Us vs. Them: What a Crock

After close to two decades of being a LEO, I've got some opinions on what could be done better at the most fundamental levels of law enforcement.  I see a bigtime "us vs them" mentality.

As simple as a kid saying "mommy, are you going out to catch bad guys?"

Some joker when you're at Chipotle saying "oooh, it wasn't me!"

You describing a neighborhood in court as a "gang neighborhood" or "high-crime area."

I swear I'm not smoking weed around a bonfire singing Kumbayaa.  However, it can be us WITH them instead of against.

WITH the community.  Serving the 98%.  

That doesn't mean we hug shooters and let criminals off all the time.  It's just a shift in mindset that leads to a shift in demeanor.

-LEO

Transcript

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Good morning. It's Leo here. Today I'm going to talk about the us versus them mentality that I feel is instilled in most of us very early in our career, likely before we even start. And many of us carry throughout, some of us transition to kind of a different mindset, and it really changes how you look at things and how you do the job day to day. You still do the job, it doesn't mean you just go out and hug people all day and go to community meetings. It's not the type of transition I'm talking about. Protect and serve. It doesn't mean I'm serving you. You know, we've all heard like you're a public servant. Get me a cup of coffee, stuff like that. I'm thirsty. Get me a glass of water, public servant. Like, no, that's not at all what I'm talking about. My podcast is called That Leo Guy, That Law Enforcement Guy, Law Enforcement Officer Guy. It shows in my logo to protect and serve. That's important to me. Law enforcement officer comes with an implication of your job is to enforce the law. When if you look at your daily shift, there's a good chance that much less than half, possibly less than 10%, you are actively enforcing law. You are collecting facts, you are gathering information, you may be counseling people, you may be taking people places. So, but when you sign up to be a law enforcement officer, you're thinking, okay, I'm here to enforce the law. That's my main job. It starts there, it goes right into it in training. A lot of the, you know, basic law enforcement training at local, state, and federal levels, it's very militaristic. There's uniforms, there's marching, there's group workouts where you're yelling and being yelled at. There's a high focus on fighting and shooting and safety. Obviously, all of those matter immensely. They're high liability, high risk. You got to protect yourself, you got to go home safely. I'm not taking anything away from those. I am saying that the way we design it in this militaristic fashion, it creates a lot of officers that look at the general public as not like us, no matter what they look like. If they look different, it doesn't matter because we're all human beings, and that's what it comes down to. Everybody you deal with is another person who's come from a different background. So I love some of the stuff. You know, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, you know, wrote on combat, on killing a lot of law enforcement and military psychology stuff. He talks about being sheepdogs and how there are wolves out there, and most people are sheep, and we got to protect the sheep from the wolves. The problem is a lot of these new law enforcement officers, they take that very literally. They become wolf hunters, and it causes them to mistreat the sheep often. Yeah, there are a lot of people that are completely unaware of the crime that's about to happen to them or the crime going on around them. Okay, so what? If that leads to you mistreating 20 sheep a day so that you can catch a handful of wolves, because I'll tell you, again, it's my opinion, drug dealer's not really a wolf. So if you're busting random people's asses to get a bag of crack rocks, are you a sheepdog or are you like taking chomps out of a lot of sheep to catch a goat or a donkey or something? So the point being, when we start looking at it as we are the objective good guy, we are the sheepdog, and the bad guys out there are bad. It makes it difficult to do the job as effectively as we could. Because our job, if you've listened to a single episode, is to collect facts in an objective fashion using a variety of techniques. It's not necessarily to enforce the law. I would I wish they would just change the name to like fact collectors. Probably doesn't really have the same ring, but it's more of what we do. So you hear in training, you they might have veteran law enforcement officers from your department come in, and they might be saying things like, oh, yes, some of these people are real shit bags. Like they're fucking criminals. Get the criminals off the street. That's what we do. And yes, it's great to catch a real criminal, a wolf that is victimizing people. But on these impressionable, usually pretty young minds, they hear that and they take it to another level and they start looking at everybody as one of them. If you're not wearing the same uniform as me, or wearing a uniform or wearing a badge, you're one of them. And that's the mindset that I think we should get rid of from an organizational level, from a training unit level. And if you don't have influence over that, from your own level, going, you know what? Most of these people are not one of them. They're not monsters. The monsters are extremely rare. Good chance you'll never meet one, a true monster. You will meet people that are troubled by their past, that have been through things that had you or I been through them, we would be in ruins. So that culture often continues in the field training phase. You get put with either one or a variety of field trainers, and there's an old saying that you become your trainer. They're telling you how to do the job. Most field trainers that I've met, they all my field trainers, I had five or six, plus I had field training agents. I've been at different agencies. So I've been trained in law enforcement by like 10 different people. I think all 10 of them thought that their way was right. If I did something that they saw as wrong, they corrected it. And there was a lot of extreme us versus them mindset of we gotta, we gotta get these guys, and here's how we're gonna do it. Don't trust anybody. You get it drilled into you, don't trust anybody. Safety is first. Take care of yourself. You gotta go home to your family, which is true. But the problem comes when you start focusing so much on that that you're no longer doing the job objectively. You're everybody else, everybody needs to be at 10 feet away from me. It's like, all right, if you're that scared, most attacks come with indicators beforehand. So you don't have to be fearful of everybody that's around you. I'm looking for you to kind of make a transition. You may have already done it, to like an us helping us transition. You're working with the community. I want to reiterate, they used to use the phrase hug-a-thug. People would go to community meetings and they'd say, Oh, it's a hug-a-thug meeting. Like they just go in there and just, you know, there's people in there yelling, and the officer just hugs them and says, I'm sorry, we'll do better. I like community meetings. Personally, I think they're they're a useful tool and it it shows that you are engaged with the community. But us helping us is the transition, not us against them, not enforcing the law on everybody we see. Us helping us. If that old lady at that meeting was your grandma, if that young man who's angry at that meeting was your brother and he'd been done wrong, would you want to help him? So if we can make everybody helpable and somebody we want to assist, that's good. I mean, the saying is protect and serve. We've heard it, it's cliche, it's kind of sounds kind of goofy. We've heard it a million times. But if you break it down to what it is, protect and serve, it kind of changes the view of the job from law enforcement officer to someone that wants to protect and serve a community. It gives you ownership of that community. It gives you accountability for that community. Hey, I'm here to protect and serve this small area that I was given. If you're in New Orleans, hey, this parish, I'm gonna protect and serve this parish. And if that involves catching people that are hurting people, breaking into houses, shooting dogs, whatever they got going on, breaking into churches and setting fires, I'm gonna protect this community from those people. But I'm not targeting everybody. There's kind of two ways to go about law enforcement. I mean, obviously there's a thousand ways, but I'm gonna break it down into two. You go out, you bust heads, you find crime, you have a low ratio. You do 25 traffic stops a shift, you search 15 cars, you get one gun, you go home and you feel good. You don't tell anybody about the 10 cars you searched that you got nothing and they were mad and they feel discriminated against and screwed, and you know, each car had four people in it. So the 40 community members that you're protecting and serving that feel distant from the cops, that are not gonna cooperate on the next shooting. You know, next time the detectives need information, they're gonna go, no, I remember Officer Leo, he jacked me up and was rude to me and said, I'll get you next time when the stop ended. You know, I don't mess with the police. I don't even like the police because I've had bad interactions. And oh, and those 40 people, they're each upset. So they each tell three people. Let's do some math. That's 120 people that have a close friend now that feels victimized by law enforcement officers. So that's one way to do it. Go out and jack people up all day. Another way is protect and serve your community. I've already released an episode on Intel-driven police work, intelligence-based police work. That's what this leads to. It leads to you taking action against the five to ten percent that are doing the 90% of crime. And that's a good thing. That's a much better feeling. You didn't jack up a bunch of randos. So if you if you need people humanized, if you are listening to this and you're going, I still feel us against them. Like, I don't think I'm not really with Leo on this one. I love his other 60 episodes. This one is just not good because he just kind of sounds like a hippie. Like he's trying to relate to these guys that shot these people. Like, what are we even doing here? Go to a sentencing. I'll tell you about a couple of sentencings I've been to. I've been to a lot where people get a lot of years. And a couple of the people that were some of the biggest, what I would consider, I'm not gonna use the word monsters, the biggest dangers to the community. They're willing to shoot people. They shot kids. One of the guys, when I interviewed his ex-girlfriend, she was like, Yeah, I was with him like three years. I saw him shoot six people during that time. She was like, he's little and he can't fight. And so he's a hothead and he's always got a gun. That's how she described him. She's a little and he can't fight. I was like, oh man, that's kind of is obviously an X, like you're running your mouth about him. But he was very dangerous. I mean, she said he did six in her presence. It wasn't that she knew about six where she was there in three years, and then they broke up and he like tried to trick her out and then like hit her with the gun and ran from the cops and blah, whole crazy thing. That's how they broke up. But when I went to his sentencing, where I think he got like 17 years or something, he his defense attorney talked about his childhood. And most of these guys that are quote unquote monsters, their childhoods are insane. I mean, watch that show with that show Ed Geen or whatever. I think it's called Monster, Ed Guy and Ed Gean, and the childhood he had with his, you know, his mother and like extreme, far Christian, extremist mother who would like had him like standing naked reading Bible verses or something crazy. Like, yes, that's extreme, but that's how monsters are created. And this guy who I'm talking about, who'd done I got him for a shooting that was unrelated. So that's at least seven that he'd been involved in, probably 20 more. His childhood was absolute madness. His defense attorney got up there at sentencing, the guy spoke, the suspect spoke, and they talked about his stepdad trying to kill his mom in front of him, and how he got in and saved his mom's life, and all the stuff he had witnessed as during the formative years. Another guy that I put in prison, he's doing 15 or 20 or something like that. He had done a quadruple shooting. That's what I ended up getting him tied up with, but he'd done a bunch of other stuff. He had shot a kid. Some pretty heinous stuff. Same thing. Sentencing. His dad was gone. His mom got locked up when he was like 10 for bank robbery and was gone, raised by grandma. Brother was a criminal in the same gang, surrounded by gang members. So if you've never seen the movie, I think it's called Trading Places. It's that Eddie Murphy movie. There's these two rich old dudes who like want to see, they're basically tinkering with society. They bet each other like a dollar that they can make Eddie Murphy, young black dude coming from poverty, and whoever the other dude was, but it was like a well-off, same-age white dude with a job and a family, and kind of had his stuff together. And they wanted to see if they could make them trade places. So they tinkered with circumstances, and they basically did. They made Eddie Murphy into a successful man, and they made then this other guy turned to crime and got arrested and did all this stuff and was essentially a victim of circumstances. They changed the circumstances, he became a criminal. So I say all that to say most of these monsters you're dealing with, they didn't start that way. They were neglected, they were victimized, they were screwed, they saw five murders by age six, they saw blood hit the ground, they saw robberies, they saw people do murders and not get caught. And then, you know, they just got caught up in so much. So once you start looking at even them as part of the community we serve, everything will change you because your interviews with them will have an air of empathy. Your rapport will increase when you show an interest in where did this shooter come from? How did you become this? They're gonna want to talk to you more if you go, man, you've been you've been blood. I'm looking at you, you've been documented, you're 24, and you started being documented when you were 12. How the hell did you become blood and getting documented at 12? Like, can you tell me your story? Because I'm actually interested, because if you're documented at 12, you're probably active at 9, right? It wasn't your first interaction with police. You didn't get documented at the beat-in. You got documented when you got caught in your first stolen car at age 12 with three other Pyroos. So what happened, like, what was your childhood like? Did you have a father figure at all? Did these guys provide you a family and a structure and an organization that you needed? Most of them will tell you about this. And once you start looking at them as people who kind of got screwed, it'll transition you away from doing an interview like, hey, we need to talk about why you shot that kid, why you would do that. Tone's not great. They're probably gonna shut down. It's gonna help you deal with juveniles. Juveniles, I don't know what it is. I'm no scientist. They're frontal lobe. It ain't there. You're 15 and shooting people. Your decision-making stuff is just not there. And you've seen crazy stuff. So it's gonna help you deal with these kids. It's gonna help you deal with their parents, which you will. It's gonna help you deal with young men, not juveniles, but let's be honest. It's usually us guys about 18 to 24, maybe 16 to 24 years old, that do most of the violent crime, most of the crazy stuff. Once you look at them as people, it's it changes everything. It's just gonna help you deal with offenders in general in order to better do what? Collect facts. You got it. That's what we want to do. So there's a shift in mindset from what you do at work. Let's go with Patrol Cop. Here's what I want you to get away from. You show up, you ride your 911 calls, your windows are shut. I'm big on this, man. I'm big on the windows open. I know I quote training day a lot. I think Denzel made him roll down the windows and smell the city. I'm big on it, man. It's it's not only that kind of barrier, it's a physical barrier. You ride through apartments with your windows shut and stare at people. They stare back, they feel an intimidation. It changes the game when you just roll your windows down and speak. Roll those windows down. So here's what we want to get away from. Windows are up. I enforce the law on bad guys. That's a mindset that a lot of cops go to work with. I go in, I catch bad guys, and then I go home. You're welcome for my service. Hero cop. Try this for a month. Give me a month. It'll be all right. All right, give me a week. Give me a shift. Give me something. Windows are down. We're out walking around. We're walking through some apartments. Don't walk through some apartments where they're gonna jump on you. If you got apartments where they're crazy, don't be like, well, Leo said, go walk this building in the stairwell and you get freaking blasted in half because cops don't go in there. General apartments, most apartments are not like that in most cities. So walk around, break bread with people. If there's a little hood barbecue going on and it's in some project apartments, can you go up and act like you're part of that community? Yes, you can. You can treat them just the same. You can get a plate. Hey, can I get a plate? Worst they can say is no. They can't spit in the food because they're right in front of you. It's probably safer than McDonald's or Wendy's. So, hey, can I get a plate? Can I hang out with y'all for a minute? They got a little burn barrel going. Hey, can I hang out for a minute? You don't have to do any police work. Your mere presence and showing that you care and that you're with them. You're not foreign. You might be wearing different clothes. You might be on duty. Some kids might ask you some offensive questions. Hey, what's it like being a pig? Like, can we put some bacon on the smoker? Like, make a stupid joke. Okay, does that have to hurt your feelings? No, it doesn't really matter. Ignore that kid. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, I'm bacon. Cute. Thank you for the food, though. Can I have a coke? Move along. We don't have to let our ego get us bothered by that. I took a ride along with me when I was policing in Georgia. He lived in Atlanta. It was a buddy. I was in the National Guard with him. He came down and he was like, at the end of the ride-along, he was like, This is what you do all day? Because I remember two times. One, I rode into some little project apartments, some Section 8 housing apartments, bunch of kids out. Some people are scared. There's a bunch of people out. Some people look scared. Some people are just staring at me, kind of aggressive. I put the windows down. I put on some song. But it kind of played the music loud. Kids came up, started dancing around the car. I wasn't making a TikTok. I wasn't shooting it for the internet thing. They came up dancing around the car. Some people are kind of smiling. They're like, oh, he's not here to just like start a fight or run up on somebody. And so then we left there. We went to some other little kind of low-income apartments. We pull in. There's like 10 people. They got a burn barrel going. That's what made me think of it a minute ago. They're kind of hanging around it and drinking. I came up. I didn't jack them up. I came up. They weren't like being out of control. They were out having a drink in their apartments around a fire in the parking lot. I parked. He's like, what are we doing? I was like, we're going to hang out with these dudes. We went and hung out for like 10, 15 minutes. There were no calls. There was nothing going on. We went and hung out and talked to them. The people were trying to figure out like, what does this cop want? Like, why is this guy in here? And by the end, we were cool. They were like, all right, see you, Leo. I introduced myself. They're like, see you, Leo, take it easy. I was like, yeah, see y'all later. That's totally different. And it does a lot of the stuff I've talked about in the past. One, if any of them really are that monster, hopefully they don't shoot me if they see me on a traffic stop. They're like, ah, this is one of the good ones. And I want them to cooperate with me. And I want to serve them. Like they live in that community. And I want to serve that community. I don't just serve the middle to high income communities. No, I especially serve the low-income communities where the highest level of victimhood is, where kids see the worst things. I want to serve them and show them that police aren't bad dudes. We're actually there for them. Because I guarantee you, most of them have heard, hey, if you see the cops run, that man's here to lock you up. They've heard all that stuff. You see him, he'll lock you up. Hey, if you keep not going to school, he's going to lock you up. Every kid in most kids in real low-income apartments have heard that told to them by some adult or some teenager. So overcome that. Show them, hey, that's actually not true. I'm not here to lock you up. I'm not here to shoot you, to fight you. People are gonna say that too. Oh, you out here to kill somebody? Nah. That's my answer. Nah, I'm not here to eat this plate that I just got. What you talking about? Make them look stupid. Like you can be aggressive if you want. I'm not matching that energy. You got your own problems, obviously. But I love breaking bread with people. I'll sit there and eat and hang out and have a cold drink and shoot the crap. Just engage with your citizenry that you serve. Engage with store owners. Go in. Don't just go in, get the free drink, and leave. Go in and talk to them for a minute. Hey, you having issues? Do people steal from you? A lot of the clerks, especially the owners, they care what's going on. They might have been robbed. They might have five kids that come in and grab handfuls of candy and run off. You don't know what they're dealing with or what they're seeing, but they are your eyes on the ground. So if you want to do intel-driven police work and catch shooters, you might go into that crappy store where stuff happens and go, or they keep a big old shotgun with a banana clip behind the counter and go, hey, what do you deal with in here? Like, what times of day are the shooters coming in? You know what they look like. When are they coming in? What are they wearing? I'm here for you. Like I'm here to serve your store. I'll help you if I can. What can I do to help you out, bro? Nothing wrong with that. And if you just show caring, you're gonna end up with intel. It's gonna be by accident. But they see a professional that's on their side. And they're gonna tell you, they're gonna start telling you things. The third time you walk that apartment complex and they see you not slamming people against the wall, not telling people, hey, your jaw's in jeopardy, you're about to get lit up. But just going in and just talking to people, they might, it might just be a simple look of the eyes to that stolen car that's in the corner. Hey, you want to check that car. Don't do it right now. They're watching. I see them in the window. But you'll be surprised the intel you start getting when you humanize yourself and you treat others just like yourself. Because I'll tell you this we're no better than the people we serve. We're exactly the same. So once you get that out of your head of it's us against them, I do no wrong, it's like he who throws stones but lives in a glass house or whatever. Like, okay, you're gonna pass judgment on everybody like you didn't do wrong this week. Of course you did. So let's not judge them, let's do our job.