LOG 062 Suicide By Cop

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content on there if you're already a subscriber. It's a better way for us to each get some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave them below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like it, subscribe, follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. So please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoyed the show. Thanks. Thank you so much. And on that note, I think we will get started for the day.

Today we are going over a few different cases and will, of course, be working in the COVID virus at some point. But those of you listening, remember this is recorded probably a week or so before it actually airs. That being said, we're all dead from it. We think of the—

I know, I know. Wayne, everywhere, we'll be more famous than death. We have made our way into the top 100 category on iTunes as a podcast for, I guess, social sciences, which is funny. We're going to make sure it's not social diseases.

Yeah, because you've had an edge in that.

Mark, I... oh, years now. I'm horrible at any type of social media. I don't tag stuff correctly or identify any, so it gets thrown in a different category. So we might be like the top in some. We started in Travel and Leisure, and so that's worked around. Apparently, we're pretty hot in the Philippines. So thank you, everyone, for...

Second only to that painting elephant, Marin, in the Philippines.

That's really cool. That's really cool. I would rather, in fact, everyone stop. Let's go check... This is a mega episode, anyway.

Yeah.

So, anywho, I so appreciate everyone out there listening. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys, who have been going to the Patreon site and checking out our extras. We're always updating that. We got some cool stuff on there coming up too, so thanks for that. And if you're listening and enjoy it, please hit the five-star review button. If you can scroll down to the details, that would really help us out. But anyway, let's jump right into it today.

So we're going to start with a case from Minnesota where I'll give kind of loose details of the case, but someone calls 911. The police get a call for service about someone who's suicidal. They have a gun, and they're basically in the street on their knees or sitting down the entire time with this gun. Police officers show up. They begin talking to the guy. Obviously, it's a highly emotional situation for him. This guy has a gun to his head with his finger on the trigger pretty much the entire time, and actually moving around. The officers identify themselves, trying to talk to him. That's going on for nearly 40, 45 minutes. Obviously, there are initial police officers who show up to the scene, then there are follow-on responding officers who continue to show up at the scene as well.

During this time, this guy actually ends up removing the magazine out of his gun. So now they're thinking, "Okay, he's got at least a bullet in the chamber." They're trying to talk him down. And then what happens is one of the responding officers—not one of the initial guys that were talking to him, one of the people, I believe, that was covering the situation, meaning covering with their weapon system in case something happened, and that allows those police officers talking to him to kind of have freedom of movement to do their job, right? They can talk to them, they know they have a cover officer who's controlling the scene for them—ends up shooting and killing this man, shooting him multiple times and killing the man who is suicidal.

So the big question is, how the hell does this happen? How does it escalate from a guy who's going through horrible mental health issues, who wants to kill himself, to the police showing up and then being the ones who ended up killing him? Now there are some details and explanations as to why that person—everyone has it, you know, "Hey, this is why I made those decisions." But just to frame it real quickly: how the hell does this happen? So, how does this guy who's dealing with the situation, wanting to kill himself, have police officers who show up trying to help him, and then some of those police officers that showed up ended up killing him? How does that happen?

I mean, first of all, let's frame this: this is not a suicide by cop. So take that right off the show. Right. By "suicide by cop," you mean those are sometimes people who are armed, and then they want to die, and they know if I run at a police officer or point a gun at them, they're going to kill me. So it's just, they do it just to be killed. Remember, there's a fear that motivates that, sometimes there's a severe mental illness that motivates that, sometimes. But we don't know here because the cops killed the best witness.

So my point here, and I'm distressed, I'm a little angry, only based on the fact that the logic and lack thereof that went into the choices. So procedurally, there was a lot right here: up and out, down and in, who was covering who, the availability of less-lethal force weapons. All of that stuff was great. But Brian, I would ask us to rewind a little further "left of bang"—no pun intended—in this horrific incident and take a look at what happened. Somebody called saying, "Man with a gun." That just pops everything up to dispatch as a most serious call. Oh, "coppers on the way." I already know that the subject is likely armed. So a lot of chemistry starts to happen and a lot of emotions start going into play, and a lot of policies and procedures start to go into place. Now that supervisors have taken note, dispatchers know, emergency services are notified. And many times, many times, you come in, it's a misunderstanding. But guess what? Guns, like even suicide by gun, Brian, right? Serious stuff. You can't unring the bell. You can take some pills and call the hotline and maybe, you know, still have a good chance. You can cut your wrist and maybe still have a good chance coming back from it. But when you pull that trigger, there's very, very likely you're going to have a devastating...

Well, I have a difference too, in the fact that it's a weapon that you could hurt or kill someone.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's what you're getting at. It's like, if I'm going to commit suicide and I throw back a bottle of pills, the response I get from the police or emergencies can be different, right? So even though it's the same mental health situation, two completely different responses based on what this person has decided to do.

The immediacy of the danger, the threat that goes much farther than that, that initial at the ground. So now they get there, and here's a person in a public place. I think this is important as well. When I hurt, and I feel, if I got—I don't want to turn this into, "Hey folks, this is how to commit suicide." But the idea is that most of the people that feel like we all do sometimes about committing suicide, you're much more likely to do it in a private place: in the garage with photos of your family surrounding you, carbon monoxide, or in the tub with the warm water and some music playing and a candle lit. Why? Because it's a very personal thing. It's like William Atkinson's tattoos. He has a hundred tattoos, but they're all hidden in places that nobody else would think of. Why? Because there's a...

So, this guy does it in a public place, which is meaningful. Did he want to actually commit suicide? That's the only way he knew of trying to get the help and people to listen to him. We'll never know. Okay? Because it's always stupid to grab a gun. Folks at home, there's a lot of other ways. Call those hotline numbers because they'll talk to you all day. Go seek help, go to an emergency room—unless they have coronavirus—go to an emergency room and tell them you're feeling suicidal. Why is that important? Because there were other means, but this man in his mind had exhausted those and said, "I know for certain if I'm holding a gun, they'll show up."

He also makes mention—and folks, do your homework, read the case, it's everywhere—he also makes mention that "I'm a first responder, so I know all the tricks that you're going to use. I've been through this before." Again, Brian, frame it: what is he trying to tell us? What psychological message may he be trying to impart? "I know that you've got procedures, and those procedures are likely to get me killed so that I have your attention."

So that's a really important thing to bring up right here, because I didn't mention it because I knew you would. Because now that changes the dynamic of this person. But again, we're looking at this after the fact. We're not trying to Monday-morning quarterback this, just explaining this situation. So he is this person who wants to commit suicide, is a first responder himself, correct?

Yes.

So he actually knows all right, the procedures, buddy.

Yeah.

So he knows the policies and procedures. And like you just said, that changes it. Maybe this person really didn't want to kill themselves, because if he did, he didn't need anyone there to do it. He could have just done it.

I'm going to be a dick here, I'm going to be big and say this: How many times have you seen the Hollywood film, and it's just the same pattern over and over and over, but how many times have you seen it where the bad guy and the good guy who finally in their face-off—it doesn't matter what great technology they had before—it's always going to end up in a fistfight, right?

Right.

So right there at the end, at the most critical moment, and the guy goes, "Now, let me tell you, Mr. Bond, why that we've done it." And he delays all this time, allowing the cavalry to come in or whatever. But here you've got this guy that's saying, "I feel like killing myself." I think that's a check-in about the psychology. We safely can predict that he has the means and that he went through enough steps to likely show everybody, "I'm serious. I may commit suicide at this moment." Again, no armchair quarterback.

Now he's got a gun, now he's got fellow first responders that are around him, and he wants his say, not necessarily his way. The problem is he has his means, which means that around him there's a circle of danger. And I will acquiesce that even if he shoots himself, depending on where he shoots himself, there could be an additional involuntary muscle reflex which fires that gun again. For example, a single-action inline pistol. Do you get what I'm saying, Brian? There are myriad scientific realities that you have to compare, specifically in the physical physics realm. So just like holding a grenade, we draw a line around this guy: your danger zone and this is our safety zone. Danger zone, meaning if you get hit, you're going to die. The safety zone, meaning, yeah, you might walk away, but you're going to walk with a limp the rest of your life. Now we have a captive audience, that's him thinking. And now the cops go, "Well, at least he's not going anywhere." Now what do we have, Brian? We have the gift of time and distance. When you tell me that unless he popped up off of his knees, unless he turns that gat and starts aiming it at somebody, we have a situation where the clock is in your favor. The longer a person doesn't kill themselves, the longer a hostage-taker doesn't shoot the hostage, the better it is.

Yeah, around them. Right, right. I see what you're saying. So you're saying from the responding perspective of how do you handle this situation: time and distance. So, I'm not... you are also doing, is explaining the part about why this is different than someone just—I mean, the guy on the bridge who's going to jump off is different than the guy sitting there holding a gun, right? It's like we said, he has a gun, so yeah, he could, even unintentionally, kill or injure someone while he's in this distress period. Could fire a round, he could kill a police officer, could kill a neighbor, a kid, whatever.

Exactly.

So there's a... it's not just that the danger isn't just to him, but to the public at large.

You're exactly right. That, that has to... And he doesn't have that right, Brian. He knows, "I don't have the right to..." No one knows, so one, it's illegal. Do you get what I'm saying? But two, as a human being, you should never place anybody else in this type of scenario. But again, we're not talking about a completely sane, rational human at this point. Folks, don't write me letters. What I'm saying is this is a damaged, fractured human that's acting out because he thinks he's hit a (pun intended) dead end. And what he wants is help. What he wants is somebody to listen, to listen. And that's why he's sparring with them at the beginning. Because if you didn't, Brian, if he just wanted an audience when they showed up, he'd say, "Welcome to my suicide, bang," and he's done. He did it for every second, for every minute that they were negotiating, that meant that he was sparring with them, that he was talking to them. And the longer that goes, it's always in your favor, the less likely he's going to kill himself or another.

So, and we always say it is some people want their say, not necessarily their way, right? So you're going to act out, lash out, or kill themselves without making a scene. Those are the people that want their way, whether that's a school shooter or the suicide. Good. So most people just want their say. That's what everyone does, right? "Yeah, I'm going to get on social media, I'm going to tell everyone how I feel. I want to yell and scream, I'm going to be the big guy acting all tough somewhere." But I don't actually want to do anything necessarily. So that can be difficult to determine, especially in the moment, but not if you know how to identify it, right? So, how do you balance that, meaning, you're standing there going, "All right, this guy clearly, he's talking. Clearly we've been here for, I think, over 45 minutes they're on scene before he was killed." That's a long time to be sitting there in the street talking to someone, right? So if he just wants his say and he wants all these people to understand, we have to factor in the point that, "Whoa, he does still have a loaded weapon and he is still potentially very dangerous to the people who showed up to help him and to the community at large."

Yep.

So they're walking that fine line. What are they supposed to do? Because what happened was, for some reason, an officer decided that he was now a threat and killed him and shot him multiple times.

Yep. So, but let's not go there yet, Brian. Let's back off just a second and talk about your time issue because I think that's a great example. Let's talk about a traffic stop. The U.S. Supreme Court has stated that during a traffic stop, time doesn't matter if the probable cause is still there and if you're actively searching for information, exculpatory information ("No, this is the wrong car"), inculpatory information ("Listen, I think I've got something here and I just got to wait 'til Wyoming Department of Motor Vehicles calls me back or I talk to that Florida detective and see if this is my witness or a suspect"). So time is in your favor unless you're wasting time and you just don't have a caper and you're trying to invent one. Then the U.S. Supreme Court, and every mistake in law enforcement, comes down to advisory leadership and lack of training.

So if we put that in the same element, the same frame of focus here, what's the right time on a suicide call? I'll tell you right now, if I was the supervisor on the scene, these guys are on that scene until they tell me they need to switch out. I'd have a backup team that's ready to go. I'd have EMS on standby, and I'd already be on the phone going, "Hey, you've got anybody in a hospital that's a psychologist that can come down that's talking?" So 45 minutes doesn't matter to me. Or 0.5 hours or it goes the next day. What's the value in a life, Brian? I mean, clearly our plan B here can't be to let him go. We can't just say, "Listen, you're on your own." We can't, because he's a threat to the public.

Right.

But by the same token, as long as he's talking, he's not doing. So clearly he wants something, and this is the art of the negotiation. "Now, what is it that you want? What can we get you? What are the steps we can take to de-escalate this right now? And if you're going to say no, then perhaps we have to up the ante and use less-lethal, try to disarm you." But that's a hell of a choice, isn't it? I mean...

So is it near a school? Is it a major...? And what are the elements? You brought up a major point. And a lot of these issues, one of the major points is, how do you respond? What are we supposed to do? Because it's like, "Hey, those police officers, fire department, supervisors, all those people, hey, I got shift change. This is a job I've got, right? I've got another... like to you, I got..." Yeah, then the city's going, "We're not paying you overtime." So when you're right, time is on your time to go. So they have to force guys. But they got pressure from the community and society at large too, "Hey, why aren't you closing these cases? Why is this not solved yet?" What? And so, "I go to work and you're in my way."

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Everyone on that...

"Well, if that had lasted, they're really, 'Hey man, I got to go to work.' It's like you have a..." So this plays into society, "We'll do this," and "They want this." But then the realities are, "Well, look, man, that's the job I've got. Time, we can't sit here all night. We have other people with more important things. Look, there may be a structure fire on the other side of town and these EMS guys have to go help those people out. They can't be so nicely because they're tied up here. That's a resource I can't use elsewhere."

But Brian, what's a human life worth? So if we were talking about a guy in a business that was barricaded up, there's a language difficulty, and it's going to take me 45 minutes to get a Vietnamese interpreter down here so I further understand this guy is not trying to kill anybody, he's just wanting political asylum. Let's say that was the issue. We would grant that 45 minutes. If we're saying now we got a different... if it's a ticking clock, and the guy says something stupid like, "Hey, I already killed a hostage!" Yeah, that's a... there's also... there's a clear-cut almost. But remember, this is a clear-cut case. The guy is surrounded by cops. The only person he wants to hurt is himself, and he's only got a handgun. He doesn't have a repeating firearm. And the argument's going to be, "Yeah, but he may have had two handguns or four magazines." Yeah, okay, but listen, if you can't kill this guy—what I'm trying to say is that now if we look at what happened, listen, Brian, I would be completely okay with this. I'd still be wrong. Don't, don't take me at my word, folks. Take what I'm trying to tell you. I would be completely okay if they changed the stakes and brought in a police sniper, and he tried to shoot the weapon out of the guy's hand, or they had a de-escalation Taser that was aimed specifically to, or somebody snuck up—none of those are good ideas, folks. But let's say that's what they tried and at least they told the public, "Listen, we didn't want the guy hurting himself. School was about to start, we didn't want to panic until... So we thought that maybe we would try these other things and they failed." I would be okay talking about that, because even those are dumb, uninformed choices. At least it wasn't the dumbest thing that I've heard this year, which is, "I calculated where the muzzle was, and I figured I was over there, and that bullet coming out at, you know, 900 feet per second—1,600 feet per second, let's say—he's going to go through this guy's skull after he kills himself, continue on and threaten me." Yeah. So based on that calculus, Brian, based on the trajectory, geometry, internal, external, and terminal ballistic of which this copper obviously was a scientist, he shot him. Brian, I'll say a couple of things here. One, it could have been accidental. He's covering his ass. The second thing is people are going, "Yeah, but then why did he shoot?" Because when you shoot, you keep shooting.

Well, yeah, I'm saying, and then the other people around him. I give everyone else a pass. Yeah, good, because they would have shot. So Brian, let's, let's break that down, and I apologize, certainly there's an earthquake here. Let's break that down and talk about, so really that's what happened. So now it's exactly what it's officer who killed this man, who's now referred to as "defendant" in the statement that the facts—"Well, the defendant, please rise." Okay, it's, he said he fired based on what you just said. All of a sudden he's holding it to his head, but the holding a gun to his head, this person was holding a gun to his head. Evans was his name, sorry. This guy, Mr. Evans, holding a gun to his head, turned enough so now that if he fired a round, the bullet would, could travel through his head and hit an officer behind cover. Rather than risking that, he decided to shoot him, shot him once. He slumped to the ground. He was still holding the gun to his head, and the weapon was still moving in what direction? According to the weapon, the weapon apparently was still moving. So he shot him, I think, three more times after that. So your description is what basically he said. I would have kind of wanted to read or read it verbatim.

Yeah, let's do it. But his words...

Yeah, yeah. In a recorded statement played to the grand jury, the defendant stated, "Mr. Evans turned his head further than it has in"—this is a quotation—"further than it has in the past, to where it's for sure at me, and I felt that it was even past me at Ramos, who was another officer at the scene. So I fired. I just fired."

Okay, those words are extremely powerful. That last part, "I just fired," that's a... I, I just... I don't think that would give me artifacts and evidence to support your claim that it might have been accidental, and he fired and then, "What? I don't know, I did." "So I can't be the idiot that accidentally fired, so I got to put some, 'Hey, listen, there's logic here,' my ego tells me." Yeah, "I can sell this story." And Brian, let me ask you a question, have you ever held a pistol at arm's length for 45 minutes?

No.

No more than anybody I know. The only person you do that... the only person I know it's more than you, it's Nico, and with his threadbare arms, I don't think anybody can keep that up. So it's likely to assume that at some point you're aiming when the gun comes close and stuff. But at this 45-minute mark, Brian, all of a sudden he says, "I fired. I just fired." In his own words, I think that's powerful. I think he cranked off a round. He's thinking, "There's a lot of stress." That's going. It's as logical as his argument that the bullet is somehow now threatening.

So then, yeah, he said, he kind of, "Mr. Evans," the person who was killed, "kind of goes limp and falls over, still has a gun to his head. Officers start moving toward him. Mr. Evans, the one who's dead, didn't comply with commands to drop his gun." And according to the defendant's statement, this is a quote: "The gun falls out and were kind of like, you know, around him. The gun falls out and it is now starting to point at my other partner. So then I fire again at him."

Now it has nothing to do with the suspect. It's that damn Austrian-made Glock that has a mind of its own. What is this, Stephen King? Are we saying that this is Christine? All of a sudden, I'm trying to bring to light that I do not understand where this officer's head was, because the idea is that the penalty for attempting suicide shouldn't be homicide. Now, let's take a look at our caper in Dallas that nobody wants to bring back, and there's got to be a plea deal going behind the scenes somewhere because it hasn't made one iota of new space. But a female officer walks in what she thinks is her apartment, it gets in a shootout, Brian. Accidental. It's not a homicide. Whatever they said, that ain't a homicide, it's a homicide. Now we're talking about a person that knowingly, intentionally fired the first round and then kept saying, "It's the gun, it's a threat," and kept pumping rounds into him. Brian, do me a favor. Take these, and remember folks, these are legal documents. A person was given his rights and then asked to swear to this testimony. Brian, do me a favor, go down the page and read the part where the guy says, "At which point the defendant, or the victim rather, said, 'I'm going to kill you cops,' and 'I swear to God,' and pointed at him." Where's that, Brian, in that testimony? It's not in there at all. It isn't. Is that kind of conspicuous that it's not there? I'm not saying this is a bad cop. I'm saying this is a cop that made the ultimate mistake. I'm saying this cop didn't have the leadership or the training to be in that situation, and he cared for his partner and he cared for himself, and he extrapolated this math that I still...

So, let's keep it at that right there, because that's important on how we break down these cases. It isn't a bad person or bad—maybe we don't know anything about you. Say, "Hey, screw this guy, I hate him," right? And all of these, most of these, almost every single one of cases like this, come down to is just someone made a poor decision, human performance, right? So that critical thinking skill wasn't there, but it ended in his death or in the death of another.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And this is what happens in all these, and it's just the lack of critical thinking ability to articulate the situation and respond accordingly. You get different cases where some people are hyper-alert and overly reactive, or the other end of it where they're not alert and completely unresponsive. That leads to their deaths or someone else's death. Right, exactly. And that's just, that comes down to cognitive performance and what they're actually thinking. But what if these things continue to happen, and they're going to continue to happen, and then we again, we establish policies and procedures and go, "Okay, well, the next time we're going to do a minimum distance and this person will be at the scene." Exactly, which was your tactical use, your technique, the reaction and procedures that don't prevent the next one because we fail to take the lessons learned. Everyone does, "Oh, that guy sucks, he makes other cops look bad," or "This is BS," or "Everyone goes, 'Eff this guy,' and they boot him." No one supports him, and he could have done every single thing right in his career up to that point. This guy saved a choking... yeah, that morning, with his car. He may be a hero officer.

Yeah, folks, don't vilify him or vilify the act. He did something because he was untrained, and he rushed to an unreasonable conclusion. And Brian, that's what we do. We do science and reasonableness, and this is a perfect example of an unreasonable response to what a person perceived as a threat. And had he been further trained, I don't see, because why, why did he have, why did he have that response? And I know this is where we get into a little bit of speculation, I mean, expert opinion, but meaning that's different emotion, but we have to go, "Well, that's why we use those terms, 'likely' or 'it couldn't have been this.'" Right? If these things were in place, we don't just say, "Oh, it must have been this," because write that out of your vocabulary if you're using that, because the two greatest words in the English language are "prove it."

Exactly.

So, and each sentence with "Your Honor" in order. So here's the thing is that obviously, and this has happened before because he was not one of the first arriving officers on the scene.

Right.

Yeah, there were a couple officers who arrived there first. They didn't jump to this conclusion. They didn't. Not unlike the Steven Mader case, right? What's... West Virginia where he stood up and said, "Yes, this guy doesn't, this guy just wants me to kill him. This is suicide by cop. I'm not worried about it. I'm going to talk him down." And then the next responding officer was the one who shot him.

So not unlike this one, right? And the further we go down now, because now we get into legal matters, and was he negligent? Was it negligent? How does this work? Because he was actually this now defendant was told by, I believe, his superior to use, "Hey, I want you on the less-than-lethal shotgun."

Not yep.

And so he had that and then put that down and drew his sidearm instead. So his only reaction had something occurred, had even had one, was going to be likely lethal because of the tool he used to wield in that situation. That'd be the correct way of looking at it.

That's your framing it, and I love the way you're framing it. So I would ask you to do one more thing. How many, and I don't know the answer, this isn't rhetorical, so help me, a product of the Detroit school system. How many cards are there in a deck of playing cards?

Fifty-two.

So I would, I would guess, because this ain't me, folks, so I'm not stringing you along at home. If there's 52 cards in the deck, there's a game called 21 that people call Blackjack. Are there people that are professional card counters that can determine the likelihood of what's coming up based on the number of people playing? Absolutely. So therefore, pardon me. So therefore, I would speculate in this instance that you're going to have some wiseass attorney that's going to come up and he's going to conjecture this through and say that, "Well, there's an infinite number of possibilities that doesn't, that or show there's a very finite layer of things that are going to happen." And I go back to my original question, Brian, is it likely with the amount of officers they had on the scene that if the decedent posed a real threat to them, that they would have killed him? They would have been able to kill him.

Oh, yeah.

And before he killed anybody? We've got to stop this in our society where a cop dies when the suspect dies. That's the kind of math we can't sustain. So therefore, it doesn't fall on all the officers at the scene, but the lawsuit will, and their agency, and vicariously the dispatcher, and everybody else. It falls on that officer that took the action. And when he explained his action—now remember, this is well after the incident that he's been sworn in and testifying in a room full of people for a grand jury—his story is, "I shot. I just shot." Do you get what I'm trying to say? He didn't bring up, Brian, if you would have brought up and says, "I'm an expert in handguns, and I've tried enough suicides. That's the fifth time, and four times before other officers were clipped by the bullet that went through." Brian, if you would have said that, yeah, I'd be talking about right now, right?

Exactly.

The idea of eminence to draw conclusions.

When you look at his explanation for his actions, it's a lack of... it falls below that. It comes from, to me, that says he doesn't know. Like, I don't... he doesn't fully understand what happened. Okay, that's what training—meaning you need to understand the consequences, understand what's happening. Not like an idiot, I'm just saying like, if you can't articulate why you made a decision, then something happened after.

Yeah, yeah.

You didn't, at the time you don't know, then you mean, like, you don't really know why you did that. And that doesn't get better after the incident. Remember, he doesn't improve so much after you shoot him. So if he had said, like he said, "Well, I've been to 37 instances where this happened. I saw 16 different times where a bullet went through someone and it hit a police officer or civilian or whatever like that." You go, "Okay." Or, or if he went the other way and said, "You know what? I was, 'Eff this guy, I'm done. I don't want to be here anymore. This guy wants to die anyway.'" Let's say, okay, though that would explain his actions.

But isn't... which means he felt sorry, middle or not.

Yeah, you're exactly right, Brian. Whether it was wrong or not, he would have had an explanation. I'm saying, whether it was for a good scientific answer or a reason, and there was a legitimate threat that he felt, or it was horrible, he's just a terrible person. So neither of those things happened, which means it was somewhere in the middle, meaning, "I don't think he understood why. I don't know." Like, that's the price. If you make a decision like that, people have done that before in things like, "I don't know, I just, I just fired," or "I don't know, this just happened," and can't explain it. That's...

I would have rather him got on that... I would have gone down and said, "It was 45 minutes. I don't know what I was thinking. I cranked off a round. And then the next thing I know, I thought I saw him moving." Brian, that story would have been easier to swallow than this one. This one, I've been chugging coffee and I can't get it down my throat.

Let me tell you a real quick story about drugs. So it was a caper, and I'm reviewing as a supervisor a drug caper, and the officer's writing in there over and over. He's writing in "plain smell," "plain feel," which are all accepted and understood exceptions to the search warrant rule, meaning this cop is on something. Also, something he felt.

Exactly.

So this is back when marijuana was voodoo and illegal. And so he's writing this report in any context. Sure enough, the guy's got like an eight-ball of weed, nothing major, right? But takes him into custody and then extrapolates into a search of his vehicle. And then he's now applying for a search warrant for the guy's home where he feels this big stash is. Not in the car, eight-ball in the guy's pocket. We're not talking about possession with intent. But I'm reading this and I'm suspicious and I go, "Okay, right here you said, you know, based on my experience, I know this and that. How many dope cases have you had?" "This is my third." "Okay, what was the total amount of the others? All of them, including this one, are going to be under an ounce." Do you get what I'm trying to say? So there were, we're talking less than 28 grams of weed. We're not talking about fentanyl here.

Yeah.

And I go, "Okay, so you're saying that on the strength of these three contacts where you've had less than an ounce of marijuana, you're saying that you knew or should have known this was occurring?" That's not enough, Brian. Uh-uh. Gladwell, and people in the audience know, it takes about 10,000 times to get really good at something. So if you were talking to the subject matter expert that was a weapons ballistics guy like that, I give them more credibility. Here you're talking to somebody that's saying, "Hey, I got three dope cases in all this much weed." This cop is on trial for his life, that's the bottom line. And he comes up and goes, "I shot, I just shot." Where's his attorney? Do you get what I'm trying to say? To even if it's a Garrity case and they said, "Hey, you don't need an attorney, just tell us the truth of what happened." I think that he fell on a file folder and there's nothing written on it, Brian. I think there was actually one. And then he came up and guess what we do? Guess what we do when we're less trained, less experienced, and have less intellect? We raise the level of violence, whether we want to, whether we intend to do it or not, we're human, and that's what happens.

Well, that, and that's all, that's all humans. It's not law enforcement. And that's why they're saying it's a mega episode. If you're non-law enforcement, this is going to happen. Do you think people don't beat their own kids to death? Well, they had rage and they started smacking and then all of a sudden forgot it was a baby human. That happens, Brian. And then you look, you can't unring that bell. We are fragile little snowflakes, and we make stupid, reprehensible mistakes. And guess what? When the stakes are higher, we make bigger mistakes. And that's what happened here. The stakes were about as high as you can get. And I would ask you this, friend, how much training you think they did on suicidal subjects? It was probably a video chat. Would he have the best that they had? Do you think that they surrounded a guy? Do you think that they talked to a fellow officer?

But even that, I mean, you've got people who then go, "Oh, you need to understand the psychology behind suicidal people, and you need to understand..." It's like, "Okay, well, that doesn't necessarily help you in this situation right here." So all that stuff behind it, I think, comes down to training, specifically kind of scenario-based training.

Yes, exactly. Scenario-based training. We've talked about that. But why don't, why don't we... my question is always why, why are we so bad at taking out the lessons learned? Because I mean, same thing, I've spoken to even recently a very large law enforcement agency and that was my point is like, "We're not always good at pulling out the lessons learned from these cases." And they were in violent agreement, you know? And these are all seasoned guys, really good. "No, you're right. Like, we don't, we don't take it. We just make new policies and procedures for if that, in that same incident, happens again." Well, you're never going to... it's not going to be the same that way.

No. And so let me pose you on that, right? Because you're onto something. Have you ever been to a training area that was an urban training area that had an overpass? And obviously, everybody right now is laughing because they're like, "Yeah, there was one at every training facility." And everybody knows why. Because GWOT money (Global War on Terror) was everywhere, and everybody had an IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract), and the first couple of fatalities from Iraq were from overpasses. Remember those days? And then they started, what did they do? Every training area from now on has to have an overpass. Then every training area has to have a bus stop. Then and the training is, yeah. So if you're a trainer, that's, that's, that's, "We're going to fight the last war. We're going to order and we're going to do an STP (Standard Training Plan)." Exactly. Because that guy that designed that, he was actually in the scrum. So we're going to see it through his eyes. So stop that first of all. Spend money, Blumberg (Bloomberg), spend money on training and education. So here's a trainer, Brian, let's do this. These cops are going to go, "Okay, put your money where your mouth is." So let's get one cop with a Simunition round—call the cops, use less-than-lethal force munition—yeah, this ammunition, ball munition. Yeah, yeah, okay. So everybody knows that, and all agencies have. So what we do is clear all weapons, everything, make it safe. Then we get a guy and we put a red shirt on him, and everybody else has a blue shirt. Or we put a white shirt on him, everybody else has red shirts. I don't give a damn, but there's some way of determining who this guy is, and that's going to change two other people in the room. And you go, "Okay, there's only going to be three because we only have on-duty or off-duty roll call." And what it's going to be, Brian, is the first time the guy's going to sit there no matter what you do. When you take your defensive positions, he's going to shoot himself. The second time, the guy's going to pop up from a kneeling position and race at a cop until it's a suicide by cop. The third time, the guy's going to go, "Okay, set the gun down, please don't hurt me. I want to go." If they would have done this, Brian, if they would have done just that training, do you understand this guy would still be alive and we wouldn't have this cop in a trick bag? How hard would it have been for them to create first part test, talk about it, then move into an actual scenario-based training like that? And now when your rolodex is spinning, you fall on that one. And it's like, the guest we had on here telling you folks to make index cards for a person that needs sign language to tell them, "Calm down, all is well." Did you do it? Because if you didn't, then guess what? You looked the training in the eye and you chose a different path. Brian, this guy is guilty of being stupid in the moment and exacerbating that stupidity later by not having an explanation that's reasonable enough for me to buy into it. And thank God I'm not on a jury, and certainly thank God I'm not doing the deposition on this, because I would have laughed at that point and poked him. I would have poked him and said, "There's got to be something." I would have squeezed him and said, "What, what else you got inside you? Because that blows."

So if this guy is guilty of making a poor decision in a stressful situation, I mean, that's... then why, then the training, you just get, get away from the training part of this, right? We're going to vilify this guy. He's the one that made a mistake because we don't want to accept responsibility. Right? Meaning the whole department, the training process, the academy at that scene, that made the mistake. I just happen to be bigger.

Right. Well, yeah, and what about everything leading on to that? I mean, this is exactly. It's not just him, it's the department, that agency, it's their academy, it's the funding that they get from taxpayers, it's policymakers who say, "No, we don't want the police to do this, we want them to do that." This is, and then it's us, every single member of society. It's a shared responsibility, right? I sent you that photo that I took right down the street from where I live, or someone wrote graffiti where it said, "Society gets the type of graffiti it deserves," or something like that. And that's why I was like, "No, society gets the law enforcement it deserves." I mean, if this what, what you want... I think there's a bigger picture here too, is what is the role they're supposed to play? Because here's the thing, it's like a suicidal person, why is that the... So you want, so now police, police are mental health experts. That's what their job is to go in and talk people down on suicide. That's what they're supposed to do. Okay, we want them to do that, but there's all these other responders, buddy, you got it. But then why, you don't even a... It's just, I don't feel that we're taking a large enough view at all these cases and changing it. Because anytime, any call, I don't care what it is, anytime where the police or military or whatever, anyone has to show up that as part of a government agency, that's resources we're allocating towards this situation. And we're saying, "Okay, we have to use these resources here," which means we're taking it away from somewhere else. So, I think people don't realize that, hey, if you want everyone to do this now, then something else isn't going to get done. So we have to decide what's important to us as a role in society. So, did this guy need to die? Well, no, I don't think he did. We value life, and folks, even at his own, we in general value... we have a very high value on life here in the United States and in most Western North America in general, right? We're not a third-world country. Don't live in some of the places that you and I run around. Life is very, very important here. It's important everywhere, but here we take it, it's, it's, we're very lucky. We live in a society that values someone's life so highly. So why take, why don't we take out the right lessons learned? Like, why does that... because that's the big thing from all these cases that you see. Because to us, I know it's the same thing. It's we have to explain to a lot of people how they are, how we look at it from the lens of human behavior and go, "Look, if these cases come down to a core skillset that we need to understand or get better at, guess what the gold standard is that center link in the chamber that everything comes from?" So why do you think from your experience, both military, law enforcement, working with the military—I mean, we've been at war for 20 years—why are we so bad at getting the correct lessons learned? Because every once in a while we get it right, or we come up, there's some good training that they grade, "This is what we need to focus on." Why are we so bad at doing that? Why does this become, why doesn't the police come out and say, "Hey, look, this is a failure in training. Yes, this guy made a horrible decision and someone was killed. That's the line of work that we're in. What do you do for a living? So don't judge us." You can't have that conversation right there with pointing to. But here's the thing, when the restaurant screws up your order, it's, "Hey, I'm sorry," and they go fix it, and you don't have to pay for that. This is a similar thing. The guy screwed up some...

More than similar, Brian. But I'm saying, I understand that the risk is much higher, and everything. But you just coined it, so let's talk about risk. First of all, let's step one back away from training, one back away from lessons learned, to go to the risk first. Don't show up at a debate with a gun. Don't show up at a voting booth with a gun. Don't show up to talk to the cop that's knocking on your door with a gun. Why? Because it's risky behavior. And when you engage in risky behavior, there's always a chance you're going to get shot.

Now, let's go to two. When a police officer pulls you over, roll down a window and say, "Yes, sir," or "Yes, ma'am." Don't be reaching for stuff, don't be doing something that causes them alarm (e.g., reaching for something or attempting to drive away). Why? Because that's risky behavior. And if you scare a cop or a guard at the border or somebody else, you might die. So we could categorize all of that, Brian, and that's what I call common sense. The idea is that you don't want to be the proximate cause of your own homicide by escalating the situation, knowingly, by being lippy and bringing rage. But there's laws to fix that later. Now you as a citizen are responsible, part of that. So the decedent here brought a gun to a debate, and he shouldn't have. But he was a fractured human. Somebody should have seen that.

That's... I get that. He's at fault for everything that happened. He is the cause of all this. He's the cause of this. He put his own, what, his own death. He caused his own death, plain and simple. That person, I forget his name or he... because I don't really care about the details.

Evans.

Evans. Yeah. So Mr. Evans, unfortunately, he was struggling with whatever he was struggling with. He caused his own death when he decided to call them.

I would say he put, I would say you put the series of events into motion.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm not... No, no, what I'm telling you is, if we acquiesce to that, now let's go on to the lessons learned. Humans are set on transmit. Okay? If you have two radios facing each other, both set on transmit, what do you get? A lot of noise, feedback, and static. Yeah, but do you ever get anywhere? So what's happening here is we have to say, not all information in an agency is pushed down: "Thou shalt learn this, you shall do that." Because what that doesn't do is it doesn't create an opportunity for learning to occur. Training allows for learning to occur, for a human being to get knowledge, skills, attitudes, aptitudes, abilities that they didn't have before. And when a person falls on a blank rolodex, guess what? It's a crapshoot. Anything goes. That's what happened in this situation. So when we do this, what we should do is there should be a nationwide law enforcement put a video of this...

I get, I get all that. But I'm just, what I'm asking is a general question from your experience, over your lifetime, it's not these, "Hey, this is what we should do in this case." I'm saying, why are we so bad at extracting the lessons learned, and why do we just want to put blame on someone who, I would say, if you're going to blame someone, blame Mr. Evans.

Right. He's the... Brian, hey, that's a great, that's a great point. The thing we got to blame is, is we blame the supervisors because it's always an administration problem and a training problem. So Evans didn't know critical thinking skills. Because if he had, he would have called 911. He's the first responder. He wanted to talk it out. All the evidence points to the fact that he wanted to have his say. He didn't want to have his way. And if he was going to hurt somebody, it was going to be self-inflicted. And guess what? Those people around him were put into that situation because of Evans. I'll agree with that. But they weren't trained to a level where they could take it. And guess what? They could have done a handoff. I always call it having a plan B, Brian. If I could have dropped the hammer on everybody that legally I could have killed, just find me by the trail of my corpses. Everybody that's in this job chose to de-escalate. We chose to find some common ground, less than killing the person. And that includes getting into the gray area of shooting a tire at the end of a chase to disable the vehicle because you didn't want to have to shoot the driver. And you know what? Maybe that's murky and maybe some people go, "Well, there's laws against it." But I understand a thought process that says, "At least I'm not killing the guy right now." That goes in the face of those people because when it comes to lessons learned, the idea is that that exact specific thing is never going to happen again. So that's why you've got to have training that equates certain things. Like training for sexual harassment is very similar to training for suicidal behavior identification, violence in it. Yeah, am I lying in that?

And that's, that's kind of what I was thinking too, is what it gets down to is we become then, "Okay, this is now another skill I have to learn." So that department is going to go, "Hey, we got this psychologist person who's going to come in and talk about this and have it all, we're going to do continuing professional development on it. We're going to spend this much time focusing on just this one thing." And by the way, "No, we can't hire a school resource officer because you don't have the funds." Right.

And in my line, yes.

And now we're going to go, "We're going to spend this much money on this one thing." And you're going, "All right, but aren't there some common themes throughout all of these that we can boil it down to the point?"

Brian, and that's why we have to spend more time listening to our training division and looking at the news and forecasting out ahead of it. So school resource officers, just brought that up. So a kid brings a sharpened set of forks for the grill—you know, barbecue grill forks, yeah, big thing that you got—brings that as a weapon under his coat, in Wisconsin. Goes into a school resource officer, starts stabbing them. School resource officer, because his intent was that, "I'm going to take the gun, shoot a bunch of my peers, and kill myself." Right? He didn't want to kill the officer, but he certainly did want to disarm. But as he needed this guy, he was kind of stopping and getting away, and I was laughing at this, but it's not me, it's the gallows humor. This is how, how do you do that, right? So now the cop draws his weapon to fire fatal rounds on the person that is trying to kill him, and he is justified in doing that, and he shoots himself. The cop shoots himself as he shoots and wounds the kid. And now they escalate the situation. He shot himself, Brian. And somebody's going to go, "Oh, it was pandemonium, of course he shot himself." No, shut up, it's a function of training. Okay, look, just like every department, and your department too, whatever you do and wherever you work, your department has it where you go, "Well, don't send Tim, he'll turn everybody high and right, and there'll be a fistfight at the end of it. Don't give it to Tammy. Tammy doesn't give a damn, and she's not going to do a good job." Brian, does every agency you've ever seen or everywhere you have that, every company has that? You don't give it to so-and-so down at HR, go to this person. So what does that mean? That means we're accepting and failing with the right behavior.

That's the thing. When you say that you're expecting that behavior, you're now, if you walk by it, you've accepted it, you're complicit in whatever it is. Because that's what I'm saying. And that's what, when some of these, "We all knew that was going to happen! Why didn't you do something about it before?" And I'm sorry, and I got a teacher who just answered your own question. I want you to make sure you know that. I know you were posing a semi-rhetorical, but Brian, you reap the whirlwind when you don't conduct this training, when you don't understand there's commonality between all training, where you don't have that BSA (Basic Safety Awareness) in style, and you don't require the people to, and then if you don't interact with your folks, they're going to create their own groove in the record, and guess what? It's hard to get out of that. And this kid did, and it ended up in him shooting the suicidal subject. Completely different if the kid was running toward him waving a gun around. Completely different.

Yeah, and that goes, it's just that the parallels are everywhere, right? We're talking about this case, but we've got to start doing some cases like corporate things that happened, because it's different. Because we always think that the corporation will go, "He's not talking about cops, he's talking about my company." But you know what, Brian, maybe they don't know. I got Michaela as the perfect example. I've just, we share the office, and I've heard some of her phone calls, and I hear speaker, and I'm like, "Oh my God, this guy," or I hear what she's trying to figure stuff out. I was like, "No one showed her at a new company." So she's only worked for these big, big, big companies that are freaking huge. I'm talking they're paying her really good money. And so I was like, at the last one where she, thank God, because we were mad, so she became the top salesperson in her team, and that took a year. And then she was like just blowing everyone away. And because they just, "Oh, you've got to figure it out, you've got to figure it out." It's like, "No one's training you, no one's saying, 'Hey, do this, do this.'" It's like, "No." So she had to go. So that means that company lost a year, a year of productivity, paying her money where she could have been making them more. And then she goes to the next even bigger company. I can't, I'm not saying I knew it, but same thing. I'm like, "Are they doing that?" "No," she's like, "No one showed me. It's in the same space." So I said, "I had to work with her. All right, you're going to come up with a training plan for yourself." Like, "What do you mean?" I go, "All right, here's what you're going to do. Close targets first, figure out what you need to learn right now, all right, and get really good at that. Don't worry about the rest of this stuff. Then as you have time, start building." And we came up with a little training plan, and sure enough, she's three months in and she's already hitting her numbers, doing this, doing this. And it's because no one did that. So that means all those companies are losing out on past, and all these billions and millions and millions of dollars of revenue because they don't want to invest in their people. Now, they'll go on LinkedIn and do the, "Hey, what if, you know, CEO says to his CFO, 'What if we don't train our people,' or something like, 'What if we train our people and they all end up leaving us?'" And the guy says, "Hey, what if we don't train them and they end up staying?" It's the scariest thing I can put. But a man will post that crap, and no one got about that.

Brian, two sides of the same coin. You said, "Engage your close targets first." There's logic behind that, tactically, operationally, strategically. We could break that down and show why. What's the difference between that and "Check your five and twenty-fives" when you take a knee? Because the thing that might kill you might be the thing that's right around you. What we're talking about is there's certain tenets of wisdom that come back over and over and over. And whether it's A.A. Milne, Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, whether it's Lao Tzu, whether it's a gosh darn Carnegie talking about business, they apply to all humans. All humans are forms of tribes that have groups, and those groups either produce or they don't. And when it produces, the teams are always looking down and in. They're never going to come up and out. Those things that are going up and out will have wobbly legs and will always crash down. We're talking about a function of training within an organization. And when you lapse at that training, or you lack that training, or you give people too much—look, I'm all about critical thinking skills, but saying, "I set my less-lethal force alternative next to me and I turned on my camera when I read that," what is that? That's procedure. Let's check in the box, check in the box. Training doesn't make me think myself out of the situation, and critical thinking does. So if your training components don't have a, "Why did you do that? Because of this." If they don't have a hot wash, if they don't have lessons learned, and if your agency doesn't grow from that, then don't come back to me and go, "Hey, we're getting sued again. Hey, U.S. Justice Department has fallen in on our agency. The actions of one person are spinning this agency into a horrific situation." But it could have been predicted, and then it would have been completely intentional, not a mistake like this to cost somebody their life. And it'll have repercussions months and years after this incident, and it's going to cost people a bunch of money. Pay upfront. You're going to pay one way or the other. That's the front. Pay for the training. Pay as much as you can for the training.

Well, that's going to get much, and that goes to kind of what I was talking about as society as a whole and how we look at some of these issues, whether that's at a corporation or what we want for law enforcement. It's that, people forget, you're always going to pay. No matter what, buddy, this is how it works, you pay, right? It's like, it's like taxes, right? You're going to pay. So you have to do it. So you can try and minimize as much as you're going to get a really good CPI, do whatever you got to do. But meaning, it's the same analogy. Like you're going to pay, so how do you want to do it? Do you want to wait 'til something catastrophic happens and pay a whole crap ton of money, or do you want to invest for your future? Everyone knows you get the best return on your investment by everyone forcing this, not this. Everyone knows, if you get a 401k and you put a little bit away, you start right now, today, even just starting today, a little bit at a time, a little bit upfront. What's going to happen 30, 40 years from now? Well, that's going to pay off dividends huge.

Training excitement in your cognitive capital. Try to wait 40 years and make that same amount, then you're going to be lumped up in lump sums, and you don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you're not going to live that long. So the idea is that absolutely everything you do, and much more importantly, that which you do not do, is going to come back to haunt you. Your agency isn't doing hip-pocket training, if it's not doing on-duty roll call and after-duty hot wash. If you're not spending a few minutes prepping people to go out on the road, then these things are going to continue to happen.

Yeah. I don't think it takes as much as people think in terms of calories.

Brian, five-minute hot wash. I'll put up some of that on the Patreon site, some of the stuff we're talking about. Hey, do me a favor, Brian, and do a couple of our lessons learned, or rather, our instructor-developed [materials], put that on the Patreon site. You get what I'm trying to say? And it could be that one focused thing: "Hey, remember what this means? Hey, today when you go out there, because now we're laser-focused on going out there, but we didn't lose our flashlight." You can't have one or the other, Brian, you have to have both. Look, a cop has got a gun on his side, he's got a gun at his ankle, he's got a gun in a holster in his car, he's got a sniper rifle in his trunk, and he's got 911 to call all the other guys with guns. If that's all you've got, guess what? You approach every problem. He has that mentality. We've got to spend at least as much time driving. You're driving more than you're shooting, and ten times that amount talking. And I know the numbers probably higher than that because you talk more than you're driving when you're a cop. And in this writing too, I tell you what, I'd love to have some sort of course in testimony afterwards where was his supervisor, "Whatever you do, Johnny, the last thing I want you to do is say, 'I shot. I just shot,'" because that case went right out.

No, that's, we make that joke all the time, especially, who wants to write, who wants to write the report? It's like, that's actually the most important thing. It's the most important thing that happened today, you writing that down and making a moral and ethical conduct and accurately reporting it. Because witnesses, eyewitnesses, blow, Brian. You know that caper, the pizza box caper, everybody's calling it in my world, that all the witnesses said it was a young boy that was shot in the back running from cops. And all the videos and all, the guy aggressively with the gun, and he's a man, he's in his twenties. Brian, because eyewitnesses are the worst. Here we got a case where we don't need an eyewitness, and the only eyewitness we did have is dead. And the cop comes in completely unprepared and says, "Amy and Ramos, man, I was looking out for us." Not against cops. Love cops. They've got the hardest job in the world, folks. But the idea is that one bad thing like this gives us all a black eye, and we don't need it. This is all about cognitive overmatch, about learning good strategies and thinking clearly in horrific situations so we don't have to use deadly force.

Yeah, okay. Well, I think that's kind of a good place to... there's no good ending. No, we can bring up the pizza box one. I think that's a whole separate one if we wanted to, but yeah, let's leave it for a future caper. Everybody do your homework, go look up what I just said, and I'll challenge you to be on our next show. We'll talk about it. Brian, so I appreciate everyone listening. Thanks again. Go ahead, check out that Patreon site. Don't forget that training. Akeem Marren on MacAskill's podcast. I'm sorry, I know you left now. Ms. MacAskill, good guy. Put that one up, and I got to do a shout-out, folks. There's a great one coming, way to get a hold of Nicky Selby.

Yeah.

All right, well, I think that's that, that this one is after Nicky's, so they can check that one out already. Go back one. All right, don't forget, everybody, training changes behavior.