Fred spent many years at New Orleans PD where he got into law enforcement in 1997. He spent many years there where he rose to the rank of LT over the homicide division. He worked mostly in the Lower 9th Ward in NO. After Hurricane Katrina, his family decided to move to Texas for a fresh start.
Fred has been with GPPD now for over 16 years. He is over Planning and Research in administration.
He shares his story and some pretty interesting facts about New Orleans pre and post hurricane. Fred is also an ordained minister who strives to live his faith at work. He also was an MC for a radio station back in the day!
#firstresponders #mentalhealth #policestories #firefighters #firstresponderpodcast #wellness #police #policepodcasts #coplife #grandprairie #grandprairiepd #grandprairiepolice #thinblueline #firedepartment #investigations #honorguard #swat #fto #intern #jiujitsu #bjj #mindset #lpc #wellnessunit #wellness #emdr #counseling #therapy #therapist #mentalthealth
Check out our department and come join us!
https://www.grandprairiepolice.org/Join-GPPD/Benefits
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/7iXLlroCbjAnjPAIT2zbEO
iTunes:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gppd-podcast-grand-prairie-police-tx/id1647457129
Social Media:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKcINWcNmiQWqoGebGbpug
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090391688925
https://twitter.com/gppd_podcast
https://www.instagram.com/gppdpodcast/
Fred spent many years at New Orleans PD where he got into law enforcement in 1997. He spent many years there where he rose to the rank of LT over the homicide division. He worked mostly in the Lower 9th Ward in NO. After Hurricane Katrina, his family decided to move to Texas for a fresh start.
Fred has been with GPPD now for over 16 years. He is over Planning and Research in administration.
He shares his story and some pretty interesting facts about New Orleans pre and post hurricane. Fred is also an ordained minister who strives to live his faith at work. He also was an MC for a radio station back in the day!
#firstresponders #mentalhealth #policestories #firefighters #firstresponderpodcast #wellness #police #policepodcasts #coplife #grandprairie #grandprairiepd #grandprairiepolice #thinblueline #firedepartment #investigations #honorguard #swat #fto #intern #jiujitsu #bjj #mindset #lpc #wellnessunit #wellness #emdr #counseling #therapy #therapist #mentalthealth
Check out our department and come join us!
https://www.grandprairiepolice.org/Join-GPPD/Benefits
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/7iXLlroCbjAnjPAIT2zbEO
iTunes:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gppd-podcast-grand-prairie-police-tx/id1647457129
Social Media:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKcINWcNmiQWqoGebGbpug
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090391688925
https://twitter.com/gppd_podcast
https://www.instagram.com/gppdpodcast/
Welcome to GPPD podcast. I'm your host, nate. I'm a lateral transfer officer and I'm currently assigned to the investigations bureau.
Speaker 2:And I'm your co-host KD. I'm also a lateral officer and I'm assigned to the crime prevention unit. We're always looking for great men and women for the police department, but also we need dispatchers, animal control, code enforcement officers and detention officers. So if you know anybody interested, please, please, send them to grandpurepoliceorg. Get that information filled out so that you can apply.
Speaker 1:Don't forget to find us on social media. We have Facebook, instagram, tiktok and YouTube and, most importantly, find us on your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe, activate notifications. Leave us a five star review. Today you will hear from police officers, their lives and their stories. The accounts may be mature in nature and mature language may be used. Listener discretion is advised. Alright guys, welcome back to the next episode of the GPPD podcast. I'm your host, nate, here with KD, and I'm really excited about today because this is one of the opportunities we had to talk to someone that I know. I know there's a lot to the story, but I don't know much of the story, so I'm really excited about this and I also really have no idea what you do for us.
Speaker 1:I get three emails all the time, but when I first got here, I was like, hey, I won't reply, Because if I don't reply it can't help me. Liable for policy.
Speaker 3:Actually, you can.
Speaker 2:Don't get in trouble, man, so we appreciate you coming bro.
Speaker 3:Hey, glad to be here, man, glad to be asked and excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is not. This is due to what you do in your personal time. This is like speaking is not not really new, for you.
Speaker 3:It's not new. This is what we do, this is what we. This is right up the alley.
Speaker 1:Well, why don't you? Well, let's jump on in and tell us a little bit about how you got started in life and how you went up on the road that you're on.
Speaker 3:All right, very good. Well, my name is Fred Bates and I am originally from the great state of Louisiana, from the most culturally rich city in the world, city of New Orleans.
Speaker 1:You're from New Orleans.
Speaker 3:I am originally from.
Speaker 1:New Orleans.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my, my, my journey started in a little little area of the city called the Lord 9th Ward, and Lord 9th Ward was one of those places where it was very community oriented until around 1980s when crack cocaine hit the inner cities or hit cities, and so that that that Lord 9th Ward became one of the most notorious places in the city uptown projects, stuff like that and I think that I've always had a desire to help people. That's always been one of the biggest things I've always wanted to do. And, man, I'm going to tell you what when I was, when I was a kid, I used to watch stories or shows like Adam 12. I know I'm dating myself.
Speaker 1:Now, this didn't come on, real this didn't come on real time.
Speaker 3:This was reruns. So Adam 12 and then I moved over to Hill Street Blues and what really turned me on to police work was Miami Vice.
Speaker 2:Oh, man, I know about that one.
Speaker 3:I know about the first two. You you're dating yourself too, not knowing about Hill Street.
Speaker 1:Blues. But I don't, I don't. 12 is why they call us 12.
Speaker 3:I don't think so. I don't, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:That's where the, where the slang, came from.
Speaker 3:I don't, I don't, I don't think so. We're going to have to research that, yeah, yeah, yeah so no, Adam 12 was their call sign.
Speaker 1:Right, you know, I'm saying, like when people call you 12 in the street yeah, that's where I thought, that's where I thought that came from you know what it could be.
Speaker 3:It could be we're talking about local collect colloquialisms and stuff like that. It could be. It could be they make an opinion thing for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, they call you, they call you bacon they call you bacon copper pig all that stuff man.
Speaker 3:So yeah, that comes up from anywhere. So so years, you know I was. I'm also ordained minister, the United Methodist Church is where I serve and so so those kind of things have always been my desire to help people. So I got into police work in 1980, 80, I'm sorry. I graduated from high school in 1986. I got into police work in 1997. And so and this is after college went to Orobson University in Tulsa, oklahoma, and lived in Charlotte, north Carolina, for a while and then moved back to New Orleans.
Speaker 1:How did that all work out? That's a big jump around. That's a big jump around.
Speaker 3:Okay, so. So I went to Tulsa, oklahoma, to Orobson University, following the call, pursuing ministry, pursuing theological education. So I have a minor, I'm sorry, I have a my. My bachelor's degree is in biblical literature, old Testament. I have a MDiv Master of Divinity, southern Methodist University, and so so that's the educational background.
Speaker 3:But when I was in Tulsa, oklahoma, I met my first wife Okay, and we, we got to know each other, got started talking about getting married. She was originally from Charlotte, north Carolina. Okay, she was from a large church. There was an opportunity to get some mentoring there. So we decided to move to Charlotte, north Carolina. And back in that day, charlotte was more of a retirement sleepy town, and this was in the early nineties. And all of a sudden, man, they started building buildings and now Charlotte is a mecca for finance, you know. So they, they're just as big as Wall Street is when it comes to finance. So, anyway, got to, got to Charlotte and did some radio there, did some, did some ministry there. But I did Christian radio. Okay, yeah, I was, I was in a. We didn't call ourselves disc jockeys, call ourselves announcers. We won, we won cool like disc jockeys.
Speaker 3:We'd get on and say the time is now 745 am and Jesus is Lord of your life. So listen with your spirit and discover the difference. On W O G R Radio.
Speaker 1:Perfection. Yeah, that's what you do. Yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:So we did that for a while and decided to move back to New Orleans. That's when I really started getting that, that urge to become a police officer. So we had a chief at that time that really was doing some new, innovative work. New Orleans, unfortunately, has been known for notorious corruption and so we had a. We had a real progressive reform minded police chief at the time and I felt comfortable following that leadership. So we joined.
Speaker 3:I joined in 1997 and graduated from the Academy, joined in April, started the Academy in April of 1997. We finished the Academy in 19, in 1997, december, and you go back to those early days of police work. That's when it is the best. You know nothing, you have no biases, man, you just want to help people, right, and started off doing doing patrol in the in New Orleans East, which is which was the seventh district at the time, and it was a. It was larger than Grand Prairie. Actually, that particular police district was larger than Grand Prairie, right, and we actually just just went to work and and got involved in stuff. And so finally, thankfully, just because of work and some previous relationships, I was asked to join the task force, because I had a fresh face, I was able to do what was called narcotics by bust. You know, nobody really knew me. Even I grew up in the city and nobody really remembered my face.
Speaker 1:So so when I work in that environment was when you mentioned that it was close to it previously, and it's one of those things where, like if you're around or not around, people are going to pick up on that, like kind of, yeah, if you make yourself known, basically that's going to stick to you. It's not like because I don't like it in some big cities it's so big you can. You know you, even if you get burned in this situation, you might be good. Yeah, right, right, right.
Speaker 3:Well, in this, in this situation, it's one of those things I don't know if I can give this away, but it's one of those things that if you are in uniform, you look totally different than when you're in playing clubs. That's true. And yeah, to some people, and I'll give you this perfect example. I'm riding a bicycle, I'm doing a by bus operation. I'm riding a bicycle and and I walk up to this guy. I'll ride up to this guy and ask him hey man, what you got? You know you're going to sell something. This was back when marijuana was was illegal. For real, right, I have to thank you, you know.
Speaker 3:And I looked at him and I said, oh my God, because two weeks prior I had arrested him for marijuana in uniform you know, while doing some, some, some, uh, uniform work, and this time I'm in playing clothes and the guy man, he looks at me. He says okay, what you got, I give him $20 or whatever he sells me. I said man you really don't remember me, do you? I arrested you two weeks ago.
Speaker 3:And so off to jail we go. So I did that a little while, did some by bus operations and that that was really interesting, just to get to see what it was like to to actually be on on the playing clothes side. And again, I had such an interest in in homicide investigations that that was always my purpose, my desire. That's where I'm going to be honest with you. I don't care what I ever do. That was really the meat and potatoes of my police career, my law enforcement career. That that was where it really was and we function a lot differently than the more current, you know, homicide deals. We were just because you could really get on the street and just stay out there, and office was never. If you stayed in office too long you were not considered a great detective. You had to be on the street, you had to be in the streets. Now I want to. I want to get in that just a little bit.
Speaker 3:I don't want to gloss over the narcotics stuff.
Speaker 1:Obviously you're a young guy, young cop you're. I don't know how long you were on the street before you went to narcotics.
Speaker 3:About a year, about a year and a half.
Speaker 1:What was that transition like? You're kind of because by that time you were kind of learning the ropes, learning how to be a good street cop, picking up on certain things that could save your life, and then, completely different role, doing the same thing under cover. What was that like?
Speaker 3:It was, it was interesting, it was, it was I'm not going to say scary, but it was. It gave you. It gave you a sense of being uncomfortable and I think that many times we get comfortable in life, we get comfortable in certain situations and the more you keep yourself uncomfortable, I think, the more you you tend to focus. Yeah, so, so being married to a radio is what it was called being being on patrol. You, married to a radio, you just follow on the radio.
Speaker 3:Here you had to have some self initiative. You had to work on your own, you had to make some some. You did it as a unit, but you still had to do some things on your own and I think that many times okay, let me back up, growing up in New Orleans you had to be aware when you, when you were walking the street, man, you know. So you kind of had some street sense, some street smorgasbord. In the first place it wasn't like you were coming out of, like you see, guys today they come out of suburbs, they come out of you know, they've never been experienced, they've never been in a fight Like coming from the sticks and you're like exposed to, to, to in my where I worked, and it's like, oh, this is a different place, right?
Speaker 3:And you never they've never been in a fight. Man, this is how you grew up. I'm not saying that I grew up in the Bronx, but it was. It was still some some tough stuff, yeah. So you kind of had some street smarts and so. So the police technique was not very far away from understanding survival skills and techniques and stuff like that when you get into office of safety Right. So moving over into the into the narcotics side or the undercover side or the plain clothes side was not that much of a difference. You, you, these were people who you had. You knew how to converse with in the first place. You knew how to have conversation, because this is who you dealt with on a regular basis.
Speaker 3:And so when, when, when I moved over to that place, I had I had a female partner who she kind of grew up in suburbs but because of the certain schools she went to, she was just as street. She could be a street and hood, as it were, in the beginning, and so we had such a great rapport because she was able to really function just like she was on the street.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:You know. So we, we really had a good time. We really had a good time doing it. It was not a hard transition for me, but I understand how some could, because you really have to. What I call the best way to learn is through immersion. If you immerse yourself in a, in a culture, or immerse yourself in a certain skill set, even if you're uncomfortable going back to being uncomfortable you you really look to do it quicker. So you, you, you kind of function a lot quicker when you begin to immerse yourself. That's the best way to learn a language. Just go and immerse yourself. You you're not reading books, You're actually doing it, and I think that's what that's part of what what that early life of police work was like.
Speaker 1:You ever have any. Any, because I think about narcotics work and especially undercover. I always think about that, you know, like the American gangster stuff where it's like, hey, you know, you're burned. Someone's holding you at gunpoint. You have anything crazy about that happen when you're doing it.
Speaker 3:No, no, we, we. We never faced a situation where you came up you were burned or something like that, because I just think I didn't do it long enough to really get to that, to that stage I was so fresh that that fresh faced is what I'm saying that nobody really caught it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was a devote Literally man, literally literally literally and and we just had back then it was a little low tech, we had microphones but you really couldn't do two-way conversations and stuff like that. I mean you know, but and again, I just I know some of the old school officers always say, man, it was so great back then, it was so different back then. But literally it really was. It was a different world. It was a different, different form of policing. In that stage, in that life, in that city, things are just totally different. You know my transition to Texas. It was like I was. I went from Rocky Road ice cream to vanilla.
Speaker 1:I don't get the reference.
Speaker 3:It was so exciting to just play man. I'll give you a perfect example. So when I first got here and I know we kind of jumped around a little bit we're not going in sequence but when I first got here worked nights and I'm riding down the street and a guy a guy waves at me and I pull over and I say, man, what you waving at me for what's wrong? And I'm just speaking to you.
Speaker 3:What are you talking about? See, in New Orleans, people walk all night long, but if they wave at you, they're doing something wrong.
Speaker 1:They just try to get away.
Speaker 3:Here people are genuinely nice, they're speaking to the police.
Speaker 2:Once you wave, you're talking to me. Show me your other hand. All right, how you doing?
Speaker 3:Right right, you know so I had to get used to the pro police feel of this of North Texas and people saying thank you for your service. Man, that was totally foreign to me in that transition from New Orleans to Texas North Texas in particular. But yeah. So narcotics was fun. I didn't do high, high volume stuff, we just started the process and our narcotics unit would take over. So we function more as a street level task force, so kind of like how I did in my old age. Yeah right.
Speaker 1:Well, I like complaints and stuff. You know uniform.
Speaker 3:If you can you, can you go cover, Absolutely absolutely, and you just build cases and if it got big enough then you would turn it over to narcotics and they could really see that we got something big here. Yeah, that's exactly what I did.
Speaker 2:Cool. So okay, were you there during what is it? Katrina?
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Some of the other, I don't know.
Speaker 3:Hurricane Katrina. Yeah, yeah, how was that?
Speaker 2:Of course we were over here and we're watching the news and you're just like mouth open, eyes open. You're like what the hell?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So of course, here's the difference between North Texas and New Orleans. That, I guess, can give you better context. I say sea level. That was one of the things. In this area you have so many different agencies. That's one of the things I had to get used to. You have an agency that's Dallas is on one side, new Orleans Police Department was it for the city of New Orleans? That's it. That's all you have. And so you know everybody. You know all of the leadership. You just know everybody. So Hurricane Katrina, let me back up everybody lives in a city, so meaning nobody comes from outside to help you.
Speaker 1:So when there's like no sheriff's department.
Speaker 3:There's a sheriff's department but their function is primarily jail detention, oh, okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, civil sheriff, and his function is primarily civil services, right? So law enforcement strictly law enforcement is the New Orleans Police Department. So imagine the entire police department being decapitated when it comes to any kind of service, anything from assisting citizens to assisting officers all of that is gone. What I looked at it? Let me try to paint a picture. There are many interstates. There's one big interstate is called Interstate 10, but it has many overpasses, because everything is elevated in the city. We're riding on that elevated overpass and I look out and all I can see are tips of rooftops. That's where the water was. That's crazy. So that's the look that I and I got out, and I just say to myself my life will never, ever, ever be the same, because this is not me coming into a locale and doing police work and then going back home. This is my home as well as my job. So everything is totally different in this, and so we have experienced many hurricanes, and so we were sort of under the impression that this was gonna be a normal regular hurricane.
Speaker 3:I hate to say that, but I'm regular, regular hurricane and you know, man, I have so many stories. We could probably really talk for three or four hours on this. But I'm riding it's a Sunday, sunday in August, august 28th Sunday and I'm riding down the street. We're doing some proactive patrol, just getting ready for the hurricane and getting people, you know, to hey, go inside, stop all this playing around. You know, I see three or four ladies walking down the street, each carrying a bottle of wine. Hey, my neighborhood, my neighbor, is doing a hurricane party, we getting ready to go. And then that's what the mindset was like it was another opportunity to party. If anybody knows the city of New Orleans, it's always a party. We're always looking for an opportunity to have a party. You party when you're born, you party when you're divorced, you party when you're married, you party when you die, you party, man, it's all a party and this was just another opportunity to have a party.
Speaker 3:None of us realized the implications that were about to take place when this thing really hit and it really was not the hurricane itself, it was the breaking of the levees that caused the problem. So we were that night, we were held up in a hospital and the winds were blowing, and we just felt hey, man, this is normal hurricane. The next morning, about eight o'clock, we started getting all clear, everything is clear, the winds have stopped, rain has stopped and everything was really cool and yeah, and so we were on the third floor of this hospital on the street called St Claude, near the Lord 9th Ward, and we looked out and somebody noticed you know why is that water rushing so fast in the ditches? It's kind of fast. And we just said, hey, that's just the water draining, right, because ideally you should be kind of settling in at that point, before it starts to recede right.
Speaker 3:Absolutely no. The streets were clear. There was no water in the streets at first, this was just water in the drains and stuff like this Looked out about five or 10 minutes later and noticed that there was more pulling. The water was pulling, kind of coming up a little bit and we were getting a little, you know, I guess you know maybe a little flood or something has happened. We all of a sudden started hearing car horns, you know how. The alarms were starting to go off and for some reason, the trunks started popping. We looked out again, man, the water was coming up higher and this is when we realized we are dealing with something beyond just the average hurricane. Radio started going off. This is, officer So-and-So. I'm stuck. I need help. Officer So-and-So, we need help over here. Officer So-and-So, we need help over here.
Speaker 3:We just had to get my family to the rooftop, so we had off-duty officers who were beginning to call in and request assistance and we could not. Nobody could get to anybody. We would just. I refer to. I look at this. I love history, I love to listen to history, talk about history, read history, particular military history, and what I hear about Vietnam is what I felt. We saw smoke. We heard helicopters and that was just it. Silence everywhere else. No birds, no dogs, nothing else. No traffic, no horns, nothing. It was just pure chaos. Apocalypse, as it were, and that's all you knew. You had no outside. You know, we found out later that you guys, people outside of New Orleans, were looking at this and, oh man, poor people, oh, we gotta send help, man, for us it was a struggle. It was, you know, life and death. We lost a lot of people. Two officers, two or three officers died in this process and yeah, it was just. It was a tough time.
Speaker 1:Now a normal response in that situation, and we haven't even got into what you're. Could we keep jumping around? But yeah, like a normal response in that situation. A city gets flooded. Now I imagine a place like New Orleans. There is some type of preparedness in the sense that a department like yours is gonna say, hey, we might need boats. So I assume you own boats. But how in the world do you go about like a situation like that, where streets are clear and now it's flooded? How do you go about mobilizing those resources?
Speaker 3:Well, that's the point. That's the point. You know, I had this conversation with my wife just the other night. This is where you see leadership. We had some leaders who Are the lack of no, that's the point I'm about to make. We had some leaders who were greater testing, but when the crisis came, the test didn't come through. And then we had leaders who maybe were not great at testing, didn't reach certain levels, but began to lead. And if it wasn't for those individuals who said listen, five of you guys, let's take a walk, let's go, come with me.
Speaker 3:Let's have one particular captain who did such an outstanding job, but he did it against, and I don't know how popular this was gonna be. He didn't feel and follow all the rules and regulations of the book and got was basically terminated because of some of the innovative things that he had to do. Nothing illegal, nothing immoral, but he had to do some of the innovative things, saved a whole fleet of vehicles because he did something innovative. And, again, because of the poor leadership. You have to learn how to be nimble in crisis. You have to learn how to adapt, overcome in what the Marines say all the time, and that's exactly what some people had to do and then some people fell apart, literally, literally fell apart. Nerves, lost every, all form of courage, the whole point.
Speaker 3:And so, when you talk about mobilizing, there were things in the book that you do, but on this, nothing followed the book. When you, the greatest plans are great until you get hit with adversity, and nothing followed the book and the book got thrown away and you had to really reinvent everything you knew, because everything that you had, all your resources were flooded, everything. We were basically on foot and in borrowed boats by that time, and so you just went to work. You went to work doing what you knew to do, so we had officers who jumped in boats and said let's go save people. That's what I was gonna ask. What's?
Speaker 1:your first, because ordinarily saving people that's a fire department thing. We do our best to keep them safe and facilitate that and even, like after Hurricane Harvey, I was one of the groups that went down to. Harvey, and even in that situation we were still in a law enforcement capacity because the looting and the brokerizing and stuff like that. That's gonna be a little bit different, though, in Nell's role during Katrina, if I assume, because we're talking about not only we're not saving people, we're saving ourselves.
Speaker 3:We have family that we have to take care of. We have no resources, normal resources, like we were able to send resources to Houston and you had agencies that were right outside of Houston. We had none of that, because everybody that knows New Orleans it's. We were cut off One area, which is Slydale Leeds, over Lake Ponson Train. That bridge was totally destroyed and you couldn't enter in from the other side either, so we were literally cut off. Cut off, yeah, and so we had to really depend on FEMA and we needed helicopter transports and we man it was K-San in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we were cut off and the only thing we could get was air transport and helicopter landings and stuff like that. That's the only way we could operate initially.
Speaker 2:Okay. So watching from afar, from over here, how do you feel? Fema like if you wanna get.
Speaker 3:Oh, they failed. Oh okay, they knew they failed. Everybody knew they failed, and so when we started talking about leadership, bro.
Speaker 2:It irks me. It's like if you can see something coming, everybody, every meteorologist this side of the Mississippi can see. Okay, what's about to happen. You should see this coming, which makes this over here. You get prepared.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell you now this is interesting that you bring up meteorology, because we were not given the indication that Katrina was going to be a major strike until Saturday. And Katrina hit on Sunday Because Friday we were told it was gonna curve. Okay, and usually those people are pretty accurate, especially the hurricanes, yeah, yeah they're pretty accurate, and so we had a man. We were, you know, hey, let's just kinda get ready. We had our hurricane snacks as we call them.
Speaker 3:Three days worth. We were ready. We did have some now outside. We didn't have a lot of outside resources available, but we had placed cars on the Superdome lots and we were just man, we were ready to go. Yeah, saturday, we wake up Saturday morning. I remember this like it was yesterday, and the meteorologists, the mayor, everybody on TV listen. This has changed. The situation has changed.
Speaker 3:We are gonna have to get everybody out and that's why you had the yeah, that's why you had the issue that you, what could have been like most people that went to Canada, dallas or Canada Houston would have been a five-hour to Houston, eight-hour to Dallas, took them 16 and 17 hours Because you were trying to egress a whole city in one day and then you had the showtub. Last resort, which was the Superdome, became a major chaotic mess. I remember this one of my neighbors and his wife were literally having an argument in the street. He wanted her to leave. She didn't want to leave. I've been here all my life. I don't leave the city for hurricanes and, sweetheart, we really need to leave for this one.
Speaker 3:And we lived about a block from Lake Pontchartrain. Oh, geez, yeah, I did. I lived a block from Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Pontchartrain actually overtopped the levees. I had about five feet of water in my house, cali, and if she would have stayed she would have made it. But we had a lot of people that wanted to stay because they had been through this before, and so they didn't realize the level of trial that they would have to go through.
Speaker 1:Well, that's one of the sorry no no, go ahead. I was gonna say that's. One of the negative side effects in the meteorology profession is because they want people to take precautions, but then if too many times they're saying, hey, this is gonna be bad, pay attention, and then stuff, because it doesn't always wind up being twist where you get hit, it's not just twist.
Speaker 3:What's the adage? The boy that cried wolf. Exactly, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but there is no log in somebody. Or is there a mandate where you have to leave your house?
Speaker 3:You can call for a mandatory evacuation, but that does not necessarily require a person to leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm trying to see how that you know, like constitutional.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the problem with that is and what I tell people all the time is this you know you, if you wanna risk your life, that's fine. Now, nobody has any legal right to force you to do anything. Right, but then you force the hands of somebody else, then you're forcing others to have to come out and rescue you, putting other people's lives at risk, right.
Speaker 2:That's the issue, man. Did you see, like, of course? I saw some of the pictures. I mean it was people, deceased people, animals, yeah, hell, I think they showed alligators, yeah, and I was like what.
Speaker 3:Alligators will come in. You know what alligators was saying Finally we get to take our city back. Yeah, okay, that's what, literally, because you know New Orleans man was, new Orleans was a marsh land, yeah, and that was a natural habitat of alligators, snakes and everything else, yeah. And so what you have is, finally alligators are saying, okay, finally we get our city back, yeah, we get our land back, because ultimately they were coming back taking over. We rode out New Orleans East trying to find a way to get back around into the Eastern area, because there was some roads that were somewhat passable and we tried to get out there and you would ride out it was a street called Sheffman, to a Highway and it's really a highway road that goes way, you know, just goes out. And we got as far as we can get and along the way, the whole way, you saw moccasins, water moccasins, you saw alligators, turtles just out sunning themselves, because Just having a blast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is hey. Finally we get our territory back.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the lake that you're saying top toe of the lake Lake.
Speaker 3:Ponchertrain Lake, Ponchertrain. I'm assuming that's a pretty big, yeah, it's only. Think about this. It's only 12 feet deep. That's why it can not be navigated by large ships, but it is. It's about 20 miles wide, so it is a large body of water and it was where the most of the problems came from, because you had two or three levee breaks and that lake feeds those areas Gotcha.
Speaker 3:Now, one of the things, let me say this, one of the things that New Orleans did dodge a bullet, and that's the Mississippi. If the Mississippi breaks through, which you just can't, you can't plug those holes, that would be something that you just can't plug. But there is a doomsday scenario that if a hurricane comes up the right way, with the IWO on the west side of the Mississippi, meaning the water is being pushed up river, then you would have almost a doomsday situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you and for anybody who hasn't seen the Mississippi. I remember the first time I went to New Orleans, probably 10 or so years ago, blew my mind. I mean, it's the Mississippi River best, not a river.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's an ocean man. Yeah, that was a great thing and people call it the mighty.
Speaker 3:It's called the mighty Mississippi. It is a monster. It's a monster's because it goes all the way from Illinois, all the way down, and of course we're surrounded. We're actually three feet below sea level, at least when I say we, new Orleans, three feet below sea level. So you have the Mississippi River, you have the large body water, lake Ponzi train, and then you have the Gulf of Mexico, which feeds. There was an area called. We call it the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, they call it Mr Go. It was really a low-match water deposit that was placed there by the Corps of Engineers to help dredge water in that area and it became a nemesis because it was allowed to. It just pushed water into Lake Ponzi train and it just created, create. Everything that could have went wrong naturally went wrong, and a lot of the man-made resources that we trusted, that was supposed to keep us safe, failed, and so that's what you had, okay let's go back.
Speaker 2:So if something with the Mississippi River breaks, we're talking about washing away an entire city.
Speaker 3:Uh, it could, it could so. So the Mississippi is is levied at certain places. When I mean levied, I mean they're built walls, levied walls. So there's some places that, um, the Corps of Engineers has developed a ingenious, very ingenious um way to control, like, when the river rises it could or it could become a mess, uh, problem. But what they, what they've done, is they've created a spillway that allows water from the Mississippi to enter into Lake Punchetrain, which creates a place to drip, to pull off some of the water right. So, every every year, around spring, usually, usually around spring, when, when a lot of um northern states, the snow is melting, that's when you really have that, that issue. So, yeah, so that's that's usually. It could be problematic. I mean, if you, if you have a good hard rain for three hours, the streets are going to flood.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I, like I absolutely love going to New Orleans Whenever. My wife and I we have a bunch of kids, so we don't get a whole bunch of free time, but the first time, the first time we had we got to leave before my last one got here.
Speaker 1:We had like 36 hours and like hey we're going to catch a flight, we're going to go to New Orleans because we'd taken the kids before and loved it and it's like it's this perfect mix of it's. Almost it's a coastal town, so it kind of has that coastal feel to it. But like I also love history and like being able to go on, like the Spanish mission, and look at something that literally wasn't a part of our country, it's just awesome to me and so we would. We would go and we went to this one restaurant and it would think I believe it was in the French Quarter and it started raining and like you know you go in the restaurants, you got a couple steps up or whatever. It just started. The place started filling up the water. Yeah, like the restaurant where we're sitting is filling up the water and I'm like, of course, maybe and I know about Katrina I'm like, oh my God, it's like a sneaky hurricane or something.
Speaker 3:And I'm like no one is. No one cares at all.
Speaker 1:They're just like putting their shoes up on stuff and the waiter is like, oh yeah, just have a drink. Sit, kick back, relax, give her an hour, it'll go away. Okay, and sure enough, it just went away.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sewage and water board is a little. It really is public works, and the biggest problem that they have is keeping pumps working, because pumps are the main thing that will will keep the water. You know you pump the water out, right, it does. You can't just drain it. It's got to be pumped out and if one of those pumps go down, people's houses will probably get flooded. That's what happened in that situation.
Speaker 3:More times than not, if your car is parked on streets you know the way the city is set up you do more street parking than not Many times your cars will will get flooded. So what they allow is hey, if we feel like a rain, a rainy event is going to happen and the flood is going to take place, we will allow you to park your cars on what we call neutral grounds. It's, it's, and we don't have we don't call them that here, right, but these are places in the middle of the, the avenue, the boulevard or whatever that has just grassy, it's like grassy areas, that's. That's elevated, and you can park your car up there. So you, that's that's what you do to keep your cars from park, from flooding. Yeah, so it's. I'm telling you it's a different way of life.
Speaker 1:It's just a different way of life, and it's the one city I've been to that like it doesn't seem like you just went a few hours away, like it feels like you were in a whole new I want to say country necessarily, but it almost is. It's like it's just, it's such a unique culture.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely, very few cities that feel that way. For me, I feel like that sometimes when I go to New York, and San Francisco can give you a feel.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 3:Simula yeah, simula to that for me.
Speaker 2:I've never been to New Orleans. Oh man, it's you got to go. I absolutely love it. How long does it drive from here? Eight hours, yeah, okay, I pass. You can't do that I watch it on.
Speaker 3:TV man jump on a flight. It's an hour and 15, 20 minutes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it went back yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was, yeah, okay. So let me ask you this how in the world did you end up at GP?
Speaker 1:Police department yeah. So, hang on, I don't want to skip ask. We already talked about the fact he's homicide. Oh, okay, okay, no, you're in the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got a bunch of questions, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay, homicide. Homicide Got into homicide. It was unique. I had a few number one. I had a few very good mentors One brother who was my mentor deceased now but actually I had two mentors. One taught me street life and one taught me investigations, interviews, could talk you out of anything and whatever it was, and another guy, man, he could find whatever he wanted you needed him to find, Put him in the street and he'll find it. I had two great mentors in teaching that. So I was young in police work but I had great mentors that brought me up. So I had some very, very, very interesting cases, as you could imagine, in the city of New Orleans, some very interesting cases. Everything was not what they call what we call dogs tied to a tree. You know those are easy cases where you just know pookie shot dookie and that's what happened, Okay, okay, and you know those are dogs tied to a tree.
Speaker 1:You know that's what we called them at that time I said, yeah, they're giving you a dog tied to a tree. I don't want that.
Speaker 3:That means man. This is low hanging fruit, just you know just write the report and don't make any mistakes. Get the evidence corrected, you know. So, yeah, I had some, let me give you. I don't know how much time we got, but I can give you some, maybe about three of the most interesting cases.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Maybe two or three, all right. So I'm sitting at home Sunday afternoon, sunday evening, and I get a phone call and I had a desk officer with. The desk officer would actually call you out and his famous line was he was talking with a gravelly voice hey, fred, somebody's dying to meet you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was his way of calling you out. So anyway we got, we got a call one day. A dog New Orleans East, which was a little bit more rural part of the city, a real dog no, real, real by a while this time had found a bone that was suspicious. Suspicious bone that looked like it could have been human man. We read in the middle of I think it was playoff season or game going on. So we get up, we, you know, two or three of us we make the scene and, true enough, the bone looks like it could be human. It's a regular dog. The guy said man, my dog just went out and came back with this. I said I needed to call the police because this really looks suspicious. We call out the. We call, had the coroner's office. We call out the coroner's office. They come collect the bone. We do a couple of reports and do some pictures of the area and we head back home A week later call comes back in Same dog has found another suspicious bone.
Speaker 3:So what this dog used to do, the great, the great detectives that we all, we realize this dog knows where a body is. So we call out cadaver, our, our cadaver dogs and we do a search of the area. This is again rural part of New Orleans East which is marshy. We have you. It took us about two or three hours. We find a plastic bag, a dark garbage bag. In that garbage bag is a head and two hands.
Speaker 3:The uh, the uh dog continues to search and the next finds another bag about half a mile away, and that in that bag there's a torso, another, another couple of feet, maybe another bag with legs and feet. So we, we know we have a homicide. So the coroner's office comes out, we, we pull the, the, the bags together, they put the body together, we some kind of way get an ID, we find out who this person is, and this person was, was, um, might get a little graphic, but this person was on the kit in the French quarter, meaning this person was a male prostitute. Okay, um, and so we have to now go somewhat undercover to figure out what happened. We're homicide detectives but we have to kind of really just, you know, we have to take the badges and the guns off and we have to go do real police work, ask some questions. So we, we go to a couple of bars.
Speaker 1:I was like what do you mean by undercover?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. In other words, we take off some, we take off the, we just go, we, we we're regular customers and we go to some of the more CD bars I was going to ask them to dress up. We have to dress up, we go to some CD bars. Man, I'm from the city and I know the city is notorious for certain things, but what I saw in that bar opened my eyes to some things that I'd never seen before in my life.
Speaker 3:Hello, um, we get some information that the person had been cut up. Cut up on a, on a, some sort of um, uh, uh, what are you, the guys that sell meat? The, the butchers, butchers, yeah, the guy the guy had been actually cut up in a butcher.
Speaker 1:Now we're getting to more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the actual butcher shop. So now we get into to, uh, get into Godfather kind of stuff. Now you know. So ultimately we we do not. This is one of the cases. The reason I bring this case up because we didn't solve this case. Uh, this is still a unsolved case, but the the way, the way we found and investigated it and the way we came to some conclusions was one of the most, the most difficult test that we had. And, and I'll tell you as a homicide detectives, one of the hardest types of cases are those where the victim, when you do a victimology, is difficult because the victim is so, has no roots, you know, there's nobody to really can can really monitor, can really tell you where and when the victim did this. And there's so many cases, uh, in the city of New Orleans right now where you have uh, individuals who, who were killed, but you don't know who and where because of the lifestyles that they led, right, and those are some difficult cases to solve.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've always heard that if you, you know, of course now with technology, most of them are going to get solved, but it's like if you start having a problem with somebody that you know or you just you out and you have a disagreement or argument or a fight, chances are you're going to get caught. Yeah, you know, they would always say, uh, especially some in the other city we worked. There was like no, if you just drive out of town, go to a random town, kill somebody and then come back, yeah, because it's like there's nothing to tell you to that person.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. We're very few times that you have homicides like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean those, those are your, your, you know you you're talking about serial killer or something in that nature. But many, many of them are domestic, many of them are drug related, many of them are uh, arguments, stuff like that. But yeah, the biggest cases that I think I had, that that either were solved or unsolved, were, um, we just had some cases, man, and you know, in that city you have, of course, you have the drug trade cases. Uh, there was one in particular where um, um man, to this day I still don't get it, but this guy, he believed that he, though, he trusted the guys that he was doing these, these drug deals, with enough to bring his, his children, his kid and his girlfriend to the drug deal. Um, not known to him, they had decided in advance to rob him. And so he gets to the location, they bring him upstairs, the kid and the girlfriend in the car and the. The idea was to rob him, but he put up a little resistance, yeah, and I did See, and even that like that.
Speaker 1:Like okay, bad on the guys doing the robbery, obviously bad on the idiot taking his kids, but also you got your kids with you. Like me, if I someone tries to rob me, someone's going to a gas station, I might shoot out with you normally, but if I got my kids behind me, that's. I'm not doing that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you, you, you would think that, but he, he puts up resistance and of course, they kill him and, uh, this was one of the first cases I'll tell you. Let me just give you this point right here. The hardest cases for me were children involved and, um, it turns out the mom, we believe the mom used the kid as a shield and, uh, the child passed and the mom was shot multiple times but she survived, she was able to become a witness and we were able to, um, solve and then get the, uh, the perpetrators, what we call them, the, the, those individuals. We got them, got them in jail. So I feel like sometimes I'm like Denzel and in training day, you know, I got a, I got people right now serving years because of my case testimony.
Speaker 3:You know I really, I really do feel like that sometimes, but you think about it, man, and it's just. It's horrible how people's lives change. Lives change because of what they decide to get involved in or what others involve themselves in and pull in innocent people.
Speaker 1:You know so well when it all comes down. My estimation is so much of it comes down to. That's not going to happen to me, though.
Speaker 1:Like it's always a, of course, me and my wife go back and forth about this because she just, you know, says I'm just paranoid. But it's like there's so many people I guess in our job you see it all the time that's what is never going to happen. It just does over and over and over. It's like you know that guy he bought from that person how many times he's like right, I'm telling kids it's going to be fine. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy.
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:What was your, what was your role while you're homicide? Were you like a baseline detective?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was a detective. I was a detective for several years and then, when I promoted to supervise a sergeant, I supervised a task force and then I supervised a homicide unit. Okay, what was it? What was?
Speaker 1:the task force.
Speaker 3:The task force was this was street level crime, so this was not the narcotics stuff, this was you have. At that time you had, you had corners, literally you had corners that were just notorious Right, and so you put pressure on that corner and, and, and you just made sure that your presence was felt on that corner and you clean that corner up and individuals realized we're not, this is not our corner anymore, this corner belongs to the citizens of the city of New Orleans from now on. So that's that's what you did. So you made, made a rest, you got guns off the street and and that was a big, in my estimation, a big area of crime deterrents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:You know, just just dealing with you, you, you targeted, you targeted certain, certain hot spots it's really we call them the hot spots. You targeted them and you, you made sure that that the, the individuals that made them hot spots, you, you, you took care of business with those individuals and you close that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely Well cause so much, so much. You know we wind up, you know like Dr Stanton's going to get it or two political, but like we wind up fighting against the criminal element but then also the prosecutorial element when it comes to the, the county where it's like I might arrest you for drugs because you're selling. You're selling drugs out here in this corner or whatever.
Speaker 1:But if you're, you're bonding out, you're getting out, you're getting deferred, you're, you're getting probation where the case is and you're right back out there doing it again because no one's following through, kind of that, that bum rushing style of hey, you might not stay in jail, but I'm going to take you so freaking often that I'm just going to make your life until you leave, and then people can actually live their lives like they're supposed to.
Speaker 3:Right. Well, since you're on it and I'm not going to make a big political statement either but if you notice the big wave of defund the police that took place a couple of years ago and you had a lot of progressive prosecutors who said you know, we're going to start cutting breaks and deals and all this kind of stuff, if you look at their record now you realize they have reversed course, really. Yeah, because they realized that crime was increasing and people were fed up with that and citizens began to complain and say listen, we need police officers doing their jobs, we need prosecutors doing their jobs. And if you look at the current DA in the city of New Orleans, he has completely changed course. He wasn't going to, he was not going to prosecute juveniles at all, and now that course has changed because juveniles became absolutely notorious for car thefts, car jackings, street-level crimes, and now that city is They'll be murder suspects Absolutely.
Speaker 3:And now you see that there is a major shift in the crime trends because these policies have been reversed. We talk about criminology all the time. You're going to have a certain element, a level of crime in any location and if you're not putting pressure there, it can get out of control and citizens suffer because of it. But you take care of the criminal side of this thing and citizens are happy If we're doing our job legitimately. That's the main thing and sometimes we lose that element being legitimate. But once we become legitimate or once we maintain that legitimacy and we see that here that's one of the things I love about Grand Prairie is that the citizens here trust the police. The majority support the government, our elected officials support. You don't have that in every agency in every city and it's unfortunate because we have to become partners. You have to become partners. If you're not partners together in this process, it's not going to be well for you or your city.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I completely agree.
Speaker 1:I think it's such a weird reaction to there were some instances where somewhere controversial but justified, somewhere controversial clearly not justified, but regardless of the reaction being something like OK, well, it's not a prosecute juvenile, OK, that's a response to what, George Floyd, what do those two things have to do?
Speaker 3:with one another, exactly.
Speaker 1:Of course, you're going to get results that are wildly scared and not directly related to the issue at hand.
Speaker 3:We could take politics out of this thing and really look at it from a moral justice standpoint, I think we'll be a whole lot better off. But when we try to choose sides and begin to get political and set up camps, then it becomes a we get, we officers, police officers, we get caught in the middle of this.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, that's true, right. Yeah, you know, this guy has a sign up saying police, support me. This guy has a sign up saying, please, it's like I do, right, I don't know who y'all are Right. So whenever you promoted and you go to the task force role, where did you first of all? Were you kind of around the same guy as you were working with previously?
Speaker 3:No, so when you promote in that city, when you promote you move, you have to change districts so you get a whole new set of folks that you're working with. And so I started off again supervising a great group of people who were just interested in just doing better for their city. So we worked together for a good year and a half and then after that I as a sergeant moved over to running my own homicide unit in the fifth district, which was my where I grew up. Part of the fifth district contains the Lord Ninth Ward. Many people who are from New Orleans remember the desire project area. To some of you that might not be anything, but to us that was like what's that area that we? It's real quiet now. It used to be big, notorious in the city, grand prairie. It used to be.
Speaker 1:Doward's, doward's yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was Doward's, when Doward's was Doward's.
Speaker 3:Worse than that, because I went to Doward's when I said this is, this is this is nice, this is nice compared to you know, but yeah, so in that city I mean, I'm sorry in that, in that part of the New Orleans it was a difficult place to work. So the FBI usually says that a homicide detective should have about four homicides, five homicides a year. That should be all. That's what the FBI says. One detective for five cases, because you have so much to do. My first year I had 12.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was just here, just me as a lead detective Just me and then I was just lead, so it was just four of us in one district and the other three had 12 each too. So that was the homicide rate in that, in just that one district. So it was similar to that in the fifth district where one of my good friends, who's passed away nowadays this brother, he was a great detective he would say man, I say how you doing, sir? He said Bates, I'm just taking names and keeping score. That's just the way it was, because you go from one case to the next case to the next case, and it became an overwhelming situation to where all you were doing was on scene, typing or in court. That's all you're doing. You just didn't have time for anything else. On scene of a case, interviewing, typing reports or in court, that's all you did.
Speaker 1:How do you combat the burnout with that? Because with homicide it's different than like if I had two people that are arguing over who took each other's cell phone and needed one of them to cooperate and I get burned out. In that case, ok, right, who's crying? But it's a whole different level.
Speaker 3:Here's what I personally think and this might be just my opinion, my opinion only I think people who first thing I think police work is calling, is it calling? And I think being homicide detective is a calling. I think that God gives. There was a New York detective who Herman that's not his name, I can't take his name right now, but he taught homicide 101 to cities and he said this one statement he says as a homicide detective, we work for God. It was his statement. That's what he put up. I think Chief Sezny has that deal in his office right now we work for God and I think being a homicide detective, there's a certain level of grace that God gives these men and women to really be able to do this job on a consistent basis. I think the same thing happens with child abuse detectives, because I'm going to tell you something I don't have the grace for that I don't have to. Y'all might have to edit this out.
Speaker 1:But I don't have grace for that.
Speaker 3:So I stay away from that Because I can't do that, I just can't. But with homicide, because remember, homicide well, at least in the city of New Orleans, you handled homicides. You handled what we call aggravated batteries, that's when somebody was shot or hurt to the point to where they could possibly die. Got you, we handled suicides and we handled deaths that were unexplained, those kind of things. So you went on a lot of scenes, you saw a lot of death and there's some people that are just not built to handle that.
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely not, and so that's why I really think that you have a certain grace for that, because you can leave that scene, you can go home and really you can release that and live your life. But there's some people that they struggle with that.
Speaker 1:You ever struggle with it early on, never did.
Speaker 3:Never did. That's why I really believe I had a grace for that, because I never struggled with that at all. I was able to go home, and I really believe that part of that as well is my faith. I really believe it Because I'm a true believer in God, through Jesus Christ, and I have a certain perspective theological perspective on life, certain theological perspective on death, and I place those things in that same category and I'm not living compartmentalized. I have an integrated life. My faith is integrated in my work. My work is integrated in my faith. You see what I'm saying. So I never had a problem with that. Now, morally, there are certain things that you may want to do, like training day, denzel. You might want to do things just to get people off the street, but morally, if you do it right and that's what I teach in the academy, man If you do it right because it's right, even when no one is looking, you're going to come out on the right side every single time.
Speaker 1:Essentially the way you explain how you integrate everything. That's the opposite approach of a lot. It's certainly the opposite approach of me I try to be really big on. I walk out the door and like is that life? And then this is this life. I never heard someone say they intentionally integrated all together.
Speaker 3:Well, and so I'm not going home discussing homicides, but I have an intentional faith that helps me realize that, yes, this is my job, but this is not who I am. You follow me. So when I go home, I don't have to go home a homicide detective or a police officer. I can go home as father, grandfather and husband and just be who I am there. But when I go to work, I still have faith, I still conduct myself in a manner of faith and as a man of faith, and that I can objectively look at a situation and know that this is a situation that my faith also speaks to. That's kind of what I mean by that integration.
Speaker 3:I don't sound too preachy here, but I'm not just a Sunday morning Christian. If you understand that, you can go to church and church is church, but then the rest of the week, man, I'm just wide open, whatever. No, every day, sunday through Monday, tuesday, every day is me attempting to live a godly life, righteous life, knowing that God put me here to not only help people in tough times, but also to bring some righteousness to the land, to bring justice to the land, and so I can incorporate all of that at the same time, and that allows me to be able to look at what Dr King, martin Luther King, said man's inhumanity to man, to look at that in a theological perspective and realize this is what we do to each other. But God has the last say and I'm part of God's hand in having the last say because I work for God.
Speaker 1:Do you? I imagine there are times it's difficult to maintain a principled life, but then also you're exposed and what you're surrounded with all day, every day, is you're working homicide in the world. It's not a real polished area in the environment and the authors are around. A lot of times People don't realize that the stuff we're around influences us and kind of changes the way we are sometimes. So your peers are not always going to be living the same way that you want to. What do you do to kind of keep yourself on track or remind yourself how to do this?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. Great question, and this goes to being biblical, being theological. Jesus said to believers you are a salt of the earth, you're a light to the world, and so I'm not walking around condemning folk for what they do or don't do or whatever. I just know who I am in Christ. And Paul put it this way in Galatians, chapter two now y'all got me on the preaching side he says I'm crucified with Christ. I no longer live the life I now live. I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. So what he's saying there is I'm not living for myself anymore, I'm truly crucified, and so what I do and how I live is really for Christ Around. I'm not just wearing a badge saying that I'm this and y'all are that. I'm really living my life for Christ. And so out of that comes if somebody needs help, I'm helping. If somebody needs encouragement, I'm encouragement. If somebody just needs me to just live in front of them a certain way, that's what I'm doing, you know.
Speaker 3:And so for me, as a minister, from the ministry side of this, I find police work to be a great place for me to understand people, because in this life, you have to understand three things you need to know yourself, you need to know God and you need to know people. If you know those three things, you can have a lot of success in life. If you know yourself, you gotta know what pushes you, what you need to know, cause there's certain things I told you I can't do child abuse. I know I can't do it. You know God. And then you know people. I find that in church, people put on the best face, oh man, the greatest smiles. But see, what I do realize too, is those same church people are the same people I see on the streets, and that helps me understand where people really are, so that on Sunday mornings I'm not just being theological, I'm also being real in real life and meeting people exactly where they are.
Speaker 3:That's what Jesus did. Jesus was not. Jesus didn't come here talking about, you know, the skies and the celestial stars and the angels. He met people where they are, you know. And that's exactly what I think police work does for us. We really, whether you believe or not, we really work for God. And if anybody doubts that, read Romans 13. And he sent authorities for a purpose. Do we do it just late? That's up to us. Individual right, you follow me, but that's our position and that's what we do, and so, for me, and for me and my colleagues, we we're doing God's work. We just have to make sure we do it the right way. Yeah, absolutely, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now, we've been going for a while and I know you're gonna you're gonna shoot me if I don't move on, but I interrupted him earlier, so I would like you to. We probably talk for three more hours about some of that. I would love to, but some of the. How in the world do we go from New Orleans and you promote sergeant and then your lieutenant?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you wind up in this grand prix.
Speaker 3:Yeah so I'm glad you. Yeah, I know we were about to get there, so I'm. We're in the middle of Katrina and by this time the National Guard had been In other states that started sitting National Guard. So I remember this National Guard air crew from I think it was Vermont or Maine, flew out, flew for us every night. So I rode helicopters every night just doing overwatch for the city, checking out.
Speaker 1:You know we're doing roll with that one.
Speaker 3:I was a lieutenant and I was overseeing the looting operation. Oh, got you. So we were looking. You know, if you saw, because the city was blacked out, it was still no, no electricity. So if you saw some headlights somewhere, you say, okay, you know what is that? What is that car doing right in this dogs on this dark street, you know, when they were still curfew and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:So I was doing that for a while and I met this, this National Guard person from Texas who was a police officer in Mesquite and he said man, you really need to investigate North Texas Police work, because I, you know, I was telling them, you know, quality life in New Orleans prior to Katrina was a little rough and then you know it's gonna be a mess afterwards. I'm not trying to jump ship, I'm gonna work here as long as I can to help the city recover. But I realized this is not my long term. My wife and I have been to this, not our long-term Life. So we were, we were gonna be relocating at some point.
Speaker 3:So this guy put the bug in my ear From a ski. I couldn't tell you his name, couldn't tell you if he's still on a job or not in Mesquite, let's keep police department. He said man, you really should give North Texas a try. I'm the ski police department. I said, okay, well, check this out, we're gonna try it out. My wife has some family here, so she had already investigated the area. So we decided you know what, we're gonna leave the city, we're gonna leave New Orleans, we're gonna leave the NOPD, we're gonna come up here and we're gonna just do something different. We've been in police work all our life. By the way, that I tell you, my wife was please, she was a, she was I'm sorry, she was a police officer and she, she worked the French Quarter.
Speaker 1:So she was downtown French Quarter.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we were both leaving. It was her role. Whenever you're left, she was a police officer.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, police I, she was an officer, she fun. She worked in the at that time. She was, she was, we call, across the river 4th district. She was a police officer in that, in that area Patrol. She also did FTO training and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:So so we decided we're gonna leave, we're gonna get, we're gonna just escape the life, we're gonna come out of New Orleans man, we're gonna just come to North Texas and just do something different. And I, like the godfather 3, every time we try to get out they pull us back in. So we got up here, we looked around. Initially we both Decided, you know, footwork might be the because we lived in Fort Worth, so we're gonna join, join the Fort Worth police department. We took the test, both scored high and we're getting.
Speaker 3:I Don't I'm not gonna say what happened, but we were gonna go to Fort Worth and just didn't quite. You know, like the whole culture thing at the time, and somebody suggested Grand Prairie. They said, look at, you know, give Grand Prairie a shot. By the time I was doing some stuff with Kent, tarrant County and decided they didn't let me go over and check Tarrant County outs, I mean a Grand Prairie out. So came over, score real high on the test, you know, and Thank God I was in shape, so I was able to run to the mouth mouth in the hair and all that kind of stuff and jumped on the and I think I was like One of the top two on the on the list. So I, you know now I didn't come in and say hey, I'm a lieutenant and all this kind man, I just you know, I just give it a shot.
Speaker 1:Make a difference anyway right, Right.
Speaker 3:We didn't have the lateral program at the time. So you know, man, I'm just coming in.
Speaker 1:You're really just coming in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, coming in, coming in. Like I told you before, I was actually in training, making more money here in training. Then I was as a lieutenant there.
Speaker 1:Oh, as lieutenant, as lieutenant.
Speaker 3:No man as a lieutenant as a lieutenant making more money here? Yeah, because you could come here with your underwear. Everything else is given to you there. You had to buy everything except your gun.
Speaker 1:In New Orleans.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah everything except your gun you.
Speaker 1:You had to buy. I was your uniform.
Speaker 3:I was here next, so I used to say this a lot of people and I still said man, you just don't realize what this city provides you. Oh yeah, we get, we get spoiled, we get comfortable, go somewhere else and you realize you work. You literally work for one of the best agencies in this world. I'm not saying that because I'm because we're here, here. You know, you really work for one of the best, one of the best agencies in this, in this, in this country absolutely.
Speaker 3:So so I get started now. This is the chief. Hill was the chief at the time, right, and he said hey, man, why don't you? You know, you know you have all experiences, but but you know It'll be good for you to go through the Academy because you know you would, you would get to know some of your co-future coworkers. I said, no, sir, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna just get started. So I didn't go through the Academy coming here, I just got in and we got started and, man, it's been, it's been a whirlwind since now.
Speaker 3:Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go back to homicide here Again. Homicide was at that time for me, was was like that, that was the. The only time I was in that time was when I was in the office at that time. Let me back up. Patrol was really, really, really, really fun, but homicide was really wax cell. That's what my grace was in the sense. So I'm kind of doing a boring job here right now.
Speaker 3:What exactly do you do? What exactly do I do? I am, I am called a planning and research officer about Preparation, planning. Literally planning is planning and research. But here it was. It became somewhat of a different animal. Chief died at the time Was was it pretty much became. You know, whatever you were assigned to do is one of those open-ended deals. So, man, we started doing everything from grants and and policies, and right now I'm focusing on policy. We revised policies. So if something changes in the textures legislature, something's changed with the law, we see something, we need to do something different, make some adjustments. Part of my job is to prepare the document to get the policy changed and get it reviewed. And then we that's when you get those emails hey, these are the new policies, this changed and that changed, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:So let me ask you this is something that's always, always confused me what's the thought process behind? Sometimes we get these policy revisions and it's like changes personnel to officer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, just like little terminology.
Speaker 3:I know Alright. So it is as a simple as this. If you change Either one of you have been in military yeah, okay, military structure Is is similar, you know, because we're paramilitary organizations. So if you change your organizational structure For whatever reason, if you add a deputy chief or you you add a assistant chief, that changes your bureau setup Right, and so you have to actually restructure the organizational chart, meaning that now everything that's in policy dealing with that organizational chart has a change as well. So a unit changes from a division, changes from a from Well, bureau changes to a division, a division changes to a unit, whatever happens, and it has to, it has to match up for for it to be Consistent throughout the entire document.
Speaker 3:The policy right we're, we're judged by what we call. It used to be a Kaliya accredited, a credit in agency. Now it's the Texas chiefs of police, a credit agency, and they actually come in, do an audit and part of their audit work is to look at our policies and to make sure Our policies are lining up with the Best practices and accreditation. And and so you have to have your verbiage right. Believe it or not, people, people, lawyers, if somebody violates, or they suspected of violating policy. They will go to the policy and ask why did this happen here? Why is this stated here? Is this consistent with this? So you have to be consistent all the way through every time, because you're just on that through outside accrediting agencies as well as outside legal legal Challenges now, how does that work as far as productivity in your part?
Speaker 1:Are you just consist like you just say, hey, I'm gonna read one chapter a week? Well, we do it as a team.
Speaker 3:It's, it's we've been doing this for about four years now that there's a chief them Sorry, not it. There is a policy review committee, okay, and it is done primarily with the deputy chiefs, assistant chiefs, and then let's say, let's just say, you guys right. Let's say y'all see something in policy. Are you experience something? And you say, hey, so it's wise, this like this, your soldiers will say, I man, I don't know this, this makes no sense, this is dumb, you know. I y'all talk about. This is dumb.
Speaker 3:This is some, you know. So, um, if the, if the sergeant is a proactive soldier, he'll bring it to the lieutenant, she'll bring it to the lieutenant. Lieutenant will do the same thing. Hey, I think this may need to be adjusted and I know that may take some time, but it gets up and we look at it and say, man, this is this. This does not make sense because we just sit in policy 101 that you do to do, need to do this Policy 102. You say you do that. That's the exact opposite, so that you look at that and sometimes that happens, many times that happens, and you you need to make the changes in that to make Sure it's consistent across the board. So we have a, we have a committee now that we look at certain things.
Speaker 3:Every two years, the Texas legislates, texas legislature meets and you have to make some changes about what you do. I mean, we had some stuff in policy regarding open carry and and and conceal carry right. What happened to conceal carry right? It's gone. So why? Why are we talking about conceal carry? And our policies have to go in and and Scratch that out. That needs to be, needs to be changed. We have to keep the policy up to date when it comes to the current law. Texas state of Texas Y'all want a job.
Speaker 1:I mentioned, you reflect this, this archist test, so you would just kill it. Yeah, yeah yeah, you know, but I'm gonna say what now, sir.
Speaker 3:Now, this is funny.
Speaker 3:This is funny Because I did take it and scored pretty high on it. The problem was I didn't have the time at the time right To to get the extra points, yeah, and you know. And then I got busy in ministry and managed this is, you know, it is. Yeah, that's hey, you guys handle the supervising part of this. But the the first part of that question. You said I should be able to ace it because I know it. Believe it or not, it's really hard because I'm doing two things Is this Louisiana law or is this Texas? Oh right, yeah, like I'll go back to aggravated battery quick. And there's no such thing as aggravated battery, right, and that's what I, you know because of. There's a law of First. You know, if you learn something first, it's the strongest in you, and so I have to constantly remind myself this is Texas and this is Louisiana. That's why I think lawyers or have the bar in each state, because the states have so many different laws and stuff. The second thing is it's hard for me to remember Is this the revision?
Speaker 1:or is this the original?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can't remember now. Do, do, we do two or do we do three? Yeah you know. So it's difficult for me to do that because I run through it so many different times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so are you a full time, like you have your own church now?
Speaker 3:Yes, I am, yes, I do full time, full time. Hey, we don't. By the time I finish, we will right. Grace Methodist Metroplex. We are a congregation that we are located on the campus of Texas Wesleyan University. Yeah a large church that is on the corner of Collard and Rosedale Street and city of Fort Worth, and so, yeah, we, we are online. We we, of course, everybody's online these days Facebook and Instagram and all those different places grace, grace, methodist Metroplex.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's dope. Okay, so then you know I want to talk about. How is you still going over to talk to the kiddos?
Speaker 3:Yeah, man, yeah, and I don't know if you know this, but they decided, I think the GP, isd decided they're gonna Collapse. The. Yeah, I think this Maybe political, but I think it's unfortunate. Yeah, because I'm telling here some strong learning processes, when you're not dealing with certain areas of social function, you know you're not trying to be the, you know man for the ladies.
Speaker 1:I keep working on TTCs, two different schools, ones of the man's ones. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so they're doing that Doing away with that but we have been and KKD has been doing a great job. Actually he's one of our favorite speakers on on every I think it's the fourth Friday of the month we go over as a Police department one individual go over and speak to the young men's leadership Academy. They're their fellowship of Christian athletes and it's about 50 guys, 50 young men, junior high level age level and we encourage them from a faith-based perspective on life and on leadership and and and they'll ask us questions, but we get a chance to really encourage them in some aspect of life and that has been good for us. Coach Coggins leads us, calls us over there, and so we get to get a chance to go over and chat with him. We had several offices go over and, yeah, kd just happens. I don't know what he does, but he I don't know if he's giving him money or what we always get. We always get big accolades when he comes and and he did a great job, you know.
Speaker 3:So I I'm not supposed to do this, but I'll kind of call him a little bit more, because he gets you know, he gets the big, the big accolades.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good reviews I like going over there. Those are good kids.
Speaker 1:That's awesome yeah well. I think We'll wrap it up, gone slightly past what we're supposed to.
Speaker 3:Yeah, man yo y'all call me back. We can get into some more of these specifics if you want to.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear some of the stories. Yeah, have a part to. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we, we will, we will it's. There's a lot, you know, I look back over my career now it's been 20, some 20 Y'all do the math a 97 to my cop, like 25 years or so, right, yeah, so the number of stories that you can start compiling, yeah, and forgetting, and then go back and remember oh man, that was wild. Yeah, I remember we did that. It's amazing. Now, katrina, of course, is one of the biggest highlights because it was such a traumatic incident, critical incident for everybody. Yeah, but for the most part, this I know this podcast is really geared Just people, giving people an opportunity to see inside work.
Speaker 3:If you have a calling to police work or if you even interested in police work, first of all, find a right agency, because you you get you can get turned off, going to the wrong place, you know, and the city of Grand Prairie, this police agency, this agency under current leadership in the city, I'm telling you, you know, nobody's perfect, but this is a great place to work for you know.
Speaker 1:So Please don't I Guess.
Speaker 3:I appreciate sir man, it's been a pleasure you guys. You guys were fun to hang out with yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah all right, the next time, next time, all right, all right. I.