First Response with PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke
"First Response," is an interview series hosted by PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke. This series aims to shine a spotlight on the thought leaders within the public safety industry and provide a platform for these individuals to share their experiences, insights, and the valuable lessons they've learned through their careers in law enforcement.
First Response with PepperBall CEO Bob Plaschke
First Response with Bob Plaschke Episode 16 - Lt. Davin Cole (Ret.): Breaking Silence: A Hidden Mental Health Crisis
When retired Lieutenant Davin Cole reveals that police officers experience three to five traumatic events every month—the equivalent of what most civilians face in an entire lifetime—you begin to understand the monumental mental health challenges behind the badge.
Through raw honesty, Lt. Cole shares his 31-year journey in law enforcement that culminated in addiction, depression, and a desperate act that ended his career. Despite two officer-involved shootings and countless traumatic scenes, it was an injury during canine training that set him on a path of prescription opioid dependency and undiagnosed complex PTSD. His story represents a startling reality: approximately 40% of officers develop substance abuse disorders, while suicide rates soar at four times the national average.
What makes this conversation particularly illuminating is Lt. Cole's insight into why people choose careers in public safety. Many first responders, he observes, come from backgrounds of childhood trauma, unconsciously driven to become protectors after feeling unprotected themselves. This creates a dangerous cycle where those already carrying personal trauma are continuously exposed to new traumatic events without adequate processing time or support.
The podcast explores emerging best practices for departments, including confidential mental health access, regular debriefing sessions for seemingly routine traumatic exposures, and early intervention. Lt. Cole emphasizes that the old "suck it up" culture is slowly giving way to recognition that mental wellness requires the same attention as physical fitness and tactical training.
Whether you work in public safety or simply interact with first responders, this conversation will transform your understanding of what it means to wear the badge. Next time you encounter a police officer, remember they may have just witnessed something most of us will experience only a handful of times in our entire lives. Follow Lt. Cole's work at DavinCole.com or connect with him on LinkedIn for more resources on first responder mental health.
The front line of policing is loud, but the voices behind it, you know they're a lot louder and, I think, frankly, a lot more interesting. Hi, I'm Bob Plaschke and this is First Response. This is the number one podcast that takes you behind the badge and uncovers real stories and experiences of first responders from all walks of life and the topics that shape public safety today. If you're curious about the guy or the gal behind the hero and they are indeed truly heroes and the topics that they care about, take a listen. This is kind of your front row seat to hearing some of the really interesting voices out there and, more importantly, the heroes. This podcast is sponsored by PepperBall, where I have the honor to serve as CEO. PepperBall creates unlethal alternatives to guns, at least used to keep themselves and the public safe. So today I'm really honored to be joined by retired Lieutenant Davin Cole, and Davin spent 31 years serving the public here where I live in Northern California, at the San Francisco Sheriff and then, I think, 28 years with the San Francisco Police Department, and served a number of roles there, including helping homeless and those with mental challenges, which is, you know, as people would know in San Francisco, or at least a tribute to San Francisco is a major challenge for policing country. Talking about mental illness and mental health, actually and it's not about, you know, the folks on the street. He's happy to do that. He talks about mental challenges and the mental health almost you almost could say crisis or mental health significant challenges that police officers face and the support they need both day to day and kind of the external support they need to manage through the challenges they face.
Speaker 1:Davin was telling me just before we started that he just got back from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he did a speech, and you, I think Davin, were telling me that you regularly walk up to police officers and you engage them in discussions. And what do you say? What do you ask them?
Speaker 2:You know, I like to just walk up.
Speaker 2:I think if you know anybody in the law enforcement community, they will tell you that you could go anywhere in the country and walk up to any police officer and introduce yourself as a current or retired police officer and you'll immediately be accepted as a friend, if you will. And so I approach it in that respect. As you know, I'm your friend and the first question I like to ask them may seem a little odd to them at first is you know, do you have a peer support program in your agency? And what does that look like? Usually a little quizzical, look. It's kind of an odd question to start a conversation with Um. But once they tell me you know I get a variety of answers, and once they kind of give me that answer, I follow up with my personal story and why I have such a strong uh passion in ensuring that police officers and all our first responders are getting the proper peer support and mental health programs in place that they really should have and that we're still lacking quite a bit in this country.
Speaker 1:Before we get to your personal story and Davin's had a chance to share it with me and it is compelling and it makes him incredibly credible to provide the kind of consultative support and the counseling and the topics that he gives talks on across the country. But before we get there, what is you know? You hear the term peer-to-peer support. What does that actually mean?
Speaker 2:Well, I think for most people it starts off as a peer support program is having, generally, members from your own department receive some extra training to just be an ear, to be a shoulder, to be someone that you know when you need to talk about something you can rely on, someone who knows where you've been, who's walked that same path and who's going to have a better understanding of what struggles you might be having and, you know, make that conversation easier. It's difficult to have these type of conversations with someone who hasn't really walked in our shoes, and so having a peer support program ensures that you know it's going to be somebody from whether it's your agency or another agency, but somebody that's walked your path, who's been through the same experiences as you and has had, you know, that extra training to be able to listen effectively for you.
Speaker 1:So when you talk about walking on the walking the same path, having the same experiences you know, and you think about it in the context of you know, being an ear to listen, my assumption which I would assume folks listening would assume that those experiences you know are the more on the negative than the positive side. You know Davin was sharing some statistics with me before, which I'll let you do now. Davin, in terms of you know how many negative experiences police officers face, which it's humbling, but please, why don't you share those statistics with our folks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was even a statistic that kind of didn't really catch me off guard, but it really even added more perspective to what my messaging is. And we talk about being exposed to critical incidents and on average, the average citizen will experience four or five traumatic events in their life, and that could be anything from a sudden death in the family to a bad car accident, something like that. But for police officers and other first responders we average three to five a month. So you put that into perspective. You know, you look at a 30-year career, 12 months a year. You know, and you start getting into the 300 to 400 range of exposure to critical incidents.
Speaker 2:And these are not just yours, not just the incidents that you're involved in, but you're also exposed to your victims incident. You're exposed to your witnesses. You're exposed to even the suspects. You know you have to absorb that too. You know they're in the midst of a traumatic event and you don't even have time to be part of the process. You just have to go there and do your job. And so you're getting exposed to this and it's layer after layer after layer of traumatic events and it builds up over time and we are just now learning what these long term effects have on first responders and on police officers.
Speaker 1:These long-term effects have on first responders and on police officers. And you know you think about that. Three, you know, effectively the equivalent of three car accidents a month, or three, to your point, sudden death or, I would imagine, a divorce or getting fired would be examples of that kind of trauma and, to your point, it cumulatively builds up. And when I talk to, obviously, a lot of firefighters on that side of the world, what they see in terms of dealing with accidents and the kind of carnage they have to deal with, it's horrific on both sides. I think it's, frankly, I do think it's a bit worse on the police side because you're seeing, unfortunately, you're seeing a lot of the worst of humanity, right. You're seeing people who either are going through things that nobody should go through abuse, victims of crime, rape, or victims of crime, rape and then you're seeing people who perpetrated which you know, I would imagine it just to be able. It must be horrific just to see that again and again and again.
Speaker 2:It is, I mean, and it's hard on you and, like I said, you don't really get to process it. You're there to do a job, you know. It's kind of like an old episode of you or Dragnet. Just the facts, ma'am. I'm just here to do my job and as much as you have empathy for them, you don't really have time to sit there and be empathetic. You have a job to do and you think about it. For police officers, when do we get to go to a scene where somebody's happy to see us?
Speaker 2:We're there, right, we're. We're there because something happened to you. You're the victim of a crime. We're we're there because you were speeding it and now we have to do our job and pull you over, and now we have to write you a ticket. You know, we're not there because you're celebrating a wedding. We're not there because you're having a newborn event in your life. We're only there for the bad times, and you know that builds up on me too.
Speaker 1:You know, and I and I, it's I, I I've now become a bit of a bore at my you know, at my social events, because people ask me what I do and I describe it. And then you know it's and most people don't have a lot of experience with police and police officers to your point that it's, it's. It's the person that you, you hope that you never have to call right, or it's the person that you hope never pulls you over. And I try to explain.
Speaker 1:I've said you know, look, this is, you know, they're brothers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. They're just, you know, they're just, you know, no different than you and they've picked a profession that to serve. And they picked a profession but in the process of serving to your point, no one is ever happy to see them. In that context, it's not the particularly it is, it is a really tough job. It's not the particularly it is, it is a really tough job. So so you said that you, you, you, when you pull officers aside and talk about peer to peer support and whether they have it, then you, you give them a synopsis of your story.
Speaker 2:So give us that. What is that? Give that synopsis. Yeah, so, as you said, 30, 31 years altogether in law enforcement. I'm involved in two officer-involved shootings.
Speaker 2:As you pointed out, we go to a lot of horrific crime scenes, which I did. We get injured a lot, get a lot of bumps and bruises in law enforcement. In my particular case, I was a canine trainer for 10 years and a canine handler for 15. And during a training scenario I was pretty severely bit by one of the dogs, ended up with at the time what they thought was going to be permanent nerve damage. I was at chronic pain for several years before they're able to go in and perform a surgery and repair the impinged nerve. But because of that chronic pain I was prescribed high doses of opioid pain medication. At the time I didn't know I was suffering with mental health issues, but I did develop an addiction to these prescription pain meds and, despite the fact that they were able to go in there and, as I said, repair the nerve damage and remove that pain, my addiction led me to continue to seek out pain medications through my doctors and from the time of the injury until the end of my career it was 10 years.
Speaker 2:It was a solid seven years of an addiction to the pain meds, on top of that alcohol. And again I didn't understand where this addiction was coming from. I was, and still am, in a really great marriage. I have a wonderful wife who's been by my side this whole time. I was doing well in my career.
Speaker 2:I'd moved up the ranks, uh, from Sergeant and then Lieutenant, acting Lieutenant for three years. Uh was next up for a permanent promotion to Lieutenant, was going to stick around for captain, um, but I was spiraling out of control. You know I had severe depression, um, as I found out later, I had a severe case of complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the addiction eventually led me to rob a pharmacy for payments, which resulted in my arrest as soon as I exited the pharmacy and from there, obviously I had to retire. My department understood that I was suffering with mental health and, you know, allowed me to retire. But then I had to deal with the criminal consequences and just the overall consequences emotionally, civilly, everything and had to process through that, ended up going to jail for six months, locked in my cell all day because of my status as a former police officer.
Speaker 2:Officer was 30 minutes out a day. That was. It did that for six months but since then have focused my time on sharing my story because I know addiction addiction rate in law enforcement is about 40 percent. Suicide rates and I was very suicidal prior to my arrest it was about four times the national average. So I know this is a serious issue amongst police officers and first responders and I share my story because I want people to know they're not alone in their struggles and that it's okay to struggle and that there's help and that you can survive and you can get through this and with the right help you could be back to a functioning human being again.
Speaker 1:Well, I appreciate you telling and you and I have already had a discussion, but sharing with the folks that are listening here, it is a sombering story. It is a sombering story, but did you say that 40% of police officers have an addiction of some type?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's. The current statistics is about 40% of officers have some form of substance use disorder or another type of addiction. We have pornography, we have shopping addiction. Then there's other just maladaptive behaviors that they get into, other risky behaviors Having multiple affairs if they're in a marriage or other relationship, engaging in high-risk sports or not even sports, just high-risk activities. They get in a motorcycle the next thing, you know. I've talked to guys that they would routinely go 100 and 110 miles an hour on their motorcycle, secretly wishing they would crash and die, you know, as part of their struggles.
Speaker 1:And you know, and so I don't know what the statistic is for the general population. I assume 40% is much. That's a high number compared to what the general population I assume 40% is is it's much? That's that's a high number compared to what? Um, what the general population? Certainly I, I have. I have had many people talk, come on this, this podcast, and talk about suicide rates and, to your point, four times the national average, um, when you look back, um, um, could you have, you probably could have seen the. I mean, looking back, could you have seen the early signs of, of, when it was starting to kind of build and you, you didn't have a, a weight event Was that, was that kind of? You know, years before the, the, the incident with the, with the canine, or you know, could you, when you look backwards, can you start to see the trend?
Speaker 2:I can. You know, I look back to look back to some of the simple things sleeping issues I would have insomnia, three, four days of not sleeping. I would have, in a way, anger management issues, but mainly for work. I hated everything about work. I hated my bosses, I hated other cops, I hated the citizenry. I just was always angry about work. I hated my bosses, I hated other cops, I hated the citizenry. I just was, you know, always angry about something. A new policy would just set me off on like this crazy rant of a simple change in policy, you know. And so I've been able to look back and go, wow, yeah, those were the early stages of signs of struggling mentally.
Speaker 1:I always try to articulate to folks,
Speaker 1:You know they, they talk about, you know, getting pulled over and the police officer was a bit rude and I'm like you know you have no idea what he or she may have just come from, right and and you have no idea what they've been through.
Speaker 1:But you know, you know again, I love that I not love is not the right word for it but the statistic of three to four traumas a month, you know, um it, it. It takes years to process trauma, not not days. And so you're, you're just a cumulative, um, you know, cumulative ball of emotion, um, and in that context, tell me what leading agencies you know, when you go out and talk about what they should do and what leading agencies are doing. How now do agencies try to put programs in place to try to let officers kind of grieve through that or at least process, because it's still's still. I mean, if you think how much time it would take to get over a car accident, you can't do it in an hour, right? I mean, that's the, that's the problem. And, to your point, you're back on the job. It's not like people give you six weeks off for every incident.
Speaker 2:You would never work right, yeah, the whole force would be at home, you know exactly.
Speaker 1:So how does it? How does it? How can it work? I mean, how? What is it? Is it? What is the best practices, even still abandoned.
Speaker 2:No, I mean, I think that the best, the true best practices are starting and when you look at that, what you're seeing is, first off, unlimited access to mental health care. So your the department's insurance, your personal insurance, something is covering it, you're not out of pocket and you have access to it. Confidential access. That's probably the number one fear that police officers have is that they're seeking help isn't going to be confidential, that they're seeking help isn't going to be confidential. So, confidential assistance, unlimited access, in-house, a better processing. We talk about having a critical incident debrief and we will debrief the major critical incidents. Unfortunately, today, the LA sheriffs have lost three deputies to an explosion. Right, they will have critical incident debriefs. It's a major incident.
Speaker 2:What I advocate for and what we're starting to see is just debriefing everyday BS. You know, like you said, we're being exposed to these other traumatic events and we're not debriefing those because it's part of the job, right? You, you're expected to go out to a car accident where somebody has lost their life. You're expected to go to a scene where maybe a child has died or or horrific rape, as you said, but we don't debrief those because they don't normally fit into the trigger for for starting a debriefing process. What we're seeing now is that that is starting to happen on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Like I said, it's rare. It's still very rare, but when you talk about best practices, we are starting to do that and we're having more open conversations. It's no more, suck it up cupcake. It's no more. Hey, this is the job you signed up for. If you can't handle this, you need a new career.
Speaker 2:We're now starting to accept that. Hey, yes, this job takes a toll on us mentally and we need to have those conversations and we need to start them early. We need to start them in the academy and we need to continue these conversations out throughout your career. And we're seeing more and more of that. I'm even seeing where, as part of your annual review, they want you to go talk to a therapist you know, just to show up. You don't even have to talk. They just want to know hey, here's your resources, here's a list of therapists as part of your annual review. We just want you to have a talk with this person. We want to make sure you're getting the proper care. We want you to go see your doctor once a year and make sure, physically, you're doing well, but we want to see the same thing with the therapist.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think, and probably nine out of 10 folks that I bring on the podcast, we, the conversation, eventually turns to this topic, which is you know, how do you in the old days it was give you the equipment. It then turned into giving you the equipment and make sure you're in shape right and make sure you have the exercise kind of for your body. And then now to your point. It's the mind, the mind and the spirit and the soul. And you know, and all, all of those, you have to have the right equipment, you have to have the right training, but you have to be in shape both mentally and physically, um, and you have to have the, the, the time and the resource to do that.
Speaker 1:Um, and I do think that's right and I, you know, like I said, every chief or, um, uh, sheriff that we talked to, I mean they, they will literally, if they didn't say it as topic number one, it'll be topic number, it'll be one of the first two topics, which is mental health and mental wellness. In that sense, so I do think, I do think you know the, the, the, the tide has turned in that sense, um, you know the and I do think you know it makes sense. I mean, if you see, if you see a rape, that you have at least what. You have an hour to chat about it. Right, you can at least share what you, what you saw, and at least to your point, not feel like you're you have to carry that for the rest of your life yourself, right, I mean cause that's, that's what you'd have to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and I think something that doesn't get talked out a lot is, many of us come from childhood trauma, myself included, and something that I found out that really that did surprise me was the number of first responders that come from childhood trauma, and we've talked about it and I think we all agree it's something that drives us in that there is a portion of our childhood or our early formative years where we didn't feel protective, and I think that has had such an effect on us that we end up taking these roles in society where we get to be the protector. So it was interesting for me to find that out. Well, you layer that on. Well, okay, I came from some type of trauma and here I am, I take a job that's going to constantly expose me to trauma, you know, so that you know, as they say, it can be triggering, and so I think we need to be aware of that and have those conversations again early on in the academy.
Speaker 2:They're like, hey, you're going to expose a lot of trauma. Some of this may bring back memories. Now, let's give you the tools now to be prepared before it gets to that point. Now, let's give you the tools now to be prepared before it gets to that point, before you get to walking into a pharmacy at the end of your rope, ready to die and robbing it because you have no other way out. Let's not get to that point, right.
Speaker 1:Let's stop that much sooner in the process and in other words, putting a bunch of speed bumps in place so that you just can't kind of drive off, and some guardrails so that you can keep yourself from the behaviors, these kind of destructive behaviors, and you talk about it. You know that's the personal side, you know. And then and then the public will see the example of an officer who's you know who is, you know in their minds unnecessarily aggressive. But again, you never know where they just come from. And I always try to talk. Say to my friends, you know when's the last time you had a bad, you know, had a fight with your wife, and then you went in and you yelled at one of your colleagues or you yelled at someone that worked for you. You know, that is exactly what.
Speaker 1:You know why it's unrealistic to hold a police officer, or at least it's unempathetic to try to hold a police officer to an incredibly different level. Right, that they always have to be courteous, always have to be polite, always, I mean, you're going to have a bad day. That statistic about police officers or people in first responders who have this need to protect because of their childhood, is that I. That's something it makes complete sense to me, but that's something that I hadn't heard before. Is that a? Is that a? Is that a kind of an emerging kind of research, that that people are doing into the space, or is that? Is there any facts or statistics around that?
Speaker 2:No, I think it's just something that's starting to emerge. It's conversations that are starting to come up as we improve our response to mental health for our first responders. More and more people are starting to find out like, oh wow, I was with this group and this many out of that group talked about their childhood trauma. So I think it's just now starting to get the attention and research. There's some on there, but nothing really deep diving. It's usually just part of a whole collective of mental health research and first responders and it's just kind of touched upon. But I just know from my personal experience now is easily over half of the people that I've talked to had some type of childhood trauma growing up.
Speaker 1:That's you know. Again, it makes perfect sense that they would want to be in a. They want to fix Right. They don't want someone else to go through that. And, to your point, they put themselves in that protective role as a superficial way of dealing with their own trauma, but absent of dealing with your own trauma. It is, to your point, it's a patch. You're not addressing the root cause, right. What is? If you think about it, then I'm just trying to be practical. Um, if you're, you know, if you're the you know, in the san francisco police department's out looking for a new chief of police, um, how many it's? I think it's around um a thousand, called for the sake of argument, maybe a thousand sworn officers. How many psychiatrists would you need to have on staff? I, I wouldn't even understand the context.
Speaker 2:That'd be a tough one, I know I have to call. I've been out three years now, three and a half years. I know when I was there we did not have a non-staff psychiatrist. We do have what we call our behavioral science unit. That's our peer support program or your employee assistance program. We do have officers there through their own have gone out and now are licensed clinicians. But most agencies, like I said, including San Francisco, unless something's changed in the last few years do not have a psychiatrist on staff. They have a doctor on staff, they have a medical doctor on staff one. But that's interesting. I never really thought about that. I would think in a department like San Francisco I think you want to have at least two. The problem is they work for the department. I think you would need someone presently not on staff.
Speaker 2:But to your point of you do want someone that's culturally competent. So you do want someone that has worked with first responders, who's had training above and beyond what they normally get, so they are better equipped. But I do think that that could be that could be an obstacle for some members if the person was a paid staff member of their agency.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're back to this trust issue and you know, if I'm vulnerable and say that I've got these issues, well they pull me off the job Right, because that's my livelihood. Is is on the line, so to speak. Is on the line, so to speak.
Speaker 2:Exactly? And who is their actual client? Is it the San Francisco Police Department or is it the officer that's sitting and it does bring up those issues? But I think at the very least you have someone on staff who can guide the program. You can say, hey, this is what you should have in your program and give the, I guess, like I said, the proper advice on what needs to be done and what resources should be available.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, you know it would. It would would. Just struck me as we've been thinking about this. If you think about it at that size and scale, you know there's going to be I don't know probably 50 to a hundred traumatic, what you would call traumatic things that will sit in your memory each week, right? So I mean you, literally the doctor, it's kind of the old peanuts.
Speaker 1:You know Lucy the doctor's in the doctor, she'd be, you'd be caught. You know they would be. They would be if they were just there to have a half hour, you know, check-in after you've seen a rape, or a half hour check-in after you've seen a murder to your point, which those do not classify as significant enough to kind of stop the day. I mean, and I think that's you know, as we start to wrap up, I think that's you know, when I talk to people and I'm trying to talk to people through podcasts, I just want you to, I want people to think that when someone pulls you over, the likelihood that, to your point, the likelihood that they have been in a trauma, of something that you yourself will only face three or four times in your life, they've been in a trauma in the last two weeks is quite high, and so you know you have to be they very likely may have just left one.
Speaker 2:You know, like you said, it's your job. Your job doesn't stop because you just were at a traumatic event. You got to go knock out that paperwork and knock out that report. And if you're done with that report and you're on duty, you're off to the next call for service. And so you may have just walked from that horrific crime scene and it may not even have been your crime scene, so it may have been another officer's call and you were back up.
Speaker 2:But you got there, you saw it, you're exposed to it. But now you got to go back in service because you got to go handle the calls that are waiting while those officers deal with that. And so, like you say, you know, for the average citizen they may not know that. You know and you know it is on us to understand our behaviors, understand how that could affect us. You know and and not give excuses for being unprofessional, right, but if you're aware of that and you're aware of how these events could affect you, you're better adapted to prevent yourself from getting to that point where you're losing your mind and yelling at a citizen because they made an illegal left turn.
Speaker 1:Right, correct. You know that you're venting just because you have the chance to, so I'm going to. I'm going to. This is the second to last question, and it's one that didn't even prepare you for, but it's one that I care deeply about, which is the homelessness challenge of the, the unhoused. You saw a lot, you've dealt with a lot of it in San Francisco. What is the answer to that? I certainly I'm giving my opinion. I certainly don't think it's police are the answer to that question, nor emergency rooms and the answer to that question. You've dealt with it and you spent years trying to help folks in those situations. Is this something that we'll ever fix?
Speaker 2:It's a good question, you know. Like you said, yeah, for my last almost five years I ran our homeless outreach unit and it was a lieutenant for the last three years. It is a tough question and I don't know if there's one particular answer. There's a lot more that needs to be done. You're absolutely right. It is not a law enforcement. There is no law enforcement solution. We're just a piece of that team, the way we've done in San Francisco. We are just a member of that co-response team, but it's being able to have just real, honest talks.
Speaker 2:There's just too many people with opinions who claim to be advocates who, I think, throw a monkey wrench into the process. You know there's some who say, well, it's not a mental health issue, it's a housing crisis. Well, it's not a housing crisis, it's a mental health issue. It's a combination of everything and we can't just keep throwing money at it either. I mean, we've thrown billions at it in this state in California and nothing's gotten better. If anything, it's gotten worse at times. But I just think you need to get people involved who really aren't trying to be an advocate for one thing or another. You want people involved who really want to come up with long-term solutions, and it's going to be a combination of providing the proper mental health care, providing housing, and I read one article I think described it great.
Speaker 2:If we don't have a housing crisis, we have an extreme poverty housing crisis. A lot of these people who are on the street will never be able to afford even low-cost rent here, like in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's never going to be affordable for them, unfortunately, for whatever reason, and so the housing that they're talking about is really extreme poverty housing. And so then, what does that look like? Do we just shelter everybody into an SRO and the tenderloin? And for the listeners, that's a single room occupancy, that's a. Basically you get a room and you share your showers and toilet with everyone else on the floor, and it's usually not a pleasant group of people, unfortunately, you know. So you know how is that going to look down down the road, and you have to have realistic conversations of we're not going to be able to provide everybody with a two-bedroom apartment with a nice kitchenette. Maybe it will just have to be an SRO, maybe it will be something simple and be willing to accept that, and then there is going to be a group of people, though that will need to be in a way, forced into it and it doesn't have to be a law enforcement approach.
Speaker 2:But there are people with mental health issues and we're just now willing to talk about that again of, you know, forced mental health care, and I always found that troubling that mental health advocates would say no, it is against their civil rights. And it's inhumane to force somebody into a mental health hospital as opposed to leaving them out on the street where they're not mentally capable of caring for themselves, where they're walking around crusted in their own pardon it, but crusted in their own feces, with abscesses and a lot of times stuck in addiction. Somehow that's more humane than grabbing someone and saying, hey, guess what, you have no choice but to be in this mental health facility. And, granted, we need to do a lot of work at our mental health facilities. They need to be much better, they need to be cleaner, they need to be well run and well staffed.
Speaker 2:But I think it is less humane to leave them out on the street than it is to force them into it. And I and I think there is going to come a point where we have to accept that, and the same with addiction, you know there's going to come a point where listen, we tried everything else, guess what? We're going to force you into a program. And then we say, well, you know people who don't go in voluntarily, they have a much higher rate of of reoffending and relapsing. But I don't think those are really honest statistics. I don't think you're looking at it in a way of you know where were they forced into it and what were the follow-up services and what is the long-term process look like.
Speaker 1:But you know, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, if it's inside a family, it's called an intervention and the family does exactly as you've described. Right, and they, they, they'll, they're like, hey, you're coming with us and we're going to check you into a, you know, into a mental health, We'll check you into some type of treatment, and that we wouldn't do the same to folks who don't have family seems to be a bit, you know, on the, on the, on the inhumane on the other side. I can, I couldn't agree more. You know, I told you this is 20 minutes and now we're at like 37. So, so, apologies for keeping you, keeping you on. We'll have one last question and I'll let you go, let our listeners go. We always like to make a Pepperball, likes to make a small honorarium to a charity of your choice. What can we do and where can we donate in your name?
Speaker 2:The Overwatch Collective. It's an organization started by a police officer here in Northern California. He's since moved to the other side of the state, but he or his organization it's a nonprofit and they help to offset the cost of mental health care for first responders and veterans when they don't have access to it, when their agencies don't provide it or out of just fear they don't want to go through their agencies. They help to offset that cost and cover as much of it as they can.
Speaker 1:Oh, the Overwatch.
Speaker 2:The Overwatch Collective. Collective.
Speaker 1:Collective All right Now. If folks wanted to reach out to you, Davin, and talk or learn more about what you do, or have you come speak? How can they find you?
Speaker 2:Two best ways are you just go to my website it's davincole. com, or they could reach me on LinkedIn. Same thing just search for Davin Cole on LinkedIn and you can direct message me through there, or you can send me a message through my website.
Speaker 1:All right, and this is davincolecom. Yes, all right, Davin, thank you much.
Speaker 1:Well, folks, you see me kind of return to this topic, and it's about empathy for what? The heroes, these police officers that go out every day, empathy to understand what they deal with, what they have to see. And you think about, um, what Lieutenant Cole was talking about, that he spent five years running a homeless task force where, effectively every day, he sees the stories of people who you know, who have been forgotten by society, um, who have been through horrific issues themselves just to get to where they are. And you know, and that that's what the you know, the people that serve us, and the people that go out and the people that pull you over. When you've you were speeding or you were, you know, like me, I had my cell phone to my ear. I always think, when you get pulled over, it's how can I be, how can I remember what they've been through? And now this is three to five traumatic events per month.
Speaker 1:If you think about that and how we can be, give them a heck of a lot more grace. Of course, we have to hold them accountable to their responsibility and to the oath that they've taken. But you have to say that this is a job that very, very few people sign up to do. They are the only ones that run into a fire, they're the only ones that run into a 911 call, and I think we just want to make sure we have the grace and empathy to appreciate what they do and appreciate what they go through, and here's hoping that the trend of getting them the right mental health continues.
Speaker 1:So, wrapping up, again, you've been listening and hopefully enjoyed listening to me. My name is Bob Plaschke and this is First Response. It is a podcast dedicated to understanding the stories behind the people that wear a badge, who are the very brave first responders more than a million out there in the United States and I am very privileged that this is sponsored by PepperBall, the company that I have the honor to be the CEO of, and again PepperBall we deploy non-lethal tools that allow police officers to do their jobs but not have to use their guns and not have to suffer and keep themselves and the public that they serve safe Until next time, appreciate it and be safe out there.
