L.O.G. 143 Mow Your Lawn

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media; the links are also in the episode details. And hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

All right, well, good morning, Greg.

Morning, Brian.

It's good to see that you're up and able.

I am motivated. I am, I am so. Well, this will be coming out next week from the time we're recording it. But yeah, we've had a busy, really busy October. Then came back, got slammed finishing up some things. And then I have been kind of, we recorded one, if you're listening now, with an author, Toby Harness, and that'll come out in the following week. There's a lot going on this month about what he wrote about. I don't want to spoil any of that, but listen to that coming up. So we're back, just to meet you. It's been a few weeks since we recorded one, actually, because of all my travel.

So what Brian's not going to tell you is that as soon as we got back from an incredible journey to Mexico City and met some wonderful people—our business is truly universal—just like Khan in Revenge of Khan or whatever that space movie is, Brian played Chekov, and they put the earwig into his ear. Brian spent the last couple of days in the emergency room from brain-eating fasciitis. Hopefully, it's nothing serious. I'm still not completely out of the woods yet, but yeah, waking up and the entire world is spinning. But not just as it normally is, but your room and everything, and you're crawling along the wall to go to the bathroom. Yeah, a couple days in the emergency room wasn't good. But we're, I'm back from that, sort of still stumbling around a little bit. But I think I'll be okay.

So we're all praying for you, buddy.

Appreciate it.

So today's episode, we are going down to Austin, Texas, for an event that just occurred last week from when we're recording this. And so I'm going to give Greg, I'll just go over the kind of details in this case that we want to cover. We got a little bit of inside baseball on it, like we do in a lot of different cases, which is always cool. So when these things happen, and folks, if you're listening, just, you can always reach out to us, too. If you have something that, "Hey, I worked that case," or, "I was on this," or, "I know about this that occurred," we love that stuff because it really adds a lot of fidelity to our stories, and especially that we talk about in class.

So to go down to Austin, so this is last week, I'll just kind of read it from the article: "An Austin man opened fire on a city crew that had come out to cut his lawn. After an hours-long standoff, he was fatally shot when he emerged from his burning house." So this person hasn't been identified, but he's in his 50s. And basically what happened is last Wednesday, that was the 27th, around 9:15 AM, a city code enforcement employee showed up with a warrant to perform lawn maintenance at his house. Right. So literally to show up and cut the grass. So they knocked on the door, they tried to contact him, nothing. So they went to work. And in fact, he had been notified months earlier, back in August, that he had a week to cut the foot-high grass and weeds that were on his front lawn. So it's sort of like a public nuisance thing, right? They're going to enforce this.

So the crew started cutting the lawn, and then shortly thereafter, at around 10:20 AM, there were shots fired from either at them, or just from inside the house, or on the property. It's kind of a little unclear, so I'll just leave it at that. So shots were fired. No one was injured. They obviously got the heck out of there, called police. SWAT team came in with a negotiator and everything. And they basically resisted any attempts at communication, the individual inside the house. And then finally, in the afternoon, around 3:20, shots were fired, he said, from the house at officers who were in the yard. And that's when they sent a police robot into the house. Camera showed that there was a fire started, and it was quickly spreading. Some more shots were heard. And then they basically, a couple minutes later, they were going to try and move in, or at least firefighters were going to try and start putting out the fire. The garage door opened. The guy was armed, with his weapons in his hand, was ended up being shot by police officer. And then they evacuated him after they shot him. And then firefighters had to put out the fire. Guy was pronounced dead at the hospital.

So that's the basic kind of details of what occurred. And we can get into it more. I just want to get that out there. And then we kind of got a little bit of inside information about this individual, right? So what I was told was that this guy was what people call a prepper. He had guns, water, food, gas masks, and stuff at his house. He was described as a hermit since he was fired from his job a few years ago, or lost his job. I don't know if he was fired, so let me be clear on that. He lost his job a few years ago. The police had no communication with him the entire time, other than he would flash an SOS signal from his front porch light. They could cut the water and power to it when this occurred. And then, like I said, all of a sudden, his house is on fire. They're sitting there trying to determine what to do. Garage door opens up. This guy's armed. And so they had already shot at police officers. They engaged him and then took him out.

And then after the shooting, I guess this is now some of the inside baseball, after the dust had set a little bit. The guy hadn't left his house in years. He was agoraphobic. And again, this is just what I've been hearing. And then, yeah, and then he set the house on fire and started shooting out. So that was pretty much it. I just want to get all of that out there, Greg, while we jump into it. So I'll throw it to you first. I literally just got this information.

I know. I also just leaned forward because I had an alert on my phone: "56-year-old Robert Bruce Reichert has been identified as the person killed by Austin police." And he's also, Robert Reichert is the owner of the home, Brian. So I think that we can say right now that Reichert is likely the person. He's been identified by the police, the coroner's office, and the homeowner records. So I think you did a great synopsis.

What I'd like to do is I'd like to say just two things that are done from the research that I did. And folks, listen, if you're a witness, even if you're the next-door neighbor, contact us with what you know, because that helps us, like Brian said, give us fidelity on the situation. So this is word-for-word, Brian: "I'm sorry that he's gone because I'll miss him. I like the guy," said the next-door neighbor. "I'd seen him as recently as 10 days ago. He came over, knocked on my door, and wanted to visit. So we visited for 15 or 20 minutes." First of all, I want to have that as well.

Second part is, "SWAT mental health officers and a crisis negotiator arrived on scene at 10:43. Officers say de-escalation techniques were used, but for several hours, officers couldn't make contact with him." Okay, so as point one, Brian, and this is my professional opinion, the neighbor's full of crap. Okay? Because when somebody's agoraphobic, and somebody has been locked up—and by the way, look at the house, folks, look it up online, it's a beautiful two-story brick home that's in Austin, it's wonderful. Yeah. Okay. Nice neighborhood and everything. Not anymore. Needs some maintenance. You get what I'm saying? But the idea is that first of all, "Oh yeah, he just came by unannounced and knocked on the door and wanted to visit." Highly unlikely.

Yeah, based on all of the other information, including that his neighbors were the ones that went more than one time over the years and said, "This house is a big sty. We want it clean." And on that remark, too, unless he said something prophetic, or he said something, he delivered a message, it's unlikely. So when I thought you were going to follow up with that, when he said he came over and visited, that there was some significant thing that he said, but there wasn't.

True. Yeah, that would be true. Listen, believe me, tell me something like that. You know what I mean? Like, so somebody wants their couple of minutes of glory. And listen, if you're that neighbor, get on, I'd like to depose you. The second part, Brian, I've known de-escalation techniques. As a matter of fact, yesterday, I sent you a picture of an Ohio course that's coming up. Let's not get into that one. But officers say de-escalation techniques were used, Brian. If I can't contact you, if you're not answering me, how can you have orchestrated any de-escalation technique?

So, the final point on my three-point stool here, Brian, is I'll take umbrage to anybody saying that they were shot at. If this guy's, in fact, a prepper, if, in fact, he had a gun, gunfire, shots fired, are you ready and being shot? Yes, you know, from your first ambush? I certainly do. That when the shots come in, you don't even know where they're coming from or if they're directed at anybody. So I agree, this was a tense situation. Don't let me try to derail this conversation by making it sound as though shots being fired aren't serious. But remember how this was different, Brian, in previous attempts. A neighbor's complaint, the neighbors complained, the state came, or the city of Austin came in and said, "Listen, you have to clean up your yard." Robert Bruce Reichert appeared in court. They served him with paperwork and said, "You have this many days. If you don't, we're going to do it." This has happened before. But in this case, Brian, he didn't respond. He didn't show up in court. He didn't answer the door. So something was significantly different. And if they had a mental health officer and a crisis negotiator on the scene, they should have seen it. I'm throwing that ball right at the beginning.

Yes, and this goes into some procedural steps that were likely missed or not capitalized on beforehand, right? Because that's the first thing is, obviously, this is an issue. Someone not wanting to mow their lawn and upkeep their house. And these are outward signs of fracture, the broken. And it's being held together just by entropy for different reasons, right? So if I drive down that street and I see the one house and everything's overgrown, they don't take care of their lawn. Okay, is it someone who's old and unable to do it? Is it an abandoned house? No, this person is able to do that. They're just not. That's a completely different case. And like you said, if you go in there, what was, you know, we don't know. We always give the analogy, which our friend who gave us inside baseball that, you know, they felt it. You know, they, when this case was going on, they said, "You know, this kind of reminds me what you guys talk about, about someone's cup being full." And we're like, and I was like, "Yeah, so guess what you think is going to happen?" You know what I'm saying?

So, the idea is, could he have been contacted, just going in and cutting? Right. The point I was getting, you just showing up and cutting his lawn and doing it for him, what do we think is going to happen from that? You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't need to be a catalyst. Please go on.

You mean you're, you might be, that might be, that's obviously the match that got lit to set off all the kindling that was already there. Right. So, you know, we don't have to do that in terms of, I'm going to force you to do something like this because now look at the second, third-order effects. I think this situation, we lucked out in this situation that police officers weren't killed, or something a bigger fire didn't start in the neighborhood. I mean, the spirals that could have likely gone wrong were minimized by the fact that they were able to get there and set up a scene and all that stuff. But, hang on. Like we, it didn't need to start and erupt into this situation, right? Because it could have been much, much worse.

So now I'll play devil's advocate. Somebody in Austin right now is listening to us and going, "You don't know crap," because we've got 13,000 of these cases every year because Austin's a big city, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And how many of them resulted in you killing someone? How many of them resulted in a standoff for hours? Listen, first of all, the standoff, the guy was in his own house. Do you think that if he wanted to kill a guy with a lawnmower 15 feet from his front porch, he could have?

Yes, my thing is like, clearly he could.

Yeah, it's very likely that he could have. So what does he do? Well, his lawn becomes an attention-getter. Even if he's, well, it's something he can control. I can control not doing something. Yeah, I can be a hoarder if I want. Yes. Wait, I can amass paint and paint my house chartreuse. What I'm saying is we don't know what's in his mind because you fucking killed him. But the idea was that if you didn't kill him, maybe we could have asked questions on why is this lawn so significant?

Now, I'll say that it probably spread out into other parts of his life. And so, for example, you know, we do extensive searches online, try to talk to people, try to get police reports. The one thing that's funny about this is there's no repository for a photo of a 56-year-old Robert Bruce Reichert in Austin, Texas. If a person's got a criminal history or been, you know, interesting, usually you can find something about them or at least articles about it. The other part of it is every search for trying to find criminal records on Robert Bruce Reichert. Now, he could have changed his name. You get all that. But the idea is that normally, if you're going to shoot it out with coppers, you're going to be disgruntled. There's going to be another situation. You know, it manifests itself like a, what would you call it? It's like metastasized over your entire existence. You get what I'm trying to say here? Yeah, I can't find that.

So, no, no, no. And so, but, and I will counter yours, "Okay, Greg, but I'm on the scene. How the hell do I know that?"

You're right. Exactly.

But actually, which I would then say, but if you're, if you have the time there, and there's a standoff, like, yeah, you do have the time to figure out all this stuff. You do. You have the time to find out as much information about this person. You do.

So, yeah, so let's go, let's go one step further in your logic, because I love where you're going, Brian. You come to mow my lawn. Okay, that's disconcerting enough because you posted the letter this time on my door. You didn't make contact with me. And whether that was my choice or your choice, it's seemingly different. Now, all of a sudden, the next thing that happens is I say, "Well, I'm not going to stand for this." So, inside the cover and protection of my home, I fire a couple of rounds off, which may be an ordinance violation, but certainly, it doesn't appear in this instance that it was attempted murder. Okay, but we don't know the facts yet.

But now, what's the next thing that you do? You respond by surrounding my house, shutting off my water, shutting off my power. Okay. And then one thing says, "Hey, listen, the police felt that they had to send in the robot when they were shot at in the backyard." Okay. Does that sound like a barricade to you? What are you doing in my backyard? Do you see what I'm trying to say? I get shutting down the schools for the safety. I get maybe rerouting traffic. But you don't, you get the feeling, I mean, and again, it's because we have crappy journalists now, and the police aren't forthcoming with information because they're dodging every punch. But my thing is, okay, listen, did he start the fire as another attention-getter like the lawn and the shots fired? Because that tends to fit. Listen, I'm unhappy. Stay away from my house. I'm now going to fire shots. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Now I've started a fire inside the house. All of these are attention signals. I want you to pay attention to what's coming out of my mouth or, you know, leave me alone. I think these are missed, Brian. I think the mental health people on the scene and the crisis negotiator, I don't know what their backgrounds are, but I think they miss a couple of valuable insert points here.

Well, okay, so one of those would be, you know, like I said, the flashing of the lights. You're sending out SOS, obviously, right? So what, what, what is this person trying to tell me in the moment right now? Like they, they have, obviously, a break with reality in some ways, a temporary break with reality. You, you, you've now, but they're not, at this point, a threat to anyone. I mean, you're right. Meaning, how does that differ from a Vietnam veteran hanging his American flag upside down out in front of his home?

That's what I'm saying.

This isn't going well, right? If he's sending that out after this occurs, and he's, you know, you're in that moment going, "Okay, well, this is, do I want to escalate this or de-escalate this?" Because, you know, is he a threat to the public? Well, not, not really an immediate threat, right? You know what I mean? They, if the scene's controlled, so my whole thing is, how am I supposed to do that in the moment and know that? How am I, if I'm literally there, sitting on the scene, I got a pair of binoculars trying to look in this guy's window, and I'm taking all this stuff in, and I know the facts as it's, as it's happened since 10:00 this morning. It's noon, right? So I've had a couple hours. Like, how am I supposed to determine? So let me, let me make a decision.

That's the best question I've heard out of this entire caper, and we've talked about this caper for five or six days now because it's fresh in the mind of the news. Here's my thing, okay? Let's do tabula rasa. Let's say that we can't go back. Let's say we can't save Robert Reichert or his house or any of those officers from the trauma that they had to see. The next time that you get a civil standby call because your town or city is going to go in and repaint somebody's house, or pick up their lawn, or mow their lawn, or take them for their own health and safety out of the situation, remember that some people are willing to kill and die for it. That's the first thing I would say. Okay.

Now, if we rewind the tape, people are going to say, "Yes, but Reichert was overcome with the law before where they gave him the paperwork and he didn't resist it, and he allowed his lawn to be cut." Yeah, okay, that was then. This is now. If you had a mental health officer, why didn't they have the mental health officer try to call or contact them before the landscaping crew went over there? Yeah, and again, the argument's going to be, "I, you know, if we took the time to this and we took the money..." Listen, you killed a guy. You see what I'm saying, Brian? This is what I'm trying to get to the core of this balancing act. Because, you know, we did the episode, "Fuck this guy." Remember that episode? This is a similar situation where the courts and everybody said, "Who is it? Oh, Reichert. Yeah, we had to mow his lawn before. Yeah, go over there and tell that old curmudgeon that we're coming to mow his lawn." Everybody thinks that it's going to end well, and for Reichert, this is the most challenging day of his life, and it ends in his death. Brian, when he came out of the garage, did he come out shooting?

No, it doesn't show that he did. No, not in any of the reporting that I have. So I don't, again, like, so I don't know, a body cam is out there. We know that an Axon camera took the last moments of his life.

Now, they forced entry because they're convinced that he was overcome by the smoke and the fire. Yet he wasn't. He was in his garage, and all of a sudden the garage door opens, and he steps out. Could it have been surprise? Could he have not expected them to be right there? Could the SWAT team have said, "Holy crap, it's a gun," and then an officer sees the gun? And you see how many things can go wrong. And where did they start, Brian? They started with mowing this guy's lawn.

What I'm trying to say is that every day that we go to a clown's mouth and we order the number three and ask for it super size, or we stop to get gas, or we drive across town to visit our sister, we never think that we're going to be in the crosshairs of a potential situation like this. And sometimes we need to slow our roll, and we need to look at it. Time is on our side. The gift of time and distance in this instance would have saved a lot of trauma.

Well, in this instance, yes, time is on the side. You know, if it's, here's, here's the thing, though, this is where our own policies, procedures, and training can get in the way of us making a critical decision, right? Because we, this is how we respond. This is what we do. These are the protocols we have. We lock down this area. We have our way of doing this. These are the, this is the equipment that we use. And then we go in and we get the guy. And I think that's our biggest thing here is, you know, how many times have we seen a police officer or federal agent or someone being shot and killed in some instances, you know, making entry into a home and going and doing this stuff. And you're like, well, and that's our whole thing. It's like, well, if you control the scene, you control the scene, right? If this is what it is, if this is what we've decided to do, then we don't have to fucking go anywhere.

Right.

There's no time limit. We can, we can, we can get relieved by other people, and we can collect our overtime. That's what we do. This is what we're, what we're going to do. The idea is, you know, is every time we do that, it's like, "Okay, well, we got to get in there and make entry." It's like, "For what?" You're listening. But this one is this. They talked about they sent their robot in there. They saw the, like, it's like, "Well, we got to get in there and get him."

Well, we escalated the situation. If it's for his own safety, the law does say that we can take over for his own safety. Of course, not if we're the catalyst for the event. Not if we're the ones that keep poking the bear. And there's somebody out there that's listening right now, Brian, that's going to say this. They're going to say, "Well, clearly it was a suicide by cop. You know, you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory." If you did want to go out in a blaze of glory, would have stayed in the house because the house was fully engulfed and he could have died.

He, he likely would have created that situation for that to occur. Meaning he wouldn't have waited for someone to, you know, pull up and start mowing his lawn and show up at his house. Like I think that that would have been a more planned event. Right.

But what I'm trying to say is that, yes, I agree with you, but let's say that in the moment now, things are whirling out of control. And all of a sudden, it goes from the grass cutting to now I'm barricaded in my house. Holy crap, the cops are forcing entry. Here comes this robot. You know, now the house is on fire. House could have been on fire because they put in a distraction device, Brian. House is burned from smoke. Do you know what I'm trying to say? Smoke canister, HT white. So we don't know that yet.

Who hasn't, who hasn't lit a couch on fire with a flashbang?

Exactly. Even during the holidays. Right. Yeah. Oh, that's my friend's house. But think about this for a moment. What I'm saying is in this new timeline, this accelerated timeline, because the robot and the burning house and everything else, even the fire department's convinced that this guy's dead. They think the smoke and the fire. And all of a sudden, the garage door comes open, and out he comes. Well, you can't have it both ways. Do you get what I'm trying to say? If he was going to kill himself, he had ample opportunity to kill himself before that. If he was going to shoot it out for the cops, that seemed like a shitty ambush based on the other times that he shot, allegedly, at people from inside the house.

What I'm trying to say is that you can't go back after the suspect is dead and the house is burnt to the ground and fit your story to match what occurred. What we need to do is we need to go to the very beginning and say, where are the intervention points? Where could we have slowed this down enough that we might have been able to pull out of this, even with the shots being fired inside the house? Could time have helped?

So let's, yeah, well, let's, let's do that then. Let's, let's see what those points are, because we've kind of hit on some of them, right? So you have the issue with this, I'm assuming this is for some folks that work for the city, this is a known individual, meaning, I would agree with him before, whatever part of the city. I'm going to say police, I'd say code enforcement, whoever, like, they go, "Oh, that's, that seems likely that whoever his name was, I forget his name now, Robert Reichert." So it's like, "Oh, that's Bob." You know what I mean? They might know him. And they go, "Yeah, he's a pain in the ass." And then you can go ask his neighbors, it's like, "Yeah, he kind of stays in the house a lot. He doesn't come out much. And, you know, he lets his stuff overgrown." So, you know, at no point did anything we find where he's made threats or done anything. "One more time, you mow my lawn!" Right? So, which goes to the point of people probably not thinking it's a big deal, right? That adds evidence to go, "Well, what's the big deal if we show up and cut his lawn? I mean, we've done this before in the past. He knows the process." Right. So, I understand that. But this is where we get into, you know, our policies and procedures say we do this as a city. Okay, that's fine. But did we attempt to contact him? It's like, "Well, yeah, we knocked on the door." And so the warrant from the city saying, "It's legal for us." Right. But did we get into contact with exactly? So you're saying, "Yes, we tried to contact him." Checking the box. Checking the box. But did we? And what are we willing to? So it says, "When no contact was made, hey, leave the copy and continue with work." It's like, okay, but why did that have to happen right now? And I know we're getting into the weeds, but that's the whole point. That's how these things are prevented. You prevent these particles, right?

And slip, that you said getting into the weeds. Now, think about that for a minute. But listen, Brian, on that exact point, did we not just a few weeks ago show a video that was taken last year where three people died over a snow shoveling incident? Yeah. Okay, so you have to stop thinking that, "Listen, it's just mowing this guy's lawn." Clearly, one is a message. And I could say that, "Listen, the person's just a hermit that doesn't like mowing their lawn." But that tends to show that something else is going on. And here, they took not mowing the lawn to a criminal act. I mean, to a certainly a code violation, right? But that code violation turned into a crime where Reichert tried in some manner to say, "Stop."

Yeah, so right. So this, this is what it is. Even someone who is what someone would describe as hermit, agoraphobic, all that stuff. Like, you know, I always go back to all humans, we, we need contact with other humans. We need to be connected to society in some way. We become broken.

Well, yeah, but, and people go, "Well, you know, we, I like to live off the grid or I like to..." No, you don't want, if you're listening to this podcast, you absolutely do not. So there, there's very, very, very. Maybe he's a stoic. Very, very, very few people that would be a good place to be a stoic. Right. So there's very, very few people who actually do that. Right. There is so statistically insignificantly small amount of people who truly kind of live off on their own. And actually, as a society, we, we don't like that. Right. We don't like it because it scares us because we're like, "Why are you not part of the tribe?" I know everyone likes a story of like, "Oh, I went out on my own and I became successful and did this." Shut up. No one does things on their own. No one. No one is assassinating everybody that's done that pilgrimage. It turns into somebody came back. You were that sort of, went out, found some profound answer, right? And then returned with the answer.

Brian, that's the thing. It's like, you know, his, this guy's way of speaking out and messaging, communicating to the world was letting his lawn get overgrown, flashing his lights, doing these things. Like, that's his method of communication. But that was the whole thing. It's like, and someone brought up the example, remember, of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, right? A brilliant mathematician goes and lives in like a cabin in the middle of nowhere and starts, you know, he's, he's carrying out his little terrorist attacks, his bomb mail threat. So I was like, "Yeah, but he wasn't a hermit. He didn't live by himself. He had to continue getting his message out. He had to continue communicating with the rest of society. He had to ride a bike and walk into town. He had to get a typewriter and post a message." But that's what I'm saying. If he was really just, "I'm done with this," he would be internally focused and living off the land and not doing anything. Nobody would ever heard of him. Exactly.

So, it comes into the same way, right? So he's got to have his say in somehow. Right. He's got to be able to get his message out there. So that shows he's, he's willing to communicate. He didn't sell off his stuff and boogie off the grid. No, he's staying right there. Right. And so this is how I kind of approach these because, you know, like we just said, a simple contact, right? Can I go talk to the neighbors and ask about this guy? Well, absolutely. If I'm city code enforcement or something, I want to go up there and say, "Hey, do you know the deal?" I said, "Do you know him personally? Can you, maybe can we go knock on the door together or something?"

So then the lady that said, "Hey, I'm going to miss him. I had seen him as recently as 10 days ago. He came over, knocked on my door, and wanted to visit." Well, she would have been one of the people, because it says neighbor, and you only have so many neighbors when you're in a subdivision, that said, "Yeah, I just saw him maybe 10 days ago. Let me go over with you, Brian." That would have solved this. Listen, right now, again, somebody is saying, "Oh, you reckless bastards. You're taking up with Robert Reichert's side." Not at all. I am kind of wanting to tell Robert Reichert's story because you killed him, and he can't tell his own story. That's right. You see what I'm going? And it's not, I'm not trying to be pedantic. I'm not trying to poke holes in a story. I am glad that the fire and the paramedics and the coppers are not dead. I am faulting every one of his neighbors and the judicial system at the code enforcement level for not trying harder to prevent a situation that you don't know is going to be in progress until it is in progress.

Well, then that, and that's our thing. As I always say is, "Don't get married to your TTPS (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures)," right? Tactics, techniques, and procedures. They change. But when do they change? They progress. One funeral at a time. We reach, someone dies, and then we go, "Oh, man, we need to fix the way we do things." They're written, right? Well, that's where that comes from. And people don't get it, and they go, "Well, this is how we do things." It's like, "Yeah, well, maybe that's the, and well, let me understand that just on this incident, had this changed everything in Austin." But understand that in 20 years, someone's going to look back at the way you do things and go, "Those guys were dumb," just like we do those SWAT videos from like the eighties, like LAPD. We're like, "We'd throw a guy into the room and he rolls in." It's like, "Wait, what?" Right. But back then, that was the greatest way to do things. So we're living in that moment right now.

So I think it is not, you know, we're talking about these de-escalation points that could have been done. So we're continued up now the city code enforcement, and they still had, "Hey, look, we got a job to do." Which they do, right? I'm not faulting someone saying, "Hey, this is what we're supposed to do. I attempted to make contact, made no contact." So they started working. So, like, what is the next point, you know, once those shots are fired? Because even with the inside baseball we got, the way they described the shooting was different than kind of what was in the paper. It was like a shot into the air was the description, you know.

Remember, it started just before 11:00, Brian. Now we're at 4:00. So that's a long time. Okay. So, now the code enforcement folks leave because, obviously, the police have to show up. There's shots being fired. With their, you know, firing a weapon inside city limits, I'm assuming if it's not at a place, there's some sort of crime they can charge you with on that, right?

Oh, yeah, it's always a crime.

So, a crime has been committed. And obviously, police officers show up. So what am I supposed to do when I show up on that scene? I mean, we're saying there's these different points about it because there's a gun and because there's shots fired, SWAT's coming. You got to know, right? Listen, if you're listening to my voice right now and you do something silly, SWAT's coming. So SWAT changes the calculus.

Yeah, but they also said that mental health and crisis negotiators arrived. So the new thing is that we don't want to kill a person that is having a temporary break with reality, so we'll send a mental health officer. Well, fat lot of good it did in this situation.

Now, somebody's going to say, "Yeah, but the guy didn't answer." How long did we wait? If it's okay to wait how many months until the lawn got a foot tall? I bet scientifically we could figure out how much a lawn grows, Brian. Yeah, by all accounts, it was over a foot. Okay. If we can wait that long, why can't we wait an hour or a day longer to contact Robert Reichert? That's my question.

I mean, here, Brian, time is usually, and people escalate time. Why? Based on the fly on the wall, based on their own biases, cognition saying, "We have," you said it yourself, "We have to get in there." We don't. We, the idea is if this person chose to isolate themselves, they're living in a beautiful home that looks like it's on a beautiful property and a beautiful subdivision, and they've had dealings with them before. You got to slow time down, and they say, "Okay, well, if you slow time down for him, you got to slow it down for everyone." Well, not so. Not everybody was the unique little snowflake that Robert Reichert proved to be. And here, Reichert wanted to do things on his time. Clearly, he chose grass as a method of communication.

This is what we forget sometimes in those situations, is he, he's made every decision about when and where this is taking place. So he has always made that choice too. I mean, so I mean, we, we forget about that is if we're operating on their timeline and when, when and where they want things to happen, they have every single advantage. So I either have to somehow manipulate the op-tempo to gain the advantage, or I have to recognize and realize that I'm operating on someone else's timeline, so I'm inherently behind the ball. I'm behind the curve, whether I like it or not. Like, you don't get to choose that, right? He chose the time and place for this to happen. He made the decision, not us. Not the, not the people showing up. Right. So, the idea is I have to either figure out how I can gain the advantage here, and things happen on my time. Right. And they tried to do that with like, "All right, well, let's cut the power and water." Okay, well, now I've changed the game a little bit. Right.

But right, but what did I gain out of that? You know what I mean? What, what did I really get? So, let's think of the rotor on a, on, you know, we had Jeeps at the ranch when we went on Jeep tours, and any time the orange Jeep got wet going through a river crossing, you had to stop and you had to take off the rotor cap and you had to clean it and dry it, because if you didn't, you weren't going to get the right spark ratio when it came around, and you were going to be back like that and not be able to go up the hills and floor. So somebody listening right now that had been at the ranch, they're all laughing because they saw me out there with my wild rag drying off the rotor. So what am I talking about? Well, you can enhance the performance of an internal combustion engine with timing, and you can adjust the timing and adjust the flow and adjust the spark plug, so it'll run like a rabbit. Okay. Now, if you screw that timing, if you go backwards and you allow it to fire off, it becomes sluggish. It doesn't want to operate at its full performance. So if you slow time down in this instance, you take away the advantage that Robert Reichert's going for. There is no critical point. There is no decision point where you go, "Hey, listen, we're willing to put in the time. We've shut down the roads, and neighbors be damned, we're going to wait you out, Robert. We're going to wait till you contact us." And, you know, "We're going to mow this lawn, whether it's going to be with the SWAT team standing by or not." These are types of decision points that now put it back in your hand. This is, this is exactly what Boyd was talking about. Boyd wasn't saying, "I have to out-fly you." He says, "I have to own you." Well, how do I own you? I own you by not allowing your decision, Brian. When I shut off the power, I shut off the water, I shut off the light. What did you do? Okay. Maybe you cut off, limited my longevity in that place. I now no longer have the comforts. Does this guy, Robert Reichert, care about the comforts? No, he's willing to let us know. So it was a mixed metaphor. Do you get what I'm trying to say? This is somebody should have said, "That ain't going to work with this guy. This is not the guy you want to play that card with." At this is where the mental health officer, the crisis negotiator should have stepped up. If they were trained in our course, Reichert likely would have had a second chance at life because they would have waited him out, and they would have said, "We can say." And right now, SWAT team guy's going, "You don't know what you're talking about. The guy was taking well-aimed high volume shots, and it was close to school." Okay, then prove it. I certainly don't see that in the news reports or on the articles that I'm right.

That's, that's, you know, I, and I get that there, there's the officer safety issue. Okay. But of course, on the scene and the public safety.

Well, so, but that's what I'm saying. It's like, "Well, there's a balance there." Like, yeah, there's an officer safety issue, but also one is their job. Two, they signed up to be on the SWAT team and probably do additional work, an additional screening process. And three, like, we'll then pull them out and move back.

Exactly. And there's a nasty word that keeps coming up: de-escalation. De-escalation was attempted. De-escalation was attempted. The escalation was attempted by trying to contact a guy and he didn't answer. That's not de-escalation. De-escalation is not just a principle, it's a way of life. It, it's how you run things. I'm going to show up to the scene without my lights and sirens. That's a form of de-escalation. I'm going to try to talk to you and even give you a throw phone and even wait a few more hours to contact you with a bullhorn. That's de-escalation. I'm going to send in the robot with a message saying, "Can't we talk, Robert?" What, do you get what I'm trying to say? I mean, you know, if these were done, then I apologize and I'll shut the fuck up, Brian. But it doesn't seem from the timeline that they put in the news that that happened between 11:00 and 4:00. Does it? It just doesn't feel like that occurred. You know, and here, if Robert Reichert shot at unarmed people mowing his lawn and risked public safety, then he reaped the whirlwind. He got what he deserved.

Yeah, I don't see that either.

Well, and that's, that's the other part, you know, we look into it. It's like, well, you know, what if we're going to, we make every attempt to to preserve and save a human being's life that we possibly can. This isn't one of those cases where he's not running through the neighborhood shooting. He didn't just rob a bank and shoot it out and kill a bunch of people. He did, like, each one of the situations are so different. But we try, try to apply the same kind of rigid response and way of handling it to all of them. And like you said, we always say, "Well, when it gets to this point," it's like, "Well, hang on." The that point, can it sometimes it gets that point, and police officers miss it or it doesn't get addressed and then it goes back down. We go, "Well, but he did this," but he didn't do that anymore. Right. It's the, you know, "Hey, he was at this point, you could have killed him. But you didn't. So now we're an hour later, and it shows it's not." You know what I mean? So, each one is is different. But I would ask you, Greg, why is this case worth talking about in this manner and breaking down the way we were doing it? Like, why this one?

But because it could have been me. Listen, I'm a hermit-like guy, Brian. You've known me for a good long time. You know that we live up on a hill that backs up the BLM (Bureau of Land Management). It's at the end of the road. You know that we've got signs, "Stay away, keep out." You know that we've got driveway alarms, and we've got motion sensor cameras and all that other stuff. Why? Because I read 24 hours a day, humans and all their emotions. That's why I can't watch television. I can't do that. I read a book, and I'm reading into the author's mindset when I'm doing it. So I like to willfully upset myself from the rest of society. I have a different way of putting up lawn art that other people might not like. I like my little artsy things, and I'm an acquired taste, Brian. I'll say that right now. Okay. When I'm up on the podium, nobody can match me. But just traveling along with me, I'm an acquired taste. And you know what I'm talking about. You spent a couple of days in the emergency room, is that I am Robert Reichert. I am the one that is going to say, "Not today." You get what I'm trying to say? And not on your terms. So you may have to be a little gentler with me. You may have to wear the 16-ounce gloves and take a little longer with me. Look, we've lost friends and gained friends because of my uniqueness. Okay. But I'm not willing to flex on my uniqueness. So here is Robert Reichert, and I see myself in that house. And I see myself being bullied, or feeling like I'm being bullied, right, with what seems like an obtuse ordinance that, you know, if it's for noxious weeds and this and that and the other. But people complained, and they said, "Mow your lawn." And I'm speaking out saying, "I don't want to mow my damn lawn." Right. So this didn't have to escalate to a homicide. It didn't have to escalate to a death. And that's what I always like to side with is, is what feels like the underdog in a situation. And if the neighbor said that they saw him and they talked to him, he came over and talked, that then tenfold my answer is, "Leave Robert Reichert alone." But he can't defend himself because you killed him. That's what I'm saying.

And I think another point is you kind of alluded to it and you brought it up here is these, these are the cases we you need to spend time on. Right. These aren't the options. You're right. Once, meaning though, like I said, if it's the standoff at the bank because someone went in there and killed a bunch of people and they're trying to steal money, it's just so different. These are the ones, you know, this is the, uh, Randy Weaver (Ruby Ridge incident). You know what I mean? The, oh, yeah. These are the, the standoffs that always lead to bad things. Bad things happen. Policies have to change sometimes. Right there. I mean, like, you, you get what I'm saying? He's like, yeah, these are the situations where these occur from. It's not from the obvious. It's so easy. The guy went and killing people and shooting the place up. Like, those are simple problems. That person sometimes just needs, they go, like, "You need to die." Like, and I'm okay with listening for the right, for the right reasons. Right. For the right reasons, killing in many instances is absolutely essential, and you have to delineate which ones that they are.

What I'm trying to tell you is somebody right now that's going to listen to this broadcast, Brian, is going to come back at us, and they're going to say, "This was an ambush that this guy took years to set up, and the entire goal was for him to die at the hands of police." And I would look at you and say that's a ridiculous standard, and it's not borne out by any of the evidence. Would you agree?

Of the evidence that we know, we've been presented. Yes. Yeah, that's a ridiculous, ridiculous. So, my thing is, let's start there and let's say that that's the ultra, you know, right side thinking. And then I'm on the ultra left side, and I don't have anything to do with political views. I don't mean it that way. I mean, here's my right one of the spectrum. Yeah. So the opposite on the spectrum is Reichert's on a slow downward spiral, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails musician). And what's happening is he, a little at a time, is giving away a little bit of his life through his grass, through his house, through, you know, becoming agoraphobic and staying inside because he's broken. He's a broken human, and he's demonstrating that he has stress fractures. So either of those extremes, I would always side with the fact that a broken human is going to exhibit their break with reality. And over here, that this guy would have had a violent tendency, amassed in weapons, making threat. Gadsden flag on the house. And now I'm going to get hate mail. Yeah, that's not what the Gadsden flag means. But in this instance, it would fit. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Yeah.

So, if you're going to swing back and forth from the pendulum, tell me that somebody didn't feel that something was wrong in Robert Reichert's life, that somebody couldn't have stepped in and intervened. And you're saying, "Hey, what's the right of society to help Robert Reichert?" That's what we do. That's what society means. That's what a democracy is. That's what, yeah, Brian, we're supposed to pull together, see a neighbor in trouble, and we're supposed to reach out and help that neighbor, not kill him. And I keep making that point because that's what happened in this instance is the insistence on the neighbors to have Robert Reichert mow his lawn led to Robert Reichert's death. It's literally the proximate cause.

Well, well, yeah, yeah, well, the lawn mowing definitely is the proximate cause. So we can't walk away from that. So, look at all the contributing factors leading up to that, and they all added to it. I mean, I mean, yeah, this is, this is the, this is the point. You now you're getting into even prior a city getting involved or some sort of enforcement getting involved. Could a neighbor who's apparently friends with them say, "Hey, buddy, I know you can tell you don't really like mowing your lawn. I'll, I'll have my kid do it when, when we, you know, after he's done mowing ours." And I'm saying something at that point because if you've got that much of a problem with someone doing it in your neighborhood, like, I get you don't want that that eyesore on your block. You, you work really hard to to buy a nice home in a nice neighborhood, and you provide for your family. You want it to be nice, and you deserve that. Right. You actually should. Right. But, you know, so, so what can you do at just a societal level like you're talking about? I mean, these are all the things that that we're getting into because I go back to these are the cases that go horribly, horribly wrong, and bad things happen, and it ends up changing the way people do things often not for the better. And, you know, people die needlessly. Lawsuits are paid out, so that means more tax money is spent on this stuff. I mean, these are the issues. These are the ones that we need to focus on. It's not the easy ones.

So let me throw that, let me throw you a fastball, and this is going to be a breaker, so it's going to be hard to hit. Right now, there are certain towns, cities, and states that are saying, "We are not going to enforce low-level civil infractions because low-level civil infractions turn into traffic stops where somebody's killed, and most likely the person that's being killed is a person of color." Now, follow that logic for a second. Here we have a code enforcement issue of a mowing lawn that turns out the same way. Broken taillight. It's not, it's that the situation, it's that every situation is ripe for an escalation of violence. It's the job of the people involved in that situation to hold it together. So if you're telling me that the broken taillight led to the driver's death, then I'm telling you that the mowing of the lawn led to Robert Reichert's death. Right. And if one is wrong and the other is wrong, then you have to change how you procedurally go along those things. So in Reichert's case, they tried to mow his lawn, which, Brian, would tend to show that even if you change somebody's taillight for them, it's not going to set the situation out. And I will tell you that a lot more thinking has to go on here, because it's just like the, the one sheriff in a small town somewhere that said, "Hey, we're going to shoot the wound." Listen, you're going to reap the whirlwind. You haven't done the study. I just read in one of our dear friends—and I'm not going to say who it is on this call, but it's one of these firms that makes realistic environments. I'm not going to go any further than that—and they said, "Hey, listen, being able to be in this virtual environment," I said too much already, "and give yourself first aid or shoot or help a partner is clearly the difference between winning and losing in a firefight on the street." Where's the science? Okay. You can't make an assertion like that without showing me science. And in Robert Reichert's case, the code enforcement officer never intended to kill Robert. Right. No, no. That's what happened. And the neighbors conspired to kill Robert Reichert. That's not what it felt like, Brian. But your, your point and what I'm doing is I'm trying to bolster your point because I think it's well taken that when we influence something, when we put our finger in the water, when we push the water back, those ripples have to go out and they have to come back somewhere.

That, yeah, that's society. Yeah, yeah, you know. And this is a case where it did, and we weren't prepared for it. So it becomes that one small drop in the pond that's going to change everything and how awesome code enforcement, Austin SWAT, Austin PD does their work. Would you agree?

I, I would. And, you know, time is relative, but we don't understand time and space-time like we should. And I think that's what we keep saying, you know, the gift of time and distance, and everyone gets it when you do like, "Okay, the Ramos rule from," and I'm too close to, and he's like, "I get that inherently." But putting that into practice, well, this is exactly what we're talking about. This is the time is relative. Like, you don't need to, if you have it, spend all the time you have. No one's going anywhere. Nothing needs to happen right now unless there's some pressing issue. It's like, "Well, they're using resources. What if an active shooter starts?" Okay, well, then they can go there. Like, I mean, meaning there's no, it doesn't have to end right now today on our shift, binary, yes or no. It's not, it doesn't need to be. But it's hard to make a, I don't, I can't provide a checklist for an agency to go down in a city to approve and say, "Yes, this is our response checklist to ensure we are, we're giving ourselves time." That doesn't exist. It's a critical thinking exercise. And if we need to look at each one of these as what they are, these are very, um, they're, it's a complex situation. But in this case, there were control measures in place, right? So I mean, they controlled this complex situation. So if you have overall control of the situation, then you can manipulate time, you can manipulate space, you can manipulate the other individual, given the resources that you have. And I don't think that's that's always used correctly. We don't always look at every option. We look at the checklist of options that we have. And that's what we go with because, "Hey, this is our response. And there needs to be an end right there." Because we always think there, "Well, there's got to be an end here." Well, what's this going to end like? It's like, "What do you want it to end like? What do you want the outcome to be?" Okay, now what steps have I taken to to get me towards the outcome that is beneficial for all? For the safety of the officers on scene, for the city, for Robert himself, right? Because I would put him last because he's the jackass that created this. I mean, you know, it's right. It's always the offender rights that are there, but they come last. Right. It's the people. It's the city overall, general. What we're trying to do. It's the safety of the officer on the scene, and then the safety of that suspect, that person that we're there for. You know what I mean? Like, you can, you can put their needs last, but they still have rights, and, you know, that they're afforded underneath the constitution, including due process. Right. So I have to take all of those factors into account when doing this and create a, what's the desired outcome? What do I want? Okay, well, I want him to come out peacefully, and I want him to surrender. And we got to take him into custody. He used to stand trial for any any crimes that he committed, you know, which, whatever they were at the time of not just the code enforcement for, you know, probably some fines, you know, for that. But okay, firing a weapon within city limits. You know, we need the reckless time. Right.

But then, but then how am I taking steps to do that? Is putting pressure on this helping or hurting? Is, you know, sending in this, this cutting the water and power, is that helping or hurting? Or is it sending this robot? Is that helping or is that hurting? Where, what are those means? Like, have I, have I created a pathway for myself and for him to get on this pathway to a resolution that benefits all? And then they'll demonstrate their intent. They'll demonstrate whether or not they want to go along with your plan. Right. So I can have those little checkmarks in there. Okay, did he do this when I attempted? I totally agree. I mean, you can continue that. And the idea is this, it's we have to look at it as, "This, this is now the most important thing in my life. This is what I'm doing right now, right here today." And I think if it's a dog bite or mowing a guy's lawn, it's as important as a homicide. How many times do you hear me say that? And here's another example that this is what's going to turn into case law. And I'll tell you, Brian, yeah, I'm, I'm a suspicious guy by nature. So, don't let me be suspicious. Put out there the information that I need to know. For example, they say that they decided it was time for the robot to go in. Well, that's an important step, having the robot go into a person's home, the domicile, the castle. There had to be some precipitating event. And they said that the robot was the one that signified to them that, "Hey, listen, the house is fully engulfed. It's on fire." Don't you think there would have been some visible signs that the house was on fire before the robot intervention, Brian? So I'm trying to say that the timeline that they give us doesn't feel right to me.

So, if Robert escalated the situation, and for Robert's safety, and for the safety of the community and the environment and the firemen and the cops that they had to go in, then by God, do it. And write that. Write that this is why we did that. But what I'm getting here is I'm getting partial information that tends to show me that there's some question about who started the fire and some question about why the robot was put into the house. Now, again, it doesn't seem like it would be a standardized procedure. We wait 40 minutes, then send in the robot. Right. I mean, was he completely non-communicative the entire time of the event? That's significant. But why would a person communicate with their grass, which is long and slow, and with a light display, which is long and slow, if they wanted to ultimately die in a blaze of glory? And my thing is every instance, this, this should be what Hollywood says, "Hey, I want to go down and I want to take a look at and and show everybody's different story here." Because we would be a better society for it. I want to know, listen, I love police and I love first responders, and they don't want to go on a call like this either. Trust me. But these are the calls where you make or break your society. This is the type, and this is what I get into, it's not the individual person, it's usually what, you know, that our the training and policies and procedures lead to these things. Right. There's no, no, no, there's very, very few, very, very few times where it's a bad actor trying to do something that they shouldn't be learning. Very, very rare. And so, but you've seen me get in discussions before with with people who said, "Well, Brian, you can't say this." And I did it. And everything, I did everything I was supposed to. I go, "No, you, you did exactly what you were trained to do. That's your problem. It's not your fault. It's the, it's, we're not looking at these things correctly. It's how we're handling it." Because then the Mobius loop of the investigation, you'll find out that you did what you were trying to do. That doesn't mean the training was correct.

No, exactly, exactly. Where the intervention was correct.

Well, that's what I'm saying is people then say, "Oh, it's my fault." It's like, no, no, we, we started this with saying, "It's the neighbor's fault." Yes, it's the neighbor's fault. It's the city and code enforcement fault. It's this person's fault. It's society's fault. It's this. It's all of these contributing factors that led to approximate cause of him doing this. And Robert's fault. You, you said whatever.

Yeah, I said that clearly. Like, he, he, and from the very beginning, Robert created an orbit, and now we were responding to Robert's orbit rather than telling Robert, "You don't have the right in this circumstance to dictate reality." Do you see what I'm trying to say? And that's where his break was anyway.

If we don't, if we don't pick apart these cases, then we never get better, and they never, they continue. Like, we'll pick apart every, you know, shooting involving a police officer or every this, even though the person's like, "I'm, you know, a multiple felon, just committed several felonies with a gun." And we want to pick those apart. But it's like, "Well, those are easy ones that like, sometimes there's some people out there that just fucking deserve to die, and they're not going to, they're not going to change the way they do things until they fucking die." And that's why killing is okay. But not this guy. Like, this time. And not in this case.

What's this actor's name that shot somebody with a loaded gun on set? I can't think of it.

Yeah, Alec Baldwin. Okay. So, listen, and that's, I put on there, there's so much coming out about that and the armorer, who should not be an armorer or have any handling of weapons. But this has been, yeah, this is one person dead. Yeah. One person injured. Yeah. How many lives are changed over something so simple that this was binary? Is it a real gun or is it a prop gun? Is it a real bullet or is it not? Now, here's the thing, Brian, this should be a once-in-a-lifetime situation that never repeats itself. But I can go right down, Wanted Dead or Alive, the two twins, Alias Smith and Jones, the guy in The Crow. Yeah, Brandon Lee.

Well, we even said, people, when this came out, I go, "Oh, wait, this isn't going to be a freak accident on the set. You're going to hear about all," and guess what came out? Safety violations. People are concerned. Some people quit over safety issues. Like, yep, it's never just one random thing. It's a whole bunch of pre-event indicators that lead up to this. Exactly. So if we spend that much time and money because it was a Hollywood set, and Brian, you remember the caper down towards Miramar with the blue magazine and the real magazine and the kids switched and the Marine died. That happened. Okay. That happened. I was on another range, and that happened on, I was in that, the kid got, I, that was in 2007. I, that was, you remember that interview. Right.

Right. Yeah. I'm sorry. That's the, I, I hate to hit you with that emotion, but you remember that we were operating during that time, and it changed everything. This is the key, Brian. Robert Reichert's life, short-lived, he's younger than I am. He'll never, his flame has been extinguished. He's never, no pun intended, he never was able to tell the story. I think that we should put as much scrutiny on this caper, and I'm not looking for a bad guy. I'm not saying that the cop that smoke-checked him coming out of the garage was wrong. No, no. A lot of the smoking house would have gone in your hand. It's time to go. Right. But I am saying we have to understand that this is is going to occur again, just like the shooting on this set. And if we don't take steps, Brian, then we're going to look at another one of these in our lifetime, and we don't want to.

No, and I, I agree. And it's never, you know, about me bashing the people. We rarely go after individual people and their actions because they're usually good, and they're usually, um, you know, well, maybe, well, in in line with what they were trained to do. And as we're saying, how we're approaching these and the way we do things is is the issue. Um, you know, it's, it's not, I, I really think a lot of our training is getting in the way of us making good choices. And it's because it's a thing, not a thing, and you say it all the time. And I would agree with you because we don't involve critical thinking, and it's because creating a binary decision. What the fuck decisions in life are binary? Like, those are the easy ones. The guy that comes around the corner, "Don't shoot." Yeah, well, the guy, the guy comes around the corner with a rocket. Okay, cool. Like, I can kill that guy. Those are so easy. Like, okay, like, this, that, I, I, I, nothing. But even even the EOs (Engagement Orders), even even when we were working on EOF (Escalation of Force) because it was getting people killed in Iraq, it's called escalation of force. What guidelines? Continue. It's a guideline for something. Yeah. What's a continuum? All of those mean that there's some inherent flexibility within that decision-making, and it's on the user, on the operator. If Robert Reichert intended to die on this day, he put it on the calendar, he chose this day, then Robert Reichert wins. He, he, he got exactly what he expected. I doubt that's true. That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, um, we made a lot of enemies today, and we certainly didn't mean it, Brian. We certainly didn't mean to make enemies. We meant to open eyes.

No, but we, we, like, you hire us, honestly. We want to come and train your agency. Yeah.

Now we wonder why we're both eating out of a dumpster at 7-Eleven. Yeah, it's, um, we don't mean to poke in the eye. We mean to poke an eye at how we do things. I don't have a problem with poking tactics, techniques, and procedures. I'll, we can bash those all day long. Training is flawed. We got to fix it. I'm not not bashing the people involved. Like, that that's, it's, that's, that's rarely the problem. And when it is, it's easily identifiable, and you can totally agree with that. That's those are the simple ones. We're talking about the, the com, the complex situations, um, such as this that that are that are, you know, a little bit harder to deal with, but have, I think, much bigger second, third-order effects than than some of the other ones. Because if you, if you, you know, now people just go, "Oh, here's another one, and cops killed him, and his house got burnt down." It's like, it, so it, it adds another thing, you know, it's, it's fuel to a fire, no pun intended. Wow. That's like the third one in in other arguments, though, that where where it has nothing to do with it, but but it gets lumped in there now. And it's another one for people bashing how police do things. And I know we're kind of doing that right now, but we're talking about it at a tactical, operational, and strategic level of what that actually means and how to do that.

Intervention is necessary. And guess what? The, the easiest thing that you can fix immediately is your response, which means training, which means how those TTPs can malfunction. And this perfectly illustrates it. It would be a great tabletop for any community out there. But then someone is going to say, "Well, we sent them or what am I supposed to do? Just talk to these people or do this or or spend all the time? Or someone's going to get killed." Now, you're going to have to get someone killed. But that didn't happen in this situation. So I don't each one of them don't give me this ridiculous outcome when all that is saying it's take more time. The the what if game is usually done incorrectly as far as I've seen it. But, um, you know, well, that's it. That's a, that's a whole another podcast episode.

Oh, another podcast, buddy. All right, well, any any other, I think any other final thoughts on that?

No, you just got to just go happy, Brian.

Okay, well, um, I guess it's a, that's kind of a wrap on our initial thoughts of this. Again, if anyone who who was involved or who listens to this and you have some, some rebuttal, by all means, please reach out at gmail.com. We would definitely appreciate that, and we'd love to have those discussions, and we can do those privately for your agency as well, too. They don't have to be on on this public forum. Um, we can, we can handle that. So, you know, I appreciate everyone tuning in, listening, and yeah, we took a little break there, so we appreciate you coming back. Again, thanks to all of our Patreon subscribers. We're going to get some more stuff on there. Don't forget to follow us on on social media, and stay tuned in, and don't forget, the training changes behavior.