Task Force 70 Interview

70% of LEOs are with local law enforcement that serve communities of <10,000 people.  When we think of cops, we think of NYPD / LAPD or whatever the biggest law enforcement agency in your area is.  The reality is that 70% of those responding to calls are understaffed, undertrained and underfunded.

TF70 is a non-profit dedicated to providing the necessary training to the 70%.  Training in 5 vital areas - Constitutional Judgment, Rescue Marksmanship, Breaching, Emergency Medical and Tactics - free of charge.

Small town Chiefs, Sheriffs and Training Units - set your patrolmen and women up for success!

-LEO

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Good morning. Welcome back to that Leo guy. I'm here with Chappie today from Task Force 70. Not his government name, but I think that's what everybody knows him as. Chappie runs a nonprofit organization, and I'll let him get into the details, but he brings a wealth of knowledge and he can explain why it's Task Force 70 specifically and kind of what they do and why they do it. And we'll get into some of the differences between large agency policing versus smaller towns and what those different types of organizations deal with and how to better deal with it. Welcome, Chappie. Thank you. Thank you, my friend. How are you? I'm doing well.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Good. Good. Yeah, so I'm Chappie. My government name is John Chapman, as the streets like to say. So I've been a uh law enforcement officer since 1992 in large and and small agencies and done training stuff kind of all over the place and focused on mostly tactical operations at the patrol and the SWAT level, both here in the U.S. and internationally, and got affiliated with Hillsdale College about seven or eight years ago. And that's what kind of led to what we're working on now with the foundation.

unknown 1:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

And you're in the Nashville area, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, Middle Tennessee, working for a smaller, small-ish agency. Still, according to the statistics nationally, we're a medium-sized agency, but it sure doesn't feel like it when you're up in the holler.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Yeah, up in the holler. That's right. So what led you into this type of work and helping out smaller agencies?

SPEAKER_00 1:52

So in my career, both on the on the LE side and on the training side, I've had training companies since about 1999, teaching kind of commercially for lack of a better term, for on the open enrollment side and on the LE contract side. And all the students I got led me into a unconscious bias that, you know, I've trained a ton of cops and teaching them the guys who come willingly are a different breed than the guys that don't. And being involved with Hillsdale on the constitutional education side for law enforcement, they identified, Dr. Regan at Hillsdale identified about 10 years ago the one of the core issues is that cops just aren't at the local and state level, aren't taught the proper framing for the Constitution. They're taught the Fourth Amendment, which is excellent. Like they need to know it. They need to know the case precedence involved. But there seems to be, and he was able to prove in his studies, that we get worse outcomes with a combination of the size of the agency drive because the size of the agency drives the level of education and experience that the officers have, combined with a somewhat intentional lack of education about the Constitution and the Declaration themselves, which drives what is taught as case law, but it's actually not law. But without the fundamental understanding of the Constitution itself and the declaration itself, they don't really understand where they fit in, as proven by a recent viral clip of an elected sheriff who didn't know that he represented an Article II power. Just like that fundamental level of education is required. So as I got deeper into that, and I've always studied the Constitution, probably to a nerd out level, but not understanding why it was generating some of the law enforcement cultural issues that we're seeing, especially in smaller agencies. So that's what led me to do the study necessary starting about three years ago to try to figure out who really needed to be touched, like not in a creepy way, but like what officers aren't getting even the most fundamental level of training and and what are they what are they lacking that could improve their execution of the mission that the Constitution gives us in the preamble? Like what do they actually need and that they're not getting? And and we we came to constitutional judgment being one of them. How to you got to know the Constitution well enough to allow it to guide your decisions on every call. And then there's some other things that are are low probability, high consequence in nature that a lot of folks are teaching, but they're only teaching the guys who are willing to come out of pocket to learn it.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

And and through my study, I found that about 0.7% of the 730,000 law enforcement officers in the U.S. are willing to pay out of pocket for training.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

I'm probably not. I'm one of them.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Yeah. So, well, and the the deeper I dug, the more I found that the bigger the agency over the last 20 years, having seen it from the inside, the law enforcement agencies, the larger they are, the better their training is getting over time. And they're not the problem. Like the the big aid, now there are some exceptions in big agencies that just don't give a shit. And they can't, they have demographic problems with hiring. Like those are but those are city council problems, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, of course. Right. And and intermingling of first and second article powers is a huge problem on the local level. The the Article I power of a jurisdiction doesn't understand its bounds and begins pushing around the Article II power. Those are supposed to balance one another. And the Article III power, the judicial branch of that local government, doesn't interject itself enough.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

And sometimes So you've used the terms Article I, two, three. I've been in law enforcement almost 20 years and I'm not familiar. So do you mind giving, I know it's I'm sure it's a big topic, but just kind of a brief overview to clarify?

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Sure. So the const all state and local constitutional and formational documents uh are guided or are streamed, are downstream of the U.S. Constitution. Yeah. And the the powers of the government are delineated to three separate but equal powers. So the Article I power is the legislative power, and that exists at the federal level through the Congress, through a bicurial Congress supposed to be represented by the House of Representatives at the local level and the Senate through the state level. Okay. That's the Article I power. And that exists at the federal level, it exists at the state level through the state legislatures, and it exists at the local level through the city council, county, board of commission level. Those, all three of those layers, all the way up that hierarchical train, are Article I powers. Okay. And they are intended to provide to set boundaries and to provide resourcing. That's the purpose of Article I powers. Okay. So Article II powers as well exist at the federal, state, and local level, expressed by the executive branch of the government through flowing from the power of the presidency. It's intentionally set up to represent the monarchical powers that exist in every government naturally. So it it the our founders developed the constitution this way in order to as much as possible protect the declaration. So that's why all of the power of force exists in the Article II power. It can be constrained by the other two, but all of the power of force exists in the Article II. Okay. Flows down federally from the president. At the state level, it expresses itself through the governorship. And then at the local level, it expresses itself in multiple ways. Article II powers at the local level exist in the office of the sheriff, in the office of the chief of police, in the office of the mayor, or the county executive, or whatever your local forming documents call it. Those are all independent Article II powers under the governor, if that makes sense. And that's where law enforcement lives, is in the Article II power. So it's also where the prosecutor's office lives. So the Article III power is the power of the judiciary. The only place that exists constitutionally is in the body of the Supreme Court itself. And the Constitution gives the Supreme Court the authority to degrade or de-evolve that power below it as it sees fit, in consultation with the Article I power through Congress. So that's how we have U.S. federal circuits and then federal districts. That exists on the state level as well, just like the other two powers, through the state Supreme Court, which then can devolve circuits within itself in the state, which creates, which then flows down to the local level through the municipal or general session or whatever your local government founding documents called it. That's the Article III power. And that power exists to interpret the other, the Article II's execution of the power and the Article I's execu or expression of what that power should be.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Okay. Got it.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

That's probably an over-explanation, but that's about as short as you can make.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

No, it was clear though. I mean, it's not exciting, sexy stuff. It's not blowing stuff up and shooting through glass or whatever and ballistics and all this. But like you said, it's very if you're a sheriff, you should understand what Article II is, it sounds like. Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah, you should, and every cop should too. Where we run into problems with the institutionalization of the government since President Wilson is officers are trained to believe that they report to a judge. And and the judge is a separate power. His his job is to check us and and keep us within our the bounds of our power, but we fundamentally do the same thing to him. And I'm not telling cops not to listen to judges. It's quite the opposite. It's we don't we don't operate in a vacuum. And just because a judge refuses to allow us to do something doesn't necessarily mean that we can't do it. Gotcha. So Task Force 70, what does that mean? Why 70? So Task Force 70 is the name because, and in further, as part of this study working with Hillsdale in the in the law enforcement constitution program, I found the real as close as we can get to what the real number for police officers are in the United States, police officers and deputy sheriffs. So at the state and local level, and this changes every day, obviously, people hire, fire, et cetera, but there's about 745,000 state and local law enforcement officers in the United States. So about 70% of those officers work for agencies that serve less than 10,000 citizens. So the vast majority of agencies that that execute Article II power are small police agencies. They serve populations of less than 10,000 people. Their average staffing size is between six and seven officers at these agencies. So those guys get about 6% of the training resourcing of all of them. So 70% of the departments get about 6% of the training resources. And there's reasons for that. They try to centralize it at the state level with the state police academies and the state, whatever your state calls the post commission. They set the standards, and that's all necessary and good, but it very rapidly devolves into a bureaucratic checkbox for continuing education, initial training, field training. It it vastly degrades the level of training and experience that the officers in these small towns, which are the majority of departments, get. Right. Whether it's whether it's in one of the big five that the task force covers, or like they know that they need to, they really want to become an A-ride certified drug expert. Right. That that's a $4,000 training pipeline. Yeah. That their department can't afford. You know what I mean? So that's where the name comes from, and that is what we're trying to fill in, where we have the capability to do it.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah, you think of cops. I mean, your civilian thinks of cops. What do you think of? LAPD, NYPD, Chicago PD, Miami Vice, you know, all this stuff. And we're in Tennessee. You know, I'm in Memphis. Your Metro Nashville area. Tennessee has four big cities, right? Right. Knox, Chat, Nash, Memphis. And I mean, we got the other ones. We got Jackson in between. And I think most states are like that. And I mean, how many counties? I think there's like 93 counties in Tennessee. So that means 89 of those are not Shelby. I don't know, what's Nashville? Davidson. Davidson County. Right. Yeah. And then Knox County and whatever Chattanooga County is. So that's that's a vast given those are big departments, but every one of those counties has law enforcement entities and there's cities within them. I mean, the next city over for me, Galloway, Tennessee, I mean, they probably have like five police officers. It's tiny. And that's the norm. Yeah. So you're trying to reach the 70%. Yep. Which are getting neglected on training despite being the majority at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Yeah. But they've been bifurcated so much as an independent agency that they're and you mentioned it earlier. When when the resident of I live in New Johnsonville, Tennessee. It's 3,000 residents. We have four cops. And and they do their best. Like they're they're good dudes. But when a resident who doesn't know law enforcement well calls 911, they expect freaking Delta Force to show up. And they have a reasonable expectation of that. Our mandate in the Constitution is laid out in the preamble of the Constitution itself to ensure domestic tranquility. And it's laid out in detail in Federalist 17. The citizenry has a reasonable expectation of us being capable of managing those issues. And when it's one guy at 3 o'clock in the morning and his nearest cover officer is 35 minutes away and it's from a different agency, like we're training him at the centralized police academy like it, like he works in Nashville. Because that's where he's trained. And he's well, you just get on the radio. If there's an active shooter during the day at a school, there'll be 50 cops there in three minutes. Like you're you're lucky to get three in 40 minutes where I live.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Yeah. So you mentioned five training areas that you guys cover. What's that look like?

SPEAKER_00 17:13

So we have we we believe in the fundamental philosophy of we only focus on what we can control. So as an individual officer, going throughout what we teach, we teach them how to focus on what they can affect. As a foundation, we think the same way, and we have the capability inherent to do to teach, to do six things, but teach five things well. So we teach constitutional judgment, we teach rescue marksmanship, which is a different kind of shooting than cops or traditionally trained. Again, when someone calls 911, they expect freaking Delta Force to show up, like reasonably, and they have to be taught how to rescue shoot. We teach breaching, which patrol is very rarely taught, excuse me, as we've seen in some large nationally covered incidents recently where officers didn't enter a classroom with a shooter in it because they didn't know how to breach the door. And then we cover medical. It's being taught well fairly widely, but it's still not enough. And it needs to be incorporated into everything that's taught. So we teach medical skills, and then the last one is tactics. So officers nationally, the alert program at a UT is doing a pretty good job touching a lot of people, but they're at most they're getting it once a year. And as you know as well as I do, you can't teach and retain tactics, especially complicated tactics, excuse me, if you're not doing it all the time. So we we teach a methodology of tactics that can be applied on every call that the officers go on. So it applies if it's Navy SEAL Delta Ninja Lerp rescuing the daughters, the per daughter of the president, or you're responding to a domestic violence at two o'clock in the morning by yourself. Like the the tactics have to be scalable and applicable. And and getting using tactics training to help them mentor themselves and each other. So, and it also makes it more useful when especially federal agencies show up at small agencies, knowing or or getting a some level of confidence that I don't have to put these guys on the outside perimeter because just based on on the training they've been through or how they're they're performing in a briefing or as we're going, like these guys obviously aren't shitbags, excuse my French. Yep. But the the goal of any police officer, no matter what size agency, should be I should be useful when somebody else shows up.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

You know what I mean? And otherwise you're just a wasted asset. So anyway, those are our big five. The sixth thing that we also do is we have a patrol institute because there is no centralized national level think tank for patrol. There's lots of criminal justice programs around the country with grad students writing each other white papers about what patrol should be doing, but none of that matriculates down to the patrol level. So we we do not only equipment validation and testing independently so that small agencies don't have to do it. They can not make purchasing decisions based on a YouTube video. They they have somebody to call, say, hey, we know you test everything. How does this work given our circumstance? And we can give them an honest, independent answer. And then we also we just finished our first academic study that translates into a training program, which is how to divert adolescent violence early before it turns into something serious, because most adolescent violent offenders can be diverted pretty early. Just takes a patrolman to see it. Like we give them a checklist of like, just look for these things. And if any one of these things or any two of these things are present, every county in the United States has some version of social services. Like there are resources out there, but nobody's catching them. So, and it's not the fact that they're a trans kid. Like, that's not the problem. The problem is what behaviors we're seeing that that can be correlated to the potential of a future violent problem. So those are the kind of projects that the Patrol Institute side of the foundation works.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

Yeah, so I mean, a big city, we'll take Memphis, because that's where I am. There's thousands and thousands of high at-risk youth, right? Right. Kids without the structure, kids exposed to gang culture, way too young, death way too young. But you take a small town, I mean, we'll take what's what's your town name again? We're in New Johnsonville. New Johnsonville, which With 3,000 people, there may be one or two kids that Patrol knows and is like, this kid is off the rails. So giving them the tools to manage that and keep them from being a 16-year-old murderer or a you know a 21-year-old meth addict and go ahead and get ahead of the game would be fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Well, exactly. And it doesn't take much to divert them. It really doesn't. And and whether so those kids who are at risk go into one of two pipelines, depending on the social media profile that they have created. They're either pushed into becoming a sexual assault victim through some methodology through through a Discord server, or they're pushed into Discord and Telegram to become a potential violent offender. And if we can divert them before they actually get into one of those pipelines, and we've got uncounted amount of uh statistical data that shows that that pipeline exists, it doesn't like none of these attacks are centrally planned. Like they call it a conspiracy theory, but it's just it's an individual psychology problem that's not being caught early.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

So 70% of the agencies have a population of 10,000 or less and probably less than 10 officers. So most of them probably do not have a great training facility. So by by the nature of the size of the population, the funding they're getting, no fault of the agency, just it's what you're dealt. So how are you offering, you know, you have these five different training areas, how are you offering that to serve these sheriffs and chiefs?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

So we have a training pipeline that's that's intended throughout it to develop mentors because we can't train enough cops. Like we we could do this, I could have a hundred-man staff, take two years to get them all up to snuff to teach it, send them all over the country, and and we couldn't touch everybody. So we have a pipeline. So we start at YouTube to draw not only donors, because we're a nonprofit, but also to draw cops into a Patreon system where they get the first level of training is just video training. It's non-interactive. Unfortunately, it's how most states' post commissions do continuing education now. The return on video training is very low, but it gets on our from our perspective, it gets them into interest and then draws them into the next layer of training that we provide, which is virtual training, which we're already executing. Uh, we teach a patrol trainer's course virtually. That means it's personal interaction live on Zoom. They go through a six-week, one hour each week training course to learn how to teach their fellow officers. They don't have to be an FTO, they don't have to be super experienced. We're just like, this is how we build what we teach.

SPEAKER_02 24:58

So the other trainer too. You can just be a you know, 10-year officer on the department and there can be a 20-year guy.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

Exactly. That's and that's part of the institutional capture that's occurred with the credentialing system kind of being bred into the law enforcement world. The other one, the other virtual training course that we teach is the patrol leaders course. And and you've already touched on exactly why we do it. Every cop is a leader. Like every call you go on, you're you're the leader of everybody who's present at that call. So we teach them the the four character or the four uh strengths of a leader and the things you need to be working on and and all of those things.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

Yeah, when you show up in a uniform, everybody's looking at you for what to do, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Exactly. And and that's every call. Yeah. It's every call. So they have to be trained to be leaders, and it's not happening in the academy, and it's not happening in their field training programs. And and again, that's no fault of their own. It's just not something they would have ever thought of. So that is designed not only to teach them, but to also encourage them and draw them into the next level of our training hierarchy, which is our mobile training teams. Those are a three-day program that cover all five of the big five, but they just kind of touch them. It's like the first hit of crack. Like a lot of the guys, we we just finished one up outside Pittsburgh. Like in two days, I leave for one in Kansas, teach in a very rural region with seven or eight agencies out there that are each sending a guy. Oh, that's great.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Then they all then they're all getting to know each other a little bit too.

SPEAKER_00 26:41

Well, exactly. And even in that three-day course, like the rescue marksmanship program of that course, they have never seen that stuff before. And it's it's not that it doesn't exist, it's that like their YouTube algorithm is tuned to sports or whatever. They're not gun guys, and most cops aren't gun guys. And the ones that are are seeing military-style shooting, which is excellent, but that's combat shooting.

SPEAKER_02 27:07

It's totally different, definitely. You're so much more responsible for your rounds over here.

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Exactly. And that's that's a danger in in social media driven training information, especially in this space, because there's so much GWAT experience out there, which is excellent. Like that's awesome. But we don't do combat shooting, we do rescue shooting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

There's no suppressing fire in Oakland, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

And and hitting a hitting an A-box on an IPSIC target is unfriggin' acceptable for a law enforcement officer. Our our standard is a three-inch circle. Like that is what we have to be able to hit reliably. Because otherwise we're we're putting rounds all the way off target when when our stress or emotions are engaged. We're not stopping threats immediately. All of those things. So that's what the three-day class does on all five topics.

SPEAKER_02 28:04

It's an introduction.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Yes, exactly. And then the campus training is a 10-day program broken into two five-day sections. Okay. Uh so they come, they come to us for that once the facility's built based on fundraising stuff, which we'll talk to probably.

SPEAKER_02 28:23

I want to be part of this, man. I love the idea of reaching because we've all met the I mean, the small town cops just get neglected. It's hard to get to training. If you have four, if you have four cops, how can you even get you know time off to go do it? Because you can't. You know, and Betty Lou's having a baby, and we got stuff going on, and it's just hard to get away. Man, I I love the idea.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

I won't, I want to do it. Well, let's do it. All right. So the the campus training is two five-day courses. The first one is called the Patrol Tactical Operations course. There is a a tactical association in Illinois years ago, started a patrol tactics course, which was very good. And it kind of died off. And all the resourcing for that type of training goes to SWAT, which is great, but SWAT is a support function. And I've been a SWAT guy for over 30 years, so I can talk shit. Like we are a support function for patrol. Patrol is the mission. So when we we create problems, when we bias so much resourcing into tactical operations that the patrol guys start falling off the back of the bus. But because they can ignore it because we have a SWAT team. Like if something happens, I just call the SWAT team. Like SWAT's just gonna miracle to your traffic stop where the guy jumps out with a Draco. Like your problem. Exactly. And and the second half of this is our five-day patrol rescue course. So that is kind of the culmination of the entire project, and it's focusing around rescue. So active shooter training is a is a much abused term. So the same, and we're teaching now nationally different tactics for shootings in a school than we would for anything else, which further reduces the bandwidth of the officer to retain the information and get good at it. So during research for the for the foundation, we're not trying to run a government-funded welfare program for rich people. So like we can buy our kids Porsches and stuff. We're actually trying to teach these cops, trying to really dig into what the guys need. I found that it's between 93 and 98 percent of all circumstances of a call where someone is being held against their will, which is the definition of a hostage. Whether it's on a domestic, inside of a school, all of those are hostage jobs. They're all hostage rescues. So the the challenge with that is over 93% of those are solved by patrol within 90 seconds of arrival. And those guys get zero training on it. So we're using the entire training pipeline of Task Force 70 to build up to that one five-day course to help them to teach them to identify and then rescue or isolate when it's necessary.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

That sounds like what we need in this world is training the 70% to get them up to where they need to be. And I'm sure they'll appreciate it and the citizens will appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

So far they do. We've we're we're we crested a hundred guys trained so far with the limited amount of resourcing we have available now. And every department is is grateful for it and wants to do more, which is actually saying something from the modern police leadership class.

SPEAKER_02 32:03

Yeah. So what I'd love to do, I'd love to get a little deeper on the next episode into what those five different sections actually mean and kind of how you teach it, if that's okay. Absolutely. That's something we could do. Yep. Absolutely. Thank you for your time, and I can't wait till the next one. Yeah, thank you, sir.