Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates

Police Reforms Are Killing Cops

• Travis Yates • Episode 127

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A quiet surge in officer assaults is happening right under our noses, and most leaders aren’t talking about it. We dig into the policies, the pressure, and the missed accountability that turned a wave of “reform” into a spike in risk—even as violent crime trends downward from its 2020 peak.

Data matters more than slogans, so we walk through the numbers where mandated strict “last resort” policies saw significant increases in officer assault rates. Nationally, assaults hit record highs while many agencies doubled down on de-escalation training that still lacks rigorous scientific validation.

If you care about officer safety, real accountability, and reforms that actually improve outcomes, this is your moment to lean in. 

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Intro:

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice, and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Travis Yates:

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today. And I have a topic today that, quite frankly, is not really being discussed. And I'm not exactly pleased that I'm the one that sort of have discovered it and have been talking about it. You've been following us in our Substack, you'll know what I'm talking about. And I'm going to sort of review some of that and talk about what is actually happening with leadership that has created this. You know, law enforcement has, I will say, endured many reforms, more reforms in the last decade than in any time in history. And I want to sort of back that up and tell you that law enforcement should be reforming. Reforming is just a dirty little word for we should keep improving and keep improving. Now, traditionally, the courts have dictated some of those improvements, but keep in mind, many, if actually all of these reforms that I will discuss here in a minute have not been dictated by case law. And when I say case law, I'll give you know Miranda v. Arizona, we decided, okay, we have to start reading Miranda or you know, Terry v Ohio. Okay, we we can now do pat downs under certain parameters. And so the courts will dictate that for law enforcement. But what has occurred in the last 10 or 15 years, with the last 10 years specifically, is a lot of changes to the profession that have come from those outside the profession that leaders have just adopted. They've adopted with no evidence that they will work, and then when they adopt them and they don't work, there's just silence and the changes remain the same. I know I've said this before, but uh, you know, a terrible example is LVNR, lateral vascular neck restraint. And George Floyd did not die from an LVNR. You don't have to believe me, you can read the autopsy. He didn't die from a choke code, which is different. You don't have to believe me, you can read the autopsy. But before George Floyd, uh, many departments had LVNR as part of their use of force continuum, and it was always intermediate force because that's what it is. And if you're not familiar with what LVNR is, watch UFC. You know, you know, if you if you're in a jiu-jitsu, I think the term is choking them out, although it's not a choke, it's cutting the the blood off, you know, from the neck. But it's a very safe maneuver, like I said. Um, I don't think anybody here is going to be able to point to me where someone's been seriously hurt or killed through an LBR. They've been they've been studying this and teaching the train the trainer up in Kansas City for many, many years, which is LB and R. It's called other terms, but that's sort of a trademark name that they use for it. And that was removed from the vast majority of policies after George Floyd because of you know people lying about what happened to George Floyd and saying it was LBR, and you have national organizations like the IECP that said this should now be moved to you to deadly force only, which is crazy. You know, I I have a personal example of my department did the same thing, and I'm in a staff review of the new useful force policy, and the chief is announcing that this is now deadly force, and everyone's just sitting there just shaking their head yes. And I raised my hand and I said, but it's not deadly force. And the chief agreed and said, Oh, I know it's not deadly force. And I said, Well, why are we changing it? He goes, Well, it just looks bad. The truth is, no force looks great, it's up to our leaders to communicate that force and why we have to use it. It's up to our leaders to communicate that. A chief in Missouri that I highly respect, I saw a change in it, and I called even just say, What's going on here? You're a great chief, you're a great leader. And he said, Travis, I know. But he said at some point there was so much pressure from the community, community groups, and then I worked for a mayor, and he basically just finally said he made me do it. He goes, I know it's not deadly force, and so you he's you see these decisions being made uh without any uh, and by the way, if you're all if you all want to argue with that, let me just give you the definition of what deadly force is from the courts. It's anything that law enforcement does where there's a high risk of serious injury or death. No one ever can point to this being deadly force, but it was moved to deadly force in the vast majority of policies. And I get the when leaders have to do that, because if you have national groups like the International Association of Chiefs of Police or PERF, the police executive research forum where all the East Coast chiefs go to die and try to ruin other departments, and they're saying this is our standard policy now. I've got a caveat with that because these groups do not like me talking about them like this because it's the absolute truth. And most street cops listen to this know it's the truth. There's nothing that those groups have ever done that street cops have said, great idea. And uh, but they're very politically charged, right? The ICP themselves are getting a large chunk of money for the Department of Justice. And then, in consequence, you'll see the DLJ investigate departments, and they'll say, You're violating people's rights because you use LV and R. And they'll cite the IECP in the document saying how it should be deadly force only. So it's really, really sick of what's happening. But leaders do not stand up for this. Instead, they should be communicating about it. And so that's just a really terrible example because it's just tragic that we've taken that tool away from law enforcement. When guess what? What's your next choice? I mean, consider this. You ban LB and R, which is an intermediate force, which, if you're in a fight for your life, you could use the intermediate force and bring it to an end. You know, you put them to sleep for a few seconds to get them handcuffed. I've seen it done many, many times. No one ever gets hurt, period. Now you take that away. Now you're in a fight for your life. What do you have to do? What's your options now? Yeah, that's right. You're gonna have to probably use Deadly Force. So it's just really wild that we've done this to our profession, and leaders have done this. The other thing they've done, and I talked about this in an article. You can go to courageous police leader.com. Can't remember that, go to my name, travisyates.org, and you'll be a link to articles, and that will take you over to my Substack page. I write a weekly article every week, it's totally free. You just gotta go to Substack and sign up for it, and it gets emailed to you every week. It's the easiest way to get it. And it was this issue of use of force policy. Now, we've seen various renditions of use of force policy in recent years. You know, the first one was we need to put language in there that says the law enforcement has sacred of life, which is crazy because sometimes we're the only ones that believe in sacred life. Of course we do. We put a little language in our policy. Guess what? Didn't impact shootings whatsoever. Because come to find out, suspects that want to harm us could care less what our policy says. Well, then you see this policy language called last resort policy. And what that what those policy languages usually say is you will only use deadly force as a last resort when all other means have been exhausted. Well, that maybe sound great to an academic person or to a chief that doesn't care about the safety of their officers or to a community group, but what does that even mean? Right? Because you have to remember we're dictated by case law. And Graham v. Connor says that your force must be reasonable. Okay. It also says you cannot judge officers based on what you find out after the fact. You cannot judge officers based on the intent or motivation, even at the time. It's not for officers to know. Graham v. Connor says that officers have to make split-second decisions about their force, and you can't judge them after the fact. Meaning to be able to go after the fact and say, well, yeah, we see you use this force, but did you exhaust all other means? Was it a truly a last resort? You're judging them from after the fact. And so that's the issue with making that policy strict like that, rather than just what case law says. By the way, this is case law that has existed, Supreme Courts that were left, supreme courts that were right, supreme courts that are right down the middle. They have time and time again supported what Graham B. Connor said, which has been around since 1989. The other issue I have, the huge issue that we should have been pointing out, is what Last Resort actually does to law enforcement. The FBI used to do very extensive studies on law enforcement. They haven't in several years. I hope they get back to that. And you can say what you want about the FBI, but when they do a study, there it's solid. They've got some great, great individuals in their human behavior unit. They do extensive studies on law enforcement killing the line of duty. Most of you are familiar with the Lee Oka studies done by the FBI. They did a study called Violent Encounters. And if you go to that Substack page, courageouspolice leader.com, you'll see the article where I link to the study. And the documents called Violent Encounters. And what they did is they did a victimology study on the characteristics of officers killed in the line of duty. Meaning, if officers do certain things, they're more likely to get killed in the line of duty. And they give a whole list of things they are. One of them is officers that were killed in the line of duty. This is a quote, used force only as a last resort, end quote. So we're actually putting in policy, uh, language and training language that is conducive to getting more officers killed. It's not me saying it, that's the FBI saying it. And so when I I came across this, I read a research article. I read a research article called The Reasonableness Divide Comparing Community Members' Assessment of Force Reasonableness to legal standards. And here's a shocker in the study. The community at large does not understand what legal justified force is. Why would they? Once again, go to that article. That article is titled The Leader Playbook to Harm Officers. You can go to Substack and read that. And I link that up. And so I read this study that basically says shocker, when you use legal justified force, about half of the citizens think it's not justified. But here's what enraged me. This study was done by you guessed it, the police executive research forum out of Washington, D.C., a group that is supposed to be for law enforcement, making law enforcement better. The study said a recommendation is you should make your use of force policy comply with what the community expects. And then they cited South Bend, Indiana did this and made their use of force policy only as a last resort, completely violating the terms of Grammy Connor. And so I saw this. This was their only example of why this should be done because South Bend Indiana did this, and this makes everything better, so to speak. So I looked into South Bend Indiana, and here's what I found since they implemented that last resort policy, there's a clear before and a clear after. Now you would say, how could that be? Because that seems to it makes sense that if you don't use deadly force only as a last resort, that these metrics should be better. It should be less force because you're only using it as a last resort. Officers should not be as injured as much because you're not using force. Well, it's the exact opposite. When you don't use appropriate force at the right time, officers get assaulted more. And then when you get assaulted more, you have to use force more. Okay. And I've known this because I've taught a class called Seconds for Survival for about 15 years, which is a behavior threat analysis class, meaning how to predict where someone's going to be assaulted or not, how to predict whether someone's going to be violent or not. It goes on very scientific uh human behavior protocols that we talk about in class. And I watch thousands of videos and I see it every day, where someone is displaying signs they're about to get aggressive, and instead of quickly handcuffing them or quickly using a minimal amount of force to get them under control. We sit there and we talk and we talk and we give it time and we do all these things that we teach cops now in de-escalation training. And then what happens? The suspect votes the wrong way and they attack an officer. And then we have to use force, more force that tends to have to be used. And so I put this article out and I got a lot of feedback back. And so most cops understand this. They know they're working in a situation where it's much more dangerous today than ever before. And I decided to dive into it a little deeper. I wrote an article last week called The Last Resort Policy Could Be Your Last Day. A little bit dramatic, I know, but you can't argue with the numbers. So what happened after George Floyd was in several states mandated a statewide use of force policy, meaning a department couldn't just see what's best for their community and best for their agency, conducive to their training, and put out a use of force policy best for them. The state governments, the politicians made a blanket policy that every agency had to adopt. Now there's about two dozen of them that are crazy. But about I don't know, nine or ten of them actually did the last resort policy. Now there's others that are just as bad, but I'm just going to stick to the last resort policy. And I pulled all of those states. Um about a dozen states had policies that basically said you can only use this force as a last resort. Some said absolute last resort. Of course, they don't ever tell you what that means, meaning they could just prosecute you and fire you for any force because everybody after the fact can go, well, you should have done this or you should have done that. You see what I'm saying? Completely violating the Grand B. Connor standards, where it says you must judge an officer at the time with the information they know at the time based on reasonableness at the time. Last resort, by its very nature, lets you judge them after the fact. And so our leaders have permitted this, and it is mind-boggling to me. They've not only put officers at risk being fired and prosecuted, but uh being hurt, which I just told you about South Bend. Well, South Bend is just one example. That's the only example of a study mentioned, which is pretty weak. And so I pulled every state that had a last resort policy, and here they are New Jersey, Maryland, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia all have these extreme last resort policies that were passed in either 2020 or 2021. So you know hints it's from the George Floyd incident because we we tended to say that that had something to do with Vermont, Maryland, or Washington somehow. And then I went into each of the state's databases and I pulled their officer assault rate. Now, this is supposed to be reported to the FBI, but it's pretty amazing to me that I could only find the data on three states, and I had to work several hours to do this because they were they they hid them in a bunch of Excel spreadsheets. Virginia, Washington, and Maryland all passed these extreme policies, and they were the states that I could find the data on. So since this policy, this last resort policy was given to these agencies in Virginia, the officer assault rate has increased 123%. In Washington, the officer assault rate has increased 42%, and in Maryland, the officer assault rate has increased 12%. Consequently, nationwide, when many of these policies have changed, last year we had an all-time record of officers assaulted since the FBI has been tracking it. Does that say without a doubt it's because of policy? No, there needs to be more studies done. There will be no more studies done. It won't be done because that's what we do. We do some silly change or silly reform to make somebody feel good about it, and then we never look to see how it affected the profession. And we've got to somehow get away from that. In fact, just to prove to you that there's no studies done or even intended to be done, let me tell you, let me show you a quote from a study from 2020. It's linked in the article. Quote Quick and decisive action is typically taught to be the safest approach for officers faced with dangerous or unpredictable circumstances. Yep, that's right. Researchers have not been able to address these concerns adequately because, similar to most other police training curriculum, de-escalation training has not been subjected to rigorous scientific testing. So, in addition to the last resort policies, they've combined this mandatory de-escalation. Now, is de-escalation bad? Of course not. It's bad if you have to use it every time because there are people that cannot be de-escalated and you're giving them time to assault you, which I believe, I believe is what's causing the increase rate in assaults. 2004, 2024 wasn't all-time high. The ICP met just last week with all of our leading chiefs across the country. Do you think they've addressed this? You think they talked about why the assault rates increased? I guarantee you they didn't, and they won't. Probably more ideas coming down the pipe for more reforms and more changes. The ICP put out a model policy that said much of this language. And since then, nationally, officer assault rates have risen 53%. Now, why am I the one outraged about this? Why I'm the one talking about this? This doesn't make any sense, right? It just doesn't make any sense that this is a this is an issue that every police leader should be enraged about. And I can't find anyone talking about this. And so it's painfully obvious to me that nothing's going to be done. We're going to keep accepting policies and trainings that are getting more officers hurt. And it's time that we do something about it. I don't expect any organization to do anything about it. Quite frankly, unfortunately, I don't expect many leaders to do anything about it, but I can't rest until I do something about it. So I'm in the process of working on it. I'm not ready to announce it yet. I cannot believe that this profession has enabled changes to the profession that have increased the risk to the officers. These are real numbers, by the way. How do you argue the assault numbers? It doesn't make sense that your assault rates have gone up since 2020 every single year. Meanwhile, since 2022, the violent crime rate has ticked down. Now, you granted it jumped up huge from 2020 to 2021, but then it's been ticking down ever since. So normally, historically, when the violent crime rate is reduced, the officer assault rate is also reduced. It makes sense because if the violent crime rate is reduced, officers aren't coming in contact with the many violent offenders and they're not being assaulted at that same rate. But that's it's the exact opposite. So we live in this day and time where technology is everywhere and you have all these resources. Meanwhile, the core of it, more officers are getting hurt. And so I'm pouring into a project that is the largest project I've ever done. And I've written books, I've done exhaustive studies, I've gotten a doctorate degree. And I'm telling you right now, what I'm working on right now is a larger project than all of that. And it will save lives, it will turn around the assault rate. Will any agencies want it? I have no idea. Probably doubtful because these are the same agencies, oftentimes, that have implemented these policies. Some will. We still have leaders out there that care about their personnel. But the fact that no one's talking about this tells me where we are from a leadership standpoint. By the way, where's your leadership gurus? I see them every day. Where are they at? Why am I the one talking about it? Well, I can tell you why I'm the only one talking about it, because this is not conducive to get being able to speak on leadership. Because the same leaders that have implemented these policies are the same ones that will not want to hear about this. I don't know the influence I'll have. I know some great leaders out there that will want this, that will, that have done things to this, that have fought back on this already. But even at the officer level, maybe they can make a choice to partake in this project to even make their them safer. Um I've sort of had some nervousness about this because uh I said, well, what's that to do with leadership? You know, uh this project I'm working on that can that will make officers safer, that will turn back the clock on these assaults and to sort of uh get back to true officer safety. What's that to do with leadership, Travis? I'm a leadership guy. Well, I I came to the conclusion, and I believe the Lord helped me with this, that it has everything to do with leadership. If officer safety is not about leadership, then what is leadership? Right? You can have your John Maxwell coats all you want, but if your officers are not safe and they became to be not as safe as they once were, leadership failing. I don't care how many bricks or trilogy coins you have or what your resume looks like. And so I came to the conclusion not to shy away from it, that this is leadership. And if you're interested in what I'm talking about, you don't know details yet, I can't talk about it yet. There's a lot of moving parts. You can reach out to me and I'll tell you about it. I'll tell you what we're working on. I'll talk about getting you involved in it. And um listen, I'm excited about it. Uh there's very few things I've done in my short 50 plus years of life that I'm I think can really impact the world. This is one of them. A lot of thus to lift. I've got a lot of uh great friends and mentors that are assisting me with this. Uh I'm not acting like I'm some so-called expert at it. I'm just somebody that found a problem, and I'm gonna do what I do to solve this problem. And if you want to help with that, I welcome it. So you'll hear more about this as we near the end of the year. That's my time schedule, uh, which is and it's a pretty lofty time schedule, which is beta test this early 2026 and roll this out in the spring. Well, I'm working diligently towards that. Uh, I'm trying not to think about how much works ahead, but I've been in the middle of it for about three months now, and I put it on supercharge about a month ago when I started discovering this. I'm looking forward to telling you more about it. I know I don't know if this, what I talk about, helps you, but maybe you didn't know about any of this because quite frankly, I didn't know about any of this. I didn't know what was going on inside these cities and states with the officer assault rate, which by the way, you can contribute to we all talk about line of duty death rates. Well, that's what assault rate is. As your assault rate goes up, your line of duty death rate will go up. And uh we're just really good now at saving people's lives, so you don't always see it in the line of duty death threat data, but you do see it in the assault data, and it's sort of an underlying enemy that nobody is talking about. And um, I'm thankful to have the opportunity to help with it. So, more to come on that, more to talk about on that. I can't thank you enough for being here. Once again, if there's anything I can do for you, let me know. We're building out our training schedule next year for not only sexual survival, but our trade's leadership training. Want to discuss that with me? Reach out. I'm easy to find TravisYates.org. Just reach out in the contact section. They'll send your inquiry over to me and we can have a dialogue about it. I'm interested in helping your agency any way that I can. With that said, thanks for being here. We'll talk to you next time.

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Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at TravisYates.org.

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Travis Yates

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