The Blueprint for Law Enforcement Excellence with Brian Baxter

Join Travis Yates and his distinguished guest, retired assistant Chief Brian Baxter, for a deep and engaging discussion on the essence of leadership and trust within the law enforcement community. Brian, with over three decades at the Texas Department of Public Safety and founder of Performance Critical Inc., shares his invaluable insights and experiences that span from his initial days on patrol to his pivotal role in revamping DPS training. We unravel the fundamental shift needed for trust to evolve from being a mere metric to becoming the cornerstone of an effective policing mission. Listeners will gain a raw and revealing look into the practices that build respect and trust, not only among officers but also within the communities they serve.

Our episode pivots to the nuanced art of officer management, where the fine line between public appreciation and private rectification is explored. Brian imparts wisdom on the importance of nurturing a culture where leaders honor their officers' efforts, creating an atmosphere where respect and trust are both given and received. The conversation travels through the intricacies of police training, advocating for an approach that instills communication and respect from a rookie officer's first day. This episode peels back the layers, connecting the quality of leadership to the caliber of public service provided by law enforcement officers, and offering a unique perspective on how the internal culture of an agency can translate to its public interaction.
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Brian and I share our professional journeys since 1993, appreciating the progress made in technology, diversity, and transparency, while acknowledging the hard road ahead. This episode is a testament to the relentless pursuit of improvement within law enforcement, offering enlightenment and a beacon of hope as we confront ongoing challenges and strive for excellence amidst scrutiny.

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Transcript

Intro/Outro: 0:02

Welcome to courageous leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Travis Yates: 0:12

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored that you're spending a few minutes with us here today. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to whatever podcast platform you listen to. Give us that review, help us get the word out, because we've got some great interviews and podcasts coming up this year, and this one is one of those. This is going to be a barn burner, folks. You're going to love this interview. A lot of insights. I have with me Brian Baxter. He's a retired assistant chief of the Texas Department of Public Safety, where he served Texas for over 30 years. He's the founder and president of Performance Critical Inc, where he provides consultation to both private and public entities. Brian has a master of science degree in criminal justice and a master of science degree in applied psychology. You're going to love what he has to say. I love anybody that thinks outside the box, that thinks outside the narrative, that's trying to push the profession to progress better, and that's what Brian is doing. Brian Baxter, how are you doing, sir?

Brian Baxter: 1:14

Doing great. Travis, Thanks for having me.

Travis Yates: 1:16

Well, man, I was excited to talk to you. I've been seeing your post on LinkedIn and you certainly have. You know you have takes and opinions that aren't just opinions or grounded in all of your experience. I just kind of wanted you to kind of tell our audience kind of how you got here. I know you, I love your bio where you say, hey, I serve Texas because Texas kind of has that, that attitude Like we're Texas and everybody else is everybody else. And I've been down to Texas a lot, I've done some work with DPS a lot, been around a lot of those troopers and just the salt of the earth men and women, and that's where you kind of cut your teeth. Kind of tell us how that happened and how your career progressed.

Brian Baxter: 1:55

Well, I started out in 1993 and you and I have spoken a little bit about the troopers assigned to the Capitol. That was actually my first duty station. I was assigned to the Capitol in Austin and did patrol out of that office for a while about nine years went into narcotics and really, really enjoyed narcotics work, did that out in West Texas and South Texas and did a lot of moving around, a lot of traveling with that. Then I started promoting into supervisory ranks and became a narcotics lieutenant, became a criminal investigations captain. My last actual real cop job was a criminal criminal investigations commander in West Texas. I had 30 counties basically everything from the Hill Country West to about Fort Davis and Sparxley populated, but a whole lot of geography to cover. It was a great job.

Brian Baxter: 2:51

I finished out my career at headquarters. I started out as a or. I came to headquarters as a training captain and then promoted through the training division and ultimately retired as an assistant chief and acting chief of the training operations division for DPS. So I have an opportunity to serve Texas in a lot of different ways and you're right, I do. That is intentional language and that's one of my things, intentional language. I served Texas for 30 years? I didn't. I didn't serve the Texas department of public safety for 30 years. I certainly didn't serve myself. I served the citizens of Texas for 30 years. So that's a very important distinction in my book.

Travis Yates: 3:30

Well, it goes back to community, right, and I know you've had a lot to say about community and trust and all those issues and we've really messed trust up, I think in a profession I'll just tell you where I think. I think we we use trust as a metric, thinking that that's the mission and trust is important because we need the public to help us. But at the end of the day, the mission is crime reduction and you need the public to help you do that. But if you place that trust or you place that humanizing a badge over the mission, it creates issues. What's your take on that?

Brian Baxter: 4:03

That can go a couple of different directions. The first thing that pops into my head when you say that is a friend of mine, a really, really smart guy, who says very similar things about these catchphrases that we apply to things. These feel good catchphrases, and one of my favorites is the public trust, and he would tell you that that's a myth, that's a pipe green, can't get everybody in the public to trust the police, and I would agree with that. What I like to define the public trust as is a situation where, kind of like the way we use the phrase, conventional wisdom. It doesn't mean everybody subscribes to this idea or everybody believes it. It simply means that when you think about an overarching opinion, it's probably going to be that direction. That's the conventional wisdom. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. The public trust, kind of in that same vein, in my mind means that if something questionable happens and you see a video on Facebook edited out of context video on Facebook and it's viewed by under informed viewers, if it looks like the police did something bad, if we could get to a place of the public trust, that's when they say that looks really bad, but the police usually do it right. So I'm going to dig deeper, get more information, find some more answers before I form an opinion. And again, that's a big goal. That's a big goal, but it's not a, I don't think, an unattainable goal.

Brian Baxter: 5:47

So when I talk about the public trust, that's what I mean, and it is important because not only do we need, to your point, the public to reduce crime, we need the public's consent, we need the public's authorization to even exist. We can go back as far as we want to the Declaration of Independence, and it says that the governments are constantly. The governments exist based on the consent of the government, and if we lose the consent of the governed, we lose our ability to do our job. And so I think it's important to balance one of the oversimplified ways I've heard this put in. It's good, as long as you listen to it as intended.

Brian Baxter: 6:29

When people say public servants provide a service, sometimes it's a service that the public doesn't want and that's limited mainly to those that are breaking the law, finding themselves crossed with the law.

Brian Baxter: 6:41

But as long as we don't label people that break the law for the rest of their lives as criminals and write them off, especially traffic, and I think you and I will get into this probably in more than a minute. When it comes to traffic stuff, we really have to balance what we do with the outcome of what we do and the ripples that we make with the people that we come in contact with, so that when it comes down to the really, really bad situations that we have to make the best decision we can. The public is going to say, hey, that looks really rough, but police have a rough job. And the Supreme Court has even said, because it's such a rough job and things happen that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving, we've got to be reasonable about the way we judge them. So kind of jumping in two or three different directions, but that was a pretty broad topic.

Travis Yates: 7:33

Yeah, but, Brian, you did something that most people don't do outside of the profession, because you got to remember and I want to, I want to kind of bring our audience to this is, for the most part, almost all the reforms and all the ideas, all the things that people outside the profession are sort of demanding. They always couch it because we need public trust, but they don't ever define what that means. You just defined it and I liked your definition, and it's always struck me as odd that we seem to jump to pretty much any idea. Don't get me wrong. We should be reforming, we should be improving, but I think we're the experts that know how to do that. I don't necessarily need an activist or a politician that's demanding. You know that we do certain things when there's really no facts or evidence behind it oftentimes, but there they use this public trust metric which sounds good to the general citizen. Oh yeah, that makes sense to me, but then they never go back after that reform to see whether it even worked. When they're talking to us, brian, they're talking to a group and organization National American Law Enforcement that has been in the top three or four organizations with the highest trust level for the last 50 years. Gail has been doing it anywhere from 68 to 82% in the last few years and meanwhile you know the media and politicians and Congress and they're all bottom rung in the trust level, so they don't hold themselves to the same accountability. So I think, as leaders in the profession, we need we need that balance, because so much of that is a farce right and they just use this trust thing and we tend to just jump at it and because trust is important.

Travis Yates: 9:01

But I do agree there's always going to be a small segment of society that just don't like the police. That's always been that way. But what you talk about is we talk about in our seminars a lot. We talk about leave, no doubt. Do your job so well, be so transparent, be so accountable, communicate so well to the public that when something controversial does occur because we are in a controversial business, that we will get the benefit of the doubt right. And what can organizations, do law enforcement do today to sort of leave no doubt? I think in? You mentioned in one of your posts that your quote was are we earning the benefit of their doubt when something we say or do is misunderstood or, even worse, when we actually do make a mistake. So when you talk about achieving that, earning that benefit of the doubt, what recommendation would you give law enforcement agencies and leaders?

Brian Baxter: 9:55

You know, that's exactly where we need to focus a lot of energy right now. People talk about the small stuff and they say don't sweat the small stuff. I would submit that the small stuff is generally the easy stuff and if we're not going to do the easy stuff, how can we be trusted to do the hard and complicated stuff? Not to say that this problem is a simple one or an easy one to work towards solving, but an example I would give you is from a leadership perspective. You know, when you see your officer and he's got a Punisher logo on his body armor and he thinks it's cool, he's not doing it to do anything bad, he's not doing it to hurt the relationship with the community, he just thinks it's deep back to cool and he put it on his body armor. The leaders should have a conversation. We spoke to transparency and accountability. I think that's an opportunity for a leader to have a conversation and and say help me understand why you have that on your body armor. What does it bring? You know? What value does it bring? What risk does it bring? How could it possibly be interpreted by someone who sees that, finds himself crossed with the law and is gonna have a story to tell afterward, I think, just pointing out little things and and you know that's a good example to me because it's what one of the arguments from the pushback I get most on that opinion of mine is that, well, that's his first amendment, right? You know that's your first amendment right to have that sticker on his truck, on his body, armor, on anything he wants it on, and that's true.

Brian Baxter: 11:31

But just because you can doesn't mean you should, and I think his leaders. We need to live a little bit more in that and that area of just because you can doesn't mean you should, while simultaneously praising All of the good work that gets done on a daily basis. The reason some of these criticisms and corrections from leadership when they are made, the reason those are so negatively impactful on officers in times, is because the day before when that officer Did something outstanding, we didn't publicly praise him. We need to praise people in public a lot for the good things they do and and when we do correct him, we need to do it in private. We need to do it in a way that respects the officer. We need to do it in a way that helps that officer Find the answer to that question themselves. For that I call that objectionable. Branding is just one example of the things that I think as leaders and as officers we could address intentionally To take a baby step toward earning that benefit of the doubt.

Travis Yates: 12:34

Yeah, and you mentioned something that's very important that I don't see as often as I should. As you said, we should have a conversation with them. We should have a discussion with them because I'm so often. What you see, brian, is you see a Policy that comes out that tells everybody to take off a sticker, without any communication, and that actually is what creates the negative vibes, so to speak, and Because it's really all about communication leaders, we, we put so much emphasis and communicating to the public, but our own officers also need that same communication, correct?

Brian Baxter: 13:03

Absolutely.

Brian Baxter: 13:03

And I would tell you that, when it comes to respect and Trust, which are two things that you got to have From the officer with his supervisors and also also with the officer in the public, we, whoever has the biggest, whoever the tallest dog at that trough is, needs to be the one to give their respect and trust.

Brian Baxter: 13:27

So, as a leader to the officers, I say I give you my respect and I give you my trust and you have it Until it's lost.

Brian Baxter: 13:36

I will. On the other hand, I will work to earn your respect in your trust, and that works from a leader to an officer, and it also works from an officer to a member of the public who might be on the fence about what they think about the police. Hey, I'm going to give you my respect and the trust is a little bit different issue there. But then get officer safety concerns, obviously, tactics and things that that might be affected if we, if we just quote, unquote trust too much. But when it comes to respect an officer, giving unconditional respect to a person they come in contact with on the road, and Then working to earn that person's respect, that's a, that's an equation for a win and also for a leader to an officer and when you do that, that's another baby step that it becomes part of what you do, becomes part of how you treat people, it becomes part of your relationships and Our business. If it's about nothing else, it's about relationships.

Travis Yates: 14:35

Yeah, I couldn't say that any better. And we pay such an emphasis on getting the community to trust us, brian, but our own leaders need to understand that you have to also earn that trust. You may have the authority, you may be able to tell somebody what to do, but until you actually earn trust, you're really not going to get everything you need out of your culture, your organization, are you?

Brian Baxter: 14:56

No, and I'll tell you this, this kind of Segways into a one of my opinions that, depending on the audience, can be pretty unpopular. But I think we start that trend. I think we plant that seed in the Academy. We we bring people in, we make them run with their duffel bag and we make them cut their hair and make them stand in a line and do drill and ceremony and we yell at them and we don't let them speak to anybody. Don't you say good morning? You haven't earned the right to say good morning to me.

Brian Baxter: 15:28

And we treat recruits who are entering this very people-centric profession in a very military sort of environment.

Brian Baxter: 15:41

That doesn't breed conversation, it doesn't breed trust, it doesn't breed actual interhuman respect, and then we turn them loose and we expect them to treat the public differently than we've treated them for six months.

Brian Baxter: 15:56

So I don't you know, a lot of people hear this and they say, oh, you're damn hippy, you think we need to do this like college, and that's a, that's an oversimplification. What I would recommend is an environment where, yes, recruits do need to walk in a straight line and they do need to make their bed every morning and they do need to do the things to, to help them instill good habits and professional habits, but, at the same time, teach them to greet people in the hallway with a good morning or a good afternoon. Teach them to wave to people when they're driving a patrol car. Teach them to be able to have a conversation with someone and not feel superior or inferior because of their job. That's where, I believe, it starts, and I think the days of treating a police academy like infantry training should be long, long behind us. Unfortunately, it's. It's something that is here to stay, I believe, for at least the foreseeable future.

Travis Yates: 16:55

Yeah, I don't. I don't know how anyone could argue that that there certainly is a balance and whenever I had an officer that would get a rudeness complaint obviously it's the most common complaint to any leader of this list who this deals with. And you know there's a difference between the officer never gets a rudeness complaint All of a sudden got one versus that serial person that you've worked a couple of rudeness complaints on in a year. Well, my first question when someone would come to me as a commander and say, hey, we're working this, he's had two or three rudeness complaints. My first question is how's he being treated or how's she being treated? Because if you're, it goes to what you're saying, brian. If you're being treated like crap from your supervisor or your leader, why did we not expect that? That's not going to roll downhill to the citizen we contact?

Brian Baxter: 17:35

And everything we measure should be measured at that intersection of the officer and the citizen, the officer and the community. We like to measure things like hey, if we had this new airplane, we could. We could have X, y and Z more outputs. Well, outputs are important and generally, because we are an honorable group of people and we do a very honorable and important job when we say we need something, at the end of the day it's going to make life better for the citizens.

Brian Baxter: 18:08

But I think to your point if we start to measure things and present things in that way not hey, if we had this new patrol car, we could do X, y and Z greater outputs take it a step farther and show the outcome.

Brian Baxter: 18:23

And those outputs would, because of this metric or because of this market research or because of this survey, these outputs stand to reduce crime in this area by this amount, they stand to reduce speeding and crashes in this area. By this amount they stand to improve this area of the citizen's life. I think if we just make it a habit to measure things out to that end, not only do we still accomplish where it benefits the officer in the department, but we're putting a spotlight on where it benefits the citizen and again, that's something else we can do. But if we're not treating our officers in a way that tells them they are the most important component of the agency, I would agree with you it's going to be difficult for them to expect them to treat the citizens and the people in the community as if they're the most important people in that relationship.

Travis Yates: 19:20

Well, now you're talking about a subject that I've written a lot about and I've spoken a lot about and I always get funny looks or funny comments, and that's a subject of customer service. And for some reason, brian, in our profession we think that every organization on the planet but law enforcement should be concerned about customer service. Every time you fly on an airplane or book a hotel or go to a restaurant, they're giving you those little surveys, right, how was your? And they're doing it for a reason they need to repeat customers, they want to make sure that they're they catch a problem before it occurs. Meanwhile, in law enforcement, so often we wait for the complaint to come in and then we go, huh, do we have a problem? In fact, we don't even do it. Then we wait for three or four to come in from the same officer. Oh, do we have a problem? Meanwhile, the rest of the world, they don't wait for the problem. They're trying to monitor, like you said, that office, that employee customer relationship throughout.

Travis Yates: 20:15

And I don't understand. I mean, there's a couple of companies that have popped up trying to do this. I know that because I launched one about six years ago and quickly got ran out with the funds because I couldn't get anybody to do it. I was trying to give it away. Couldn't get anybody to do it. It was app based, it was QR code for citizens and it was just simple. You know, did was? Did the officer treat you well? Were they professional? You know, I don't expect everybody to like what's going on, but I was trying to get, I wanted them to gauge how the officer treated them Right, and they just thought you were crazy, kind of like body cameras 20 years ago. That's crazy. So I would like to think we're going to catch on to this.

Travis Yates: 20:50

But why do you think we are so adamant? Because I've had officers tell me, brian, that that's not who we are or we're not like a business. And I would say no, we are exactly like a business. The only difference is if we run out of money in a year, they just give us more money the next year. We're not going to go bankrupt, and that's part of the problem.

Travis Yates: 21:06

If you're in Austin and you call 911 and you have a really bad experience with the police, well, guess who gets to call the next day the same police department. But if you have a bad experience in an outburger, which is probably impossible. You will go to a different restaurant, so. But customer service doesn't seem to be that big of a deal to us because we're not measuring. I don't say it's not a big deal, but we're not measuring. If you're not measuring it, you don't know and you can't anticipate. Maybe not maybe who needs discipline, but maybe who needs help or who needs training or who needs counseling to try to make that relationship better. Why do you think we're so against that? Or the profession hasn't grasped on that like everybody else?

Brian Baxter: 21:45

Immediately. I go back to where we measure and I think you mentioned surveys. You know I rented a car last week going to and from the airport and I took my pickup to a service station here in my hometown. A couple of weeks before that and after both experiences, I got a survey via email that I filled out and they didn't ask what should we do to align your vehicles wheels better? And they didn't ask hey, how many people should we have at the desk to get you out of the rental car place faster? Those are procedural questions that you started this information, this conversation, off with. We know best how to how to remedy the problems that we have. We just need to know what the problems are, and I think that's a great example. If we do a survey, we shouldn't ask, hey, how many people should we have in your neighborhood? Should we run radar in this school zone? We should ask questions like how were you treated? Did this happen? Did that happen? Did the officer tell you their name? Did the officer tell you their agency? Did the officer state the reason for the stop? And we don't ask questions that can gauge the experience and then, based on the answers, we know where to address the, the training, the education that will fix the problem.

Brian Baxter: 23:05

You know there's a I made a post the other day about celebrity cops and you know we got a guy in Los Angeles, california, doing an amazing job of showing his interactions with the community and how he lives, where he works, and he deals with the same people in out, day in and day out and and that kind of celebrity is fantastic because it does a lot of good work in transparency and showing people not only his hardships, but it shows the hardships in the community where he works and how he can sometimes help and sometimes, as I said earlier, the services he has to provide.

Brian Baxter: 23:43

Maybe you're unappreciated by the person being arrested or the person to be incited, but that the opposite of that celebrity cop is the one that goes on YouTube and Facebook and and and tick-tock and pulls people over for traffic violations and then berates them and makes jokes and condescends and he's sarcastic and he says you know you don't drive well, you don't drive a speed limit, you're doing a lot of things wrong and and starts a conversation off with hey, do you know why I stopped you?

Brian Baxter: 24:13

And things like that and and all of that is for clicks and views where we should be spending our time trying to make the public, increase the quality of life for the public, reduce speed, reduce crashes and all of those things that we can measure as an outcome.

Brian Baxter: 24:31

Where they intersect with the public. This guy is not only not doing that, he's doing the opposite by going out of his way to be condescending and discourteous during the contact, in the name of humanizing the badge, in the name of look at this cop and how funny he is and how cute he is at the expense of a driver who the only thing they did wrong was commit a traffic offense. And and so I think that's we're not only not doing the right thing in some cases, in some cases we're doing the wrong thing and we're doing it for personal gain, we're doing it for personal celebrity that this particular officer deputy is in a county where some very important people in that agency are running for national office. So it's it's clear what what being done, but I think they overlook the the damage that's being done at the same time yeah, that was a great example.

Travis Yates: 25:30

You talked about Dion, joseph, and I would encourage everybody to follow down. I've spoken to Dion a few times. I'm actually gonna see him this summer. Amazing, yeah, his wife's got a great food truck. I'm gonna visit that again. But Dion, yes, he's online. He's very visible. He's no doubt what he's doing is building trust in that comfort level around police, but he's mixing in the mission of his job. That's the big difference here, right, like he's not just playing Midnight basketball. To be playing Midnight basketball and doing silly TikTok videos, like when you watch him it's couched around the mission of him trying to help people say people sometimes arrest people. He talks about the conversations he has with kids. It's all about his actual mission and pretty brilliant stuff and we just have so he's doing it right but so many people. It's almost like a fame thing or a clip thing, like you said, and it really has nothing to do with the mission of the profession yeah, not at all.

Brian Baxter: 26:25

You know, dion, his he's educating. He's educating his audience in areas that he sees a need for the audience to be educated. In some cases it's. This is why the police do what they do, and you need to understand this about the police. And in other cases it's man. This guy I saw doing this thing to a citizen. It was, it was wrong, and here's why it was wrong. We shouldn't be doing that in this profession. I think he's a he's an equally equal opportunity educator.

Travis Yates: 26:52

He's doing it for all the right reasons well, he breaks the mode because so many in the profession they feel like they can't talk about problems they're seeing. Right, they can't really verbalize that and and he's a prime example I mean LAPD is very high profile. I know their policies are strict on this. You normally, as you know, he's covering up his badge when he's talking, but he doesn't cut it. He doesn't cut any punches. I mean, he talks about politicians, he talks about the bad policies, he's talking about issues that are affecting the mission. He's not shying away from it.

Travis Yates: 27:20

So if we had a hand full of him out there, it probably wouldn't be you and me talking on this show. Right, we probably actually be seeing some progress and we can only hope that we sort of wake up to that. But I think so many in this profession kind of work under fear. They're scared of their supervisors or their leaders or their chiefs or their shares or what an actress is going to say, what the media is going to say, and that is really stymie and open thought and critical thinking and logical skills where we can kind of go okay, this isn't working, let's try it this way.

Brian Baxter: 27:49

Yeah, but you know, again, I'd bring up the where do we measure? And I think the example there with Dion is that he measures his outputs by the outcome on the citizen and he measures his outputs otherwise, and maybe not just him, but a good leader measures their outputs where their outcomes meet the employee. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and I said, man, we need to be careful that we don't prioritize our employees so much that we overlook the customer. And he said, yeah, but don't forget, if you don't have good employees, you don't have a business. And I came back I said, yeah, but don't forget, if you don't have customers, you don't have a business.

Brian Baxter: 28:36

So that balance doesn't need to be who's more important or who matters more. The balance needs to be what's important now. In other words, what do we need to focus on in this moment and with this particular problem, and who needs to be addressed or who needs to get more resources, or who needs to get more in the way of guidance, leadership, training, so that they can do a better job and ultimately affect that outcome? Sometimes it's the officer who needs a better vest, the officer who needs better flashlights, the officer who needs a better conducted energy weapon. Sometimes it's the citizen who needs a better understanding of why the officer does what they do, or affirmation that no, what happened to you wasn't right. What happened to you was a violation of policy and it was discourteous and it shouldn't have happened. It just depends on what's important now.

Travis Yates: 29:32

If you're just joining us, we're talking to Brian Baxter. He's retired assistant chief for Texas Department of Public Safety and the founder and president of Performance Critical Inc. And, brian, those are solid, solid points and I don't know how far in the rabbit hole you want to go with this. But obviously I will tell you my burden. I feel really burdened by the mission of what I'm doing and what I see you're doing and others are doing, because I think if we don't get some things right rather quickly, we may never see a return to normalcy, so to speak.

Travis Yates: 30:01

Now, I said this one time return to normalcy and then everybody came out of the woodworks talking about giving it racial connotations. Now, what I'm talking about is normalcy is when crime was not as high as it is now, when there wasn't so much anger towards the profession and we could actually protect communities through actual doing police work. And so we've been so distracted in recent years doing a bunch of other things. Where do you see the profession going if we don't get it right? And then what do we need to do to try to get back on track? Because maybe you don't agree, but I just think we're off track.

Travis Yates: 30:35

I think there's a lot of things. We've gotten away from that. Really, we proved throughout the years that we were good at what we did. We do know how to stop crime. I mean, texas is a fine example. Pretty sure you guys know how to stop the border, stop the border invasion. You know, you just got to be able to be able to give permission or do it, and so we know how to do that. We're the experts, so to speak, in crime control. What needs to happen for us to get back to that?

Brian Baxter: 31:03

So I appreciate what you're saying, for what I feel is the way you mean me to hear it, and that is the good things that we used to do I would offer that there were also a lot of things that we used to do that we probably shouldn't have done, or things that we didn't do that perhaps we should have done, and I think we've made leaps and bounds of progress toward those improvements. In a way, we have stopped doing some things. We collectively do less proactive law enforcement than we used to, and there's undeniable benefits to doing proactive law enforcement. But to answer your question about what do we need to do, I think the very first area of focus needs to be what is our job? We need to define what. You don't.

Brian Baxter: 31:49

Go to an ear, nose and throat doctor and say, hey, will you do this surgery on my foot? I think I got plantar fasciitis. There's a clear delineation between that doctor's job and the ear, nose and throat doctor's jobs and it isn't questioned. We need to get to a place in law enforcement where we aren't everybody's fix it to everything, where we're not the imaginary panacea for every societal ear. And I think when we get to a place where we say law enforcement's function are public safety, emergency response, criminal law enforcement, traffic law enforcement, and we make that list and we really focus our public responses on those things and we condition not only ourselves in the profession but also members of the public that those are the things that we do. I think that's a big first step and that's going to have to happen before we can really refine what we do, because if we don't define it, we can hardly refine it.

Travis Yates: 32:54

And I think that's why we're seeing people going in a million different directions. Right, you name the idea, we're trying it, but if we don't get the mission down, our mission statement, so to speak, that's really all for naught. And I love what you said earlier about the things we used to do. You and I came in this profession in the exact same year, 1993. And so we both experienced the exact same thing. When I came in this profession, we were smoking in the hallways, we didn't have computers, we didn't have body cameras, we weren't transparent, we used to typically say no comment at press conferences, we didn't give any information to the public. You know we were a lot less diverse in 93 than we are today.

Travis Yates: 33:33

So we could spend hours talking about the good things that we have done. And that's what frustrates me, I think, when people act like we're the worst profession on the planet, because I'm sitting here thinking, man, we have improved so much, from technology to relationships, to communication, to everything. But there are things we have to keep doing and keep progressing on, and if we spend all of our time arguing with people and without a mission, it's going to be hard to get that, and I'm convinced there are certain people that just don't want us to get to that mission. They want to keep us sort of on the back of our heels, and so there is so much more to do. So that was a great point you made. Nobody's talking about the things that we've improved on in the last 30 years. Everybody wants to talk about the things that we don't do.

Brian Baxter: 34:16

Well, I guess that's just human nature.

Brian Baxter: 34:23

Yeah, and it's easy to point out the things that don't go right, and this takes us all the way back to the beginning of this conversation. We're real quick to point out when officers are discourteous, or when officers violate a seven-step contact or whatever policy they didn't follow to the letter, but we're not as quick to point out the things that they do well. Or hey, I've noticed that your report writing has gotten exponentially better over the last six months. Are you taking a class? Are you working with somebody? Man, this is great work. I want everybody to appreciate what's going on over here with Travis and maybe find out how you can get a little bit of that for yourself. We've got to refocus the the spotlight not only on the things that we need to continue to do better, but at the same time, we've got to keep telling our professionals what they're doing right and what they've done so much work to improve over the years.

Travis Yates: 35:22

Yeah, let's just go, brian, and I'm so glad, even though you retired this last summer, that you are still out there and you're still trying to make a difference. I want to encourage all of law enforcement out there. You never stop caring for this profession. I don't care how long you've been away. There's something you have to offer. You have a lifetime experience to do that and you're doing that through Performance Critical Inc. Tell us about that and tell us how they can contact you and what you're doing there.

Brian Baxter: 35:47

Performance Critical is a very small, very early in its existence company that I founded with the purpose of applying evidence-based procedures and evidence-based processes to answering hard questions, instead of making emotional decisions in a courtroom or on the side of the road or in a classroom. I'm going to teach this this way, because this is the way it was taught to me in 1993, replacing all of that with evidence-based practices. We're going to teach this in this manner because there's research that supports it. It's good, solid, reputable, peer-reviewed research that supports it. We're going to investigate this use of force incident in a very pragmatic way and an unemotional way. We're going to apply limits of human performance. We're going to apply things that we know through science and through research that will help us make better decisions. In short, applying pragmatic, evidence-based practices to use of force case analysis investigations, as well as training for the law enforcement and public safety sector.

Travis Yates: 37:02

And where can they contact you, Brian?

Brian Baxter: 37:07

PerformanceCritical. com is our website. You can go there and we've got phone numbers and addresses and everything else that you can need, so it's performancecritical. com.

Travis Yates: 37:18

Awesome man. Well, brian, I can't thank you enough for serving the state of Texas and what you continue to do today. It's been awesome to talk to you. I'm excited to sort of find Brother in Arms, so to speak. That is thinking a little bit differently, because that's really how we can make things better, because the way we've always done it isn't always the best way to do it and, of course, we work in a profession that tends to move that way. So I appreciate your voice, I appreciate your effort. I certainly appreciate you being here.

Brian Baxter: 37:45

Yes, sir, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed the visit.

Travis Yates: 37:48

And if you've been listening, thank you for doing that. And just remember, lead on and stay courageous.

Intro/Outro: 37:55

Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates. We invite you to join other courageous leaders at www. TravisYates. org.