You Can't Solve Everything Alone, with Michel Moore

What happens when police stop trying to solve every problem alone and start building the partnerships that actually make communities safer? In this episode of the 21CP Pod, we sit down with Michel Moore, the 57th Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and 21CP senior advisor, for a candid conversation about collaboration, mental health response, and what it takes to plan security for the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Michel draws on his four decades at the LAPD, including nearly six years as chief, to make the case that effective policing has never been about going it alone. From building co-response models with mental health clinicians, to partnering with community service providers to meet needs that fall outside law enforcement's lane, he reflects on what genuine collaboration between police and the broader service community can look like in practice.

That same philosophy of partnership turns out to be at the heart of large-scale special event planning as well. Michel talks about the work he and the 21CP team are doing as chief security officer for Philadelphia Soccer 2026, the World Cup host committee in Philadelphia, and why an event of that scale simply cannot succeed without deep, trusting relationships across dozens of agencies and organizations. He walks through the progression that separates departments that are truly ready from those that only think they are: standing plans, tabletop exercises, documentation, and then execution, with the understanding that 20% of any plan will always surprise you.

The episode closes with a message that runs through everything Michel Moore has built and believes: the communities that are safest are the ones where every responder knows their role, trusts their partners, and has practiced getting it right before it matters most.

Transcript

Deborah Spence 0:26

Whether you're a practitioner, a policymaker, or simply someone who cares about public safety, you've come to the right place. Our guest today is 21 CP senior advisor, Michael Moore. He served for over four decades with the Los Angeles Police Department, including the last six years at the helm as their chief. LAPD is one of the largest and most scrutinized police departments in the world. And during his tenure, Chief Moore navigated some of the most consequential moments in modern American policing. Since retiring in 2024, he's been doing consulting work with departments across the country, including as part of the 21 CP Solutions team. Chief Moore, welcome to the pod. I'd love to start off with just a little bit about your background. I know you worked your entire policing career with LAPD.

Michel Moore 1:17

Well, you're right. I came on in 1981. I was 21 years of age. I was the first in my family to be in law enforcement and actually to this day remain the only member of my family. So it wasn't a traditional route. I went to college essentially to become a CPA. And yet while I was working uh full-time and going to school, I realized that it just wasn't fulfilling, neither the eventual arrival as being a certified public accountant and doing that type of work, or uh the full-time job I had, which was building aircraft for Lockheed. And so I began looking uh back to what I thought as a young child, which was public service. And and police department uh drew my attention and LAPD drew my attention specifically. I was in the LA area, and uh four months after I applied, I was found myself in an academy class. And the next four decades had a just a tremendous career of, you know, both ups and downs, uh tragedies as well as triumphs, but a thoroughly enjoyable career uh in law enforcement, uh, with a capstone of finishing as nearly six years as chief of police, the 57th chief, uh, following uh Charlie Beck and his course uh his predecessor uh Chief Bratton.

Deborah Spence 2:26

You really served through four very fascinating decades at LAPD, I would think.

Michel Moore 2:32

I I term it the arc of the arc of policing, uh you know, building off of Martin Luther King Jr.'s the arc of uh of justice. The moral arc of the universe is bent towards justice. I think the moral arc of policing has changed, has evolved, and it's built on continually efforting to build trust, to build uh safety in our communities, but doing it in a manner much like much different than where we were four or five decades ago, of not being the solution to every problem, uh not seeing every issue as something the police department has to solve. Uh, we are in a shared environment, a shared responsibility of what it means to be uh safe in our communities, to be safe in our homes. And in that uh that time, in that transition, also to recognize that there are so many other parts of our system that are broken that that our role is not to take on those jobs as we've often done. The uh Chief Bratton and now Chief McDonald often have said that uh policing has been asked to do too much for too long or too little. And unfortunately, uh it's in our DNA to be problem solvers. And so I understand how we got there, but I'm grateful that police leadership and even rank and file, the officer in the black and white, realizes that there are other parts of the system that are broken that need attending to, uh, and that they cannot fill that space entirely. So you're right, uh, at the end of the day, uh, it's not the end of the day for me, but at the end of the day of looking back on 40 plus years, I have seen and witnessed and and have really applauded the changes in our profession. And while there are many critics uh of our work and there's many who believe we could do better, and and also I believe that we're we're not there, uh, there's no other profession that's tried harder. There's no other profession, I believe, that has tried to lead uh in this space of helping address the needs of society.

Deborah Spence 4:21

Yeah, when you talk about uh police are too often seen as needing to solve every problem in a community versus taking advantage of the network of other service providers. Um I think the most obvious example of that is around mental health response. And I know that you were uh you know a champion of bringing in uh mental health responders and professionals into working with LAPD and helping to take that burden off of officers and put it with real experts.

Michel Moore 4:50

Well, you know, LAPD, I I've learned from a lot of my predecessors. I came up with an organization that adopted a co-responder model back in the late 80s, early 90s. It's often called the Memphis model. So we're not the authors of it, but we began pairing officers with trained clinicians in the early 90s and have continued that to this day. It's a model, though, that has uh over its time uh suffered from a lack of resources on the mental health clinician side. And that's part of the cultural thing I I've said that needs to change if we're really going to see uh a deepening of that program. I will say that during my tenure, we shifted our model from being a model of a trained clinician and also responding to a scene after officers have uh essentially what we call a code for, made it safe, uh, so that they could then intercede and determine what mental health services could be provided to, whether it be the victim or suspect or others. We changed it so that we would co-dispatch them. They would be dispatched at the same time to a call involving mental health or suspected mental health issues, because we recognized that the first entry, the first approach, was actually where when we saw calamities, 99% of them occurred. So having a clinician dispatched at the same time offered the solution of now you have two sets of disciplines, both policing as well as mental health clinicians, that are approaching a situation and can broaden the awareness of tactics that are available and look to uh resolving it by manners of de-escalation, by manners of even disengagement. Now, with LAPD, uh, you know, I enjoyed but and also suffered as the rest of the profession did with the onset of COVID. And so with that, we saw the adoption of mental health professionals being willing to provide services remotely. And that has helped the profession immensely. Historically, it would require a clinician uh directly, person-to-person, face-to-face contact, and that's now since changed because of the necessity of what COVID brought about. And I'm proud that many of those clinicians have continued to offer their advice, counsel, and support uh and the real utility of their position by offering that remote counseling. The challenge we have in LA, it's shared in other parts of the country. I'm currently now live in Tennessee. My daughter is a who happens to be finishing her doctorate in mental health, uh, actually works with the Mental Health Cooperative, the state of Tennessee, and a co-respondent model with Metro Nashville. Uh and John Drake, Chief Drake there, has done a tremendous job. I'd like to talk briefly just about the differences in that model versus LA. But but even in that instance, their largest challenge is getting mental health professionals to work in the off hours.

Deborah Spence 7:33

I would love to hear more about what they're doing in Metro Nashville.

Michel Moore 7:36

So about so about five years ago, I believe it was, uh, under Chief Drake's leadership, the department entered into an agreement with Mental Health, the Mental Health Cooperative, which is a nonprofit uh collaborative that works uh in many parts of Tennessee. And they began a co-responder model that began in one precinct, one station, and is now grown, I believe, to six or more. And the interesting twist that that it had, my daughter had the benefit of actually coming in. She was a master's student at the time, and she had the benefit of coming in at the ground level as one of those uh counselors. And so she saw firsthand the work and and the uh training and orientation that Metro Nashville did. And what Chief Drake did, I thought was very, very smart and something I think all of us should consider, is that he did not limit the co-responder model to just a select group of trained officers. In LA, it's approximately 60 or 70 officers that are in the smart team, but they're not at the geographic level. They're not assigned to individual stations. Chief Drake took the different approach, and I think a very wise one, learning that there is a there can be a gap between officers in their perspective and a mental health clinician. And so his decision was to immerse those together by training officers on a volunteer basis at an area station and then pair them with clinicians. And you know, again, uh my daughter was in the early steps of this, and we would talk often about, well, how are the officers responding to this? And at first there was some hesitancy and some concern about you know whether this was being too soft or going to get uh an officer hurt or that real justice would be served. And what happened over time was that these officers saw in practice that what they're that these problems were no longer their problems, and that these resources that were on the on the scene was was taking work off of them and solving problems through us through a door other than the criminal justice system. And and the attributes of that was the people who are really in need were getting help. And the interesting thing is I think that even when those officers don't have that clinician next to them, they have a broader mindset. They have a broader set of tools to think about, well, you know, what could what would we do if we had a counselor here? And they're reaching out to the counselors on and off hours to say, hey, we have this, we have this situation. Can you help us? What do you suggest?

Deborah Spence 9:53

That's interesting too when you think about what you said about COVID and technology and changing the way that officers interact, right? That I think a lot of officers hesitate over co-responder models because they worry about needing to not only keep themselves safe, but also the clinician. And but building those relationships and making use of technology are two ways to solve that. Absolutely.

Michel Moore 10:15

And it comes really with also, you know, officers are not supermen, superwomen. They're not bulletproof, they don't fly, uh, they can't leap tall buildings in a single bound. They have human as well. And so if they're worried about the safety of a clinician, that same point uh goes to their own safety. Now, having said that, but this goes to a similar model with fire. SWAT in LAPD decades ago adopted a tactical paramedic uh response that not only did we train uh SWAT officers, which many agencies do across the country, train SWAT officers to be paramedics, but we actually take paramedics from the Los Angeles Fire Department and give them training and orientation into SWAT operations so that they can be part of the element teams. And because uh and with that, they bring a much deeper and and I believe uh experienced hand as to rendering first aid and that essential those essential moments after you know a potential catastrophic injury and so forth about how to stabilize the uh the patient, whether that be an officer or or or suspect or others, and how to render aid, and yet to do so in a manner that is safe. In policing and in fire, our relationship is cops stay out of the red zone, firefighters are there. But we do go into the yellow zone. We do go into the area that there is some hazard, but it can and must be mitigated, and there's safety precautions to be made. But we can't afford to be outside the evacuation zone. No one gets evacuated if the closed area only has firefighters. There's always a role for all these agencies back and forth is to step back, look at it and say, how do we share this? Again, the shared responsibility, how can we work towards the best unified resolution that capitalizes on everyone's strength and minimizes uh potential weaknesses?

Deborah Spence 12:02

That actually is a really good transition into another area I want to talk to you about around special events and crisis situations. 21CP has been uh deeply involved in helping Philadelphia prepare for the FIFA World Cup this summer. And, you know, I mean that's an event that's bringing 39 days of a fan festival to the city, um, international visitors, there's games that are going to be overlapping with uh events celebrating the 250th birthday of our nation. That's a a lot for a city to take on. So um I'm curious from your perspective, what does truly rigorous special event planning look like?

Michel Moore 12:40

Sure. So first of all, let me throw uh kudos out to Philadelphia, uh, both as a city as well as police department, fire department, all the city services, the officers of emergency management, as well as the state officials and the federal officials. Uh our involvement with 21 CP, and I'm a senior advisor with them, was invited into an operational team uh under the chairmanship, if you will, of really the founder of 21 CP, co-founder Chuck Ramsey, a very experienced individual leader, uh still well recognized in that region for his wisdom and his ability to really provide effective uh policing recommendations and executing plans. We'll have a fan fest of 39 days. I call it 39 days and nights. It's the longest fan fest uh activation, if you will, for uh all the games across the entire uh tournament spectrum. The and it happens to be in the birthplace of America, which means that uh there's potentiality for Congress to hold a special session. They certainly have the 250th anniversary on the 4th of July, parades. Uh they have the Major League Baseball All-Star Game the week after the uh after the 4th of July. Uh so they definitely stacked on a full full dance card of of um of activities, and they'll bring hundreds of thousands of people. A stadium alone will hold 66,000 just on uh on a stadium day, and tens of thousands more expected for parties and so forth. So it is an enormous engagement and an enormous endeavor. I'm grateful for the a couple of different aspects. First of all, the the support we're receiving from the White House and from our federal government uh needed funding, needed uh resources. This is a SEER two event, meaning on a national security level, it's just below the very highest level of a protection and of resources and of planning and executing an oversight of what it what it means to provide for public safety. In providing for something of that enormous, in Los Angeles in my time as chief, and really coming up through the organization, we've engaged in in similar engagements, but not to this scale because of the duration. Uh we've seen this during my tenure, we had the Super Bowl, we had our World Series, we had National Basketball Association, had its playoffs and championship series. There's a whole host of things. We have the Oscars every year, and and uh so there's a number of special events in the city of 4 million of Los Angeles in a region of 10 million that deal with these matters, but they never have had a Super Bowl for 39 days in a row. And I think that requires a different level of training because the most important aspect is that you put it all together in advance and plan for the actual execution of the day. And then you have the apple the aftermath, and there's some secondary events and then demobilization. But this is an event that has been going into a pre-operational planning period and execution for months, and it really began in Philadelphia years ago when they were appointed as one of the cities. And now we're getting into this next week. Our first game will be uh on the 14th, and we'll see that first match, and then from that, the fan fest will already have been opened by about three days uh at Leaven Hill. It will attract upwards of 15,000 people a day. Uh we'll also see uh various uh watch parties that occur across the city. Uh tens of thousands of people are coming here internationally as well as as well as nationally. I never realized the popularity of soccer until I became engaged in this, and I've had a number of my friends and colleagues say uh who are excited just for me to have an opportunity to be involved in it in this. But with that, all it the enormity of that it still relies upon some basic principles and and structured around the national incident management system, and that is to define events. What is it that you're talking about? What is the identifying impacted areas and stakeholders? With that, what are the needs? What are the what are the objectives and now organize a structure? And the word bureaucracy has often been ridiculed, but it is so important that in such engagements that you identify core functions and responsibilities and then put a bureaucracy of order, of marshaling these particular tasks are going to belong to this organization, this group, and then to cross-pollinate that with the various disciplines, meaning that the police department does not have all of the public safety because street services has an important role, parking authority has an important role, the fire department has an important role. And so what I'm really, again, impressed by what's happened in Philadelphia is that they've recognized that. Their office of emergency management is, in my view, uh, I uh they're without peer and they've been orchestrating this. Uh we work as 21 CP as a chief security officer for the Philadelphia Soccer. And while we have that overarching, if you will, role and responsibility, uh, we're there to help and support. Uh really, it's like every planning effort, the people who actually execute the program, the farther you go up in the organization, the more you're in a support role. You're not there to tell people how to do things. You're there to say, what are your needs, what what are your what are your asks, and how do we find resources to help go about uh executing this. Uh so I think it's a wonderful opportunity, but it really at the end of the day requires relationships. And that's where these you cannot just say, well, we'll pull a book, standing plan, we have an evacuation annex, we have an annex for mass casual event, we have plans for how to deal with an unruly crowd. Okay, those plans are all great. And every city has those those uh emergency plans and those annexes, but you've got to bring them the people that are going to actually execute those plans, A, for awareness. Uh they have to be they have to even know that they exist, and then what the contents of the people who put them together, what do they what did they identify as objectives? So you're not making it up as you go, so you're not trying to come up with a whiteboard. Okay, what are objectives? Well, let's plan out. So with this is bringing people together. Secondly, is then tabletops. Really proud of the team at 21 CP working with Officer of Emergency Management that have been having tabletop uh exercises where they go through a series of events, potentialities, if you will, and what would be the play? What would we do? And you find gaps, you find a times a lack of awareness of what resources are out there, because again, people think I'm the only resource. No, we have resources that can provide for that. And they have their own plans and they have their own contingencies that can help surge resources and overcome these problems. So those tabletop exercises in person, uh, in reality, working and investing that time and energy, those also develop relationships to get to know who people are, what their strengths are, what you can do to help them support them. And you build a camaraderie that when it hits the fan, and and everyone knows that any plan, it's about 80% there, and then 20% is going to come in, and it's gonna be that wild weasel that just frustrates you. So the the last portion of that is so with standing plans, relationships, tabletop exercises, documentation then, of getting people to write it down. And that's where we're at right now. We're in the final throws of each department putting their operations orders together, of uh OEM can you know coalescing those, Philly Soccer, uh our federal partners and state partners being you know briefed into those so that what's been briefed back verbally is actually now in writing, uh, is documentation. And then as the games begin, you wash, rinse, repeat. And at the end of the day, staying ahead of the problem. And as we do that, uh, I think we'll we'll see success. I have great confidence that this is going to be a very successful uh engagement with FIFA, that this is going to make Philadelphia shine even more than it does already. Uh, and and I'm uh proud to be a member of that team.

Deborah Spence 20:38

One of the conversations that we always have to have in planning security around these is how to balance the tension between uh security and hospitality, right? Like there is a fan of public experience that is expected and that gets balanced with the security needs of any given space. Um I'm curious with the World Cup, do you have conversations about the expected international visitors? And I mean, not everybody has an American perspective on what a police officer does or has the same reaction. Like, does that figure in as well?

Michel Moore 21:11

Oh, absolutely. And you know, I'm proud of Kevin Bethel, the commissioner there, because he took advantage of technology and one of the most recent developments in uh in body warm video and with the automation of uh of what those devices can do with AI and so forth, the power is that they offer multilingual services. So now officers uh during the games and after will have the ability to simply press a button on their on their axon body warm video camera, and the person will speak. And the officer can use a universal language of hold the hand up, hold on, and the device will interpret more than a hundred different languages back to the officer of what the person's saying. The officer then presses the button, replies, instructions, further questions, or otherwise. And the device then translates that and provides in real time the language back to the person he or she is talking to. So that I think speaks to policing today in such a great way because that's a burden, that's a cost. And that's something that sometimes comes at the expense of other things, other technology that policing may look at, yes, but you know, we need this technology to go out and capture people. No, this is technology we need to improve the fan experience, improve the ability of an officer to understand what's happening here. And it'll be used countless times in the aftermath of the games for just general control and coming in and dealing with victims and others that have a language barrier with officers here today. So there is a great deal of attention to the fan experience, both leading up to, during, and the aftermath of uh match plays, but as well as the fan experience at uh at the fan fest and then countless parties that are occurring throughout the city being organized both officially and otherwise. So I think there's a great deal of effort. Now, I will also say that with that, the overarching goal is a safe and secure uh game. The interesting my experience this time, what I'm looking forward to is to understand uh how to deal with the fatigue factor, uh how to keep people uh as sharp as one is today getting into this game. This issue has been recognized, and the planning, again, by these departments I I applaud is that they recognize there is a fatigue factor that a person, a horse, you know, we oftentimes talk about horses and canine, you know, they can only be on a post for so many hours. Well, so can only a cop or a firefighter or emergency planner. They need rest and recuperation as well. And so I think the largest challenge for Philadelphia and for all the cities will be that steady state of high elevated readiness across the course of more than a month. And again, I think that's where all this early planning work, getting to know all the players around the table, getting to understand their respective roles and responsibilities, and understanding that we all have a common goal, but that personal connection I think will serve everyone well.

Deborah Spence 24:08

Well, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation today, Mike. I uh I wish you and all the team working in Philly over the next month. Uh I don't want to say good luck, that seems wrong, but uh good games.

Michel Moore 24:25

No, no, I'll take good luck. I'll take good luck, good fortune, what do they call it? Smooth seas, you know? That that's yeah, yeah. Unlikely we're gonna get it, but you know, but they're up for it. And again, I couldn't be happier. It's interesting. It's good. I'm proud of 21CP as much as I'm proud of Philadelphia because this is a Herculeane task and they're doing well. Uh and very they're supporting us, uh, and I think they're supporting the games in a way that uh the organization should be proud of itself.

Deborah Spence 24:49

Here at 21 CP Solutions, we're committed to making public safety work better for agencies, for officers, and for the communities they serve. If today's conversation resonated with you, we'd love to connect. You can reach us at info at 21cpsolutions.com or by phone at 844 767 2172. New episodes of the 21cp pod drop regularly. You can find them on our website or subscribe through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And follow us on LinkedIn to stay in the loop on everything we're working on. One final note our theme music was composed by Rachel McCullough. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, and we'll see you next time.