Left Of Greg 029 The Case of Amber Guyger and Botham Jean

Hey everyone, this is our video version of the audio podcast we did on the case from Dallas, Texas, where off-duty police officer Amber Guyger walked into the wrong apartment and killed a guy by the name of Botham Jean. I just want to remind you that we look at this case through the lens of what we call Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis. We offer a scientific explanation for how this can actually occur, right? How can an off-duty police officer walk into the wrong apartment and kill an innocent man? We look at it as a failure of human performance, so we just try to explain it through a scientific lexicon.

Also, stick around towards the end. I added in a few minutes of myself with our CEO, Shelley Williams. Shelley is a veteran law enforcement officer and behavior expert, so she's able to bring her own unique perspective to the case. So, thanks again for watching. Please like and subscribe, follow us, and I hope you enjoy.

Alright, so we're going to go ahead and get started here today, Greg. It's just going to be you and I. Obviously, it's a big case that we're talking about; a pretty huge case in the news right now. To get everyone who's listening—I'm sure a lot of them have already heard it and have their own opinions about it—but just to bring everyone into the fold here and know what we're talking about: we're talking about the Amber Guyger case, who is recently the Dallas police officer—former Dallas police officer—who was just convicted of murder.

To give a little bit of quick background on the case: on September 6, 2018, off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger walked into an apartment that she thought was hers at the Southside Flats apartment complex. She fatally shot an unarmed man named Botham Jean, whom she believed to be an intruder in her home. So, that's basically what happened and what led to all of this. Now, we're going to get into detail on it, and just like we always do, it's always going to be through the lenses of Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis. This isn't a political discussion; this isn't about race relations in the United States. This is just about human cognitive performance, Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis, and how we can articulate how something like this would happen.

I'll just throw to you how it's portrayed or how I first heard about it, Greg, and then we can kind of start there: this guy is sitting at home after a long day of work on the couch eating ice cream and is then subsequently shot and killed in his own apartment. That's kind of how it's basically been portrayed, which sounds ridiculous to anyone—how could that possibly happen? But I think we can kind of walk through exactly what occurred and then talk about the ramifications of it, where it's at today, and everything that may occur down the road because of this decision. How does that sound, or do you want to add something?

Absolutely love that. I would start and admonish everybody in our audience, and everybody that picks up or listens to this or watches this on YouTube or any other venue: shame on you for the ice cream! Here's the thing, when we are going to address something, let's address it scientifically and clinically and take the emotion out. The entire argument about the ice cream and the couch and watching football and everything else is an attempt to prejudice the outcome of the caper. Listen, this is a horrific incident. Mr. and Mrs. Jean, if you are listening to our broadcast, I am so sorry. That's a horrible, horrible tragedy. No family should ever have to endure this. But once it goes to the declaration of charges and an arrest is made, and now we're in the court, we have to talk about the facts. And while those are facts, those are facts that have been added not in mitigation, or not because the facts of the case have never been in question: that this female officer killed this man, was unarmed, in his own apartment. Everything that we add on to that, Brian, sort of detracts from why—and I'm not talking motive, I'm talking why something like this happened. First of all, it's so rare, that's why we're talking about it, and that's why the news and everybody else is talking.

And also, I should have added in there: she's not saying she didn't kill him. She's 100% admitting, "This is what happened." So, she was very clear. So, everyone listening, she went into his apartment and killed him, and she has not disputed that, has not denied it. So, now it's, "Whoa, how can this happen? How did this guy—Botham Jean—and Amber Guyger, how did their two lives intersect and how does this occur?" So that's what we're going to cover.

And I think we add the one additional comma: was this a homicide? Because the difference of being a murder or being negligent is huge, and that's the heart of much of what we're going to disclose. First thing—I think that's not an earthquake, I apologize (likely referring to a sound, such as a phone notification)—the "achievable syndrome." We have the Rogue Manor West cheaply-funded folks, "Colin, I could use a new jacket" GoFundMe page (joking about poor quality sounds/equipment). The idea that, I think, Brian, that our viewers and our listeners need to know, too, is the night that this came out and the next morning, you and I were following this.

Yes, next morning, that first message.

Yeah. What we call an instructor development, and folks, if you're interested in the Instructor Development Program, contact Brian; call him, email, or drop a message to the site. It's one of the functions that we do with our closest instructor base, our advisory board, certainly our board of directors. What happens is if any of us come up with something that specifically talks about HBPRA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis) and the human behavior of human performance wheelhouse, what happens is we'll do an opinion piece on it so everybody can take a look at what's likely to come, what's going to happen. Are there going to be protests? Who's going to... let's see, in the last 24 hours, the B-17 crash and investigation, the stabbing in Paris, the workplace violence police. Those are the type of things that will come down. Generally, it's me that will prepare all the facts in a case and circulate them with the HBPRA links so all the instructors can clearly say the next time in their classroom or when they're asked about it, "Hey, this is our position from Arcadia (referring to their organization) on what occurred." And then our subject matter experts will chime in, and the finished document is something much like what we're going to talk about today, Brian. But I think the key point is that we've been talking about this one specifically because it is so unique. These are a unique set of circumstances that don't happen very often, right? Therefore, let's take it from that perspective rather than whether she's a female or not, if it was daylight or not, whether Mr. Jean was black, white, or Hispanic. Let's take that out.

Yeah.

Because if we do that, then nobody can accuse us of pandering to one of those audiences, because you see what's online right now, and the horrific stuff that's online right now is rhetoric, and it's horrible. But there's not a pundit, there's not a lawyer, there's no cop that I've talked to that said 'murder' and then after that they said 'convicted.' Everybody's surprised; they're not understanding the two perspectives that were vying for control here, Brian.

Yeah, no, and that's a good point. We'll talk about this because that was both of us, we were both shocked. Our legal team, when we talked to them at Arcadia, was shocked that it was a murder conviction. We all knew we couldn't get through to them because they were trying to call us and go, "What?" Yeah. So, we knew that she was going to get convicted of some charge. Remember, once again, she fully admitted that something bad happened, something occurred, she admitted to doing it. Your vote, Brian, just so they know, my vote was that it was going to be negligent homicide.

Brian, I don't remember, some type of involuntary manslaughter. But, because remember, the different, well, and different was her being law enforcement, it was going to change it because now they're going to say... But, but here's, yeah, but to go back to what you said, it doesn't matter, it shouldn't matter in terms of female, male, color of skin, right? I mean, I go back to: put yourself, and you're the brother of this guy, you're the mother, you're the dad, you know, do you, do you really care the color of the skin or whether it was a man or woman who killed your family member? Exactly. You want justice for that. You want to know what happened. You want someone to pay for that. So, I always put it from the victim's perspective as well, like, that's, it's horrible, none of us want that. So, let's get into, you know, so let's, let's first just, just throw a caveat at what you just said. So, Mr. Jean's due process was violated. His Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the Constitution were violated. An argument could be made under Title 42, Section 1983, that his due process was violated.

And I'll add to that for our legal experts in the room, because under color of law, Ms. Guyger had recently left work, she was still in uniform, still communicated by somebody from work. And when she came in, she immediately did her role as a police officer: "Freeze! Don't move!"—those type of statements. So, an argument could be made that under color of law, she was still a police officer acting as a police officer at a crime scene. So, therefore, Mr. Jean has it's this panacea of his rights that were violated in his own home.

Right. And I want to—that's, that's absolutely where we want to get into. But let's, for folks especially just who aren't too sure about the case, let's, I mean, yeah, I described, but let's talk about actually what happened. So, okay, so Amber Guyger is a sworn law enforcement officer for Dallas Police Department. She that day, I believe, worked a 15-hour shift, something like that.

15-hour shift, 14 hours, somewhere right around there, folks. And beat up on me if it was 13.

She worked overtime that day and had a long shift. She was driving home at night, it was now almost 10 o'clock, 10 p.m. at night. Pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex. So, this parking garage in apartment complex also was shown that she was also talking on the phone to someone while she was driving in. And while during the point where she was parking, she then walked into the apartment complex, right, to the door that she thought was hers, encountered a man there whom she did not know, as she thought was in his apartment. So, do we want to stop right at that point before we go through that threshold, Brian, metaphoric and realistic, and let's talk about some things. One, no sympathy for Ms. Guyger from the standpoint that she worked a lot of hours. We all work a lot of hours.

Yeah, okay. So, right away, it's all the—mo—simplify, understand that you're going to say, "Hey, listen, this has got to be considered." So, I'll ask your viewers to consider it, not from the emotional, I'll say, "Oh, consider yourself walking around like a zombie after your shift in the emergency room, or after your shift at 7-Eleven, or the gas station, or wherever you work." Clearly, from a cognitive performance standpoint.

Exactly.

So, from human behavior, think of how good you are at that role. Then think of factors that nobody brought into the caper. Some people wrote, "Like EtOH (alcohol) was there alcohol on board this?" Then, yeah, I can guarantee you that the toxicology came back negative on Ms. Guyger because had it come back, they would have been—both the prosecutor and the defense would have jumped at it—diminished capacity, all these different issues. So, it clearly is off the table. But she was tired. An argument could be made that she's tired. That's reasonable. That's a reasonable conclusion to make. The other thing is, Brian, you've been to Dallas, I've been to Dallas, you've lived in an apartment, I've lived in apartment.

Yes.

Now, I live behind in the alley, yeah, I live right behind it, but by that guy's bike and the dumpster. And the idea is that all of the places look identical. The floor plans are sometimes reversed, but the facades might be different, but the parking garage looks virtually identical. And if you take a look at this apartment complex specifically, it looks identical. So, don't sit there and come at me with Architectural Digest in one hand and the Bible in the other and say that she intentionally did it. Now, she unintentionally came off with divided attention because she was on the phone and texting. And I'll go even further: she had at one point a romantic, sexual relationship with the man that she was talking with, and it's likely that those hormones were still flashing either where she remembered him fondly or they were having an argument. Those things take us away mentally from the moment, and inattention blindness starts to build. So, now she walks into what she thinks is the hallway leading up to her apartment. One of the people said, at that point in the argument, Brian, he said, "She should have known, should have seen the number, she should have seen the red carpet." And here's what I'll counter for you: there's a well-known, gosh, PM series of videos where people were asked to count the number of basketball bounces, and a guy in a gorilla costume walked by, and everybody missed it. So, for you, sir, that are sitting in your apartment, or you, ma'am, that are sitting in your office, saying that this female who was distracted, she was tired, and everything looked alike cognitively to her brain, that she would have noticed something as simple as an apartment number or a carpet, you're out of your mind.

And that's no way. That's where it gets into, you know, we talked about inattention blindness, we talked about adaptation, all that stuff, changed the confirmation, confirmation bias that she's done it a million times, so it's the same apartment.

Right.

Right. And I'll just, since we're on that, let's go to what actually came out during the trial, that the investigator said, "Hey, you know, it was common for residents of the Southside Flats Apartments to get confused and go to the wrong apartment." The investigator, the Texas Ranger, the lead investigator, said that he even had trouble determining which floor he was on while investigating the shooting. And then it continues to, he interviewed, he led the team that interviewed 297 of the 349 residents, and they said about 15% of those had walked to the wrong floor and put their key in the wrong door. And actually, for the third and fourth floor, where this event occurred, where Mr. Jean was living, and where Ms. Guyger thought she was at, was between the third and fourth floor. I believe she was on the fourth, and whatever her apartment was on the third, she ended up at the fourth. Forty, 46 people, you know, obviously had been interviewed, had walked the wrong floor and put their key in the door. And it was actually higher for the residents on the third and fourth floor, where 38 residents had gotten confused in the past. 38 people living in those floors had done the same thing she did.

Crucial investigation by Mr. Brian Marren. And kudos to you, Brian, because that's the type of stuff that we need to talk about. So, Brian, I'm going to depose you right quick. Do you remember a couple years ago in Florida, the German student that was killed walking into the wrong apartment after a night of drinking?

Yep.

Okay. So it happens. Was that family charged with murder?

No.

No. Okay. And was it a horrific incident?

Yes. Yeah, they yelled at him to stop, and there was a language barrier, and they ended up shooting.

Now, do you think that's happened more than once?

I would say that it happens annually, okay? And maybe a couple of times a year. And specifically, in places like college towns or destination places where perhaps there's over-service of alcohol or some other confusion, right?

Yeah, it happened not long ago, a few months ago, right near me. Obviously, a lot of Marines here. A woman wakes up, and some drunk Marine is making breakfast at 3:30 or 4:00, and all that. I remember seeing it, it's nice about it. And yeah, and then, then he looked up and realized he was in the wrong place, and he took off running and had no idea.

It just happened. Or making breakfast. We had a friend growing up walk into someone's place, and the neighbor came back the next day to her with her shoes and said, "You left these in my living room last night," because she woke up going, "Oh my God, this isn't my living room," and ran out. Okay, so now add to this: you've just answered that honestly, nobody provoked you. I didn't send you a note or say, "Hey, please answer in this manner." So, we're not trying to make an excuse. What we're trying to do is we're trying to build a cognition file. You and I had stayed in a bunch of hotels over the past few years, working and socially. But the idea is that do you ever remember a time where we went to the parking garage and we were so fatigued that we couldn't find a room?

Yes. How many people have done that at the airport, at wherever, like, constantly?

Now, have you ever had the occasion, with me or without me, absent me, where you've gone to the hotel room and your keycard wouldn't work?

Yep.

And they walked all the way back to the desk and you were at the wrong room?

Yep. Especially, especially because, you know, we are at the Holiday Inn Express, because it's uniformity, same. We do that on purpose, but yeah, it's easier for our minds. Our minds adapt with reality.

Right. But I just this past time—I won't tell the city—but a lot of confusion is—the front desk assigned me a room. Do you need one key or two? And I go, "Hey, I'm big, I just need one." Though, you know, today I made the joke, we were, I get several and I passed that, I passed the extras just to random people. So, I went down and scanned, and the light came off, and I pushed the door open, and the TV's on, and I see feet. And now I'm going, "Well, I don't think that's me. I didn't order that." So, that's the first thing I thought was, 'Is it me?' And the second thing is, 'Boy, she's, you're way too early,' you know, we had an appointment, kind of the grub up thing. No, just joking. What would happen is I had apologized, and a guy screamed from the other, a girlish scream, could have been a woman, but I saw the feet. And I went back, and I go, "Hey, somebody's in there." And they apologized up and down and gave me extra hotel points for staying at the hotel. What I'm trying to say is we've all made a mistake, so let's take a mistake, let's write that on a shoebox, yeah, and let's put that on the table and say, "Could this have been a mistake?" Because the difference is unintentional versus intentional, right? Intentionally, if she knowingly did something. If she disregarded carelessly and recklessly. Well, how do you recklessly disregard it down a hallway to what you think is your apartment? So, I would ask our viewers and our listeners, Brian, to consider that.

Okay, that's important for a number of reasons. Not just understanding how this could occur, like, how does this, how did this actually physically happen? Like, how does someone actually make this, what are the mechanics, right? But it also goes into—and we'll talk about this after we get through it—I think is the actual murder charge itself, because, like we said, there's varying degrees. When one person kills another person, there's a number of different charges you can be charged with, right, depending on the situation. Right? If I'm, you know, you come up to me and I'm minding my own business and you try to fight me for some reason, to rob me, and I end up killing you in the process, that's not murder. I didn't, I didn't go into that situation.

Or if I was driving the getaway car and you robbed the 7-Eleven, and I killed—you punched a clerk, and I drove away, and seven years later that clerk died, I go up for homicide. Don't get that, that it's nuanced. And here's the thing, the reason that laws are considered breathing, living documents and the reason that we have appeals courts and SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) is we still don't completely understand all the idiosyncratic things that occur with the law at that time and at that place. So, it's a prism and it's constantly changing and maneuvering. And I would, I would tell our viewers, before you go, "Yes, that's what's going on," consider both sides, but it's more than just two sides to this one, I think.

Right. Right. And like you said, this is all heavily nuanced. So, now we understand walking up, how we're at the door, right? So, how, how she could get to the wrong door that isn't hers. I guarantee there's been plenty of people who have done something similar before in the past.

Let's just ask, Brian, have you ever been on a freeway and you're looking for Exit 135 and you can't remember the last five miles? And all of a sudden it seems like you came to and said, "Hey, here's my exit," right? That happens all the time. There's a number of great books and great lecture series on that one recently in Edinburgh where they were talking about that in the book Traffic, highly recommend, where they talk about that. And what happens is inattention blindness again, and familiarity, and change blindness, and adaptation—all those, look them up, folks—cause your brain to go into this mode: "Listen, I don't have to think about this because I do it every day. This is a function of my memory that is completely allowed to function on its own without my intervention." That's where she was. She was in her phone call, she was in her moment, she was digging for keys, she was thinking of what I'm going to have for dinner tonight, am I going to meet this guy for a—what's going to be going on? Not once did she consider, "I'm going to look at my own house number."

No. And that's going into, folks listening right now, you're probably driving to work or home from work or what—how many times have you gotten to work or especially gotten home from work, and you can't remember a single thing about that drive? You could, you just go, "Oh, geez, I can't believe I'm home. I don't remember anything about that drive." So, you're doing it right now if you're listening to this. Your brain is engaged. At a red light, when it turns green, you're not seeing the green light, you've never even looked at the green light, but everybody around you is moving forward, so you start to drift forward. Those are autonomic reflexes that we resort to because our brain can't afford to burn calories in repetitive functions. It's the truth.

Yeah, so. So, now she's... let's, let's continue on with it. So, understand a little bit how this could happen. Okay, so I get it, this is, this happens, people go to the wrong house or the wrong door. So, now we're at the door, and a very short amount of time from her getting to the door is, is, you know, Botham is, is shot and killed. So, let's, so, let's do that as a study, that part.

Yeah, so. So, have you ever—and Shelley comes to mind—Range 36 Alpha on Pendleton, we're walking along and there was a tarantula, which they have at Camp Pendleton in California here. And the tarantulas can jump. And if you don't know the tarantulas can jump and you don't know that there's these kind of wasps that eat tarantulas, that whole thing is acting out when you're at Pendleton and you're already a little bit scared. So, Shelley, our CEO, and I were going to separate observation posts at each convent, of course. And Shelley walked up and saw something. And I see the mission focus and she kneels down and it's a tarantula. So, what's happening in her mind is she's going through what could this be? You know, what are these things? Before she ever knew it was a spider. Then once she knew it was a spider, she was freaked out and jumped. Now, maybe 45 minutes later we met up and we were going to discuss the OP (observation post) and what we had seen on that scenario. A leaf blew by. That leaf was that tarantula head earlier, and I cringed and jumped. So, somebody's going to say, "Well, how could that happen?" I will tell you this, when that door slid open, when Ms. Guyger took her keycard and pushed it and that door was slightly ajar, the last thing on her mind was that this is a burglary, there's somebody inside my apartment. What happens as you go through phases of denial, and the very first thing is, "I can't believe I left that open. Did I leave the iron on? Maybe my key is not working. I wonder if it's the service." All things are all examples of denial that we all get to when we find that noise and observation. And they're not complete thoughts prior because there are electrical impulses borne by chemical inferences in our brain. So, they're not unlike having a stroke where you see those light flashes, boom, boom, boom, boom, they're all coming at you like this. Yet, she never stops. She continues into the threshold. Now, I would caution you for this, okay? And I fully would request that you interview Shelley on this point. Here you got Amber Guyger, and I'm not sure about her size, I'm not sure about her training. I do know that she's only had four years on the road as a cop. I know she's done warrants service. I know she was in the vicinity of or at the scene where those Dallas cops were killed, God rest her soul, during the parade. So, she's heard gunfire before, she's seen all that other stuff. Now she's coming into a dark apartment, and all this is still going on in her brain, and certainly it never goes to the evil. But now from the darkened couch stands up a human, hulking figure. And I'll say that because what your brain does, it magnifies it. Now, all of a sudden, this Yeti-sized human in her mind is between her and the television set. The glow, the sound in the room, all the odors and everything else. All of a sudden things go boom, and now you're in that moment. And what has she been trying to do? One, what is she wearing? Two, what's that at her side? Three, has she been taught, Brian, a de-escalation protocol? At this point, she does what she's been doing on that warrant service moments before, and for the last four years, she draws her gun. Now, let's jump across to Mr. Botham Jean and think about him holding the bowl of his ice cream. He's watching football, and he's like, "What?" Now, how many times do you think he said, "What?" I give the Pulp Fiction defense. I think, "What, what, what?" They would again, right? You see what I'm trying to say? Now, what she's seeing—let's drift back—she's saying, "Okay, he's not doing what I'm asking him to do." And in Botham's mind, he's going, "This is my apartment!"

Well, that would, like, do you, and that's taking nanoseconds. Like, that's, again, that's exactly what we're saying. So, like you said, from both sides. So, you know, now as you just described from her perspective, yeah, let's, let's describe from him. You're sitting on the couch with the bowl of ice cream, and someone comes in your door, you hear something, something. We know what it is, which, and you don't, you hear that, "Someone's coming in my door." Especially in the city you just grow up in, a city like, same thing, you know, you know when someone's coming over your house. So, when that door, something's happened at your door, and you're not expecting someone, everyone goes immediately to what? Hyper-vigilance. Something's happened, and what's going on here? So, he jumps up, or he gets up, or he's going, "What the heck is going on here?"

Well, he did. Well, because it would be unreasonable and unlikely. He now has that jolt of adrenaline. His adrenal cortex is going, he's got the epinephrine. So, I would say to you that he, he got up like this and in a hurry. And now he might not be aggressive. And I doubt that he was aggressive at that specific point, but he certainly was inquisitive and he was oriented. Right, so we can't recreate what happened there because we don't know, right? But we can say what likely occurs given the, given the artifacts and evidence that happened in this situation. And was that likely that he said, "Continue to eating ice cream and said, 'Hey, what's going on? Who are you? Hey, come on in'?" That's an unlikely scenario based on, based on the events that occurred, right? All walking in your house, you don't know, you're going to get up. You're scared. So, just like you said, all those electrochemical neurotransmitters start kicking. You get that adrenaline going. You, you're starting to figure out that cortisol hits your stomach. Like, what's going on here, right? In the background you got The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" going. Now, switch back to her perspective on that. Now she's observing this someone coming after her who looks terrified or angry or something. Is it unreasonable to say what you just said? Someone coming after... she is in her apartment. She has just gotten off of work. He has no right to be there. And certainly now he's either oriented towards her or is moving closer, closing in on her. Those are reasonable assumptions. Now, let me sidetrack for just a second, Brian. I'll tell you how old I am. We used to have to go to a place, a video place, and get a VCR when you rented your VCR tapes.

Yeah, VCR home. So, you had to get on the list and go in and rent both.

Wow, who didn't? And we were poor, and it was a long time ago. There was still a thing called Betamax. And so, we had a poor movie classic weekend, let's call it. And so, Shelley and I are doing the horror movie classic weekend. And I'm doing one of the night off things. After the third in a row, you can only watch so much. And then, you know, you're tired from work and everything. I remember nodding off, and at that point we didn't have a lot of money, so we still had a couch bed, you know, that you laid out and then you put it back the next day when you went to work, the sofa that turned into a bed. And so, in my falling asleep, all of a sudden I said, "Wow, I got to go to the bathroom." So, I sneak out of the bed to go to the bathroom, kind of sneak around the TV, VCR cables everywhere, not like it is today, and go down the short hall in our baby apartment into the bathroom. Bathroom door's open. Step right in to go to the bathroom. And a ghost stands up, an apparition in front of me, and it's moving towards me. So, I dropped into my martial arts stance. I screamed as loud as I could. I didn't want to scream, it's not like I, yeah, you know, and my heart is in my throat. What happened is during one of those nanoseconds that I drifted away, Shelley got up to go to the bathroom. And Shelley's wearing her nightgown. And as Shelley is coming out of the bathroom, all of a sudden this apparition in my brain, it was a haunting. And to this day, I can remember how scared and shocked and frightened I was. And I swear, had I been closer, I would have kicked or punched Shelley, or vice versa, because she also didn't know what happened. And she is surprised at me screaming at her in the dark in the bathroom. If any of our listeners or readers can understand that, you now become the jury, and that's why this couldn't have been murder. There was some huge mistake in the grand jury investigation to come back with a murder charge, and there was some poorly given jury instruction, or they didn't get them. Let's, let's, let's see something wrong there.

Let's explain that a little bit, okay? Further right now, since we're already there. We know the events that occurred. She did twice, she fired him center mass, killed him. He ended up dying. Now, because what a lot of people will go into, or a lot of critics go into, "Well, what about your training?" We kind of explained that, why she made that decision right there. Yes, but I think so. But then I went to, "Hey, why didn't you start life-saving events? Why didn't you just get out of there?"

And training changes behaviors. And I'll guarantee you on any range that she was at when she was doing the live fire, when she was doing the shoot/don't shoot, they didn't have a component for handcuffing the suspect and giving first aid while you were on your radio. They don't do that.

Yeah. And if she—and I would say even if she did, even if she had been a man, even if she had been trained, had done that, again, I can't, you know, we were trying to figure out what—I can't, I can't speak to what her mindset was at the time. I'm not her, and I wasn't there, right? And you can only go off of what she said, which memory is horrible. But, yes, but at this point, because I think she—and this is why I bring it up—one of her texts was, "I just screwed up." And so, at this point, she's now maybe realizing, "This isn't my home. What the hell just happened?" So, you want to talk about again a non-standard observation and going into denial? Her training then just goes out the window because what she thought was occurring is now she's now maybe coming to a realization that what she thought happened is not what happened at all. So, you have now that training, obedience training, that exact moment. So, now she doesn't have a file folder: "What do I do?"

So, if anybody—and Brian, you're a famous beatboxer on the San Diego club scene. But if anybody hasn't seen Brian, please get online and look for "God, the meerkat is..." I feel like "punchboxer" is some type of pejorative term that I don't know. But the idea is that our readers, our listeners likely know what an album or a record is. They may have seen one in a museum at one time. But what you have is you have a needle that goes into a groove on a record. And there's an old, old question, "You know, how many grooves are there on a standard 45 or 33 and a third record?" One. People go, "140 and 60." Okay, so there's one groove. And this is how your brain works. And so I put the needle into that groove and it follows that groove. If there's a bump or a skip or disruption, something happens in here. Now, what happened is Guyger and her training were in this groove. Now, all of a sudden, what happened is Botham Jean is in his own apartment, but Guyger doesn't understand that it's not her apartment. And now what we have is these spirals that are starting. And if I had a number of pens that I could start, now it's a lethal force encounter, which she hasn't had before. She hadn't shot and killed somebody, although her lover and her partner had in a liquor store, which the defense and the prosecution brought up that he had one shot—like it was some red cell push out of the way. Amber Guyger drew her weapon, probably still had her phone in her hand, probably still had her keys, and fumbled with her keys, because now she doesn't know which is more important: "Should I hold the gun or should I hold my keys?" That's exactly how shootings occur. And she fires two shots. And now, 20 times on the phone as she calls 911, she was clear enough to do that, because that's a repetitive function, that's one of those grooves on the record. She says over 20 times, "I'm in the wrong apartment! I'm in the wrong apartment!" People that said she didn't give first aid—she's overwhelmed by it. She has no idea that Botham Jean is still in the apartment. She thinks that this thing—this disassociated, and it's horrible to call it a 'thing,' Brian—but now the body in the room with her, she just is incredulous. She can't believe that she's in the wrong apartment. She can't believe that she just said, she texted one-handed, "Hey, listen, I just screwed up." All of that fits the psychopathy of somebody overwhelmed.

That's right. It's 100%. So, we could dissect just that interaction in terms of what she has been trained on. She's obviously been in use-of-force training scenarios to rapidly engage a target and hit what she's aiming for, because she did that. So, this is a point of where there wasn't any critical thinking. However, she is, so she was overcome by what was going on, and her training kicked in. So, yes, you're going to do what your training tells you to do, or not do. Or if that's why training is essential, right? You don't have training, you'll go to, like, file focus, and you'll do nothing. You'll do nothing, white, flight, freeze. And that's what happened. So, immediately she thinks she's in her apartment, this guy comes out, she shoots and kills him. Yes, that's what her training taught her to do. And then when she realizes this isn't what happened, and I don't have a file folder for this, this is a non-standard observation, now the denial sets in, now I'm completely overwhelmed, now I don't know what to do. And the Mobius loop comes back. I'm going to say the same things over and over. I'm going to walk the same path. I'm going to do the repetitive motion over and over. That's because the brain needs a kickstart now to say what has happened, what has occurred.

And now I'll tie that, Brian, to the units that are responding. They pull in, and we've seen video evidence and heard on audio evidence that they couldn't find the apartment because everything looked the same. They weren't sure which apartment, are we up, are we down? "It's at her apartment." "No, she's upstairs." So, that confusion—that I would call it pandemonium—is not just in Amber Guyger's mind, okay? It's in that apartment, and it's in the dispatch, and the responding officers. They all feel it. But was it ever conveyed to the jury?

Right. And I know so, so we kind of covered that from a performance perspective, cognitively, how could this possibly happen? What are the factors that led to this? Yes, we did a good job articulating that. And if folks, if you want more information, obviously, talk, but we could go deeper. We go deeper on every single aspect. We can do, we could do an entire podcast series just on this event and never stop talking about it. But that's, if you guys want more, we'll give you more.

So, here, here's, here's where it comes in. So, now this is what happened, this is, this is the event. They then take her into custody. They try to get him back to the hospital. I think I know the arrival. Once the paramedics and all that got there, they tried to revive him. They bring him to the hospital, he's, he's, he's dead. And they, they initially obviously booked her. I think she gets bonded out. There was some manslaughter charge, she originally arrested on manslaughter charge. So, this is where I want to get into how it turned into what it turned into because there's a number of things she can now be charged with, correct? So, from, from a legal standpoint, what is it now? Okay, she, this was obviously, this, we know the events that occurred. Now I'm a prosecutor or a criminal investigator and I go, "Well, what did a crime—first of all, did a crime take place here?"

Yeah, so. So, and I'll ask you to step just one step back, okay? Let's talk about Police Chief Renee Hall. Police Chief Renee Hall is under a tremendous amount of pressure to fire Guyger immediately. There's protests in the street, there's people getting arrested, everything else. And Chief Hall says, "So, listen..." Because these are, these are, you know, factors that led to your—are you saying these are factors that led to a different charge or what could happen? Because that's all taken into account, right? Chiefs of Police, mayors, prosecutors, those are, those are political jobs. We know that.

Yes.

So, there's other factors involved, especially with the community. So, these are all, are you saying, contributing factors to why, to—

Exactly. Exactly.

Just like if we—just like, Brian, if I was a weatherman and I was telling you that I predicted that this front was coming through Gunnison tomorrow, these are the factors that led me to the reasonable conclusion that this was nigh, that this was going to occur. So, Chief Hall, changing her tune much more rapidly than she said she was going to do, and firing Guyger. First of all, again, I'm not shedding any tears for Amber Guyger because Amber Guyger was going to be fired, okay? You shoot an unarmed man in the apartment—eight years, I don't care if she saved a hundred choking babies—you're done. You're done. Your career. And basically, like, I don't know if your, I don't know if your career, your life... I'm not going to go that far, but certainly your career with the Dallas PD—

Well, certainly, what I'm trying to say, yeah, there might be a law enforcement officer in another agency, like, somewhere, a number of times, but you're certainly not sticking around Dallas.

That's number one. So, that's just got to understand both sides. Second thing is, you got District Attorney John Creuzot. And Creuzot has got to make a decision here. And all of the deliberation, all of the decisions before this point were that this was manslaughter. And that was right, might have been even the negligent homicide, but it certainly wasn't murder. So, that's something I need us to discuss at some point, why that occurred. Does it make sense?

Yeah, that's what I want to cover. Is that what is it? One thing that I think is also bad is that they impaneled a grand jury, and the grand jury came back with murder. So, number one, elected officials—write that down somewhere—because they're elected officials, and they want to go and get reelected because this is their primary breadwinner, and you don't do that on boring cases. So, the more challenging cases, it better write history. And Judge Tammy Kemp, the judge in this caper, an elected official, she used to work with the DA's office in Dallas County—a huge conflict. So, all of a sudden a motion is made by Guyger's defense saying, "Hey, listen, we'd like to change of venue," which is a reasonable request. We want to have this adjudicated by a jury of our peers, which is an absolute right of the defendant, and we want to have it in a place that isn't rocked every day, this is "Ocean Alterman, Oil Major Oil" (unclear reference, possibly to a prominent local entity), and it was denied. The judge said no.

And those kind of things happen all the time with high-profile cases. You, you don't—yet, we, in this country, you deserve a fair trial. You know, if you, no matter what you've done, you're in a small town somewhere, and you, something, you get accused of doing crime to someone in that small town, well, they'll move you to somewhere else because everyone there's going to be biased or prejudicial possibly. There's that jury pool. So, you're more likely to get a fair trial.

Right. And that, that's the point. And just, just understand the precedent of that is that happens all the time in this country, right? This is not a unique case, this is an average thing, and any good trial attorney is going to ask for that. Okay, so it's key though that it was denied, right?

And also, before we get to the charging and the trial and the case, these are the pretrial motions that are going on. The night before the trial, Creuzot is on television in direct violation of the gag order. Now, I don't care what trial it was, I don't care what court system it was in, that enough, that enough was enough to declare a mistrial. And here the judge again said no.

So, let's ask what—and that happened, that happened with, too, that big one I know, because a lot of the folks on, and watch the Netflix thing on the Avery case, which we had stupid behavior do that. But, but same thing, that prosecutor beforehand was going on, "Hey, it's this, like," well, before the trial started, completely against protocol to go on and talk about an impending case with facts, details of it, to a potential—so, the people watching are the potential jury pool. So, that was one of the major factors they brought up. So, I'm just saying that's, you're exactly right, it was shown to be wrong then, and not only wrong, wrong, it's as wrong as much as what Amber Guyger did to Botham Jean. Yeah. It's as wrong what happened to her at the beginning of this trial.

So, here's the thing, every crime is adjudicated in a manner according to the law. So, there's a law that goes along. If you, if you haven't violated a law, if there's no law in the books, if there's an out-of-statute against it, you can't be arrested and you can't be charged. So, you have murder, and you have a murder that's premeditated where you go out, you plan, and you do the ambush. But you have other type of murders too. You have second or third-degree murder. A second-degree murder is commonly a heat-of-passion defense: I walked in, my significant other is engaged in some act with another person, I can't believe what's going on, and I lash out, and in my heat of passion, I kill somebody. Third degree: I knew that firing a weapon into the crowd was reckless and it would endanger that crowd. And that moving car driving away from you where the suspect was in the backseat and all the others were innocent, but I was just trying to shoot at him and I shot the person next to him. That's murder. You, you knew or should have known that your actions were—

Yes, you knew. You knew the consequences would—

Exactly. You, it would be unlikely that you didn't know them. So, alright, flip that around. So, here, of all the things that Guyger did, there was never—there was the intent to kill the person in her apartment.

You know what? Let's establish that intention. You can even say that, go ahead. That goes into poor defense attorney, but I totally agree. So, before we get to that, let's continue with the, because you're talking about the charges, the different types of murder charges. Now it goes down to manslaughter after murder, involuntary.

You have a duty, you as another human have a duty to care for other humans. So, we're talking about something like, you knew the carousel wasn't greased but you let the little kids get on the ride, the ride crashed killing your child. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Okay, you knew that putting all of those fireworks into that pot for the Fourth of July was likely reckless and somebody could have got hurt. And so when it blew up and killed the neighbor's cat and maimed their daughter, you were negligent. You were criminally negligent. And then negligent has a standard where it was unintentional or it was intentional. You intentionally did something because it made you more money, but you overlooked the safety thing and took down that guard. Or you unintentionally had no idea that pouring gasoline into your antifreeze to cool off your car was going to cause the explosion. Do you get it?

You know, so, so, and that's where I came up with the intent, Brian. My, my, my idea was not to distract.

No, no, no. I wanted to show that that intent is a huge, necessary element of many of the crimes, right?

So, so, to boil it down for layman's terms, I guess for myself would be, in order for it to be a full murder charge, there has to be some intent there, meaning malice aforethought. Okay, I thought about it before coming to church, before I showed up to your house, I said something, or I went, "I'm going to bring a gun because I think I'm going to kill this guy," or "I'm going over there and I know what I'm going to do." Now, there's an intent there. Now, maybe if things go right, I don't. But, but I have an intent even—

Exactly that. So, so that, that then certain factors establish that intent. You did bring the gun. Also to that, do you know that "To Catch a Predator," remember that guy used to be on television all the time? People go, "No, no, I didn't mean it," even though they're bringing what? Are they having a car full of—

Oh, yeah, condoms.

So, would you agree that it's reasonable to assume that those artifacts and evidence tend to show intent? Okay. So, Guyger didn't bring duct tape and a kill kit to that apartment. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Botham Jean never sat down his ice cream and picked up a French knife. Do you see what I'm saying? That will change the dynamics, the mechanics of our discussion. Yes. Okay.

So, that's, that's, that's because that's what got me. It's, "Okay, they're charging her with murder, but she had no intent to murder this man. They didn't know, at no point was it a forethought in her head driving home, talking on the phone, was she going, 'You know what, I'm going to go kill that guy who lives below me'?"

Or, what did the streets of Dallas County scream what they wanted, right? And if you're going to get reelected, you're going to listen to the people. Even if you say, "Well, I know full like, like..." I can imagine this happening, Brian. I can imagine Creuzot and his team at the District Attorney's office—and sir, if I'm butchering your name, I totally apologize. It's the French spelling that's throwing me, I guess. Yeah. But the idea is, I could see them sitting around the table and go, "Look, we charged her with murder, that placates our Dallas County folks. Everybody will be happy with that, knowing full well that she's going to plead down to, 'We're going to get her with a manslaughter.'" I know that that discussion, in my mind, I can't believe it, but in my mind that's likely the discussion that went on. And Guyger's attorney probably came up to her and said, "Hey, we got this! Yeah, there's no way, there's no way in the world they're going to say murder." I can guarantee that discussion probably if you're so—

So, take this now from the defense attorney's perspective. I got some insight, I talked to the Arcadia lawyer yesterday, who when I asked him about the case, went, "Yeah, yes," and went into a discussion that I was just going to call him and some other folks earlier. They weren't unrelated. Then they all brought up that case and just sat and added it around. So, all attorneys talking about it. And then, you know, we went over it, and it was—and that was my question was, like, "Well, how could, how could it be charged with murder?" And he said, "Look, that's a purely political reason."

Absolutely.

The other thing was—and I go, "Well, wait a minute, from the defense's perspective, they're charging with murder? Great, I'm going to get, I'll get my client off because you can't."

And I'll do the unprecedented. I will do the absolutely unprecedented by putting Amber Guyger on the stand. And the reason they did it is they were showing that she was in automatic mode. She's just doing what she was trained. But when you're ready to talk about that one, I think we deserve to talk about the castle defense for just a minute here.

Yeah. And that was not, I get what... Okay, go ahead. So, so folks listening—the defense kind of went with this, and now we're just getting into trial and how things occurred, and you guys can go read up all the facts. When was on there. But, but the defense, in my opinion, and after speaking with our attorneys, he said that was a horrible defense.

I would never. I would put it with the band, but I would have had her, I would have prepped her better. We have a bench of, let's say, of extremely intelligent trial lawyers that always worked towards these ends. Brian had the luxury of talking to them, I didn't. But amazingly, we all came home with the same idea. And the conclusion was this: okay, one, if you're going to put her on the stand and you're going to ask her about her training, also have the FTO (Field Training Officer) and the training officer to say, "Yes, she was trained to shoot to kill," because that's what police officers are trained to do. In our own president and many of the people that are in our government and a lot of people at home listen and go, "Why don't you just shoot him in the leg?" Because that's illegal. You have to shoot to kill, because if you don't shoot to kill, you've just demonstrated by not shooting them to kill that you were in a lethal force situation. So, it's a conundrum. But the answer is shoot to kill. Now, when we get that from movies and all that crap or—

Yeah, and so stop, first of all, yeah.

Now, was there—and Brian, there's a whole other thing we need to discuss—was there a chance for Guyger to de-escalate? Absolutely. Once she was in, she saw it was happening, she should have beat a hasty retreat, taking cover. She could have still killed Mr. Jean if she thought she was threatened. All those other things. And people are going, "Yeah, but he never posed a threat." Dude, in her mind he had. In her mind, he was moving towards her. It's a dark apartment. This is life or death, so she believed that even if it's wrong and she made a mistake, she believed it. And would she pass a lie detector? That's why she got on the stand. But this whole thing about your curtilage of your home and your home is your castle has been protected by our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, our founding fathers. The simple answer here, folks, is you can't just carry that in your wallet. Eminent domain, you can't flash it like, "Here!" No one. There's a clear set of circumstances laid out in the law. And it was a great argument, I'll give you that. It would have been great for a college class to argue. But when Amber Guyger's life depended on it, that was the wrong card to play.

And what they said, folks listening, and like Brian said, look it up on your own, what they said is, "Home is a castle," because she thought it was her home, then she could use that defense and failed. And then that goes into exactly what were you talking about, they were able to somewhat prove intent by her own testimony because she said, they asked her, "Did you intend to kill him?" Which, which she answered it incorrectly by saying, "Yes." When she could have said, "Look, I think the worst thing, I wanted, the last thing I want to do as a law enforcement officer was take someone's life or kill someone. I didn't have a single thought. This is what under these circumstances or these circumstances, the way I was trained, this I did. And clearly it showed I didn't have a conscious thought during that or I wasn't thinking of those even the moments at and after, nearly after."

To prove your point, Brian. And it was just, "Hey, look, I was this is, this is the set of circumstances I thought I was in. Therefore, I've been trained when I think I'm in those circumstances, I'm allowed to do A, B, C, and D. I did that." Right. And then my training kicked in. If you think that was wrong, go get the training manager. Go get my, the guys who do, who plan the program. Get the video, get the lawyers, this policy. Get the department. Put the chief on blast. These are her policies, which they are going to do by the way. Just so you know, everybody, tort law is coming in. Negligence torts are going to fly, and Dallas County is going to pay—the Dallas PD rather—is going to pay big bucks in this case.

Yeah, and I'll tell you negligent training, negligent retention, failure to supervise—all these things are going to come up in the Jean family lawsuit. Even how she's worried about money for a while.

Yeah, well, I think even, yeah, there's, there's a lot that's going to come after this. But I think that was the point is that now if you're saying, "Alright," because that was my whole thing was, "Well, wait, if in order to be charged with murder, I have to show intent." There was no intent for her. But then she actually kind of showed intent on her own by her own testimony and what the way they asked her in the way she answered, which just goes to, and this was what the, with the attorneys I was talking to yesterday was like, "This was a horrible defense. Yeah, I would never, this is what I would have done, this is what I would have done to protect my client." I would have absolutely taken the stand in this case, which again is not something you're going to find most defendants do. It's very rare.

Very low. So, it's, it's going to be, "Hey, you know, why did you fire? Why did you tell...?" You know, there's a whole litany of things that, that you, you know, you could have gone through. But, but the way she described it, she didn't articulate her, her case very well. She didn't articulate it.

But again, remember, she doesn't have to. She doesn't have to. The idea is that facts that she shot and killed Botham Jean are not in question. She was the one, she fired the gun. The forensic pathology and her own statements prove it. The idea is why at that point. Now, if you read or listen to a lot of the people that talk to us, and I keep getting this rule of engagement and escalation of force and all that. One, keep de-escalation component—put that box on the table because we need to talk about that because she failed there, okay? Yes, but the idea was, in her mind, she was in a life-or-death struggle with this large looming person that was not listening to her, that was coming closer. And in her mind, at that nanosecond, lethal force was the only option. That's why she didn't retreat. That's why she didn't try her baton. That's why she didn't scream, "No, no, stop!" whatever, and fire.

So, so staying on that, on the topic then, to the people who then say, "Well, wait, you didn't take any other options. You didn't move back. I didn't do this. You didn't..." You're, you are 100% right, she did not do any of those things. Yes, she didn't do any of those things because she had not been trained to do those things. That's what we're getting at is, is you fall, but somebody, Brian, a training officer right now is going, "Oh, you guys are calling this and that." Look, stop. Go back to it. Remember your shoot/don't shoot training where there was a chair, a folding chair that had a white piece of paper on it that said "cover" and one that said "concealment"? Was that realistic?

What, close enough cognitively. And even, you know, some of that has gotten a lot better.

But, but your supports—it is. But it was what they're still. No, but, but it's still, but I think it goes to the point. Yeah, this that's gotten a lot better. You can tell even, even where she actually hit him, it shows that training has gotten better because she hit center mass of the target she was aiming at. Most one shot.

Right. But I think there, in a smaller, how many times, but how many times for decades was that where, you know, that where that wouldn't even happen where they wouldn't get hit or they did? I would go to your perception bias. Why don't you shoot him in the chest? One function of the training. Two, she assumed a whole bunch of things. I assume that you likely are armed. I assume that you're committing a felony in my apartment. I assume that you're going to close with and try to get out the only exit. I assume that you're about to do... Your brain does those in a quadrillion of a second. And at that point, she felt that she had no other recourse. That's what I would have got her on the stand to say. I would have had her a training officer say, "This is the way she was trained." I would have had other people in that situation say, "I was scared for my life and shot." I would have other people that shot other people, and I would have had a linear testimony to demonstrate that she is no different than you, and if you were scared, you would have done the same thing.

And that goes into the defense of, "Okay, the, because the Department fired her, they for, you know, adverse conduct during this right after it occurred, prior to any full investigation of what happened." So, at that point in your defense, I would bring in, you know, and you could tell me otherwise, I would bring in every, I would call every Dallas police officer to the stand and just one by one, "What was the training you received? What was the training you received?"

It's now you go into the prosecutor is going to stipulate, "Okay, we get it." Yeah, and that's good, that's a good, yeah, move. But, Brian, I would ask this. I would say, okay, first of all, there was a necessity, there was an essential nature of her being fired. And again, termination had to be there because suspension wasn't enough, because a person died. She denied that person his rights. She denied him his due process, and she shot and killed him. So, no matter, even if this was a pursuit situation where she had caused a traffic accident and a kid in the car, one of them, you know, died. She has to go. No more for Dallas County. I'm not saying that she has to be brought up on charges, and if she was, it should be negligent or some sort of manslaughter. But what happened here was a perversion of what was supposed to happen. It was all about sympathy, do you get what I'm saying, for the family and to keep the crowds from rioting and going crazy. We adjudicated this in the streets of Dallas County, not in the courtroom.

Exactly. This was the court of—that's how I feel. I wasn't, it wasn't a legal or scientific trial. It was, it was a public law. Anyone, no, no, no one, absolutely know that.

And that's, that's the thing is, like, that and it's a situation where no one does win. I mean, there's no, there's no, how do—what, you know, the, the light, hopefully, which it's not going to, but the best you can hope for is a lesson learned out of this.

Okay, so is it for education purposes? Is it a punitive? Like, for example, you go back to Mapp v. Ohio (the exclusionary rule or "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine), you look at any of these wonderful cases in our histories, or horrible what happened, right? But that, you become landmark cases, and tell us, "Well, a car is inherently mobile, so therefore the motor vehicle exception." Mapp v. Ohio (exclusionary rule), rather, the poisonous tree. "You didn't have a warrant and you lied, so therefore everything that you found, is not going to be brought into court." That's punitive. That's to educate the police or the prosecutors or whoever. You know it specifically. Same thing with what's that female they made a movie about her that said, "Power lines and gas companies, and our kids are dying." And so she said, "This was wrong." And the courts just yesterday gave a $735 million settlement in Las Vegas. Those are punitive to teach people, "You better not do this again. You better be more careful," right? So Botham Jean and his kids and another person don't die. What happened in this case? What was the warning? What was the message that we were supposed to take away? That a bunch of people listened to their constituents in their district and sold their souls to get a conviction so they would get reelected? I'm asking.

I know, and it smells. It does, Brian. And the, this, that's it just, it opens the door for other issues. It, no one, it's a horrible tragedy and no one won in this case. And I think, you know, even the investigator to, you know, to go into all the different, everything that we were talking about, right? The, the investigator on the stand, you know, was asked, "Hey, you know, after finishing your investigation, looking at the totality of the circumstances, considering everything, do you believe today that you have probable cause to believe that Amber Guyger committed a crime?" That was what one of her, you know, attorneys asked him, and he said, "You know, based on the totality of circumstances, based on the complete investigation, no, sir." And he, he noted that, that she acted reasonably and perceived Jean as a deadly threat. So, so the guy investigating and went, like, I mean, again, this is a horrible tragedy, but, but this is, this is what occurred.

Now, I'll have the knowledge. You have the knowledge of many murder cases, Brian. And, you know, 15-6 investigations and an incredible instructor for a dozen years where we dissect these cases and table-top them all the time. Right? So this case shouldn't be different than all those other cases. Do you ever in present memory remember a murderer subsequently getting 10 years?

No, and that's a minute. That was, that was, that's the whole thing is that, do you remember a judge hugging a murderer? You're going to, you're going to prosecute for murder, and then you're going to give them 10 years? If this is a murder, then it's a, done, it's a murder. If that's what you're going to charge someone with, that's what you're going to send someone with. Totally agree. So, if you're not going to say logical, then why would you charge them with that? So, that goes both ways. It's like, "Well, wait a minute, so, so that murder, that M word, is that who's that for?" Because it's not, it's not over.

It's for, it's for good Dallas County because every person in Dallas County that wrote the sign that said, "This, this was a murder, and she's got to go!"

Right. And that's, and that's my point, because then it's like, "Hey, if this is one of those, 'Well, we're going to charge with murder, but then look, well, I'm not really going to, you're going to give you like nine years,' like, what?" No, that's not how this works.

That's why I knew the fix was in. I knew this was in when the judge hugged her. Because here's, here's my thing, that's unprecedented. There's a completely different event where a judge hugged a convicted serial killer, but that judge is under the spell of somebody.

But, and this is the other side of that coin there.

Yeah, that's the other side of the coin, exactly, Brian. But in this instant, when I saw that, that just showed me that cats are sleeping with dogs, follow the Roman Empire, this is wrong. And, and, and folks, when it doesn't pass the smell test, you got to say something. And I'm not saying anything that has to do with political division, or racial lines, or cultural appropriation. I'm saying that this stinks, and our legal system demands better, so somebody needs to say something.

Yeah, no, and, and, and that's, that's, that's the takeaway, is that what's the takeaway? Now it's time. Yeah, I am, I'll give you a training guy. You got it. Would you agree that we need to train a de-escalation component? We have de-escalation and everything we talked about, because if you don't have it, you're not going to be well.

Right. And the problem with saying we need to do de-escalation training is that that does occur, but it's very—it's not from what I've seen, based on my experience, from what I've observed and read and what people do—it's not, it's a very, "Hey, in this situation, this is how you de-escalate it." Well, unless you come across that specific situation, that, that specific type of training may not help, right? So, it's, "How do I sense-make?" How do I make, I don't know the way. How do I make the right decision, Brian? Whether, whether illogical DSPs advanced critical thinking. Advanced critical thinking is the Mobius loop that you just created, and I mean this in a good way. Take a rubber band. Here's your rubber band, put a twist in a rubber band, and whatever path you follow, you'll be able to stay on that path and change into the other path in the center of it. Why? Because when you take a look at psychological de-escalation, advanced critical thinking, she would have stepped out of the door, "Freeze! Run!" He had some other stuff. And then you say, "Well, she didn't have to, she didn't do all this other stuff." Listen, if there's time not to kill, I think you should take that time. And that's what we teach, Brian, we know he said on traditions to slow time down, to give yourself the gift of time and distance. And I didn't see that in this case.

Well, it's a, it's the process, and we went into everything that was going on in her mind and what, when she walked up to that door and what was actually happening. And she never had a plan, there was no processing to make a good decision, because just like that, had one thing changed, that she had left something in her car, had she dropped her keys, had she dropped her phone, and then had to—now her brain jumps out of that Mobius loop that it's in, and picked it up, and then taken a second to look around and gone, "Oh, crap, I'm on the wrong floor now that I see what I didn't see." Now that I can compare incongruent signals.

Yeah, just to teach baseline development. Just to teach, you know, B + A = D: baseline plus an anomaly. And guess what, there were three or four anomalies now. Can you imagine the strength of the defense if the jury knew what we were just talking about in my last 45 minutes? There would never have been a murder conviction. Okay. If her defense would have said, "Listen, put yourself in the shoes at that time and place," there wouldn't have been a murder conviction. As a matter of fact, the prosecution would have been admonished for choosing murder. But whatever they told that grand jury, the grand jury came back with the charge of murder. So I put that squarely in the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor wanted a win in this case. They wanted to show the Guyger as an evil killer, and they got what they wanted.

It appears as though they did. They definitely got what they wanted. But, and this goes back into any of these, or most, or a lot of the, the use-of-force situations, especially with deadly force. We've seen with law enforcement where we look at it from one simple perspective: this is a failure in human performance, as a failure of cognitive human performance. That's what happened. Now, that's horrible because it was a tragedy, and someone lost their life and did not deserve any of that. And now he's, you know, his family is, is without him for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that's horrible. And but it, it's, and it's sad. We don't, it's hard for people to understand that, that you're telling me this happened because of a failure in human performance, and the same thing that she did is the same thing I would do or any law enforcement, or even if it—even if it doesn't bring Mr. Jean back, you have to understand that she didn't kill him because she wanted to murder him, right? He killed him because she made a horrific error in judgment. So, guilty of that, yes, admit to it, yeah, there's no, there's no doubt. But I mean, even if, even if, even if somebody were on the defense team would have said, and taking a poll, "Hey, my thing is once she had to be fired," okay, yeah, that's the right thing to do. And two, she was certainly guilty and, and may have needed, you know, some time in jail. I don't understand the time in jail because what's jail for? We used to call them penitentiaries, Brian, because you're supposed to make people penitent. You put them in a cell, you give them a Bible, and you make them—

Oh, that's a whole separate, yeah.

But are we, what are we serving by putting her in jail here?

No, and that's, that's exactly it. What, what do we do? What would it do? So, you're, you're going to lock her up for nine, ten years or whatever. Who knows what she'll be able to do when she gets out? Probably have a whole, you know, she's going to do five, the appeal process, she'll do five because they'll get one day in for good behavior. I get your—

But, but then, you know, what if instead, if, if she is now, you know, you are now going around to law enforcement agencies or you're working with the community saying, "Please look at what we're going to set in from a foundation for the family, and you're going to work with them, and you're going to go around the communities, explain how this stuff happens and why it occurs and how to prevent the next one from occurring?"

There's going to be a video series from the U.S. Department of Justice, "Starring Guyger," where Amber Guyger comes up and they recreate the incident and she says, "I was wrong." Yeah, those like that, and every police academy—

Brian, now you're onto something.

Okay. And you, you have been this the entire time. Everything you said, even when you try to take devil's advocate. Listen, folks, if you're that person that likes to do the devil's advocate, here you're shoving a round peg into a square hole. It just doesn't fit. And listen, when it comes up that it was a mistake, that it was a failure in human performance, that needs to be your starting position. And had the defense looked at that, they would have been able to trump the prosecution's efforts because the truth and the science would have demonstrated clearly that this was a broken human that made a mistake on that night.

Yeah. Over in the sense that she was overwhelmed by the events, over... she wasn't taught the de-escalation strategy. And that overwhelmed by events caused her to shoot rather than give herself the gift of time and distance.

Yeah, I, and I, I think that's kind of a good point to kind of, kind of bring it in on. I mean, it's, we've wrapped it and a lot to talk about. A lot we can, that's why we can go into each one of these. If folks, if you guys are listening and you want more, you got to contact us. We can go into detail about how this specifically worked and how to articulate her actions and how to articulate what was going on in her brain and her behavior and how it works and how it affects you. So, we can do all that, it just had to squeeze that into an hour would be absolutely impossible. And trust us, we are so sorry for what happened here.

Yeah, and nobody won. And we're so sorry to the, to the family of the decedent, and we're so sorry to the family of the officer because all those four years of great stuff and all the 20-some years of great stuff that she did on inserts are always going to be tainted now because of this error.

So, from your perspective, obviously, years and years of law enforcement as a female, and then teaching and working with all kinds of different military units and stuff, so you have kind of a different perspective from it, or at least more of a perspective from her understanding of it. So, she was a police officer for, I think, less than four years, so fairly new still. But, you know, 15-hour shift, that goes to the wrong apartment, gets in this altercation. You know, just kind of what we kind of wanted to do is get your take or your opinion on it and what you thought of the whole situation.

Well, only speaking on behalf of being a female police officer as far as the legal standpoint on this, and that's everybody's opinion at this point. But being a female officer has its own downside, obviously, especially being normal-sized. You're going to be 5'5", you know, somewhere in that general vicinity, you know, 120 pounds. And when you come up against what you truly believe you walked into your own apartment and see some, you know, figure in your apartment, her training kicks in, which is to announce herself, pull her weapon, and start giving commands. Fear plays into this. And if anybody says they're not afraid during their job, especially in that type of job as a police officer, they're wrong.

Yeah, they're either lying or they shouldn't be in that job. That's right. Because a good, healthy dose of fear is—is it makes you good at what you do. Yeah, it's not about just being, you know, bad, meaning like a bad, you know, you know, it's alright.

I know.

You're good, you're good. Not on here, we're, it's pretty much free for all for the most part, so people that listening seem to, seem to enjoy Greg ridiculing me more than the rest of The Human Behavior Podcast. So, and standing, whatever, you know, being tough is, is one thing. You know, we train soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, all these really tough people. And even they will tell you there's a healthy dose of fear in everything they ever did because it keeps your mental acumen at the same time that you're doing your job.

Yeah, and, you know, it used to be a standard of putting yourself in that person, in a place at that time of the event and with nanoseconds that those decisions were being made. And we have things like lack of sleep, yeah, and long—just like that, will really kick in. And being in the military, you know that, that sleep deprivation can really, you know, become a part of your decision-making matrix. So, whether good, better, or different, it's just the reality of being a human. And everyone has an opinion on this case, so we'll just—the statistics of being a police officer. You know, these aren't where you can slow down time. This was happening in real time as she was coming home from work to her what she thought was her apartment. And it's a very sad scenario, and if there was anything I would cause an accident, that, that this is truly an accident. There was no malice or, you know, malevolent intent towards it. But I think that, I think that it should have been played out, in my opinion, what it was really truly like for that, you know, 30 seconds, 45 seconds of that event.

Yeah, and, and that's obviously what you're supposed to be judged on, but everyone gets to, you know, Monday morning quarterback it and say, "Well, yeah, I would have done this," or, "I could have done that," or, "Why didn't you?" Because that's the big thing, and that's right, Greg and I discussed that at length. But, you know, "Why didn't you take another, why didn't, why didn't you do something else? Why didn't you back out? Why didn't you get some distance?" And you kind of already hit that answer right at the beginning is if she's in that situation, she's basically doing what she was trained, right? So, she's having the same reaction she had during those use-of-force training exercises, right? Is it going, "Okay, this is it, this is what they were talking about, this is what they taught me," and probably didn't really have much of a conscious thought of drawing her weapon and giving a command. And then from that whole nanoseconds where it happened, I'm not sure, no one's sure because it obviously wasn't recorded, specifically how long that took for her to pull the trigger and everything. Like, like you said, is all in nanoseconds. And then everyone, we all get to sit back here and go, "Oh, well, this, this, and this." It's like, "Well, you, you weren't there." And so I think the, the perspective too is, you know, people like to do the, "Oh, well, you're a trained law enforcement officer, you did, you went through this training." Yeah, okay, and depending on what agency you're at is how good that training is, or how adequate it is, or how, how advanced they are, or, you know, how well-rounded they are. Like, there's a lot of factors that play into that. So, I'm just, and, and I know that, I mean, you've had, I mean, tons of experiences on this, you know, metropolitan Detroit area law enforcement, you had a lot of experience there. So, I just want to kind of from, from, even though she's a police officer, and police officers are supposed to have this standard of training, and then everyone who's a Dallas cop should be at that same standard, right? But it doesn't necessarily work that way, right?

Well, and I mean, you know that too from your military background. Yes, there are certain things that we learn as we go, and those are the file folders, I'm sure you guys have discussed already. And you don't have a file folder for every single scenario that's going to play out, whether that's part of your, you know, FTX (Field Training Exercise) training or computer simulation training. There are certain scenarios you're going to get involved that weren't covered because they aren't all the same. Everyone is nuanced. Differences, maybe sometimes, but there are differences in training for the real event. People sometimes forget that the real event may play out off-duty, if you will. And so, I think when we talk about training for the real event, even training mentally for what-if games, can really make a difference. But those file folders take years of training. And thanks for the years and years and years—it hadn't been that many years. But, okay, I had to retrain myself in a different state where I went from a metro big-city mentality to a small town, which has its own set of rules and standards and different ways of looking at the world. So, it's true, you know, you have to—you as any, any person, and especially in law enforcement, is to think these things through on an off-duty. But like you said, I'm not armed, sharing, and I'm saying that, you know, you're a smaller human most of the time comparative to the people that you come up against. You have to come up with decisions that make sense to your brain based on what your knowledge is of the scenario at that time. And she truly believed she was in her own apartment. And so you can imagine how that played out, which is her first reaction when someone wasn't responding to her was to pull her weapon. And if that's all she had with her at the time, since she was off-duty, there wasn't a gun belt full of options like there are on-duty.

So, yeah, and you, you bring up a good, that's a really good point. We actually kind of didn't get into it too much: on-duty versus off-duty, not just in terms of, right there with, like, maybe the gear you were wearing or what you have, right? But even just that mindset too for a lot of folks, which is why, you know, when we always teach the skill set of the human behavior stuff, it's not, "Hey, don't just think while you're on deployment, just don't think while you're on shift or you're in a patrol car." It's, "No, no, this is, this is when you're with your family, when you're at the gas tank." It's if you got to build in those file folders for everything because, because that happens a lot. It's, "Okay, now I'm going to work, now I'm in this dangerous, I can turn it on. And now that I'm home, I get to turn it off." And, and, and that is probably a factor that played into it too, because if she was talking on the phone coming up there, she's carrying stuff in her hands, trying to get late-night, long day at work, coming in. And that's the whole thing is that we didn't even get to touch on that was just that, "Hey, I'm off-duty now, I'm done for the day." You know, and then so that's why that situation, had she been walking into the same situation on-duty at a place, likely would have turned out very differently, right? Because she may would have been prepared to make decisions based on what she was approaching. But when it comes literally, as we say, "out of nowhere"—I mean, nothing comes out of nowhere—but, but it is all a sudden, the situation presents itself, she if she doesn't have that file folder like you talk about, that experience, it's going to go to, "I'm in fear for my life."

Right. And it's the same for when we used to train the military. We always told those kids, "When you go to town, go to Walmart, go to dinner with your families, this isn't about just going to deploy to Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever." And so I think that we set that, that up early with them, that it wasn't just about CONUS versus OCONUS (Continental United States versus Outside Continental United States). So it was about everyday life with the type of uniform you're wearing right now. It's, you know, it's important. And so I think that maybe we don't hit on that, even as an FTO. I don't, I don't remember hitting on that as, as hard, yeah, as I would now because of the way the world changes and things that we have to keep up on, you know? And so I mean, even there's enough time. I don't think I harped on off-duty as much as I did on-duty.

Yeah, and that's a good point, no one ever really does. And now obviously, you know, us from a training perspective, when you, I mean, that's the beauty about being in any type, you're in where you're in the, you're the trainer, right? You get that outside perspective looking in at your own profession or own job or whatever, and then you get to pick it apart, see, "Oh man, this is where we're failing. This is what I got to do. This is everywhere." And then you can make that better. But yeah, when you're at the time and you're doing it, it was the same thing, was always even in the military, it's for deployment, we're prepping for deployment, prepping for deployment, it's what happens over there. And you almost compartmentalize it, "Then I'm fine back here." But I mean now you've got to the point where I think in the last couple years more Marines have died during training than they have deployed. You know what I mean? So, so if you, if you don't have that same mindset, I think that's a, that's a great point to add. Unfortunately, we're going to have to learn it through some mistakes.

Yes. So, you know, it, it's just, I care a lot about that profession and type of professions that we've been teaching everybody in, and it's a sad, unfortunate scenario. And so hopefully we can change some mindsets, your training, you know, what kind of trainings need to happen for all the backgrounds for these guys. So—

Right. And that, and that was a big thing we kind of ended with too with Greg and myself when I was, you know, it's just our, what, there's not a lot of takeaways. You know, the takeaway is this needs to change in a training aspect, right? Now, we develop law enforcement professionals and what we want to focus on and what we want to do to avoid these horrible, horrible, tragic situations. I mean, no one, like, no one wanted this. There's no one wins in this, there's no good outcome here, right? Her home life and career, his life is over. You know, it's just, this is just a horrible, horrible tragedy that could have been avoided. And then of course, Greg and I brought it back to, you know, it's, it's a failure in human performance. That's it. In the fact that we don't understand the science behind ourselves sometimes, where things like divided attention and sleep, sleep deprivation, can really play into your decision-making matrix.

Absolutely. Hopefully we can help, help change some mindsets.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and adding your thoughts. We got to get you on more often. I know the last one was good, and once I put out the blooper reel, you have the best part in the blooper reel when I try to beatbox and you immediately start laughing at me. So, once that gets shown, I'm sure people love it. But we appreciate you coming on, Shelley. Thank you.

Of course. Thanks, Brian.