Research Driven Leadership with Dr. Marshall Jones

We explore why culture beats cash, how leader–member exchange strengthens trust, and why sergeants are the keystone of retention. Dr. Marshall Jones makes the case for borrowing proven business models, fixing communication beyond email, and putting guardrails on AI so cases stand up in court.

• education versus training and why the difference matters
• applying business and I‑O psychology models to policing
• toxic behavior definitions and positive accountability
• building a leadership pipeline from FTO to sergeant
• leader–member exchange as the daily discipline
• communication beyond email with face‑to‑face touchpoints
• recruiting less by retaining more through culture
• research bias, better data, and practitioner context
• AI report risks, court scrutiny, and policy safeguards

Dr. Jones is the co-author of the best-selling book, "Law Enforcement Leadership, Management, and Supervision." It's a must-read, and you can purchase it here. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dr. Marshall Jones
• 2:30 Education Versus Training In Policing
• 6:30 Adapting Business Models To Law Enforcement
• 10:30 Generational Shifts And Retention
• 15:20 Defining Toxic Behavior And Accountability
• 20:40 Culture First: The Leadership Pipeline
• 25:10 Why Research In Policing Lags
• 30:00 Bias, Data, And Interpreting Studies
• 35:30 Leader–Member Exchange In Practice

Transcript

Announcement: 0:01

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

Travis Yates: 0:11

Welcome back to the show. I'm so glad and honored to decide to spend a few minutes with us here today. And today's guest is exciting. I'm so honored to have Dr. Marshall Jones on the show for you today. He combines his background as a law enforcement practitioner, trainer, and consultant with his applied research experience to explore and understand individual and organizational behavior. He's a practitioner in the heart, and Marshall considers himself an accidental academic who has earned his graduate education in criminology and industrial organizational psychology while working full-time in law enforcement. He also holds a doctorate degree in business administration. He's a co-author of Law Enforcement Leadership Management and Supervision. It's the book that uh you've already familiar with. Uh, we had John on the show a few weeks ago, and we're excited to have him. Dr. Jones, how are you, sir?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 1:02

Well, Dr. Yates, it is my pleasure to be here. And please, it's just Marshall.

Travis Yates: 1:06

Well, I'm I'm always super curious when I speak to law enforcement officers that went and continued their education and they did, you know, because it's obviously very difficult to do on the job. I did it late in my career, and I sort of understand that. What drove you to do that? Because it certainly you don't have to, it doesn't necessarily give you any bonus points in the profession. Sort of what drove your uh drove you because you have a bunch of degrees. I just mentioned a few of them. What kind of drove you to do that?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 1:32

You know, it's it's interesting. I graduated high school and went in the Marine Corps with a 2.0 grade point average in high school. And uh the Marine Corps was probably the best thing that that happened to me. And my recruiter, the uh wonderful human being that he was, said, Yes, son, you can join the join the Marines and you can be an MP. Once you turn 19, you just fill out some forms and you can get all the college classes you want. So after being an infantryman, I did end up with one college class. But my father was born in 1908, had a sixth grade education, and and while we didn't have a a lot of wealth growing up, my mom and dad were together, and he was much older, obviously. And the most important thing for him was that we got to school and earned an education. And that just kind of stuck with me. But you know, the other thing is, you know, there's a big difference between getting an education and getting training. And one of the things that I found is I've always kind of been a problem finder. You know, where where's the issue? Quatsch brewing, how do we solve it? And just out of that curiosity, if I'd set in these classes and light bulbs would go off, especially in the I.O. psych and the business classes, we could really use this in law enforcement. But one of the problems we have in policing is if it wasn't done by cops for cops, we automatically dismiss it. And there's a lot of concepts in the book, and thanks for the mention on that, that John and I have taken these models and theories that have been very successful in other areas, and we've kind of reskinned them and modified them to fit in the law enforcement community. Because today, between AI and generational differences and the rapid speed at which people are getting promoted to sergeant and then lieutenant, the generational value over the work-life balance being different. You know, you and I came up and it was work, work, work. And overtime, as soon as we can get it, and we stand in the hallway and we shank people when the extra duty, off-duty details came out. But it's a different generation today. So there's so many things that are happening. And I think just my curiosity, the other advantage I had is I I retired early to go start an academic career. And I've been in, I've spent enough time as an academic, it also gave me an opportunity to leverage some of that for tuition remission and and and get the get that education. But I found myself, and this is for folks who are transitioning out of law enforcement, you know, I say it all the time, and I and I like to coach folks as they transition. You don't understand how valuable your skills are operating in law enforcement, where the consequences are high, decisions have to be made, and you can't kick these cans down the road. You gotta go, you gotta go. And the leadership principles of military and of law enforcement translate to any other discipline. You just got to learn what those what those disciplines are. So all of that stuff really, I think, to get back to your question. I think I had the opportunity, and and you know, after being born in high school and not doing that great, um, you know, my father's dream for my my brother and I is to earn an education and let it help us in our career is really I I valued that perspective. You know, he was a coal miner, you know, he lived to be 89 years old. But the most important message he has was education, education. And I hear all the time from cops, you know, getting a degree is not going to make me a better cop. But I say, you're absolutely right. It's not gonna make you a better cop. But getting a degree adds tools to your toolkit that you don't even realize you don't have yet. And I think that's the that's the takeaway, that's the the curiosity that I think folks need when they work on their degree.

Travis Yates: 5:05

Yeah, it's so interesting because I have a similar story. I just I grew up in a household, uh, no, no one in my family's generation and ever got a bachelor's degree. And I just I can remember from as long as I can remember, you're going to college, you're going to college, you're going to college. You know, it could be a debate today whether you want to do your say that to your kids now because the landscape sort of changed on the workplace, but I it was just never an option. Just never an option. And um, and I that's even though I was well out of my parents' house and on the job, I think I just that was in the back of my mind. And so I'm when I decided to retire, my first default was I needed some more education. Don't know what that's supposed to be, but I got it in what I was interested in, which is of course leadership. And so you I think you're right. And I want to mention your book again, Law Enforcement Leadership, Management and Supervision. You can get it at all major bookstores. And I I called it the Bible of leadership to John. I think he kind of liked that, and I will it was no disrespect to our Lord Jesus Christ, but I just think it's so packed with so many valuable stuff, and I think it's so needed. And I think in the sea of leadership materials that's always out there that we could have a debate on whether it's actually working because of the state of law enforcement, this really barrels it down and it's very unique, and so I think it's very helpful. But you're right, John. It it does bring in a lot of the proven business models in leadership and business theory and business practices. And obviously, when I got my education, I discovered that. Do you see law enforcement a little bit resistant in that? And what's been what's been your experience?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 6:28

You know, and that that's a great question. So I'm a member of the Florida Police Chiefs Association, and for the last three or four years, they've invited me to come and do a day on organizational culture and organizational leadership issues for new chiefs and future chiefs. And there's some common themes that whether, and I and I my passion is training sergeants because they are the most important step along the way. That's where the rubber meets the road. But whether it's a new chief, a future chief, or a sergeant, the questions always come back to generational differences and dealing with difficult folks, right? So I had one uh future or new chief's class where we spent half the day down a rabbit hole talking about, well, you know, I came in from another agency and now the honeymoon period's over. It's you know, two or three months in, and I've got a lieutenant or a commander who didn't get promoted, who is just doing everything they can to backstab me. And, you know, the issue is with the recruiting and retention in particular, I always like to ask the question is all retention positive? And I usually get the the dog chased a car and caught it look, and they well, what do you mean? I said, let me ask you a story. Let's let's do my little genie test, right? You're walking down the beach, you find a genie's lamp, but it says Dollar General on the side, you pick it up and you rub it, and out pops the genie wearing a Dollar General vest. He says, Yes, I'm a genie, but you only get one wish, and your wish can only be in this area, and that is who in your agency could you snap? And they'd be gone from your agency right now, and your agency would be better off for it. And they usually think, and I've had everything from one to two, up to eight or ten of the of the toxic folks in the agency, whether they're they're the lazy patrol officer who doesn't do anything, or if it's a uh somebody in command staff who's undermining and just wreaking havoc down the line and being able to pull stuff, you know, that in the second edition of the book that we're working on, I've just added a whole new section on generational differences, along with some case studies on how to work it. But the bigger one was as I go look at the literature, and this was part of the frustration I had 20 years ago studying leadership, depending on the discipline and depending on the frame, there's no common definitions for supervision, leadership, and management. And that's one of the core things that we tried to do in the book. But there's no common definition on what a toxic employee is or a toxic boss is and what you should do about it. So framing some of that stuff specifically in a law enforcement context, I think can be helpful. And, you know, you mentioned in some of your tenets in your work, and that is it's that positive accountability. If I love you, if I care for you, as Jack Enter says, right, talking about um uh the wounds of a friend and how how hurtful it can be, but how important it is for us to hold one another accountable on the positive end. But if we don't shift today in policing to a culture and cultures of that positive accountability, that helping accountability, we got a much longer road to hoe in this recruiting, retention, leadership cycle than we anticipate.

Travis Yates: 9:29

Yeah, I've I've often said that it's it's more about leadership than anything else. If you fix leadership, you're fixing your staffing, you're fixing your crime, you're fixing your retention. And I think, and this is what I'm afraid of. I mean, 30 years in the profession, there's plenty of people that's got more experience than me. But what I saw over and over again is we take the easy route of doctor to doctor. We let's throw some money at it and fix a problem. Let's hire this consultant to fix a problem. But the real work of leadership has to happen between those walls. What's your thoughts on that?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 9:59

So, great question. I've done a lot of a lot of research. Actually, I've spent the last 25 years researching recruiting and retention. So, back in the late 1990s, I had an opportunity. I'd gotten my master's degree in IOSYC, I was still full-time, and my chief was involved with the Florida Chiefs. And back then we were having a recruiting and retention crisis, which is a lot different than the one we're we're just now coming out of. But I spent God a year and a half working with hundreds of agencies um looking at that problem. And then 20 years later, I looked at the same problem for the Florida Police Chiefs again. And I'm kind of like the board from Star Trek. I like to assimilate all the information I can get from wherever I can get it. And in doing that, it became evident to me. My old keep it simple, stupid mantra from the Marine Corps paid me a lot of dividends. We recruit less when we retain more. The absolute key to retention is good leadership, and the key to developing leadership is the culture. I'll give you a good example. Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, they've honored me the last few years, and I go out and speak, and they'll have six, seven, eight hundred folks come. So I'll do a session two or three times. And every time I'd ask, how many of you are not having retention problems or recruiting problems? And only two or three hands out of a couple hundred folks would come up and I would say, Well, folks, either they're completely full of crap or they're doing something right. Is there anybody in their region that can vouch vouch if they're full of crap or doing it right? And fortunately, so far everybody's vouched for them. But when you when you drill down and you question, the bottom line is it happens naturally because the culture has developed and is maintained to develop leaders, which means you're developing followers. You're treating FTOs as leader coaches, giving them that first leadership opportunity, developing into the corporals and then into the sergeants. And when you get into that developmental pipeline, I call it the law enforcement leadership pipeline, those things just happen. And like you said, you can you can't bring you can't bring in a consultant in this to fix your problem. You can bring in somebody to give you some advice on the steps that you need to take in your agency so you can make your agency better, but it's gotta be, it's gotta be culturally anchored.

Travis Yates: 12:14

Yeah, and I I'm sure you found this out, and I want to just sort of uh flip the page a little bit here on research and leadership because I know when I was doing my studies, I found a lack of actual peer-reviewed research on law enforcement leadership. Meanwhile, there's plenty of it in other industries, and it uh I guess I'm curious of kind of the genesis of that and why you see that happening. Is it is it just our culture? Do we think that we're so different than everybody else that we don't have to do what other people do? Um, because obviously leadership is not that complicated, but you have to sort of know what works and what doesn't work to have success. And so I just want to know your thoughts on that.

Dr. Marshall Jones: 12:56

So I and I talk to Chiefs about this a lot. I think it's due in great part to a lack of adversarial collaboration. And what I mean by that is, you know, and and I and I've lived in this in this environment of an academia now for 20 years. Academia and research leans left, and cop's conservative and leaning right. And unfortunately, especially in today's environment, it's becoming more and more challenging to find somebody who sees things differently than you to sit down and have a conversation and collaboratively go look at it so that you can account for it. And I'll give you a good example in the law enforcement leadership, uh, and even in like use of force that I know you that you're a fan of, right? Most of this stuff is done through a bias lens that it's almost confirmation bias. And they and they don't look beyond those stats. And the bigger problem is for folks that are doing research in criminal justice, is they don't engage with practitioners to help them put it out, a practitioner's interpretation on what that data looks like. And I'll give you a perfect example. I spent some years helping the FBI with their Indian Country Crimes Unit looking at sexual assaults. The the supervisor for that unit got called to Congress and got scalded by Congress folks saying, why are you allowing white folks to go on reservations and rape these Native American women? And they're like, What are you talking about? Well, what had happened was they had gotten a study that was based on census data where people self-reported as being Native American rather than registered tribal members living on tribal lands where the FBI actually had jurisdiction, right? So once we unround that and we discovered it was overgeneralized, we're able to do that. But until a cop stepped in and said, well, hang on a minute, let's check, let's challenge some assumptions here. And we ended up spending years actually looking at sexual assault in the Indian country because it's it shocked me up until the last few recent years, the Indian country, the tribal police didn't have to report crimes and uniform crime report. There was no data. So sometimes it's a lack of data. The other, the other part of the equation, I'll give you a good example with use of force. All the prevailing literature says it's based on race. And that's because the research questions were framed based on race. But there was a study, an international study, a guy named Cogine and Associates looked at it, and what they found is that it's actually subject resistance, not race. But if you looked at, if you did a, if you did, if you go to a listed or you go to your into your library, you're going to find 10 articles that say it's based on race, and only one voice that says it's based on subject resistance, and it just it just gets overshadowed. So the leadership stuff in law enforcement, I will say this Jeremy Wilson with a police staffing observatory. Do you do you know Jeremy? Yeah, yeah. Um, they had a study from 2023 that actually took about 95 studies on police retention, specifically to police, and they did a meta-analysis on that, and it's a great piece. But the problem is if if I'm a if I'm a grad student in policing, or if I'm a police chief or a captain, or I'm at the National Academy, I'm trying to find it, it doesn't pop up at the top of the list because it it just doesn't get hit on it. So if you don't network well, you can't find the good research. And the reality is with behavioral research, good research is going to be able to account for 18 to 22 percent of the behavioral variants. That's that's a that's an A plus report, meaning you know, 82 to 78 percent is something else. And that's just that's the best that we can do. And if we're not engaging in a collaborative way with the researchers, a lot of the research just points us in the wrong damn direction.

Travis Yates: 16:42

Yeah, and I want to just sort of uh make sure our audience is aware of this discussion because this is sort of the game that's played, is uh you talk about left and right narrative. It's very easy from a left narrative to get peer peer published, very easy, very difficult if you have a different narrative to get peer published because there's extreme bias in academia, which is kind of blows my mind, but it's just the truth. Uh, you can go back a few years during all the COVID stuff and see that bias and see what some of the journals were doing. And so, for instance, I'll give you and I'll kind of parlay on what you just said, is is everybody talks about systematic racism, systematic racism. African Americans are shot at 2.5 times their rate of this and that. Well, what the and you'll find a ton of research on that, but it's all flawed. Every bit of it's flawed because they're taking the U.S. census and comparing that to police activity. Where even Dr. Robert Engel, who's attempted to make some sense of this, will say that's completely flawed. If you're going to look at police activity, you have to look at criminality because that's who we interact with. And so when you look at criminality across the board, you don't see that 2.5. That's why academia won't talk about that. And there's not hardly any studies that will parse that. You'll see a ton that parse this, and it's so simplified, it's so ridiculous. People need to have a brain. But what they're able to do by getting some a peer-reviewed journal from the left side to print is they'll say, This is science, this is the science, the science is set, you know, all this nonsense. And so we need more academia and law enforcement, we need people purporting this truth because uh it really is watered down, and so that's that's an excellent point. Now, you talk about theories, a lot of leadership in the book, Doctor. A lot of theories. Now, I think I know the answer to this, but uh, is there any particular theories you want to hone in on for law enforcement specifically to kind of help our audience?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 18:22

If I had to boil that book down to one theory that I would tell a new sergeant or a new chief to learn and live, then it would be the leader member exchange. And it is basically this your relationship with all the people in your care, whether you're the sergeant and you have a bunch of officers or deputies, whether you're a lieutenant and you have a bunch of sergeants, or if you're a chief and you have a command staff that includes civilians, the time that you spend with them and their development is the most valuable resource that you have. And you have to be mindful. And, you know, I've got a bunch of kids and some of them keep score, but I always put it to you, like put them like this. And I like to pick on the SWAT guys. You know, it's common at three in the morning, four in the morning on a on a weekend, you're going to go to Denny's, you're going to go to the Waffle House, you're going to go somewhere and eat. And it's natural to say, hey, you know, we went to the academy together, we're on a SWAT team together, let's go, let's go get some bacon and eggs. But if you've got seven other officers and they're seeing you go to lunch with the same person all the time, you may not have any intent. And I've had sergeants go, oh crap, I never thought about it that way. But you have to give the same love and attention to everybody. You have to be mindful of it, and you have to realize it. They keep score. So if you've had lunch with your SWAT buddies the last couple of nights, go have lunch, go have breakfast with somebody else. You have to spend that time, whether it's car to car, you got to get to know them. And that leader member exchange theory is critical because to do it right, you're going to build rapport, you're going to communicate, you're going to get the trust. Once you get that rapport and trust, you get into what I call the leadership pathfinding, which is my model of leadership from that whole domain of stuff that if you can If you can communicate well to build rapport and build trust, everything else takes care of itself. And if the chiefs will do that, and the commanders and the lieutenants and the sergeants and the FTOs with their trainees, this is what builds that culture that sustains that development without even having to really think about it.

Travis Yates: 20:17

Yeah, culture and trust is such the key, is such a huge factor. And I think that's probably, I'll just give you my opinion, I think that's probably one of the failures that's causing a lot of issues in leadership. Because if you don't have, you don't build that trust, you hence don't build the culture, you have a problem. And what a lot of leaders don't understand, and I'll mention it again, I mention it all the time, which is quit with your I have an open door policy nonsense. No one's coming into your door. You're gonna have to go to their door, you're gonna have to spend moments with people, time with people, even people you don't necessarily like on a personal level, because they're never going to trust you unless you trust them. And that's really the key, is it not?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 20:50

You know, it's the old book management by walking around. And you know, Jack Enter, he he challenges folks, make a list of all your people every week. You go to them, whether it's car to car with them, whether it's in their cubicle, their office, and it's just five, ten minutes. How's it going? How are you doing? How's your class going? How's your sick mom? How's your kid doing? So uh John and I and a couple other fellows, we did an assessment for an organization that was a sheriff's office here in central, south central Florida, excuse me, and we're kind of doing a cultural assessment. And the problem they're having is they are paid so less than the coat. We call it the coastal payward, right? Somebody can go 30 minutes to the coast and make $15,000, $20,000 more a year, no matter how happy they may be. That's life-changing money. And there was a young deputy about three years, she said, you know, I will never leave this place. I don't care what the pay is. I said, well, tell me more. She said, I can walk down the hall and the patrol captain or the sheriff will see me and ask me about my daughter, or say, Hey, how did that test, how did that test work out in your grad class? She said, they know who I am and they care about me, and there is no amount of money that will replace that. Now, I've also talked to deputies who had been there, some cases eight, 10 years, that were going to a coastal agency because they said, I know I'm giving up a good place to be, but 18 grand a year, that's life-changing money for my family. So when you when you look at those relationships, and the other thing is communications is a growing challenge. It's always been a challenge. I remember back in the day we don't manage by memo, now it's don't manage by email, and now it's you know, you get inundated with with communications. But one of the nice things about it is when cops trust each other and they trust their boss, and the boss says, I need you to go do this on this perimeter, there's no questions, there's no why, there's no dancing around it. They simply trust you that you know what you're doing and they're going to do it. They may ask you later, especially if they're Gen Z why, but trust is the ultimate mediator, moderator, and the and the the essential aspect of having a good organization.

Travis Yates: 22:56

Yeah, you mentioned communication, and and obviously, uh Doctor, you're an expert in behavioral science and and and all the communication aspects around that. I think email is probably done. I'll put email up there with Taser. Taser, I think, has hurt so many of our uh agencies because it's there's an over reliance that's put people in danger. There's a reason why we're at all-time high with officer assaults, even though the violent crime rate's dipping, that goes against everything traditional we've ever seen. And I think it's because we're over relying on some less lethal tools when clearly there's there's there's times you should not have a less lethal tool out. But I think I would say um it's almost the same way with email. I think email has really uh hurt us from a communication level because there's no balance there. I can tell you right now, people aren't reading email. I part of my dissertation was evaluating that, and literally I was told we don't look at email, we don't read email.

Dr. Marshall Jones: 23:48

So if it's something or read beyond the first five words, yep.

Travis Yates: 23:52

Yeah, and and I know by the time I'd retired, I mean, I was getting two, three hundred emails a day. I mean, so that's probably only getting worse and worse and worse. And so if you don't want something to be read and it's not important, use email, but you've got to use other means. I just want to know your thoughts on communication and the power they can lead in leadership.

Dr. Marshall Jones: 24:09

Well, and and the interesting thing is I I talk about this, especially in the new chiefs class, and especially with some of the smaller or mid-sized agencies, they've gone to apps like like uh Slack and others, and there's and there's there's shortfalls to that. But having apps, and there's some secure ones out there. A good friend of mine, Nikki, she she runs an organization that they have that secured, but you know, there's too much noise in our emails, right? HR sending this, and there's just party, and there's just everybody's getting this email. I don't know why. But if you have an app that basically, here's my leadership team, this is stuff you need to know, and you get a notification once or twice a day, that's something you're gonna pay attention to, as long as it doesn't get overused. But we've we've got to leverage technology not to do more information blast, but to make the information that's critical get to folks in a in a timely way. It's interesting, we're talking about this. I just wrote a case study for the book, and it was a lieutenant who sent out a message um about um doing some close patrols because there's been a lot of uh autoburglaries. And one sergeant skimmed it and told his his crew that we're getting, you know, we're getting crap from administration because these are happening. Another sergeant actually read it, and then when the lieutenant went back a week later to look at the the cost for service and and the report logs, one shift did great, one one did not, and it came back to that lack of communication. So there is no replacement for face-to-face communication. Yeah. It doesn't always it doesn't always work, but the challenge is, especially with generational differences, the newer generations would rather text, even if they're sitting right next to each other, than have the conversation. And in doing so, especially when you put the cost cross-generational differences in, it just adds another layer of complexity to communication.

Travis Yates: 25:58

If you're just now joining us, we're talking to Dr. Marshall Jones. He's the co-author of Law Enforcement Leadership, Management, and Supervision. Get this book, however, you have to do it. All major booksellers have it. I call it the Bible leadership because I believe it. And I've written leadership books, trust me. Get this one. This will help you out in every aspect. I wish I had it. And uh, Doctor, I think I just wanted to get a resounding answer from you because there's probably more challenges today in law enforcement than ever before. And I know every generation said that, but I think truly we're living in a state in a time where we see chiefs having to answer to everything but the mission. They have to answer everything but the crime. In fact, I usually challenge people in my seminars find me a chief that's been fired for high crime. Find me a chief that's failed the mission. You know, you'll have chiefs fired for other things, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a chief that gets actually gets fired for fulfilling the for not fulfilling the mission, which is high crime. So we're sort of off the very basics of what we do. Where do you see this going? I know you're part of some futuristic stuff and you're really on the cutting edge of that. Where do you see law enforcement in the next 10, 20 years with what's going on right now?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 27:06

I think our biggest, our biggest threat in law enforcement right now is something that most people don't think about, and that's AI. And uh a colleague of mine, Dr. Brandon May, we started uh Center for AI and policing, and you've got all the vendors out there that are that are helping solve the critical problem that's report writing. We're many agencies are working short. The report writing issue. We all know the history of getting officers to review the reports and the supervisors to check them off, and then you've got the kickbacks. But here's here's the real problem. And and I was sitting at South Carolina Chiefs listening to the retired lieutenant from SLED who worked the Murdoch case, and he was the lieutenant in charge of digital forensics, and a light bulb went off. He said, I prepared for over a year to go testify because the defense had three experts on digital forensics, and everything from the car data to the phone data and everything in between, I had to become an expert so I could explain to the jury in a way that they'd understand what we did and how we did it. Otherwise, they're gonna chew me up and spit me out. Our threat in law enforcement is there's more and more technology that'll take our body cam or take other things out of CAD and generate a report for us. If we as law enforcement can understand how LLMs work, how what AI really is, and it's not artificial intelligence, we're gonna get on the stand, we're gonna have a critical case where some poor child was molested, and because a defense attorney learns to say, Is this report true and complete? Did you use AI? Well, how did it work? How did you use it? They're gonna chew them up and spit them out. There is no cop that I've ever worked with that wants not only that embarrassment, but to know that because they were taking a shortcut and they were lazy shits, that a that a case was messed up. And I was recently talking to a chief deputy who said, Yeah, but Marshall, we've all gone to court and you know, we've used our case reports, and even if there was an error, we could talk about it. I said, that's true, but you are the generator of that. You didn't shortcut it. You could talk about it, and there's no reasonable doubt that you shortchanged this report with AI, because the problem is AI will anticipate what the words should be. It will make crap up. And in our training for this, I say you've got to treat AI like it's a very savvy suspect in an interview room for murder, the high consequence. They're gonna give you nine-tenths truths, but the 10% that's not is going to kill your case and it lies, and you have to triangulate and you have to verify everything because it will lull you into a false sense of security. And and you you add that. And one of the biggest frustrations I had when I was a sergeant, which I still think mid-night shift sergeants, the best job on the planet, is there was always those officers who waited to the last minute to give you reports that were crap, and then you had to spend all that time reviewing reports. At the at the other side of that equation, is we had those officers that we knew wrote good reports. Well, the problem now is all of them are gonna look good, which means we got to read them all, and we gotta we gotta read them for attention to detail because I I predict this within the next 18 months, there's gonna be a high-profile case where a bad guy walks because a cop gets wrapped around the applicable by a good defense attorney on their AI use, and it's gonna send a shockwave through our profession and to vendors that we have got to tighten up how we're using AI. And I think there are wonderful advantages to AI, but they're not the things that we're capitalizing on right now. And that and that scares me. The thing that scares me more is the younger generations, the Gen Z folks, they're native to this. They're using AI for their reports, whether we know it or not, or whether we have an agency policy or not. The decision makers, the older generations, are still trying to figure out what AI is. And if we don't infuse once an influence with vendors to make sure they're helping us protect against having failed cases, we're we're that's the kind of things that if we're going to get fired for doing things wrong, that would be one of them.

Travis Yates: 31:07

Can you imagine this one? And I can see this coming because just like you, I have college students and you run them through the AI detection software, and that defense attorney asks that cop, Did you write this using AI? And maybe they don't recognize the software, or maybe they don't exactly tell the truth, and they say no, and he pops up that AI detection. I mean, can you that is not gonna, it's not gonna be good. I I totally agree with you. And you're you're one of the few that's that is talking about in this aspect because we're running this thing like a shiny flavor of the year, and we're running hard and heavy, and it's going to bite us. You're absolutely right. Uh, man, phenomenal stuff, uh, Doctor. I I I mean, we could go on and on. And so, man, I can't thank you enough for being here. How do people reach out to you? Uh, obviously, you and uh John and your book is a knowledge of wealth that they're gonna want to reach out to you. How do they reach out to you and and uh contact you?

Dr. Marshall Jones: 31:58

So um I do a lot of work through the Police Leadership Institute. And you can go to PLI.network or police leadershipinstitute.com. You can reach me that way. Uh, I'll be glad to give you my my cell phone. If folks can reach out to me directly, I'm good with that. Um, you know, I and I'm happy to talk with agencies, whether you're sergeant or chief, anything in between. If you're having a problem and you just need to bounce it off somebody that's not in your immediate circle, give me a call. I'm glad to talk about that. I learned so much in talking about those things. I did want to Travis share one thing. Jerry Ratcliffe up at UPenn, he does a lot of research with actual data looking at the race crime issue, and he actually parses this out, parses it out the right way. Have you seen any of his research? Yeah, you know, uh he's he's one of the few bold out there doing it. He is, and you know, when and here's here's the thing I I talk to my students about because I go there with the race and crime issue because everybody's afraid to talk about it. And until we get to that onion underneath the race, we're never going to solve it. And I really believe it's social capital. But the issue is here's what's missing in that argument. If violent crime is intra-racial and it's it's in this case, African Americans victimizing African Americans.

Travis Yates: 33:13

Yeah, about 90% plus.

Dr. Marshall Jones: 33:14

And then, well, why is there an argument against law enforcement addressing that crime? Why don't the victims matter? And when you frame it that way, even with folks who want to buy into all the the literature-backed type of it's all systemic racism, the argument dissipates itself just by making folks use some logic.

Travis Yates: 33:37

Yeah, the in the media section in our courageous leadership class, we actually that's exactly what we hone in on when it whether it's proactive policing or over policing or all these terminologies people have made up and thrown at law enforcement for actually trying to fulfill our mission. Is it so you don't want us to help out African-American victims? You don't want us stopping that crime, but stopping crime in the suburbs is okay. And leaders have got to start that, you know, leaders have got to have that language, they've got to have that conversation. I will tell you, you you mentioned something very important. We can't even talk about this issue, more or less solve this issue. I open up my seminar and I'll do it tomorrow. I open up my seminar with uh literally a warning. You're all adults, we're about to talk about some adult stuff. Yeah, I mean, they people are scared to death to even talk about it because we're letting everybody else talk about it, which is why we're in the position we're in.

Dr. Marshall Jones: 34:30

You know, I I tell Chiefs when it comes to somebody using research against you, here is the absolute truth of it. The the the theoretical statistical models that are used assume equal distribution. And because that equal distribution is assumed, that's why all the stats, unless folks like Jerry Ratkiff's work that actually parse that out and look at it more concisely, when you just look at the raw stats with a false lens of equal distribution, it's messed up. We don't live equally distributed. There's differences between preferences when it comes to educational attainment, social capital, host of other things, that until we talk about fixing that stuff, the race thing is just going to be it's just gonna be a red herring for the problems that are really facing our communities.

Travis Yates: 35:18

Yeah, if we were if we were to take a lens and look at the world like this, well, NHL is obviously racist, the NBA is obviously racist, and I don't know what the MLB is. So, yeah, nothing is even like that. We don't live in this sort of fantasy land. And I'm glad uh Dr. Ratcliffe and others and a few others like yourself are talking about it. So uh Dr. Jones, thank you so much for being here. I mean, what a pleasure. I know our audience is gonna love this engagement. Um, can't thank you enough. It was my pleasure. Anytime. And if you've been watching or you've been listening, thank you for being here. Thank you for your time. And just remember lead on and stay courageous.

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