Ryan Johansen, Apex, NC Police

The CopDoc Podcast - Season 10 -  Episode 173

Guest: Chief Ryan Johansen, Apex Police Department, Apex, North Carolina

Most police chiefs walk into a new department and tell people their vision. Ryan Johansen asked questions and took notes for 90 minutes with every single one of his 200 employees. One-on-one. No agenda. Just listening.

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Chief Ryan Johansen of the Apex Police Department sits down with Dr. Steve Morreale for a wide-ranging conversation on what it takes to rebuild a police department's culture, restore officer confidence, and lead with both conviction and humility.

Ryan came to Apex, North Carolina about 15 months ago after five years as chief at the San Bruno Police Department in California, just south of San Francisco. He made the move with his wife and family, driven by a desire for a different environment and a chance to do something meaningful. What he found was an agency with purpose-driven officers who had pulled back on proactive policing, and a community watching crime numbers rise as a result.

He walked in with a clear belief: most of what ails policing starts inside the organization. If officers are treated as numbers, managed through policy, and punished more than developed, it shows in how they treat the public. Johansen flipped the model. He spent 90 minutes one-on-one with every one of his 200 employees, asking questions, listening, and taking notes. He made clear that the org chart runs the other way: everyone in the building, including him, exists to support the officers answering calls.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Ryan talks about his early days at the San Diego Police Department and what he learned by leaving a 3,000-officer agency for a 50-officer department in San Bruno. He talks about taking the chief's job in San Bruno just two days before Covid lockdowns, and then navigating George Floyd and the calls for reform that followed. He describes walking into the Apex roll call room, tattoos and all, introduced only as "Ryan, from California," and what he said to a room full of officers who weren't sure what to make of him.

He and Steve dig into the managing versus leading debate, the difference between policy and culture, the false safety of no-pursuit policies, and what servant leadership actually looks like when it's time to discipline someone. Johansen is candid about the tension between institutional pressure and personal courage, and why he believes most police chiefs live in fear of the average three-year tenure rather than leading the way their people deserve.

This is a refreshing, honest conversation with a chief who isn't performing. He says what he believes. And the people around him are proving it works.

KEY TOPICS COVERED

• Career path from San Diego to San Bruno to Apex: what each stop taught him
• Why he believes policing "breaks good humans" and what he is doing about it
• The recruiter's words that brought him to Apex ahead of schedule
• What a real listening tour looks like: 90 minutes, one on one, with every employee
• Managing versus leading: where chiefs spend their time and why it matters
• The discipline dichotomy: development versus documentation
• Command and control culture and its effects on officers in the street
• Extracting a vision versus dictating one: how to earn genuine buy-in
• AI in policing: low-risk value versus high-risk shortcuts

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com 

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Transcript

Intro/Outro 0:00

Welcome to the craft police leadership and innovative ideas.

Steve Morreale 0:29

Well, hello everybody. Steve Morreale coming to you from South Carolina in on Hilton Head. And we are beginning another episode of the Cup Talk Podcast. We're headed to Apex, North Carolina, not too far up the road from me, and we have Chief Ryan Johansson, who is with the Apex Police Department. Hello there, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan Johansen 0:49

I'm doing really well. How are you?

Steve Morreale 0:51

Great. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. You were brought to my attention by some of the things that you post on LinkedIn, one of them being a recruiting piece that really struck me because of your openness and your positive message and messaging about policing and policing in Apex. But let's get started by asking how long you've been in policing. You've been on both coasts. Tell us your trajectory during your 20 plus years.

Ryan Johansen 1:23

Yeah, so I'm just at about 25 years of policing experience at this point and was fortunate enough to start that career with the San Diego Police Department down in Southern California. Started there with the Southeastern Division. It's a busy bit of a baptism by fire into police work, a super busy division of a very large department, several thousand police officers, and uh spent a couple of years down there cutting my teeth and learned very fast, as was necessary down there with what was going on. Had a couple of critical incidents. I was already married, already had children at the point that I started my career. Really? And I think my wife had kind of had enough of running around in a particularly rough neighborhood as a cop and uh asked me to pursue some transfer opportunities. She was from up in the Bay Area originally. And as crazy as it may sound today, back then it was much safer to leave Southern California and go be a cop up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Steve Morreale 2:15

Imagine that.

Ryan Johansen 2:16

Yeah, right. so I transferred to the San Bruno Police Department, but very, very different, from about 3,000 cops to about 50 cops. And San Bruno is located immediately south of San Francisco. It's where San Francisco Airport is. So relatively small jurisdiction, but truthfully, just kind of in the middle of the urban sprawl of the Bay Area. So big city problems with small city resources, as we always like to say in San Bruno. At any rate, I spent the next 19 years with the San Bruno Police Department, climbed the ranks, did just about everything that department had to offer from patrol to investigations to running a gang unit, promoted to sergeant, promoted to lieutenant, and then ultimately ended up leaving there after five years as the chief of police. Left there because my wife and I had always planned to relocate out to North Carolina at some point when the kids were both.

Steve Morreale 3:04

Explain that to me.

Ryan Johansen 3:05

Yeah. I will say that California, while born and raised there and will always be to some degree near and dear to my heart, had lost its way. And that's not something that happened right before I left. We had experienced quite a few years of just the direction of the state as a whole and the culture moving in a bit of an opposite trajectory to our own and our belief systems. And so we began targeting a move out of there a number of years ago, but wanted to wait till the kids were out of school and kind of settled a little bit on their own so as to not shake up their lives too much. When that opportunity popped, I started looking at opportunities out this way. And just so happened that Apex came about two years ahead of what the schedule was in my head. But it was an ideal opportunity given the niche I had sort of carved out for what I do as a chief and what the town needed. And so here I am.

Steve Morreale 3:53

That's great. So let's talk about that difference between West Coast and East Coast. And I I understand what's goes on out there. I spent a lot of time chatting with Jim McDonnell from LAPD. And and and I spent some a good deal of time when I was with DEA out in California, so I do understand it. And life is a bit different on this side, a little bit chillier at times, even up your way. By the same token, you've got the seasons and a nice way of life. What is the difference between San Bruno, your experience there in terms of the size and the size of Apex? And tell people where where you're located.

Ryan Johansen 4:34

Yeah, so Apex now, we're suburb to Raleigh.

Steve Morreale 4:37

Part of the research triangle, right?

Ryan Johansen 4:39

Yes, I would argue that we're suburban also to Durham to some degree. So we're kind of tucked in between the two. It is a booming, growing community. So just about 20 years ago, I think there were somewhere near 20,000 population. You go back a few years before that, it's largely just a pretty rural farming type of a community in central North Carolina. And we're now approaching 100,000 residents and no real end in sight to that growth based on the popularity of relocating to the area and the fact that Apex is a really great place to raise a family. I mean, they've got ample resources and kind of good old family values, some relative affluence in terms of, the parks are beautiful, the recreational programs are beautiful, the schools are good. And so it's not only managing the change from west coast to east coast, but managing what it's like to continue building a police department in a place that is growing so rapidly that trying to keep up with that population growth and the crime trends that go with is always going to be, has been before I got here and will continue to be a challenge here in Apex.

Steve Morreale 5:42

How big is the department by comparison?

Ryan Johansen 5:45

So San Bruno, we were about 50 sworn back and forth throughout my time there. I think we were 54 by the time I left. Here we're 114.

Steve Morreale 5:53

Wow.

Ryan Johansen 5:54

So a little, a little better than double the size, and as I said, continuing to grow. When we hit the new fiscal year in July, we'll be at 123, I believe. And so we just keep trying to keep up with the population growth.

Steve Morreale 6:05

I just drove through there because I just flew out of Raleigh about three or four weeks ago, and I came very close to what what you were saying, and it can be very rural, and yet it's very developed, and certainly all kinds of research facilities that are out there. And so let's talk about you taking the plunge, taking the steps, satisfying your dream first to move from San Diego to the San Francisco area and now to the East Coast. What kind of transition did you find? What were the things that that you see that were different in terms of culture? I presume you had to adapt as much as an organization has to adapt to new leadership.

Ryan Johansen 6:51

Yeah, absolutely. And I could even go back to the transition from San Diego to San Bruno and what that required culturally. I was a young cop. I was coming from a very large department whose byline is America's finest, and we really believed that. And then going to a very small department and needing to initially check the ego and accept that moving to a smaller sort of bedroom community and out of being a hard-charging, cop in a really rough neighborhood. Interestingly enough, I learned very quickly that while the San Diego Police Department made me very good at the what I'll call the code three stuff, pursuits and foot pursuits and shootings and stabbings and gang cases and just running hard all day really did not make me a great investigator or a great cop. our model in patrol was to show up and put up the yellow tape and wait for the detectives to show up and do most of the work.

Steve Morreale 7:42

Yeah.

Ryan Johansen 7:42

And go to San Bruno. And it was a wake-up call. I thought, again, a little bit of a chip on my shoulder coming from that environment, but quickly realized that I had to learn a lot about how to be an actual investigator because in patrol, you've got to carry your case and you've got to conduct your own interviews and interrogations and uh do your own follow-ups, right?

Steve Morreale 8:01

You can't wait for the cavalry because you are the cavalry, right?

Ryan Johansen 8:04

Yeah, it's largely true. So a little bit of a culture shock and check there, but a very positive one. And I quickly realized that I actually preferred being in an environment where I was encouraged to be very thorough about what I did investigatively, and where there also was a little bit of gap in the radio calls where I could actually spend time doing some of the things that made me want to be a cop in the first place. I could connect with the community, spend extra time with a kid that was having trouble. I didn't just have to look at that pending screen of calls and chase it all day long, like I was doing in San Diego. so I would say that was the full first sort of cultural change for me in my career trajectory. Certainly from there, moving into administration and definitely taking the leap into the chief's office was another big culture shock. And I've often said since then, I've been a chief for a number of years now that you really, no matter how hard you try, cannot understand that role until you sit in that chair. It's just so wildly different from being an actual police officer and even from the levels of administration leading up to it, it was a huge leap. And the timing was crazy for me, right? I basically took the helm and two days later we went into lockdown for COVID. Oh, and a couple of months later, we had George Floyd. So I'm a brand new white police chief in a very progressive part of the country during a arguably one of the greatest reckonings for police and police culture in recent history.

Steve Morreale 9:26

No question.

Ryan Johansen 9:27

Really crazy cultural challenge. And I'll say that the biggest challenge there to me was simple now in hindsight, but it was balancing the outcries from communities for change and reform and accountability and our profession writ large, while understanding that if I can't keep some level of inspiration and morale in the men and women who actually go out and do the work every day, that we will be wildly ineffective and the impacts to our community will be profound and difficult to even comprehend. And so trying to walk that line during that period of time was very, very difficult. But I actually think it prepared me quite well for the eventual move out here to Apex with some of the things Apex is going through and the fact that I had kind of navigated some of those waters before I even got here.

Steve Morreale 10:13

So we're talking to Ryan Johansson, and he's the chief of police now in Apex, North Carolina at the police department about 15 months. And so I'd be curious to know this, Ryan. What your experience had been when you when you came to Apex. Came to a completely different culture in a lot of ways, because the East thinks different than the West. The police are police, I understand, almost all over the world. But but what strikes me, you just said something and it had had to do with the chief having to walk that tightrope between dealing with uh the community and the advocates and the people who are against what police are doing and keeping your police organization focused on mission and trying to to help them do their job despite the noise. Because there was a lot of noise after Floyd for sure. So how did you take that forward? Where were you getting your mentoring? But who were you leaning on to say, how's it going? What can we do? What am I doing wrong? Those kinds of things. Because we can't operate as a chief all by ourselves. Is that fair?

Ryan Johansen 11:33

That's absolutely fair. And and just like anybody in a position like mine, I wouldn't be here were it not for phenomenal mentors over the years and a lot of people who showed faith in me, even when I probably didn't deserve it. So I was able to lean on some of those relationships. And yet I will say that one of the things that we struggled with during that period as a profession was that if if you had not been a police chief in the last, let's say today, if you've not been a police chief in the last 10 years, so much of your frame of reference has uh dwindled off in relevance. It's the whole game has changed profoundly. And so, yes, there were definitely like I I uh took over in San Bruno for a very good police chief who I think came in there and did great things to write the ship in that organization before moving on to another local department. So he was still close enough for me to be able to confide in him and kind of get an idea of what everybody was doing. I I will say, however, that again, because there was no roadmap for where we were, we had never navigated a pandemic in recent history. We had not navigated calls for reform on such a profound level as what followed Floyd and the incidents before it, that it actually almost opened the door to do things unconventionally or to do things a little bit differently, which was very much in my wheelhouse. Uh I did not become a police chief because I wanted to simply carry the water that had been poured before me. I wanted to make some changes and to try to do things a bit differently. And I do feel that while a bit opportunistic, those occurrences open that door.

Steve Morreale 13:07

So, all right, so now you're coming to Apex, you get ready to interview again, and you do your homework, I presume, and you get the job. And now you're walking in, and you told me that there was a deputy chief who was the interim, but you came from the outside. And I know so many people who go through that. Who is this guy from San Francisco and San Bruno? And what does he know about Apex North Carolina? and I'm sure these were things that you had to consider. But take us into your first few meetings and your mindset when you walked into Apex.

Ryan Johansen 13:52

interestingly enough, the way the recruiting process worked here that occurred before they had chosen me or before I was hired. So the I showed up here for the sort of second set of interviews and process. And after the first day of doing some things over at town hall, the town manager told me that I needed to be at the police department at 9 a.m. the next morning with no other guidance or direction as to what was going on. So I walked into their roll call briefing room, and essentially the entire departmen t was in that room or online. And the recruiter just said, Hey everyone, this is Ryan. He's from California, which is a great introduction in this day and age, right? You're starting from behind the eight ball.

Steve Morreale 14:32

You progressive bastard, you definitely some of that, right?

Ryan Johansen 14:37

And then I show up with tattoos all over my arms, and you have to combat that. But I was in the room basically, and they just turned it over to me and said, Tell these people what you're all about. Now I can back up a little bit and say the reason I decided to apply for this job ahead of schedule is pretty simple. I spoke to the recruiter, and I had learned by that point that these positions are largely about fit, that everyone at this level is immensely qualified. It's about what an organization needs and what you're particularly strong or good at. And he said, This is a really great place. What it needs is a chief who loves cops. Man, I get chills hearing that today because I had been using that word for a long time where others were so uncomfortable with it. And unashamedly, even during the period of George Floyd saying, Well, I have news for you. I'm a chief who loves the police, because I believe most police are exceptional humans who deserve our love.

Steve Morreale 15:23

Yeah.

Ryan Johansen 15:24

And so when he told me that, I kind of knew what I was walking into, and I had a reason to believe that they really did want what I do. And so I didn't have to do anything in that room besides just preach the gospel that I actually believe.

Steve Morreale 15:35

Yeah.

Ryan Johansen 15:35

Plain and simple. And I told him the same thing I've been telling them ever since. I hold a foundational belief and have done a significant amount of post-grad research to back it up, that what's fundamentally wrong with policing is that we break good humans when they become cops. That's it. I'm not trying to sell what I'm doing beyond telling them that what I will do is come in here and focus every day on how to make this the best department for you, the people who work in it. Because my experience has been that then you go out on the street and you do exactly the kind of work, even better than the kind of work I could set expectations for, because you are yourself and you are cared for and you feel safe and secure and supported in your work and genuinely appreciated and things, great things tend to follow. It's what I said in that first meeting. It's been what I said ever since. And I think with no doubt several slip-ups, because I am far from perfect. I have pretty much walked that talk from the time I walk in the door.

Steve Morreale 16:30

Well, it's so refreshing to hear that from you and the things that you're talking about in terms of the approach. I think that so many people show up for work, and if you'll allow the metaphor, that they are allowed to do one thing. They rent. They don't own, they don't have ownership stake. The chief won't let them have an ownership stake. And I remember talking to an earlier guest, he indicated that his message was that you don't work for the Apex Police Department. You are the Apex Police Department. And it seems to me that by giving people the belief that I'll back you, just do the job the way it's supposed to be done. You'll make mistakes, like I'll make mistakes. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth. But what you've exhibited here is humility and vulnerability, which is one of the things I think is important for a servant leader, and I know that's your your take on it. And allowing not only buy-in, but also seeking feedback from them. Ryan, I want to say something. I just did a training, I just went up to Massachusetts, did a training, and I had a number of of high-ranking officials in there, and it was about managing is not leading, or leads don't manage, right? And I asked a question of chiefs, and I'd be very curious to know your take. I I said, think about the ratio of how much time you spend in your week, month, year that that is managing versus leading. And there were lieutenants and above, a good number of chiefs, and here were the numbers I heard. This blew my mind. I've been doing this for a long time. They said 60, 40, 80, 20. And I said, okay, well, what's what? 60, 70, or 80 percent I spend time managing. And I said, well, wait a minute. So that means 40, 30, or 20 percent you spend leading. It's your job to lead as a chief. React to that. I see you're smirking. I see you smirking.

Ryan Johansen 18:35

I guess I smirk because there are two thoughts that immediately occurred to me. The first is I'm nodding my head because the the nature of our bureaucracy wants to continually suck you back into management. And there are a million ways to differentiate between management and leadership. I think maybe Covey is one of the ones I like the most who had said that management is making sure people are doing things right. Leadership is making sure people are doing the right things. And so I would agree that we're pulled towards this management because we're asked to be risk assessors nonstop. And we're basically asked to keep the department perfect, have nothing bad happen and go out and combat crime and keep all the residents happy. At the same time, what I really thought of towards the end of what you were saying was this I think you're remiss if you don't think you're always leading if you chose to be a police chief. And I don't care if you're managing or supervising or you're out having a beer with the boys, you're leading all the time. And perhaps a failure to recognize that is one of our greatest shortcomings because leadership is just not something you can choose to turn on and off. The position is establishing you as a leader within the organization. And it's up to us to rise to that occasion and be worthy of that label all the time.

Steve Morreale 19:50

So let me ask this spending a lot of time with chiefs and with emerging leaders, one of the things we talk about is that the role of the chief is to have to cast a vision, is to be forward looking. And obviously, you're in a department large enough that you have a command staff. Your expectations of command staff in some cases are to handle those day-to-day managing things. And there are things you have to check on. How did that go? How'd it go? We are on track with that. And that may be the extent of some of the ways that you manage on on a on a day-to-day basis. But as you walked in, you're a different person. You represent I guess a new idea. You and I have worked for people who are autocratic or top-down. They're the ones that that are going to be listened to. They're not looking for your input. And you I'm sure you remember those kinds. And I think that's so sort of short-sighted. And today we hire the best, supposedly, and then we tell them to keep their ideas to themselves. Right? That's the past. You represent the future. Tell me what that means to you. And tell me how you have helped develop others who work with you to become better leaders, to be more focused on people.

Ryan Johansen 21:19

Yeah, I think that at a high level, the only thing I've really done is to be consistent behind that belief system and to keep integrating it into all the challenges that face the department. So even when things don't seem people related or they don't seem cultural or culture or leadership related, I probably to the point of annoying my staff will always come back to that look, there's a leadership question here, there's a culture question here. Even when it comes, for example, discipline, uh you discipline is probably where leadership makes the most profound leadership statements about the organization, right? If discipline is about protecting me, protecting the organization. Organization, if it's about making examples of people, you can say you care about people all you want, and you can try to indoctrinate that in your organization, but what you're doing is in direct contrast to what you're saying. But most people don't look at discipline as something that's culture focused or leadership or person focused. They see it as pragmatic. It's it's simple. There's policy, you violate it, you get held accountable. And I would just argue it's not that simple. So even as leaders that are sort of at the next tier of the organization are coming up with, say, disciplinary matters, and they say, oh, officer A did such and such. And so I want to do B in response to hold them accountable, I won't let it stop there. I always ask them simple questions. Well, did you explore at all why the behavior occurred? What's really going on here? What's our role as an organization and why this behavior occurred? What challenges have we put up in front of the officers that they're attempting to overcome in engaging in conduct that isn't exactly what you want? Or more profoundly, what's going on with the officer? We talked it all to them about what's going on at home, what's going on professionally, what's going on with their health, and just focusing over and over again on people to try to get them down that path. And understanding that I don't mince words with telling folks that in this organization, the org chart is upside down. And I mean that. Like anyone in this building, you could ask them, they've probably been indoctrinated just over this year alone, that that's how it works here. And they'll tell you, they'll tell the public, oh, I don't work for the police chief. I don't work for him, he works for me. That's how it goes here. The folks above us, right? The only two things we really have to do as a policing organization, if the chips are really down, is we need to answer, we need to send officers to phone calls. The rest of us, all the way through my office, are support staff to those two ends. And we have to remember that and keep realizing who it is we're serving.

Steve Morreale 23:48

You realize how different that is.

Ryan Johansen 23:51

Yeah.

Steve Morreale 23:51

Where did that come from? Where did those beliefs come from?

Ryan Johansen 23:57

I don't know. I guess I would say that to a large degree, they come from venturing out of the public sector in terms of my own learning and self-development, spending a lot of time at in in the more, you know, the personal development space within the private sector. I have owned and operated businesses since I was 19 years old. So being in that type of environment, like most of these ideas are not really new out there. They're apparently very new here. Yes. We're so reluctant to look outside of our walls, even though we all acknowledge we can taste it. Not that the profession is broken, but something's not quite right, and we haven't managed to fix it despite all kinds of new philosophies and theories over time.

Steve Morreale 24:36

And so one of the things I've been saying, we're talking of Ryan Johansson, he's the chief up in North Carolina, Apex, North Carolina. But the idea of command and control, that troubles me. And I think there's so much from the military. I have a military background, but I think command and control, there's a time and a place. There really is a time and a place. And if that becomes the default, I think that causes some of the problems that we've had inherited in our organization. If you're top-down, if I'm being treated top-down in the building, then chances are that may be how I treat people outside with this authoritarian view. And again, I that may be unusual. I have the benefit of seeing your head shake up and down. But react to that, Ryan.

Ryan Johansen 25:20

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. In fact, in my thesis research, I called this the culture versus command conundrum because we are so indoctrinated in a command structure. And then we're we're shocked, right? Think about if you're raising a family. If you if you treat your kids a certain way in the house, you're very dictatorial or a heavy-handed parent, you physically discipline your kids, and then your kid goes to school and gets in trouble for punching someone in the mouth. But you got to look in the mirror and realize that maybe you're creating some of that behavior internally. Organizationally, I would argue it's no different. If the cops are going out there and being very dry and heavy-handed and just wanting to tell the community what to do and expecting they will always comply, pretty good chance they're getting that from the way you're running your organization, right? You're not giving them any voice. And so they're not giving the community any voice when they're outside of your walls. And so I completely agree with the fact that the structure that we've built is somewhat flawed. Now, I want to be careful here to say that we both know there are definitely times in our profession where straight command and immediate obedience to that command is critical for survival of ourselves.

Steve Morreale 26:28

And that's good, that and I don't mean to cut you off, but that's time and place, both inside and outside. In other words, if I'm showing up on the scene and I'm telling you to go to the back door and you say, How come I get to go to the back door? This is not a time for you to argue with me at that point in time. We'll argue later, but right now you do what I say because I'm thinking bigger picture. But it's the same with do I always have to walk into a scene where I am bellowing rather than saying, What's going on here?

Ryan Johansen 26:54

Yeah, exactly right. And the problem is we borrow from that need to command in day-to-day communications and interactions in organization. And there's no research anywhere from the beginning of time that says that really works in an organization. You're not here for four years like most forks folks in the military. You're here for a career of 30, and we're attempting to build relationships of trust throughout the ranks and open communication so that we can get better, but then we're not actually allowing that because we keep acting like we're at an active shooter scenario when we're having a conversation about whether or not to write a parking ticket. And it's not appropriate at all. It's very simple to see that we need to open the doors and stop being so dictatorial. I will share with you a brief anecdote here, however, that's kind of always been humorous to me. I had a wonderful second in command in my time in San Bruno, which I have definitely learned that is a big part of the successful police chief, period. And when we started doing this, I had promoted this individual up pretty rapidly. He was definitely buying into this philosophy of how we're going to run an organization differently. And about two months into it, he turned. We were fully staffed, one of the few departments in the whole state, fully staffed. People were lining up to come in the door. He said, I don't understand why everyone's not doing this. How come everyone isn't doing what we're doing? It clearly works. And I simply told him, You'll figure it out. Give it a couple more months. And so he did. He gave it a couple more months and he walked in after attempting to explain this philosophy at a command meeting for the whole county. He said, I get why not everybody's doing it now because it's hard. It is so much easier to just look for the things people are screwing up and hit them with a progressively larger hammer until they correct their behavior than it is to actually accept the reality of our situation, which is we are engaged in a deeply human endeavor that is almost impossible to be perfect at, and yet perfection is what's expected. And if we can understand that and treat our employees like humans and give them some grace and some room to fail because we learn in that environment, we tend to generate superior results, but it is so much harder. It is so much harder for a sergeant who wants to hold an officer accountable for a lack of activity to really explore why that's occurring, to look at the person inside, outside, the organization inside, outside, the culture inside, outside, instead of just saying, look, you're supposed to write 10 tickets a month, you're not doing it, do it or else. And so we keep even people who bought into this, they tend to fall back when they get really busy or really overwhelmed or there's a lot going on. We fall right back into that command structure. And I would just argue that it's pretty clear that it doesn't work day-to-day to run an organization.

Steve Morreale 29:32

Yeah, but how does Ryan make that argument that this is not only this is the way we're going to do things, but this is, I suppose in some ways, it's explaining why.

Ryan Johansen 29:46

Yeah, it absolutely is explaining why. And you mentioned earlier that you think the you talk about the role of the chief being to articulate the vision, the mission for the future. Maybe a semantical change that I would suggest there, but I think that the job of a good chief is to extract the vision and the mission of an organization, to spend time getting to understand the culture and the why for the people in the building, and then to attempt to integrate that into something that can be easily articulated into a vision and a mission. And if you do that, you tend to get a high level of buy-in, right? Fundamentally, how could you argue with what I'm suggesting that we should take better care of people? We all got into this line of work to take care of people. We just decide we're not going to do it to each other. And so if you can keep making that argument, but you do it by extracting what matters to the organization, which was a big deal here because, like you said, I'm coming from a different culture to a whole new department and a whole new set of beliefs and systems and problems. Uh, but taking the time to let them explain why do they why do they get into this work in the first place on an individual level? Why do they continue doing it through all of what the last 10 years have held, and in listening and starting to hear themes emerge and start to identify or extract the why of an organization rather than coming in and dictating it to them? I think that allows you to then um get more buy-in. So it's not that I'm telling you here's the future, come follow me. You're telling me here's the future, and I'm just helping to wrap it in something that is a little bit easier to understand.

Steve Morreale 31:12

So let's talk about that. Actually, you just uttered a word that I was about to ask. How important for you as a chief is it to be an active learner, an active listener? More important listener, because you were talking about listening. So, can I assume when you walked into Apex, you had some ideas in mind, but you also had to couple those with what goes on in the organization, what other people would be willing to do to make this a better place to live and work. Were you on a listening tour for a little while?

Ryan Johansen 31:46

Oh, absolutely. At every level you can imagine, right down to I allowed a full hour and a half with every single employee, 200 employees in the organization for a one-on-one sit-down. I've been through those sit-downs. It's usually the chief telling you their vision and telling you that you better get on board. This is all me asking questions, trying to get to know people, trying to get to know what their challenges are here, trying to get to know, sometimes the best solutions in organization come from the lowest levels.

Steve Morreale 32:13

They know what's going on the day to day.

Ryan Johansen 32:15

That's right. So asking them if you're in my position today and you could change anything you wanted to make the job better for the men and women putting on a uniform, what would it be? What would you do? You've been here a lot longer than I should have.

Steve Morreale 32:24

Did you take a lot of notes?

Ryan Johansen 32:25

Oh, absolutely.

Steve Morreale 32:27

Okay. That's terrific. One of the things that you have said that you're a servant leader, and so what does that mean if you're trying to serve the organization? What does that mean when it comes to a couple of things? Meeting out discipline, holding people accountable, guiding them towards a better way of doing things. What does that mean? What does it look like?

Ryan Johansen 32:51

Yeah, I think again, first what it means is humanizing that process. Like these are not numbers, these are humans. I call it the forgiveness dichotomy in our line of work, right? We tell cops you need to go out there on the road and be infinitely forgiving of the most horrific things you're going to witness that humans can do to other witnesses. you're going to interview a person who has sexually assaulted hundreds of children, and you're supposed to sit there and look them in the eye and treat them like a human with dignity and respect and work your way through the interview. But then you come into our walls and we don't even give most organizations are not giving cops the same dignity, rights, and respect that you give to a criminal who's accused of wrongdoing out on the street. It we don't even meet that level. And so coming around and realizing how broken that is and saying, I told the folks here when I first came in, this is the way I look at discipline, pretty simply. The first question we ask ourselves with misconduct, is the officer likely to be terminated over this offense? The answer is almost always no with the stuff we deal with day to day. It is occasionally yes. That immediately puts it into one bucket or another. And if the answer is yes, we are in documentation mode, doting the I's, crossing the T's, and we are protecting the profession that we are charged to shepherd. That's one way of going about things. If the answer is no, we immediately move into developmental stages. The idea is how does this officer learn as much as is humanly possible from this experience and emerge better? Not because we make them an example in front of others, but because we get deep with them individually, exploring why the behavior occurred, where does it come from, what again is the organization's role in the conduct, because it is not always all about the individual, and then exploring what the solution is and what we how we come out of the iteration.

Steve Morreale 34:35

Well, one of the things that comes to mind is if you look in the past and the experiences that others have had, what was tolerated in the past? And if you start to look to see, well, wait a minute, we didn't do anything the last time, does that mean we need retraining? Do we need we need to change our expectations? And to me, setting expectations is one of the most important things you and your command staff uh should be doing. Because I don't know how you can hold people accountable if your the expectations aren't clear. Think about your own kids, right? You have to set expectations. And by the way, not always just once. And I think as cops, we think he knows what the rule is, she knows what the rules are, they'll follow the rules or else. And that's just such BS at this point in time. Because again, we're human beings, we do make mistakes, we do fall back. So again, it's such a refreshing conversation to have with you, Ryan. I appreciate it. But tell me what you're thinking as I'm pushing you in this line of questioning and you're sharing back. I think you're such, maybe anomaly is a bad word, but so different in mindset. And so many people could gain from that.

Ryan Johansen 35:44

I think a lot of times it can be interpreted as being too soft. And let's be clear, I have terminated a number of sworn and non-sworn people in what is a relatively brief tenure as a police chief, right? They're when you do fall into that bucket of terminable offenses, look, and we shepherd the profession. It's here long before me, it'll be here long after me. And you've got to protect that. I think most cops will agree with that, that nobody hates ugly misconduct like a good cop, right? It it reflects poorly on all of us. So when they're in that bucket, stern, keep after it, and and get people out of your organization when they don't belong there and out of the profession when they don't belong there. But everything else, I could line up probably 50 people right now and ask them, did you learn more your successes or your failures? And we're all going to save from our failures. And yet we're trying to create this failure-free environment, which is not likely, but also not.

Steve Morreale 36:42

We will go back to a little bit of a time that that this failure failure-free society that we create that's not realistic, if you can kind of recap that.

Ryan Johansen 36:53

Yeah, I think it's about the challenge. You have the what is it, the Steve Jobs, like move fast and break things. And unfortunately, we know we're in a profession where that extreme is not possible because when we make mistakes, people can get hurt or worse. However, we cannot act like everything is that. And when cops make mistakes of the mind, not mistakes of the heart, we've got to be very forgiving and show a ton that individuals not learning and the organization's not learning. And this has been really put on front street for me in Apex because you have an organization that has grown up very quickly. And now we have significant crime issues we're dealing with that are not something that has been dealt with uh rampantly over the years. And so we're learning about how to address these things in real time, sort of building the plane as we fly it. And if I don't show them a ton of grace to go out and try to do things out of their comfort zone and occasionally not do them perfectly, we're never gonna get where we need to be to really provide the safety the community expects. And so I've got to create an environment where they know that they have that grace. And I've got to not be risk averse as a leader and say that look, it does mean that sometimes not great things are gonna happen, but it's just the reality of our job, and we've got to be a bit more comfortable with it. Again, my argument would be that they happen less over time as you become better at the job than if you simply try to stop them from happening. I think a great example of this is pursuits. Right? A ton of organizations over the last 10 years have just moved to what is essentially a no-pursuing suspect's policy. And believe me, I'm acutely aware of the dangers of pursuit driving and, you know, to the community, to the officers. It's all very true. At the same time, I cannot imagine a world in which the message we send to criminals is that if you choose to run, we're not going to chase you regardless of what you've done. And I think it not only creates an environment where the worst of your criminals are going free, but it also creates an environment where your most compliant people who commit crimes, those who do pull over, who do accept some accountability for what they've done, are penalized, and the ones who take off and don't are not. And so I'd argue we have to pursue cars. Well, what's interesting is that the more that you pursue cars, the better you get at pursuing cars safely. And so, yeah, there's this window of time where it's not something the agency's regularly done. It's not in their immediate skill set, and there's a heightened risk and danger there. But that quickly tips into an organization that is pretty experienced in this space, doesn't get as much tunnel vision, knows how to take in all the information and chase safely, and also knows how to weigh policy and decide when to chase and when not to. And but many organizations not even creating that opportunity because we're so afraid of the liability that comes with pursuing that essentially they've adopted no pursuit policies.

Steve Morreale 39:41

Understood. I wonder how you look at the rise of AI, its value, and those things that we should be very concerned about about transparency and potential algorithm algorithm mistakes. You know, what's your take on it as a relatively young chief with amazing ideas and an educated chief? What's your take?

Ryan Johansen 40:09

I wish I was smart enough to really give a comprehensive answer to that, because it's actually difficult with how fast AI is becoming ubiquitous to assess where it's going next in a meaningful way. I will say that I think a very guarded approach, understanding the potential value in terms of new efficiencies and effectiveness that it could bring to our profession, just like many others, while understanding, again, that what we do is and will always be a deeply human endeavor. And removing that human element is concerning to me. And so even as we deploy AI tools, I think maintaining a human system of checks and balances over how they're deployed, when they're used and not used is incredibly important because it could be so tempting to just take the shortcut of letting AI drive all police activity in the near future, right? Telling you where to make traffic stops, what crimes to address, who to pull over, who not to pull over. There are so many concerns there that need to be walked through very slowly instead of run through. I think at this point, we have embraced the use of AI for things that just seem to make good sense. Simple application would be adding an AI component into automated license plate reader technology so that when a vehicle doesn't have a license plate, it can analyze the rear of the vehicle and still give an investigator a year, a make, a model, something they can work with, right? Relatively low level of intrusion, relatively high level of value in terms of community safety. You get to some of these systems that are writing police reports using AI based upon video evidence. I have real serious concerns.

Steve Morreale 41:45

I do too. I I think because it can it could be one hallucination that could ruin your career and the image and integrity of the organization. So it's not the machine running the human, it's the human running the machine, which means that we have to use our brain and our intellect to guide it, to challenge it, to say no, that's not correct, to double check it, that kind of stuff. And so I appreciate that. over the period of time that you've been here, what are you most proud of? Not individually, but as an organization where you have moved the ball?

Ryan Johansen 42:28

I think that the change I've seen in this organization that I'm most proud of for them and honestly just kind of taken aback. I came in and remember what the recruiter told me. This this place needs a chief that will love the cops. And we could do a whole separate podcast talking about why he said that. but you had an organization that had been sort of beaten up and frankly had put away policing for a period of time. I don't know how else to explain it. I'd like to be more guarded than that, but you had about an 80% reduction in proactive police work being done here that was met with significant increases in property crime, significant increases in injuries on the roadways, because as much as we may want to be convinced otherwise, the fact is that proactive policing works. It's a deterrent, it discourages people from committing crimes, and it's an essential part of what cops do. It's what makes cops so different than firefighters, right? We don't sit and wait for the call, we go to it. And that had all but been erased here as a measure of policy and sort of a lack of support for the line level in the organization. And so I honestly thought it's gonna take years to begin to repair that harm, to encourage these folks that you're safe to go out and do police work. You've got to do it right, you've got to do it ethically, but you've got to go do it. And I found that they were so purpose driven and so believing in what we do as cops and the impact it has in a Community that the transition was much quicker than anticipated. And we have all but erased those reductions that existed just a year ago. That's not me, that's them and their sense of purpose being so ingrained that they were just waiting for someone to kind of get out of the way, love on them a little bit, and support them so they could get back out to doing the work the community needs.

Steve Morreale 44:19

So you speak so positively about policing and your belief in policing. And again, what attracted my attention was a very brief video that you did standing in front of the department saying, This is a place that you really want to work. And words to those effects. It was very positive. Tell me what led you to do that. It was so simple and yet so meaningful.

Ryan Johansen 44:47

Well, the first thing it led me to do it is it's genuinely what I believe. That's not a script written by that, those are my words. And I suppose a little bit emboldened at this stage of my career to feel that I can get out and say that sort of thing.

Steve Morreale 45:01

I and not worry about your job.

Ryan Johansen 45:04

Yeah, I'm a proven commodity to some degree at this point. I know how to run an organization and can help it to do what it needs to do. So hopefully I'm a little bit more secure. And I have a very supportive elected body and town administration that I know agrees with what I believe in or that wouldn't have brought me here. And so I guess the real reason behind it, though, is that through my tenure as a chief, I've just been kind of beside myself with the fact that those words are now considered somehow profound. I didn't say anything that I wasn't raised with in terms of what this job meant and what I was expected of me when I put on the badge. And yet we've allowed it to be taken from us. And I actually mean to use those words because I'm pretty defensive about it. There are bad cops and good leaders will do everything in their power to weed them out. But there is no question in my mind from the front lines that the vast majority of police officers are exceptional human beings, really just special people who are sacrificing tremendously. Even if they don't get into some crazy shooting or something in their career, the average life expectancy for a cop is 22 years less than a non-cop of the same health. They're giving up a quarter of their lifetime to do this work and to expose themselves to all the craziness of doing this job day in and day out. And yet it's somehow become profound to call them heroes. It's somehow become profound to suggest that there's a lot of trauma you experience throughout the years in this job, and that it's our job as an organization to take care of that, to at least give you the means to integrate those experiences into the person you become instead of having it ruin the person you were when you walked in the door. And I just can't believe that you have a police chief who you know records a minute-long video saying things like that, and it goes viral with people kind of freaking out. Were you surprised? Completely shocked.

Steve Morreale 47:04

Really?

Ryan Johansen 47:05

Yeah.

Steve Morreale 47:07

Let me say let me say this. here's my dilemma that so many of your colleagues, and I don't mean to disparage, are so reticent to speak out when things are for fear of their own position in a way. When Floyd, or you name any, any particular national issue that all of a sudden impugns my police department, that where we don't do it, and the police chief doesn't say, Look, that happened, we don't like it. That happened, but I can tell you we do this, this, this, and this to work towards it not happening here. Can I promise that? No. But this is what we do differently. And so many people don't choose to do that.

Ryan Johansen 47:53

I agree. Why is not that hard to decipher, right? It is the average tenure of a police chief, I don't know about here anymore, but in California is three years.

Steve Morreale 48:02

That's three years.

Ryan Johansen 48:02

Yeah, that's right here. So there's two reactions you can have to that. You can try to buck that trend and say, well, I'm gonna say whatever I need to and act however I need to to preserve my position. Or you could choose to say, well, apparently I'm only gonna be here three years anyway. So I got news for you. I'm gonna be the leader that these people deserve. And if you want to root me out, someone else will be looking for someone who leads the way I do. And unfortunately, I will be there instead of here. So I think that there's an amount of courage that needs to be had to do that. I think the other thing is to go ahead in those in those situations, and far be it from me to speak about it too much, because knock on wood, I haven't been through that crazy high profile incident that many chiefs have found themselves out in front of the camera talking about. But the reality is that you may not be doing anything all that different. We all want to differentiate we're training so much differently, it won't happen here. But to your first point, you can't guarantee that. Again, it's a deeply human endeavor. And even the best trained cop is only as good as they are in that moment, with everything they bring to that moment, whether they slept, whether they ate, whether they're working out and taking care of themselves, whether they got in a fight with their spouse before they came to work, whether they're battling a health issue like cancer, whether they just lost a loved one, if they're in a big internal affairs investigation or worried about losing their job, all that comes to that incident. And we act like it doesn't. We act like that they're a computer program. If we train them properly, everything's gonna go great. It's not actually how it works.

Steve Morreale 49:30

I agree. Oh, thank you for that. I how receptive and welcoming have your colleagues been in the police chief world.

Ryan Johansen 49:44

I would say that I've gotten probably more support than I deserve because I know that in many ways I'm paddling upstream. And I'm also, as you can obviously tell, quite passionate and not too reluctant to speak my mind about things that I think need to be done differently. So I think I've gotten quite a lot of support, but I do know I'm probably not as embraced at the peer level as those who just kind of go with the program, if that makes sense.

Steve Morreale 50:14

No, I understand. So IACP or North Carolina Chiefs, those have been places that you can find some like-minded people, I suppose.

Ryan Johansen 50:23

Absolutely. And I haven't been here long enough to be terribly active with the North Carolina Chiefs group as of yet, participating, but at an observational level, trying to learn how things are different out here.

Steve Morreale 50:35

Because you're the outsider still, but understand you're proving yourself. All right, let me shift gears very slightly. How important is your role and the role of your command staff to developing others, identifying people who are potential leaders in the future so that that leadership is sustained, and how important is it to coach others? It sounds like it's right in your wheelhouse.

Ryan Johansen 50:58

Yeah, it absolutely is. It needs to be our primary focus, especially in a place like Apex that's growing at the rate we are, right? We cannot expect to be a well-run department if we don't have people that are ready to assume leadership positions and frankly, in many cases, to assume them ahead of the conventional schedule. So it makes it very important for us to pay close attention to the informal leaders that emerge within the organization, those who are being looked to by virtue of their character and their knowledge base and high levels of trust. Maybe they haven't established the rank yet, and to do what you have to do to get those people into formal leadership positions so they can continue to steer the organization. I think their development is critical, and yet I try to make it largely self-driven because I've learned that if people before me didn't allow me to be me and to do the job putting my own stamp on it, so to speak, that I would have never been able to get where I'm at now. And so I try very hard to provide some guidance, but to really enable them to have their own best self emerge and figure out how they want to do things as opposed to how to do things my way.

Steve Morreale 52:06

Yes, understood. Take the best of many and the worst of others to avoid. So a couple of questions as we wind down. What do you think that certain chiefs get wrong about leading others and their command staff?

Speaker 5 52:25

Well, I think we actually already touched on the number one thing, which is the top-down structure and the belief that you need to control everything and that's how this world works. I I'll say that dovetailed into that to some degree is an over-reliance on policy, which has been exacerbated by acts of misconduct across the country where the the number one and two things that get brought up by the media and everyone else is you need more training and you need better policies, where they start shoving new policies via legislation down the throats of departments. That culture is going to eat policy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Period. Cops are going to find a way to get the job done. You can write all the policy you want, right? And I think when I first came into the job, we had a general order manual that was like 240 pages.

Speaker 2 53:13

Yeah.

Ryan Johansen 53:14

And now I've got 1,600. And it's so in the weeds, we're acting like we can build a profession that just simply tells cops if A happens to do B, if C happens to do D, if E happens to do F. And what we're doing is removing the expectation that they think what we actually need is humans who are somehow capable of thinking in circumstances that cause most thinking to shut down. But all this over-reliance on policy is driving it in a completely different direction. And you can watch this in body worn camera video. You can see cops arrive at a scene and they're going through that rolodex in the checklist.

Steve Morreale 53:47

Yeah.

Ryan Johansen 53:48

Instead of paying attention to what's happening right in front of them and making the best decision they can possibly make. And part of that's because they're they're afraid of self-preservation. They think if I act outside of policy, even if it was the right thing to do, they're going to hang me out to dry. They feel that way for good reason because we've kind of done that for a period of time.

Steve Morreale 54:04

Yeah, there's so there's such a gray area in policing and discretion is important. It's the one thing that we value. You know, do I have to write everybody up? Can I cut somebody a break? There are certain things, there are mandatory actions. I understand that, but we take away discretion from people, then we become robotic, which is exactly what you're saying, and in terms of judgment. one more question. What is something police officers who work for you, either in San Bruno or in Apex, would say about you that might surprise somebody in the public? What do they believe about you? What have they found in you that they would say?

Ryan Johansen 54:47

Well, I know that they would say that could be and almost certainly would be misinterpreted by the public is that I have their back. That gets perceived as a covering up, right? And so you combat that with an uber sensitive level of transparency and being clear. look, the king wears no clothes. You can come in and see what the misconduct accusations are. We're very transparent. Here's everything going on here. Here's what we're working on. We publish crime statistics. But when they say that I have their back, I think as the video proved, that's just not how the vast majority of cops feel about their administrations these days. And I don't know how we lost our way to that point. Someone has got to make these people feel supported to go out and do this work. And it's got to be someone who is willing to have a level of humility in remembering what it was like to do the work and not sitting in this ivory tower and beginning to pass judgment as though they're acting in a vacuum because you're watching some body worn camera video and you don't like the way something went. Instead, seeking first to understand and then to be understood. Why are these behaviors occurring?

Steve Morreale 55:53

More covey stuff, right? No, you know, there you go. That's good. So is there a question I have not asked you that you would like to address?

Ryan Johansen 56:01

Oh, I don't think so. Normally when I engage in these things, we talk a lot about wellness of officers and what that actually looks like. But I think that we've come a long way there. And most organizations are at least attempting to develop more comprehensive wellness programs because it's easy for me to say we're going to provide better police work by taking better care of the police, but what does that actually mean day to day? it can't be a checkbox wellness program. It's got to be an actual shift in culture to genuinely caring about the people who work in your organization, and that takes a lot of different forms.

Steve Morreale 56:32

Well, we've been talking to Ryan Johansen. He's the chief of police in Apex, a Californian who has come to the East Coast from west to east. And it's been a pleasure to chat with you. I do appreciate it. You bring a fresh perspective from many who I've spoken to in the past. And there's a lot that can be learned. I wish you the best of luck in what you're doing there, Ryan.

Ryan Johansen 56:57

Thanks very much. It's been a real honor. I really appreciate the opportunity to chat a bit. And always take a lot away from the questions that get asked and the thought process going on. Appreciate what you're doing to keep the profession moving in a thoughtful direction as to what the future looks like.

Steve Morreale 57:11

Thank you. So that's another episode of The Cop Doc Podcast in the can. Thanks for listening. Our growing listeners are from 116 countries now, 3,000 cities and towns, which is just crazy for me. If you have somebody in mind that I should be chatting with who is a progressive thought leader like Ryan Johansson we just spoke with, reach out to me and I will give them a call and see whether that's a fit. So thanks very much. Take care of your people. Have a good day.

Intro/Outro 57:40

Thanks for listening to The CopDoc Podcast with Dr. Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune in to The CopDoc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with the leaders in police.