Dave: [00:33:22] Yael, you had mentioned earlier in the podcast, recruitment and retention as concerns. Can you expand on that?

Yael: [00:33:30] Yeah. So, like I said, the NYPD, like, many other departments, lost a lot of officers after 2020. There are multiple reasons for that, but almost every single officer that I know that was eligible to leave left. A lot of them felt it wasn’t worth the risk anymore. They didn’t want to be arrested for something that they don’t think was justified. They didn’t want to be a viral video and there was a real sense of danger. If you’re past your 20 years or 25 years or when you’re eligible for retirement, it’s a no brainer. It’s not like somebody quitting and necessarily dropping the pen. It’s just saying, “Okay, well, I don’t really need to do this.” That’s a big issue.

[00:34:08] When I did this interview once with a few officers, and at one time, cops were very happy to have their children come on the force and their family. I asked one officer who’s very actually high ranking and asked him, “Would you let your kid become a police officer?” And he said, “This city doesn’t deserve my kid.” I think that’s something very deep that is felt among a lot officers in a lot of cities. And then recruitment is tough, because it’s not as respected as it used to be. Again, if we’re looking at public opinion, the job is still good, the benefits are still good, the pay is getting better and better because police departments are offering a lot of really lucrative packages, but it’s not considered worth it anymore for a lot of young people. Unfortunately, a lot of police departments are dealing with this by lowering standards for hiring.

Dave: [00:34:57] We could talk about this for the next 10 hours. I’m just sitting here nodding my head like, “Yeah.”

Yael: [00:35:04] Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dave: [00:35:05] This is reality from people who actually have a practiced and trained perspective on these issues. Lots of times, we don’t even get asked for our opinion on it, but I agree. Why stick around in some of these areas and departments when you don’t have to, when there’s really more risk than reward for sticking around?

Yael: [00:35:28] And you don’t have the tools to do your job.

Dave: [00:35:30] Yeah. And honestly, you need the public’s support to do these things, because unfortunately, we do have decision makers right now who make emotional, politically charged decisions rather than on facts. You have to worry about that stuff. I’m not in the job because it just got miserable.

Yael: [00:35:49] Yes. There’s a police chief, Art Acevedo, and he says, “When you talk about criminal justice reform, you have to think about the criminal justice system. You have to think about the courts, and how long you wait, and the prison systems, and the district attorneys. This is a very complex system. Police are at the forefront of it, but it’s so much bigger than that.”

Dave: [00:36:09] Agreed. [chuckles] It’s a big machine. So, you’re with NYPD at some point. You moved on, but you mentioned that you work with other agencies. So, my curiosity is, are you specific to police agencies or can you work with any sort of person or company to devise strategies that help them either build their business or engage with the public in a more constructive way? How do people use you to find their own success?

Yael: [00:36:40] So, on my consulting side, I work primarily with law enforcement agencies right now, helping them, first of all, audit their current social media, but also build a strategy that works for them, whether you’re a 5-person department or a 5,000-person department. That’s very important to come in and see like, “Okay, what are we working with here? What are the needs on the ground and how can we make this work for you?” Because like I said earlier, my job is to make your life easier, not harder, with social media.

[00:37:11] Unfortunately, like I said, for police departments, you really have no choice because people are out there talking about you, whether you like it or not. The Yonkers example, right? I mean, they have a great social media presence, but that happened. Whether or not they have social media, somebody captured that interaction and put it on social media. So, you can say that you don’t want to do it, but it could still come for you.

Dave: [00:37:34] It’s the biggest thing facing law enforcement today.

Dan: [00:37:37] Right. I agree. If you’re not at least acknowledging that you have to have a social media presence and you have to address things via social media, because that’s really how you’re exposed to the public. People go to your social media page and they want to know what you have to say. So, if you’re not acknowledging it, you’re just ignoring the problem.

[00:37:58] Now, on our other podcast, Small Town Dicks, when Dave and I vet a guest to see if they’d be a good fit for our podcast, I typically ask them one question. What’s the case you’re most proud of? So, Yael, what work that you did with NYPD are you most proud of?

Yael: [00:38:17] Wow. So, I had to pick one– Rolling out the localized program is my baby, and it’s still out there. I’m proud of all the times we managed to change the tone a little bit. So, I didn’t become the director of social media until later on in my tenure there. And then I worked with a team, and we oversaw all the NYPD properties, including NYPD News’ Twitter, which was like the holy grail and that was always very official and very formal. Every time we could bend it just a little bit—

[00:38:51] One time, I remember a big transformer exploded– and electric like Con Edison transformer exploded in Queens a few years ago, and the whole sky turned like a light blue at night. It was one of those things where everybody– My phone was blowing up because everybody could see it. Anybody who was looking outside, “Oh, my God, the sky was turning this weird shade of blue.” I was home. At the time, it was late already and found out what was going on like, “Was anybody injured? Was anybody killed?” And they’re like, “No.” I’m like, “Okay, so, maybe we can have a little bit of fun with it.”

[00:39:27] We put out this tweet that said something like giving people information, saying, “We want to confirm this was a Con Edison transformer, no injuries, no this, no evidence of alien invasion” or something like that. But it was like in our police tone, but a little bit tongue in cheek, and it went wild, and it was all over the news and everything. And for me, it’s like A, giving people the information which is most important. We’re not showing up there trying to be standup comics, but we’re showing that there are people behind these uniforms that may or may not have a sense of humor.

Dan: [00:39:58] I think it’s a brilliant move. I think anybody in that situation, any citizen who sees something like that and they don’t know what it is, I think a moment of levity can ground them a little bit and make them feel a lot more comfortable. And also, you get to show that, yes, we have a sense of humor too. We are human beings.

Dave: [00:40:16] This has been a long time coming, and I appreciate you coming on. I hope to have you in the future as well.

Yael: [00:40:21] Oh, thank you.

[music]

Dan: [00:40:27] On the next Briefing Room, we talk to a digital forensic guy who will blow your mind with all the ways he can get into your devices.

Digital Forensic Guy: [00:40:35] We’ve had all sorts of major crimes that ended up being very heavy with the digital forensics. We have a lot of murders that have a lot of digital forensics nowadays. We’re using the cell phones to really put the nail in the coffin when it comes to convictions. You’ll use them to track people, we’ll use them to check where their location was, if we can pinpoint them to where the crime was. There’s so much information now that people, I guess, don’t realize that their phone is keeping track of that when we can get in there and take a look at it after a crime has occurred, it really can make or break a case.

Dave: [00:41:16] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:41:21] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed the theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:41:46] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:36] Today on The Briefing Room, what’s it like to leave behind the life and home you love and start a new one with the dangerous people who you cannot trust? You might think I’m talking about going to prison, but I’m talking about long-term undercover work. Our guest, Matt Pitcher, can tell you exactly what it’s like. Matt’s extensive career in law enforcement includes lots of UC work as we tend to refer to it. First, as an undercover detective making drug buys and later on two complex cases that took months, and in one case, a year to complete.

[00:01:09] Matt’s talked in depth about his two deep cover cases on our sister show, Small Town Dicks. Today, he’s here to tell us about the personal toll it takes to pause your own life and assume someone else’s identity. Matt, welcome to The Briefing Room.

Matt: [00:01:24] Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dave: [00:01:26] Listeners, Matt has appeared twice on our other podcast, Small Town Dicks and you can hear his episodes in Season 10 and Season 11. Season 10 is Politically Incorrect. That’s the first case where Matt was living an extravagant lifestyle as a UC. Politically Incorrect, Season 10. And Deep Cover in Season 11 of Small Town Dicks highlights Matt’s efforts to take down an ecoterrorist group in North Carolina.

[00:01:58] I was hoping to talk about what led you into law enforcement, and then if we could segue to the point that you said, “Okay, I think I want more involvement in law enforcement. I want so much that I’m going to kill my current identity and take on someone else’s.” Can you walk us through how you got into this?

Matt: [00:02:18] Law enforcement, in general I think you’re going to hear this from almost every officer you talk to, but there’s always in your mind as either military or law enforcement that that’s always an interest to you. And for me, my brother was in law enforcement and he was in an apartment in Wilmington, North Carolina, actually. He came and would tell me stories about foot chases, and arresting bad guys, helping people, saving people, and didn’t take long for me to say, “Well that’s really cool and something I would enjoy.”

[00:02:57] A sidenote that I don’t really talk about a whole lot. During this time, I was actually out in California for a very brief six-month stint trying to become an actor. I know you guys never hear that from California, but I had lived out in Wilmington, North Carolina, for a little while with my parents and my brother, and there was actually a very large movie studio there. I’d gone there just to be an extra and get paid $50 a day and be in a movie, which I thought would help me get girls. It seemed like a good idea. [Dave laughs] [laughs] So, I did that.

[00:03:30] When I went to sign up to be an extra, the casting associate said, “Hey, have you ever thought about trying acting?” I was like, “Well, no.” [chuckles] She gave me a list and she said, “Well, here’s a bunch of agents that are really good in the area. Why don’t you reach out to them and see what they say?” So, of course, I was like, “Well, why not?” So, I did that, and actually, really enjoyed it. I loved acting. I actually ended up teaching classes a little bit with it for one of the agents I worked with and did some modeling, but also learned real quickly that a 5’8″ model for a male just really doesn’t have it. [laughs]

[00:04:06] So, I did a couple of things there, and then the agent said my best bet would be to go out to LA. They hooked me up with an agent out there. And of all places that I found that I could afford was a falling down motel in Compton. And so, I’m staying there and I still vivid as can be staying at this place. There was an earthquake one night, first one and last one of my life. I had no idea what to do for an earthquake. So, I run outside and then I hear multiple gunshots outside. So, I said, “Well, I’m going to go back inside. We’ll face this.”

[00:04:38] It wasn’t long after that I decided that I wasn’t up to pushing through with acting. My brother kept talking about law enforcement. And so, while I was out there, actually put in an application to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. I wanted bigger city than what Wilmington had to offer, so I decided to reach out and go to Charlotte. And so, at that point, I came back home. As you all know, it takes a while to get through the application process and to do your interviews. And so, I come back and then I get my first interview with a sergeant who is in charge of recruiting.

[00:05:15] He went through the whole thing of, “Well, what do you want to do in the police department?” And I said, “Well, I have three things that very much interest me.” I said, one is SWAT, because every kid in their 20s wants to be a SWAT guy.

Dave: [00:05:28] Everyone.

Matt: [00:05:29] Every single one, exactly. And then undercover work, because it sounds cool and get girls. And then the third one was I wanted to be a minister or be in the chaplain program. When I said that one, of course, he had to give me the funny look and he goes, “Well, I’ve heard the first two, but I’ve never heard someone put the three of those together.”

[laughter]

Matt: [00:05:50] Even in the academy, I wanted to work drugs. That was definitely a huge interest of mine. I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on where it came about. Actually, I can come close, because I read Billy Queen’s book when he infiltrated the Mongols, and that fascinated me, like, big time. And so, at that point, I was like, “Boy, that’d be the pinnacle of your career to do something like that.”

Dave: [00:06:15] How old are you at this point?

Matt: [00:06:17] 23 years, 24 years.

Dave: [00:06:19] Okay. So, you know everything, but you know nothing?

Matt: [00:06:22] Oh, yeah. Big time. Exactly. I’m, at that point in my career, once I get out of the academy, like, I was lucky. There were one or two districts I wanted to go to. They were David 2, David 3, and that was you got into everything all the time.

Dave: [00:06:35] That’s not the suburbs. That’s where all the action’s happening type place?

Matt: [00:06:39] Yeah, exactly. So, getting to go to David 3 really paved the way for me to go into narcotics. Right out the gate, I started working, making a lot of dope arrests, a lot of narcotics arrests. Now, this would never be allowed today, but after I finished my FTO– [crosstalk]

Dan: [00:06:57] An FTO is a field training officer. That’s your coach while you’re beginning as a cop.

Matt: [00:07:01] Exactly. Probably six months afterwards. They were real big at the time at some kind of projects to try to improve the community. So, I wrote up one where I’d go undercover and just do dime buys and have somebody take them down right after me. For everybody listening, I don’t condone this. It shouldn’t have been done and it should have never ever happened. Dangerous thing I’ve ever done probably.

Dan: [00:07:23] The reason why you’re saying it’s dangerous is because when you’re a customer buying drugs in that situation, you frequently get robbed.

Matt: [00:07:30] Exactly. But it got approved. I had two other guys I went through the academy with that also got to go to David 3 with me and used them as a takedown vehicle. I was in the UC vehicle, and we’d go up and down the streets, and I’d buy little dime bags of crack, and then they’d come up and try and soup them up.

Dave: [00:07:47] What does a UC car look like for you in those days?

Matt: [00:07:51] So, this one was a gold Chrysler 3000. I still remember the first UC car. Yeah, that was an ugly car though. [Dave laughs] It fit the purpose though and it was beat up, which I needed.

Dave: [00:08:03] How long after you’re out of the academy are you on this new team where you guys are able to be creative and proactive? How long after you started are you already into this lifestyle?

Matt: [00:08:16] As soon as I was done with that, I started. If weren’t on a call for service, we were being squirrels.

Dave: [00:08:22] Looking around.

Matt: [00:08:23] Exactly. I’d say about every single night we could get in a foot chase, no problem. We were every night making felony dope arrests.

Dan: [00:08:31] So, at some point, you transitioned from being a patrol officer to you start doing undercover work, UC work. How did that come about?

Matt: [00:08:40] Oddly enough, I was actually doing some UC work while on patrol. My favorite story is, so we had our worst area of public housing called Piedmont Courts, which is now demolished. But it was considered the worst of the worst spot to be. You always had people on the corner there selling dope nonstop, 24/7. So, I had done UC one night and had gone down there and subject that I already knew pretty well from patrol was there on the corner, rolled up, and he’s like, “I know who you are. You’re a cop.”

[00:09:12] The whole time, in my hand, right by the wind I’m holding a $20 bill. Like, “Man, I’m not a cop. I just need to get my fix. I need it.” Holding that $20 bill, waving it back and forth a little bit. So, finally, he’s like, “All right, digs down his pocket and gives me a piece of crack.” Give him the $20 and off he goes. And of course, we arrest him. Takedown team comes in and takes him off and he probably spent six hours in jail before he got out.

[00:09:38] So, the next night, I’m down on patrol in uniform saying hi to him, and he still did not completely put it together. And so, I started with that patrol, and then I started getting really good with using confidential informants, which are people who, for different reasons, give you information that can lead you to a search warrant. They’ll buy drugs for you, so you can get a search warrant.

Dave: [00:10:00] So, Dan had informants. In my caseload, working child abuse, you don’t necessarily have informants in that caseload, but I know Dan did. And to develop informants is pretty tricky, sometimes. Sometimes, it’s because you have leverage on them like, “I’m going to charge you or you can start helping us.” How would you go about developing an informant, and how do you go about vetting them? So, now you can list them as a CI and a search warrant, and they’re credible, all that stuff. Can you walk us through that?

Matt: [00:10:32] Yeah. So, in Charlotte, basically, and it started the exact same way you say. If I pick someone up for a stem, which is an item that they use to smoke crack cocaine, that’s a charge of drug paraphernalia. It’s a misdemeanor. It’s not really a big charge at all, but most people don’t want to spend any time in jail and will do what they can to get out. So, that was a very common one for me is, what we call, flip somebody that had a stem.

[00:10:56] So, first thing we got to do is make you what you just said reliable. And so, I said, “Give me information. What can you tell me about people in the neighborhood?” And so, they’d name off some drug dealers, people who I already knew were selling dope. So, I was like, “Okay, information they’re giving is credible. They’d go into detail, what the person looks like, what they drive, where they live, that kind of thing to really vet it out.” Then you just say, “All right, come on, I’m going to grab a UC car. I’ll meet you at this location and pick them up,” and then we go do a buy.

[00:11:26] We’ll give them money. It’ll be documented. We’ll have the serial number or whatever. Then we’ll go with them, drop them off somewhere. They go and do a buy, come back to us, give us the dope. And then my thing was three times. They would do three buys for free that don’t count for anything and that I don’t use for charges or anything. It’s basically letting dope walk, but it’s showing me that, “All right, they can do what they say. They’re reliable. Now, I can use them.” Then we send them to a house, same exact procedure. They go into the house, buy the dope from inside the house, come back out, meet with me, and then I’m off to the judge to write up a search warrant.

[00:12:04] So, when I was still in patrol, I was leading the way at being able to get search warrants and work informants. So, I got pulled from patrol and they created a weird position for me, I guess, in a way I was a community coordinator/street crimes officer. Ultimately, my goal was to make informants and go kick indoors or do UC work. So, I got real into that and was doing know every day and loving it.

Dave: [00:12:30] So, right now, your UC work feels kind of transactional that you’re addressing community issues, but you don’t have a target necessarily, like, a person or a group. Is there a time where you’re getting pulled in by command staff saying, “Hey, we want you to divert from what you’re focusing on right now? We actually have a bigger,” I’ll say, “mission.” We don’t really talk in those terms, but “you have a bigger task and a bigger target, and here’s what we want you to do.” Was there a situation like that?

Matt: [00:13:04] So, there are multiple. The first time that I ever had that situation, we had a gang, and they were called the Hidden Valley Kings was the name of the gang, and they became a huge problem in Charlotte. They had tons of guns, removing kilos of cocaine at this point, and well operated. And probably 50 members to 65 members. They were in this one community in David 3, it’s called the Hidden Valley Community. They were just wreaking havoc, everything from robberies to dope dealing and everything else. And so, can your informants, any of them get into it? I did have an awesome informant who was able to do just that. And so, used this person to do numerous buys into them that led the way to actually a big federal roundup on the whole gang.

Dave: [00:14:11] So, we’re here talk about how going deep undercover changes you, and your first big or should I say long case is one we discussed on Small Town Dicks, Season 10, Episode 7. You were doing an undercover drug investigation that involved political corruption. How are you assuming the new identity for that case?

Matt: [00:14:32] So, I had gone just previous to that to looking pretty rough. I had long hair, beard, all that kind of thing. Coming into this case, quickly realized when I met with the stripper and bought the cocaine that it was a different clientele altogether. I knew the people I was looking at were different. These were most well due, well known, very flashy. They wanted to wear nice clothes, look very business professional, and that kind of a thing. So, I switched up my appearance immediately. Went short hair, clean shaved all the time. The only thing I had were earrings in at that point to fit the club going scene. And of course, I had to look like a billionaire too.

Dave: [00:15:16] You got to get flashy, right?

Matt: [00:15:17] Yeah, exactly, which is against– One thing with UC work is you can’t go way off and change who you are. You’ll dime yourself out in a heartbeat. The FBI wanted me to wear this $50,000 watch and you’re insane. There’s no way I’m putting that on and going out. They just wanted to justify their money.

Dave: [00:15:37] [laughs] Right.

Matt: [00:15:38] It wouldn’t have fit who I was and plus I didn’t want to get robbed. So, you try to stay at least somewhat a little bit of you, even though you’re this different person. You can’t just change completely. But this is where things get really difficult with UC work and that’s why I don’t think deep cover has really done anymore. This is what I learned the hard way. I talked about how after reading Billy Queen’s book and all that, this is all I wanted to do. And then I get halfway into the first case and I realize what an idiot I am. You don’t realize it completely, but you cut out your other life. You’re no longer you. You’re this person and you’re this person all the time. So, the things you never thought about were all the friends you have, they’re moving on, they’re doing their own thing.

[00:16:25] At the time of the first case, I had my wife and a newborn who was eight months old when I think I first got involved. And so, we’ve talked about it since then, my family and I. You don’t get it that their life is moving forward. And for you, your personal life, like, who you are for real, just hit a pause button and stops. So, you’re that person that you were just before the case started and that person is gone for the amount of time that you’re undercover.

Dave: [00:16:59] What does this look like? Are you sleeping in your own bed at night or you have an apartment that’s miles away from your house?

Matt: [00:17:05] No. Yeah, you have an apartment. Especially the first case, I was out all night every night anyway, just because of the whole club atmosphere, you don’t get to do much. You catch sleep where you can in between things.

Dave: [00:17:16] That’s the kind of stuff that leads to divorce.

Matt: [00:17:18] Exactly. Thank God and luckily, my wife is incredibly strong. I broke rules that you’re not supposed to break with my wife. She knew what I was doing. She knew stuff about the case that technically she shouldn’t. But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my family any more than I already was for the case, so I did break details that I wasn’t supposed to. I think that at least helped her some mentally to know a little bit of what was going on instead of being completely in the dark. I have a good friend who infiltrated the outlaws.

Dan: [00:17:58] The outlaws are the oldest motorcycle gang in the United States and I believe they’re headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. They were founded in Illinois.

Matt: [00:18:07] Yeah. My friend, he was working with FBI with that, and he followed it basically by the book and didn’t tell his wife anything. He was still getting to come home a little. Obviously, outlaws go to strip clubs and everything else. So, there were several times he’d come home and he would smell like a strip club, as you can imagine what that smells like. Following the rules and not saying where he was or anything like that, it ended up costing him his marriage, something he really regretted. So, that was part of my decision as to why I played it the way I did.

Dave: [00:18:42] So, you have this major disruption in your personal life, and when the case is over, you’re doing a different kind of undercover work that might be less disruptive, but it’s still dangerous with these targeted transactions to takedown drug dealers.

Matt: [00:18:55] Correct. Yeah, that’s a perfect way to put it.

Dave: [00:18:58] So, two big operations in addition to a life on patrol and detective work, where you’re doing this kind of transactionally, taking out drug dealers, targeted, focused investigations on probably geographical areas in cities?

Matt: [00:19:14] Correct. So, the way that it typically works started arresting people for street level drugs and doing undercover for street level drugs, when I was on patrol and then moved over to a street crimes position. And then from there, I got into Vice and Narcotics. Now, I didn’t even understand completely about undercover and Vice and all that when you go to it. We all think of the same thing. We think of narcotics transactions, murder for hires, and prostitution. That’s what you think of when you think of UC work. But the reality is it’s everything under the sun.

[00:19:49] Unfortunately, everything from having to investigate other officers that may be doing something illegal. Like, unfortunately, you have officers that are selling drugs sometimes and everything across the line and so your job is to investigate all of it. It’s kind of funny. I always say the undercover unit or the vice unit is the black sheep of every single department. These are the ones that every agency knows they need them. Not a single agency wants to admit they have them kind of thing, or even recognize them, just because we do, for lack of better words, the dirty work and we look dirty most of the time. There’s only, like I said, that one case where I actually got to be clean, but the rest of the time, I looked pretty grungy most of it.

Dave: [00:20:38] Are you carrying a weapon on this? Is it play it by ear-type thing or are you always armed?

Matt: [00:20:44] So, when you’re doing street level buys, you’re always armed. And then there’s a golden rule to undercover work, and that rule goes to crap when you talk about deep cover, because the golden rule is with undercover work that you always keep it business. If you want to stay alive doing undercover work, business only, it cannot become personal. If it becomes personal, then emotions get involved, and that’s when you get killed. That’s when the person wants to take revenge kind of thing. Unfortunately, deep cover work, if you keep it business, you’re not going to achieve your objectives. You just can’t. That’s life.

[00:21:22] A lot of times when it’s narcotics that you don’t really know the person, you’re not building a friendship, it’s business only, you can stay armed, no problem. I’ve even had a couple of cases where they’ve seen my gun on my side or anything like that, and basically, I’m like, “Well, hell yeah, I have a gun. You don’t.” So, you can play it off pretty easily. Both deep cover cases, I could not carry a gun and I was searched pretty much, especially in the beginning you’re searched every single night. So, with the political corruption case, we spent most of our time in strip clubs, and they used the girls, check them, make sure they didn’t have anything and just the way it went.

[00:21:59] One of the scariest times on the second case was when I had to go shoot with my crazy best friend in that whole thing and sitting there. He’s got the guns and I’ve got nothing. And hate to say, but he was actually a good shot.

Dave: [00:22:13] That’s from the second episode you did with us on Small Town Dicks in Season 11. That episode is Deep Cover. You are in mortal danger.

Matt: [00:22:24] Yeah.

Dan: [00:22:24] So, he’s telling you, “Hey, go put these targets up.”

Matt: [00:22:27] Yeah, exactly. And you’re walking down range to put up targets and say, “I’m really making this too easy for him.” [laughs]

Dave: [00:22:34] You think about that, just the, “Oh, shit, this could be it. Right here.” Just the anxiety of walking down with your back to somebody, like, “So, we ended up at a gun range today and it’s way off the beaten path, awesome.”

Matt: [00:22:49] Yeah. And this was his farm, acres and acres and acres.

Dan: [00:22:53] Being at the range when you’re in law enforcement, there are some very clear rules that, if you violate them, you could probably get fired. You just won’t work in law enforcement anymore. So, cops inherently, anytime we’re around a range, we’re very careful and we’re very measured. Everything is deliberate. You think about it’s not like you ask your buddy there, “Hey, have you had firearm safety courses and training?” That’s just not a question that’s going to be asked. So, I’ve been around my buddies who don’t have firearm training and I’m so conscious of what they’re doing with a gun. That’s got to be a concern too. Like, “Hey, is he an idiot and I’m just going to catch around, just because he’s screwing around?”

Matt: [00:23:39] Obviously, and this guy in particular is so crazy as it is and does stupid things on a daily basis. You don’t know is he high right now or is he of sound mind? Yeah, it’s not comforting.

Dave: [00:23:53] I think, for listeners, when I think about UC work, I’m thinking, “What do you do in the situation where it’s starting to get a little hairy or somebody’s starting to question whether or not you’re legit?” Do you have some situations like that that you can recall right off the top of your head?

Matt: [00:24:09] [laughs] More than I would like.

Dave: [00:24:12] Walk us through those.

Matt: [00:24:14] The one that I thought was probably going to get me killed one time. I was at a party in Charlotte, and this was a who’s who party. You had celebrities at the party on down. I had come to the party with a drug dealer. I’m not positive how much dope he brought to this party, but it was a very significant amount.

Dave: [00:24:32] Significant means something to me and Dan, what is significant in this lifestyle with this group? What is a significant amount of, I’m guessing it was cocaine?

Matt: [00:24:42] So, yeah, upwards of a kilo of cocaine, as well as Adderall, because that was real big with the club goers at that time, especially the girls. So, he came with a ton of both. So, I went to high school up in Pennsylvania. There was a girl from my high school that actually found her way down to Charlotte and had a quasi-celebrity status because she had been on one of the reality TV shows. And so, I had a feeling she could be at the party. I knew she was in Charlotte, but I hadn’t seen her since I was in 9th grade. Well, there’s no way she’ll remember me. So, I’m like, “All right, I know there’s going to be a bunch of people.” I talked myself into it that, “All right. There’ll be enough people there. I can play this. This won’t be an issue.”

[00:25:21] There were there were about at least 200 people at this party. I mean, it was a big party, huge house. So, at one point, my drug dealer buddy is in the media room, and I’m out by the kitchen area. And all of a sudden, I hear my real name. Somebody yelled Matt, Matt. I was like, “No, this isn’t happening.” You know how you can do that peripheral side glance and get somewhat visual to know, sure enough it was her. So, not immediately turn and walk away, but just that gradual so it doesn’t look like it caught you or anything like that and go back and I was like, “All right. I’ll just hang out in the media room with him and everything will be fine” [unintelligible 00:25:58] because he was in the very back of it. Like, it was a huge auditorium-type thing with elevated scenes. Like, there’s no way she’s going to come all the way back. She probably doesn’t even know who he is.

[00:26:07] So, I go back and sit with him within two minutes and she walks with two of her friends, and they literally sit down right in front of us in this big auditorium. So, at this point, I’m like, “I’m screwed.” And now, all of a sudden, being in the back of the auditorium seems like a really bad idea, because I actually looked and I knew– You go down the auditorium to the front or media room, whatever you want to call it, and right to the left, there’s a door, that’s a sliding open door, that leads back to the woods. And I was like, “Well, that’s escape plan. This goes wrong and that’s where I’m running.” And so, I hear him whispering in front of us.

[00:26:39] Then finally the one friend reaches back and starts whispering to him. So, I’m starting to stretch out at this point, and I hear him say, “How would I know with a few bad words. Why don’t you just ask him?” So, then, sure enough, one of the friends asked me, “Where are you from?” Now we have a different problem, because you always want to keep your cover story somewhat close to your real life to keep as many mistakes from happening as possible. So, my cover story is I grew up in Pennsylvania. I’m like, “Oh, crap.” But I always used that I was from an orphanage, just because it’s very hard to get information on orphans obviously, it’s protected information. So, that makes it harder for them to find me.

[00:27:17] So, she reads back, “Pennsylvania? Where at in Pennsylvania?” It’s like, “Oh.” So, I tell her where at in this orphanage, and that was a little ways away from my house, but I knew it from growing up from being at some camps and stuff there. So, she turned around and said, “Okay.” And then I see all three of them on Facebook. And funny enough, within 24 hours of that, you wouldn’t believe what friend request I got.

Dave: [00:27:38] Shocker.

Matt: [00:27:39] Yeah, exactly. And so, even as soon as I was clear from that room, I actually sent out a message. Because I didn’t have pictures of me on Facebook at that time, but we all know how it goes. You have friends who will tag you in a picture, nonstop. So, I left there and said, “If you’ve tagged me in a photo, if you have a photo of me, it needs to be deleted from Facebook immediately and off,” and left it at that.

Dave: [00:28:01] Trying to explain the importance of that to friends who are outside of law enforcement, it’s a difficult conversation because they just don’t understand.

Matt: [00:28:11] Exactly. So, that got all the pictures off. So, as far as I know, she never completely put it together. I’m pretty sure she had thoughts, but couldn’t figure it out.

Dan: [00:28:24] Meanwhile, one of the subjects, one of the targets is sitting next to you and what are they saying? Do they approach you? Do they ask you questions?

Matt: [00:28:33] So, I’ve lost a lot of respect for this guy, because he should have had me. This is the second time with this individual that it had actually happened. I had a cop call me out in a bar with this guy. I’m hanging out with him, and a cop comes up, grabs me on the shoulder, “Matt, what’s going on, Matt?” I was basically, “I’m not Matt. Who the–? Are you–?” And he goes, “CMPD.” And at this point, I’m like, “Oh.” Lucky, I didn’t punch him.

Dan: [00:28:58] Yeah.

Matt: [00:28:58] I was like, “I had no idea.” And my drug dealer buddy actually steps up and says, “Dude, will you leave him alone? He doesn’t know who you are.” I was like, “Oh, so, that’s twice the same guy and he didn’t nail me on either one.”

Dave: [00:29:10] I’m putting myself in your shoes here in these situations, and I just know for me, my anxiety [chuckles] would be through the roof. I’d be a mess. I couldn’t act my way out of a wet paper bag. Most people would have issues in a situation like that. To remain calm, at least outwardly appearing calm, how do you address that? How do you mitigate that in the future? How do you go to sleep that night? Truly, like, how did you sleep that night?

Matt: [00:29:42] Actually, I don’t think I did. But I got really good at– That anxiety bottling it up for that time period and then bursting later on is the way that went. After this particular incident, I waited till I was in a clear spot, and called Blake and went on a tangent for probably about 20 minutes of just screaming.

Dan: [00:30:08] So, Blake being Matt’s handler, he’s basically Matt’s contact with law enforcement. Matt is checking in with Blake periodically to let him know how the investigation is going and that Matt’s okay.

Matt: [00:30:21] Yeah. And then it’s funny, because you get off the phone or whatever. There are two times that I can specifically remember this, where you’re like, “Wow, that wasn’t even me talking.” I usually don’t get really angry or anything like that. Just you’re already under a lot of stress and you don’t even realize at times.

Dave: [00:30:38] All that frustration, anxiety, and stress all comes out in a big word salad?

Matt: [00:30:44] Yeah, pretty much. Exactly.

Matt: [00:31:02] So, I think deep cover may actually be a thing of the past, because I don’t know how– To the point of embedding yourself with different groups, I think social media has killed that. I don’t know how you could possibly– You can’t justify not having any pictures on social media anymore, even from a kid-type thing. When I am 46 years old, if you’re younger than that, there’s no reason you wouldn’t be on social media at some point.

Dan: [00:31:31] The digital permanence of everything. Even youth teams that you’re a part of, they have Facebook pages that they post photos to.

Matt: [00:31:40] 100%.

Dan: [00:31:42] Even though you may be conscious of it, it doesn’t matter. The people who are around you will post photos of you online. There’s nothing you can do.

Matt: [00:31:51] Exactly. What nobody realizes is, is with the facial recognition software that these companies like Meta has and all these other ones, they can take that picture of you when you’re 13 and a picture of you when you’re 35, and it will put them together. It’ll show the match.

Dan: [00:32:06] The book you speak of with Billy Queen, it’s Under and Alone. When he infiltrates the Mongols, I’ve read that book as well and it was fascinating to me. Just the lengths that he went to try to cover his identity, because this organization that he’s trying to infiltrate, they run credit checks on him.

Matt: [00:32:29] 100%.

Dan: [00:32:30] So, the organizations that you were targeting during your career, did they have similar countermeasures?

Matt: [00:32:38] Yeah. So, actually, the first one, which was [unintelligible 00:32:42] people, criminal enterprises. They went to a club one night and they said, “Hey, we need your driver’s license and credit card,” after I’m already sitting down in the club. “Yeah, we need both of them.” You don’t have a choice. It’s not one of those things like, “Well, I’m not giving this to you.” Hand it over and at the end of the night, I’m like, “Hey, I need those back.” “Oh, no, we’re going to give those to you tomorrow. We’re going to hold on to those.” And then, of course, FBI has all their systems that. It flags, “Okay. Yeah, they checked this, this, and this,” so you can see what they were checking. But yeah, they definitely run through it. The second case was worse than the first. The second case, they had a private detective or private investigator that would follow you around.

Dave: [00:33:25] Based on your experience, Matt, what are the personality traits and what type of cop can work UC type of cases? What are the basic needs and they can be intangibles?

Matt: [00:33:38] So, the number one that you’re always going to hear everybody say and I’m going to call BS on right out the gate is you have to be an extrovert. I tend not to be an extrovert. I go more introverted a lot of times. The number one thing that you have to be able to do, and if you can’t do this, do not, do not, do not get into UC work is listen. If you cannot listen, some people have a very hard time, like, nothing against them, but that is not their forte. If you can’t listen in UC work, you’re rolling the dice every single time that you are going to get in a bad situation, because being able to listen to people probably saved me more times than not, because you’ll read the situation. You’ll know when maybe I do need to look for a way to slide off on this one.

[00:34:25] When I say listen, it’s not just what they’re saying. Obviously, you have to hear every word they’re saying, but you got to listen to their body language too. There were a couple of times where just even doing street level buys that I knew I was getting ready to get robbed. You could tell by the way they were talking, going a little bit faster, that kind of thing, that I just was able to bail out and take off to avoid it. I’d say number one is being able to listen.

Dave: [00:34:46] It is uncanny. The little flags that we see and I learned it from Dan and his senior officers, I remember being on a call with Dan and another guy, and they both looked at him and said, “Now would be the time.” The guy looked at him kind of confused like, “What are you talking about now would be the time?” They’re like, “You’re about to run. Now would be the time, because there’re a couple more officers coming into the area right now.” And the guy looked at him like, “Oh, you’re right,” and took off running. I was a brand-new baby cop. Looking back, I’m like, “Oh, it was obvious.” He’s doing the little drop step, opening up, checking out each area. He’s looking past us when he’s talking to us, clenching the fists. You can tell there’s about to be an event.

[00:35:31] They just called him on it and I think it was like, “We’re daring you, dude. We know what you’re thinking.” When you deal with enough of those as a cop, you don’t need the event to happen to know what’s about to happen. So, truly, we profile body language. I can tell when someone’s wanted, they put the hood over their head and they turn the other way and they do an about face and walk the opposite direction you’re driving.

Dan: [00:36:01] I could always tell when people were going to run, when I contacted them on the street, I knew it was coming, because they’re looking for their escape route, they blade their stance, where you start to recognize little things like you’re saying, you listen to their body language. That’s fascinating.

Matt: [00:36:19] Yeah. Same thing as an interview. When you’re getting to where you want that guy to say something, all of a sudden, he goes way back and you’re like, “Oh, crap, I’m starting to lose him a little bit.” And you rework things to try to bring him back in, but it’s that same thing.

Dave: [00:36:50] When you finally put a case together and it’s time to return home and you haven’t been home for days or weeks or months potentially, and you look, in one case, very scraggly and unkempt. What’s it like to walk in the front door back home?

Matt: [00:37:09] Rough.

Dave: [00:37:10] Do you give them a heads up or you just show up unannounced?

Matt: [00:37:13] No, I just showed up actually on the second case. First case? Yeah, I think so. The hardest and at least I learned this after the first one, the hardest part was I get home, and I remember I talked about hitting that pause button. So, now I’m hitting play again. I thought, everybody else in that house hit the pause button too. I can hit play and everything is right back to way it was, where the reality of the situation is my wife had to figure out how to basically be a single mom with a newborn and a full-time job. Believe it or not, as cops, we don’t make enough money for the most part where she could just stay at home and be a stay-at-home mom. I know that’s crazy to think about, but anyway.

[00:37:54] So, she actually was hitting a very busy time at work when I finished the first case and I come back thinking, “Well, now is going to be a great time for a vacation for all of us. Relax a little bit, my head can get clear and all that.”

Dave: [00:38:10] Great time for you.

Matt: [00:38:11] Yeah, exactly. And when she tells me, “Well, no, that’s not happening.” I’m like, “What do you mean that’s not happening?” [laughs] “You just had the last two and a half years off of.” “Oh, wait, that’s not the case.” [laughs]

Dave: [00:38:21] Right.

Matt: [00:38:22] So, the first case with her, once I got past that, that was good. I had a lot of trouble in the first case with friends. I pretty much lost all of them, all my cop friends, to the point where they knew I was working with FBI. There were a lot of rumors. I know the FBI purposely put out a couple of rumors, so that nobody knew where I was or what I was doing. But then everybody comes back and they’re iffy on you. That was a very hard experience. I had a very, very, very good friend who– We were even roommates at one time, but we haven’t had a relationship since. I haven’t really even talked since then.

Dave: [00:39:13] On this first case, what was the longest time you were away from your wife? How many days?

Matt: [00:39:19] It would have been months. It would have been over a month.

Dave: [00:39:24] I’m just trying to give myself and the listeners like, “We’re not talking he went away for a week.” We’re talking months, where it’s just like, “I’ll talk to you when I talk to you.”

Matt: [00:39:34] Yeah, and it can get very hard. The first case was better than the second case. Second case, it was basically a year. And 95% of the communication being text messages and very brief text messages at that. I can tell you the real conversations that we’ve had. One, she called me when my kid– Well, my kid has always been extremely well behaved, everything like that. He was at daycare and he was just acting very moody, very down, that kind of thing. They confronted him on it, of course, and he’s like, “I miss my daddy.” My wife debated whether she was even going to tell me or not but was more worried how upset I’d be to find out about it later.

[00:40:20] So, I was actually driving to an environmental meeting, and she called me and tells me, and I ended up pulling over and bawling my eyes out for a few minutes. I almost dropped the case at that point. She’s actually part of the reason I stayed in is because it was though, well, if the bombing does happen, how are you going to handle it emotionally if you leave, which, thank God, she got me through it.

Dave: [00:40:50] Matt, this bombing you’re discussing is, this group is discussing planning a bomb to be majorly disruptive at a huge political event.

Matt: [00:41:01] Yeah. And the hard part was I pulled over, I bawled, and then you sit there. I’ve got to go back to being the other person then, that was hard. And then during that case also, my mom had uterine cancer. And so, now, my wife had to deal with that and the kid. I tried to get clearance to see my mom at the hospital and was denied. It felt too big of a risk. I finished that case, and I come home, and I was mentally not there. I was pretty gone after that case. I was drained. I came home. I hadn’t showered in over a month when I came home, because everybody else stank, and I wasn’t going to be any different. If I had to smell them, they were going to smell me, [Dave laughs] kind of the way I looked at it.

[00:41:54] So, I got home and showered forever, shaved, and then immediately got sick. I felt awful. I think my body just was shutting down at that point. The agency was trying to do the right thing, and I think they did the best of their ability. I didn’t go back to work for over a month. They wanted me to take time and adjust. We were at least that time able to take a vacation too. So, that was kind of nice. But I saw a psychologist afterwards and I definitely struggled for a while after that case. And then I think another hard part is, you get so wrapped up in everything and you have adrenaline dumping the entire time.

[00:42:40] I came back to work and the one thing I fought with for the remainder of my career was getting the same sense of fulfillment almost as what I got during that and just could not get back to that level.

Dan: [00:42:53] A lot of people talk about over time as one of the benefits of being a cop. Well, when you’re working undercover, 24 hours a day, you’re on duty, you’re working. Are there any considerations regarding compensation when you’re working a UC case?

Matt: [00:43:08] I did get some. The second case, not very much. I think my per hour would have come out to around 3 cents to 5 cents an hour is what I was making.

Dave: [00:43:17] My last question. Was it all worth it?

Matt: [00:43:22] Prior to the case, that’s all I ever want to do. I’m finished with the case. Well, I’m never doing that again to, you know a year later, “Hey, here I am. I’m going to do it again.” If I am completely honest with myself, I loved the work. The actual undercover part itself for me was the best part of the job 100%. The pain it put my family through, the mental stuff it did to me once I was out make it where it’s not desirable in that sense, but I’m extremely proud of the work I did in both cases. The second case, I can say for 100%, had I not done the work, we would have had a bombing in Charlotte. And so, being able to say that gives know a lot of comfort.

Dave: [00:44:09] Matt, first of all, thank you for the time and really appreciate you getting into more details about what it takes to work undercover.

Matt: [00:44:22] Well, I appreciate it very much.

Dan: [00:44:24] Thank you, Matt. Really appreciate it.

[00:44:28] On the next episode of The Briefing Room.

Female Speaker: [00:44:30] In policing, you have to invest in the bank of public trust because you’re going to withdraw from it from time to time. You’re going to have incidents, whether they’re completely justified or whether it’s just a cop acting like an asshole. Sometimes, a cop acts like an asshole and yells at somebody and gets reprimanded, but it’s all over the news. Those incidents, you’re going to have to explain, you’re going to have to be forthcoming, but you’re not going to win people over. Then you have to do that work every day.

Dave: [00:44:57] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:45:01] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed the theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor, Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:45:26] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[Briefing Room theme playing]

Dan: [00:00:36] Imagine you’re the parent of a 13-year-old child. She’s gone on a bike ride like she often does. She has a curfew, which she always complies with. Then the worst thing you can imagine happens. The curfew passes and she’s nowhere to be found. You call her friends, they haven’t seen her. You scour the neighborhood, she’s nowhere to be found. You call the police, and your worst nightmare begins.

Dave: [00:00:59] That’s the story at the heart of our next guest’s book, In My DNA: My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares. In the case of 13-year-old Jennifer Bastian, who went missing in her town near Tacoma, Washington, on August 4th, 1986, the worst nightmare came true. Her body was found three weeks later, but the case went cold for over 30 years. Detective Lindsey Wade helped lead the team that solved the case. Hello, Lindsey.

Lindsey: [00:01:24] Hello. Thank you for having me.

Dave: [00:01:26] This was a cold case that landed on your desk, and you dug in, and solved it. For anyone in law enforcement, a fresh child abduction is a nightmare call. But law enforcement officers don’t get a whole lot of training on child abduction cases. So, they might not know exactly where to go, which resources to start mobilizing. And that can be a huge issue because minutes matter in these child abduction cases. Lindsey, you train law enforcement on child abductions and you’ve worked numerous child abduction cases.

Lindsey: [00:02:03] Right.

Dave: [00:02:03] I wanted to lean on you, so you could provide some expertise on what law enforcement should do, what parents should be concerned with, and in general, how child abduction cases are investigated.

Lindsey: [00:02:18] Appreciate you having me on the show. This is a topic that is so important for law enforcement to really understand, for the general public to really understand. I think that it is so complicated and these cases are so massive that they really can just take over an entire agency and really an entire community in the blink of an eye. And so, it’s one of those situations where you really have to have resources set up ahead of time. And unfortunately, a lot of agencies will never experience a situation that requires them to get ready, if that makes sense for something like this. And a lot of times, of course, waiting until it happens is too late.

Dave: [00:02:59] It’s one of those calls that you’re just hoping never happens, but how do you hammer home the most important first steps of these investigations? You can’t get the first hour back. You, as a subject matter expert, what are the absolute must haves from a police response in the first couple minutes, hours, and days? What should a family expect to see from an appropriate law enforcement response?

Lindsey: [00:03:28] Yeah, that’s a difficult question to answer because every situation is so different, and I think with the majority of child abduction cases, it’s not witnessed. And so, that puts law enforcement in a really difficult predicament from the beginning, because they don’t really know what they have. And hindsight is always 2020, and sometimes it takes a while to figure out what you have. We’ve all been to those calls, all been sent to a place because a child is overdue, the kid was due home after school, or should have been home hours ago and hasn’t come home. We’ve all responded to those and they turned up to be nothing. They turned up to be, “Oh, the kid forgot to check in or they stopped at somebody else’s house and didn’t tell their parents.”

[00:04:15] So, when law enforcement gets that call of a missing child, they have to weed through all those previous experiences of, it’s probably just an overdue child. That’s what we’re used to responding to. In some cases, though, it’s pretty clear from the get go that something has happened. And in those cases, I think it may be a little bit easier for law enforcement to quickly mobilize, and lock down the crime scene, and call out detectives, and decide whether or not an Amber alert is appropriate, and do all of those initial steps that you would take if you do have a true child abduction. Unfortunately, it just usually doesn’t happen like that.

[00:04:57] A lot of the cases that I’ve been involved with, either current cases or cold cases, they didn’t happen like that. There were hours between when the child was last seen and when they get reported. It’s not really clear at first if nobody wants to make a big deal out of it. And that, of course, puts the police and the investigation behind the eight ball, because now you may have days or weeks, hopefully not weeks, but sometimes, a long time between when that child was last seen, and when law enforcement is finally notified and gets involved.

[00:05:32] There was a case that I was involved with been a few years ago now. And in that situation, the family didn’t report the child missing for over 24 hours, and she was six. So, you have the fact that the child isn’t even reported missing for 24 hours, which means the police aren’t involved for over 24 hours. And then in that case, just based on her age alone, really ratcheted up the level of response by the law enforcement agency, because at that point, okay, she’s six years. She shouldn’t have been out all night on her own. No one really knows what happened to her initially, but regardless, it’s pretty dangerous for a six-year-old to be out on their own all night long.

[00:06:15] So, either something happened to her at the beginning or something may have happened to her later. But even though there was no witness to what happened to her, no one could really say, those facts alone tell us, “Okay, we need to really heighten the response here.”

Dan: [00:06:31] Lindsey, you talk about a 24-hour gap in law enforcement being even notified of this. The significance of that that I think Dave and I recognize and obviously you is that we’ve got potentially a crime scene that is being contaminated or especially up where you work depending on time of the year, the weather can have a huge impact on that crime scene. So, can you talk about why it’s so important that law enforcement gets involved early? This is our job as law enforcement. We are bound to investigate. That’s what we do. So, it’s not an interruption to our work. It’s the purpose of our work.

Lindsey: [00:07:09] Yeah. It is absolutely critical that law enforcement be notified as quickly as possible to do exactly what you said, to lock down that crime scene, to preserve it, and make sure that evidence isn’t lost, destroyed, walked away with, cleaned up, or whatever. And with child abduction cases, there may be multiple crime scenes. In fact, there usually are multiple crime scenes. And so, I would also take it a step further to say, not only should law enforcement be contacted, but whoever’s going to be investigating it, presumably a detective or a detective unit or a Child Abduction Response Team should be notified as soon as possible. And that was really one thing that we tried to hammer home with our agency.

[00:07:50] When I was working with our Child Abduction Response Team is that we want to be notified right away. Don’t wait a couple of hours while you try to figure it out and try to find the child in patrol before you call us and now that you’ve exhausted all your leads. We want to know now. I don’t care if I get in the car and I drive in and then as soon as I arrive, the child is found, which has happened. That’s fine. I’m good with that. I would rather have that than have you call me two hours or three hours into it and say, “This child’s been missing. We’ve done these 10 different steps and we still can’t find the child. So, can you come out?” I don’t want to hear that. It’s never going to be a waste of resources because like you said, you can’t get that time back.

Dave: [00:08:30] Right. You mentioned the CART team, the Child Abduction Response Team. What did a Child Abduction Response Team look like at your agency and what are the roles and responsibilities of each member?

Lindsey: [00:08:41] So, yeah, Child Abduction Response Team, CART, is what you’ll hear people refer to them as, and it’s a multidisciplinary team of investigators and other professionals within the criminal justice arena who come together and respond in a timely manner when a child is abducted. And CARTs are pretty well known around the country. They can look different depending on the agency and the size of the jurisdiction. Our CART in Tacoma, I think we started working on it around 2009, and we got certified by the Department of Justice in 2013.

[00:09:18] It was a really huge undertaking for our agency. CARTs are, they’re invaluable and what they bring to the agency is organizational structure, and a plan, and training, and expertise. It brings together a group of people that can be basically called at a moment’s notice to respond. There’s no scrambling, trying to figure out, “Okay, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What’s your role going to be?” Everybody knows ahead of time what their role is. So, we had about 30 core team members on our CART, and that included detectives, it included people from our child advocacy center, it included prosecutors, people from Department of Corrections, Department of Social and Health Services like CPS workers.

[00:10:10] We also had our SWAT team involved with our CART, because we knew just from other cases that some of these situations can become extremely high risk very quickly, and so we wanted to make sure we covered that component. We had search and rescue as a big part of our team. We also included the Team Adam representatives from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We had a therapist who was involved to assist with reunification. And then we also worked really closely with the FBI, and so they’ve got victim specialists that would assist us on these kinds of cases as well.

[00:10:51] With these child abduction cases, when they occur, they are so massive and so chaotic because you’re just getting inundated with information from the news media, people calling in tips. It’s pretty important that you have a system in place ahead of time to capture all of that information to organize it, to quickly dissect it, and identify how you’re going to prioritize the tips, and how you’re going to sign them out, and who’s going to follow up, and who’s going to document all that. So, these are all things that we took into account when we created that CART team.

Dave: [00:11:28] Was there a landmark or a milestone-type case that made your agency decide, “We need to go with a Child Abduction Response Team model. This is what we need to go for?” Or, was it a cumulative, “Hey, we’ve had these over the years. Let’s get organized?”

Lindsey: [00:11:45] Unfortunately, we’d had quite a few child abductions in Tacoma prior to us forming the team. When I say quite a few, I mean, just off the top of my head, maybe six or seven at least. Most of those were unsolved. Then we had one in 2007 that was really horrific and we did end up solving it.

Dan: [00:12:08] You’re talking about a case where a 12-year-old girl was abducted by a sex offender.

Lindsey: [00:12:13] Yeah. It brought to light some of the deficiencies with how child abductions are investigated. And so, one of the recommendations that we received after that was that we needed a comprehensive child recovery strategy. And then, in order to get certified by DOJ, we had to do this huge mock exercise where we had, I don’t know, maybe 150 participants and a bunch of different locations around the city where we did this mock child abduction from start to finish. We had assessors on site from DOJ that were watching the whole thing and assessing us in real time. So, it was pretty nerve wracking to say the least, but we did it. It was successful. And so, I think that our city is much better off. Since then, since we created the team, we have been called to other jurisdictions to assist them with their cases.

Dan: [00:13:23] Lindsey, can you talk a little bit about the different types of abduction or missing child cases that you encounter?

Lindsey: [00:13:30] Well, so, some of the cases that I have worked on as cold cases, they’re still unsolved even today. I have my opinions about what may have happened with those cases. One of the cases that I worked on was a case that’s still unsolved, and I believe that it’s most likely what is referred to as a false allegation case. And a false allegation case is a case where a parent or a caretaker makes a false report of a missing child to cover up a homicide. They’re very difficult cases to investigate, but there are some flags or some key considerations when someone reports a really little kid missing, a kid that is really too young to be off on their own or a suspicious story about the kid going missing from the house when they’re two or three years old or one or a baby, an infant, that kind of thing.

[00:14:28] So, those cases, they’re really hard. I don’t know what the stats are on solvability factors for those kinds of cases, but those kinds are hard. The stranger abduction is the most unlikely type of child abduction, the stereotypical kidnapping. And the one case I talked about with a six-year-old, that was an acquaintance. And so, it turned out to be somebody that she knew, somebody that lived in her neighborhood. The cases with the two little girls from 1986 that I talked to you about on a previous episode, those were stranger cases.

Dave: [00:15:08] This is a cold case that dates back to 1986 that you talk about on our other podcast, Small Town Dicks.

Lindsey: [00:15:15] Yeah. And so, those are the most rare, the hardest to solve, because there’s no connection between the victims and the suspects, and they literally are victims of opportunity. With a lot of these child abduction suspects, when they’re interviewed, they will say, the victim was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t like this perpetrator was out stalking them, or had been watching them, or picked them out ahead of time. It literally was they’re looking for a victim and the victim presented themselves.

[00:15:49] The case from 2007 that I talked about earlier, it was the same situation. She was a 12-year-old little girl. She was literally standing in her backyard, about to walk into her backyard. She had her hand on her back gate trying to walk into her yard when this guy pulled up. He saw her a minute prior to this. He was pissed off. He wanted to have his kid for the day. This is according to him, later, and his ex-wife wasn’t home when he showed up unannounced. So, in his mind, I guess, that gave him permission to go do whatever he wanted. So, he said he was driving around, he was angry, he saw this girl riding her bike, and he decided that he was going to grab her.

[00:16:31] He followed her, and pulled his van around, and parked it, so that he could make a quick getaway. He walked up to her and he said, “Does this alley go all the way through?” And she stopped and she addressed him and said, “No,” and then she turned her back on him and tried to go into her backyard, and that’s when he grabbed her and pulled her into his van and then took off. He later murdered her and dumped her body out in a rural area. And he was a registered sex offender. He was within like nine months of being off sex offender registration at the time of the murder. So, he was level one, which was considered the least likely to reoffend.

[00:17:10] Yeah, he didn’t know her, never seen her before. It was just that he was looking for a victim. I think a lot of these guys do have, of course, a fantasy of what their victim looks like, but if a victim presents themselves that’s vulnerable and available, they’re going to go for it.

Dan: [00:17:25] Yeah. And his motivation was based on a disagreement with his ex.

Lindsey: [00:17:30] That’s what he said. That was what set him off.

Dan: [00:17:33] So, I’ve encountered true stranger abduction. I’ve been working when one of those occurred. I’ve been a part of an abduction where it was an acquaintance who abducted a woman. And then the other type that was a little more common to me was more of a custodial interference type of abduction where somebody loses a custody hearing or something similar, where they’re not going to have equal access to their child and they feel slighted, so they just decide that they’re going to take their child. That’s something that I have found to be fairly common. Do you agree with that?

Lindsey: [00:18:09] Yes. When it comes to abduction cases, the majority of child abductions are family abductions compared to acquaintances or strangers. I will say though that sometimes people have this belief that if it’s a family member that abducts the child, then it’s okay, like, they’re with their dad or they’re with their mom. That’s just absolutely not the case, because these kids are being taken as punishment. And oftentimes, they’re not taken care of. They’re hidden. They’re subject to abuse themselves, whether it’s physical, sexual, or mental, and they’ve been ripped away from their other parent that they love. So, they are very tragic cases as well.

Dave: [00:18:48] Absolutely. You think about Hollywood and their portrayal of child abduction where you’re getting a ransom note, and we’ll be in touch by Friday at 5 PM, follow the instructions, don’t involve law enforcement. All of that is horseshit. I’ve never heard of it happening in real life. It’s not the way it goes. So, I imagine from a lead detective perspective, this waiting for additional leads, updates, good news, give us something. It’s not like the movies where you’re like, “Well, he’s still talking to us, so we still have a shot.” Usually, you never hear from the abductor. How does that feel for you specifically, I didn’t sleep very well when I was a detective. I can’t imagine having a case like that and being the lead on it, what that would have done to my life?

Lindsey: [00:19:45] Yeah, it was very difficult. It’s like having an elephant and a grand piano strapped to your shoulders, because you do feel like the weight of the world is on you, not only to find this child, but then to hold somebody accountable. My perspective on child abduction cases is we’re not going to wait around for tips. We’re not going to wait around to hope somebody calls something in, like, we need to be proactive. And so, that’s where having some really strong crime analysts involved. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. If a guy goes out and abducts a kid, chances are he’s done it before, he’s done something like it before, there may be some previous attempts, there may be something that happened previously that you can look back to try to help identify the suspect in the case.

[00:20:29] In a lot of these cases, that’s what you’ll find if you look for it is, okay, this child’s just been abducted, but a month prior or three months prior, there was this attempted abduction, and we have a witness in that and a description. So, those are the kinds of things that law enforcement really needs to take a look at when they’re looking at one of these cases, both fresh cases and cold cases as well. Look at what else happened in the area, look at suspicious activity reports, look at Peeping Toms. It doesn’t have to be the exact same type of crime, but look for people that are off, things that are off, odd things that happened at that location prior to the actual abduction.

[00:21:11] Really with the case from 2007, and the one that I talked about with the six-year-old from a few years ago, neither one of those cases was solved by way of tips. Those cases were solved through investigative leads by the detectives working the case. In the case from 2007 with the sex offender that abducted the 12-year-old girl, we solved that case because I happened to find a report when I was digging back through our police database looking for similar crimes or other crimes. I did two different searches. So, I was looking for other crimes, something similar in the area, luring, abduction, kidnapping, sexual assault, anything like that. We had a vehicle description. So, I did some really broad searches just looking for similar vehicles, and I ended up finding a couple of reports with similar vehicles, and we followed up on both of those reports, and one of them turned out to be the guy.

[00:22:14] Unfortunately, when we found him and got him into custody, we had no evidence. Literally, it was just a circumstantial case. We had no body, nothing to tie him to the case. It was just all these circumstantial things. After tallying up the 50 different circumstantial pieces that made him look really good, we presented the case to the prosecutor, and he said that he would take the death penalty off the table if this guy would lead us to this child’s body and he went for it.

Dave: [00:22:49] That was a gamble.

Lindsey: [00:22:50] It was a gamble. And really, it was like, up until he said, I’ll show you where she’s at if I can have a cigarette, I was like, “I don’t even know if this is the right guy.”

Dan: [00:23:01] Not that there’s an average child abduction case or an average offender, but are there commonalities among suspects that you’ve seen over the years?

Lindsey: [00:23:10] Yeah, that’s a tough one because it depends on the type, right? Like, is it family? We’re going to take that out. Acquaintance and stranger can be similar with the statistics. Unfortunately, there haven’t been a lot of studies out there. There’s really only one study that you can point to that’s well known about child abduction, murder cases, and that’s a study that was actually done in Washington State. People just refer to it as the child abduction murder study. And that one, I think they looked at about 800 cases total of solved child abduction murder cases. From that they were able to create some stats about what the composite looks like. Like, what does the average child abduction victim look like and what does the average child abduction murder suspect look like.

[00:23:58] For the suspect, it’s a white male somewhere around 28 years old, somebody who’s got marginal social skills. When you’re talking about someone that’s going to abduct a kid off the street or even a slight acquaintance, this is somebody that doesn’t have the social skills to groom a child. This is not the camp counselor, the boy scout leader, whoever. The person that has access to these kids all the time and is continuously assaulting these kids because they have the skill set to groom them, this is the person that probably couldn’t carry on a face-to-face conversation with anybody. Those are the kinds of offenders typically.

Dan: [00:24:38] Little more impulsive?

Lindsey: [00:24:41] Yeah, the stranger or the slight acquaintance type of abductions. Some of them, actually, I think at the time of the offense, majority were unemployed. For the ones that did work, the most common job was some kind of construction work.

Dave: [00:24:58] What Lindsey is describing sounds very familiar to me. I can think of two cases in our area that were child abductions where the offenders in those cases had very poor people skills. So, they don’t have the traditional ability to groom like others who are charming, quick witted, manipulative. So, based on the crimes I’ve worked, when I think of someone who’s able to groom a victim, I think of these folks who can really fit in to almost any scenario. They’re good talkers and they put people at ease. If you don’t have those skills, brute force becomes an option.

Lindsey: [00:25:37] Mm-hmm. For these child abduction murders, most of the suspects that were identified in the study were not registered sex offenders. They were actually a very small number. However, a good percentage of them did have history for child sexual assault or some kind of sexual assault offense. So, while they may not have been a sex offender, they had something in their history, an arrest or a conviction or something. Maybe they were even just listed as a suspect in some kind of a sexual assault case. And so, that should be something that investigators key in on.

[00:26:11] The sex offenders themselves, yes, you have to check them, but they’re probably not as high priority as that person that just has that in their background, but has managed to stay under the radar.

Dave: [00:26:24] I have always noticed that that you see– I watch a lot of true crime.

Lindsey: [00:26:29] [laughs] Yeah.

Dave: [00:26:30] Sometimes, you get these cases where they’re like, “Oh, and then we just did a sweep of all the sex offenders.” And I’m like, “God, if it was only that easy.”

Lindsey: [00:26:37] Oh, 100%.

Dave: [00:26:38] It’s actually not. So many horrible crimes that I’ve gone to where the person just had a speeding ticket in their past. They’re really good at hiding, folks.

Lindsey: [00:26:47] Yes. And I will say I’m hoping that at some point this study gets updated, now that all these cases have been solved with genetic genealogy, because I think we’re going to see a different picture of the offender once those stats are produced or published, because a lot of the offenders who have been identified and arrested and convicted for child abduction, murder cases, thanks to genealogy, they don’t have any criminal history. They don’t have anything that stands out. There’s nothing about them that meets this stereotypical profile. And so, that’s going to be really interesting. It explains why the cases were unsolved for so long.

Dave: [00:27:28] Yeah.

Dave: [00:27:43] You had a hand in changing some state law regarding DNA. Do you want to talk about that at all?

Lindsey: [00:27:50] Sure. There were two girls that were murdered in Washington state back in 1986, Jennifer Bastian and Michella Welch. When I was investigating their cases as cold cases, I had this theory that the suspects in their cases, they must have slipped through the cracks somehow with their DNA. Because after reading the child abduction murder study, and based on my own experience with these kinds of predators, I just thought, there’s no way these guys are like a one and done. They have to have history for doing this. They have to be incarcerated someplace or maybe they died in prison.

[00:28:25] I just couldn’t believe that a suspect who could commit a crime this horrendous could just be out walking around. So, my thought was, “Okay, I know that we have a major gap with collecting DNA from convicted offenders.” This is national. This is not just a Washington thing. And so, I thought, “Well, could we strengthen our state law with regard to collecting DNA, and maybe it’ll help us solve not only these cold cases, but some other cold cases as well.” There are lots of different reasons why people are missed and why their DNA is not in CODIS.

Dave: [00:29:02] And CODIS, as we know, is the DNA database that law enforcement leans on heavily to identify offenders.

Lindsey: [00:29:09] Yeah. And in this case, I thought, “Well, maybe we can go back and look at some of these older offenders that were operating back in the 1970s and 1980s that are now deceased. Based on our state law, they couldn’t be entered into the DNA database, because they committed their crimes prior to the DNA law actually being enacted. And so, I was able to work with a state representative here in Washington. It took four years of going down to Olympia and lobbying with the mother of one of the victims. But we finally, in 2019, got Jennifer and Michella’s law passed. It did several things to strengthen our DNA law. But the main thing, I guess, that I was happiest about was that it allows law enforcement to enter DNA from deceased convicted offenders into the database regardless of when they were convicted.

[00:30:01] So, prior to this, I found examples of these basically serial killers in Washington that one of them had been executed, and he had just committed a string of atrocious crimes. But not only was he not in CODIS, I was all excited when I tracked down a sample of his DNA at the Medical Examiner’s Office, just to be told by the crime lab, “That’s great, Lindsey, but we can’t do anything with it. Can’t put it in the database.” So, that’s when it lit a fire under me that, “Okay, we need to change something here.”

Dan: [00:30:32] I guess, maybe it’s just too obvious to me, but what is the objection by a lawmaker why you wouldn’t want to put a serial killer’s DNA, even though they’re deceased, into CODIS?

Lindsey: [00:30:43] Well, you would be surprised. One of our trips to Olympia, I don’t even remember which year it was because it’s kind of a blur. Patty Bastian and I, so that’s Jennifer Bastian’s mother, we went to testify in Olympia. And someone basically stepped in and said, “Well, that’s really sad about your daughter and all, but we’re more concerned about the rights of the deceased offenders and their families being bombarded with this kind of information if it were to appear on the news that they were somehow linked to a new crime.”

Dave: [00:31:17] Nothing surprises me anymore. We already have a system that’s fairly weighted in favor of the defendant as far as they have rights. They say, “I don’t want to talk to you. We can’t talk to them anymore.” It’s very protective of defendants. I think we have continued to move where we’re protecting the accused and forgetting about victims and answers, and what’s the bigger picture? If we get this guy’s DNA, maybe we clear six cases and we get closure for dozens of people.

Lindsey: [00:31:52] Absolutely. You have to look at the greater good. I could talk about lawfully owed DNA all day, because that is something that I’m really passionate about, because it’s just ridiculous. I love genetic genealogy, I think it’s great, I’m glad it’s solved so many cases, but we also have CODIS and there are a lot of people that should be in CODIS that are not.

Dave: [00:32:11] 100% agree.

Dan: [00:32:13] I think most parents, it’s the worst nightmare to have your child abducted. And Lindsey, you mentioned this study about child abduction, murder cases, murder statistics, for parents out there, just to give you an idea, what do the stats say about how common child abduction is? Obviously, I think that and we talked about it, acquaintance abductions. So, we’re talking about maybe the creep that lives down the street, who the child has seen in passing over the years, or maybe is even known to say hello to the family every now and then. And stranger abduction, those are the least common types of abduction. What is realistic for parents to feel about the likelihood of their child being abducted? Because we don’t want to panic parents.

Lindsey: [00:33:03] Correct. It’s extremely rare. When I say rare, I mean, the FBI keeps stats on child abductions each year. It’s less than 100 a year for the entire country. It’s probably closer to around 60 per year for the whole country. That sounds like a lot. It is a lot. But compared to other violent crime, it’s extremely rare.

Dan: [00:33:31] So, let’s talk about what parents can do in the meantime with their children, obviously educating their children about stranger danger. We’ve heard it for decades, stranger danger. But what are some things that parents can do on their end in the event of the worst-case scenario happening?

Lindsey: [00:33:50] So, let me first start by saying, you have to have open dialogue with your child. I think there are just some things that parents need to talk about with their kids. I feel bad for my poor daughter because I have had so many conversations with her about this particular topic, way more than she ever wanted to hear about. But it’s just really important to even throw some scenarios at your child. What would you do in this situation? Because believe it or not, they’re not going to do what you think they’re going to do. And so, bringing it to their attention– It sounds silly to us, right? But what if this guy with a cute puppy asks you to come help him find the other puppy, or he says he has a cute puppy and he lost it. We all love animals. Having that open discussion about the fact that these are some potential things that somebody like that could say to you. And so, just be aware. So, at least, if something like that happens, it’s like, “Oh, I remember my mom saying something about that.”

[00:34:52] The other thing that I think is really important is that parents need to explain to their children that adults don’t need anything from them. It’s not okay for an adult to come up to you, to drive up to you and say, “What time is it?” No, they have their own watch, they have their own phone. They don’t need directions from a nine-year-old. They don’t need the time from a nine-year-old. But those are the most common ruses that these guys use to get close to the kids. So, keep that thing in mind.

[00:35:25] Then really arming your kids with the knowledge and also, the permission to yell and scream and say, “No, get away from me,” and to run away. It’s okay. We teach kids to be respectful of adults, and kids are just naturally prone to do that. But make noise, yell, scream, run away. You need to do that. It’s okay.

Dave: [00:35:52] If I can piggyback on Dan’s question, just getting out in front of this, what can parents do? What are items they can keep, pictures, those types of things?

Lindsey: [00:36:03] As far as preparing for your child going missing, yeah, it may be helpful to have things like a fingerprint card. I know they make those ID Me kits and things like that. The reality is that law enforcement is probably going to have a pretty easy time of getting a reference sample if that was necessary.

Dave: [00:36:23] Toothbrush. [chuckles]

Lindsey: [00:36:25] Yeah. So, I’m less concerned about that kind of stuff, more concerned about just let’s avoid it from the get go. And that means encouraging your kids to use the buddy system. And this day and age, it’s all about online safety. I have conversations with my daughter all the time about Roblox and all these games that they play. It’s like, they think that somebody who tells them they’re 14 playing with them in another state is really a 14-year-old. I’m like, “Well, that’s possible, but it also could be like a 75-year-old guy living in his mom’s basement, FYI.”

Dave: [00:36:57] Your daughter’s got a mom who just knows too much.

Lindsey: [00:37:00] [laughs] Yeah. So, I don’t want to scare my child, but the online enticement is a real thing. I know we’ve all heard some horror stories about these online predators who meet these kids online and they say that they’re their same age and then they come across the country and abduct these kids. It does happen.

Dan: [00:37:19] I know Dave’s talked about it for years on the podcast, and especially when he does presentations for parents that, parents you have a right to know what’s in your child’s phone and if your child is going to protest that, then maybe your child just doesn’t get a phone or they just get a phone that has the ability to dial 911 and the parent’s number, that’s it. But I think a lot of parents don’t feel empowered to have that visibility into their child’s phone and the different apps that are on their phone. I know, detective, that was my partner for a while, any app that his child downloaded onto his phone magically appeared on my partner’s phone also. So, my partner, he had the keys to the castle. I want parents to feel empowered to do those things. It’s not that you’re going to snoop on your child, but there’s some accountability there.

Lindsey: [00:38:15] Absolutely. Kids, they are still trying to figure it out, and they just don’t have any kind of a concept of just how evil people can be and how manipulative some of these people can be. And so, it doesn’t even occur to them that those kinds of things could be happening. So, I think it is absolutely important for the parents to be aware and monitor that social media, and the games that they can communicate through. I have an app, the family app, on my phone so I can see where my daughter is at. We’ve got the whole family on there. So, we can all see where we’re at, you know? I think that’s important. I want to know where my child is. If God forbid, something happened to her, I want to be able to go and look and see where she’s at.

Dave: [00:39:17] Have you been present for a reunification between child and parent?

Lindsey: [00:39:21] I have not. No, I have not.

Dave: [00:39:24] Does that feel like an empty checkbox from your career? It’s like, when you work all this tragedy, give me the feel good at the end.

Lindsey: [00:39:33] I know. Although, I think reunifications are tricky. I know we did quite a bit of training on that very topic, because I’ve definitely heard of situations where the reunification didn’t go well, where maybe they do it very publicly. I’ve definitely seen some news footage from some of the older high-profile cases where they literally film the child coming out of the hospital or whatever and reuniting with the family and there’s no privacy. There’re so many variables, like, how long has the child been missing and what kind of things was the child told while they were missing about the parent that’s been searching?

[00:40:08] If they’ve been told the whole time they were gone that the parents didn’t want them anymore, that they basically did something wrong, that’s going to look very different than a child that truly believes their parents were looking for them.

Dave: [00:40:20] I understand that that’s a control tactic and manipulation, but how evil. That’s disgusting. But as we know, they’re out there.

Dan: [00:40:33] The case that I think about the famous case of Steven Stayner, he got abducted when he was seven years old in central California, held hostage by his abductor, Kenneth Parnell for seven years. And then Kenneth Parnell goes out and abducts another kid. And Steven Stayner says, “Uh-uh, this ain’t happening on my watch.” So, Steven Stayner takes this kid, Timothy White, and they escape. Steven Stayner had been living autonomously with Kenneth Parnell. Kenneth Parnell had trusted Steven Stayner to not leave. And finally, Steven Stayner said, “I’ve had enough. I’m not going to watch this happen to this little kid.”

[00:41:12] So, Steven Stayner rescues this child. The reunification with the parents happens. It’s just chaos. There are cameras everywhere. I think it was completely inappropriate how the reunification happened. You’ve got Steven Stayner’s brother, Cary Stayner, who is watching all this, and now he is the forgotten brother. And this whole case is just tragic. Ten years after Steven Stayner reunites with his family, he dies tragically in a hit and run motorcycle accident. And then you’ve got Cary Stayner, who moves up into the Yosemite National Forest. And in 1999, Cary Stayner goes out and murders four women. You couldn’t write it because I don’t think anyone would believe it, but it happened and it’s tragic, and you wonder what the tale of that reunification if that was maybe the spark for all the bad things that happened following.

Dave: [00:42:10] Right. Is there a Cary Stayner as we know him or as we knew him, if his brother, Steven, isn’t ever abducted? The cost is tremendous.

Lindsey: [00:42:21] Yeah.

Dave: [00:42:23] Good or bad, what are some memorable moments from some of these missing and abducted child cases that you’ve worked over the years? Do you have things that just, “Oh, I remember that one, and it always bubbles up?”

Lindsey: [00:42:36] Mm-hmm. Yeah, they’re not fun. I don’t think that anyone would argue that children are the most precious gifts that we have. And so, even the most hardened law enforcement officer, detective, whatever you want to say, has a soft spot when it comes to kids. So, I think the child cases are certainly the hardest to process and to deal with. I think when you’re working on it in real time, it’s easier because you have a job to do, and so you have to focus on the job. It’s more like after the fact. And that’s, I guess, how I experienced those cases.

[00:43:15] I would say for the cold cases, it’s a little bit harder because just the case that we talked about on your other podcast with the two girls that were murdered in 1986, those were long ago cold. And so, it wasn’t like that fresh fear and panic in the community. But once you meet that family and once you make a connection with the victim’s family, it just takes on a different tone and it can become a bit more personal. So, with those cases, I wasn’t there. Like, I wasn’t at the crime scene. I didn’t see all of the things. Looking at photos and watching the crime scene video is different than actually being there.

[00:43:58] You still are emotional, but it’s not quite the same. With the fresh cases, it’s just an emotional roller coaster. [laughs] You’re basically working– I don’t even remember what kind of hours we’re working in the midst of those crazy cases, but it would be 15, 16-hour days. You’d run home and get a couple of hours of sleep and then come back and it’s just nonstop. You’re bombarded. The case that I talked about previously with the little six-year-old, that case was resolved fairly quickly. She, like I said, hadn’t been reported for like 24 hours. And so, when we got involved, I think it was a Monday morning. And so, you figure, okay, all-day Monday, this thing is going, all day Tuesday and I think it was either Wednesday– I think it was Wednesday afternoon, her body was finally found.

[00:45:01] Of course, this was after multiple searches in the same exact area where she was found, which is another issue with child abduction cases, is searches. But in this case, the area had been searched multiple times. People literally walked right over the top of her. And so, when she was finally found, it was like this let down and this sadness, but also like, “Okay, we still have a job to do now. It’s no longer a missing child. Now it’s a homicide case, and we need to find who did it, and we need to get justice for this little girl.” So, while it’s sad and it’s heartbreaking, you still have to go and you still have to get things done. I know for myself, with those kinds of cases, it’s all over. I don’t even know what all over means, because it can take years and years for these cases to go to trial. But it seems like I have to be completely separated and away from it for quite a while before I allow myself to really think about it.

Dave: [00:45:58] I understand that.

Dan: [00:46:01] Lindsey, you mentioned challenges when it comes to searching for a child. Can you give us a little more detail on what you were talking about there?

Lindsey: [00:46:09] Yeah, I can think of several cases where an area had been searched previously, and the child wasn’t found, and then later the child was found in the same exact spot that had already been searched. This has come up in at least three different cases that I can think of right off the top of my head. And so, some people will say, “Oh, the child must have been taken away and then brought back later. I don’t think that’s the case, usually. It just depends on where the search is taking place and who is searching. When you’re talking about a vast wooded area and the cases I’m thinking of in particular, these were wooded areas where you don’t have a million people out doing a search. There’s no way that you can cover every square foot of a wooded area. And so, things get missed. They do.

[00:47:03] I think it’s just critical with the child abduction cases, especially that there’s a plan ahead of time with search and rescue about who is going to be searching. And also, keep in mind, search and rescue folks are very adept at doing searches, but they’re adept at doing it on their own. Like, they are called out all the time for people who are lost in the woods and people that are missing, not necessarily related to a criminal investigation. And so, keeping that in mind, when search and rescue is brought in on a missing child case, sometimes what will happen is they will want to search as if they’re doing a typical search and rescue operation. That has to be managed by someone within the criminal investigation to make sure, “Okay, you’re not just looking for a person. We’re also looking for evidence.”

[00:48:00] So, along the way, I know you’re looking for this child, but if you happen to find some suspicious items as well, you need to stop, and you need to flag them, and you need to contact the command post. I’ve seen that happen in situations where they’re so used to doing the search the way that they’re doing it and also being autonomous and just doing it how they want to do it. You can’t do that with the child abduction case because that communication back to the command post and back to whoever is running the operation is extremely critical, and that can really cause problems. I’ve seen cases where something was found out in the woods by a searcher, and they brought it back to the command post, and just set it down. No one knew where it came from or who found it.

Dan: [00:48:42] Never photographed in place.

Lindsey: [00:48:44] Nothing. So, with search and rescue, they bring in the ESAR volunteers which are the Emergency Search And Rescue. Oftentimes, they’re kids. Again, they’re trained to find lost hikers and things like that. They’re not trained on how to preserve a crime scene or how to look for evidence. And so, that’s something to really keep in mind, because I know everyone wants to mobilize, and just jump on it, and let’s deploy all these people. But sometimes, that can be problematic.

Dan: [00:49:11] Yeah. I think it’s easy to look at a map and draw a perimeter around a part of a map and say, this area has been searched when– Depending on terrain, there are certain parts of an area and terrain, we’re not talking about flat fields with two-foot-tall grass.

Lindsey: [00:49:28] Right.

Dan: [00:49:28] We’re talking about mountainous, there are cliffs, there’s brush everywhere. Like you said, you can’t cover every square foot of that area. So, to just blanket mark this area off as it’s already been searched, it’s just not a true representation of the search.

Lindsey: [00:49:45] Yeah. And with that case, with the six-year-old, this same area was searched and researched and researched again. It wasn’t until, I think, maybe the third or fourth search that she was found. It was a difficult situation because she was actually submerged in mud. I mean, it’s not like people walked by her or anything like that, but there were other items of evidence nearby to someone that’s used to looking at crime scenes would key in on, “Okay, we need to spend more time here, as opposed to let’s keep looking for a body,” so to speak.

Dave: [00:50:18] So frustrating like. [laughs] We say it all the time over the years. You are at the mercy of the law enforcement professional that’s assigned to your case or assigned to a task. It’s the same way in every job.

Lindsey: [00:50:31] Oh, 100%. Not to say that any of those people did anything wrong, because that’s the situation that they were in. My case from 1986, the area was searched, and then I think it was 24 days later, a jogger noticed an odor, and they went back to the same area. Even after, I think there were two days’ worth of additional searches and it took that long after they noticed the odor to find her right there. So, that just gives you a sense of how difficult it can be in a rugged, forested area with all kinds of trees and shrubs.

Dave: [00:51:10] Right. You think about, if you lost your car keys in your front yard and hadn’t mowed for a week, go find them. That’s such a small scale compared to what search and rescue and these search parties are doing on these cases.

Lindsey: [00:51:25] Right.

Dave: [00:51:26] We could devote a whole episode to search and rescue. Lindsey, former detective, police educator, author, and expert on child abduction cases, we appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us, and of course, you are always welcome back.

Dan: [00:51:41] Yes, thank you.

Lindsey: [00:51:42] Well, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Dan: [00:51:49] On the next episode of The Briefing Room–

Male Speaker: [00:51:52] I get halfway into the first case and I realize what an idiot I am. And you don’t realize it completely, but you cut out your other life. You’re no longer you. All the friends you have, they’re moving on. You don’t get it that their life is moving forward. And for you, who you are for real, just hit a pause button and stops. That person that you were just before the case started, that person is gone for the amount of time that you’re undercover.

Dave: [00:52:17] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:52:25] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed the theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:52:50] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you our fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:10] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[Briefing Room theme playing]

Dan: [00:00:36] Today, you’re going to hear about a day in the life of a medical examiner. Medical examiners are a key link in the chain of investigators when someone dies. They’re the ones who determine the cause and manner of death. So, we asked Dr. Mark Super, a highly skilled veteran who worked mostly in Central and Northern California, to join us. You’re going to hear how he became a forensic pathologist, because really, how does someone end up in that job, about what it means to go above and beyond as a medical examiner, and he’ll tell us a little bit about what he wishes the people he works with, police, ER doctors, nurses, knew about his job to make autopsies easier. And we’ll ask him about some of his most interesting cases as well. Without further ado, Dr. Super.

Mark: [00:01:22] Thank you.

Dave: [00:01:24] Over the years, we’ve had a lot of guests on our two different podcasts that we have, we’ve never had a forensic pathologist as far as I can remember, and we thought it would be helpful to give our listeners a little bit of insight into what the medical examiner provides as far as being a stakeholder in the greater criminal justice community and beyond. Before we get into that, I was hoping we could just have you, Dr. Super, give us a little bit of a bio on your jurisdiction, the population you serve, and what typical workday or work week looks like for your office.

Mark: [00:02:00] Okay. I practice in California, which is predominantly a sheriff coroner state. Death is investigated on a county level in California. There’re 58 counties and the vast majority of them are sheriff coroner jurisdictions.

Dan: [00:02:16] My understanding is a sheriff coroner county, you have the elected sheriff who’s elected by the people, he also serves as a county coroner. He then appoints a chief deputy coroner, in this case, it would be someone like you who goes in and does death investigations. Is that correct?

Mark: [00:02:33] Yes. I practice full time in Merced County. We have a sheriff. I also have a private practice, and I go all over Northern California doing work for other coroners and private work as well.

Dave: [00:02:45] Okay. And is that in a consulting capacity where you get called in to give another opinion on a case?

Mark: [00:02:52] No, I don’t do that as much. Mostly, they need somebody to do autopsies, [Dave laughs] because there’re very few of us out here. Sometimes, people are gone, they’re on vacation, they need help. And so, I’ll go up and do cases, especially in some of the far-flung low population counties like Humboldt County, which I’d worked for over 20 years. I did all of their homicides.

Dave: [00:03:16] Oh, small world. My brother and I have spent quite a bit of time playing baseball in Eureka, which is in Humboldt County.

Mark: [00:03:23] Oh, well, [Dave laughs] I have some great stories about Eureka. [laughs]

Dave: [00:03:27] Very excited to hear about Eureka stories. First, let’s give some context to what a medical examiner does. When a dead body ends up in your office, what do you do? What scenarios require your participation and expertise? Take us through a day in the life of Dr. Mark Super.

Mark: [00:03:48] Well, just like everybody is born, you have to have a birth certificate. So, when you die, you have to have a death certificate, and that’s what the coroner’s main job is to do. Most people die of some kind of natural death, over 60% of people. And most of those people have a doctor, people know that they’re dying or their death is not unexpected. But then there’re those cases where people die suddenly or they die of some means that’s not natural. So, the coroner must investigate it.

[00:04:19] So, let’s say overnight somebody dies, or two or three people die, and they could transport it to our office. Then we would look at them. First of all, we have to make sure we identify them. That could be a big problem, if you [Dave laughs] misidentify somebody. That could get you in the papers and things that go bad in a hurry.

Dave: [00:04:37] Right.

Mark: [00:04:38] And that’s fingerprints. Most people will do fingerprints right off the bat. As you know, there’re large databases that we can automatically look up who somebody is, which is a big help. Then we decide, are we going to just do an external examination, or are we going to autopsy this individual? Sometimes, it’s an older person. It’s obvious and natural, but they don’t have a doctor. Some people are really smart. They don’t go to doctors. [Dave laughs] They don’t believe in doctors, but they still have to have a death certificate. Then we’ll go ahead and do an autopsy. When you get done, hopefully, we’ll have a cause of death.

[00:05:14] Nowadays, with this opioid crisis and the fentanyl deaths are so high, most of our autopsies are now– We do the autopsies and they end up as pending cause of death, because they’re waiting for results to come out. That takes many weeks usually. Then we have to decide on the manner of deaths. So, a lot of people don’t realize that it’s not just the cause of death, but it’s the manner of death that goes on to the death certificate. Was it a homicide? That means death at the hands of another person. Is it a suicide? Death at their own hands. Is it an accident? Was it some unforeseen event that resulted in their death or is it a small percent of the cases we just don’t know what it is?

[00:05:54] Sometimes, they’re so decomposed or they’re even skeletonized, we may not know how this individual died. But then our day is mixed up with other things like court appearances. We do have to testify in court and so that sometimes takes up a large part of our day. Hopefully, forensic pathologists are going to scenes. I’ve always made it my point to go to homicide scenes, if possible. If the body is at the scene, hasn’t been transported to a hospital or something, I respond and I go and I look at the body at the scene. To me, that’s where the autopsy starts. So, that’s how my day goes.

Dave: [00:06:29] As a former detective, I would have really enjoyed having our medical examiner out at the scene. Our medical examiner in our jurisdiction where Dan and I worked, very, very good. He had his deputies that went out and made on scene determinations and those types of things. But you’re right. The crime scene and the autopsy would definitely start for you seeing the circumstances and the land out where the body’s found, correct?

Mark: [00:06:53] Yes. I’m answering a lot of questions in my own head that I don’t have to ask you. [Dave laughs] Like, what’s nearby? What position is the person in? You’re giving me a status on what happened. So, questions about how long do I think the person’s been dead? Sometimes, I can give the police a good idea or based on what the police tell me and based on what I find at the exam at this scene, I can say, “Well, that’s pretty consistent with what you know,” or “It’s not inconsistent.” “This person’s been dead longer,” or “This person hasn’t been dead that long.” So, sometimes, I can say those kind of things at the scene and things that are moving along.

Dave: [00:07:30] Okay.

Mark: [00:07:31] Nowadays, at 70 years old, I go to the homicide scenes, and I’m the most experienced person there by far. So, I can sometimes be of help. It hasn’t been that uncommon where I’ll go, “This isn’t even a homicide.”

Dave: [00:07:43] Interesting.

Dan: [00:07:44] Dr. Super, I’d like to go back just a little bit into your personal history. You’re from Bismarck, North Dakota, and then went into the navy. I think that when you’re not around an ocean growing up, I think going into the navy might be an interesting choice. Can you give us a little bit of your background growing up and your decision to join the navy?

Mark: [00:08:05] I went to the University of North Dakota. I grew up in Bismarck, as you said. I graduated in physical therapy. So, I became a physical therapist. That’s what I was doing. I went back to Bismarck, and I was practicing, and I enjoyed working with the elderly. I love talking to old people, and hearing their stories, and helping them get better. When I decided to go back to medical school, I was accepted to the University of North Dakota. My intention was to become a geriatrist. It wasn’t until I was a fourth-year medical student, I was allowed to do an autopsy. I’d watched one and I got to do one. This is 1979. I did my first autopsy and I said, “Oh, this is great. I really like this.” So, I became a pathologist.

[00:08:54] Well, not having a lot of money, I was fortunate enough to get a navy scholarship. Even though I’m in North Dakota, the navy, they gave two of us in my class scholarships. So, when I graduated, I went out to San Diego to start my residency. I didn’t know anything about forensic pathology, nothing. I just liked doing autopsies pathology. Well, my second year, the navy sent a forensic pathologist to take over the morgue at Naval Hospital San Diego, which is a large military hospital, one of the largest in the world. I’m talking to him and he says, he’s a forensic pathologist. I thought, what is that? I didn’t even know. I come from Bismarck. How many homicides are there in Bismarck in a century?

Dave: [00:09:46] Right.

Mark: [00:09:47] So he says, “Well, you do autopsies on people that have been murdered and then you work with police, and then you testify about how the person died under these homicide circumstances.” And I went, “Really? Really?” You get to do autopsies, which I like, and you get to work with the cops and figure out why people were killed. And I said, “Where do I sign up for that?”

Dave: [00:10:09] Right. Do you remember the moment you put the scalpel in for the first time?

Mark: [00:10:14] Oh, yes.

Dave: [00:10:15] Was there hesitancy before that, or was it just straight excitement, “I can’t wait to get in and see what I find”?

Mark: [00:10:21] It was excitement. I’d watched a couple and I just felt like this was where I wanted to be. It just felt so natural that this is where my brain works. I was really thinking about medicine. To me, autopsies was medicine. So, I was thinking, I’m going to help other doctors, I’m going to help families figure out why somebody died. That was my thinking when I went into pathology in the first place.

Dave: [00:10:48] And just ballpark, how many full autopsies do you think you’ve done?

Mark: [00:10:53] I know exactly how many I’ve done. I’ve done over 13,600.

Dan: [00:10:59] Wow.

Mark: [00:11:00] It’s been 43 years.

Dan: [00:11:14] So, eight years in the navy as a lieutenant commander doing pathology, where was the transition when you move on to be a county coroner? How did that progress for you?

Mark: [00:11:27] Well, I was in San Diego, I was finishing my obligation. When I finished my fellowship, the navy sent me back to San Diego to run the morgue. I was the first junior officer to run that morgue in the history of its time. They built a new hospital there. I did the first autopsy in the new San Diego Naval Hospital. Anyway, as I was ending my obligation, I was starting to work on the weekends at the then coroner’s office. San Diego was still a coroner’s office in those days. I would go on Saturdays and they would give me so many autopsies due and I would do them for $100 apiece. But that was 100 bucks.

Dave: [00:12:05] Oh, it’s like getting overtime.

Mark: [00:12:06] Oh, yeah.

Dave: [00:12:08] Yeah, you love it.

Mark: [00:12:09] I had young children, that was extra money that I really needed. But at the same time, San Diego was planning on becoming a medical examiner’s system and they were going to do away with the coroner altogether. So, at the very time that I’m getting out, they needed full-time forensic pathologists. So, they knew who I was. So, one day I was still in the navy, and the next day I was a deputy medical examiner in San Diego County. [Dave laughs] On the very first day that the ME office opened up, I was one of their MEs.

Dan: [00:12:43] Can you explain the difference between a coroner’s office and then the ME’s office system?

Mark: [00:12:48] Well, I always explain it by a medical examiner is a forensic pathologist with an attitude. Because as a coroner, coroner is a political title. So, that person might be appointed, that person might be elected, but there’s nothing about their training as a physician or as a medical person that has anything to do with their job. They just have to fulfil this public office. San Diego at that time wasn’t appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

Dan: [00:13:17] Right. So, just to clarify, a coroner is typically elected by the people, sometimes appointed in the city or state that they work in. But in some cases, they might not even have medical training. They’re simply holding the office of the coroner. Whereas an ME, medical examiner, has to have a degree from a medical school and have a certification from the state.

Mark: [00:13:40] Yes. There are a few counties in California where they abolish the coroner altogether and they set up a medical examiner’s office. So, a forensic pathologist is deciding the cause and the manner of death and that person is filling the death certificate up. But in a coroner system, a coroner can’t do an autopsy. That’s a medical procedure. So, a coroner has to hire a forensic pathologist to do the autopsies. There’s nothing to stop the coroner from not even caring what you say. They could technically put down on the death certificate whatever they wanted. But you can imagine how you can get into political situations that way.

Dave: [00:14:18] Oh, absolutely.

Mark: [00:14:19] Especially when it comes to the manner of death. When police are involved in someone’s death, in the old days, they would just call them accidents and just go on, even though maybe the scene was not quite that if the one person looked at it.

Dave: [00:14:33] It’s interesting you mentioned that Dr. Super, Dan and I frequently speak about how victims and their families are directly affected by the competence of the detective that’s assigned to the case. And in this instance, I’m sure it’s the same for you. A medical examiner or a deputy medical examiner out on a scene is at the mercy of whatever law enforcement has done at that scene prior to the medical examiner’s arrival. So, in some instances, you might have a pristine scene that’s been really well handled by an investigator. But Dan and I have both seen plenty of instances where a scene can be mishandled or evidence can be misinterpreted. Do you run into that?

Mark: [00:15:21] Well, when I was first a new deputy medical examiner in San Diego, as I recall, San Diego had three, maybe four teams of detectives that were on their homicide team, and they had been together for years and years. So, these are, I don’t want to say, crusty, but you know what we’re talking about.

Dave: [00:15:42] Salty veterans that have seen it all.

Mark: [00:15:44] Yes. And we were told that they weren’t going to be very accepting of some young guy showing up at their scene and some kind of know it all. So, I was a little hesitant when I went to my first scene early in this time, and I showed up at this homicide scene, and I said, “I’m Dr. Super. I’m here for this.” And the detective said, “Well, what took you so long?”

Dave: [00:16:07] [laughs]

Mark: [00:16:09] They were totally accepting from day one. They couldn’t figure out why nobody ever came before.

Dave: [00:16:14] It’s great to have another set of eyes, especially one who you know is going to be the last person to see this victim. I want that person to know everything about the case.

Mark: [00:16:23] I can’t tell you how many times police– they’ll be at scenes and they’re talking to each other and they’ll point to something on the body and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s a powder stain.” And I’m thanking them, “No, that’s not what that is. No, no, no.” Or, they have the range of fire or the direction of fire totally opposite what it really is. And sometimes, you can tell at the scene and they’re just wrong. They’re wrong right off the bat. So, it does help to have somebody have another set of eyes, or it helps to say, “Let’s just wait until we get to the autopsy before we decide what we know what’s happened here.”

Dave: [00:17:01] Yeah. The worst thing is to have to course correct after you’ve characterized something as one thing and it turns out to be something completely different.

Dan: [00:17:11] I do remember my first autopsy as a detective. I’d been to one as a patrol officer simply for a training exercise to get me used to what this was going to be, because I always had the goal to be a detective and I knew that this was on the horizon for me. I remember the medical examiner having me roll prints, so roll the fingerprints of the subject that was on the table, who he was going to be examining, which I was a little hesitant to do. I think it was to break my mind out of what I’m actually looking at and get involved in the process. It was great. But going back to that first autopsy as a detective, by all means, this case looked like it could have been an overdose, something else.

[00:18:02] We get into the autopsy and the medical examiner, our doctor, quickly determines you’ve got a homicide on your hands. I felt a rush come over my body, and I’m imagining that there are times when you are doing an autopsy and you start seeing things that completely change the course of direction for an investigation. Can you tell us what those moments are like for you?

Mark: [00:18:27] Well, they’re the things that make it fun to do this. It’s why we’re doing it. Like all jobs, there’s a lot of mundane stuff that happens with dead bodies. But we’ll be doing an autopsy and I’ll say, “Whoa, this bullet, we thought was doing this direction.” We always like to have the police there, some detective there from the agency. I don’t know, if you have that experience. They send the person that’s the least knowledgeable to the autopsy.

Dave: [00:18:57] [laughs] We usually send the case agent, the one who’s going to be leading it. We want them to see– [crosstalk]

Mark: [00:19:01] That’s good, because sometimes they’re just looking at me like, “I don’t know, they just told me to come here.” I hate that. Anyway, I’ll go, “So, let’s go back to the scene. Where did you say this bullet was supposed to come from?” It totally changes everything they think about the scene, some finding that I’ve had. I had a case where there were two bullet holes, and I thought it was an in one side and an out on the other side. But when I got in there, there were two bullets. So, things can change on a dime in the middle of the autopsy. They can.

Dan: [00:19:36] Yeah, they totally can. I’ve been there when it happened. Dr. Super, I’m just curious. I watched that Netflix series, Murder Mountain. I was wondering if you were involved in any of those investigations, because I know they happened in Southern Humboldt County.

Mark: [00:19:50] So there’re five homicides that discuss Murder Mountain. I autopsied all five of those people.

Dan: [00:19:56] For our listeners who aren’t familiar, Murder Mountain is a Netflix series, but it really discusses the many disappearances and murders that have occurred in Southern Humboldt County, and they all revolve around the marijuana industry, and these growers that are up in the mountains. It really goes into a little more detail about one particular case where a cannabis grower was actually murdered.

Mark: [00:20:22] I was going up there for years. Well, I did the famous one where Mr. Ford, who walked into the sheriff’s office up and said, “I’ve been a very bad boy,” and he pulled a woman’s breast out of his pocket.

Dave: [00:20:36] For listeners, this was 1998 when Wayne Adam Ford turned himself in. He’s now on death row at San Quentin.

Mark: [00:20:44] Yes. And so, that got people pretty concerned. So, that afternoon, I was out digging up various parts of this woman that he had dismembered and buried. He was a trucker and he ended up being tried for several women along his way. He just decided to admit to it one day and there it was. And the torso that went with the pieces that I had was just identified through familial DNA.

Dave: [00:21:13] Oh, wow.

Mark: [00:21:14] They finally found out who this young woman was. And the family, they didn’t know where she was for years and years, because the police said, “Well, she’s an adult. She can take off if she wants, we don’t have to track her down.” So, they had no idea where this young woman went and she’s been dead for all these years.

Dave: [00:21:32] So, the victim in that case was 25-year-old, Kerry Ann Cummings, and they were finally able to identify her. The closure that provides a family, invaluable. That’s why we want the answers. I don’t care if it comes in 10 years or 20 years, but we got to get some answers here. There’re too many people that care.

Dan: [00:21:52] Yes.

Mark: [00:22:07] We had a case, what I call Thelma and Louise case. So, these two guys, they’re going to buy some marijuana. They’re going to buy some dope. That’s not a big deal. That’s just commerce up in Humboldt County. [Dave laughs] So, they don’t pay for that. They just take the dope and take off. So, the person that was supposed to get the money called the police because by God, they– [laughs]

Dave: [00:22:33] I’ve been robbed.

Mark: [00:22:34] I’ve been robbed. That was a legitimate crime. So, they start chasing these guys up these mountain roads, and they’re exchanging gunfire with these guys. One of them has an M14 and the other one has a .45 semiautomatic pistol, I think the driver. So, they’re chasing these guys on this mountain road. So, they decide to put the strip down and take out their tires and they do that. Now they’re riding on these rims on these mountain roads. So, they decide to just aim for the cliff. And so, they aim for the cliff, and they went over the cliff, and they’re talking on the phone saying, “You’re not going to stop us.” So, as they went over the cliff, the driver takes his semiautomatic pistol and shoots his accomplice and then he shoots himself in the head-

Dave: [00:23:24] On their way down.

Mark: [00:23:26] -on their way down. So, the car goes down a cliff. And so, the police are up there, they’re looking down, going, “What the heck was that?” Next thing you know, the driver’s crawling back up. He shot himself in the face. He didn’t do the job. So, he ended up being tried for the other guy’s murder in the robbery and all the shooting of the police and stuff.

Dave: [00:23:48] I love the poetry of that.

Mark: [00:23:52] [laughs] That was Humboldt County stuff.

Dave: [00:23:54] Like, Humboldt County craziness?

Mark: [00:23:55] Yes. Absolutely.

Dan: [00:23:57] So, Dr. Super, you said you worked in Merced County, which is more Central California. Does that cover Yosemite National Park?

Mark: [00:24:05] No, Mariposa County does.

Dan: [00:24:07] Mariposa County. Okay. I recently visited Yosemite and became fascinated by some stories of unfortunate circumstances that led to people’s deaths in that park. I thought it was really interesting because they had really broken it down to deaths at waterfalls and deaths on the roads there. I was just curious if you’d covered any of those cases.

Mark: [00:24:34] For many years, I also did all the autopsies in Madera County, and as you know, part of the park is in Madera County.

Dan: [00:24:40] Oh, yeah.

Mark: [00:24:41] There’s mountainous rural areas around the park in that county. Well, we had a case where a man– He’s a tour guide, and he knows where these natural waterslides are up there. So, he takes a bunch of Japanese tourists out on this hike up to this waterslide. He says, “I’ll show you how this works.” So, he climbs to the top of the slide, and he slides down. And then when he gets to the bottom, he stands up, and then he just says, “Oh, S-H-I-T.” Falls, like, several hundred feet off a cliff. While these poor Japanese people are looking, “Ah, now, how did we get here and how do we get back?”

Dave: [00:25:26] Right. He’s got the keys, right?

Dan: [00:25:28] Yeah.

Mark: [00:25:28] Yes. He knew how to get there and he broke about everything.

Dave: [00:25:32] Oh, man.

Dan: [00:25:34] So, this tour guide shows these people what should be a really fun experience for him. But when he gets to the bottom of the waterslide, he loses his footing and plummets to his death.

Mark: [00:25:46] Yeah.

Dan: [00:25:47] Oh, my God.

Dave: [00:25:49] What does a fall of several hundred feet do to a human body? I have my own assumptions.

Mark: [00:25:55] Ones that hit solid ground, they have major fractures of the long bones, and thorax, and usually head too. I’ve done some parachutes too, people that parachutes aren’t open. Or, in the military I’ve done like green beret type, those Special Forces that do low altitude jumps?

Dave: [00:26:14] Right.

Mark: [00:26:15] That don’t work sometimes.

Dave: [00:26:16] Yeah. The parachute doesn’t deploy.

Mark: [00:26:18] Well, they jump high, but it’s not high enough for the chute to deploy.

Dave: [00:26:23] Got it.

Mark: [00:26:24] Yeah. It’s a straightforward training accident, but it’s fatal.

Dave: [00:26:27] What are the types of cases that really interest you or get you very engaged versus what are the more mundane things that–? I’m not even talking about autopsies. What’s your favorite part of your job? What’s your least favorite part of your job?

Mark: [00:26:42] My favorite part of the job has always been going to the scenes and seeing what’s going on, because that’s where the excitement is for us. It’s different than working in a lab all day. I always found the asphyxial death to be the most challenging, because there’s not a lot of wounds. A lot of people can see somebody who’s been shot 10 times and figure out that they weren’t going to make it. Not to say that they’re not important, but as far as figuring out why somebody died in using my head, those kinds of cases are the best.

Dave: [00:27:15] You said asphyxial, like choking or strangling, lack of air.

Mark: [00:27:20] Yes.

Dave: [00:27:21] You like figuring out puzzles.

Mark: [00:27:22] Yes. People that have been smothered, people that have been strangled, people that have been poisoned and made to look like something else, those are the ones that really make it worthwhile and you go, “Yeah, now I know why I’m doing this.”

Dan: [00:27:39] Over the years, you’ve been doing this for, I think you said 40 years. Is that right?

Mark: [00:27:43] Over 40 years.

Dan: [00:27:44] Over 40 years. You started in 1979, I believe. Is that correct?

Mark: [00:27:48] That was my first autopsy as a medical student.

Dan: [00:27:51] Yeah. First autopsy in 1979, up to current day, we’re in 2023. And the changes in forensic science, can you talk about what that’s been like from your perspective?

Mark: [00:28:06] Like, night and day, for all sorts of reasons, probably in my tenure, DNA has been the number one thing that’s really changed what we do and changed how we figure out who did what and how to identify somebody. Now we’re identifying much more people using state-of-the-art DNA stuff. I think that’s the big change, the technical changes. We were typing reports in those days. We’d have to type the reports, then there would be two mistakes, and then the stenographer would have to retype the whole thing. Then there was also the days before digital photography, we’d take all these photographs of the autopsy, and then they’d run them down to the store, and then the next day they’d pick them up and they’d be all out of focus. Those days– when digital photography came around, for me, that was the greatest thing, because I can see right away if the photo is not what I want, and you can take 100 of them.

Dave: [00:29:08] We’ve tried to relay that as detectives to patrol officers for years like, “Hey, you know, there’s a little disc, and it saves lots of these things on one little digital disc. Take three times as many as you thought you needed.”

Mark: [00:29:25] Yes.

Dave: [00:29:25] There’s never enough. [laughs]

Mark: [00:29:27] Yes. Polaroids were a big deal. Remember how much those cost a pop?

Dave: [00:29:33] Oh, yeah.

Mark: [00:29:34] So, if we used three or four boxes of those and the coroner would start to grumble.

Dave: [00:29:38] Right. Like, you’re hitting my budget now.

Mark: [00:29:41] Yeah, absolutely.

Dave: [00:29:43] Those are things to be concerned with. I think back to a few of our cases where we want to throw the body through a full body scan just to see what it looks like underneath and there’re concerns about, “Well, that’s going to cost a few thousand dollars to throw this person in the machine and get a scan. Is it something we really need?” Those are things where I’m like, “It’s a murder. Yeah, we need it.” The right answer is, “Let’s do it the right way.”

Mark: [00:30:11] Oh. Absolutely. Digital x-rays are another example of that. In the small rural jurisdictions, it was uncommon to get any kind of x-ray on a firearm injury. It was uncommon, and the coroners couldn’t figure out why that we even needed those. It took all we could too to convince them that you can’t investigate a firearm injury without an x-ray. You just can’t. I don’t care what you want to say about it. I don’t care who saw what. You really need an x-ray-

Dave: [00:30:37] Right.

Mark: [00:30:38] -because there could be still a bullet in there. You think you know what happened, but you don’t know what happened.

Dave: [00:30:43] Yeah.

Mark: [00:30:44] So, digital x-rays have been a real big help and now they’re affordable. So, even the smaller agencies often have one, and you can take a whole bunch of x-rays.

Dave: [00:31:09] We have a lot of law enforcement and first responders that listen to our podcast. What are some things as a medical examiner with tons of experience? Are there things that you wish were being taught in police academies and ongoing training with law enforcement that would really aid you when you get called out to a scene and then you have to do your follow-up work?

Mark: [00:31:34] I always advise people, especially in the emergency rooms, those people are really good at what they do. God bless them. They save people. But they should not tell people what entrances and exits are. They should quit doing that. They should quit making these kinds of statements that so often are wrong. The investigation will find out that they weren’t even close. They think because they see a lot of gunshot wounds coming through the ER that they know what happened. No, they know what to do about it. They know how to help the person, but they don’t actually look at the wound itself. That’s what I do.

Dan: [00:32:14] So, these are all things that come up in court, I imagine. If you’ve got statements from ER personnel or other law enforcement personnel who are putting statements in reports and then it contradicts what you found at the autopsy, I would imagine that that is just ripe pickings for a defense attorney.

Mark: [00:32:33] Oh, yeah. I’ve had that happen a whole bunch of times. I’ve had defense attorneys try to blame the surgeons, because they tried to save the person. Now they can’t figure out why the person died. I’ve seen all of that stuff. But it’s easily overcome, really. It’s easy to explain things to juries, because juries aren’t stupid. I think a lot of people think juries are some– maybe just don’t know what they’re doing. They’re intelligent people. When you just talk to them plainly, this is what happened to the dead person. That’s my job in the courtroom. I don’t get any reward if the defendant is convicted.

Dan: [00:33:09] Right.

Mark: [00:33:10] It doesn’t help me any. I’m not there to convict him. In fact, him or her. Because if they got the wrong person, I don’t want to be part of the whole thing.

Dan and Dave: [00:33:19] Right.

Mark: [00:33:20] My job is to tell the jury or the judge, what happened to the deceased person as clearly and concisely as I can in words that people understand. Sometimes, medical and scientific terms go over some people’s heads, but I can explain it in kind of a Midwestern kid and say, “This is how this happened.” They’ll nod. You can see the jurors, they’ll nod. They get it, “Okay, now I’m on the same page with you. That’s my job.”

Dave: [00:33:48] Have you had any memorable showdowns in court?

Mark: [00:33:51] Oh, yeah. I had a case where the prosecution really wanted the photographs. You’re probably experienced with this, where the defense gets all the photographs eliminated, because they’re prejudicial.

Dave: [00:34:06] Right.

Mark: [00:34:06] But they don’t tell me that. I show up and I start to talk about the injuries, and I’ll say something about, “Well, you can see this on the photograph or something like that.” And they’re like, “You know, then there’s a big sidebar and everybody’s yelling at everybody.”

Dave: [00:34:20] Right.

Mark: [00:34:21] So, the prosecutor goes, “Well, Dr. Super, don’t you think it would better for you if you had the pictures?” And the judge just slammed his gavel down, and he threatens to send this DA out to fix parking tickets for the next six years. It’s a big old thing. Well, then he does it again. About five minutes later, he insinuates that pictures will better. So, that was it.

Dave: [00:34:46] Oh, yeah.

Mark: [00:34:46] I got hauled into chambers. It’s a child death. And so, there’s an easel there with my diagrams. And the judge goes, “Dr. Super, do you think you can testify to these by this diagram?” And I’m going, “Well, I can.” It’s not a matter of what I know. I said, “I think I can explain these injuries based on these diagrams.” Obviously, the photographs help. He says, “I know, I know, I know,” and he explains to me why they’re not going to get in. So, then we go back out, and I’m going to start my discussion with my diagrams. Well, no, a jurors passed a note to the judge saying he’d like to see pictures. Oh, my God.

[laughter]

Mark: [00:35:31] More gavels, more pounding, more yelling.

Dave: [00:35:34] Sometimes, I think some of those rulings are, the judge doesn’t want to see that stuff. I’m not allowing it because I don’t want to deal with it. I can understand how in a kid case, that would be cumulative and a little bit prejudicial. I understand horrific pictures there is testifying to those types of things. You have to be sensitive to what you’re explaining, but at the same time, this is the facts about what this person did to this person. Let’s talk about it. That’s what we’re here for.

Dan: [00:36:07] Yeah. So, I’m always curious when I see a certain cadre of medical examiners who end up being expert witnesses for the defense, and that I would imagine that you have experience in being a rebuttal witness or defense brings an expert in to rebut what you’ve determined during your autopsy. Can you talk about what that experience is like for you?

Mark: [00:36:36] I hate it. I don’t plan on doing much of it. I guess, it’s not helpful. Everyone deserves their time. They deserve a representation of their opinions. We’re supposed to be criticizing each other just as professionals, which I don’t like. I don’t like to testify that this other pathologist is wrong and they’re insinuate that they’re dumb or that they’re sloppy. I don’t like that.

Dave: [00:37:06] A lot of people only come across a dead body a couple of times in their life. For someone who sees death, and destruction, and harm, and people being maimed so often, I’m wondering, how does dealing with death as frequently as you do? How does it affect you?

Mark: [00:37:26] The psychological part of this started with me in my fellowship. So, you become a pathologist. In order to be a forensic pathologist, you have to be a general pathologist first, so you go to residency for that. And then the navy, fortunately sent me to Washington, D.C. to become a forensic pathologist. There was only one slot in the whole world that was open and they chose me to go there.

Dave: [00:37:49] Wow.

Mark: [00:37:50] It was 1984, 1985, when I was actually doing full time forensic pathology, and that was in Baltimore, in Washington, D.C., in the city. I stuffed myself around six months, eight months into it, and I coined the term in my own head was tired eyes. I felt like worn out. I was starting to get emotionally detached from things. It just seemed near the end of my fellowship, I went through this kind of veil where one part of my brain just set all this emotional stuff aside, and I realized somebody at the scene has to be the person going, “This is what we have to do. We have to get this, we have to do this, we have to do this.” We can’t worry about how things look and how sad everybody is and how distraught all the families are and the community is. Somebody has to be the person that’s going to get all this information down and get it right-

Dave: [00:38:44] Absolutely.

Mark: [00:38:45] -and get it documented, because we want somebody to go down for this if it’s crime. I could be the one that has to do that. So, I was able to put that aside. It worked for years and years and years. But now, as I’m going to retire here in a few weeks after all this time.

Dave: [00:39:03] Congratulations.

Dan: [00:39:04] Congratulations.

Mark: [00:39:05] Thank you. And it’s started to affect me again.

Dave: [00:39:09] I’m not surprised, to be honest.

Mark: [00:39:11] It’s creeping up.

Dave: [00:39:13] Yeah.

Mark: [00:39:13] So, it’s really time for me to get out.

Dave: [00:39:15] Yeah. I think sometimes the box that we all stuff it in gets a little disorganized and the lid pops open sometimes.

Mark: [00:39:23] Yes.

Dave: [00:39:24] How do you deal with it, and how does your family and close friends deal with what you handle on a day-to-day basis in life for the last 40 plus years?

Mark: [00:39:35] Well, my individual family– My wife just recently died.

Dan: [00:39:42] Ah, I’m sorry to hear that.

Mark: [00:39:43] She was an investigator, so she knew what I did. We met when I was an ME. My first wife, you can see I just got detached. Those kinds of things that happen to you. It didn’t help my marriage. Let’s put it that way.

Dave: [00:39:58] Right.

Mark: [00:39:59] But the other people in your life, they want you to entertain them at parties. Anybody noticed that?

Dave: [00:40:07] It’s the genesis of our podcast, honestly. Tell me a story.

Mark: [00:40:10] Yes. What’s the goriest thing you’ve ever seen, that kind of thing. I have two cases or three cases that I throw out there because they were so cool, and the autopsy changed everything. But I don’t like to go into the dismembered people and the kids that are starved. I did the kids that were starved and beaten and left in the storage bin in Reading that case. It was horrific. And then I’m autopsying them at Christmas at that time and I have my own kids. So, it has been brutal on my psyche over 40 years. But other people love to hear about that stuff. They just do. I’m a hit at parties.

Dave: [00:40:58] It’s one of the things that we talk about. I say, when I go to a dinner party or I’m at a barbecue with folks, there can be all kinds of people with much more esteemed credentials than I have. But typically, firefighters and cops and medical staff, people who work in hospitals especially, get acute cases. We get asked a lot about, “Well, tell me about your job.” You usually have the most interesting stories at these types of functions, so people tend to want to ask about things, but there is a proper way to ask those things.

Mark: [00:41:37] Yeah. Sometimes, I’m at the party to get away from that.

Dave: [00:41:42] Right.

Mark: [00:41:43] So, now I’m back immersed in it all and bringing it all back in my own brain.

Dave: [00:41:49] Can’t escape.

Mark: [00:41:49] Yes.

Dave: [00:41:51] Yeah. What’s the rest of your day look like? Are you doing anything that you enjoy in your job, or are you stuck doing the mundane?

Mark: [00:42:00] Well, I’m no longer doing any autopsies in Merced County. I’m semi-retired now and just closing cases. By the end of the month, I’m ready to get on to being a grandpa.

Dave: [00:42:13] Well, that’s well deserved, sir.

Mark: [00:42:15] Thank you.

Dan: [00:42:16] Do you have a favorite baseball team?

Mark: [00:42:18] Well, right now it’s a Giants, but I’m a homer. So, when I moved back down to San Diego, I was a big Padre fan in the day before I moved up to Northern California. Then I became a rabid Giant fan.

Dan: [00:42:29] Yeah.

Mark: [00:42:29] And now I can see me in a couple of years being a Padre fan again. We’ll see. But right now, it’s the Giants all.

Dave: [00:42:36] We’re both Dodger fans.

Mark: [00:42:37] Uh-oh. Oh-oh. You mean the scum-sucking Dodgers?

[laughter]

Dan: [00:42:46] That’s great.

Dave: [00:42:47] Dr. Super, really appreciate your time. I know you’re busy, and I hope you enjoy your retirement, and get away from it all.

Mark: [00:42:56] Thank you very much.

Dan: [00:42:58] Thank you for so many years of service for our country and the county that you served.

Mark: [00:43:02] Thank you. Appreciate it.

Dave: [00:43:07] On the next episode of The Briefing Room–

Lindsey: [00:43:10] With a lot of these child abduction suspects, when they’re interviewed, they will say the victim was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn’t like this perpetrator was out stalking them or had been watching them or picked them out ahead of time. It literally was they’re looking for a victim and the victim presented themselves.

Dan: [00:43:31] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

[music]

Yeardley: [00:43:37] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:44:02] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you, our fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Dan: [00:00:04] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:00:09] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:00:17] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:00:19] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: [00:00:21] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[Briefing Room theme playing]

Dave: [00:00:36] Welcome, friends to The Briefing Room. Today, we have a special guest, and we have an open seat at the table. My brother, Detective Dan is actually not with me today. Fear not. If you’re a fan of our sister show, Small Town Dicks, you’ll hear a familiar voice today. But for those who don’t know him, I’m thrilled to introduce my friend, Paul Holes. Paul has had a long and storied career as a forensic investigator. But for law enforcement folks, it’s important to point out how different Paul Holes is as an investigator that he has a wealth of knowledge in the science of evidence and DNA. He has a wealth of knowledge in crime scene investigation. He’s also been an administrator and made policy. Paul has a range and agility that we don’t typically see in law enforcement. He’s got a dog named Cora. Welcome, Paul Holes.

Paul: [00:01:35] [laughs] Hey, Dave. How are you?

Dave: [00:01:37] I’m doing well. It’s good to see you. I appreciate you coming on.

Paul: [00:01:41] Of course.

Dave: [00:01:42] I really wanted to talk to you about, one, over the years, we’ve probably piecemealed your resume together, Paul, but never really gotten into step one. If you would, just walk us through how someone becomes a forensic analyst. I’m probably butchering the term, but entry level all the way up through your last assignment, walk us through your special assignments and what each of those contributed to an investigation.

Paul: [00:02:09] Yeah. I actually was drawn to the field of forensics at an early age. It was from a TV show, Quincy, this pathologist that not only was he doing autopsies, but he was going to the crime scenes, he was interviewing suspects, and I was just so hooked. Of course, that’s not the role of a real pathologist in this day and age. But it really was formative in terms of how I approached my career because I wanted to have the involvement across the spectrum of the cases that I was going to be working. But with the idea that I was going to become a pathologist, I thought, “Well, I’m going to have to go to medical school.”

[00:02:48] So, I ended up attending UC Davis out there near Sacramento, California, and got a degree in biochemistry. And to be frank, my grades weren’t up to snuff to actually get into medical school. I didn’t know what I was going to do after I graduated. But I stumbled across a job posting for Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office for their crime lab.

Dave: [00:03:13] Contra Costa County is in the San Francisco Bay area.

Paul: [00:03:16] Yeah, and it was a position at the time called Forensic Toxicologist. I got hired on as a forensic toxicologist and was doing controlled substance analysis. You get the little dime baggie with white powder. Well, what is that white powder? Is it methamphetamine? Is it cocaine? Is it heroin? Is it salt?

Dave: [00:03:38] It’s important to note that these bags have all kinds of chemicals in them that aren’t a part of the original process.

Paul: [00:03:44] Absolutely. But my role was to identify, is there a controlled substance and what is that controlled substance? And that involved, of course, presumptive tests. At the time, we were doing microcrystalline tests on the common controlled substances such as cocaine and meth, but also instrumental analysis. So, I got very well versed within the science of doing this type of work. Then I was assigned to the alcohol unit and this is where now I’m testing blood and urine samples for alcohol content, percentage of alcohol for typically, DUI cases, but also for cause of death determinations. If we had somebody that had a lot of alcohol in their system in the morgue, as well as maintaining the breath testing instruments throughout the county, and would go in and testify to alcohol impairment. So, I had to become what in California was known as a forensic alcohol supervisor.

[00:04:39] A lot of studying about the biology of alcohol, the metabolism of alcohol, the impairing effects of alcohol. And then even put on an impairment test where I’ve had subjects that I had to dose up to a certain level. Get them to, let’s say, .708, which in California .08 blood alcohol concentration is considered too impaired to drive. And then have CHP officers coming in and do field sobriety tests on these subjects. We had different types of games that they would have to do, and we could see the degradation and the increase in impairment during this.

[00:05:18] My party trick is, is you tell me what your body weight is and how many drinks you’ve had and how long you’ve been drinking, and I can give a pretty good estimate as to what your blood alcohol concentration is. [laughs]

Dave: [00:05:29] Okay. And were you happy to move on from the alcohol supervisor position or–?

Paul: [00:05:36] Oh, God, yeah. [laughs] I was bored out of my skull. I was stuck in the lab learning the subject matter. Developing the expertise was interesting, but once you get into just testing stuff over and over and over again in the lab, thousands of samples over the course of a year, it’s mundane work. I get bored. I don’t do bored well. With my crime lab, there was a different facility where the criminalist worked. These were the individuals that would go out to crime scenes, as well as working at the time in the serology unit, ABO testing, enzyme testing, firearms, trace, and were the ones that were getting involved with doing what I really wanted to do.

[00:06:26] So, I applied to become a criminalist. My agency was the last agency in the entire state of California that required criminalists to be sworn officers. So, I got hired and I was sent out to the police academy. [laughs]

Dave: [00:06:42] Cop camp.

Paul: [00:06:42] Cop camp.

Dave: [00:06:43] How long was the academy back then? We’re talking like the 1940s or 1950s, right?

Paul: [00:06:47] Oh, good God. [laughs] I’m not quite that old. No, this would have been 1994 and it was five months long, which at the time that was lengthy, but then people would criticize the length of the police academy saying, “It’s not long enough. If you want to become, what is it, a barber, [laughs] you have to spend so much more time than what the academy is.” But it was absolutely invaluable experience in terms of– I never worked patrol, but I got exposed to patrol aspects. You start learning case law, of course, all the various defensive tactics, use of force scenarios and going through that. So, that gave me an advantage over, let’s say, a civilian forensic scientist who is never exposed to something like that. And so, it’s a foreign world more to them than what it is to me.

Dave: [00:07:52] Understood. Yeah, you don’t have the experience until you get out there on the streets. Really, for me, it was eye opening. Dan made this statement the other day on a podcast we appeared, he said, “You know, you can go to the academy for four months, five months, six months, however long it is. You learn more in a week on the streets than you do in months in the academy.” It’s just because there’s no way to expose people to– The things that we see on the street cannot be simulated in an academy scenario.

Paul: [00:08:26] Yeah, I can completely appreciate that. I know part of what was a benefit of becoming a sworn officer is because now I was going out into the field, out to the crime scenes, I’m showing up with a badge and gun. The investigators who may not know me, at least I was seen as one of them versus here’s somebody who doesn’t have the same set of experiences, if you will.

Dave: [00:08:58] Right.

Paul: [00:08:58] So, that always was helpful. But after graduating the academy, I was over in the criminalistics unit. I was assigned to the serology unit as well as the CSI unit. And so, I was doing screening for physiological fluids, typically blood, semen, saliva, though we also looked for other types of tissues, as well as at the time was doing ABO testing and the various protein tests in order to try to show, yes, let’s say, a bloodstain found at a crime scene has the same biological markers as the suspect that has been arrested. At the time, we were also just starting out the DNA discipline. And so, I got on board in doing forensic DNA testing from pretty much the very beginning of forensic DNA technology.

Dave: [00:09:50] Is that because you’ve recognized the utility of it?

Paul: [00:09:52] Well, of course, the people working in the lab had recognized it. And then that was the direction that forensics was going across the nation. I just happened to be hired on right when it was starting, just being developed within the laboratories. This is not the old technology. This is now the very beginning of this PCR-based technology that really increased sensitivity of the DNA testing. It’s the reason why we can go after such small samples today. So, I got the exposure of doing all of this biological testing, as well as going out to crime scenes.

[00:10:30] Criminalists, we were the sledgehammer. When we are being called out in my county, we are going out to homicides, officer involved shootings, the most complicated cases out there. Having both the in-lab experience dealing with physical evidence as well as seeing the physical evidence in situ out there at the crime scene. There’s nothing that really can compare to that type of experience, because I can bring my scientific expertise out into the field and know how I need to document and collect a certain item of evidence, because I know how it’s going to be examined in the lab. That’s part of the advantage of this type of model versus having forensic scientists who do good work inside the lab, but they never have been out in the field or you have CSIs who have never done the actual testing in the lab. So, that’s where I developed both the field expertise, as well as the in-lab expertise. It just was absolutely critical.

Dave: [00:11:34] You’re kind of an alien in our world. [Paul laughs] We don’t get that kind of scope of knowledge. Most people get in one discipline and stay in that lane until it’s retirement time, a few special assignments in between. But most people don’t have quite the experience you do. So, I think it’s worth noting. Do you remember one of your first really bad crime scenes, when you’re bright eyed and optimistic and had no ounce of skepticism or cynicism?

Paul: [00:12:05] Yeah, I’ll say my first case that I went out on, it was a homicide case. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but of course, it’s the first time I’m being exposed to a homicide. It was a shooting in the backyard on the west end of our county. When I got out there, the victim’s body had already been removed. Paramedics had transported him, but half of his brain was still in the backyard. I’m looking at this going, there’s no way this guy should have– He was dead. There was that much brain matter that was just laying there. But he had been living in a trailer in this backyard. This is somewhat of a very impoverished area. On the stove was a pot that was filled with, at this time, solid wax.

[00:12:55] This was an interesting thing where in the lab, before I moved over to working these cases, I was seeing this bunk dope come in. It was wax that had been mixed with laundry detergent and made to look like crack cocaine. The laundry detergent somewhat mildly reacts with the presumptive test for cocaine. So, if somebody on the street were to try to do a little test, they go, “Oh, it is cocaine,” and then they buy it, right? Well, this guy was the source of this bunk dope. There is a reason he got killed. This is part of the street’s way of quality control. If you are going to sell bunk dope, eventually you are going to die. And so, that was seeing that play out from, both in the lab as well as out in the field.

[00:13:51] But then I go and this is my first autopsy, I go to his autopsy the next day and dealing with a dead body. He’s rigored up. And so, now I’m fascinated. But of course, it’s still that first experience. And so, it is surreal going, “This is a person that’s laying dead in front of me.” But after the autopsy, I was interested in the trajectory of the bullet that went into his skull. During autopsy, of course, the brain is removed and then all the organs are put into a bag and they’re put into the abdominal cavity and the body is sewn up. But I’m now taking a metal rod, trajectory rod, and I’m playing around with the entry hole. To this day, I can remember, because he had no brain inside his skull, when I would hit that rod on the other side of the back of his skull because he got shot in the right temple, there was this weird echo coming from inside his head. This is just part of that organic experience that as I’m now going out into the field and dealing with all sorts of situations with victims, that’s just part of the unnatural exposure that we get in the law enforcement world.

Paul: [00:15:27] So, now I’m hired, I’m going out doing crime scenes, doing homicides officer involved shootings, doing a lot of the meth labs that were going on. I’m in the lab assigned to the serology unit, and then had the fortune as part of my training to be assigned to different forensic disciplines. So, I got training in latent prints, training in trace, in firearms. I was going out with our CSI to property crimes. So, I got to see the spectrum of your burglaries. Over the course of time in working in this field, I found that the CSI work was really– I love that much more than the in-the-lab type of work. But I also found that I was drawn to wanting to do more for the case. This is in part where I’m doing the CSI work, crime scene investigation. I took that as, “Okay, I’m not just merely here to document and collect evidence.” I’m not a technician. I’m a high-level expert after a few years of doing this. But I want to do more. I want to be involved in the case. I want to work side by side with the homicide investigators, and that’s what I ultimately did.

[00:16:40] This is part of now for those CSIs that are listening, really take a look at what are you contributing to the case. You have high levels of expertise in what the evidence is saying about what happened, but are you conveying that to the investigators early on? Is there a collaboration? There should be a collaboration as they’re talking to witnesses, as they’re talking to suspects, they need to know what the crime scene is saying. That is a must. Don’t be a technician. And then I took it a step further, and that’s when I for the unsolved older cases, I decided, “You know what? I’m going to start investigating those cases.” I was fortunate that I, through casework, had become tight with a couple of outstanding homicide investigators, John Conaty and Raymond Giacomelli.

[00:17:36] In many ways, I learned the trade from these guys that knew their shit, and I applied their expertise, and what I learned from them to the cases that I was looking at. That’s how I transitioned. Even though I was a forensic scientist and a CSI, I transitioned into an investigative capacity, but my department didn’t know I was doing that.

[laughter]

Dave: [00:18:03] It’s no policy violation. Now, you’re retired, right? So, you don’t have to worry about anything?

Paul: [00:18:08] [chuckles] I don’t have to worry about a thing. It’s out there. [laughs]

Dave: [00:18:11] I think it’s worked out all right for you. Going back to those first few grisly crime scenes and trying to explain what your body’s feeling. I remember the first deceased body I saw as a patrol officer and it was someone who was on hospice care at their house. Typically, we wouldn’t go to those, but they sent me because I was brand new baby cop. I remember going out there and just feeling this heavy weight on me like, “Don’t screw this up. This is the family’s last memory of this person. Make sure you do everything properly.” There was nothing to prepare me for the gravity of that situation. This was an expected death. Nothing like a violent, unexpected death to put a Paul over a scene and over family members who are outside the tape waiting for news. How do you handle that?

Paul: [00:19:15] I think part of handling death, as I was going through and getting my degree at UC Davis, I was spending a lot of time at the medical library looking at the pathology books and seeing the imagery of death in all of its forms. Just seeing the imagery is shocking. Especially, as a young man, now I’m really confronting my own mortality as I’m looking at how people die, what it looks like, what the death process is like. But seeing it on in a picture versus seeing it out in the field is very different, because now you have three dimensions, now you have smells, now you have emotional situations, you have a gunshot victim in the middle of the street, crime scene tape up, and then mom comes up to the crime scene, and is wailing. You’re recognizing, this is a real person.

[00:20:11] There are loved ones that are impacted by the violence that occurred. And then horrible situations involving innocent victims inside their own homes, and you see the violence that they suffered, but you also see the photos hanging up on the wall of them alive. And that to this day has an impact, because I would spend hours with the victim’s bodies documenting, looking at them, collecting evidence, but going through their house and seeing how they lived and correlating looking at the person laying on the ground dead and seeing them smiling and laughing in a family photo, it screws with you. The way to deal with it, the way I dealt with it is typical, is you compartmentalize. You shut that emotion off and go, “I’m here to do a job.”

[00:21:07] That’s where we’ve had many discussions about you do this over and over, where you just shove that emotional and psychological state into your brain, and then never let it out again. You just keep shoving more and more in there until eventually, it’s going to come out, whether you like it or not.

Dave: [00:21:26] Well, yeah, [chuckles] it happens. I think back to your comment about seeing someone who’s deceased on the floor and looking up at a family photo where everything is fine and everyone’s happy. I used to feel the gravity of those situations. I’d say, “Man, an hour ago this guy was alive.” For me, personally, I felt very humble in those situations. I felt like I was trespassing a lot of times, because this person’s family had no idea there was going to be a team of cops and investigators in their house hours later that night when they woke up. Those scenes, just the gravity. There’s a lot of emotion at those scenes, even when there’s not family around. I’m rethinking, “What did this person go through in their last moments? What were they thinking? When was the last good day they had?” I think about all those things and I’m an overthinker, but all that stuff goes in the box too.

Paul: [00:22:22] It does. There is a component of rage how could somebody do this to the victim. Like, one case, which is a tough one, was a murder suicide. Father walked into his 15-year-old daughter’s room, gave her a hug, and while he’s hugging her, he blew her brains out with the .357. Then he walks out into the hallway and kills himself. And so, now I’m in the daughter’s room. You got the posters of the boy bands on the wall, and the unicorns, and all of that. Processing, going through this pelo, looking for the bullet that exited out of her head, but also reading as high schoolers do, the notes that she had written to a girlfriend or had received from a girlfriend, talking about a boy. All the excitement that this girl was going to experience in her life and her dad took it away from her. I was like, “Why?”

[00:23:24] He had some mental issues. He left a taped suicide on VHS tape, and basically, God was calling him home and he felt that, “Well, if God wants me, my daughter has to come with me.” It’s just so tragic. If I start drinking, I’ll rage. It’s not a good look, but that’s where everything starts to come out. I think for people who are wanting to get into the field, and I’ve sat people down and talked to them. It’s very rewarding. The work is great, but you will see the worst that people intentionally do to each other, and it will have an impact on you as a person. So, you have to dig down, do some soul searching to figure out, “Do you want to have that kind of negative consequence on your view of the world?” I have had people who thought about it and they said, “No, I think I’m going to go a different direction with my career.”

Dave: [00:24:43] Tell me how that felt. While you’re out there, the first time you see somebody’s brain sitting beside them, you’re like, “I should never see that body part.” That doesn’t make sense and you’re sitting there trying to figure out this Rubik’s Cube of emotions going, “How do I deal with what I’m seeing right now?” It’s really important for us to highlight that cops are just like everyone else that this stuff does affect us. We just have really strong boxes, but every once in a while, the seams burst.

Paul: [00:25:13] For sure. I think getting back to the coping mechanisms. When you see officers out at the crime scene and maybe they’re not primary investigators or the CSIs, but they are perimeter security and they’re talking about something else, that in many ways is them shutting the door about what they are seeing out there. They’re seeing that victim laying out there and it’s like, “Nope, I am going to direct my attention to something completely different. Hey, we’re going to go fishing.” And so, they completely shut the door on what they are experiencing by diverting to something else.

Dave: [00:25:53] Yeah. I’ve seen it. Especially on kid cases that there are certain cops that do not want to deal with kid cases. They will drive the opposite direction to avoid getting sent to a call involving children. So, we’re human just like everyone else. Some people don’t have a tolerance for a certain type of crime. I always understood that A, as a patrol cop, then a detective, then a sergeant, I understand some things are outside of people’s comfort zones. If I can keep that person in their comfort zone by avoiding them having to go to something that I know they’re not good with, I’m going to try to do that, or at least if they get sent to that, I’m going to relieve them as soon as I can.

[00:26:35] It’s realizing you’ve got humans out there wearing guns and badges and going out, having to do things that everybody watches or hears about on TV the next day that these cops are right in the middle of it, and they’re having to adjust, and be versatile with how they deal with this kind of stress.

Paul: [00:26:54] Well, and different people have different capabilities to deal with the various situations. I know we made it a practice. If we had a child that was going to be autopsied, I would try to assign somebody who didn’t have kids themselves, because now you have that personal association. If you’re watching a child being autopsied, you can’t help, but think about your own child laying there on the morgue table. I have personal experience of– It was a hostage situation, and a father held his two little girls hostage before he blew their brains out and then he killed himself.

[00:27:34] Working that scene, they were at the same age as my kids roughly at that time, and seeing the same shoes that my son had at home that one of the girls had, or seeing a baby bottle that had brain and blood matter on it going, “This isn’t right.” Because I had kids of the same age, there is that emotional connection. So, when I’m going home and I’m seeing those same shoes, I’m flashing back to the scene of what I was experiencing there. And of course, that impacts me at home and as a person.

Dave: [00:28:08] Yeah, “What’s your problem tonight, dad?” “Well, I saw some shit today that I’m not going to ever tell you about.”

Paul: [00:28:15] Yeah. And for sure, I didn’t have anybody at that point in my life that I could ever talk to about what I had just gone through. It just got bottled up. If I had shut down, sometimes the relationship struggles increased because I was not engaging. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but now I recognize, well, that is part of the impact of dealing with all these different cases is that it impacts you as a person. It impacts your quality of life. No question about it.

Dave: [00:28:47] We all understand it. I have never faulted people for getting into the job and then realizing, this is not what I thought it was going to be. More power to you. It’s the folks who never consider what they might experience. They’re like, “I didn’t think I was going to have to deal with dead bodies.” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, but you probably shouldn’t be a first responder.” If you don’t want to deal with people in tragedy, go do something else. Keeping that in mind, we talk about the true crime genre, and I hear that a lot, true crime. You’ve done something that I really like and you’ve characterized what folks who acutely experience crime as being more of a real crime rather than true crime genre. Can you get into that?

Paul: [00:29:34] Yeah, this was something– because of course, I’ve got a lot of public notoriety in the true crime genre and going through working on the TV side, doing the podcasting, going to the true crime conferences, one of the things that really started to stand out to me is that people who are consuming this content, oftentimes, they’re consuming content from other people who are really just like them. They’ve never experienced the realities that you and I have gone through. I started thinking about it going, yes, I very much am in the true crime genre, but I come out of real crime. I recognize that these are real cases that are being talked about. Typically, in true crime, it’s a homicide case. A victim has had their life taken and oftentimes, in a horrific manner.

[00:30:33] Loved ones are impacted and there’re a lot of emotions that are involved, and sensitivities that need to be considered as the true crime story is being told about that case. And so, I came up with that differentiating term just to let the consumer know, number one, to give a level of authenticity to what I am involved with, but also to underscore, it’s okay to watch and listen to these stories. But consider– You always have to consider, real people have lost their lives and are still being impacted by it.

Dave: [00:31:17] I want to shift gears a little bit and get into some of the cold case work that you’ve done, both professionally and then now as a consultant as you’ve moved on from getting paid by your county. I would say that the work that was done on the Golden State Killer case, and we talk about genealogy, has revolutionized and really buoyed hope for a lot of people who are waiting for answers with their loved one’s death from decades ago. I was hoping you walk us through, your love of cold cases or dislike? What draws you to cold cases and what keeps you going? After disappointment, after disappointment to keep forging ahead, that kind of persistence is fairly rare in law enforcement that most people don’t stick with it.

Paul: [00:32:07] These cold cases, I did very early on. I just became fascinated with what is the answer. I was looking at cases 30 years old, 40 years old. When I first started doing cold cases, I was looking at cases as far back as the early 1960s. What drew me to the cold cases, to be frank, in part was ego. I was like, “Okay, they couldn’t solve it. I think I can solve it.”

Dave: [00:32:36] I’ll figure it out. Yeah.

Paul: [00:32:38] I’ll figure it out, right? Quite frankly, these cases are very humbling. I’ve had the big success with Golden State Killer. That was a team effort, but I was a primary component of why that case was solved. That success is something I’m very proud of and I’ve had other successes. But I have failed more often than I’ve succeeded. That’s the humbling aspect. After I’ve gone through this, I’m now recognizing, “Oh, yeah, I shouldn’t be critical of the original investigators because I failed just like they did.” There’s the ego side, there’s the solving the puzzle. This is where working cases is very complex. Human dynamics are at play. The inter individual variability, the behaviors, the interpretation of physical evidence, the applying of new technology to evidence that is degraded over time, there’re so many complexities there. I like that challenge. So, that’s also part of it.

[00:33:38] The cases that I go after are generally the whodunits. There often is no association between the offender and the victim. Traditional investigations, you work the victim’s social circles. You work with who’s closest to the victims and start working out from there and then find, “Oh, yeah, the killer is somebody the victim knew.” Those are relatively easy to solve. You hear some of these investigators, got 100% solve rate. I guarantee what they’re working domestic violence, and they’re working gang bang homicides. [laughs]

Dave: [00:34:14] I have always remarked about that. I’m like, “Wow.” To have that kind of clearance rate is, to me, a practitioner, shocking. I live in a small town of 60,000 plus people. I call that a small town. And in my short career, I’ve got a couple of homicides that I want answers on. I don’t know if I’m going to get them because of what we did or didn’t get at our first shot at the crime scene. So, the frustration level that I have on those talk to me in about 30 years and I’ll probably still be frustrated. That kind of payoff coming decades later has to be frustrating for you and for the families going, “This is never going to get solved.”

Paul: [00:35:00] Yeah. And that’s the big realization. When I first started getting into cold cases, there was a selfish component. Again, ego the challenge, let’s see what I can do. But with these cases, as I started investigating them, I’m getting out in the field, I’m knocking on doors, I’m talking to victim’s loved ones, the family members, mothers who lost their daughters or daughters are missing and have never been found. Even after 30 years, the family still cares. They want an answer. That really when I started interacting, even in Golden State Killer with either the surviving victims of sexual assault or family members who DeAngelo killed, they needed an answer. Prior to getting an answer, they were still traumatized to this day. They are still traumatized to this day, even knowing who their attacker was or who killed their loved one. That is where it’s for the general public, they look at these old cases as– Well, it’s history. But the families, the loved ones, it doesn’t matter how old it is. It’s like, it happened yesterday.

Dave: [00:36:16] I was going to say it just happened to them.

Paul: [00:36:18] Yeah. I even had one analyst. I got word that one of my analysts who was responsible for assigning DNA case workout was not assigning the requests on these older cases. Her response was, “The family’s waited this long. They can wait longer.” It’s just like, “No, that’s somebody who is too detached from the reality of what these cases mean to the families.”

Dave: [00:36:48] That same line of thinking is opposite of my thinking. Those types of tragedies don’t leave families. They think about them every day. So, any answer you can give them saves them another day of that torture.

Paul: [00:37:03] Part of what I’ve experienced is many of them just want to know that somebody cares about the case and is working the case. In some situations, they recognize that they’re likely never going to get an answer. But the fact that I would take my time to try to work the case to get them an answer, they often are very appreciative because what generally happens is these older cases, nobody is working them. The family is frustrated and they recognize, “We’ll never get answer. We’ll never get justice for our loved one.

Dave: [00:37:52] When you, Paul Holes, agree to at least give a once-over on a case, how does that happen? Do they send you a case file, they send you all the reports? How do you really get into one of these that you’re consulting on that wasn’t in the files at Contra Costa Sheriff’s Office?

Paul: [00:38:10] It comes to me in many different ways. This is just an example right here. I just literally opened this letter up, handwritten letter that was snail mailed to me, and it’s a homeless woman who is asking for help. I won’t go into the details of her situation. But I do have families, because they’ve either listened to me, they’ve watched me, they’ve read my book, and they think I might be able to do something that the current assigned investigating agency can’t do or bring a different set of expertise or skills that they think would be helpful. I have law enforcement reach out to me, and I do consult with law enforcement on a routine basis, and they’re asking for my insights on cases, usually on the technology side.

[00:39:04] But I just recently did, in essence, a crime scene reconstruction and an investigative overview for a case and gave them some thoughts that they’re going, “Oh, this has just reenergized our investigation.” So, I’ve typically gravitated towards cases that are either serial predator cases or there is that interpersonal aspect to the case between the offender and the victim that escalated up to violence that I can sink my teeth into utilizing my various skill sets. But I got so many requests through social media to take a look at cases, I just had to stop responding. I couldn’t keep up with the volume. I can only do so much.

Dave: [00:39:51] I understand that you get approached a lot, but it’s important for people to understand that you no longer are a credentialed law enforcement officer. You don’t have access to all the databases we had.

Paul: [00:40:04] It’s so frustrating. [laughs]

Dave: [00:40:05] The day we left, we still had logins. Two minutes after we left the building, they were all revoked. If a citizen is wanting to get a case reopened, is there a little basic outline of things that they need to do up front? If they’re going to give the case to a private investigator or a consultant that we at least need the police reports, I need the medical examiner reports, all the paper things we are going to need, because until I get that, I’m really just speculating about everything else.

Paul: [00:40:40] Yeah. For anybody that’s trying to get a case reopened, where I’ve seen that work is first, be the squeaky wheel. Make your presence known to the investigating agency. Find out who the case is assigned to. If it’s an older case likely, there isn’t anybody assigned to it. But if you are persistent in communicating with the agency, there’s a good chance that that case will have an investigator’s name put to it. Just to, “Hey, eyeball this. This family member is just constantly calling in.” Ask for a face-to-face meeting. The higher up the chain of command you can meet with, the greater likelihood something is going to happen. The reality is is that you take a look at when you get to the highest authority within sheriff’s office or police department, the chief, the sheriff, even the DA, they’re politicians.

Dave: [00:41:39] They probably don’t know very much about the case that you’re referencing.

Paul: [00:41:42] They probably have never heard of the case. Even if they have been with that particular department their entire career, they don’t know that case. But if they see where, “Oh, family does care, and if I don’t act, family might go to the public. I now have investigative journalists calling me, TV news stations hitting us up.” They can recognize the liability there. I’ve seen that work for families to get a case, at least eyeballed again. As far as getting access to the case file, that’s hard. If it’s an unsolved case, departments typically will say active investigation. And in many places, just by throwing out that term undercuts the FOIA, the Freedom of Information Act request or the Public Records Act requests. That’s where the family has to go, “Really? Is there an ongoing active investigation or is this case stale? Is nobody doing anything on it?”

[00:42:46] Because typically you submit a FOIA request in writing, and then the department on these unsolved cases. They have their lawyers respond citing these various codes and the reason that they’re not going to provide you the material that you want. That’s where you just need to push back. If they are trying to hide behind, it’s an ongoing, active investigation. Any communications that you’ve had with that department ahead of time, which is showing, oh, the part doesn’t even know about this case, that becomes important. So, I know I get frustrated, because there are cases that whether it be for various true crime shows or I just generally have an interest in thinking I can help out. I don’t get the case files, I don’t get the autopsy photos, the crime scene photos. And it’s like, “Well, I can’t do what I do without that.” I still see myself as being an insider, but I’m not. I know that. That’s what’s frustrating.

Dave: [00:43:49] It takes a while to come to grips with that. I was like, “Oh, they’re still my friends, but those were my partners. That was my family.” Once you’re outside it, it really does feel like you’re on the other side of the fence watching the concert outside the venue.

Paul: [00:44:02] Yeah, it’s very, very frustrating. But at least, when law enforcement reaches out, there’s already buy in on that level. And so, it’s in those situations where I typically will be able to get access. Even though I’m on the media side, when I consult on a case for law enforcement, that is just like, if I was working the case within law enforcement. I’m never running out and divulging sensitive information about that case or even that I’m involved in that case until, let’s say, the case is solved. It’s a good story and law enforcement goes, “Yeah, well, let’s do a podcast” or something like that.

Dave: [00:44:39] Yeah, absolutely. What does Paul Holes have coming up in his life? What are you working on right now? What are you looking forward to over the next few months?

Paul: [00:44:51] I will be at the CrimeCon, Orlando. I’m doing multiple things, but you’re going to be out there with me, as is Yeardley and Dan.

Dave: [00:44:58] You’re dragging me there kicking and screaming. [Paul laughs] But I’m actually excited. I just don’t know what to expect.

Paul: [00:45:04] Oh, you’ll have a good time and we have to figure out what we’re going to do. But I’m looking forward to that. I’m actually providing training and case consultation to an agency out in Texas. I’ll be out there at that agency for about a week. This was somebody they sent me a case to take a look at, and that’s the case I’ve mentioned before where I’ve reenergized their investigation. And so, I think they’re interested in having me eyeball some of their other unsolved cases. So, I’ll be doing that. There’re some potential TV projects that are in the works. But as I’ve seen on the TV side is there’s a lot of stuff that gets started and it never goes anywhere [Dave laughs] until something is actually in process and it looks like it’s going to be done. I can’t divulge what those TV projects are.

Dave: [00:45:56] Understood. Just going back to the one thing, that Texas case you’re referencing, you get a little bit of that warm, fuzzy back? That’s the stuff that keeps you coming back, right?

Paul: [00:46:07] Yeah. That’s where it’s going to be weird, probably for the listeners to hear this, but for me, reading a case file, a case that I am truly interested in, I get such a dopamine release. It’s more compelling than reading the best novel out there for me. I tunnel vision onto that case. Literally, I am just absorbing all the imagery, all the details of the case, and I’m thinking about that 24/7. It is a passion. And so, that’s where it allows me to experience what I used to experience daily before I retired. And so, yes, it’s like it brings me back. It’s like, “Okay, I’m doing what I love.”

Dave: [00:46:53] You get the taste of all those things you miss.

Paul: [00:46:55] Yep, for sure.

Dave: [00:46:56] Paul, I really appreciate your time. As always, I appreciate you, man.

Paul: [00:47:02] Hey, love you too. This has been great. And of course, you could have me on here anytime.

[music]

Dave: [00:47:12] On the next episode of The Briefing Room, do you remember the moment you put the scalpel in for the first time?

Speaker 5: [00:47:19] It was excitement. I’d watched a couple and I just felt like this was where I wanted to be. It just felt so natural that this is where my brain works. I was really thinking about medicine. To me, autopsies was medicine. So, I was thinking, I’m going to help other doctors, I’m going to help families figure out why somebody died. That was my thinking when I went into pathology in the first place.

Dave: [00:47:44] That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

Yeardley: [00:47:50] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[00:48:15] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production. And I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]

Yeardley: [00:00:02] Hey, podcast listeners, it’s Yeardley Smith, one of the hosts of Small Town Dicks, and I am so happy to welcome you to Season 2 of The Briefing Room. The episode you’re going to hear today is about child predators, and the many ways they prey on children, especially online. The conversation is packed with information and things to watch for, as well as advice. But some of the descriptions of how these people find and think about their victims will make your skin crawl. The discussion isn’t sensational in any way, but in order to illustrate how insidious these predators are, Detectives Dan, Dave, and their special guest, Roo Powell get into the belly of the beast. And we just want to warn you ahead of time, so you can take care when listening. Now here are Dan, Dave, and Roo to launch Season 2 of The Briefing Room.

Dan: [00:01:07] In police stations across the country, officers start their shifts in The Briefing Room.

Dave: [00:01:12] It’s a place where law enforcement can speak openly and candidly about safety, training, policy, crime trends, and more.

Dan: [00:01:20] We think it’s time to invite you in.

Dave: [00:01:22] So, pull up a chair.

Dan and Dave: Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[Briefing Room theme playing]

Dan: [00:01:38] Hello, David.

Dave: [00:01:39] Hello, Dan.

Dan: [00:01:40] And hello to you, listeners. Welcome to Season 2 of The Briefing Room. If you’re new here, this show is a spinoff of Small Town Dicks. Over there, we talk to detectives about the cases that are most important to them.

Dave: [00:01:52] Here, you’ll join us for a virtual ride along as we talk about the relationship between law enforcement and the community they’ve sworn to serve. Best practices, helpful tips, new ideas.

Dan: [00:02:03] Basically, we want to empower you by inviting you into a space where we can speak openly and freely about a job we saw as a calling.

Dave: [00:02:11] So, welcome to The Briefing Room. Today, you’re going to hear from a citizen activist who has turned a small online operation into a powerful tool to take down sex offenders. Roo Powell is the host of the docuseries, Undercover Underage, and the founder of a nonprofit, Safe from Online Sex Abuse or SOSA, a group aimed at preventing child abuse and exploitation. As a former detective who specialized in child sex abuse investigations, I have to say I really enjoy Roo’s work. Roo, great to have you here. Welcome.

Dan: [00:02:44] Hello, Roo.

Roo: [00:02:45] Oh, well, thank you for the kind words and thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Dave: [00:02:49] You might have seen her show, Undercover Underage. I watch it on Discovery. I think that’s where you’re found, correct?

Roo: [00:02:57] Yeah. You can stream us on Max now or formerly known as HBO Max.

Dave: [00:03:03] Awesome. Roo, can you walk us through how you got involved in what kind of amazing work your organization is doing?

Roo: [00:03:11] The SOSA, which stands for Safe from Online Sex Abuse. It’s a nonprofit organization that I started. Our goal is the end of the sex abuse of children in all its forms. Online sex abuse can seem really abstract and it feels new. I feel like I’m part of the first generation of parents that’s raising kids with smartphones. I didn’t have Snapchat or a smartphone when I was growing up. Most of us didn’t. And so, this is kind of a brave new world. It’s uncharted territory. When the three of us were kids, our parents were only worried about the people that were in close proximity to us. Is someone going to snatch me while I’m walking home from school? Is the softball coach creepy? It was limited to people that were in a geographical proximity to us.

[00:03:58] But now with the advent of the internet, a child can be abused without even being in the same room or the same state as a perpetrator. It could be happening from somebody on the other side of the country. And because of that, it can happen really quietly and silently, and it can go on for so long without anyone ever knowing because it’s not the same as hands on predation. We call it CSAM, Child Sex Abuse Material. Legally, it’s known as child pornography. Years ago, CP had to be handed off to people. You had to record it to a VHS tape or develop photos or send it in the mail. And that’s when law enforcement could intercept. It was a lot riskier then. Now it’s the click of a button. You can download it on an app or in a chat room or it’s really easy to get on the dark web.

[00:04:55] So, while I think the Internet is wonderful for a lot of things, it’s allowing the three of us to talk, it allows us to learn about news and cultures and talk to people in other countries, it’s also a really big avenue for bad actors to prey on children.

Dave: [00:05:10] Absolutely. And you have a child yourself?

Roo: [00:05:14] I do. I have three daughters.

Dave: [00:05:16] Okay. So, this is critical to you. You are definitely a stakeholder in what happens with all this stuff.

Roo: [00:05:24] Yeah. I think you don’t have to be a parent to care deeply about the world’s most vulnerable population. I think that even when they are adults, I’ll still be doing this work as long as I’m effective. I’ll set up my laptop in a nursing home if I have to.

Dave: [00:05:43] [laughs]

Dan: [00:05:45] How did you get involved in the work that you do?

Roo: [00:05:49] I’ve always cared about issues that affect either kids or vulnerable populations, whether that’s been– I’m a career long writer, so I’ve written about sex trafficking, and I traveled and spent some time in brothels talking with investigators, or I’ve written about the refugee crisis, or various topics that affect kids. I was working in the tech space with a company that was working online safety. Online safety, there’s a lot of things that are covered in online safety, including school shooting threats, and bullying, and lots of things that happen now that we’re introducing smartphones to kids. But what I was noticing a lot of is online abuse.

[00:06:34] I knew that my peers didn’t quite get it. You hear about a bad guy online, but maybe you’re only worried about if you only hear about the stories where somebody crosses the country to pick a kid up and then they’re arrested. But it’s so much more ubiquitous than that. I really wanted to be able to demonstrate the pervasiveness of online predation. So, at that company, I was running a team and I said, “Let’s just put a pretend minor online to demonstrate what happens,” because we had seen it happen. But you don’t want to exploit a real child. There was a part of me that said, “This kid with this case with the FBI, all I have to do is print out this conversation, hand it to every parent,” and every parent’s going to go, “Whoa, wait a minute, I need to think twice about online safety.”

[00:07:23] So, I ran a team of designers and writers. We put a very aged, down version of me online, and that got a stupid amount of hits. Even working in that space, it was just absolutely shocking. It wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as we’re doing it now. It was like two pictures on one account. I wrote a piece about it, that piece went viral, and I ended up leaving that company because I really wanted to focus on online sex abuse as opposed to just generic online safety. As I was working on this, I had a couple cases that I was actively working on because surprise-surprise, you put a kid online, and all of a sudden, there are bad guys and you do have to deal with law enforcement.

[00:08:13] One case went federal, and then I decided I would start SOSA. And then in the midst of that, a production company approached me and said, “Hey, really like the work that you’re doing. Can we follow you around with a camera?” My first reaction was, “No, that’s super weird.” [Dave laughs] But then they explained, “Hey, think about your mission and think about the fact that you could be reaching one million people per week talking about this thing that you care about, that people need to know about.” And I was like, “Damn, that sold me.” So, we filmed Season 1 of Undercover Underage. We filmed Season 2 of Undercover Underage, and that premiered earlier this year.

[00:08:59] I think that what Undercover Underage has been able to do, this is our decoy work. We do a lot of things at SOSA, but this is the sexiest stuff. This is the stuff that people want to know, the Chris Hansen-esque stuff.

Dan: [00:09:12] And for our listeners, Chris Hansen, a legend is from the show To Catch a Predator.

Roo: [00:09:17] Yes, to see that one were effective. We partner with law enforcement from the beginning. So, we’re working hand in hand with law enforcement. Different states have different rules. Each state is kind of its own little country in that way, so you have to learn rules of engagement and the requirements for prosecution. So, last year, I think we did in the course of the operation that’s covered in Season 2, in 11 weeks, we had 24 arrests maybe. It was a big deal because we’re not just getting the people that are maybe a little bit too cavalier, and are maybe not very smart about it. We were able to get some really bad actors who are risk averse, who have been doing this for a very long time, and finally have been caught, and get to face the consequences of that.

[00:10:08] So, that work has been really meaningful, not just be able to get– My goal isn’t to just get one bad guy at a time, because we could get 24 bad guys tomorrow, and there’s going to be another 240,000 out there the next day. It’s really about empowering an entire community, empowering communities to combat it together. That is through raising awareness, and that is through helping parents and caregivers understand what their kids are battling online, that is through supporting internet crimes against children task forces and the list goes on.

Dave: [00:10:43] We talk about ICACs and the Internet Crimes Against Children task forces are incredible, and are very helpful to law enforcement. Speaking of law enforcement, how difficult was it for your organization to break in with law enforcement? How many meetings does it take for them to get comfortable with working with an outside source of information and what kind of rules did you guys set up in advance?

Roo: [00:11:08] How long does it take for them to get comfortable? I’ll let you know when I find out.

[laughter]

Roo: [00:11:13] Honestly, working with civilians, I’m sure always makes law enforcement clench up a little bit. What happened in one case, this is why we ended up working with Canadian County Sheriff’s Office in Season 2.

Dave: [00:11:24] And that’s Canadian County, Oklahoma, correct?

Roo: [00:11:28] Yes. I had come across someone who was actually on bond awaiting trial, because he was arrested in a sting in Canadian County. It turns out he’s a former deputy. So, he called up and I’m like, “Hey, this guy that you got, I saw the news clip. He’s reaching out to my decoy.”  We take very careful evidence, incredible attention to detail. So, I was able to send him a PDF, walk him through it, all the evidence. I had a separate voice recording, and a screen recording, and a camera. We’re very thorough. Major Flowers was into it and was like, “This is great.” They were able to present it at this guy’s trial and he ended up getting the maximum sentence.

Dan: [00:12:13] You’re talking about Major Adam Flowers with the Canadian County Sheriff’s Department?

Roo: [00:12:17] Yes. So, he was joking. He’s like, “When are you going to come down here? Let’s do another one. I’ll deputize you right now,” because he really appreciated the work that we’re able to do. Because I’m a woman, I am able to maybe portray a younger girl a little bit better than Major Flowers with his big gray beard can. So, us being able to be a little bit more agile, we can edit photos really quickly, we can hop on a phone call, we can get on a video call. A lot of ICAC units don’t have the capacity for that. And so, if we’re able to show how we can be helpful– That’s all we want to do. We want to be helpful. We never want to be a hindrance like, “What can we do for you, guys? What do you want from us? Do you just want a bank of photos? Do you just want us to do phone calls?”

[00:13:05] So they get it. There are plenty of places who don’t want to work with us, and frankly, a lot of that is because of the amount of vigilante groups that are out there. It’s the people that will just go online, say, “Let’s meet up at Walmart,” they bring their camera, they’re live streaming it on YouTube. Those cases are, as you know, largely not prosecutable. And so, when people hear us say, “Hey, we have this case for you,” they’re like, “Oh, hold on, not another one of these.” That’s taking up space in our desk, because these people are running amok.

[00:13:40] There have been cases where it’s out of CCSO jurisdiction and they have to vouch for us. They’re like, “No, we’re working with this organization. This is legitimate. Here’s how they intake evidence.” We have rules of engagement based on each area, but we also have our own internal rules of engagement that even if it’s permissible by law enforcement, we won’t do X, Y, Z simply because we want to remain so above board that nobody can accuse us of something come trial.

Dave: [00:14:07] Absolutely. I think it’s notable that in the show, it’s clear you guys are considering elements of the crime. The quality of evidence and how it was obtained, I feel like it really is the first portrayal of an investigation, not by a law enforcement agency to come up with, “We got to check these boxes before we get to probable cause.” It is interesting how you guys have really accepted what is required to make a criminal prosecution. It just shows that you guys are attentive to the detail involved.

Roo: [00:14:47] There are so many perpetrators out there that I would hate to cut a corner and bork an entire case. Like, I don’t want to have to go through that. I don’t want to have to put my team through that just for nothing to come out of it when we don’t have to conjure things up. There are plenty of people out there breaking the law. If somebody’s going to message us and be a little creepy but not break the law, I’ll cut them loose really fast, because it’s not worth our time. When we’ve got really dangerous people that present an imminent threat to children out there, we would rather turn our attention to that.

Dan: [00:15:23] Speaking of that, did you go through any specific training or do you have members of your team who have experience in this space that helped you break into these kind of investigations that you’re doing?

Roo: [00:15:38] No, it really started with me doing this, and I think it is the aggregate of the different things that I’ve done in my career that allow me to be good at this. A lot of it is studying language, and syntax, and how language evolves with children over time. I joke like, I can spot an adult pretending to be a teenager from a mile away. One thing that’ll give you up that I hate to break to everyone who’s my age and older, when you put two spaces at the end of a sentence, [Dan laughs] you’re north of 40 and we know it. [giggles]

Dan: [00:16:20] Right. There’s little things. Even some of the stings I used to do, I would go back through the child’s actual interaction with the suspect and just see how they speak, kind of the rhythm, the syntax. I used to make very poignant notes about spelling that if I’m putting down polysyllabic words and I’m nailing the spelling on all these, I’m going to give myself away. So, I really learned the acronym language. It’s true. You give yourself away if you’re not really careful about the way you’re speaking to these other adults.

Roo: [00:17:00] It evolves so quickly, what some kids were saying last year they’re not saying this year. So, we have to be very much online and up to date with what young people are saying. Then when we train law enforcement, we say, “By the way, here’s a cheat sheet of acronyms that are happening right now, but call us in two months and this might change.” So, just be aware like, this is what this means. What does body count mean? Well, in our day, we know that body count means how many people have died. In this case, body count means how many people have you had sex with. And so, when that question comes up in a conversation, you need to know that. Otherwise, they’re like, “You’re not a teenager. There’s no way.”

Dave: [00:17:40] There are times, especially in Season 2, where some of the suspects are making references to things that you recognize or your team recognizes, “Oh, this is stuff that was like 2008 type of contacting minors.” And so, maybe this guy’s been offline for a while or maybe he’s just not got his game up to somebody who’s prowling the nearest happy hour.

Roo: [00:18:06] Sure.

Dave: [00:18:07] These guys, for you to recognize the difference in the eras of online safety issues, is pretty poignant to me as well.

Roo: [00:18:16] Thank you. Because I’ve been online for a while. So, if somebody makes a comment, I’m like, “That was a really popular statement on Reddit 10 years ago. This guy is at least 30.” Like, “This was a very big thing on Reddit and Imgur. This is not a TikTok level kind of reference.” Being very much online and understanding language really helps with that. And so, when we talk with law enforcement who’s doing this too, we’re like, “Okay, you can’t spell the word cool as K-E-W-L.” We did that in the late 1990s when we were listening to punk music. It’s no longer applicable. I think what we’re also really good at is attention to detail, because I’m 40, I don’t look like a teenager, the people on my team don’t necessarily look like teenagers, but a lot of the heavy lifting comes from the context, the bedrooms, what we’re wearing, what we’re saying. A lot of digital editing too of course, but a lot of it is the attention to detail.

[00:19:21] There was one guy in Season 1 that was very sketched out, was really suspicious. We know he’s suspicious because he’s been doing this for a long time. And so, I said, “Hey, somebody print out a certificate of achievement for this high school. I’m going to stick it on the wall, put her name on it.” This Season, we had trophies with our names on it. I know people are concerned that I’m giving up the secret sauce, but we don’t share all of the secret sauce. But everything that we can do to make a teenager believable, I think, is what helps with the trust building. And then when they trust and believe that someone’s actually a kid, that’s when they show their hand or they make a plan to meet, that’s when we’ve got them.

Dan: [00:20:09] For Season 2, can you walk us through what it takes sequentially for you guys to set up production to the time that you have an actual case? Can you give us a walkthrough of your first week or two weeks up to your first arrest?

Roo: [00:20:25] Sure. We call them decoys prints because I never figured out a better way to call them. But our operations vary in length, and I guess I would say, the amount of resources that we have. So, for Season 2, we had lots of resources. We had this really big house and a really big staff, but we do this work irrespective of a camera. And so, earlier this year, it was five days in some weird little Airbnb. The way that we did that very quickly is we went in, set up two bedrooms, the dining room, just had a bunch of young people clothes in it that she and I would just keep swapping out. And the next day, I think our quickest turnaround was two hours. It was first contact.

[00:21:08] He had a commute. First contact, two hours. Later, he’s pulling into our driveway. And law enforcement’s there, of course. He pulls into the driveway and he’s texting. He’s saying, “Come out.” And we’re like, “Shoot.” So, I have this young-looking hoodie on, and I go to the door, and I just wave my hand really quickly, and he doesn’t see my face, thankfully. He gets out of the car. But before he gets out of the car, he needs a little courage. So, he does a bump of cocaine. He gets out of the car, he approaches the door, just did coke, and his zippers all the way down. And this guy, he’s arrested. And then he goes, “So, I just completed the hiring process with such and such police department. Do you think this is going to affect my employment?” Like, “The cocaine, the pants down, the wanting to rape a minor? Yeah, bud, I don’t think you get to be a police officer anymore.”

Dave: [00:22:01] I would worry less about your career and more about freedom.

Roo: [00:22:04] Yes. And I really think that sometimes they just don’t get it. They’re like, “Okay, well, so I pay a fee and I go home now?” It’s like, you don’t understand the significance of what you were trying to do here. That’s when we do a really quick and dirty operation where it’s not glamorous. There’s no television involved. I’m eating a cold cheeseburger and it’s like 02:00 in the morning and we’re waiting for a meet to happen.

Dave: [00:22:27] You’re fishing.

Roo: [00:22:28] I would say less fishing and more like, we’re just putting two young girls online and waiting. We have never started a conversation, unless law enforcement has said, “By the way, we haven’t been able to get this guy. He’s been on our radar for two years. Do you think you can reach out?” And yeah, of course. Sure. But for the most part, we’re just two normal kids online. And the amount of people that come in is, I think, really, really surprising. There was a time where I just had a parent sit next to me because she’s like, “Well, all the apps, it’s fine. My kids are smart and they’re not going on the bad apps.” And I’m like, “This is crap, but we’re going to hit post on this picture, and I’m going to let you know that I can catch a dick online in a minute or less.”

[00:23:15] So, she sat next to me with the phone in her hand, we did it together, and she was just shocked. She’s like, “Wait, you already got a message. Wait, look how vile it is.” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s what’s happening on the internet.” And people want to say, “Oh, the good apps and the bad apps.” There is no such thing. People want to demonize the Snapchat and the TikTok. But what they don’t understand is any app, any website where there’s the potential for communication, there’s the potential for someone being preyed upon. So, I’m talking like Roblox that kids love.

[00:23:49] I’ve consulted with companies, and it’s been a Coloring Book app because they’re coloring and someone can comment, and they’re like, “We’re having issues with kids getting groomed on a Coloring Book app.” Coloring Book app seems so innocuous. I think any parent would download it on an iPad and give it to a kid at a restaurant because they need 20 minutes of peace and quiet, right? And so, it’s been on Words with Friends. I’ve had a perpetrator say to me, “Hey, I don’t want to give you my number because it’s too risky. Can we please download the same makeup app, and then we can just talk on this makeup app?” When you hear stuff like that, it’s like, “What corner of the internet is safe?” And that’s why these conversations with kids are so important, because it isn’t just this one bad app and this one good app. I would never want to give a parent a false sense of security because, “Oh, we’re using this specific app for kids on this specific device, and we’re monitoring with this specific service.” No, no, no, the parenting has to be really proactive when it comes to this.

Dave: [00:24:46] For listeners, if you’re interested, you can check out Season 1 of The Briefing Room, Episode 9. We highlight online safety and devoted a whole episode to it.

Dan: [00:24:57] That’s right. And I was thinking, one of the things about law enforcement is we are so reactive to what’s going on in the world. It’s hard to be proactive. I’ve worked these cases on the periphery. Dave’s always been the quarterback who’s talking to the online predator, while the rest of us, the defense are surrounding a meetup spot doing surveillance. How fun that is for the rest of the team? I would imagine it’s got to be the same for you when you’re working a case like this and you finally get somebody to commit. And then they take that act of furtherance where not only are they committing, but now they are driving to the meetup spot that that is the act of furtherance that creates probable cause for an arrest. What is that feeling like for you?

Roo: [00:25:51] Usually, I’m ready to barf down the front of my shirt at any given point. [Dave laughs] They need somebody in the field, like, a decoy. Sometimes, it’s really nice to have a decoy because then a perpetrator will see me from afar and get tunnel vision. And so, they’re not seeing all these cars. Like, they’re not seeing that they’re just being swarmed.

Dave: [00:26:10] Oh, yeah.

Roo: [00:26:12] And especially in Oklahoma in the dead of summer, I’m wearing a teenage girl skirt or whatever, but I’m wearing Kevlar and then a big sweatshirt over it. So, at this point, I’m just dripping sweat, and I’m also nervous, and I also want this guy to show because I know what this guy is capable of. I know all the things he’s said. For TV, we have to sanitize it for TV-14, right? So, people don’t see how vile and violent and awful it actually is, you can’t just go around traumatizing people and telling them all these terrible stories.

[00:26:47] So, when it comes down to it, my adrenaline is through the roof. Once they show up and once they’re arrested, it’s like, “Ah, finally, I know they don’t have access to their phone and they’re unable to terrorize children online for the time being.” That is a very satisfying feeling. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s also grief in knowing that now, because of their decisions, the lives of the people around them are also forever changed. There’s a wife, there’s a kid, there’s an employee, there’s a mom, there’s always other people that are affected. So, the collateral damage is a lot wider than you expect.

[00:27:26] It’s not just this one bad guy doing this one dumb thing. You find out that there are more victims, you find out that this person is a breadwinner and now he’s behind bars, and his wife had no idea, and his kids now have to go to school knowing that. So, I would say, it’s a lot of mixed feelings. It’s definitely a lot of adrenaline going up and then adrenaline crashing. And there have been days where we would do two stings back-to-back, and it’s just I feel like at that point I need like a heart monitor and a nurse on staff.

Dan: [00:27:59] Totally get it. I will say this, after watching my brother over the years work this caseload, there is a cumulative effect on a human being when they are dealing with this every day. My brother’s caseload was varied, but every now and then, he would work a case like this. And the things that men say to young girls is just jaw dropping. It was always a pleasure to be on the arrest team in those cases. Really enjoyed that.

Roo: [00:28:32] Yeah, there’s something very satisfying about knowing what they’ve said and what they’ve done and what they’ve been doing and saying and knowing, like, the buck stops here. I don’t know if you’re able to catch the season finale, and so no crazy spoilers. But it turns out one guy who had been reaching out, he had come across every single one of our decoys, because he was heavily in teen chat rooms. He was arrested. Turns out he had been he confessed to sexually assaulting a family member for years. For years. We had a few cases like that this season where you can tell they’ve been doing this for a really long time and thank God, we were able to find them and it was able to stop then.

[00:29:18] Sometimes, you catch people that are not necessarily serial. They’re just like opportunistic. Like, “Oh, this cute young girl’s online. Let me just try X, Y, Z,” as opposed to somebody who is perhaps a pedophile who struggles with this and collects CSAM regularly and only wants to talk to children. And then we get some people that clearly have been doing this for years and years and years and years and years, and need to be stopped, and need to be in prison for a very long time because the things that they want to do to children is just so awful. Where you sometimes are like, “How can someone do this to another person?” And then you realize that sometimes, from a perpetrator’s perspective, the cruelty is the point and that’s what– I know the audience can’t see me making faces because I’m struggling to really get the words out, but that’s what I think is like, A, the biggest knife in the heart is knowing that.

Dave: [00:30:20] I think being in this line of work and I’m not even talking about issues that are specific to SOSA or my caseload, you realize very, very quickly, or you’re out of the job very, very quickly that evil exists. We can think what we want about people, but there are people out there that just care about themselves, and they care about how they want instant gratification. It is hard even to my family members to explain to them like, “No, you understand. There are just evil people out there that just don’t give a shit about laws. They don’t care about that it’s an 11-year-old girl. They don’t care.” You have to get over that hurdle to understand the depth of people’s savagery sometimes like, “No, there are evil people.”

Dan: [00:31:09] I think the thing that surprised me the most, I was fat, dumb, and happy working financial crimes and then violent crimes. I was fat, dumb, and happy at my desk, but across the office, I’ve got Dave. He’s got headphones on and he has to watch child sex abuse material to try to identify victims. And to find out, for me, it was shocking how prolific these online predators are that they’re not just talking to one girl. Their net is wide. They are talking to 5, 10, 15 youth females trying to find one that is going to commit to a meat.

Roo: [00:31:51] I don’t know if this tracks with you, but I know the Child Rescue Coalition references a study that says the average predator has 50 to 150 victims in their lifetime. And whether that includes CSAM or what have you.

Dave: [00:32:06] For our listeners, CSAM is Child Sex Abuse Material.

Roo: [00:32:09] Right. CSAM is really, really hard, especially because you’re not sure where that kid is now, you’re not sure how old this video is, you’re not sure– There’s just so many unknowns. Actually, I’ve got something here and I know your audience can’t see, but hopefully it’s okay. We have a perp wall where we keep some of our mug shots. And the reason why is not because we want to glorify it or feel like we’re like Liam Neeson in Taken just like getting ready, torture people.

Dave: [00:32:39] No, I can tell you, we understand. It’s, “Hey, this is why what we’re doing is important. It’s a reminder.”

Roo: [00:32:50] It’s a reminder. And when we go through how many that we either are able to calculate or estimate based on law enforcement or see based on a forensic investigation of their phone, what we do is I put little post-it notes to represent a kid. And some of our mug shots are just like a sticker or two. And then we’ve got one like this. And I know that your audience can’t see this, but this piece of paper is covered in, I don’t know, 80 post-it notes where you can’t even see a face or the charges or anything like that. And knowing that and then a certain CSAM, that’s the stuff that I think we really try to protect the rest of the team from.

[00:33:34] If CSAM comes in, we do have like a code for everyone to put every device goes down. Put the device down and walk away, I need to document this and send it to law enforcement. But because of the way that we have evidence, I don’t want someone else to come across it, because that stuff can kill a soul knowing that there are people out there that are willing to do this to children. It’s interesting. I was talking with law enforcement that we’ve worked with before about a specific case, and it was an attorney. These people come from all walks of life.

Dave: [00:34:07] Absolutely.

Roo: [00:34:08] And they can be the nicest, most wholesome, attractive family man that the community loves and reveres. And then in this case, it was an attorney and he had reached out to a woman saying, “Hey, I need a sex worker.” She’s essentially a pimp, but for sex workers of age. And he said, “But I want a really young one.” And thankfully, she went to the law enforcement right away and said, “Hey, I know that I’m into some shady stuff, but I don’t do this.’

Dan: [00:34:35] Kudos to her.

Roo: [00:34:36] Yeah, kudos to her. And so, she set up this operation and essentially, she was saying, “Yeah, I do have a couple of foster kids. It would be a fee to me. It would be a fee to the foster parent. And you could have two hours with the child. I’ve got an 11-year-old and I’ve got a 5-year-old.” He’s like, “I’ll take the 5-year-old.”

Dan: [00:34:55] You mean as part of the sting, the informant tells this attorney that she’s got a couple of foster kids that he could choose from, and the attorney’s interested?

Roo: [00:35:04] Yes. And so, we’re watching the video footage, and he shows up, and there’s the cash exchange. $200 for the foster mom, $200 for this woman who’s doing this transaction. She’s like, “Look, she’s little. I want to make sure that she’s okay and safe.” He’s like, “Don’t worry, I brought lube, I brought this, I brought that. We’ll start by having her watch cartoons, and this is what I would like to do to her first, and could we take some photos and some video?” He’s sitting there, he pops a Viagra while he’s talking about this, all the things he wants to do. She asks a question that I thought was a really smart question to ask, and the answer is fairly brutal. “Why the 5-year-old and not the 11-year-old?” “Ah, the 5-year old’s less likely to tell someone.” “Yeah, a 5-year old’s probably not going to talk.”

[00:35:50] Honestly, this kind of thing can be really traumatizing, but a five-year old’s more likely to forget. And it’s like, there’s self-awareness there, but it doesn’t matter. And I will say and I can’t gloat too much because I often do get subpoenaed and I need to maintain my professionalism. I fucking loved watching that man getting arrested. I loved every second of it and I hope he never breathes free air again because watching that was just so, so vile, so, so awful.

Dan: [00:36:22] When you’re on a team, an arrest team, out in the field and you bring the bad guy in, there are a lot of high fives that get exchanged, and it’s a great feeling for the team.

Dave: [00:36:33] You just realize how everything has to line up for you to get to finally put handcuffs on bad guy. So, once you get through all of that, it is a relief. It is, “Ah, I don’t have to deal with this guy much longer. I don’t have to deal with this.” Another one, obviously, pops right back up right behind every suspect because we know the breadth of the problem.

Roo: [00:36:57] But that case is done. There’s a part of me where I’m like, “I no longer have to send photos of my legs to that one guy. I’m going to have to send them to the next guy, but this guy done.” Truly, that is a good feeling. I never want to gloat, but there is something that it’s just like this feeling of gratitude that it’s over. Another one can no longer harm a kid.

Dave: [00:37:28] One thing I absolutely don’t want to lose sight of is the impact of grooming. And I speak about it often when it’s especially online, but it also occurs in families, and at schools, and everywhere else all the time. And grooming is a huge problem. I hate to beat the dead horse on grooming because I recognize when things are happening and I’m like, “Oh, that’s grooming stuff.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, you’re just an old sex crimes detective and you think everybody is always out to get a little kid.” And I’m like, “No, I just know the behavior and I can recognize it from a mile away.” Can you talk to parents about what they should be looking for in, A, should they have their child’s passcode to get into their phone? My answer is obvious. Everybody should until their kid’s 18. But tell us about how pervasive and how effective a complete stranger who might be a complete dirt bag might have on a parent’s child in just a matter of minutes.

Roo: [00:38:35] It’s really important for parents to know that this is not something that takes months to do. When parents go, “I would know because I would see a difference in my kid if they were being groomed.” It’s like, it can happen in minutes. It can happen in the amount– You go downstairs, you’re changing the laundry over from the washer to the dryer, someone could be grooming your kid. It’s that fast. And it’s not because your kid isn’t smart. It’s not about being a smart kid or a good kid. It’s just about being a kid on the internet, because these people are practiced, they’re manipulative, they know what they’re doing, they’ve been doing it for a really long time. There’s no fence around like socioeconomics or race or sexuality or gender. Really, anyone’s at risk.

[00:39:20] I’ll tell parents too, even though the majority of online predators are men, heterosexual boys, teenage boys are also at risk because they’re being extorted. And so, it’s important for parents to know that it is not something that necessarily happens over a very long period. It’s these guys that are building trust, and they can do it in a number of different ways. We talk about that sometimes. It’s like, “Hey, I noticed that you are in the Minecraft subreddit. I think that’s great because I love Minecraft too. But you have to be really careful because you’re this young kid online and there are a lot of really bad guys out there. I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, thank you.” It’s like, “This is what you need to look out for. You can trust me. I will make sure that you’re okay. I can be like your big brother. I’ll keep an eye out for you, no problem.”

[00:40:12] That kind of caring language that seems so generous and so genuine. I consider myself to be a decently smart woman. When I was a kid, I was a decently smart kid. I would have fallen for a line like that, hook line and sinker, not because I was a bad kid, not because I was a dumb kid, but because they’re just that good.

Dave: [00:40:36] Right. I try to explain this to folks who especially with hands on victims that I would arrest stranger or I’d arrest dad or stepdad or uncle or whomever. You go to the other spouse or you go to the other caregiver or guardian and you say, “Hey, this is what’s been happening.” And a lot of times, it’s like, “No, that’s just him being friendly,” and “No, I don’t believe that,” and “No, he would never do that,” and “Oh, you’re reading way too much into the conversation or what happened.” And I used to always say, but here we are.

Roo: [00:41:13] Yeah.

Dave: [00:41:14] Think back with an open mind about odd things that might have occurred to you, where you came home early one day, and all of a sudden, it was a frenzy in the house, and it seemed suspicious, but you didn’t know what was happening in the back room. You have to disengage from this. I’m an optimist, and I believe everyone’s out for the greater good. Truly protecting your child from harm is being suspicious.

Roo: [00:41:42] Yeah.

Dave: [00:41:43] Why are you asking for such a huge piece of my child’s life? Why do you want to be such an influencer or a mentor? I am a skeptic by nature, especially now. I always looked at it as, why? Why is this guy so interested? Why does this person have such an interest in this kid? It really was frustrating to not be able to break people of that like, “Hey, this is how far down the road we are. I just arrested your husband, and you still aren’t on board with this is even a possibility.” We got to break parents of that.

Roo: [00:42:20] Oh, we’ve seen that too. “Uh-oh, you arrested him for assaulting my kid? All right, I’ll come bail him out, I guess.” “No, there’s no bailing out. There’s nothing like that. No, you’re not getting it.” I think that I don’t want to live as a fearful person. But I think for some people, there is this gift of fear, and it’s really just about trusting your gut. Just not necessarily walking around scared, but being aware. It’s almost comical how we do this, but I teach my daughters about situational awareness. So, we’re walking into Target. You’re not on your phone. You’re always looking around. When you park, you don’t park necessarily the closest. If it’s nighttime, you park right under a light. That’s where you park, all right?

[00:43:10] You’re not fiddling around with headphones or your bags. You get in, you open your car door, just open the driver’s side door. Throw your shit in, get in the car, lock the door. That’s how you do this. Not every single door needs to be unlocked, because you don’t know who’s on the other side, right? We’ll walk and I’ll go, “Okay, we’ve just passed five cars. What was the color of the past five cars?” And they got to tell me, black, black, blue, black, green. It seems silly, but it’s also like, “All right, I want you to describe the person that we just passed that just passed you on your left side without turning around and looking.” And they’re like, “All right. It was a woman, dark hair, probably 5’6″, wearing a Yankee shirt.” Good.

[00:43:53] Not because I want them to be suspicious, but because I want them to know what’s happening around them, because I think that is a good skill to have, especially when you’re a young woman. You’re going to the grocery store, you’re going out for a run. If you’re going out for a run, you don’t have headphones on. One of my daughters loves to run. If you want to go for a run with headphones on, then mom’s going to run behind you without headphones, so I can be your situational awareness for you. But that also has to translate to other people, and other people who are around you all the time, even if it is your kid’s best friend’s dad who is just so nice and so sweet, or the coach that just wants to take a few extra sessions with your kids. They could be the most wonderful, wonderful people in the world, but the onus is still on parents to go, “Okay, hold on a second. Let me just make sure that everything’s okay here.”

Dave: [00:44:47] I love it. I love the situational awareness lessons that you teach. I would encourage you to go to every police academy in America and teach that same class about situational awareness and being observant. My point in saying that is only to highlight that we can all work on that.

Dan: [00:45:05] Yeah, it’s definitely a mindset. It was something that maybe I was a little bit unaware of, a little naive to when I started the process of becoming a police officer. I had my first field training officer. We were walking up to a domestic dispute and he said, “Where’s your nearest cover?” And I was looking around, I’m like, “The curb?” Like, “Lay down in the street, the curb is–” And he said, “Yeah, you’re right, but it took you too long. You might have gotten shot.” So, it’s just changing your mindset. I applaud you for doing it. If you can just imprint that on a young person’s brain where they’re thinking differently than normal people out there, I think it’s a huge step. You have to be proactive in your own safety. That’s for sure.

Roo: [00:45:55] I will say the criticism that I do get is that I’m teaching my children to be fearful, and I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s actually really empowering to teach your kid about situational awareness, teach your kid that there are people in the world that don’t have their best interests at heart. It’s a conversation that I’ll have with any young person that I know well. I’ll say, “Let’s have a talk about you going off to college and what you need to look for.” When you’re walking down the street and somebody passes you, you got to do a shoulder check. You got to just turn your head over your shoulder to make sure they kept walking. That’s just something that I need you to do. That’s not striking fear into their heart. That’s empowering them. That’s how we empower our kids.

[00:46:31] Maybe I’m a bit more sensitive because I’ve got daughters, and sure, I know that boys are targeted too, and young men are targeted too. But in these cases, knowing the rates, the onus is on me to be as responsible as I can. And more than that, what I would want to tell parents is that victim blaming, I think, is the number one thing keeping perpetrators safe. Because as society, we victim blame so much. Why on earth would a kid come to us and tell us that they’ve been harmed when they know the parent’s going to freak out, take away the phone, “How could you be so dumb? How could you be so stupid?” So, a lot of kids go through this just silently like living in shame, when if my kids know, one, mom’s got their back, come to me, I’m here to help. Two, I’m not going to freak out anytime there’s a problem. I’m here and I’m going to stay as even keeled as possible. Three, what happens in this world, abuse is never a victim’s fault.

[00:47:32] I feel like that also helps them trust their gut too. That also helps them understand like, “Hey, I’m seeing warning signs here. And because I feel weird about it, I’m going to raise my hand and tell mom right away as opposed to waiting and waiting and waiting. Mom can intervene now as opposed to intervening later down the road.”

Dave: [00:47:59] We’ve got a few listener questions that I was hoping to send your way. And first one is from Cassie Tuck. “As our children age and eventually become more familiar with the ins and outs of social media, different apps, etc, what best practices or advice do you have for us parents who may not be as in the know about hidden dangers?” Just the highlights. What should they be looking for?

Roo: [00:48:25] Yes, I think that it’s important for parents to also, if your kid wants to download an app, you should download that app too and just check it out and see what are the features here. Did you know that it can show their location? There’s a Snap Map. Can a stranger reach out to your kid? I do let my kids have social media, and I know how to work the family controls. If my kid, who I have lots of conversations with about online safety, if she’s talking to someone on Snapchat, I can see exactly who she’s talking to and I go, “Okay, we’re going to run through this really quickly, make sure that you know all of these kids. Not one of these people is a stranger. Okay?” “Yeah, this person’s in my geometry class, this person is on my whatever team, this person does this.” “All right, great. That’s great.”

[00:49:09] So I think that knowing the kind of technology your kid is consuming, which for some of us who are older, that means doing a lot more legwork, knowing the technology that they’re using and also having regular conversations with your kids about online safety and online usage. I liken it to the sex talk. I don’t have the sex talk with my kids once and that’s it. It’s a regular part of our conversations, and so is the conversation about online safety.

Dave: [00:49:35] Brilliant.

Dan: [00:49:36] This is from Mordent Me. “What is the greatest barrier to getting these people convicted?”

Roo: [00:49:43] Great question. I’ll share this that I think one of the issues is that states have different laws. And because states have different laws and because this is still relatively new, some of those laws have not evolved to keep up with what is going on in today’s society. So, one of the things that I helped pass, which is bipartisan zero no votes was in the state of Connecticut HB 6737. It was the act establishing that it is illegal for an adult to contact a minor in a sexual manner. Now in some states, to reach out to a kid and say, “Hey, send me photos of your feet or of yourself in a swimsuit because I’m going to use that for my own self-gratification.” That’s considered creepy, but not a crime. It should be a crime everywhere. We know what they’re doing with those photos.

[00:50:35] So at SOSA, one of the things that we do is we do talk to legislators and say, “Hey, this should be illegal. It’s illegal in some states, it’s not illegal here. What can we do about it?” So, I think being really proactive with, A, legislators about what is okay and not okay in your state, but then also B, we need to be holding a lot of these platforms to task. If a company says that their app is safe for kids ages 13 and up, then they better be doing stuff to make sure that their app is safe for kids ages 13 and up. With the technology, with the economy changing and technology tech companies losing money, a lot of them cut their trust and safety teams. And those trust and safety teams are what’s in charge of moderation keeping kids safe.

[00:51:21] I think it’s unconscionable that any tech company that serves young people would cut their trust and safety teams. So, go ahead and contact an app that you love and say, “Hey, what’s the status of your trust and safety teams? What are you doing to make sure that this platform is safe for my kid?”

Dave: [00:51:37] I completely agree. One of the things that we’ve highlighted on our other podcast is that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children does great work disseminating information to ICACs. ICAC task force in different regions of the United States, which are then passed down to local law enforcement who will go out and knock on the door or serve the search warrant that we really are set up in a way that these electronic service providers and apps in the perfect world are reporting to the NCMEC, “Hey, we found this on our servers and this is the user ID associated with this.” When you lose that oversight with these safety teams, you lose all of that as well. That kind of stuff is going to slip through the cracks more and more, and these electronic service providers won’t have the visibility because they just miss it. They don’t have enough people looking at it to monitor their servers.

Roo: [00:52:37] Right. And some apps and companies just don’t bother. They don’t care, unless it affects their bottom line, they don’t care. One thing that SOSA does is we take all of our conversations with predators and we strip out the PII, which is personally identifiable information. We take those conversations and we show those patterns to a company that does AI moderation. So, it’s able to teach their AI signs of child abuse. And then that company goes and works with other platforms like gaming platforms, dating platforms, social media platforms to run that program to detect for signs of child sex abuse, and then it gets reported to NCMEC automatically.

[00:53:20] I wish more companies would take advantage. We’ve got really rich data. Some people are using data that a group called Perverted-Justice had from 15 years ago. That stuff’s outdated, and so we’re always happy to help and say, “Look at these patterns. Look at what we’re seeing.” If you see this on Instagram, if you see this on your X, Y, Z platform, it’s worth looking into because this could be a sign of child sex abuse happening on your platform.

Dave: [00:53:48] From Jesse Kai. “What keeps you and we can add your team from burning out in the environment you’re working in? How do you stay grounded when encountering such vile things and predators? What’s your self-care?”

Roo: [00:54:02] I get this question a lot, and I wish I had better answers, really, really good ones. The team does a lot of different things and I think that having a rotating staff really helps. We don’t do the decoy work every single day, year-round. It’s just not tenable for us to be doing that. So, we do break it up and then we do this other stuff in between, whether it’s talking to kids or legislators or frankly, as a nonprofit raising money. I’m here at my office. You will not see a single photo of my children here at the office. And at the same token, I don’t bring work home. I might do a phone call, but I don’t touch evidence, I don’t communicate with perpetrators, I don’t do any of that from my home. Separation of church and state really happens there.

[00:54:50] Then, for me, I also make sure that I really enjoy a Hendrick’s and tonic. [Dave laughs] I make sure that I’m not enjoying a Hendrick’s and tonic because I’ve had a really bad day at work. I’m making sure I’m enjoying it because I like a Hendrick’s and tonic, and I’m not using it to medicate. So, I won’t drink, if I’ve had a really bad day, if that makes sense.

Dave: [00:55:09] It does.

Roo: [00:55:09] I see a therapist weekly and I try to stay active. Season 1, we had a punching bag in the attic. You could tell when I was having a rough time because it would just be, I guess it reverberated through the house, it would be just 15 minutes straight of me hitting a punching bag, which I found very therapeutic. So, I also recommend that for most people, actually. [giggles] So, those are kind of the main ones. I don’t talk to my friends about work because I feel like it’s just, again, poisoning the well. So, I don’t tell them those stories. I find it really helpful to talk to law enforcement about it, like, other people that are working in the same space, whether it’s Major Flowers or another law enforcement that’s working at ICAC, because they get it. There’s something about that– I can tell them this and it’s not going to harm them because they also went through it.

Dave: [00:56:08] They’ve got the calluses.

Roo: [00:56:10] Yeah, we’ve all got the same sort of scars, right? And so, I think that is also helpful. And then with consent, I make everyone around me hug me, like, once a day as much as I can do that without being accused of sexual harassment.

[laughter]

Dave: [00:56:32] I like the asking for consent.

Roo: [00:56:34] Yes.

Dan: [00:56:34] Yeah.

Dave: [00:56:35] Can we have a moment?

Roo: [00:56:36] [laughs]

Dan: [00:56:37] This next question is from Rediscovering Trish, and I don’t know if this is even true for you, but the question is, “Why do you believe some of these types offenders can be rehabilitated?”

Roo: [00:56:50] So, I assume that’s somebody that’s followed me online and I do get some flak for this. So, I think that people will ask like, “Aren’t you worried that the show is giving up too many secrets? Aren’t you worried that perpetrators are going to watch?” My response is, “No, I really hope they do watch. I hope they watch–” And one, maybe they’re worried that the person they’re talking to is actually a 50-year-old sergeant. Or, two, I hope that they watch and they go, “Wow, I really recognize that I have this propensity to do something harmful. I don’t want to do that to a kid. I’m going to get help,” or not even for noble reasons, “I just don’t want to go to jail.” I hope that it’s a deterrent. I hope more people watch, and so it becomes a deterrent.

[00:57:36] Now, as far as rehabilitation goes, what I would like to see is for people to get help before they ever become offenders, if they recognize that propensity within themselves. Are there cases where people– I don’t use the word pedophile because I’m not a doctor. That’s a diagnosis. I don’t know enough about that to say whether someone is or isn’t. But what I can say is, let’s say somebody can’t take away that– I think in a lot of cases you can’t take away that attraction or that propensity to want to harm a child. But if that’s recognized, can they work with someone to make sure they never act on it? I think so. I think I’ve had enough conversations with folks that I believe it to be true, but I also recognize that I am probably too ignorant on that aspect of things to be able to say one way or another.

[00:58:28] That said, I’ve had plenty of people reach out that say, “Hey, I’m a reformed sex offender. I really appreciate what you do. I’ve become a monthly donor because I think what SOSA does is so important, and I wish I knew about this when I was younger before I ever started offending.” Those messages leave me speechless, so I’m hesitant to say one way or another, but I am hopeful know rehabilitation is a possibility for many.

Dan: [00:58:54] I think that’s a great answer.

Roo: [00:58:56] Thank you.

Dave: [00:58:58] This one’s from Caroline Freak. “At what age should I start talking to my kids about online safety and how do I bring that subject up?”

Roo: [00:59:07] Honestly, as soon as they’re old enough to start wielding an iPad. I’ve had families say, “I don’t let my kids use the internet. They don’t have a phone. They don’t have a laptop.” And I’ll go, “Great.” That probably only works completely if you’re Amish, because my kids go to school and they turn in their homework on their school issued laptop. Or, you’ve got kids that go to a friend’s house and maybe your kid doesn’t have a phone but a friend does. Maybe your kid doesn’t have the internet, but a friend does. Or, your kid goes to school and they look up stuff on internet all day long. If they’re of school age, this is the conversation you need to start having.

[00:59:40] I think it can be age appropriate. When they’re younger, you start talking about tricky people on the internet and making sure that you’re staying safe. They get older, you talk a bit more about digital footprint. As they get older, you talk more about sex abuse that can happen online. But I think there’s always an age-appropriate way to have these conversations. If your kid is old enough to go to school, work an iPad, text someone, then they’re old enough to hear about what can happen online.

Dave: [01:00:07] Love it. My last question is, when do we get to do a ride along with your team on a sting? [laughs]

Roo: [01:00:14] How about this? How about you contact the good people in Bend[?] and your ICAC team? And how about I just come out there and I’ll do a ride along with you guys and we can just do an op together?

Dave: [01:00:31] I would love that.

Roo: [01:00:32] Just say, “Hey, we know this person who’s decent at her job. Would you guys want to do a one-week op with her?” And I’d be happy to come out.

Dave: [01:00:40] I’ve got some options out here with different agencies, so we could probably figure that out.

Roo: [01:00:45] All right, let’s do it then.

Dan: [01:00:47] I think that would be great. I’ve got one more question, Dave. So, you mentioned earlier that this space, this online predation space, is an ever-evolving thing and they’re using different apps. “What are the apps that you’re seeing right now that these predators are typically using?

Roo: [01:01:06] It’s really any app that a kid’s on. I could open up a phone right now and tell you it’s Discord, it’s Twitch, it’s Instagram, Twitter, it’s Snap, it’s TikTok, it’s Kik, it’s Wattpad, it’s Minecraft, it’s Roblox. Name an app and there’s someone on there. When an adult knows, when a perpetrator knows that an app is an app that kids flock to, they’re going to be there. So, whether it’s Reddit or Twitch or Discord or Threads, which is on the newer side, there’s going to be someone there. So, the key is to just be mindful. If you open your eyes, you’ll see it. You always see hints of it.

Dave: [01:01:48] I agree. I had a family back when I was still working the caseload that said, “Hey, we already had this issue with our kid on Facebook. Should I be worried about him on Xbox Live?” And I said, “100%.” [chuckles]

Roo: [01:02:04] Yes.

Dave: [01:02:05] If you can get a message, if you can be contacted on that app, it is not safe. So, just be aware not to make the whole world look like it’s scary, but I’m just saying, every one of these places can be where someone intentionally puts themselves, so they have contact with minors. It just is the way the world is.

Roo: [01:02:24] Words with Friends, and then we’ve heard about it on the Fitbit app, and we heard about it on a Bible Devotional app. It’s not to scare everyone. It’s just to know that regardless of where you go, there’s probably somebody that wants to harm a child, and so that’s just something to keep in the back of your mind as you’re raising children.

Dave: [01:02:44] Absolutely. I want to close one thing. You had already mentioned your Season 2 finale, and I watched that episode, and I was very happy at the end of it without giving away too much of your season finale. I know that at the end of that case, you caught someone who was an online predator and also somebody who had historically been abusing someone close to them. I’m just wondering where that sits with you and your team, that kind of success of an operation, and where that sits with you guys when it comes to feeling like, did we make a difference today? I think the answer is obvious.

Roo: [01:03:30] In these times, and I remember after that happened, I had to go back after that arrest and talk to the team about it. We’re a bunch of people from a lot of different backgrounds, but I think what was probably the most, the thing that I wanted to get across to them was one that they’re doing amazing work and they’re doing important work. And regardless if you’re with me for two months or two years or longer, I have just so much gratitude for anyone who’s going to be here to work with me. When we get involved in a case like this, for a lot of us, it is a chance for us to be who we needed when we were younger. Being able to share that, like, we get to be that person that we didn’t have, that’s powerful. That’s powerful for a lot of us.

Dave: [01:04:22] Don’t stop doing what you guys are doing. It is fun to watch from a law enforcement perspective, but the gift and the value for that to anybody that watches Undercover Underage is fairly obvious. Once you watch one episode of that show, you go, “I get it. I love what they’re doing.” And if fans of the show or people that just want to get involved, can they donate to your page? How do they get involved with you guys without being the stars of a TV show, something reasonable like donations or any other way to help?

Roo: [01:05:00] Donating is so helpful. We are scrappy. We can do a three-man sprint over the course of a week for 10K. So, donations really, really help. If you want to be a monthly donor, that’s amazing because then we can budget for the year, budget the work that we do, whether it’s providing therapy to survivors or doing these decoy sprints or talking in schools. If you follow us on social, we’re @sosatogether everywhere, and we will post volunteer opportunities at times for when we need somebody to help with, whether it’s social media or we need a volunteer bookkeeper for a couple of hours a week. We do post those opportunities there. If you want to donate or get more resources, we’re at sosatogether.org.

Dave: [01:05:49] There you go. Thanks for your time, Roo.

Dan: [01:05:51] Awesome. Thank you.

Roo: [01:05:52] Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you for telling these stories and I hope you’ll have me back on soon.

[TBR’s theme music]

Dan: [01:06:00] On the next episode of The Briefing Room–

Paul: [01:06:02] I think part of handling death, seeing it in a picture versus seeing it out in the field in real life is very different because now you have three dimensions, now you have smells, now you have emotional situations. You have a gunshot victim in the middle of the street, crime scene tape up, and then mom comes up to the crime scene, and is wailing, and you’re recognizing, this is a real person and there are loved ones that are impacted by the violence that occurred. The way I dealt with it is typical. You compartmentalize. You shut that emotion off and go, “I’m here to do a job.” You do this over and over where you just shoved that emotional and psychological state into your brain and then never let it out again. And you just keep shoving more and more in there until eventually it’s going to come out, whether you like it or not.

Dave: That’s next week on The Briefing Room.

Yeardley: [01:07:05] The Briefing Room is produced by Jessica Halstead and co-produced by Detectives Dan and Dave. Executive producers are Gary Scott and me, Yeardley Smith. Our production manager is Logan Heftel. Logan also composed theme music. Soren Begin is our senior audio editor. Monika Scott runs our social media, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

[01:07:30] Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. To read those transcripts or to hear past episodes, please go to our website at thebriefingroompod.com. The Briefing Room is an Audio 99 production, and I cannot go without saying thank you to you, all of you are fans, you are the best fans in the pod universe. And I can say with complete confidence, nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]