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: [00:00:09] 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: [00:00:20] Welcome to The Briefing Room.

[The Briefing Room theme playing]

Dave: [00:00:36] Today’s Briefing comes at the request of someone you all know, Yeardley Smith. Hi, Yeardley.

Yeardley: [00:00:41] Hi, Dave. Hi. So happy to be here.

Dave: [00:00:44] We’re also joined by my brother, Dan.

Dan: [00:00:46] Hello. Yeardley’s question today is inspired in part by conversations we had last week with defense attorney, Lissa. So, Yeardley, I’m turning it over to you.

Yeardley: [00:00:56] Thank you, Dave. I’m really excited about this subject. So, we call this episode of The Briefing Room, The Dance, because you guys have often talked about the way you interview suspects. You call that The Dance. And I think it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of your job. It’s funny, you often gloss over it, but the way you interview, the way you do the dance is so nuanced that I think our listeners would really enjoy hearing your perspective on it, like, how do you conduct a suspect interview, particularly if you’re dealing with somebody who’s done a person crime, as you say, so they’ve hurt someone, injured them, violated another person in the worst possible way. So, how do you interview a person like that and gain their trust, so that they don’t shut down and say, “I want a lawyer,” and then the interview is over.

Dave: [00:01:55] Uh-huh. Interviews, for me, I separated them into two categories. One is, I’m familiar with the case, because I’ve been investigating it for days or weeks, even hours, and then suspect is taken into custody or comes in for questioning, and now I have a shot to take a run at the suspect. The other is, acute, like, incident, just happened, still have investigators out looking for leads, canvassing a neighborhood, et cetera. I’m waiting for reports to come in. A lot of those reports, if it’s an acute case, are going to be verbal, like face to face? You haven’t even written your report yet. So, my strategy is a little bit different depending on which case I’m getting, if it’s a historical case or it just happened today.

[00:02:51] How I prepare depends on the caliber of interviews that have already taken place in that case. So, say, it’s a case that I’ve already been investigating for days or weeks, and I’m very familiar with the initial reports that have come through. I’m already well versed in the facts of the case. When I go into an interview room, all I’m thinking is, “Let’s get the truth.” And I wonder what this guy or this– I’ll say guy because in my caseload is usually male offenders.

Yeardley: [00:03:23] We should tell our new listeners who might not know you that your former caseload was investigating sex crimes and child abuse.

Dave: [00:03:32] Right. On a case that I’ve been investigating, I’ve already done a ton of background on my suspect. I probably already run his computerized criminal history. So, I know what types of things he’s been arrested for in the past. If it lines up with the type of case that I have at this point, I’m going to look at social media. What kind of photos does the guy post? Is he family oriented? Does he have a bunch of biblical quotes on his page? Because those allow me to explore threads. Religious people know that, eventually, they’re going to be judged before God and they want to get things right while they’re on this earth. And part of that is the truth and validating a victim’s statement or a victim’s disclosure.

[00:04:19] So, there are people with consciences out there who are like, “I got to get this off my chest.” There are other straight evil people that just don’t give a shit and they’ll hurt whomever if it benefits themselves. They don’t care about the wake of damage they do.

Yeardley: [00:04:36] If you see somebody post a lot of religious scripture, let’s say, on their Facebook page, can you use that as a way in to say, “Hey, I know that you believe in God and you will be judged by God when everything is said and done”?

Dave: [00:04:55] I probably wouldn’t go to the judged piece of that, because my job as the investigator is to not judge. I’m there to arrange a potential meeting between a court, a DA, a defense attorney, and defendant. One of my big pet peeves with police officers is, you’ve seen the worst of humanity, day in and day out. You see horrible things, even if you’re a new cop. So, for a police officer to go into an interview and be judgmental or snippy or have attitude, I’m always like, “Well, either the game is too fast for you. You’ve lost sight of the finish line, which is, let’s just get to the truth. The act is already over with.”

[00:05:37] My feelings about the suspect and what they did are completely irrelevant. It has no bearing on the case whatsoever. The facts do. So, I want a police officer who’s doing questioning to be thorough, to be inquisitive, don’t just ask a question and move on. If they give you a little bit more narrative, I’m like, “Well, let’s go down that thread. I can get back to my–” Not prepared, but I had a general idea of what I wanted to do in an interview. If I think that I’m going to get a confession that day, I’m going to go for the confession. If it’s clear the person’s probably not going to ever confess to this, because they probably have previous exposure to the criminal justice system and everyone’s taught, they don’t ever talk to the cops. You see it all the time. So, someone who spent time in prison, I usually was like, “They’ve already been down this road. They’re probably not going to talk to me.”

Yeardley: [00:06:29] Do you Mirandize people at that point or are you afraid that if you read them their Miranda rights that they won’t actually talk to you that they’ll just clam up?

Dave: [00:06:40] Well, it depends. So, situations where you have to Mirandize versus some of the gray area versus you don’t have to Mirandize, there’s no gray area whatsoever. There’s differences. If you’re familiar with the differences, then there are times where I might be able to get more statements from someone totally lawful. I’m not violating anybody’s rights, but it’s all determined on this reasonableness. Would a reasonable person feel like they were free to leave? Would a reasonable person feel like they were being accused of a crime? In those situations, if somebody’s not free to leave and they feel like they’re being accused of a crime, I need to get Miranda out front. There are other situations where the interview turns and you realize, “Okay, now we’re getting into Miranda territory. I need to get that handled as soon as possible.” So, when we talk about familiarity with someone’s rights, someone being familiar with their rights, they’ve already been down this path.

Dan: [00:07:39] They’ve had attorneys in the past because of previous arraignments or previous court cases that they’ve gone through. So, they’ve heard all this advice. And lawyers typically tell their clients, “Don’t talk to the cops.”

Yeardley: [00:07:52] Don’t say anything.

Dan: [00:07:53] Don’t say anything.

Dave: [00:07:54] Right. In a situation where somebody’s not had that exposure to the criminal justice system, they’re going to want to cooperate. They’re going to want to talk. They want to explain themselves. They want to explain an alibi or why they did something or how they didn’t do something that they’re being accused of.

Dan: [00:08:13] Well, and sometimes, they just flat out think they’re smarter than you. Really, the first part of an interview is, I’m gathering information. And they are too. A lot of times they’re gathering information. They want to know how much we know. So, holding on to some of those things as a strategy. Sometimes you hit them right in the face with it and you tell them what you know. I remember doing interviews where I started out the interview with a suspect that I was familiar with. And we got in the room. I read her Miranda rights to her, said, “Do you want to talk to me?” She’s like, “Yeah, sure.” I just pulled out a surveillance photo from Walmart, and I put it on the table, and I said, “Who’s that?” That was the first thing that I said.

[00:08:57] She looked at it and she goes, “I don’t know who that is.” [Yeardley laughs] I said, “Do you see that tattoo on the right arm?” And she says, “Yeah.” And I said, “Well, you have the same tattoo on your right arm. That’s you.” And she’s like, “Okay, that’s me.” [Yeardley laughs] I mean, like, one minute confession, and then you go down the road. Now I can back up a little bit, and I can say, “So, what’s going on in your life right now that you are out committing these crimes?” Dave’s the same way, and I learned a lot from Detective Don, in watching him interview. You can have a game plan going in, but depending on the suspect, they’re either on board or not on board with that game plan. So, you better be nimble.

[00:09:42] I always found it. Of course, you have some sort of strategy. You have to cover the elements of the crime in your interview while you’re trying to get a confession. But you have to be light on your feet and adapt to whoever you’re talking to who’s across the table from you. Dave’s really good at that. I’ve watched his interviews. When Dave had a big case come in and he was going to sit down and interview somebody, I would always watch the interviews. A day or two later, if we ended up hanging out at my house or his house, we’d talk about it. He’d ask for feedback, and I’d give him feedback. I’d tell him what he did really well, and I would point out, like– In one of Dave’s first interviews, I pointed out, it was like, “You shouldn’t have taken a break right there. He was nibbling on the hook right there. He was almost going to bite.”

Yeardley: [00:10:32] The suspect was?

Dan: [00:10:33] Yeah. And you got uncomfortable and tired.

Yeardley: [00:10:37] And so, you literally left the room–

Dave: [00:10:39] Because I was uncomfortable. You’re a new-ish detective. Interviewing someone in plain clothes is different than interviewing someone in a patrol uniform. It’s a different vibe in the room. It’s a different look on camera. I have always gotten more out of people when I’m in playing clothes. My plain clothes, typically, unless I got called out in the middle of the night was business casual. Suit and no tie. Business casual. There’s a formality to that, but there’s also a casual quality to it.

Yeardley: [00:11:12] A comfortability, like, you’re comfortable in this environment and therefore, that might go a long way towards putting them at ease.

Dave: [00:11:20] Right. From the criminal or the suspect side of this equation, I’ve heard in the past, they’re like, “I want to talk to a detective.” Even when I was a sergeant, after having been a detective for a long time, I would have suspects who have no familiarity with me and they’d say, “Well, I’ll just talk to a detective.” And I’d be like, “Well, you’re going to be talking to a detective that I trained,” [Yeardley laughs] and has less than six months on this particular assignment. But I can arrange that absolutely, because I understand the dynamic. And how do new detectives get that exposure? You hand it off to them. “Here, this is your case. I’m certain you have more facts than I do. I’m just dealing with this person on this contact out in the streets.”

[00:12:04] This person has an attempt to locate flag on them. I call the detective that put this flag on them in the system. When the police come across you, your name is going to get run. They’re going to call a detective and they’re going to say, “Hey, see if that person is willing to come down to the police station. I’m driving in right now.” That detective, although new, is going to have more pertinent facts for the case than I am. So, I’d be like, “Absolutely, I can get you a detective. No problem.” Freeze up my patrol guys to go out and chase taillights and deter crime, do what we’re supposed to do.

[00:12:46] Going back to Dan’s interview with the female where he confronts her right away. He does that based on experience with the suspect familiarity and knowing, “Well, I’ve already been in this room before with this person and we did the runaround game for an hour and a half.” He got the hard part out of the way right at the beginning, and now it’s, “Okay. Well, you’ve admitted that this is you using the stolen credit card or whatever the case was.” Now we can go to what led up to this. That is powerful, because you can always go back to that person if they’re starting to stray and say, “Listen, you already admitted to the heaviest part of this whole case that it’s you committing this crime.” Let’s not worry about the other stuff. They might help you. They can help explain things.

Yeardley: [00:13:31] Dan, why in this particular case with this woman, for instance, who had the tattoo, why did you ask her, what’s going on in your life?

Dan: [00:13:39] I had a pretty good idea, and typically, it’s substance abuse, and I’m sensitive to that. So, you always want to know the why, right? I think that with these people, if I can empathize with them and try to get an understanding of what’s going on in their life, if they’re not happy with the direction of their life, some people, they just flat out aren’t ready to quit using and they’re going to commit crimes to support their habit until they’re ready. Sometimes, they’re ready in that interview room and they are begging for an intervention, and sometimes it’s the police that provide that intervention. So, I want to know those things.

[00:14:21] I think it also builds rapport and trust between me and whoever I’m interviewing. So, if they trust you, they’re probably more apt to tell you more. They’re going to give you everything. If they don’t trust you, they’re not. My job in that interview room is to gather information. Try to get a confession. Also, in a lot of the cases that I worked, I knew that there was going to be a lot of follow up on the back end. So, I’ve got, say, someone who burglarized the house, stole credit cards, stole guns, jewelry, I want to build trust with that person, and now let’s go down the road of trying to figure out where all that stuff is, so I can recover it and get it back to the victims.

[00:15:03] Many times, I would tell people like, “Hey, some of that jewelry you stole, those were heirloom pieces that had been in the family for hundred years. The woman’s ring was her grandmother’s wedding ring.” Those things are important. So, if I can track those things down, it’s really good for my victims, too. I’ve had victims just straight up break down and cry when I return property to them, because they thought it’s gone forever.

Dave: [00:15:29] Honestly, it’s in the suspect’s best interest too. They show compassion. They show remorse. They show, “Hey, I want to right this wrong that I did. I’m caught. Let’s just give the people back their property, or at least, I can tell them where I last saw it,” because property in this world of theft and substance affected folks, it’s probably changed hands a few times if it’s been more than a week. So, to track that stuff down is difficult, but it also shows some willingness on the suspect’s part to show some compassion, be contrite, and, “Hey, I screwed up. Let me try to fix it.”

Dan: [00:16:09] I would always tell these people, when I write my report, “This is going to go to the district attorney. Do you want them to read in this report that you are not cooperative and that you didn’t care about returning people’s property or the opposite that you were actually cooperative and you aided me in recovering this property? It’s going to look way better for you. You’re caught. You’ve got an opportunity here to help yourself out.”

Dave: [00:16:34] There’s huge value to that for a suspect. There’s huge value to that for the victim.

Yeardley: [00:16:41] Does the value to the suspect, will it necessarily or it might lighten their sentence? Is that what you’re saying?

Dan: [00:16:49] It can. Yeah. I think district attorneys that I’ve talked to will say, “This person, they weren’t cooperative at all. Why should I cut them a break?” Every detective, when you talk and present your case to a district attorney, those are conversations that are had. And DAs will flat out ask, “What do you think is appropriate in this situation?” And I’ll give them my opinion. They may take it, they may not. I’ve had DAs that said, “I don’t care that they helped out. They’ve committed four burglaries in the last two years. The first one, they did 13 months and they obviously haven’t learned their lessons. So, guess what? I’m hitting them with everything.” Yeah, those are all factors. I will say this, “I’ve never seen the court go harder on somebody who is cooperative.”

Dave: [00:17:39] I can say the same thing.

Yeardley: [00:17:41] Okay, good to know.

Dave: [00:17:43] Unless the court has no latitude.

Yeardley: [00:17:46] There’s a mandatory sentence kind of thing?

Dave: [00:17:48] Right. There’s mandatory sentences that have taken discretion out of judges hands.

Yeardley: [00:17:53] And, Dave, for your former caseload, which was sex crimes and child abuse, there are a number of mandatory sentences based on the kinds of things that you would find in their computer or the kinds of criminal acts that were committed. I think it would be interesting for our listeners to hear– Obviously, it’s all about gaining trust, so you get as much information as you can. But what if you’re faced with somebody for you, let’s say, Dave, the disclosure from the victim is highly credible. This person is a fucking scumbag. How do you present yourself like, “Hey, listen, I don’t think you’re a bad person. I think you made some bad decisions.”

Dave: [00:18:37] I have to eliminate any notion that I’m the judge here, because I am not. For me to put myself in that position, it shows a lack of professionalism. It shows a lack of skill. It shows a complete disregard for any strategy. You have to get someone to talk, because now you’re holier-than-thou and you’re standing in judgment. You think about kids, when they screw up and they have to go face their parents. They’ve got a frowny face to get their head down. Their posture is very submissive. I want a suspect to contribute to the conversation. I don’t want to have to carry that conversation. I want them to do most of the talking.

[00:19:19] I’ve never, ever seen someone be judgmental, a police officer, and have it turn out to be a success, because criminals and suspects and people with no exposure to the criminal justice process, we all know what it feels like to feel judged.

Yeardley: [00:19:34] Yeah, to feel shamed.

Dave: [00:19:36] And I’m like, “Well, I don’t want to talk to this guy. He’s sitting here judging everything I say.” When I’m in a room, even if it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard, I can always say, “Hey, man, I’ve been in this room, I’ve heard a lot of horrible things in this room. There’s nothing you’re going to tell me that surprises me. Is that a bluff? Is it a lie?” Sometimes, because you don’t know what they’re about to tell you, and then your bar moves, [Yeardley laughs] and you’re like, “Okay, well, now my bar is way up here. Holy shit I did not see that coming.”

[00:20:09] So, taking judgment out of your interview tactics, number one, be familiar with the elements of every crime that you’re confronting the suspect about, because some of those crimes have an element that if you don’t have that element up front, the rest of the elements below it don’t even matter.

Yeardley: [00:20:26] What do you mean?

Dave: [00:20:29] I’m talking about, like, there are crimes when it has to do with intent. There’s plenty of cases out there where somebody screwed up, but they weren’t meaning to. They were reckless or they were negligent. It wasn’t intentional.

Yeardley: [00:20:43] Right. I see. So, for example, intention can mean the difference between first degree murder, second degree murder, or manslaughter. In the scope of the law, how you charge somebody, a lot of that has to do with intent, right?

Dave: [00:21:00] Exactly. The hit and run case where the gentleman ended up on the top of the car had to go several blocks west before being taken off of the top of the car.

Yeardley: [00:21:09] Impact. Yes. That’s what we called the episode on Small Town Dicks.

Dave: [00:21:13] In Impact, there was no intent by the driver to hit this pedestrian in the crosswalk. Was there negligence and recklessness? I would argue both. Shouldn’t have been driving, should have stopped right there. The act became way more egregious because of the events that followed the several blocks that this person was riding on top of suspect’s vehicle. Part of my intent for one of the crimes there would be manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life. Now I would say, what, that suspect did in that case checks all the boxes. So, I know if I’ve got those elements and I just checked the big one, which is manifesting extreme indifference, I know that other things are going to be able to fall into place. I can fill in the gaps there.

[00:22:05] So, there are certain crimes where there’s an element that is essential, and then there’s other things below it that you also need to check the box on certain assaults with deadly weapons. Is it reckless? Is it negligent? Is it intentional? Is the weapon would it cause physical harm or is it capable of causing serious physical injury and or death? Different levels of crimes. One, the most serious crime and assault, especially involving a weapon, would have to do with what type of weapon is that, and when it’s used, can it cause serious physical injury or death? If I hit someone with a foam baseball bat, it’s different than hitting somebody with a tire iron. So, you have to be familiar with the elements of the crimes that you’re going to confront your suspect over.

[00:22:56] There are times where I’d be like, I’ve said it before. I don’t know what crime that is, but I’m certain you can’t do it, because it’s going to be in this family of crimes. So, I just got to find which elements fit that crime and not misapply that, because I’m going to forward this case to the district attorney’s office. They’re going to get my report and they’re going to do the same thing that I just did. They’re going to look for what crimes were charged and are the elements there. If I charge a crime and I’ve only checked two of the five boxes on the elements, that charge is getting dropped.

Yeardley: [00:23:28] Right. I see.

Dave: [00:23:30] Can’t prove it. You don’t have enough here. So, that’s a learning process for detectives and patrol officers as well is, “Oh. Okay. Yeah, I need that one too. Got it. All right.” It doesn’t make it a false arrest. It just means that I charged the wrong crime. This is why we have district attorneys and lawyers and grand jury processes, and judges. They can make those law determinations. I’m just a cop. [Yeardley laughs] I know how to read real good.

Yeardley: [00:23:59] [laughs]

Dave: [00:24:12] So, I want to be non-judgmental, I want to be familiar with elements of the crime, I want to be familiar with the suspect and their movements, because if we’re talking and I say, “Where were you last Thursday night?” And I’ve already dug into your background and you say, “I was at home all night,” and I’m like, “Well, I got two friends I already talked to and they said that you were at their house for a party.” Oops. Or, “I was asleep all night, but there was a party going on.” “I have multiple people at that party saying that you were one of the drunkest and stayed up the latest.” So, I want to be familiar with these things, so when they drop them in an interview, I can confront them on that or I just put it in my back pocket and I’m like, “I’ll save that one for later when I get confrontational.”

[00:25:00] Usually when someone would lawyer up or invoke their right to remain silent or have an attorney, whatever, you can see that coming. It’s usually very early on, like, first two minutes of an interview. After, we get the, give me your name, rank in horsepower, like name, date of birth, social security number, what’s a good address, phone number, email. You move on from that the initial stuff where I don’t need to advise you Miranda to ask your name.

Yeardley: [00:25:28] No, we did that really interesting Briefing Room, where you encountered the man on a bicycle in the middle of a night. He said, “I don’t have to talk to you,” and you said, “You’re right. You don’t.” And then when you encountered him an hour later, you’re like, “Now you actually do have to talk to me,” because you had reasonable suspicion. And actually, that’s what we called that episode on The Briefing Room, Reasonable Suspicion.

Dave: [00:25:52] Yeah. So, the order of questions is all going to be dependent on how the first few minutes of that interview goes. Do I feel like I’m going to get straightforward answers? If I ask your name out on the street or in an interview room, and you start with, “Uh?” [Yeardley laughs] It’s bridging. “I need more time to think of the bullshit answer I’m about to give you.” “Have you ever been arrested?” “Uh” That’s a yes. [Yeardley laughs] And you’re making assumptions when you hear those things, but it’s based on a lived experience of, every time I ask this question and that’s the first part of the answer, it’s always bullshit. And you learn a lot about what to do in the interview room from your time on the streets.

[00:26:35] When I’m out on patrol, I have a whole different set of expectations when I’m doing an interview, as opposed to a controlled environment where I’ve got a suspect in the detective section. We’re in a small room. I’ve got video. Everything is accounted for. It’s different on the streets. And for new cops, it’s a place to really start to learn human behavior out on the streets, interactions with people, be nosy, be curious, ask a lot of questions. So, within a few months of being on the street was the first time somebody gave me a bullshit name. We’re doing the run around, they still can’t find this person in the system and your FTO is looking at you like, “Have you figured it out yet? Because I knew this after the first uh.”

Yeardley: [00:27:17] [chuckles] Right. They didn’t give you their real name.

Dave: [00:27:20] You need that life experience. But that happens quickly when you’re on the streets. It doesn’t happen so quickly in the academy. You can’t watch cops. I used to say to people all the time, they’d be like, “How long you been a cop?” “Well, I’ve been doing ride alongs on cops since I was five years old.” “But you’re not a cop.” “I’ve seen some things though.” “That show was invaluable to me growing up, because you can see when people are about to run on COPS and Live PD, cops can see it. People who are body language folks, you just step back and you’re like, “Oh, okay. His bladed stance, he just looked over his shoulder. Look at his hands. Oh, he’s clenching his fists like he’s about to punch or run or punch and then run.”

[00:28:01] You see these indicators on COPS and on LIVE PD when you’re watching like, “Oh, here he goes.” So, when you’ve seen that and then you experience it as a police officer, I know when I ask your age and you say, “Uh.” “What’s your date of birth?” “Uh.” I know I’m about to get bullshit. It just might be a tick, but this is why we do a little baseline information gathering. At the beginning, I want to see their tempo, their rhythm to how they speak, how articulate are they? Are they prone to providing open ended narratives? Are they yes and no? These are all things I want to gauge is how deep is this conversation going to be? How is the exchange going to be? Are we going to talk or is this going to be a Q&A? I want to have a discussion. I don’t want a Q&A. It’s very sterile. It’s not compelling. I want to see the emotion. When I bring up something to a suspect, I want to see the reaction. So, when they start talking about some horrible or regretful thing they did, I want to see their emotions, body language, those types of things.

Dan: [00:29:04] Dave’s talking about body language, and I will say this. Sitting in an interview room, there are some things– So, if you’re watching First 48, and they show a lot of the suspect interviews or just witnesses coming in. I watch those interviews, and I see body language, and I see how people place their chairs in a room or their body.

Yeardley: [00:29:28] The people being questioned?

Dan: [00:29:30] Yeah. And so, typically, if you’re going to have a conversation with somebody, you’re face to face. Our bodies are lined together. Sometimes, I would put the chair in the room a little cockeyed just to see if this person is actually going to arrange their chair, where they actually square up with me. That, to me, is an indication of, “Yeah, I’m willing to talk to you.” But when people sit down and they turn their bodies away or they physically turn their chair away from you, I think that’s a pretty good indicator of how that interview is going to go, the interview that I had in Cut and Run.

Yeardley: [00:30:10] The Small Town Dicks episode, Cut and Run.

Dan: [00:30:12] Yes, with one of our suspects. He did that and he was evasive in all the questioning.

Yeardley: [00:30:19] Meaning, he turned his chair not squared up with you.

Dan: [00:30:23] Correct. So, I was facing him. He was facing–

Yeardley: [00:30:26] With one shoulder towards you.

Dan: [00:30:28] Yeah, and looking at me during the interview over his right shoulder. I interviewed that guy for hours over a couple of days, and he wasn’t cooperative with me. He was information gathering is what he was.

Yeardley: [00:30:45] From you?

Dan: [00:30:46] From me. He wanted to know how much I knew. He also thought he was the smartest person in the room.

Dave: [00:30:51] And he’s also a convicted felon prior to that, correct, Dan?

Dan: [00:30:54] Correct. We’re talking about murder here. So, I caught him in a lot of lies, and every time that I caught him in a lie, he would posture with me. These were all indications of, “Back off, buddy.” So, I learned a lot in that interview. It was a long interview over the course of a couple of days. He never really gave us much. If I had him locked into a corner, if I had him pushed into a corner on something, he would admit to that. Anything else, he would deny. Deny, deny, deny, until I presented him with, “Oh, here’s a photo of you walking out of a store carrying a bunch of swords that just happened to be the murder weapons.” [Yeardley laughs] And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, that is me.” So, now, he’s got to explain that away. But it was constant. I had to keep doing that.

[00:31:48] Every time if I went down a line of questioning, he would deny, deny, deny, and then I would have to present something that would pull him out of that that he had to actually answer to. He would posture and he would get loud and angry. He got angry. He always pointed at his arm, because he would get goosebumps when he got fired up. And so, during that interview, he would look at me if I was going somewhere that he didn’t want to go, he would point at his forearm.

Yeardley: [00:32:22] What a strange reaction.

[00:32:32] This brings me to another question. You guys have said in casual conversations with just the three of us that you would rather have a list of provable lies from your suspect than a confession, because a confession could be thrown out in a suppression hearing, but provable lies, you can present to a jury and destroy the suspect’s credibility. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Dan: [00:32:57] Oh, I would say that I’d rather have the confession.

Yeardley: [00:33:01] Oh, you would?

Dan: [00:33:02] But done correctly, where it’s bulletproof that you Mirandized correctly that you weren’t coercive in any way, which are things that I’ve seen. I’ve seen promises being made in interview rooms.

Yeardley: [00:33:16] You mean like, “I can get you a lighter sentence if you tell me the truth?”

Dan: [00:33:20] Yeah, that’s coercive. I can’t make those promises. That’s the DAs job. One thing that always bothers me, and I went to The Reid school of interviewing, and it’s valuable for some things.

Yeardley: [00:33:32] Can you explain what it is or what it’s based on-ish? It’s like an FBI technique, right?

Dave: [00:33:38] No, it’s a private firm that’s got a bunch of former law enforcement people in it.

Dan: [00:33:42] Yeah, it’s a nine-step process of an interview. To me, it’s very formal.

Dave: [00:33:47] It’s very structured like, “After this, you go to this, unless they do this, then you jump up to this.” It’s rigid.

Dan: [00:33:54] So, I see when I watch First 48 too.

Dave: [00:33:58] Like theTulsa guys.

Dan: [00:33:59] For anyone who hasn’t seen the show, these guys are much more conversational. They’re far less rigid. It’s more of a free-flowing conversation. And that’s the kind of technique that I usually employ in the interview room. But I have seen other departments who are much more focused on the Reid Technique.

Yeardley: [00:34:15] I know this because when Dan and I watch those shows together, he goes, “Oh, Reid.” And now I know, if you have two detectives questioning a suspect and they’ve pulled their chairs right up to the suspect, and then there’s bodily contact where, say, a detective puts their hand on the person’s shoulder to say, “Hey, listen, you could tell me the truth or whatever.” Isn’t that a Reid Technique, get right up in their grill?

Dan: [00:34:39] It is. There’s a time for that.

Dave: [00:34:43] The utility of Reid is limited in certain circumstances. Like you guys, I recognize little things in the Reid Technique, especially when part of the training for Reid is, leave the room, leave the suspect in there for several minutes, act like you got shit to do. And then come back with a folder full of papers, even if they’re empty.

Yeardley: [00:35:07] You mean even if the pieces in it are blank?

Dave: [00:35:10] Completely. It’s a prop. And you stand 3ft to 6ft away from the suspect while they’re seated, and you tell them like, it’s like a scripted, “My investigation shows that what you’ve just told me is incorrect.” And you drop the file folder on the table. “My investigation shows X, Y, and Z.” It’s a Reid 101. When detectives who have taken Reid training, see it, they’re like, “Oh, there’s another one.”

Yeardley: [00:35:39] What happens if they open that folder and all the pages are blank?

Dan: [00:35:42] You better not.

Yeardley: [00:35:43] [laughs]

Dave: [00:35:44] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:35:44] That’s incredibly risky.

Dave: [00:35:46] I hated bluffing suspects. I wouldn’t bluff until I got way desperate like, “Okay, we’re nearing the end where this is a last chance effort.” I did not bluff. I hated lying to suspects, even though we’re able to. I love when people like, “You can’t lie to them.” “Fuck yeah, I can.”

Yeardley: [00:36:06] They lie to you. [laughs]

Dave: [00:36:08] They lie to me all the time. I can’t threaten, intimidate, coerce, or otherwise, promise things, but I can lie to you.

Yeardley: [00:36:14] I believe in the UK you are actually not allowed to lie to your suspect.

Dave: [00:36:18] Oh, thank God, we broke away.

Yeardley: [00:36:20] [laughs]

Dan: [00:36:22] Typically, here’s a lie that we might say in an interview. [cat meow]

Yeardley: [00:36:26] Oh, boy. Zipper is here offering her opinion as only Zipper can do. Please go on.

Dan: [00:36:32] Say, there’s two suspects and you say, “I just talked to your buddy in the other interview room and he’s talking.” Maybe you haven’t even talked to the guy yet.

Yeardley: [00:36:40] To the other suspect.

Dan: [00:36:41] To the other suspect, but you tell this person. That’s a lie that you might tell, but that’s a bluff too. I think bluffs are risky. I’d rather just be upfront and honest with people. I’m not going to give you everything though. I’m not going to show you all my cards. I want you to tell me what my cards are.

Dave: [00:37:01] Well, and part of that is because of what we’ve seen get suppressed is that this claim– the police were feeding the suspect info and facts, and basically, it was a Mad Libs of the confession that the suspect only gave a word here or there, but the rest of the narrative was written up by the detective. That’s not useful. I’ve seen it interviews too, where I’m like, “Oh, I can see where the defense would probably say, ‘This is a leading interview,’ and they’re just putting words in my client’s mouth.” That’s why Dan wants to hear it from the suspect. “I want to hear the facts from you. That way nobody can claim, ‘Well, you just fed him a bunch of information.'” In the 1970s and 1980s, they would have suspects that gave written statements, and then later on, there’d be this claim that, “Well, that statement was written by the police, and the suspect just signed it.” That’s a bad look. Even if it’s bullshit, it’s still a bad look. It better be in the suspect’s handwriting.

Dan: [00:38:02] Yeah. Now that most of our interviews are recorded by video, if someone writes it out, then you’ve got video proof of someone writing out a statement.

Yeardley: [00:38:11] But better be the suspect. It better not be the detective.

Dan: [00:38:14] Oh, no. I’ve never written– I’ve asked a suspect or a suspect said, “Can I write a letter to the victim right now?” “Sure, I’ll go grab you a pen. How many pieces of paper do you think you’ll need?”

Dave: [00:38:26] Absolute gold.

Dan: [00:38:28] So, I would let people do that. I would ask them if they were comfortable doing that. But you’re going to get their version of what happened. I’m not going to sit there and ask them questions while they’re writing that. I want them to just write it out and give me their version. And then you read it, and sometimes it’s a page and a half long, sometimes it’s like five sentences, but it gives you a gauge on how open this person is. If they’re not going to write everything out, if they’re going to give me three or four sentences, they’re not really being forthcoming.

Yeardley: [00:39:02] But it’s still a measure of culpability.

Dan: [00:39:04] Absolutely.

Dave: [00:39:06] However, you get a district attorney and a defense attorney that look at a five-sentence statement and all says is, “I’m sorry. I’ve always loved you. Take care of the family. I wish none of this had happened.” It doesn’t say anything. “I wish none of this had happened,” meaning, me being in an interview room and having to write a letter about me being sorry, in a very general and ambiguous way. That doesn’t help anything. I can understand when an attorney would look at that and say, “Well, you could have just thrown that in the trash because it’s worth nothing.” I love when people are like, “Well, that’s a confession.” “What did he confess to? Didn’t confess to anything. He just said he’s sorry, that he loves them, and he wish this didn’t happen.” That could mean any number of things.

[00:39:48] I used to ask my guys– and be specific. If you remember a certain day where there was a bad interaction with you and the child after something happened, reference it. It’s probably in their memory as probably the worst time this ever happened. If you take accountability for that, that’s huge. So, I would encourage specificity. Some guys gave it to me. Some guys would be like, “I’m not going to write a letter because they already know what’s up. I’m going to take a photocopy of that, I’m going to put it in the file, and I’m going to give the photocopy to the family and be that.” And say, “For what it’s worth, this is what suspect had to say to you and your child.”

[00:40:24] There’s utility in that and it is gold when it’s specific enough to address a name, a place, a location, a date, a certain type of interaction with the victim where you can be like, “Oh, they’re referring to this particular crime on this date that happened at this house when the child was eight.” That’s huge. So, written statements are gold. You just want it to be specific.

Yeardley: [00:40:54] Sure. Well, your fifth grade English teacher wouldn’t stand for this in place of a specifically referenced noun as in an act or a crime or something.

Dave: [00:41:04] Right. And I’ll say even police officers that I’ve been around that maybe don’t have the exposure to a suppression hearing or being in trial from suppression hearings all the way through the verdict and sentencing, if you don’t have the exposure to the utility of having a letter or having been in the room with somebody who’s confessing to horrible things, you might not know how to address that in your initial investigation, because you just don’t have any exposure to it. I learned these things from Don, sergeant David, Jeff, my former partner, 20 plus years working sex crimes and child abuse. But talk about working right next to an encyclopedia. I took a lot of things from him. He had a certain way of doing things very commanding in a room.

[00:41:53] I’ve always said like, “If I had a family member that was sexually abused or a victim of a crime in that family of crimes, I want Jeff to be the assigned detective on it.” Because I’ve seen him in an interview room, and the guy is fluid. He knows when to step on the gas. He knows when to push the brakes. He knows when to confront and say, “Get out of the car,” figuratively speaking. He knows all these things, because you think in 20 plus years, how much exposure to sex offenders, and personality types, and types of crimes has Jeff been involved in? Too many to count. There are times where I felt like I was getting nowhere in an interview, I would come out and Jeff would tell me, “It’s time to crawl on this guy’s face.”

[00:42:44] When we say crawl on somebody’s face, it doesn’t mean like the Hollywood version of, “Let’s turn the lights down. There’s just one light [Yeardley laughs] dangling down over the table, and I’m going to screw my gun into the side of his head.”

Yeardley: [00:42:56] Like a Black Ops kind of interrogation. [laughs]

Dave: [00:42:59] It’s nothing like that. He means, it’s time to confront this guy. I remember the first time I used it– It’s a Reid Technique, but it’s effective. Jeff told me, it was this suspect that I had on video committing this crime, but he just would not admit to it. All you see is the shoes in the video and I’m like, “Same shoes you’re wearing, dude.” “But tell me about what happened in this house.” “That’s not me.’ So, finally, I take a break. I think suspect asked to use the restroom, I was like, “Perfect,” because I need to retool my strategy here. Let the person use the restroom.

[00:43:32] I go out, talk to Jeff, and I’m like, “You want to take a shot at him?” He goes, “I’ll take a shot at him, but I want you to do this first. I want you to walk in there, start down that same path again, but physically put your hand up in front of yourself like a stop sign. I want you to put your hand up in between you and him, like you’re telling him, ‘Stop.’ I want you to actually say, ‘Stop. We are way past that.”‘ He goes, “Just try it.” This guy goes down there, we’re about two minutes into this other portion of the interview, and the guy’s not going to go there, and I just said, “Listen, man, stop. Stop right there. We are way past that.” And he just dropped his head and he’s like, “All right, I’ll tell you.”

Yeardley: [00:44:11] Wow.

Dave: [00:44:13] Jeff told me later, he’s like, “You interrupted his train of thought. Everything he’s about to tell you said, ‘I don’t want to hear any of that shit. I want the truth right now. Tell me what happened.'” He gave it up. Jeff knew that because he’d probably been watching me for 30 minutes going, “Just put your hand up and say, ‘Stop. We’re way past that.”‘ [chuckles]

Yeardley: [00:44:33] Right. But you wouldn’t think such a gesture though demonstrative would actually work. I don’t know. You just feel like if somebody’s hell bent on not telling you something, they’re not going to tell you. But in fact, that’s not true.

Dave: [00:44:57] I learned this from Dan. When he’s talking about the guy who would get very confrontational and his body language, I remember that case. But Dan just told Sergeant Dave, he’s like, “He’s too comfortable lying to me. He’s used to lying to me. I need someone to take a run at him, because he’s gotten so comfortable telling me bullshit that he’s not going to come off of it, because he knows what’s this guy going to do.” You got to introduce a new face to the interview room. We didn’t have a policy where we would interview with two detectives in the room. I would do that on occasion, if there was another detective who had additional information for me or there’s security risk. I’ve been in interview rooms where you’re like, “Fucking hope, this guy doesn’t come over the table, because he’s going to eat me up.”

Yeardley: [00:45:42] Oh, like you feared for your bodily safety?

Dave: [00:45:46] Yeah. I had a child pornography suspect who’s passed while he was in prison. But Dan remembers this case. Guy was enormous, bodybuilder. I mean, shredded. I don’t know what type of guy this guy is. I know what he’s into because I just served a search warrant on his house.

Dan: [00:46:02] That guy was like 6’7″, 260 and ripped.

Dave: [00:46:06] Less than 10% body fat. And he’d spent time in prison. He was nothing but a gentleman throughout our entire interaction. Even in the interview, he lawyered up. It was just because he told me, he goes, “The only reason I’m lawyering up is because I’ve been through this before.” He’s like, “I want to talk to you, but there’s no explanation for it and I’m not going to speak to you. It’s not personal. You won’t have any hassle out of me.” Well, it’s getting to be close to time to go to the jail and lodge him for X, Y and Z. He starts having a heart issue, his demeanor. Everything has changed about this guy. I think he’s having a– we call it a significant emotional day. Significantly emotional event in your life where he’s like, “Oh, shit, I’m going back to prison and this is bad stuff.”

[00:46:54] Previously been to prison for drugs, some pursuits, some thefts. Shit, we deal with in the law enforcement world all the time. Child sex abuse material is a different look when you’re a prisoner and he knew it. Well, he has this heart related event to the point that I call for an ambulance and fire personnel show up at the police department, go into the room, and they’re like, “He’s having an event. We got to get him to the hospital right now.” I was like, “Is this guy– is he playing me? Is he trying to get to where I’m going to be in an ambulance or in a hospital room with him and now he’s going to try to get away?” Total gentleman threw out. He apologized. He wouldn’t talk specifics. He said, “I’ll talk to you about anything,” and I said, “It’s all off the record, man. You already lawyered up, unless you tell me I want to go back on the record, none of this will go on my report.” I was at the hospital for six hours that day.

Yeardley: [00:47:47] And was he having a heart attack?

Dave: [00:47:49] Yeah, he had a heart attack. So, he gets lodged the following day in the jail, gets lodged in the jail, goes away to prison, pled guilty. Total gentleman. I don’t like what he did. I wasn’t judgmental of him. He was remorseful. Never gave us a problem. But it’s one of those where initially, I was like, “I don’t want to be in the room alone with this guy. I don’t know what he’s capable of.” I mean, he had whole cans.

Yeardley: [00:48:14] Right. [laughs] Snap you like a twig.

Dave: [00:48:16] Right. So, some departments have a policy where you’re going to have two detectives in there. It’s useful in some situations. You’ll have a detective. I typically want one voice in that room. So, when I see another detective jump, like when another officer shows up and you’re the primary officer on the call, but the cover officer shows up or a third-party shows up, and they start running people’s names and barking out orders and giving directions, I’m always like, “Oh, hey, you’re jumping my call right now. It’s my call. Don’t jump my call.” Same thing in an interview room. If you’re the secondary, unless I prompt you, I typically don’t want to hear you ask any questions. I want you to be able to point out when we take a break like, “Hey, let’s tease this out a little bit. He said something that I caught on.” I was never huffy about it, but it was my preference that I’d rather there just be one voice in that room.

Dan: [00:49:08] Yeah, that other officer, a lot of times too is just simply observing body language and making observations.

Yeardley: [00:49:15] An extra set of eyes.

Dan: [00:49:17] An extra set of eyes, because I’m not watching the suspect the whole time. I’m looking down at notes or whatever. This other detective can be in the room seated in a way where we talk about runners’ stance. I’m not saying all things about Reid Technique are bad. Reid Technique also teaches you a lot about body language interviews. That was my main takeaway from the Reid school that I went to was, those observations that I can make with people where I can tell that they’re being evasive or deceptive, those were important things to me. So, that’s what another set of eyes in that interview room can do is make those observations.

Dave: [00:49:57] Yeah. And I don’t fault agencies that do it that way. It’s just a personal preference. I’m sure there are detectives out there like, “I want two of us in the room every time.” Some of my preference was formed around dealing with detectives like Jeff and Don, and Sergeant David. Others were being around district attorneys who are like, “I don’t want a physically imposing presence at council table during the trial.” So, lots of times, the lead they call the case agent will be up at the table with the district attorney during the trial. I used to sit up there with certain district attorneys. I had others who I was an unknown commodity when I first started. They’re like, “You’re going to be in the front row. You’re not going to be with me at the table,” because there’s usefulness in having me at the table.

[00:50:42] So, the attorney, when he hears something, he’s like, “Is that a fact?” He would have to turn, roll his chair back, talk to me in the front row. In other situations where I’m at the table already, they just write a little note on their yellow legal pad, pass it over. It’s non disruptive. You answer it yes or no or, let me check. It’s useful to have the case agent up at the table, but attorneys, they don’t want it to look like the government needs five people piling on this suspect. It looks heavy handed. So, you limit the optics of that. Now, I’ve been in trials where there were three co-counsel with the suspect, and it’s just the DA and me in the front row. If I had that situation, I do agree. I think it’s a better look to have fewer people from the government up at the table.

[00:51:30] I’ve never seen two detectives up at the table. Only a couple of cases where there was co-counsel on the prosecution side. There are several cases where there were two defense attorneys with the suspect. Their strategy is the same. One of them is doing the questioning, the other one’s observing, recording, checking the case file, like, “Does this statement on the stand differ than what they gave the police officer eight months ago when they were first interviewed?” Doing valuable work for their client. It’s the same thing on the police side. I don’t want two people at the table. On the law enforcement side, I don’t want two people in the interview room. There are exceptions.

Yeardley: [00:52:06] Right. I think these conversations are so fascinating, gentlemen. Thank you so much.

Dave: [00:52:13] Lots more to talk about on that vein.

Yeardley: [00:52:16] Absolutely. We could definitely revisit this topic in the future. It’s just a great conversation with so much to learn about how you both do what you do. I can’t get enough. I loved it.

Dan: [00:52:30] Thank you. I would just add this on. My number one strategy going into an interview room was be respectful. Show them respect. Sometimes that’s all these people have is their own self-respect. So, you don’t want to take that away from them.

Dave: [00:52:44] Yeah, it’s poker. You can’t show emotion in there. The minute you act like, “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard somebody do to somebody else,” now we’re back into judgmental land and probably it’s going to be a short conversation after that.

Yeardley: [00:52:59] Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to be shamed, even if they did the worst thing. Thank you, gentlemen, so much.

Dan: [00:53:06] You’re welcome.

Dave: [00:53:07] Thank you. It was a great question.

Yeardley: [00:53:09] Thank you. I just tried to do my part.

Dave: [00:53:11] I’m sure you listeners have some questions of your own. Feel free to drop us a line one of our social media accounts. Next week on The Briefing Room, we’ve got Paul Holes. He joins us to talk about forensics. It’s going to be gruesome and great. Can’t wait to hear it. And now for a little Briefing Room feedback.

[00:53:32] So, the first two episodes of our new podcast, The Briefing Room, we talked about active shooter response in schools. And as part of those two episodes, we had a discussion with two teachers from Texas. It was quite apparent there was a distinction between one school district and the other when it came to the caliber of training and the opportunities for training that these two school districts offer to their employees and their students. We got a lot of feedback from the first two episodes and many questions had to do with, “How do we ensure that our school district is getting up to date quality high caliber training to our teachers and our students?”

[00:54:22] My answer would be and I think probably most school resource officers would agree is that, reach out to your local police department or sheriff’s office, and ask them if they are conducting any active shooter response, any critical incident traumatic event type trainings, and get on the police department’s training calendar, and offer your school and say, “We want to have a training at our school. It’ll probably be on a teachers in service day or on a weekend, and we’ll run all the teachers and staff through this active shooter training.”

[00:55:01] It does two things. It gives the police officers an ability to really do some reconnaissance of the school grounds. They become familiar with the buildings they could potentially be entering. It also inoculates the folks who are being trained into a little bit of a stress response. I know that Dan has done that to varying degrees, but at some point, that training felt very real to some of the folks who weren’t used to hearing gunfire, even though they were shooting blanks. It’s not just a drill. It’s stressful.

Yeardley: [00:55:36] I remember, Dan, when you talked about participating in going to a training at a school, and you played the bad guy and you were so good at it, you made the teacher cry. So, when Dave says, “Yes, it’s a drill, but they’re trying to make it as realistic as possible,” and of course, you weren’t trying to make her cry.

Dan: [00:55:55] Not my proudest moment, but I wasn’t even shooting blanks. I had basically a Nerf gun that I was using. But I was heartless. I played a heartless person. I think that’s alarming to people that someone could be so heartless that a bad guy would not care at all about your misfortune or the pain you’re in. It’s a reality that we have as police officers, because we see it every day.

Dave: [00:56:22] I love that Dan made it real. That makes the training worthwhile and not just a waste of everyone’s time. I want you to be uncomfortable.

Yeardley: [00:56:31] Because also, chances are the actual incident will be hundred times worse than what Detective Dan was able to bring on that day.

Dan: [00:56:39] I’ll tell you what, the first time you hear a gunshot go off and you’re not wearing your protection, it rattles you. And so, I had a Nerf gun that day. I can’t imagine what these people would go through if it was a real incident and how loud a gun going off is. It’s not like television. It is loud.

Dave: [00:56:59] But to bring that back to the training piece, folks can reach out, their school district can reach out to the fire department and the police department, and they can team up together to create an active shooter or a critical incident trauma response training that can combine medics, and fire personnel with police, and schools’ staff and students. You can do that. Reach out to your police department and ask if they can help you coordinate an active shooter training. That’s a public service. The police department, they should jump at it.

Dan: [00:57:38] Yeah, and couple that with a stop the bleed training.

Yeardley: [00:57:42] Some triage.

Dan: [00:57:43] Not just triage, but, like, let’s really work on the first aid aspect of the aftermath because if we’re ignoring that part, then we’re failing too. Dave and I talked about it. We were buddies with some firefighters in our local town. We had a boat, so we wanted to make a first aid kit. Not that Dave and I are going to get hurt out at the lake, but what if somebody else gets hurt out the lake? It’s dangerous. Somebody gets hit by a prop on a boat.

Yeardley: [00:58:10] A propeller?

Dan: [00:58:11] Yeah, in the boating world’s cup prop. [Yeardley giggles] But there’s going to be a lot of blood, and Dave and I wanted to be prepared to respond to something like that if it happened. If I was a teacher, I think in our town, I think teachers could probably go down to the local fire department and say, “Hey, can I just get some basic supplies if the worst thing ever happened and there was a shooter at my school?”

Yeardley: [00:58:38] For first aid.

Dan: [00:58:39] For first aid. “Would you guys give me some of those things?” I would bet that the fire department would say, “Yeah, what do you need?”

Yeardley: [00:58:47] And they’d say, “I don’t know, can you help me?”

Dan: [00:58:49] Yeah.

Yeardley: [00:58:49] Then the fire department would say, “Okay, this is what you need.”

Dan: [00:58:52] Yeah. But honestly, the schools should be paying for all this stuff. There’s no excuse.

Dave: [00:58:58] There truly is no excuse. The stuff that teachers and staff are putting on their own personal credit cards is embarrassing.

Yeardley: [00:59:05] I agree.

Dave: [00:59:07] They shouldn’t have to do that, but I agree with Dan. If you went down to a local firehouse, they’ll hook you up. They’re happy to, if you tell them what it’s for, “I need stuff to stop bleeding.” They’re going to say, “You need tourniquets and you need big gauss, pressure bandages, stuff like that.” Stuff that soaks up blood and puts pressure on wounds.”

Dan: [00:59:27] Yeah. I would say at a minimum, you should have some tourniquets in your classroom available. They’re not that expensive. You can actually get them on Amazon. If your school district or your school won’t pay for those things, go on Amazon, look at tourniquets and learn how to apply it correctly. It’s invaluable. I’ve watched a tourniquet save a life.

Dave: [00:59:51] Thanks to everyone who listened for all the thoughtful comments we’ve received. We read every one of them. So, keep them coming.

Yeardley: [01:00:02] The Briefing Room is produced by Gary Scott and me, Yeardley, Smith and coproduced by detectives Dan and Dave. This episode was edited by Soren Begin, Gary Scott, and me. Our associate producers are Erin Gaynor and the Real Nick Smitty. Our social media is run by the one and only Monika Scott. Our researcher is Delaney Britt Brewer. Our music is composed by Logan Heftel. And our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell. If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the podcast, please visit us on our website at smalltowndicks.com/thebriefingroom. Thank you to SpeechDocs for providing transcripts. And thank you to you, the best fans in the pod universe for listening. Honestly, nobody’s better than you.

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