Dynamics of Use of Force Leadership with Danny King

Embark on a journey to the heart of law enforcement's high-stakes decision-making with retired police officer Danny King, as he lays bare the complexities of use of force and leadership. With a career spanning from the military to the streets of Las Vegas, Danny joins Dr. Travis Yates, to unravel the intricacies behind the thin blue line. Our candid conversation reveals how leadership shapes the outcomes of critical incidents, the creation and disbandment of specialized use of force units, and the profound effects these changes have on the officers involved and the communities they serve.

Danny King, decorated for his service, lends his expertise on the evolution of force analysis and the undeniable impact of skilled leadership—or the lack thereof—on the morale and effectiveness of a police force. We explore the ripple effects when leaders fail to support their officers, and discuss the importance of understanding the human factor in high-pressure situations. The conversation turns to the pivotal role of specialized units in fostering trust and fairness, and the consequences when such units are dismantled, leaving a wake of mistrust and doubt within the force and the community.

We tackle the challenges officers face today, scrutinize recent policing reforms, and emphasize the importance of state-dependent learning and recall in high-pressure scenarios. It's a discussion that promises to enlighten and provoke thought on the realities of policing, the weight of leadership, and the pursuit of fairness and understanding in times of crisis.

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Transcript

Danny King: 0:00

People are trying to make these laws that don't necessarily make sense. It feels good to them, but throughout the last few years we've seen a massive leadership failure where people just haven't stood up for law enforcement and said, hey, hang on a minute.

Intro/Outro: 0:18

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yeats, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

Travis Yates: 0:29

Welcome back to the show. This is going to be a barn burner. I have my good friend Danny King on the show, and Danny is a retired police officer from a 480 man agency in the Las Vegas area. You'll have to do the research on that one, it won't be that hard. But he has worked as a patrolman, canine handler, problem solving street crimes detective, in-service training officer, use of force investigator more stuff than we can really list today. Danny's an expert in the area of use of force investigation that's what we're going to focus on today, including he's an advanced forced science specialist and he's really pioneered use of force training and analysis within an agency. This is going to be a show you don't want to miss.

Travis Yates: 1:16

Expertise is widely known. He's taken that expertise and he's dazzled classrooms you heard it from me. I said the word dazzle for the first time. I laugh. And he does this as both as a consultant and a trainer. It's going to be phenomenal today. And Danny not only talks a talk, he walks the walk. He's been awarded the agency's Medal of Valor Award and he was the Nevada VFW officer of the year in 2000. Danny King, how are you doing, sir?

Danny King: 1:45

I'm doing all right, man, it feels a little awkward to have people talking about me, but I'll be all right.

Travis Yates: 1:51

No man, you deserve every bit of it and you know I used to call you diamond in the rough, Danny, but I'm. More and more people know about what you're doing. But I just wanted to start this out because we're going to get into the importance of how leadership plays in use of force investigations and there's no better person to talk to about it than you. But I just kind of wanted you to give our audience kind of how did you get here? How are you talking to me right now? How did you get into law enforcement and where's your interest lie when you got there?

Danny King: 2:18

So I was born in Las Vegas, in inner city Las Vegas, which probably sounds like a joke to most people, but Las Vegas has its rough parts and that's where I was born. The prospects weren't great for me and so I joined the Army very early on, took my girlfriend with me, who is my wife. We just celebrated our anniversary on the first like 31, 32 years or it's been a lifetime, whatever it is and I was in the Army and decided ultimately to get out. I was a flight medic on Blackhawks and one thing I found out about myself and I was, I was in Central America during the height of the drug war is that I had the ability to operate under extreme stress and I mean we're going to die, we're going to get blown out of the sky, we're doing rescues where I'm jumping into the ocean to get people from sunken ships and shark-confested waters, and it was just everyday business for me. So I don't have many skills other than being able to make high pressure decisions and operate in life or death environments. So when I got out of the Army, ultimately a friend of mine, who was also in the Army that I went to high school with, became a Las Vegas police officer and he said hey, man, listen, you should, you should test. Well, I work for an agency just outside Las Vegas city of Henderson it's Nevada's second largest city and I just happened to fall in line with their testing, first made it and worked patrol.

Danny King: 3:54

Like you said, canine, I was a swat dog handler for many years and in 2011, I was involved in an OIS.

Danny King: 4:03

That then led me to the training bureau because I had worked in so many different assignments and I specialized in officer safety, use of force, a lot of the survival skills, and just by delving into it, there's a guy that I worked in my unit with.

Danny King: 4:22

It was called the training use of force training and analysis unit named Jamie Borden, and you've met Jamie. He works on, does a lot of stuff with chip and owns a company called CIR. We started the use of force unit and we it was like two nerds we just loved it. We focused on nothing but use of force and that led us out of an interest. It led us to start teaching use of force, consulting on cases across the country, and then, ultimately, those cases became more and more controversial and it's just one of those things that you know I've navigated through the complexities of force within an agency and, like we're going to talk about, leadership plays a huge role in it, because it doesn't matter how smart I am or how much I know about force and adult behavior and humans under pressure, if your command doesn't support you, if they want a particular outcome, then you're going to have problems.

Travis Yates: 5:20

So well, that must. You must have been a kid in a candy store, right you get. Put you sort of get the pioneer of this unit and unless I want to take our audience back, I mean this is 12, 13 years ago. This was not common. Looking at use of force from a human performance angle was not a common thing and you know everybody's heard of force science and Danny, of course, in advanced certified force science I'm at the one lower I forget what it's called certified force science and everyone's heard of that today. But go back 12, 13 years. Force science just getting their energy together. You guys are on the not only the forefront of a unit that looks at this, you're in the forefront of the entire philosophy and the science behind it. What did you do when you started out Like? What did you expect?

Danny King: 6:06

I was a medic in the army and I was in aviation and both of those areas, what we call human factors, right, how humans perform in a particular environment. Human factors is steeped in aviation and medicine. Now for science and human factors. These days in policing has its detractors because they say, oh, it's just making excuses for officers and it couldn't be anything further from the truth.

Travis Yates: 6:33

Well, and they don't do that. I'm sure you know they don't do that for any of their profession, because when you work at traffic rack, we're looking at human factors. When doctors make mistakes, we look at human factors when you know we look at all that and nobody blinks an eye. And then you have a human factor on steroids which is high stress, environment, split second decisions and a ton of information you're processing much worse than really any other profession and we blow that off like it's not a big deal.

Danny King: 6:59

Yeah. Well, so you know what? The number one killer of other than natural diseases, the number one killer of Americans Doctors, your doctors, yeah, your doctors, and they can't nail down that number. It's somewhere around 455,000 Americans are killed every year due to medical malpractice. Now, this is not an anti medicine rant, but if you take the use of force and officer involved shootings that occur in the United States, 98% of them are unquestionable Right. And if you're looking at the number of unjustified killings by law enforcement, it is you're talking single digits, and even those are still oftentimes questionable.

Danny King: 7:43

So, for us, we wanted to make sure that we truly understood what a human being does under stress, what a human being is going to do out on the road, and there's a couple of things that you make us different from most other agencies we looked at. Let me back up. We had an officer who came through training, just like everyone else came through training. He got the training, went off about his business, he was working in the jail and he had a use of force. Incident Deputy Chief comes to us and says hey, listen, we're going to have to put this guy on admin leave for a unreasonable use of force. At that time, 2011, 12, it wasn't in our wheelhouse, right it just. We weren't the approving or disapproving authority when someone used unreasonable force. But we still were uneasy because it, you know, we started to gain knowledge and we recognized there was a lack of knowledge in the agency. So we just said, hey, Chief, can you get us that video as soon as possible? We'd like to take a look at it. So they get it to us the next day and we put that thing in there and into the player and we look at it and we're trying to figure out where's the unreasonable use of force, Like what are we missing here? So we had to call Chief hey, did you send us the right video? And he goes no, yeah, no, no, that's the right one.

Danny King: 9:00

Look at this particular time. And it was a completely reasonable use of force, completely reasonable. And so our Chief, the Deputy Chief, is the one that put him on admin leave because the Chief was out of town. The Chief had told us, when he allowed us to start up this unit tell officers to go out and do their job. Just go out and do your job right, and we'll back you. So long as you're reasonable, your heart's in the right spot, we'll back you. And so when they put this guy on admin leave, we had to go back to our Chief and say hey, Chief, we've used our social capital amongst our officers to tell them to go out and do their job. And this officer does something that's not even remotely questionable. But his chain of command didn't understand it. And then, once someone in the chain of command had labeled it as unreasonable, then everyone just kind of rolled with it.

Travis Yates: 9:51

Someone else had to say let's just explain what has happened to Danny and for those of you maybe not, in law enforcement. As you go up the ranks in law enforcement, we assume the higher ranks are more intelligent or they're an expert in some certain area. Well, the truth is, the higher rank you go, the farther removed you are from actually having to use force and driving a car at high speeds. So the more time you're removed from that, you actually understand less. So it's very, very important for leaders to listen to those under them. The closer you get to the patrol officer and you're the American patrolman, danny King the closer you get to the police officer, the more actual expertise you actually get. So our leaders need to embrace that.

Danny King: 10:31

Well, it's that and there's a handful of other dynamics. By time it gets to a chief of police or administrator, there are no unknowns, right, they know exactly what happened, they know how it happened and if you study the science behind hindsight bias, it basically says that a chief or an administrator can't believe that you didn't foresee this as the natural consequence of what you're doing, right, and therefore you should have known that this was going to be the outcome. And there's a lot of other things. No one, when they're reviewing a use of force incident, sits down with all the lesson plans, sits down with the policy and then reviews that incident and goes yeah, no, according to policy, that's reasonable, according to lesson plan. They watch that video and they just have a gut intuition about it. Yeah, and a vast majority of time that gut intuition is wrong. So after they put this guy on admin leave, the chief says you know what you're right and we told him you make us look like Liar's chief, but more so you're making yourself look like a Liar because your chain of command put a guy on admin leave for a completely reasonable use of force. So he says you're absolutely right.

Danny King: 11:49

From now on, I want you guys to review each and every use of force that occurs in the agency, and every time there's an allegation of unreasonable force, we want you to conduct an independent analysis of it. Cool, so now we are looking at 250, 300 use of force incidents a year. The reason this is important is because if I teach you how to use a taser or I teach you how to use a baton and send you about your business as the instructor, I'm not necessarily getting feedback. There's nothing that tells me what I thought was effective or ineffective. But if now I'm reviewing each and every case in which a baton is used or pepper spray, now I'm seeing it. So in the human factors world it's what's called work versus imagined versus how it's actually done, or work as imagined versus how it's actually done. So if your instructor has never actually practically seen people do it, they're gonna imagine that it occurs in a particular manner. But if they've reviewed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds I've reviewed thousands of use of force incidents in my agency with the full benefit of the record, with the full benefit of the body camera video, everything, and so I can tell you what's normal and what's not normal.

Danny King: 13:07

We've created Jamie and I and Mo partner Sean Tebow. We've created thousands of officer-involved shooting scenarios, thousands of use of force scenarios. So when it comes down to the spectrum of behavior that you're gonna see in a use of force incident, we've seen it. And now take that with a deputy chief or a captain who has spent time on the road, then spent time in narcotics and then maybe homicide investigations or whatever it is, but now he's in charge of his own area commander district and he's not a use of force specialist. He doesn't have that experience. When he gets a use of force that comes across his desk, that doesn't look good, he doesn't have anything to back it up and so he's been a cop, he's gonna go. Yeah, you know, this isn't reasonable, or this officer's lying or whatever the case is, whereas a person who's seen this thousands of times would go. No, that's completely reasonable.

Travis Yates: 14:05

Yeah, you know, I became a certified analyst late in my career, so I'd already looked at more use of force. I would look at the rest of my life and I was mad. I was mad that I waited so long. Of course, my agency didn't really even pursue much of that, I did it on my own, but I was upset that I didn't do it earlier in my career. And I would say I'm so bold about it, danny, that anybody out there, any position that has a review issue on use of force, whether that's the first level supervisor to the chief of police or civilian review board if you do not go to this training and discuss, if you do not somehow, if you do not educate yourself, and you have no business reviewing it.

Travis Yates: 14:44

And up until the day I retired, I was arguing on a couple of cases that were clearly human performance. They were, but instead of looking at when the decision was made, they were judging the officer based on when the bullets hit. And now that you've got to back this up, just like we do in basic car collision investigations, you have to back this thing up to when a decision was made. And they just these are smart people and they just didn't understand it, because it had been so many years since they were involved in it, and so we should not let anybody review use of force without having this type of training. Now you talked about this chief that did a 180, which is extremely rare. Right, these are? This is obviously a decade or so ago, so it's changed a little bit now, which is why we do our seminars on courageous leadership. But how important was that? That that chief recognized the problem and then empowered you and your team to fix it.

Danny King: 15:31

Well, you know what? It was extremely important and here's why, like we were talking about earlier, guys want to know that their command supports them, right? Guys want to be good at their job, but they don't necessarily know how to do that right. How does someone become a cop's cop? And that's what Jamie and I set out to do is make these guys as knowledgeable as possible, and the chief empowered those things right. And so one of the selling points of the unit was chief, we're going to analyze these incidents. If we have a controversial incident or critical incident or whatever, you're gonna have two guys that obsess about these things night and day who are going to bring you closer to the truth. Yeah, chief, we have a problem here or no? This is completely reasonable, and one of the things when you get down any human factors, if you truly understand it, is it's not making excuses for police officers. Human factors affects everyone every day, but people don't know about it, and so there are many. Anytime we gave them a conclusion or anytime we gave them our opinion, it's understood. That's just our opinion. But here's the science behind it. Here's the lessing plans as to how this officer was trained. And if you have the right.

Danny King: 16:54

People like we didn't lose because we could explain everything, we could back it up.

Danny King: 17:00

We were extremely thorough and guys knew that we had their best interest in mind. Now there were some people who did things wrong right, and when we concluded that they did it wrong, the rest of the agency, the command team and that individual didn't question it, although we documented it right, and so no one got screwed on our watch. Now, as soon as I left and as soon as my last partner left, they started a new unit and they absolutely railroaded people. And you saw the contrast. You saw the contrast of the use force training analysis to what they called the critical incident review unit. And people hate the critical incident review unit because all those lessons learned they put on the officer, all the mistakes or things that were suboptimal, they just screwed guys all the way around. And so I was able to see that the once our unit, once I went back to the road, just nonstop people appreciating or telling me hey man, I think you for teaching us what you did, and that other unit was absolutely hated.

Travis Yates: 18:15

So well, I think you've just described the big change in leadership in the last decade and that's what we continue to pound on every day where because I'm sure during your tenure, when you had that unit, dana, you had some politically charged shootings where the community was outraged or whatever explain the importance of that unit and did your leaders ever back down from what you said based on politics, when you had that unit going?

Danny King: 18:40

No, they didn't. And so in 2015, after we had excuse me, 2014, when Michael Brown was shot, we recognized that what happens in Henderson, what happens in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Tulsa and these other places can affect other cities. So I wrote up a program where we started this critical incident protocol to make sure that these things didn't blow up. And man, what's the attorney out there that handles all the civil cases? He's in Oklahoma.

Travis Yates: 19:18

He works

Danny King: 19:21

Yeah, Scott Wood, yeah, so I got information from Scott Wood. After a handful of incidents out there, we briefed our city attorney staff, we briefed our public information officers in the department. Outside the department, we briefed members of the city council and we said listen, this is what happens in the critical incident. We kind of broke down how the breakdown of communication affects what they do. Their constituents are going to want to know, hey, listen, what happened here. Well, we took them, showed them what we do behind the scenes so that they could turn around and say yes, listen, we understand, this is controversial.

Danny King: 20:04

Right now we are conducting two different investigations. We're conducting a criminal investigation, we're conducting an administrative investigation into this and then very shortly, we'll have an understanding and an answer as to what's going on here. But understand, just because you don't know or it looks controversial doesn't mean that it is actually controversial. And so, knowing that we had put all those things in place, it just kind of diffused the bomb before it was even built. People just didn't get up in arms and ultimately I was able to convince them to move to a model where we release information. And I learned that from Las Vegas Metro. If you search Las Vegas Metro officer involved shooting. It doesn't matter how controversial it is.

Travis Yates: 20:50

Las Vegas Metro tells their story before it is a news channel.

Danny King: 20:55

Yeah, they're consistent and so if you search it, they're going to get the first search result. They had an incident at one of our hotels that looked controversial and they put out a video that night. They put out a video on their social media, they did a brief interview as to what they knew at the time and then, three days later, I think, ultimately they end up charging the officer. I don't know if it was within those three days, but they told the story, as they always told the story, and then people in Vegas just went okay, because there's nothing for anyone to get upset about.

Travis Yates: 21:29

Yeah, it's amazing Every one of those principles we discussed in our leadership seminars. Danny, I know you've been there and you know that, but it's amazing how simple it is. It's amazing how easy it is, and we just and you, fast forward to today. You know, from when you had this unit, they immediately disband the unit, they immediately start coming after officers. That actually is the model we're seeing in many, many agencies Not all agencies, of course.

Travis Yates: 21:49

We do have some good leaders but that mindset has switched and changed, which is amazing, because the people with that mindset were the officers 10 years ago that worked under the system. That was pretty fair and biased and we actually looked at things, and so now they're in positions and they I think they feel a sense of career survival. I need to be like this. I need to be the chief that goes after my other, my employees, to get my next job or to stay in my current job, and this has done so much damage. I mean, we all can talk about the recruiting issues and retention issues, but you're on the ground, danny, how you saw that switch in real time. What did that do to your agency when that mindset shifted?

Danny King: 22:29

It literally destroyed it right, and I can tell you there was a change in chiefs and it got really ugly for a little while where things became political, and it's a long story that would completely sidetrack us, but I can tell you that the individual who ultimately ended up taking over had a real shady past, real shady past and in order to legitimize himself you understand, in the consent decree, police reform world there's a group of chiefs that kind of travel around and yeah, I call them the DOJ chiefs.

Travis Yates: 23:04

They're Mr DOJ, they work, they don't. They don't get a paycheck from the DOJ, but they are informants, I suppose, for the DOJ.

Danny King: 23:11

Sure, and some of them you know. I don't know chief Ramsey. I don't think I've ever met him. I don't know whether he's a good leader or bad leader. I can tell you leadership is important, right? So some of these guys are completely legitimate, but some are not legitimate. This chief was had a really shady past and his only out, by the grace of God. He landed a premier police department in the Las Vegas area. Do strictly to politics and after that was over, there is no glory in taking over a high functioning, highly decorated, storied police department. So he started running it as if it was under a consent decree and crooked yeah the reform.

Danny King: 23:56

Yeah, he was a reform chief and he's doing it for the sake of his resume, right and so he founded this unit as you often find in DOJ type agencies or agencies under reform and they immediately went after officers and it destroyed morale. And he didn't just focus on this unit, he changed all kinds of things and he had no experience. He went from being a watch commander in a city in Texas that had I don't know a watch commander span, a control, 20, 30 people To being a deputy chief and then, once this chief was fired, he became the chief. So now he's running a 700 person organization With 500 officers, and he was way out of his league, right which, by the way, danny let me interrupt you because there's no doubt in this era we're in, there's plenty of chiefs that are not qualified and have no knowledge.

Travis Yates: 24:53

But that's okay if that's you, if you're listening somehow, hopefully you are, because most people that are stupid don't think they're stupid. But anyway, you know what I'm saying. It's okay because you probably have smart people around you, just like they did with Danny. Find the right person to do the right things and let them go to work and you can still get a pretty good department. We don't need to see you to be the smartest person in the room. We need to see you to acknowledge who the smartest person in the room is.

Danny King: 25:20

And I think that's part of the problem with inadequate leaders, people that are just not up to task. You could be a newbie to it. You could have been a watch commander and some agency in Texas and stepped into this police department and let people do what they do and and ask the the most qualified person questions and make decisions. But when you're not in order to, I Think, make sure that you're, you have a grasp of things, you begin to micromanage stuff. Right, and the department unfortunately went from looking outward in how to serve our people. It started always wondering what, what he wanted, right, and when you put the focus on the leader, you're not serving the people and and it just destroyed the morale of the agency. Um, ultimately you got guys that just started bailing you know everyone who could retire retired because it was just sheer ineptitude and it put our agency down. I couldn't tell you what the percentage was, but it was a it. We still haven't recovered to this day in in the amount of manpower that we lost, and not only did it affect our manpower.

Danny King: 26:41

You had 20 year guys that couldn't leave that Recognize that this was a mess. And then you also had the one-year guy that recognized that the 20-year guy recognized this was a mess and so that one-year guy who Should be going out and doing police work, he's just like hang on a second right. It's not like the burned out cop is just burned out. We're seeing evidence that there's unfairness, that people are being henpecked for doing just regular police work. You know, when I came into law enforcement back in the 90s, you went out and you did police work Foot pursuits. If it ended up on the use of force or whatever, that was police work right, I went out and I enforced the law. Now it's not about that anymore, and so ultimately, what you end up with is you have guys that now have four or five years of experience. That and I'm not speaking negatively about them, but four or five years of experience in the 90s is not the same as four or five years of experience in 2023.

Travis Yates: 27:47

So, yeah, I think you were absolutely wrapped the cook. Wrap the covid years around that, danny, wrapped the covid years, right? We hired a kid in 2019. The Gallup Academy in late 2019. Covid hits. We don't stop anybody for two years or whatever. We're working from home, whatever's going on, right? So now you've got a five-year officer with about six months of experience of maybe, maybe police work, right, so it's gonna.

Travis Yates: 28:09

You mix this up and it's very important you talked about. You could come in even if you don't have a lot of knowledge as a chief, and you can let us do what we do. Well, here is the issue that law enforcement running into. If your philosophy as a leader is Well doing as you do, is you're a bunch of white races discriminating against people. So if your ideology is is it doing what you do is wrong, that you you inherently think that all that is wrong, then that's why you're seeing all these reforms happening without one court of law saying to reform, without any data Suggesting that reform even helps.

Travis Yates: 28:43

In fact, shootings have gone up since the era of reforms, as you know, because as a society gets more Violent, so do use of force, and so there's no an analysis of whether it even works. It's just about saying, like you said, resume building because I want to be in that club. I want to be in the club that says I'm a reform chief, because if I'm a reform chief I could go to a bigger department. That's even more politically driven. Or I can go work for the DLJ. It's even more politically driven than that. And so it's all about thinking about self versus the greater good, because to this day, nobody has given any evidence whatsoever that all these reforms are doing Either was even needed or even helped in what they were trying to achieve.

Danny King: 29:22

Yeah, absolutely so. You look at CIT. Um, listen, I'm a fan of training, let's train as much as we can train, but there is no evidence that CIT is actually effective, and not only is, is there no evidence that critical incident or CIT training is is crisis training is is effective, but law enforcement officers have been doing that since the dawn of time. So because you package it up and because you Create all these protocols and I see guys get hemmed up all the time and we get sued in law enforcement, which is another point we get sued in law enforcement because there was no CIT officer on scene.

Danny King: 30:05

Okay, there's no evidence that that that would have made a difference one way or the other, right? And so in, in analyzing use of force cases, you see all these errors or missteps or tactical errors and things like that, that Ultimately, there's a shooting that ends up happening or there is a use of force that ends up happening. Well, if you watch enough use of force videos, you'll see that in the ones that work out exactly fine or completely fine, there's those same area errors, right? So people think that because there was no CIT officer on scene and ultimately there was a use of force that occurred that had there been a CIT officer on scene, that things would have worked out different. It's not that. That's not the truth at all.

Travis Yates: 30:52

Well, I think they've had a relation of things. They've had some recent studies out on de-escalation, because that's the new packaged up thing that we've been doing for decades. But now we package it up and we call it de-escalation. There's actually no evidence whatsoever. In fact the evidence is the other way that use of force has increased as agencies have implemented de-escalation training. And I'm not. I don't know the specific study by heart, but it was out of NYPD and and we'll link that up for you. But nobody wants to pay attention to that because that's getting into the way of. I'll attribute to the DARE program I did my. One of my theses is on the DARE program in the 90s and how it was a colossal failure, how we know it was a failure because all the studies said people that took DARE programs took more drugs because the DARE programs Educated them and intrigued them. And so what dare would do is they would run a program for 20 years. The empirical data would come back because you know you're tracking kids as they grow into adulthood and they would just change up the program, change up the curriculum and what? The end of the day?

Travis Yates: 31:48

So much of this damage you're talking about, danny. It's all about money. It's driving people's consulting businesses. It's getting in the next job, it's getting in the next book deal. It is nauseous, and if anybody thinks that, any, I mean. I'll even pick on the leadership training after I do leadership training. But it's completely different than anything else you've ever seen and, danny, you've been there. You can give them your thoughts on that. But everyone else that you know not everybody, but there's so many these programs that it's me myself and I. We go to here, we go here, we got this certification, we get this. Stop Me myself, and I is not helping this profession. If you don't believe me, they can just look around, danny. How's the crime going? How's officer morale going? How's recruiting going, how's retention going? But nobody seems to want to acknowledge that this is tied to the things you're talking about right here.

Danny King: 32:34

Right and in who's. At the end of the day, like I said, in the state of Nevada they have a bunch of laws that came about after the killing of George Floyd Okay, I have no problem with accountability, but there wasn't a Nevada police officer that killed George Floyd and so we've taken all these Problems, pulled them on to the state of Nevada and then tried to solve that problem. You know, they Introduced a bill that ultimately I'm I believe it passed. It was worded differently that said you know, an officer needs to be screened for bias. Okay, and the indicators of bias were things like disproportionate traffic stops, minorities Taking too many sick days, just a bunch of wild stuff that it's like listen, hang on, what did this come from? Where did you get these things? Stay in Nevada.

Danny King: 33:34

We have a duty to intervene law and it says you have to intervene if you recognize its use of force, and I think it's it's Safe to do so. Right, and the reason that that's important is you have to intervene if it's safe to do so. It doesn't mention a realistic opportunity to intervene. So if you and I are walking a guy back to the car and you punch him all of a sudden, I Recognize it. It's safe for me to do so, but it's done Right, it's, the action is done. So there was no realistic opportunity for me to intervene. But Nevada doesn't have that in its law and so it doesn't mention it one way or the other. So if you punch a guy and I'm on the hook for it one way or the other and it's people are trying to make these laws that don't necessarily make sense. It feels good to them.

Danny King: 34:31

But throughout the last few years we've seen a massive leadership failure where people just haven't stood up for law enforcement and said, hey, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. I'll give you an example with that same chief that I was talking about, state in Nevada introduced a someone introduced a bill that says if someone, if a law enforcement officer, is involved in an incident that leads to serious bodily injury or death, they have to go give urine. So if I walk up to a scene, a domestic battery, and somebody comes out shooting at me and I return fire and I hit that person, even though I'm the victim of an attempt murder, I have to go give you, not based on suspicion of anything, not based on you know, not based on anything other than this law, saying that I have to do it Right and they get to screen me for drugs and all this other stuff. Well, when they ran it past, the chief said hey, we need your input on this. He didn't say hey, this is unconstitutional, it violates the Constitution. It violates the Nevada Constitution, he goes well. So what if an officer is taking cholesterol medication or something like that, does he have to disclose that beforehand? Right, and it's just like listen, dude. You didn't even stop to think that it's unconstitutional. You didn't stop to think that, hey, hang on.

Danny King: 35:53

A second Police just tried to murder a police officer, murder anyone. And now a police officer has to go give urine. You know, there's only a couple of police officers every year I don't even think it's every year that come up hot on your analysis after an officer involves shooting in each of those cases. One of those cases, someone tried to kill that police officer. Another one was just a tragic event, but the fact that the guy had cocaine in the system appeared to not be causal to what occurred. So one or two in the last handful of years, and now we have to go give urine.

Travis Yates: 36:29

Right, based on what? But it's very politically expedient to say there's a problem with cops and that's what you're seeing. You're seeing political leaders and even leaders in our own profession. It helps them politically to keep pointing at problems, but the problem they have with that is you have to almost invent problems. I know people who are not in the profession. It's hard to hear that because of all the media stuff, but you and I have been in this profession for many years. Danny, you looked at thousands of use of force. I mean the problems that are there are so minuscule because of all the accountability factors before you even get hired. As you're hired, all the ranks of supervision I mean the typical cops got more bosses than anybody in any profession would ever have. Looking at what they do Now body cameras 24-7, because when we first got him it's as if you think you need it. So now the policy is always all the time, so there can't be more accountability ever. But these people are running around actually acting like there's no accountability and it's very political expedient. And how do we get that back? How do we even by talking and suggesting we need to get it back?

Travis Yates: 37:37

I was just telling you about a comment. I need to quit reading comments. There's this guy online going. This old white guy is talking about the good old days. Well, yeah, he's right about me being white. I don't think I'm old and I've never said to word good old days until I just read it from you. So who's the racist one here? But he sees what we're talking about. Hey, the high crime's bad, recruiting's bad. We need to get back to the basics, back to the mission. And he takes that in his little racist brain and twists it into I'm somehow a white supremacist.

Travis Yates: 38:05

And here's what leaders need to do when that happens because this will happen to any chief that goes we're going to start focusing more on criminals and making things safer. There'll be a 5% of any community in this country that calls him a name for that, just like I just got called a name today. And here's what leaders need to do ha ha ha and keep moving down the road, because that's nothing but a distraction. And look what distractions have gotten us. Danny, look in this. If I would have told you 10 years ago we'd be talking about this stuff, you would have thought I was crazy. So I've told you what I think leaders should do, which is completely. Laugh at them and keep moving and you don't waste the energy to laugh, because that's what's gotten us here. Everybody's afraid about being called a name, which is insane to me. And what is your suggestion to leaders today?

Danny King: 38:52

So I am a massive fan and I've seen it work. Education, right, the public wants to know. Now I'm not talking about education like we're going to hand out stickers and we're going to do all these other things. For years I taught the citizens Academy in our police department and in most of the time they were citizens that supported it. Other times they were people that didn't support the police department. And at this point, reasonable is reasonable, unreasonable is unreasonable. Right, everyone in the country has the entitlement to have their opinion, but unfortunately, with that, they think that just because they don't like something, that it's unreasonable. So when you sit down with the pastor of a church and you sit down with business owners and you give them the realities of policing, where they understand, hey, these are human beings, these are individuals that are oftentimes doing their best and these are the realities of use of force. Just explaining little things like this right, I'm a citizen, now you're a citizen.

Danny King: 40:05

Use of force is written into the Oklahoma statute as it's written into the Nevada revised statute. Those things are not written into the statute because Travis Yates wants to use force every now and then. The founding fathers of the country wrote into the Fourth Amendment that the seizure just has to be reasonable, because they understood that the government had to seize people In order to have an orderly society. The government had to seize people and our founding fathers were fairly anti-government All right. And so in the Nevada revised statutes, we have all kinds of statutes that relate to use of force. Those are written in there because I, as a citizen, I'm going to pick up the phone and I'm going to request an officer go into a dangerous circumstance and I want him to protect himself, I want him to have the tools necessary, and for that reason we write it into the law. Because cops need to use force. It's a reality of it, and when you explain that to guys, when you explain that it's in the statutes, because officers are placed in dangerous circumstances, they need to be able to protect themselves and enforce the law people go, oh, I didn't think of it that way, right. When you talk about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, people go, oh, okay. And then you sit and you explain to people hey, listen, during foot pursuits or during all these other incidents, tasers may not be the best tool. Here's why here's the limitations of a taser People start to understand it right and they want to understand it. I'm working on a website, very slowly, called Police Basics, and just it explains the basics to citizens so that they understand all these things.

Danny King: 41:54

You have a family member who's flipped out that the police officers show up and the guys stand at the top of his driveway with a knife. I don't know who that guy is. I don't know anything about him. He may have never intended to stab me, he may have just wanted to run up to me and scare me, I don't know. But ultimately, if you shoot that guy, the family gets upset.

Danny King: 42:16

Well, listen, we're stepping into the unknown and the unknown is used against us all the time. So saying all that to say, if you educate most people, there will be an understanding. Most people want to support the cops and they've seen now the effect of societies or individuals not supporting the cops, and I think a lot of Americans want it to go back. Things are out of control all the way across the board in our country. Inflation is through the roof, crime is through the roof, guys are just being taxed to death. Even poor people are being taxed to death, and so I think a lot of people in our country are just going. Hey man, what is going on here? What are we doing? And we have some decisions to make. And while I can't fix everything, I think we can certainly educate the public as to the realities, those that want to know.

Danny King: 43:08

And just because someone says I have a chief that was involved in a, one of his guys was involved in a critical incident that became fairly well known here in the state. Every political activist came out of the woodwork, every faith leader demanding things from him, and it just became a nightmare for him. Well, just because you say you represent all these people doesn't mean that I have to meet with you and doesn't mean that we have to change all these things. I'm all for transparency, right, but while we have the time right now, educate people. We would put our IA detectives in such stressful circumstances and when we would interview them afterwards, they would misquote what the person said. They would get the sequence of events wrong, they would characterize the events completely wrong and ultimately, when a guy was sitting before them in IA, they knew they'd done that themselves, right, and they were not talking about. Like you know, if a person couldn't remember, they understood how stress works. We would put faith leaders in our Virtua 300 simulator and they would shoot everything a lot and they would walk away with an understanding of Wow, okay, yeah, this isn't as simple as I thought, right, and if we can continue to educate people because we have to do something. We have to do something for our people out there on the streets because it is a job that goes upside down instantly and we need to be able to protect them and guys like you that have that knowledge. I think we have somewhat of an obligation to make sure that the public understands how things go upside down and that these guys are just trying to do their job.

Danny King: 44:55

You know, you mentioned that you're an old white guy and talking about the good old days, and that might be partially true the old part but I worked on a squad when I went back to the road in 2018 with a kid that I used to. When I was a canine handler, I sponsored a school and I would take my dog to the school and I would have lunch with these kids. I had a kid that was in third or fourth grade when I was a canine handler that worked on the squad with me when I came back to the road. This kid doesn't have a racist bone in his body. In fact, that school was so diverse that you couldn't tell what nationality these kids were, and so the idea that this is 1970 or 1960 or any of those other things, those things are gone. It's a completely different breed of cop, and it's while things are becoming more violent. These people joined law enforcement to do the right thing.

Travis Yates: 45:51

Well and that's kind of back to my point is, you know, I just think about my kids, my oldest kids, 23, like this race stuff. They're only seeing that on the news. They're completely confused by this stuff. So this generation of cops coming up you're not speaking to the dude working in the 60s, right, when obviously race relations were, you know, it's perceived bad now. It was really bad back then.

Travis Yates: 46:16

So what that entails is because this is, you know, once again, leaders that say there's a problem or whatever you want to call that. They have to keep inventing problems if they're saying that. And there's a whole we talked about the people just in law enforcement when it comes to race. There's a whole bunch of people out there that need that to be a problem, right, because there's lots of money flying around. I think the stories are going to get crazier and crazier in trying to get law enforcement, you know whatever they're trying to do fired in jail because they need that, so to speak. And so Danny or I aren't discounting that there's not bad cops. We're proofing the human race. Every profession has people they don't need there. But I would say to you that we fight tooth and nail to keep those people out of the profession and then kick them out when it's a problem. What we're saying is is, by blanketing the entire profession this way when clearly there's no evidence of that, as time goes on, that evidence is going to get next to nothing. It's going to get even crazier, which means it's going to take leadership to not be worried about getting called a name, not be worried about not agreeing with the narrative. It's going to take leadership to protect this profession, because Danny and I I mean, we're two people we need people inside departments that are going to stand up.

Travis Yates: 47:29

That, frankly, would have something to lose. Danny and I have very little to lose by saying the truth. If you're a police chief, you could lose your job. If your mayor doesn't like what you said, even if it's the truth, well, we better start putting people in those positions. Danny, that doesn't care about that. They care more about the greater good, because that's how we kind of eradicate what's going on, and it's going to. It's going to be a drastic change. So I think we're at a crossroads. Danny, you are doing tremendous work. Before we get off here, man, how can people find you? And I would tell you that if you're interested in use of force. You need an expert, you need training. This is the guy to contact. How can they reach you, danny?

Danny King: 48:05

So they can reach me at American Patrolman dot com. That's a man, american Patrolman dot com. I try and educate guys, specifically police officers, on the realities of using force. There's a lot of things that that police officers misunderstand and so I've taken the last couple of years 10 and I've studied what causes us problems, what do we do needlessly that causes problems and, ultimately, how you can avoid some problematic behavior. But if someone decides that they're going to send you to internal affairs, this is most likely the common cause of that Right or wrong. This is most likely the common cause how police officers end up getting charged and indicted.

Danny King: 48:51

What's the process that it happens, how do they use experts against you and what you can do about it now, right, what you can proactively do about it now. As an example, you know you spent time in training and training law enforcement officers. Well, I would tell police officers in 2024 pay attention and training, even if the training is horrible. Training, pay attention, because when something goes upside down, they're going to look back at that lesson plan and they're going to hold that against you and they're going to consider you trained, even if it's. You know, you spent three hours doing defensive tactics and a year later you ended up in a fight. They're going to hold that lesson plan against you and say didn't you receive this training? No matter if you actually wrestled on the ground or you just got a presentation and watched it.

Danny King: 49:44

You know, a good example is for years, to this day, they tell you don't use a taser in a gas environment. I would agree with that right. But, travis, let me ask you this have you ever been trained? Have you ever stood in a gas environment and been put in a scenario where you had to decide whether to use a taser or not? I doubt any policeman has. I haven't. Yeah Right, I haven't. But they charged a cop in Florida because a motorcycle got knocked over. He didn't know that the gas is spilling out of it and he tased the guy and because this is happening so fast and rapidly.

Travis Yates: 50:25

he doesn't know any of that. We only know that after the fact, which is his hindsight judgment, we keep seeing.

Danny King: 50:31

Right. So this is what's called state dependent learning and state dependent recall. I can talk to you about putting on a tourniquet, but if I never put you in a heightened state where you've been injured or or I don't teach you in that state, you're not going to recall it in that state, right? And so you talk to 99% of the people out there. They couldn't tell you what state dependent recall is. A chief of police couldn't tell you what state dependent recall is, or state dependent training, and so they just know that the presentation says don't do this and someone did it, and so now they charge the police officer. It's things like that that I teach guys, to make sure that you know. Hey, listen, this is how this is going to be used against you. Now, please don't don't taze anyone at a gas station with a motorcycle knocked over. But here's how the misunderstanding occurs when they do charge you or they do an olgy accountable.

Travis Yates: 51:24

Danny King powerful stuff, man. Thank you so much for being here and if you've been listening or you've been watching, thank you and just remember lead on and stay courageous.

Intro/Outro: 51:35

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