No Way Out

Real-Time Policing in Chicagoland: Real OODA With Lou Hayes, Jr

• Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera • Episode 132

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Momentum favors those who move first. We sit down with Lou Hayes to trace how real-time crime centers (RTCC) rooftop drones, and secure collaboration tools are compressing response times from minutes to seconds—and what that means on the street where handcuffs still close the loop. Lou explains how small suburbs in Chicagoland connect with city, county, state, and federal partners to build a shared picture, crowdsourcing intelligence from 911 centers, analysts, air units, and even organized retail teams. The result is faster orientation and clearer guidance, but also a new dilemma: how much transparency helps the public understand the tools without giving criminals the countermeasures they need.

The conversation goes beyond gadgets. We examine the human cost of screen fixation, the quiet erosion of interview craft, and why de-escalation and calm radio work keep the frontal cortex in the fight. Lou walks through how strategy must evolve when new sensors come online, why canine and overhead assets change ground tactics, and how criminals adapt—ghost plates, tree canopies, tunnels—faster than policy can catch up. We talk scams targeting older adults with fake dashboards and urgency scripts, the role of facial recognition in challenging ID cases, and the harsh realities of human trafficking where victims are coerced into other crimes.

Recruiting and retention surface as critical constraints: smaller talent pools, vocational drift, and the continued value of military veterans. Lou argues for systems thinking over silos, connecting wellness to use-of-force, intel to action, and strategy to recruitment. His closing challenge is a detective mentality: hold your theories loosely, hunt for disconfirming evidence, and keep refining reality. If you care about public safety that privileges outcomes over optics, and technology that serves people instead of replacing them, this is your field guide to what actually works.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway. Your feedback helps more curious listeners find conversations like this.

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Lou Hayes, Jr:

We're in such a rapid state of tech growth in public safety that we have the opportunity to kind of like we got the momentum and we need to exploit that momentum and use it before they figure it out. Once they figure it out, uh once they're reoriented to it, then no good. We want to be supported by our citizenry and the constituency of these elected officials. We want that support. So we want to talk about the things that we're using, we want to showcase our successes, but at what cost? Because the cost is giving up tradecraft, the cost is explaining how we do things so somebody else could then use it against us. So it's the it's a balancing act of how much do we give up, how much do we talk about, and is showcasing what we do actually counterproductive to us?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

All right, Lou Hayes. Welcome to uh No Way Out. It's been a while since uh we've last connected. Uh, what's going on in Chicagoland, man? Give us some background.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, there's no politics going on, nothing at the national level. Everything's good. Well, good. We'll end it right there then. Cheers.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No, that was a great show. So I want to I do want to talk about what you were doing last week with the RTCCs, real-time. What are the what's the CC mean again? Prime Center. Yeah, so it must have you must have all this software technology and all of these amazing whiz-bang tools. So tell us a little bit about that and what's going on in policing when it comes to building situational awareness, getting inside the loops of criminals and that type of thing.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, so first let's talk about what Chicagoland is. Right? It's a huge, it's a huge city that's surrounded by a bunch of very small municipal suburbs to the tune of 250 to 300 of them. So what we're trying to do is connect all of those suburbs and city and county and state and federal police agencies together using software and communications platforms. I work for one of those small suburbs. I've had some cool experiences working with task forces, kind of open my eyes into what's possible. So when we're talking about the technology, it's another set of eyes and ears out in the field that's helping us become more efficient with observing sensing, making sense of what's going on out there. And it's basically growing faster than we know how to deal with it, both on policy level, tactically using it or technically using it, and then morally using it. So I think it's a perfect uh mental, moral, physical kind of uh discussion.

unknown:

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So what kind of tech are we talking about? Are you talking about like sensors, cameras, drones? Uh what what what what is giving you guys other eyes and ears out there?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, we're using cameras that have certain sensors or algorithms for movements and identifying objects. We're dealing with drones, both that are getting deployed out of police cars trunks, but also in a drone as first responder program. So now we're launching drones straight from rooftops of government buildings right onto the scenes of 911 calls and helping with our uh with our surveillances out there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Uh what's the okay, let's we're right before you came on, Moose and I were talking about the use of technology to compress timelines. So in a first responder situation, launching a drone or a platform from the roof of a government building, what advantage does that give you to sending a uh you know a fire truck or a police unit or or other to the scene?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Well, a lot of it is just that time. We're seeing depending on how close you are to that drone and how much overlap you want to give these different coverage areas, you could get to you get on scene in under 60 seconds when it's gonna take a police car two minutes, three minutes. That's fast on the ground, three minutes. So, I mean we're at worst having this, and in many cases, it's like one-fifth of the response time.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah. So it's it's a force multiplier, and what I don't mean like physical force, but allows you to get more capability to your uh to provide safety to folks in your in your area. I I I'm kind of curious though, where did where where is a lot of where are the lot of these ideas coming from? Are you are you borrowing them from other um police uh units around you or looking at New York, looking at Seattle? Where are these ideas originating from?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I think a lot of it's coming out of the military, the uh private security industry. They've got a lot less bureaucracy to contend with. The private industry I'm talking about, not the military. Private industry's got a lot less bureaucracy to fight through to put some of this technology in place. So they're able to iterate fast, they're able to put product out really quickly, whereas government moves slow, sometimes like chilled molasses, and you gotta you gotta have policies, procedures, and surveys and tests, and you gotta run all that stuff. That's six months, twelve months worth of T and E. So we're uh yeah, we're getting a lot from private industry and then trying to adapt it to what we're doing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

And do you have a budget to do this, or uh is this I mean, how do you get money to do it? Is it is it top down? And I mean, where's where is this coming from? Is it coming from the those that are closest to the work, or is it coming from above? Is it coming from the politicians? Who's who's demanding this and and uh if if not, where is the demand signal coming from?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I don't think it's consistent across the board. I came at it a little bit differently than most of my peers in that National Real-Time Crime Center Association and just across the country in general. I came at it from a detective that was running surveillance. And when we're trying to use this to help with surveillance using uh different types of surveillance technology that I'm really not gonna talk about, but using surveillance technology and then building desks to support surveillance cars in the field is where I came at this problem from. This wasn't to support 911 calls and patrol cars. And that's a that's a radical difference. So by me, the push came from folks like myself that are out in covert vehicles conducting surveillances on career criminals. Whereas in other places, it's coming from the top levels of government, like mayors and managers and elected officials that have seen something in the news, have seen something in a government publication, and say, my city or my county needs this kind of technology and is then being funded from those top levels. And the thing is that a lot of this can be done on shoestring budgets. A lot of the crime desk stuff, the actual desks that folks are sitting at receiving all these sensors, it's just logging into systems that you already have access to and putting a person there to be the central collection point.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah. So I, you know, I come from the uh world of air and space operations where we have theater battle management core system, hundreds of millions of dollars in these capabilities to put that thousand-mile screwdriver out there so we can have a three or four star say, hey, move this tanker over there and do that. That's not what we want to do, by the way, but that's what ends up happening. Hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this. We, you know, the origins of things like Slack come from uh what we've learned in the Air and Space Operations Center 20, 30 years ago. So all that wasn't new to us when it came came to us in the private private world. But that is not what you're trying to do, correct? You don't need hundreds of millions of dollars of capability to do this, you just need small incremental capabilities. Am I right or wrong there? Well, it depends on the need.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

And this is where I uh this is where I keep on debating our my old community on this is where what is the need you're trying to satisfy? Because if the need is to support folks in the field, you don't need a whole lot in the office. But if your need is to be recognized as having a good command center, then that's gonna look totally different. So what is the need you're trying to fulfill? If it's like trying to keep up with the Joneses next door, saying like that other agency's got this big command center, there's LED lighting and awesome logo on the wall and you know ginormous video screens, then you're gonna invest differently in that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Isn't that the same as saying, do you want to be something or do you want to do something? That's exactly it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah. You could you can have this awesome optics of an operations center that has the illusions of federated command and control, if you want to put it that way, or distributed leadership or however you want to put it. The illusion of that, or you can actually go after that. And I think that's what I saw you write in the last few weeks uh after your experience down in in Atlanta is is just that is you know, what is what is the desired outcome? If you're trying to reduce crime, if you're trying to do, you know, increase response times, this is, I think the direction you're talking about, the application you're using, is going to achieve that. Whereas uh if you follow the military approach, and I'm not saying not to follow this, by the way, I'm just saying that's gonna cost a lot of money. It's gonna give you the illusion of control, illusion of operational centers, and of course the uh the ability to go take a photo op in there to go, hey, look what we're doing, all this money, but it's not gonna fix anything. Moose, any thoughts on that, brother?

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, I mean, I think, Lou, it seems like what you're describing is like systems that enhance orientation and compress ootaloops at many scales from the from the officer down on the front lines, maybe if they're surveilling or walking a beat or whatever, uh, and all the way up to the the strategic level of law enforcement, too. It just seems that that the systems hopefully improve implicit guidance and control that make for speedier bootaloops.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, and I think we have to ask ourselves is who's driving the strategic changes or the strategic shifts? Is it people running tech or is it people doing the job in the field?

Mark McGrath:

I think do you think that a lot of the there's a lot of the designers of those softwares are they are they connected enough to the people down the deck that they understand really what what an officer goes through when they're doing surveillance in a covert car, for example?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

It's gonna depend on the company. Because we run so many different types of systems in my area and and in my center, those developers and engineers actually fly out to us, they ride with us in the field to see what it's like on the other end of this. Yeah. Because it's like this is this is the person that you're supporting. You're not supporting the person at the desk, you're supporting the person in the field through the person on the desk. Many times the response has been, I never realized you used this technology in the in this way. I'm like, you mean we're using it in a way it wasn't designed? Like, we didn't even know how it was designed because the training program was so horrible. We had to figure this out by ourselves. We learned all the hacks and the shortcuts and the workarounds, and then we realized that that's more efficient than the way it was actually designed. So I'm curious.

Mark McGrath:

I mean, so there is there is a ideally then there's a there's a bottom-up and a top-down and a lateral, right? Where everything, again, you would hope that uh the orientation is open and learning and feedback is is appreciated and it gain you gain more perspectives. I mean, it seems like the way you're describing it is like that people came down to gain the perspective of the of the officer out on the front lines to figure out what exactly he needs from a system that's gonna enhance, again, orientation, right? And speed up and compress those zoodoloops versus the opponent, the the person you're surveilling or the suspect, the offender, whatever for the proper uh the the jaywalker?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Is that what you're concerned about there?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Well, yes, that that's the big problem.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah. So that that we may we may get into the moral, mental, physical side of this here.

Mark McGrath:

Let me can I ask this, can I ask Lou, this do you find that uh the human qualities of policing wane at all because of an over reliance on technology? Does technology become so pervasive or so helpful or so useful that it starts to wane the human aspects of policing that are still important?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I think we first started seeing this with digital forensics, which is the extraction of data coming out of cell phones, social media accounts, computer systems, that that's been, you know, 15 years. And everybody's got digital forensics capabilities now to do these examinations on all these personal devices. And that's when we started seeing a reduction in the quality of interviews and interrogations.

Mark McGrath:

Tell tell us more about more about that. Ponch and I were just having a conversation about this types of thing. Well, like from the from the from the like the quality of it slipping, you know, like from an interrogation standpoint. Give us some color up.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, and I don't I don't want to blame the reliance on digital forensics. Maybe it's just the digitization of the entire society. Is this because we now have police officers that were raised on cell phones and social media that now now their interpersonal skills are lacking? You know, I don't necessarily think that it had to do with the digital forensics and policing units, meaning that our detectives can't talk to people. Maybe just society in general has a difficult time talking to people. You know what I'm saying? So you can't disappear discount getting out of a police car and talking to people on the street, walking into shops, talking to merchants, walking into a park, talking to moms and dads and grandmas. Like that aspect of policing cannot be discounted. But when you're glued to a screen waiting for the next alert to go off, telling you where the bad guy is, that that's not helping us.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So that's the fingers, pitching a fuel, right? Yeah, so that's the you gotta have that mission command, that leader's intent, that it's the same application. You gotta get out there and feel what's going on, right? You gotta be part of the system.

Mark McGrath:

It's like you were saying, Punch, about the the top gun bros. They pointed out to John Boyd that the human in the system is still the most important factor. The tech is not enough or the equations are not enough or whatever.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah, or just get back to the basics of people ideas and things in that order. So I think a lot of folks, even yesterday, and we're recording this the day after Secretary of War Hegseft went to Quantico, which at the last time I saw Lou Hayes, I believe, was we were in Quantico, or there may have been a time after that, actually. But people are upset because a leader did just that, right? Got the interaction, got the face-to-face time. By the way, a lot of folks that are upset about that, their orientation, the way they sell themselves to companies is exactly what uh Lou Lou just said is you got to get out there, you got to do the face-to-face interaction, you got to get out there and share your intent. And I think that's what policing is, is is about intent. Our intent is to protect you, is to make sure there's a presence, to make sure laws are followed, right? It's not to come here and arrest you, right? I mean that may be what the end state could be. But again, it's it's that presence of leadership, that leadership by walking around. And I think that's that what you're really talking about? Yeah.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

And I think we've lost that because you're now glued to a screen that's receiving dozens of sensor types, and you're trying to be efficient, right? But in being efficient, you're almost losing effectiveness, right? You're optimizing the wrong thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

It's funny you bring that up. Companies are now talking about operational effectiveness, and they think that we can come in there and just help them with technology. And it comes back down to the basics. It's the human side of things. How do you interact with not just not just with your technology, but with other humans? And you and I know that human sense making or sense making requires people at the tip of the spear, people out there doing things. And again, I want to bring back that finger spits and good fuel. You gotta you gotta have that fingertip feel of what's going on in the environment, and you don't get that from behind a desk, right? So the lessons here are not unique to policing. These are the same things that organizational leaders need to understand. You can't just manage by email, manage by conference calls. You gotta get out there and feel it, right? So, and Lou, I think the application of, I'll just call it what John Boyd gave us, the the understanding of how to get out there and and and be part of the system, is what you're doing. Can you build on that some more?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So all this technology is and if we're using the technology for crime fighting, which is the bulk of the bulk of what it's being used for, it's investigating, preventing, interrupting crime, and then ultimately apprehending the offenders. That's what most of this technology is really good at. So what it still requires is police officers being in the field putting handcuffs on people, right? You still need to stop the speeding car, you still need to find them hiding in the under the porch, you still need to put go hands-on with these folks. You're never gonna remove that aspect of policing. I I was just looking back at pictures from my department from over a hundred years ago, and I said, not much has really changed about the people. Like I have a gun, handcuffs, and like we're still doing pretty much the same thing. Now, uh, yeah, I drive a car, I could get places faster, but I still need to confront bad people in bad places. And when I look at Boyd Zoodaloo, I look at these real-time crime centers being efficient versions of observe. And then I look at the orientation phase as being this repository of collective intelligence. So we can have intelligence bulletins that are pushed out with the intention to get everybody on the same page so we're all operating from the same mental modeling of what the world looks like, what crime looks like. But none of that matters if you don't have a good strategy. Right? And the strategy is going to change based on the type of information that you can bring in. That if you're able to bring in certain sensors or get certain alerts, your strategy needs to change every time you bring in a new bit of technology. But the the human portion is that action is that you have to actually do something and intervene in the in the real world. Right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

That's that that's that's the piece that a lot of folks uh building the technology don't understand.

unknown:

Right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So what you described there is uh, you know, we get into theory every now and then and affordances with the uh and medium is the message, and and I'm I'm sure Maurice will bring more of that in here in a second. But the idea is as you get more technology, the adjacent possible, we we have more possibilities, which means we have to adapt our strategy. We have to understand the external environment, those new technologies that not only we have, but possibly what the criminals have, right? And that drives our strategy. Is is that does that work with both of you guys thing for sure?

Speaker 3:

I think so. Yeah.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I mean, to take, for example, you know, I I didn't work with drones in the beginning of my career, but then as my as the career progressed, I started working with helicopters and airplanes. So air assets, which are very expensive. You're burning fuel and uh and these sometimes hard to get up, uh, they're hard to get to your area. But then drones came up, and this is basically mini helicopter, mini airplane at your disposal. And the teams that work with the helicopters have a much easier time jumping to working with drones than those that are just now starting to work with drones. Because when you have somebody that's overhead you in a helicopter or watching on a screen what that their drone video looks like, you should behave differently on the ground. Your strategy is different. You let air units kind of find things for you. There's thermal images, there's night vision, that there's different capabilities that they have that changes what you do on the ground. It changes your action, it changes your strategy.

Mark McGrath:

It adds perspective. It helps add perspective and uncover blind spots. They can loiter longer, they can, they can, they can sustain longer. Right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

You know, it's just kind of reminds me of our uh like a TAC P program or a FAC A program in the military where you in the Marines, and let's talk about the Marines. Um, Marines love to have a TAC P or a FAC A actually a TAC P who has an aviation background because they know what they bring, they understand the capabilities, right? And I think um, Lou, do you guys ever integrate people that have that? Let's just say you somebody's flying a drone or or or working in drones, you ever bring them to work with the police officers in the field directly without, you know, just to understand what the context is. Have you guys looked into that yet? For sure.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

And some of the some of the strongest folks that are up in the planes, like the observers, not the pilots. I mean, a lot of times the pilots are is a contractor, right? And like never been the police. They're they're just moving the observation platform around. But the person that's directing them to where to go, working the cameras, they've all come from a ground perspective. And the best ones are ones that have come from canine. Why is that? The canine teams just run a lot of searches, a lot of perimeters, just so much more coordination on the ground that they can now set that up from you know 900 feet up or or 1500 feet up. It's almost like you could tell who's been a canine operator by just the way that they talk from uh from the uh quite are you guys go ahead, Moose.

Mark McGrath:

Uh yeah, what kind of dogs do they they still use German shepherds? And the reason I ask is because somebody had sent me a reel recently about the Belgian Malinois, and I had no idea that that was a type of police dog that could like scale fences that Michael Jordan couldn't even get to the top of. Like, what the hell? You see those?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, so German Shepherds, Dutch Shepherds are still big. The Belgian Malinois keep gaining in market share there. But if you were to give me a dog, I'd take a bloodhound any day. It's not gonna bite you, but it comes down to sensing, right? It's gonna be able to distinguish the the that scent. Find a scent cone and start working in an area, and then you've got those biting dogs behind you.

Mark McGrath:

But like the Belgian Melano looks like a bionic dog, like like like like like a German shepherd with with better fitness and a cocaine habit or something.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, but again, to be or to do, right? Right. They're doing yeah, you know, the uh the bloodhounds, the way that they can distinguish scent right, is just far superior. So when you're coming into basically sense making, right, it's the scent that they're picking up and distinguishing one particular scent amongst what could be dozens that they're following. Yeah. That I mean that that's that's amazing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Like we haven't been able to find tech to do that yet. Well, it sounds to me like uh what you're doing is kind of putting an orchestra or jazz ensemble or a rock band together, is everybody has a capability, but to harmonize them. And I think that's what the RTC RTCC is doing, right? How do you harmonize not a line but bring these folks together and not just folks, but censors, including the the dogs? How do you bring it together to make sense of the environment so you can have a better picture and you can be more effective and efficient in it? So hey, are you guys capturing any of this? I mean, what's the doctrine on if there's any doctrine or dogma or or who who are who are the thought leaders in the space? It's rough.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I mean, uh, the National Real Time Crime Center Association has got most of the smartest people in the space working on this. And what I appreciated about them is they bring in diverse sets of opinions on it. Folks that have come at it from different spaces, like 911, right? I mean, 911 from the call taker and dispatcher perspective is like being completely up-ended by these real-time technologies. So 911, the technology vendors, the crime analysts, detectives and surveillance teams, patrol air units, right? Like they're all coming at it with different experiences, trying to figure out what we're gonna build locally. Because what works well in Chicagoland may not work well in some other area. How does a small suburb like mine fit into the greater Chicagoland picture is much different than how do we build this within New York City or Los Angeles?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So, hey, I'm kind of wondering this when it comes to teaming, and you and I talked about teaming in the past, but uh like communication, communication brevity, building situational awareness, uh transferring leadership, planning and debriefing, those type of things. Do you have any gaps in that? I mean, are you seeing any like gaps as as we start to as you start to integrate all this type of thinking?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, like there's a lot of gaps, right? And it and the teams that can bridge those are the ones that are more successful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

How are they bridging them?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yes. Yeah. So for example, we started using Slack. And what Slack has been able to do is bring us a safe and secure environment with certain compliance requirements by the by the government, and to share information, basically crowdsourcing it from our 911 centers, our Intel people, our air units. We bring them all together. So we start having basically open conversations on a bulletin board type environment that gets us all together on the same page. This is what we know, this is what we believe, this is the background on it, and this is what we want to do about it. This is high-level strategic overview and direction. Here's who's in charge of this, and here's the other radio channels that we're going to be communicating on. And that gives us the ability to share documents, links, maps, X files, video clips, all sorts of things. So we're all operating on the best. What it does is it democratizes all this information across a region. So instead of having disparate hubs, like different 911 centers operating on different platforms that don't talk to one another, we're able to say, despite that, we need to have some conduit that allows like for some sense of flow. So it becomes our it becomes our flow system for information. It's where everybody can put in and everybody can take out of that platform. That's kind of been the that's been the bridge for us. Despite what technologies that you're using as an individual agency, officer, organization, or region, we could bring you together using one common platform.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Let me ask you this. Are you including Joe Civilian in in any of these conversations? Are you do you look at the population as part of the extension of the team or where does that come in?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So it's tricky because you need to maintain a separation between sensitive information, right? So certain things need to be compartmentalized. We do have workspaces that bring in private sector, so security loss prevention, like organized retail crime teams within a lot of the big box stores, because they've got their own sensor networks out there. They know who's committing a lot of these organized retail crimes that they didn't share. So now we're developing networks to pull from their information, us sharing certain information with them as well. So I think the first phase of this is organized retail. And then there's always gonna be some open source or uh social media teams within the police that are monitoring, you know, the ring, neighbors, citizen, you know, those different platforms, because those are going to be videos or in a way, alerts for us to follow up on.

Mark McGrath:

Would organized retail be like smash and grabs, like they smash open jewelry store windows and steal watches, like that kind of organized retail, or it couldn't be.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

There's no real bounds on what's organized retail crime. I mean, some sometimes burglary is considered that, but I mean, we could even be talking about hijacked cargo loads. Hmm. You know, like 50-foot trailers that are being hijacked by uh by different transport companies. Interesting.

Mark McGrath:

Lou, can we what about the cons oh sorry, Punch, but what about the constraints in some urban areas that have said you know you can shoplift up to $900? You know, like you've seen some of these uh some of these cities that have that have basically crime sprees are are are uh you know have been fairly common because you can basically steal up to a certain amount. You know, how how does that affect the you know the human angle of policing? How does that affect an officer on the ground?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I mean, I think it demoralizes them more than anything. Yeah. You know, you start cr you start crushing the the will of the police that say, is this even worth it anymore? Like why should why should I risk myself and going after this if nothing's gonna happen?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I live here in I live here in the country. Is it happening in Chicago then that Lou? Is that happening now? I mean, are police officers?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I don't know about happening, it's happened. Okay, right under uh under different uh state's attorneys. Again, Chicagoland has got Cook County surrounded by a bunch of collar counties, and you could take DuPage County, which is a very tough-on-crime county, with a very staunch supporter of the police in the in the state's attorney's office, that was, in stark contrast to our previous state's attorney in Cook County, which was instituting these arbitrary benchmarks for retail crimes. So it was very demoralizing knowing that it was hard to get gun crimes and retail thefts and burglary charges getting approved. Things have definitely changed. She's doing a much better job. She's reducing the benchmarks for securing these indictments. So when I hear her speak in front of us, like it energizes me because now you get a different posture.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I think when I was there with you in Chicago, we you talked about this a little bit. This is several years ago, where we're talking about systems driven behaviors is you would walk me through where, hey, this is where you're going to see a lot of crime, and over here you're going to see these, they're not going to be a lot, it's not going to be a lot of crime in this space, right across the street from each other, whatever it may be. But that system driven behaviors, you've you've seen that with what Moose brought up. Up with the $900 benchmark or line there for retail theft, right? Oh, for sure.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, the environment adapts too because you said, you know, you're talking about being on the ground and interacting with the environment. Like, you know, I live here in Manhattan and the CVS right here on the corner here in the West Village. You know, there was a time where like razors and certain things were behind the lock, and you have to push the button and the guy comes. Now it's like almost everything. So if you want to get gummy bears for your kid, you have to push a button and they're gonna they're you know, like more and more and more aisles have these plastic things with the locks, the locks on it. I was gonna have, I had two other medium as the message comments. One was about here in Manhattan. I noticed, you know, I'll be there in a little bit going through Penn Station, and you see these cops, and they're all on their phones. Like they're all looking down at their phones, almost all of them. Not not not it's just a general observation, you know, because you're talking about how some of these younger cops, they're they're um, you know, they they grew up in an age in technology where someone like me, born in 1976, did not, right? So I also noticed that to your point about like situational awareness and going into the communities and going into the stores, if you ask a cop directions in New York City, they have to look at their phones. They don't they don't know the neighborhoods like they used to in the old days. You could ask a cop anything and anywhere in the five boroughs and he could tell you how to get there. Now, like, you know, where's this right around here? They have to all look at their phones. It's just a trend anyway, just a just a crude observation with no data other than my own. But the other thing I was gonna ask, uh you mentioned uh our animal friends that uh work in the work in the policing. What about horses?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Horses have kind of come out of favor lately. I think they're super expensive, and it seems like a lot of cities just kind of let you protest and burn the city down, right? So what do you need a horse for then? I mean, they're be they're beautiful animals. And they're and they're super ex they're super effective at busting up crowds, but crowd busting mentality kind of gone away from most police forces.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, interesting.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I wonder if you could talk about the type of criminals out there, the uh you know, what's it more organized crime, more more crime in general? What what are the trends that you're seeing and what are the possible threats if they're listening to this, uh, you know, which hopefully they're not.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So back, I don't know, 10, a dozen or so years ago, we started seeing street gangs moving away from uh street corner drug dealing into much more structured identity theft and financial crimes. I saw the vast majority of our caseload that was dealing with identity theft, bank customer impersonation, a variety of frauds that were coming out of the very exact neighborhoods that were typically selling drugs on street corners. And it's safer, it's more anonymous, it's easier to get away with, and now as you start adding technology to the piece like mobile deposits on phones, uh I mean COVID was uh contactless everything, right? It just saw identity theft type crimes just absolutely skyrocket. So more sophistication in terms of these scams of pig butchering coming from which is basically uh confidence schemes that get you to start uh investments or of you know, lend me some money, bitcoin scams, you know, like grandparent scams where somebody pretends to be uh grandkid.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So you know my dad was scammed out about 200k on a crypto scam. And it was, you know, we we unfortunately we caught it late. But can you talk a little bit more about that for let's you know, people over the age of 60, over 50 that are interested in making money? How are they targeting their orientation, these criminals? What are they doing to get inside their their oodloops?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So some of it is by sharing small amount. So you start by investing a small amount of money, right? As a victim, you invest a small amount of money and you're taken to it some dashboard that's showing your profits and your and your your interest going up and up and up. Well, that that's fake. That that's something that's that it's artificial, it's manufactured to show you that your investments are good. So you want to put more in it and more in it. It's not your money's not being invested. Your money's already been taken out of the system. So all you see is uh fake feedback.

unknown:

Right?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

That feedback is saying my money's growing, your money's not growing, it's long gone. So that's one of it is is you gotta be able to trust the system. Like you're not dealing with reputable banks on this. You're you know, somebody's selling you on some cheat code that they figured out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

But but I've seen them use names that are very similar to reputable bank reputable banks to do this, and that's how we figured out this was a scam, you know, when I when I got involved with it with my dad. But I have to know that I've got another question for you. Is this being under-reported because of the potential embarrassment? All that it's just underreported at the moment from your from your perspective. Yeah, and we and we don't know by how much.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

You know, we have no idea. I mean, especially if your kids are already trying to take away mom's driver's license, take control of or put her in a nursing home, right? Like the last thing you want to do as mom is tell them that, yeah, I'm not even responsible with my money because I gave it up to some scammers. Yes. Right? Like you you want to you want to maintain that that sense of of independence. Like the like the big like the Bitcoin ATMs in the corner convenience store, like tell me one legitimate purpose for those. If it's not to perpetrate scams, then it's for money laundering. Hmm. Why would you ever put money in and pay those types of fees? Anyone that's an investor, no investor is going to use the the corner convenience store or gas station Bitcoin ATM.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So these criminals are getting smarter, uh, and and clearly because of the technology, uh, the medium's changing, um, but they have access to your background on Facebook. They know who you are, they they know your search history, they can target you now. And this is this is very important. Um, and I I think this hasn't been reported much, and I don't see a lot of folks talking about it, but this is a serious threat to um your life savings. And I'm I'm talking to the you know, our parents, our generation, and even us, you know, we the latest and greatest AI is able to emulate or copy the voice of a child and and call into the home or your cell phone and say, Dad, it's me, I need money, right? Are you seeing more of that too? And and if so, can you talk about how to mitigate that for victims, potential victims?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I haven't seen a lot of the deep fakes that are kind of being warned against yet. It's coming. You know, that deep fake where somebody's being uh being copied or imitated. But I think that the common theme across all of these scams is I'm here to help you, and it's super important that you do it now and you don't tell anybody. I'm secretly helping. Listen, no government is secretly helping you ever. Like there are report numbers, and any time that I call a crime victim, I fully, fully expect to be questioned as to who I actually am. And I'm the real police. And I want folks to call back my agency, I want them to confirm it through badge numbers and IDs and official channels. Right? It's like, don't tell anybody. I'm here to help you with uh your grandson's bond or and it's not it's not super urgent. Like we'll work on we'll work on your timeline, we'll be accommodating to you. So I think when we talked to pattern recognition, it's the somebody from an authoritative position is trying to help you, unsolicited at that, right? Trying to help you that need to it involves money, it involves some sense of urgency, and don't tell anybody else. Like if you can look at all that constellation of clues or variables, like that's gonna be an indication that you're about to get scanned.

Mark McGrath:

Remember the Nigerian Prince emails?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, we've we've moved on from we've moved on from those are good ones.

Mark McGrath:

How about how about um you know where the three of us are in three different regions and you know the national news has an opinion one way or the other about like immigration and and criminals coming over the border? I mean, how how does that affect again, steering away from the political arguments, but from the actual functional day-to-day for officers on the deck? I mean, what are the things that they're uh encountering by and large with with non-citizens that have that have come into the country illegally?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So when when there are definitely elements of immigrants and coming in illegally with that undocumented, they're committing crimes. And when they commit crimes, it's very difficult to identify them. They're coming they're coming from countries, first off, that don't adopt like this Anglo-Saxon sense of like first name, middle name, last name. Right? They're the name the naming structure is differently, especially when you're looking at some of the South Americans that are coming up, that they have four names or five names, so it's hard for us to get good identification of who they are, right? And now add in an element that's where they could potentially uh be kicked out of the country, right? They're worried, they're worried about um they're worried about that. So there's an added incentive to obscure what their names are, right? So it brings in a dynamic that the citizen criminal it complicates it, right? It's more difficult than dealing with a citizen criminal, just by nature of identifying them, and then by connecting them across agencies. So when you're traveling across the country, one of our teams was just made an arrest from somebody from Washington State yesterday, and the person's coming they're coming from uh from Europe. They're hard to identify because the names are are different. So we're trying to figure out fingerprints and uh and DNA and facial recognition technology. Facial recognition has been huge in handling some of the immigrant crime. So I don't want to get into it.

Mark McGrath:

Isn't it true that it's not just any one region or any one country? I mean, there's there's people coming.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean, if I look at four nationals that we've arrested within even the last year, it's been from Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, Romania, Italy, England, Ireland, they all got their own scam. And I mean, almost like to a T, almost as if every country's got like their own little uh, you know, modus operandi, like the type of crime or scam that they're involved in. It's wild.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I would have never imagined seeing that. Hey, Lou, uh, can you talk a little bit about um let's go through a scenario here? And I hear arguments that, hey, you know, the police drew a weapon on somebody. So the mind of a criminal versus the mind of a police officer. So you got a heightened sense of awareness. You're called onto a scene, there's a potential threat out there, and that threat starts charging you, right? Can you walk us through, just based on what you understand of about the mind of a police officer and potentially a criminal, what's actually, you know, people are like, ah, the police officer should never shot this person. Well, you're not that police officer. You're not there in that context. You don't have that training. Can you help our listeners understand what what it means to be a police officer in this environment today, with with with you know being attacked by potentially media and then being attacked by a criminal and then the training that they go through and what's actually going through the processing uh through their individual oot loops as they're in that context. Yeah, that that's packed. Like like we should probably talk about this for no less than two or three days. Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's there's psychologists that look at this all the time, but I think what's important here is, you know, my point of view is when I see a criminal attacking a police officer, I'm like, that's probably the worst thing you could do, man. And let's give you some more context. Years ago when we went through SEER training for fighter aviation, you are taught when if you're shot down and marines are coming at you with loaded weapons, you don't run at them. They're there to save you, but they also have to clear the area and make sure that you're not a threat to them. They're coming in to shoot, right? That is the mentality that we're taught as is fighter, you know, from fighter aviation. If you eject over bad guy land and the marines come to get you, don't run after them. Don't pull out your gun and run after, right? So take that type of thinking and apply it to your world and tell us, you know, help our our listeners understand what's what what I think a lot of this comes down to how we train and condition our police.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

And it's not only through formal training, but it's also through just all these other exposures that they've had. Exposures through watching police TV shows, watching YouTube of police officers being murdered. Trooper Brian Colts was the very first police officer that was ever killed, captured by his dash cam. And it it was shown to me in 1998 in the police academy. And it was one of those moments where, like, now my family also needs to watch this. And it became a training tool that started the whole, let's use body cam and dash cam to train our police officers. And when we do that, we let them know of all the bad things that can happen on this job. But I do think there might be almost unintended consequences of developing a hyper paranoia or like a hyper uh vigilance that becomes unhealthy. Right? Because it it creates almost a mismatch of reality. So we've got this orientation asymmetry where what you think is going to happen, which is everybody's out to kill you, everything is a threat, is not what reality is. A subsection of it, but how much of that threat really exists? And to what level of acuity does it exist? So that's part of the that's part of the equation, is what is the mindset that we're putting our our police officers through in training? But then there's also how does the brain operate in times of stress? We could go back to system one and system two with the works of Kahneman and Klein, and you know, system one being a very primal, naturalistic decision making based on its intuition and a heuristics-based, uh it's the mental shortcuts. And then you've got system two, which is the more analytical and the more rational and and and the the creativity-based, which is a much slower type of thinking. So how do our tactics right in our and our tactics being like how close to the actual threat are we, right? How does that impact if we can maintain that frontal lobe, that that system two type of thinking to process better? Right? Or are we starting to cut off that uh that frontal lobe and uh reverting back to more animalistic type thinking? So we're pushing this more strategic mindset in like slowing things down, don't be aggressing on the problems, to try to keep it the best thinking possible. Right? The more the most explicit types of thinking. Right in in um in UDLU terms, we don't want to revert everything back to that implicit guidance and control. There will be mistakes and there will be mismatches with that. So when police officers are afraid, for one reason or another, they start reverting back to that implicit guidance and control pathways. And they still they stop taking away some of the analytical and the rationale and the problem-solving aspects. The current push for police officers to de-escalate and to use crisis intervention, those are positive things, right? Because you you want to try to maintain your composure. Every police officer knows that there's folks that get on the police radio and they start screaming, and everybody that's coming to help you is now getting amped up. They're getting nervous and anxious, versus somebody else, a more seasoned officer getting on the radio, experiencing the same exact shit show out there that's calm, collected, clear, very methodical on the radio. The responders that he's getting to help are gonna be cool and collective, right? So there's the there's this contagiousness aspect that we that we talk about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So that's one side. On the other side, you have a non-cooperative person. I'm not gonna say criminal, but just somebody who thinks that, hey, F the police, you know, they're all wrong. So if you have that context where you're everybody's amped up, they're coming to a scene, a situation, and their senses are heightened, they're ready to for action or whatever, they're they're leaning on that system one. Now you got this non-cooperative person that hasn't gone through any psychology, it hates the police and starts going at them. That's what I'm concerned about is when you see things like that, why would you put yourself, you know, just again, non-cooperative person, just why would you attack the police? I don't understand that. What what what are they trying to gain out of that?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I would say, I would venture to say that the vast majority of police uses of force that that we collect data on in my agency, let's say, is for somebody to get away. Right? It it's like basically I will attack or resist with the intention of ultimately getting away and not be taken into custody. I'm not sure if anybody's got really good answers about just these unprovoked attacks. Like, why would somebody walk up to a police car and just start firing point blank into the side windows and basically execute the police?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

That's ha that's happened. I mean, I've I've seen one a lot of times. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And but that what that does, going back to your point about your 98 video, is you know, you're a police officer, you see these reports or whatever on X or TikTok about something happening, you get the the notification about this. That that's got to do something to the psyche, you know, of the police officer, the the police. I mean, it's it's it it it's it's gotta be uncomfortable being a police officer. In fact, we we don't have time to go into today, but the the when it comes to trauma, um the way I understand it is first responders have more trauma than military personnel, right? Based off the line of work. Because you you see more than we'll ever see in a lifetime, uh more than likely. I mean, there there are some special operators that see a lot of awful things. But in general, uh and I'm just kind of painting a picture, maybe we could have another conversation on this in the future, but it changes your orientation, which changes how you sense, decide, and act, right? When you see things like that.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean, this job changes you, right? I mean, you're 28 now, and I I wouldn't say I'm a happier person now than I was 28 years ago. You know, I mean the when when you're kind of forced into seeing bad things, that just kind of chips that just chips away at you. I think that the things that I have positive is that I have a positive home life, I have a positive support structure, I have a team of believers that I that I hang out with you know from church and in my in my personal life, you know, that kind of recalibrate me. So that's positive, you know. So when we're talking about you know officer wellness and resilience, you know, you gotta do things that are that remind you that you're doing the right things for the right reasons, right? Like you with a sense of purpose. Like this isn't a crusade, right? But you can still make small changes, small positive impacts on your community without it being like this over overarching crusade that you're trying to fight. But this is why there's entire fields of psychology that are dedicated to first responder psychology and first responder wellness. It's it goes back to the human aspects.

Mark McGrath:

I mean, that's a big ass, you know, the human aspects, right? Do those like because we were talking earlier about things like body cams and dash cams, and you know, the medium is the message and has an effect on people and the way they behave, just like you're saying, the drones have a way that they behave, you know, how much of the human element of policing is lost with tech and does it need to does it need to have sort of have a restoration of the human aspects, the human elements of it?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean, if all you deal with is criminals because you didn't bother getting out of your police car and meeting nice people, what impact does that have? Your exposures are manipulated because you've isolated yourself from the good people of the community. Yeah. You know, I was on bicycle patrol as uh as a young officer, and like it was all community relations. It was all talking to shop owners and folks walking their dogs and moms with their kids in the park. Like it was all dealing with good people in the community.

Mark McGrath:

It's like the village with Bing West. Did you ever read that book we we had Bing West on the show to talk about the Marine Combined Action Program? And they found that the assimilation and engaging with the human element served a lot more purpose than the sort of the, you know, the capital applications of combat of dumping tonnage and shooting people and having high body counts and things like that. And they found that by integrating, you know, 15 Marines into a village of 2,500 people, they had a lot more effect on on turning the tide than than they were doing by by uh forced coercion, you know, raw combat. I wonder if um, you know, I know that like like I grew up in Pittsburgh and there was they called COP, it was community-oriented policing, and we had police that walk around on beats and they knew they knew everybody and they knew all the store owners, and you know, kind of like you were describing earlier. I mean, how far removed are we from that? And when it takes something like that to to restore sort of the you know, sort of reorient the people that are that are inherently hostile to police, you know, for for whatever for whatever reason. Or is there an inherent hostility that when you know a police officer walks into a store and and they're they look like RoboCop? I mean, they've got helmets and bullet-proof vests and every every weapon and every you know, lethal, non-leafhal thing they could what what what kind of tone does that set? You know, I mean, I don't know. Just thinking about the like the restoration of sort of the human aspects of uh of policing, kind of like again, kind of like a combined action sort of uh uh approach that that that's been that's been tested and proven and used even as recent as Afghanistan. It reduces a lot of violence and reduces a lot of uh hate and discontent for lack of a better term.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I think one of the worst things we did in terms of community policing is by making it a position. Right? We took certain officers and says, you're now the community officer. And what and what that did is it said your role is to schedule events, walk around, make friends with the with the public, but it also sent a different message, much more implicitly, which was the rest of you, that's not your job anymore. So we had these we now have officers that their whole jobs are to plan special events and meetups and coffee with cops and Citizens Police Academy, great programs, but that's their role. And it's basically told the rest of us that you don't have to be involved in that stuff, which is the wrong message. It needs to be thematic across everybody. Everybody is a community officer, right? Everybody needs to get out of their car and talk to folks. So there's some agencies that are getting that. Right, they're they're basically realigning that way.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, that that that ideal of these are our sons and daughters that protect and serve us. They they come from us. This is our community, they're protecting life, liberty, and property. It feels to me that there's there's been a big disconnect. As I don't know if it's tech, I don't know what it is, but you know, I mean, I think tech has a might have a role in it, but when you lose that human, when you lose that human touch, you lose that human aspect, I think that that's where I think that's where things start to go awry. And I think where things start to get disconnected. You ever read uh like hear about uh you know, one tribe at a time, Jim, James Gantt, you know, like that that kind of approach where, again, it goes back to like we had Bing West on talking about uh the combined action program in Vietnam, where they they weren't outside the village, you know, they were in the village. You know, and John Boyd talked about that in Patterns of Conflict um in the transcript that you know the the Marines were successful and the Green Brays were successful because they were in the villages, not from coming in from outside the villages. And I wonder if uh if a lot of that sort of you know being from outside that that creates sort of that us versus them that we see, you know, because there is a there is a very clear us versus them, whether it's authentic or not, or whether it's you know, concocted or not, that people do have a um, not all, but many people do have a an animosity towards law enforcement that they don't have for firefighters, you know, they don't have for post office workers or whatever, you know what I mean? Like how does that how does how does the how can the human element, the people ideas and things, how can that disarm the uh in in and sort of reorient what policing is actually the value of it, keeping us all safe, you know?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I also think that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Yeah, but in that it's the opponent it's the opponents of policing, you know, that want to defund us. They're the ones that are loud and vocal.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Right? That they're shouting from the rooftops and waving banners. I still believe that there's a lot of great people that are supporting the police, they support a law and order society that just simply aren't as loud. They're not they're not gonna host a a rally, they're not gonna, you know, hang a banner on that. But I've always measured it locally by how many trays of cookies or trays of food come into the police station, you know, on the weekends and during the holidays. And it's a lot. You know, there's still people out there that love us, that support us. Uh, there's still places that we go that uh we can't buy a cup of coffee because somebody wants to to to treat us to it. So just a gentle reminder to all the the police listeners out there that people support us. We just don't hear them as much.

Mark McGrath:

Well, we we have to even the ones that don't support you, they certainly want you to show up when they're in the the situation. We didn't really talk on on some of the other things that you you probably see a lot of, you certainly see it a lot here in a city like Manhattan. Yeah, the you know pandemic use of of opiates. And and are are cops still carrying Narcan? Is is opiate abuse still something that you're seeing a lot of that that officers on the ground are are dealing with?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, it there was kind of a separation between urban and rural. So in the rural, you're seeing the path, and then in the urban areas, you were seeing the heroin and the and the opiates. Basically, the police don't care about weed anymore. It's everywhere. Kind of evidenced by just walking down this the the street and it just just permeating the air. I feel like it's almost like ruined a lot of the urban areas, but but just haven't exposed myself to the to the stink weed.

Mark McGrath:

Oh man, it's here in Manhattan, it's everywhere. I mean, it's in it's you walk by Wall Street offices and you smell weed, you walk into the subway, you walk out of a restaurant, you walk through a park, you walk down the street, it's literally everywhere. What is funny though, having my you know, my family's originally from here and having uh grown up around this place a lot, you know, uh coming here quite often, I do notice that now living here full-time, I do kind of joke to myself, it does seem a lot more mellow than it had been in years, in years past, because maybe it's just because everybody's high on weeds. Like I guess back in the 80s when I was a kid and I remember shit being so crazy, I guess everybody was on Coke. I guess they've traded it for weed, so it's a lot calmer. But I mean, so that's that's more, I mean, they're not busting that anymore, right? I mean, like the what effects has that had on narcotics cops?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I'm kind of shocked. I'm kind of shocked that there's still drug units in police departments. Yeah. You know, there's still a lot of money involved in it, and there's still a lot of other illicit crimes. You know, you start getting into human trafficking, you start getting into uh weapons, money laundering. No, they're all connected to drugs.

Mark McGrath:

Talk more about the human trafficking. I mean, that's a that's a that's a big one I think that people don't talk enough about, although that when you when you go into places and you see, you know, in the airport bathroom, you see all the warning signs and things like that, you know, what what are you seeing from your perspective on on that? And what would you want people to know and orient to on on the concept of human trafficking? I mean the concept, I mean the reality, the realities of it.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean you've got vulnerable folks that are being exploited by organized criminals, making money, deriving power off of others' misfortune. So, you know, I've I I've seen girl runaways, right, that just get trapped into these criminal networks. They're getting exploited, they're being forced into committing other crimes, identity thefts and organized retail crimes. And I mean that's not even talking about the sexual side of this stuff. Yeah, they're being used, they're being used as pawns in a game that's so that creates an insulating layer from the actual criminals that are making a lot of money on this.

Mark McGrath:

How pervasive is it? How pervasive is it in the United States? Human trafficking.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I don't know. You know, and and and there's groups out there that that say it's in every community, and uh you know, I I I think that might be a little bit of an over-exaggeration. But I think it's so lucrative that these organized criminals have figured out how to manipulate. I mean, that this is a this is a psychological game that they play, right? It's it's psychological control over these victims of human trafficking, end up becoming offenders in other crimes. So it's up to us as the police to figure out how these folks play into it. I worked a case maybe last year where I was able to identify three of the women that were being trafficked. And it wasn't them that I wanted to build criminal cases and indictments on, it was their handlers that stayed just insulated enough to be out of reach of being arrested and indicted. It was super unfortunate. So how do we handle this? Do we still do we still indict the do we still indict the women that basically don't want to leave that environment because it's all they know, it's all it's how they've been it's how they've been groomed and conditioned. How do you set out a survival? Survival.

Mark McGrath:

How do you how would you, you know, we've heard the term cops and robbers and cat and mouse and whatever, and there's and there's orientation versus orientation, you know, how do you see the criminal orientation? And I get it, there's different types of crimes, right? Human trafficking is different than petty larceny, and there's different than assault, and different than battery and you know, murder and everything else. But generally speaking, like the committed committed criminal, the committed criminal organization, how do you see them reorienting given all the technological changes and other things? Now, granted, they don't have the same legal constraints because they don't follow municipal codes and the laws of this, you know, this land. How do you see their orientations evolving, say, since you've been in since 98 to now? Because let's face it, if if they're not reorienting as faster than faster than you are, they're gonna win every time, right? So, how how do you see that evolution?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

I mean, we see we see them adapting to our tactics all the time. So some of the technology, it's not a secret, it collects license plates. And so now what do we see? Ghost license plates, no license plates, stolen license plates, and those are all in attempts to throw us off and put us on a on a different trail. They know that we're using drones, they know we're using helicopters, so what do they do? They know how to use tunnels, roadways that go underground, and tree canopies. They they understand that. So they're evolving, right? And and they're they're evolving without the, like you said, the without the need for department policy. They didn't have to come up with some structure or SOP or checklist. Yeah, right, yeah. They just figured it out organically. So what I feel like we're in now is we're in such a rapid state of tech growth in public safety that we have the opportunity to kind of like we got the momentum. And we need to exploit that momentum and use it before they figure it out. Right?

Mark McGrath:

Because once they figure it out, uh once they're reoriented to it, then no good. Yeah.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Right. And I guess that's that's the other side of police transparency. We want to be supported by our our citizenry and the constituency of these elected officials. We want that support. So we want to talk about the things that we're using, how we're using it, we want to showcase our successes, but at what cost? Because the cost is giving up tradecraft, the cost is explaining how we do things so somebody else could then use it against us and find the countermeasure. So it's a balancing act of how much do we give up, how much do we talk about, what do we release, and is showcasing what we do actually counterproductive to us?

Mark McGrath:

What do you see in your your drift through time is your you know your orientation has changed quite a bit since 1998? And you see young officers coming into the force now. Has the vocation changed? Like the vocation reasons that were calling you to be uh a law enforcement officer, are are they different, similar? What where do the where how would you compare and contrast of uh, you know, this Gen Z that was born after 9-11, has no, they don't know what it's like to live without cell phones and that sort of thing, and and and social media. Do you see any differences in their vocation to becoming police officers? And and what similarities are there? I'm I mean, I'm sure there's both.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean, back when, when you became the police, you kind of stayed put and you did 25 and 30 years, and you were looking for this pension at the end, and then unfortunately, a couple years later you died, and that was kind of the life cycle of the police. But now you've got folks coming in, they're sampling it for a little bit, they're giving it a couple of years, they're going out, they're finding greener pastures and private industry, they're working for the tech companies that we work with in the real-time crime center space, and they kind of float in and float out sometimes. So that person that comes in is becoming rarer and rarer to stick with it, that this has been a calling for them their entire life, and this this is what they want to do.

Mark McGrath:

Have the standards shifted? Like I know in the military say they're it's harder and harder to find kids that are physically fit and and not on SRIs, SSRIs, or that kind of thing. Is it harder to find good recruits for police forces?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I mean, I I tested back in 1997, I was one of 182 candidates for a position, right? One position. And then uh you go through some rough spots where where there's questioning whether or not you're being supported and properly funded, how secure this job is gonna be for you, the stability. Now you're getting 30 and 40 applicants. So the pool of folks is is really reduced. So you can only figure that you're not gonna be getting the best of the best. You you know that there's a reason why high school sports are classified based on the sizes in athletic competitions, right? You don't have small high schools competing against ginormous high schools in in sports because of the the talent pool that's there.

Mark McGrath:

Right. Do you find you know the numbers have reduced the quantity, but do you also see that in general the quality is a lot different?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, I think it goes hand in hand. When you get more, you get to hand pick that that quality candidate that comes out. You know, there was there was there's a movement years ago to to switch over to four-year degree requirements in a lot of police agencies, and they said we're gonna get them more professionalized candidates like, but are you? But like I've seen plenty of horrible, horrible reports being written by college graduates. And I've seen excellent veterans from those that didn't.

Mark McGrath:

How about veterans coming in? Is that still a good pool for you guys?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

That is a great pool for us. They they understand discipline, they under, they understand a sense of mission, they understand sense of teamwork and camaraderie. Yeah, we we very heavily recruited into the military.

Mark McGrath:

How much impact do you have in in in, I guess let me back up. So you you have a solid understanding of authentic John Boyd and Kinevan and Oodaloop and everything else. What are the learning opportunities inside of law enforcement? What's the opportunity cost of not learning and understanding those things as you do? You know, what would be the benefit if more officers, more people in law enforcement understood those things as you do?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

You know, there's system dynamics at play, right? From whether it be systems thinking or complexity thinking, you start bringing in Kanevin to understand what the dynamics and the relationships are between variables in the system. Those things have radically, radically changed the way that I look at my job and what my my sense of purpose is here. It's changed the way I act as not only a police officer or detective, right, and operationally, but it changes what I do when I'm asked to help design new policy. I'm a supervisor. So how do I supervise and in what context do different styles of supervision, leadership management, you know, like that whole debate? How do you behave as a supervisor in what context? As a trainer, how should you be training these things? The differences between practice and education and training and repetition and scenarios and debriefing, how does all that factor into it? How does the how does information flow throughout the system? So from data to intelligence to defining department strategies to defining incident strategy, all of those things are all refined when you have a systems complexity or Kinevin thinking model behind you. The uh I just recently went through a command school for supervisors and command level folks in policing run by a university. And at the end of it, I basically offered up, I said, this class needs a healthy dose of systems thinking and bringing all these disparate topics. It's almost as if the instructors would come in as a patchwork. What if we were able to bring this together into how all of these different things fit? Right? How does officer wellness and use of force training relate? How does real-time crime center technology and use of force interconnect? How does department strategy impact recruitment? All of it, all these things are just interconnected. And there's there's few folks that are looking at from that interconnected web. They don't want to look at it in a networked way. They want to look at each of these things as its own individual piece, division, unit, office, with its own little command structure. So I think when you go to bring it together, it's exhausting. It is exhausting when you start bringing it together. So it's just easier to leave it separate and let folks do their own thing.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah. So like from a so I mean, I guess that is you're describing silos essentially inside of inside of organizations that that don't want to play nice or cooperate with others or share information and that kind of thing.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, maybe they don't see how they relate.

Mark McGrath:

Right.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

So maybe it's not that they don't want to, it's just they don't see how this impacts another part of the system.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

You know, when you push on the balloon, right, it's gonna blow out somewhere else. Yeah. You know, and and and it's hard to get all stakeholders from all these teams together in the same room to talk about these. Because sometimes, let's be honest, the function of those units is to make sure that the unit remains, right? Like officer wellness. Right, like the worst thing that for officer wellness cottage industry would be for cops to just be well. Because all those folks are because all those folks are out of a job.

Mark McGrath:

That's right. Well, if crime went away, if if if we defeat all the criminals, there wouldn't be there wouldn't be a need for cops anymore. I've heard that about like charities. Like the charity for the pet project of whatever, you know, disease or who knows what, you know, if it goes away, then the charity goes away, and then we don't have the we don't have the uh the cycling race anymore, or we don't have the ability to make everybody wear a, you know, whatever, I don't know.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Black tie galas no more.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, that's somebody's uh that's somebody's livelihood. Interesting. Well, close us out, Lou. What do you think? Uh what are you reading anything exciting? What what are things that others should be thinking about to reorient their perspective to law enforcement in this day and age?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

This is all about maintaining a detective mentality. Right? The detective mentality is that you might have your own theory or theories of what happened or how the world works or what the world should look like. Everybody's got their own theory or theories on that. And it's up to us to disprove them one at a time to refine what reality is. When we piece together criminal investigations, we we seek out information to disprove things that we believe. That's a much healthier way is seek out not which confirms to you, but that which attacks your theory. Wow, that sounds sad. That's what the most that sounds very John Boydy. And I think we can do that by adopting a systems or complexity approach. I mean, that's what brings guys like you know, you Ponch and me together, is this complexity side of things. And when when we see how our actions impact things upstream or downstream, and we have a greater appreciation for the system, right? It's not what makes lose life easier, it's not what makes lose teams easier, it's not what makes my department easier, it's what makes the community safer and healthier, right? That's ultimately our our customer, right? The customer is not my team, not my organization, but the citizen community.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, the community, yeah. Well, good stuff. Well, we could go on for hours. We'll uh we'll put a pin in this. And are you still keeping the Illinois model going, or is that getting revised, or how's that what's what's the state of that website?

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Yeah, the Illinois model was a way for me to stay connected to folks that were going through my classes uh and my workshops. It was a way for me to uh keep pushing information out to them. Run out of time. My kids are super busy. Home life, very busy, chaotic, but it still very much exists. There's still a lot of activity that that comes through that. The Illinois model.com is not going away anytime soon, but uh you're not going to be seeing the the posting with the with the the feverishness that that I had before. Uh most of most of where you can find me now is on LinkedIn. It's where it's where I'm preaching my own gospel.

Mark McGrath:

I used to be a big fan of John Boyd had a LinkedIn page. I don't know if you knew about that.

Lou Hayes, Jr:

Well he lasted for a couple of weeks, and it's assumed that somebody had to rap me out about that. That was a lot of fun.

Mark McGrath:

I mean it's there, especially when on somebody's you know, somebody would write some bullshit that had nothing to do with John Boyd, and you would come in and well, no, John Boyd would come in and say, I never said that. That actually made I've written some damning things about LinkedIn. I'm so fed up LinkedIn, the value is just I I don't see it anymore. But but that actually made LinkedIn enjoyable. So thank you for that for uh keeping me engaged for all those years. Yeah. So all right, Lou, for the sake of recording, we'll put we'll stop here. We'll uh we'll see you again. And uh thanks for thanks for coming on and uh we'll we'll we'll be in touch and we'll we'll do this again. Yeah, moose the podge, thanks guys. We'll see you later. All right, sweet.

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