You’ve been outspoken about the need for accountability for police officers. What do you think is the best way to achieve this?

What we’ve seen in many police departments is your best accountability is holding your own officers accountable. I think initially you set that tone as a police leader and as police commanders. You need to be very clear at the very beginning about what your expectations are as an organization. When you come across misbehavior, certainly there are different levels of punishment depending on what it is but those egregious things, those things that we talk to our officers about that aren’t mistakes, that are intentional types of things. Those will get you terminated and you have to realize that. I always like to tell our officers that no one person is greater than the organization and when I look at the reputation of our Police Department I tell officers that it only comes second to my family name. That’s how important it is, and they need to realize that you’re that serious about it. Every brand new hire, the very first day they come here, I sit down and I talk to them about mission, vision and our culture and values as an agency and exactly how important that is to us. You may be a lateral officer coming from another agency and you may have police experience at that agency, that doesn’t always mean that you’re going to fit into the culture that we have worked to develop within our organization and that we will continue to work to improve upon. I tell them right up front, if you can’t fit into our culture you need to go somewhere else. Because we’re not changing our values because you bring different values here from another organization. We’re very serious about that. I do think one of the things that we need is a nationwide database for officers who have been disciplined or terminated just to make it a lot easier up front to weed those people out of your process. Because we do get a lot of laterals from other agencies who come here and when we start our initial background discussion with them and we find out some of the things that they’ve done it’s kind of shocking to some of us.

I’m sure.

And it’s sometimes shocking to some of them when we tell them, we would have fired you for x, y or z and so we’re not even moving on any further in this process. They’re shocked to hear that.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

Also, what is the relationship between police officers and prosecutors and how do you think this makes it difficult to convict police officers for their crimes?

Well, I guess I have to understand exactly what you’re asking. I don’t believe it’s hard to convict officers for criminal behavior. I believe it’s easy to convict officers for their criminal behavior. I think what happens at times though is that the public hears a narrative, and that’s all they hear is this narrative that doesn’t take into account the totality of the investigation, or the totality of the use of force, or the totality of the case. I think unfortunately what you’re going to see come out of some of the most recent arrests is you’re going to see officers who don’t get convicted because the due diligence wasn’t done on some of those cases and that’s unfortunate. I think sometimes the public outcry is so loud that prosecutors rush to appease that public outcry and they lose cases and that shouldn’t happen. We should have a solid case and be able to win those cases when they occur and when they are warranted.

Definitely. Yeah, I was kind of basing that off of their decision to use the Attorney General as a prosecutor for the case with George Floyd and Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison was saying that it can be difficult to convict police officers.

Also, I was reading about qualified immunity and I’m wondering, how big of a role do you think that plays in police officers getting held accountable.

I think we have to first look at it in the context that this is a very unique job. You are asking police officers to do very, very unique things and without qualified immunity, good luck finding police officers and the courts have realized that. Police officers are always put in very, very difficult situations and while they may, say for instance they arrest somebody based upon probable cause but they don’t have enough for a conviction or the jury for whatever reason chooses not to convict them. Then you’re leaving every officer for every single arrest they ever make wide open to being sued for wrongful arrest and that’s not how the system was developed to work. It won’t work very well that way. We put a lot of responsibility on police officers to do everything. I don’t think people realize how dynamic that is. I like to explain to people that I remember the very first family fight I went to as a police officer, where I go and I’m supposed to explain to this husband and wife who’ve probably been married 20 years, well older than I am, exactly how a husband and wife are supposed to interact and how a marriage is supposed to work. I’ve been married for six months.

Oh no.

I’m supposed to be the expert in that area. That’s what the public expects of me. I go to a juvenile beyond control and I’m supposed to explain to these parents how they’re supposed to parent their child or vice versa and I don’t have children of my own. I’m a brand new, newly married police officer. One of the roles that’s been shoved upon police officers is we are now the mental health professionals and we’re supposed to be experts in that. People think we can identify exactly what type of mental issue a person is having or whether it’s a mental issue or whether it’s a drug induced issue. They expect us to be an expert in that area. They expect police officers to be experts in fighting traffic collisions and in investigating different types of crimes and then they need to be the end all to save all in use of force or self defense. Everyone thinks it’s like TV, Walker Texas Ranger, you know, with these highly trained individuals and it’s just almost, at times, it’s an impossible expectation that we place on these officers in the street. We are dealing with people at their most imperfect time, yet people expect us to be perfect. So I think at times we need to remind the public everything that a police officer does do on a day to day basis. From going to a family fight and leaving a family fight to now going and taking a mundane report call to now going to provide CPR to a child and this can all happen in one shift and we expect them to be perfect in every single interaction. And we’re not perfect. We’re human beings just like everybody else. We have families. We have issues at home that we bring to work, just like every single other person in this country. We’re not robots. They have feelings. The vast majority of officers do the very best job that they can do. I always like to say that I just firmly don’t believe that I have an officer who shows up and says, “Well I can’t wait to get to work and screw up today.”

That’s a good point.

They try and for the most part they do a great job. 375 million interactions a year in this country. Most of those are positive interactions or at least end the best way that they can.

Definitely. Yeah I was reading about how you said that lawyers can sit in their office and have all the time in the world to interpret the law or doctors can have days to diagnose someone. So I kind of thought that was a good description of that.

I think that’s one of the things the Supreme Court was very clear on in their ruling of Graham v. Connor. They said an officer cannot be judged with 20/20 hindsight. We need to look at that as what would an objectively reasonable officer do in that same situation and that’s very true. We’re making decisions in the street at a rapid pace and you can sit in a room with three attorneys on the same thing and you will get three different answers and so I think overall they do a very, very good job.

So I’m just trying to look at what the purpose of having the attorney general prosecute the case for George Floyd. So, what’s your opinion on that.

You don’t want to have an attorney prosecute officers from their own jurisdiction because that attorney may have bias towards those officers. So, you conflict that case out. So the attorney general in that case is the obvious person to conflict that case to. We do that in a variety of cases where we may be dealing with an investigation of a family member of a police officer and so we’ll contact one of the area agencies here and say, “Can you take over this investigation and you guys take it and run with it.” When we have officer involved shootings or things like that in this area, we do an investigation with the critical incident task force and that investigation is then ordered to an outside county prosecutor. Somebody that doesn’t work with the officer in this county because we want to make sure we maintain that neutrality and so that’s certainly the best way to do things.

That’s reassuring to know that you guys have already incorporated that.

So, have you witnessed any cases of racism since you started working as a police officer just amongst other police officers and how should their fellow police officers respond to acts of racism?

Yeah, actually. Yes, I have and I think you respond by confronting someone. I will tell you, I’ve never really witnessed overt racism, or I hadn’t until I actually went to a national training academy that I won’t mention the name of, but I heard a gentleman from another agency, another part of the country use a very overtly racist term towards another of our classmates. I was angry because it drove home to me why some communities have the relationships that they have with their police agencies. We all know that we’re just a microcosm of society. So are there going to be racist people that kind of get into this profession? Certainly there are. But I do believe that they’re few and far between but I can tell you I saw it first hand and it was very, very distressing to me. Now locally? No. I can’t say that I have. I’m not going to say that people don’t say things that are off the cuff that probably they shouldn’t say but they do because they’re humans and again, in a professional setting you confront those people about those things and you deal with those things as an agency. I know that we’ve issued punishment for people telling an off color joke. I know that we have punished officers for that in the past. But really it’s very, very rare at least in my experience.

That’s good to hear.

I’ve seen more racist things directed towards officers.

Really.

I’ve never witnessed an officer display any racism towards a civilian but I have seen it the other way around. For sure.

That’s a good point. That’s something no one’s really brought up.

So do you agree with the use of force that has been used across the country against peaceful protesters?

Well, I first have to say you’re going to have to give me the specific incident because what we’ve been seeing, I have to say, I haven’t seen peaceful protesters having force used against them. What I’ve seen is rioters having force used against them so I would have to see the specific incident that you’re referring to where there was actual peaceful protesters having force used against them.

Okay. So, to your knowledge have any Idaho police officers ever been convicted of murder or assault before?

In the line of duty?

On the job. Yeah.

That’s something that I can’t say for certain but to my knowledge I haven’t heard of anything like that.

Okay, I couldn’t find anything on it but I just wasn’t sure.

There has been some discussion on how crime has gone down but police are becoming more militarized with military gear from the federal government being used in police forces. So what are your observations with this?

Well for one, this has been a discussion for years. This isn’t a new discussion and really, when we started to see the weaponry change that officers used was after the Hollywood shootout. Where police officers were greatly outgunned dealing with armed robbers and police officers had to literally go to a gun store to get weapons to be able to combat these armed robbers and that’s when we started seeing a little bit of the change in the type of weapons that we carry. But this whole idea of police becoming more militarized, for the most part is a distraction more than anything. I know the Boise Police Department used an armored vehicle to put between some houses because there were some explosives in the house. So they used it to protect the next door neighbors property while they went in to recover those explosives. They use them for officer rescues. I don’t want to send officers in running with no equipment to try to save a downed officer or downed civilian. I want them to be able to drive in in a protected vehicle where they can pull right up to the patient and load them up into the vehicle and extract them out of that zone. So I don’t think that that is the issue. I think it usually is, what are the conversations that you’ve had with your community and how do you deploy that type of equipment and have you explained that to your community and what should they expect when they see that equipment out there. Are you going to go use it on a traffic stop? Certainly not. Are they going to use it on an armed barricaded subject that’s maybe firing shots out from a residence. I would sure hope so. You sure don’t want to be sitting there behind a police car taking those rounds and let’s realize, we’re a highly armed society. I can tell you this, the weapons that we carry, there are everyday people who carry those weapons and have those weapons in their house all over this country. I think it’s one of those things that it’s nice to glom onto and maybe visually it’s not necessarily a great visual at times but when you put it into the context of what it’s being used for how it’s being used, I think it changes that discussion.

Yeah, I think that there has to be a time and a place for that kind of thing.

One example is when you bring your officers out to separate two groups as we did at the Capitol. You don’t want your officers standing there with no protective gear on. Because guess what, the first officer that gets hit in the head with a bottle or gets hit in the head with a brick because somebody wants to instigate something with the other side or whatever. That’s unfair to our officers. We will never put our officers in that type of danger. We have a duty to protect them and provide them with the equipment that will do that.

So, can you speak to the six out of the eight policies that Meridian has already put in place out of the 8 Can’t Wait policy suggestions?

Sure. I got to grab something. I can’t remember then all.

I just saw in your interview about how you were talking about how we already had a lot of those in place so I was just kind of curious if you could expand on that.

Well, most of those are pretty common sense policies but, I will say this, the number one thing I will tell you is that you aren’t going to change somebody’s heart by implementing policy. You aren’t going to change bad policing by implementing policy. You’re going to change bad policing by hiring good people and training them well. Policies are a guide. They’re a guideline and they’re there for a reason but if you think that by implementing a policy manual all of the sudden your department, if it’s a bad department is going to change overnight and be a great department you’re sadly mistaken. Change and culture and those types of things take time and they take sometimes drastic measures for agencies to truly change. The two policies that we don’t have in the 8 can’t wait and I don’t know if you read my article on LinkedIn.

I did.

You know, everyone wants a catchy hashtag and think that’s going to solve everyone’s problems and they’re not. It’s not. I think it’s such a shortsighted view of that’s going to fix the issues in our country. Because this isn’t a policing issue. This is a societal issue that we’re dealing with right now. But like I say, police are a microcosm of our society. There are much deeper seated issues in these communities that need to be dealt with way before implementing policies or thinking these policies are going to change things. But the two that we don’t have, one is the use of force continuum. That is a very outdated tool. It hasn’t been used in policing for probably maybe 15 years because it is a very, very rigid tool and it’s if they do this, than you do this, and if they do this, you do this and it just locks people in. Anybody that’s been involved in any kind of use of force, or even if you’ve been a wrestler or an athlete in some type of combat sport, knows that those are very fluid situations. You can’t judge if they did this you should have done that, it’s unfair to the officers. I think it gets officers into more trouble than it has ever benefited them. We teach to the Supreme Court standard, the constitutional standard of Graham v. Connor which takes into account the totality of the circumstances of the situation. That it takes into account what was the crime that was being committed? What was the level of resistance by the suspect? What is the size disparity of the suspect compared to the officer or vice versa? What were the skill levels of the suspect compared to the officer’s skill levels? You have to take all of those things into account to be able to truly judge use of force and a force continuum doesn’t do that. If you’re telling me that because a person raises their voice or they may provide physical resistance at this level and it’s a 250 pound man yet I’m a 120 pound police officer. I can only be here and I should be using the same level of use of force above that. I’m going to lose that every single time as the officer and now you change that and you have this giant officer well trained and you have this little tiny, 90 pound kid or female who’s offering the same resistance as this 250 pound man and I decided, well you know what, they said I could use a stick I’m just going to use a stick. Well, wow would you rather see him use a stick or would you rather see him control that person and put them into custody in a much better way and that’s one of the things that we discuss often and it goes right in line with the other one, that we do not ban the coratid or the vascular neck restraint. It is an extremely safe tool when used appropriately. Choke holds have not been used in policing probably since the 80’s. The reason choke holds were banned was because they were being used inappropriately. Agencies were using what’s been called a bar arm choke where it goes directly across the wind pipe and they were crushing people’s wind pipes. They were using batons to use these bar arm choke holds but carotid holds, vascular neck restraints have been used for over hundreds and hundreds of years. I teach Judo and Jiu-Jitsu. I teach 13 year old kids how to use a coratid restraint. They use them in tournaments and they use it in practice all the time. I have never heard of a death using a carotid restraint appropriately in any Judo tournament, any Jiu-Jitsu tournament, any MMA mixed martial arts match I’ve ever seen because they’re extremely safe. Canada did a 2007 study on uses of force and they looked at what uses of force were the most effective. What uses of force have the least amount of injury to the officer and what uses of forces had the least amount of injury to the suspect. Well, number one, was OC spray or what’s known as pepper spray. Right? Which makes sense because it’s usually used at the lower level of force than other things. The next two that came in line were the use of the tazor and the use of the bilateral vascular neck restraint. They showed the least amount of injuries to the officers and the least amount of injuries to suspects. So Canadian Police research study came out and said that while no restraint methodology is completely risk free there is no medical reason to expect grievous bodily harm or death following the correct application of the vascular neck restraint in the general public by professional police officers in standardized training on technique. The problem that we have is that once you have these officers that are restraining these people and in a lot of these cases, they leave them face down. They don’t hold them on their side. They don’t set them up and the other thing that is being completely ignored in a lot of these cases, what is known as excited delirium. Now we see it in cases of OC spray, we see it in cases of tazor, we see it in cases of neck restraints being used and we see it in cases of where officers end up chasing somebody, they get in a struggle and they end up getting pinned to the ground. This is when a person has underlying health issues, maybe they have heart issues, maybe they have diabetes, maybe they have lung issues and you add to that, they are either a long term drug user, stimulant drug user usually, or they have drugs in the system and their body just gives out. People tend to want to ignore that or claim that it’s nonsense and it certainly is not. I just recently watched a video of officers literally chasing the person. They get in a struggle. They never put a ton of pressure on them. They handcuff them. They’re not sitting on them, but the person is complaining that they can’t breathe. The one thing they did do that they shouldn’t have is they left him laying on his stomach for too long. But even then, you can do everything right and you can still end up having a person die in your custody and is it horrible? It is horrible, but you can’t take away every tool from a police officer either and expect that they’re going to go home alive. Neck restraints are very crucial to this and, like I say, if they are so dangerous then we should just ban them period. We should do away with Judo, we should do away with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, we should do away with all these different martial arts that utilize this on a daily basis and in competition and people don’t die. I’ve been rendered unconscious numerous times. So I know what it’s like, I know what it feels like. I know what it feels like to render someone unconscious. It’s just, that’s not the narrative people want and you can do it. You can ban it from police work and you’re going to continue to see people die in custody. One of the reasons it started to come back with the LAPD was the Rodney King beating. The only tool they had were what.. batons. They used a tazor and they used batons. And it was ugly. I’ve always thought it very interesting that people think it’s just a tool of the trade. It’s not shocking to see an officer smacking somebody with a baton but if they see someone actually go hands-on physically with someone they’re shocked by that. I don’t know if it’s just because of the closeness. How personal it is when you see that happen. They seem to be able go, oh well, they’re just doing their job when they see a police officer repeatedly smacking someone with a baton. I think one of the things that you have to teach officers is, if the use of force you’re using isn’t effective, you have to teach them to go on to something else. You can’t do the same thing over and over and over again and expect all of the sudden it’s miraculously going to work. One of the things we talk to our officers about all of the time is if you’re applying something that’s painful to somebody, they are naturally going to want to pull away. They’re naturally going to want to move to protect their body and alleviate that pain and you have to be cognizant that they’re not always resisting.

Yeah and just to play devil’s advocate, with that, I think with some of these situations with MMA, people can tap out or there’s a referee there to kind of intervene and basically like any study, it kind of depends who’s funding it because the 8 Can’t Wait study said that banning chokeholds and strangle holds would reduce deaths by 22%.

Please research their numbers. I want to see where they got their numbers because no one seems to know where these numbers came from or how they were validated.

Yeah it definitely depends on the study and I did not read the whole study but I just wanted to throw that out there.

And the other thing I would point out is this, when we’re dealing with someone who is under the influence of say PCP, a dissociative anesthetic, and you’re hitting them with a baton and it is not effective. You’ve used a tazor, and it is not effective. Where do we go from there? Are we now saying it’s okay, now we just have to go to deadly force because that’s the only way we can control them when I know from my experience that a vascular neck restraint, whether they’re under the influence or not, will be able to render them under control because you can see some really ugly uses of force as in i.e. Rodney King, or worse when we go away from some of these tools.

I think part of that is, you definitely have extensive training in this, so you kind of have a better feel of peoples limits with it. But I feel like you’re a really big advocate for having more training and at one point mentioned weekly training on there and I think that’s really important to go along with that too.

Yes, it’s one of the things that I admire about the Vancouver Police Department and in Vancouver Canada they have had a Judo program within their Police Department for many, many, many years and it’s very effective. All of their recruits go through that Judo training program as part of their training and they come out very, very well trained. It’s directed towards policing and it’s very good. I actually attended a conference there last year in Vancouver, an international conference where we discussed ways of possibly implementing Judo and Jiu-Jitsu into American police training as well.

So just to quickly go over a couple of the 8 can’t wait policies. It’s kind of all over the news right now. So we already require de-escalation. Is that correct?

On that note, one of the things that we talk to our police officers about is non escalation. So we don’t have to de escalate. How do you initially approach somebody on a traffic stop or when you arrive at a call. I think it’s one of those things that without knowing it, I did it in my career and it worked very well for me. The first thing I did was I introduce who I was and why I stopped the person. “I’m Officer Basterrechea. The reason I stopped you today is this…” So we didn’t get into the debate of, do you know why I stopped you today? I don’t need to “I gotchya” right? I know why I stopped you. Whether you’re going to admit it or not, I just never liked that, ah ha, I got you. You admitted that you are speeding. No, I know that you’re speeding, that’s why I stopped you and I think it disarms people. Often times when you approach calls like that. Right up front you tell them why you’re there and who you are.

Definitely. That’s been a topic of discussion too. I think that’s a good way to go about it.

So, do we already have a verbal warning before using use of force for Meridian?

For shooting our firearm, when possible. If it’s possible to provide a verbal warning, then yes but we know that that is not always possible.

And shooting at moving vehicles?

Yes, we’ve had that policy for a long time. We do not shoot at moving vehicles. I won’t say never because there is always the exception in there. If you are doing that to save your life, however our training has shown to our officers that a vehicle coming at you, shooting that vehicle probably isn’t going to stop the vehicle and now what you’ve created is a vehicle that can’t stop if you strike the brakes. So our training teaches officers to move out of the way. However if somebody in a vehicles is using that vehicle say to ram an officer or something like that, then yes. Certainly. There is there is a time and place. There is always that exception.

Duty to intervene, is that something that that that is used in training?

It is and it’s funny, that’s one of the things I talk about the very first day that they come. When we talk about culture and the duty to intervene. That’s not just necessarily to protect the citizen. It’s also to protect your partner. We have a duty to our partners and in a dynamic use of force can a partner start to get, you know, you’re caught up in this use of force. Maybe you’re in a fight for your life and your partner realizes, now you’re going overboard. Your partner can step in and go, I’ve got this, step back. We also use it in the example of, there’s a guy getting under the officer’s skin and saying things about his family, about his wife, about his children. Trying to get this officer to lose his cool and we talk about our officers, their duty to step in and say, I’ve got this. I’ll talk to this suspect. I can tell he’s getting under your skin. Right after the George Floyd incident I went and talked to our current academy class. They were doing their ground control techniques and they were doing their arrest and control techniques in class and I went in and I talked to them about the sheer importance and the duty they have to intervene on those types of cases. One of the most disturbing things to me in that George Floyd case was the officer who stood there just ignoring it, looking over there and you have citizens going can you just check his pulse? Why didn’t that other officer walk over there to Officer Chauvin and say, “Hop off him. Hop off him, I’ve got this. You go over here.” You have to do that. For everybody’s safety. That disturbed me a great deal.

Definitely. Yeah, it was definitely disturbing.

So another one is requiring exhausting all alternatives before shooting. So I think we kind of discussed that already.

We have to look at the totality of everything. Do you have the opportunity to? Well…

And the last one is just requiring comprehensive reporting.

So, every time one of our officers uses force, every time one of our officers is involved in a pursuit the supervisors are required to do a use of force report or a pursuit report. Sometimes both because some calls end up having both of those things occur. A lieutenant reviews that looking for training issues, looking for policy violations. Things like that. Then after they’ve reviewed that, it comes to me and then I review that and I look again, another set of eyes to look for policy issues, training issues, anything like that. Ways we can improve how we’re doing business and then I’m the ultimate approval, of course.

So, it sounds like this is all stuff that you’re familiar with but it sounds like some of them are more guidelines than an actual policy. Is that correct?

I would say that any policy is a guideline. You can’t have policy so rigid that somebody cannot move outside of that, if it is the right thing to do. One of the examples that I’ve often used is, several agencies have a policy that you won’t transport anybody in their police vehicle unless they’re in custody and in hand cuffs. So, I see a female whose car is broken down and she’s walking in the rain and she has a baby in her hands. Should I pick her up and transport her to a safe location, out of the elements? Well policy says I shouldn’t. Is an officer going to get in trouble for doing that? I would sure hope not because they’re doing the right thing. What’s your other alternative? Just to drive by and leave her? That’s not what the public would want. We are here to serve the public. So you have to give your officers, and trust that your officers, and train your officers to be able to go outside of policy when it is the right thing to do. Does it happen a lot? No. But does it happen? Sure it does.

So, what are your thoughts on the press and the rights that the press has to report on everything that’s happening without being arrested?

I don’t understand it. I was shocked when I saw the CNN crew get arrested. The press, I will say this, especially in this area, they’re very good to work with. When we ask them, hey move over here, they move over there, for the most part. They understand why we’re asking them to do that. So why those press personnel were arrested, they seemed to be cooperating, they seemed to be doing what they were asked to do. I have no idea. But it shouldn’t have happened. That’s all I can say about that.

What would your message be to any police officers who don’t follow policy, or the “bad cops” if you will, and what would you ask of them or what do you think is the ideal solution for that kind of behavior?

Number one, if they’re bad cops they need to leave the profession because I’m tired of bad cops giving every cop a black eye. There are a thousand times more police officers who got in this profession for the right reason. And is it easy to get jaded in this profession? Yes, it can be. But you have to remind yourself and ask yourself why you got into this job to begin with, number one. Number two, I will tell you what we are not good at in this profession and that we have to be better at, as individuals and as organizations, and that’s celebrating all of the good things that we do and the good things that we see and the fulfilling interactions that we have in the job of policing in this country. Because every day there are phenomenal things that go on but everyone likes to talk about the bad things. When is the last time you saw a police show where the guy was still married, he wasn’t an alcoholic and he was involved in the community. I’ll tell you when. Never. Because that’s not what sells in the media. That’s not what sells in the movies. That’s not what’s cool. But I’ll tell you what, there’s more of that than there isn’t and I see it everyday. I see officers who pull up on somebody who has run out of gas and that pulls out money out of his own pocket and gets them gas to go in their car. I’ve seen officers go to calls where there’s not food in the house and then go back after their shift and deliver groceries to their house. So I’ve seen officers do the most amazing of things and it’s funny because they don’t want you to know either because it kind of hurts that image. We don’t find out about it until after the fact when we get a letter from somebody. I had a conversation about six months ago, maybe a little longer, I was sitting eating lunch one day and there were officers from another agency sitting down and I walked over and I was talking to him and he said, “Oh, I can’t wait. I’m going to be leaving, I’m going to be retired soon and I can’t wait to get out of it. The job’s horrible and I’ll never encourage my kids to go into law enforcement.” I said, “Really? I have a completely different view of this. I would be so proud if my son told me he wanted to be a police officer,” and I said that “We have more positive contacts with people than you will ever know.” People rarely tell you the positive contact but everyone wants to talk about the negative contact that you had. It’s human nature. I don’t know why it is. I remind guys every day, remember the positive stuff you get to do. We had an officer that left our agency after seven years. He’s been gone about two or three years. He started his own private business and I was meeting him for coffee the other day. It couldn’t have been more timely because we had just received a letter from a lady thanking him for going out on a call and it was a death call. Now I don’t remember if it was a suicide or not, but he stayed with her until the coroner came and did all these things. She was so grateful. That happened, I believe it was in 2011, and she had just now sent the letter and she said, “Oh, I’ve been wanting to and then all of this came up with the riots and I thought, I need to.” I thought how sad he doesn’t get that until after he’s out of this job.

That’s a good story.

You just don’t know the positive effect you have on people. I tell my son that constantly. I tell him when you meet people you make sure your contacts are as positive as they can be because you never know 8how much of a change or influence you have on someone. But at the same time you never know how much of a negative impact you may have had and how that might have pushed someone the other direction, so try to make them positive. As police we have got to focus on the positive because there’s so much of it.

Definitely, I think it was really uplifting to see the instances where police officers would take a knee or they’d start marching with the protesters.

So, I was wondering if the Meridian Police Department is unionized.

We are not.

Okay. I kind of thought so just from looking around.

So do we use no knock warrants in drug cases?

I can’t say no, because I’m sure we have. No knock warrants are not that easy to get, I will say that. But do I believe that sometimes they’re necessary? I do believe that sometimes they’re necessary and they should be difficult to get. You should have all the elements to defend why you’re getting that no knock warrant. Do we use them on standard drug cases, no, we use knock and announce.

Okay, yeah, that’s what was recommended on the Campaign Zero website. So I was just curious about that, another big issue on there is police union contracts. I know that you’re not unionized but it sounds kind of like the same situation with bad cops. Sometimes there’s contracts that are too lenient and now all of them are under scrutiny. Do you have any opinion on that?

You know, I really don’t. I think the bigger issue is, it shouldn’t be us versus them. Whether you have a union or you don’t have a union, that becomes the role between the city and the line troops or the command and the line troops you’re never going to be successful. The bottom line is we have to be reasonable in everything that we do. We don’t fire somebody haphazardly because we don’t have a union. We go through the same steps, quite honestly, as if they did have a union. We follow those same parameters. We do an investigation. We notify them that we’re doing an investigation on them. They have the right to have counsel with them when they are interviewed. They have a right to appeal the decision that we make. They have a right to appeal the decision if it’s turned down by the Chief and they can appeal it to the Mayor and Council. So I mean, they have a lot of those same protections but the bottom line is we don’t want bad cops. If we don’t want bad cops we can’t defend bad cops. When you see a bad cop you have to push them out the door. There’s no other way to put it. I don’t want it. One of the things we talk about and preach as well is, is that the kind of cop you want pulling your mom over in another jurisdiction. There’s the term gypsy cops. These cops have been in trouble and they jump around, and around, and around because it’s easier to let them resign and leave then to do your job and terminate them or get them decertified. Not for me. Because I don’t want that cop policing in the next town over, or in my hometown where my family lives. I don’t want that type of cop there. So we have to be vigilant as leaders and we have to be courageous as leaders and put in the hard work and go, no they don’t need to be a police officer and I’m going to make sure that they don’t get that chance somewhere else.

Definitely. Someone quoted that it’s kind of like a pilot, it’s one of those professions where you just can’t have a bad employee.

Yeah. You can’t.

Well I read your articles on LinkedIn and I looked at some of your interviews and I think that you have a really positive message and I think that it’s really important for that kind of voice to be put out there. So just to kind of wrap things up, I was curious about Invictus.

It’s a movement in Canada and the United States. Our hashtag is #makeitmandatory and that’s for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu training. We believe that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Judo, those are the arts that really are designed best for police officers. They’re the arts that are designed to help us control somebody. Not just beat them. You need to have those other tools and those other abilities. Our job is to bring somebody under control. Get them into custody. The best way to do that is using these techniques. Use leverage and angles, these types of things that fit for a smaller statured person as well as a larger stature person. We think it’s just so much more effective, and you will be so much more effective as police officers and see less of these deaths in custody and less excessive force cases. The other thing that is great about the grappling arts, wrestling, Judo, Jiu-Jitsu is you’re used to being in bad positions. If you’re used to being in bad positions then you don’t panic. You go, oh, this guy’s on top of me. I’ve been there before. If you’ve never been there before you’re going to do whatever it takes. I think that’s missed on a lot of people. Civilians are going to react the same way. They’re going to do whatever they can to survive. The more training officers have in those areas, the better communication officers learn, the better our profession is going to be and we’ve got to treat it like a profession.

Definitely. So it just seems like, going over your other interviews you’ve stressed the importance of not lowering the standards for hiring and to hold police accountable and to not be afraid to fire police that aren’t doing the right thing out there and to just be aware of that.

Absolutely. I love this profession. I truly believe it is a noble profession. We just need to treat it that way, internally and externally.