Courage and Innovation in Law Enforcement with Roland Clee

Have you ever wondered what it takes to lead with valor in the complex world of law enforcement? Roland Clee, a retired non-sworn law enforcement professional with 26 years under his belt, joins us to share his transformative insights on leadership and innovation in the field. From defying conventional divides between civilian roles and sworn officers to the essence of proactive training, Roland's experiences challenge the status quo and inspire a new wave of leadership that transcends traditional hierarchies.

Tackling the nuanced landscape of law enforcement culture, we discuss the unexpected ascent of police chiefs to executive roles, the evolution of recruitment, and retention strategies against the backdrop of societal shifts. Roland imparts wisdom on the impact of groups like Antifa on policing tactics and advocates for authenticity in leadership. His perspective on nurturing supportive environments for officers is a clarion call for those determined to safeguard the future stability of our communities.

Finally, we scrutinize the delicate interplay between long-standing policing practices and the allure of advanced technologies. Roland cautions against letting the glint of tech undermine the irreplaceable value of human insight and the core tenets of effective policing. This episode is an unequivocal reminder that courageous leadership and a steadfast commitment to fundamental principles are instrumental in navigating the challenges of law enforcement.

 Join us and become part of the courageous leadership community at TravisYates.org, where conviction meets action in the noble service of public safety.

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Transcript

Roland Clee: 0:00

Leadership isn't the command staff. Leadership needs to be taking place at all levels. We don't need to be treating training like a reward when we're giving you a tool to do your job better, giving you a tool that you can't use outside of work, but you can only use it within work.

Intro/Outro: 0:22

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

Travis Yates: 0:32

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored that you've decided to spend a few minutes with us here today and you are not going to be disappointed about today's guest On today's show is Roland Clee. He's a 26-year law enforcement professional and lead business analyst at Command Staff Consulting, and Roland has an unbelievable sub-stack at peaceofficersubstackcom. The things that he writes and the things that he talks about is so unique and so out of the box and also so helpful for the profession. It's making a tremendous impact across leadership in this country and I'm so thankful he's decided to come on the show with us today.

Travis Yates: 1:14

Roland Clee, how are you, sir, doing? Well? Thank you for having me today. Well, roland, you're now retired from the profession, but you had an interesting career and it starts off with is you weren't a sworn police officer, you were a civilian and we oftentimes in the profession have this sort of police officers and civilians and it's them and it's us and it's sort of divide. But that was not the case with you. You had just as fascinating and complete career as anybody that was sworn, and I just kind of wanted you to just take us through that journey of how you went through that profession and what you were involved in and kind of how you ended up today being kind of a lead voice for the profession.

Roland Clee: 1:58

Thank you for that also. So when I applied for a position with the police department, there weren't a lot of lot of openings, so to speak. That was just around the time of the crime bill, so a lot of people have been brought on because our agency was hosting World Cut Soccer in our area, so it was just a great opportunity. Honestly, it was the first job I applied for after graduating the University of Central Florida and I was working at a bank and I got the job and I went through the process pretty steadily and then on a certain day they said you're going to report over here to the police academy, You're going to go through this 1920 week police academy with the sworn officers. But I was talking to somebody earlier today about something that was really special about the hiring process. So you're waiting, they leave, you wait out in the lobby and you see people walking in and out of lock doors. It's not like TV where people just walk up to a detective's desk. But when they brought me back behind the lock doors and now I'm in the area where people who are hired will be working, they had a portrait, with a blue background, of silver agency badge and instead of metal of honor. It said metal of honor, metal with a T, and it just really just filled my heart to be a part of whether this organization was going to provide for me and what I was going to be participating in. So I was really fortunate to have a good supervisor. Let me go to some training.

Roland Clee: 3:45

So I became an academy instructor general subjects instructor and then I wound up going to a driving instructor school and our in-service training unit.

Roland Clee: 3:58

They had me out working with them about two days a week so while the community service officers that I was were working like five days a week.

Roland Clee: 4:08

I got to interact with all of the police officers in training and really develop relationships and respect for one another with them through the agency. So I knew the guys that were on midnight shift. I knew the guys that people said don't like community service officers, CSOs and I was like, well, we don't seem to have a problem, but getting out there with the folks training them to stop hitting combs, being the person that they rescued and shoot with simulmissions in scenario training, was a great opportunity. And then, just to give you 30 seconds of my career trajectory, I went to investigations in 2001 and was given the juvenile enforcement program. That was dead on arrival and I turned it into something really active. And then in 2009, when they were creating a special office for Obamacar and Zaw, they said you better send this guy along with them, and so I wound up going to being on chief staff and for about a decade and about two or three times in and out of media relations until homicide missing persons and close out my career in missing persons in 2021.

Travis Yates: 5:27

Well, I think we oftentimes don't see civilians with the capability of doing some of those roles, but obviously somebody there at your agency saw your talent, they saw your ability, they saw the way you think and act and they enabled you to do that. I mean, how vital was that? That a leader recognized a talent around him despite a rank, and said get after it.

Roland Clee: 5:50

Just like you preached, we did have some courageous leaders who took some risks and didn't listen to everybody else and said no, I'm going to invest in this person, I'm going to place my trust and I'm going to take, I'm going to put the risk on myself to put them out there and to do that. That's something we see far too rare nowadays.

Travis Yates: 6:13

Yeah, you talk a lot about leadership role and I got to tell you I've been reading articles and content for about 20 years. I did a decade with police one and I do some work now with law officer, and so I'm generally spending a few hours a day just looking at content. And when I ran across the content that you're producing, it blew me away. There's really it's nothing, really is like it out there.

Travis Yates: 6:37

I'm not saying I'm jealous, but I can't do what you are doing out there on Substack and you are really stepping on some sacred cows and really challenging the status quo. And I want to sort of back you up, like, at what point in your career did you look around? Because I noticed that you started this after you retired, so this was obviously boiling up inside you and you picked something that I rarely do, which is pick good timing. I rarely am a good timer of when I open my mouth, but you waited until you were retired to do that. And I just wondered at what point in your career did you see sort of the shift in the profession where you thought to yourself somebody needs to start discussing this.

Roland Clee: 7:17

Well, just like I mentioned before, I was the beneficiary of some very courageous leadership, I was also witness to some very poor leadership and at certain times you could see predictable events or people wouldn't take the risk and wouldn't do that. Sometimes the attitude was my job is to keep the boat in the center of the channel and not go close to that shore. Not go close to that shore and maintain the status quo organizationally. And then I'm still going to have a press conference every year where I tell everyone how much I reduce crime. So it wound up being just seeing the irony of some of these roles just sat deep within me. But I'm telling you 2018, 2019, we could tell that that the attitudes towards the police had completely shifted and completely changed, and I had an insider's view.

Roland Clee: 8:21

I was, I was behind the scenes of some of the some major police events by events and talk about like conferences, as one was being part of some very large critical incidents also.

Roland Clee: 8:36

So it was. You know I've seen what was going on behind the scenes with you know, I've seen them in the emergency operation center and I was seeing them in the convention center, and what I was seeing I wasn't pleased with and I had something to contribute and I contributed as best as I was allowed to when, when my voice was within the, within the walls of police department. But I was very happy to have the opportunity to do this and I'm actually I don't know how to say it, but I'm just glad that the substack found me. I'm kind of glad that I waited, because I had a body of work already written and I was, you know, wondering how am I going to get this message out there. I'm making a write, a book I want to, a series of articles I wanted to write, and then I'm sorry.

Roland Clee: 9:25

You know, tucker Carlson had Bill Morioli on a show recently and he says the moment I got fired from Fox, I decided I wasn't working for anyone else ever again. And so I I know exactly what he means by that and I know exactly what that feeling is. And now that we do have that freedom, I think we also bear responsibility to bear witness to the next generation that what you're seeing isn't normal, that we've seen courageous leadership and this isn't it, and when, when you see it, it's gonna look like this and you'll recognize it.

Travis Yates: 9:58

Yeah, roland, I think what you're contributing post career I actually think this is your new career like. I think that contributions that you are now making, because it will impact the entire profession, is going to make a far greater impact than the success you had in your own agency. And and you know, I want to tell our audience just how good the information is that you have is some of your content is paid. Only. You can do that on the substack. You're the only one I pay for.

Travis Yates: 10:29

I pay to hear what you have to say and it's that good and it's not a lot of money, it, but it's definitely worth it. And the reason is is because you make me think you, you make me, you. You sort of push the envelope, so to speak, on what is possible, and obviously you think greatness is possible in the profession, because it obviously is. But to do that you have got to break down the problems in the profession and so few people are able to do that. In fact, I can count on one hand the people writing the kind of content you're writing, roland, and is that sort of by design where you know, unless you can break these sacred cows and get people to thinking about it, you're never gonna get to the solution.

Roland Clee: 11:09

I tell. Let me answer that in an unusual way. I remember launching my substack and and my greatest fear was that I would not have enough content to maintain momentum, and that fear was completely misplaced. The, the policing universe and politics in general continue to supply more than I could possibly ever ever write about or comment about or intervene about. I just don't have enough waking hours now and I am so privileged, you know I have the support of my family in this, in this project, to to be able to, to do this, and you know I I'm not gonna sacrifice my dignity or anybody else's dignity in this, but what I want to do is I want to, I want us to have this respectful conversation about, about the facts and you know, just just like I recently wrote, can we talk about this without losing our cool? And I found out that some can and some can't, but that's the, that's the status of a lot of police programming.

Roland Clee: 12:20

The police replacement program is gaining steam and it's happening. It's gonna threaten our, our institutions. It's gonna threaten the safety of cities, people are. It is really dividing the, the country, and some of the things are that people are protesting the police about are just completely ludicrous you speak about. You know the, the trust that the public has in the police. And if you, if you walked into a roll call or a lineup and you ask, you ask the officers what you know, percentage-wise, where we're policing be and where would it be against different, different professions? They would say, oh, it's probably down in the 20s or the 30s. It's not. It is way above doctors, preachers, way about politicians, lawyers, judges and and high school principals. And it's still. Even even though we took a hit, it's still.

Travis Yates: 13:22

You know, everybody else seems to have taken a hit too, so it's still in the high, high 60s and low 70s yeah, you know you talk about the police, replacement theory or reimagining police and all these little topics that they sock about, but they won't give you the definition of and obviously you're right that that time period 2018, 2019, 2020 obviously we saw that in real time and very few of our leaders said anything about it. Like, I don't blame necessarily the, the folks that are the anti-police or whoever it is it's sort of doing, is politicians. All these folks we can blame. We've almost let this happen to ourselves. I mean, we, we have permitted outside influences to redefine what policing is, to redefine what law and order is, to redefine what civility is. Why do you think that is? Was it just a lack of preparation, a lack of leadership or just being scared?

Roland Clee: 14:20

I think that there's just been a huge change in the national organizations and what they have dictated for law enforcement organizations, and I think there's been a buddy system. I call police chiefs in many cases to be the accidental executives that these people, some of them, signed on as to be a police officer with the understanding that they were going to be a police officer for the rest of their lives. And some of them signed on with like, well, I don't really want to arrest people very much, but I want to go out and I want to gain some rank and gain some status and I'm going to take care of this buddy. I'm going to take care of that buddy. And we don't just see it in one agency. We can't just say, oh, it's happening over here, it's happening over there. But boy, when you see gutsy police in action, gutsy police chiefs in action, they're saying they're going to come from my troops, through my badge, you can take it.

Roland Clee: 15:20

There was a Rochester chief. There was the chief over in Tampa. He says you take a knee, I take a badge. Don't do that in uniform. We had the chief in Atlanta when his troops were under attack at the regional training center that's under construction. We were, then teeth are going there and burning their construction equipment. He said we're not doing that, we're not putting up with that, we're going to arrest some people and I salute the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, state Police and Atlanta PD because they wrote the blueprint on dismantling Antifa. Antifa isn't an idea, it's an organization that needs some prosecution.

Travis Yates: 15:58

Yeah, and it's so common sense, like I don't know at what point law enforcement decided to let people write, to let people break into stores, to let people vent their rage, or whatever we try to say, but it certainly is strange and it seemed to have happened rather rapidly. And what our audience needs to know is it's done by design. This is not just some organic prospect that's occurred. It's not from racist cops that we're rising up against, because you talk a lot about the data and the nonsense of that talk, roland. This is done by design, by people that want to break down society as a whole, and when you break down society as a whole, the first group you need to break down is those that keep society intact, those defending the law right, those that are trying to keep evil away from good, and so that's why law enforcement was sort of the first one. We're seeing that now.

Travis Yates: 16:50

Transition I don't know if you noticed this one. We've seen this transition into the medical profession and journalism and colleges. You're starting to see this in other professions, which is what I said when 2020 happened. Everybody was on this train against law enforcement. I said be careful what you wish for. They're reimagining us now. They're going to reimagine you next and is that sort of what you're seeing on your end?

Roland Clee: 17:13

That's what I'm seeing on my end, but I want to point out something to your audience and to anybody who hasn't read your book yet is that you wrote your book before 2020. It sounds like you wrote your book after 2020. When you're reading and you're dealing with the same characters and the same issues. You're dealing with Jacob Frey and the Minneapolis police chief in the same way that we're doing afterwards. So your book was prophetic in certain ways and it's a must read, but it's amazing that those truths that are in that book they're still valid today. 2020 didn't change your book at all. Those were the precepts. Those were the things that were putting us on the collision course to 2020. So I think that we are a real concern as far as the failed leadership in the administration force.

Travis Yates: 18:18

Unfortunately, they don't give any kudos for being a prophet in the law enforcement.

Travis Yates: 18:22

And the book was not exactly popular around my circle of folks in my agency, but I wrote it because of what you stated earlier, roland. I started seeing it in 2016 and 2017 and 2018. I started seeing this shift and I thought to myself, if we don't do something different, something's going to happen, and of course it did. Seven months after the book was published, everything went crazy and we're still reeling from that. And do we have a way out of this? Because I wake up and I read this content and things coming out and the decisions that these leaders are making and I'm thinking to myself how are we able to reverse this?

Travis Yates: 18:59

I mean, I know Roland's out there and John Kelly's out there and Tom Rizzo's out there People out there saying the right things and trying to push people to do some things differently but man, it certainly gets frustrating because this is not a complicated fix. This is an easy fix. I'll kind of limit something that John told me recently, which was we just need to start carrying again carrying for people. And how do you? What, in your opinion, is? Because we're both writing articles, we do podcasts, we do all this stuff how? What will it take to finally for the profession to realize this is the wrong route to take.

Roland Clee: 19:38

Well, we've got to figure out the recruiting problem, and one of the the recruiting problem is so mis-portrayed because even if we get somebody in the door, they're gone in three years so and they're taking on that training expense and that training with them and perhaps they've even left the profession. So we have to fix that because we're not obviously hiring the people with the, with the aptitude. Now there were like three groups of people in the police academy when I was there, and there were the people that their families were law enforcement, and these guys were naturals, they were born to be cops. Then there were people like me, who are, you know, trainable, you know, eventually. And then there were people that that were just being kept alive by their grandmother's parents.

Roland Clee: 20:29

The fact is that we, we've lost that first group, that that was our recruiting tool and those guys kept everybody else safer. Now everyone's going to, now everyone's going to call, standing 21 feet away, screaming at crazy people and you know, with their hand on their gun and expecting a different result than than the catastrophe that we're, that we're going to be facing. So we we've really got to get back to finding, finding those people, because they're out there. We don't have a shortage of them out there. They're being told not to join, and they're being told not to join for good reason, and it's because we've had, we've diminished the allure of the profession. These people, their, their chests don't swell when they see that, that big, big portrait of a badge that says metal of honor, that you're, that you're, you're joining something special that you know we are Sparta. You know that kind of that kind of moment and we have people.

Roland Clee: 21:28

Yes, you can do the job. Yes, I can make you a cop. Yes, you're probably survived 25 years. Yes, all all these things, but you're never going to, you're never going to treat it like a treasured craft, you're never going to take it to the next level. You're going to do your time. You're going to, you're going to have, have a good time, have some great stories, but you're you're not going to invest yourself in this and you know, as long as we keep running through that cycle, we're just going to be hamsters, spinning, spinning the wheel.

Roland Clee: 21:57

And yeah, I love it. I love it you and you and Jake and Doug are doing with that, because I think that you are capturing the people that are more likely to to be the best candidates for for the profession. Listen, there's plenty of things you can teach me to sing, but I'm never going to be Frank Sinatra. And you know, the more we come to terms with that is that these people are not naturally talented on some of these things. Yes, they'll do an adequate job. Yes, they can carry a tune in the in a choir. Well, you know, you're going to be singing solo out there on the street.

Travis Yates: 22:30

Yeah, you know, before this podcast for the audience, I I told, I told Roland hey, I don't have any questions, we're just going to have a discussion. But the Lord was going to lead our path and you mentioned recruiting. I think that's the path he's leading us to today, because I think what is so frustrating is on the heels of politicians saying we're going to defund you, on the heels of politicians saying we're going to reimagine you. All of a sudden, ironically, the recruiting crisis hits and our leaders, roland, do not realize that that's exactly done on purpose, like if you, if it's not popular to defund and it's not popular to totally, just, you know, get rid of police officers in the profession, the ones you talked about, how else do you do it? And we're seeing it right now.

Travis Yates: 23:16

But rather than observing that and noticing that, we're seeing these leaders going oh, we need more money. Oh, let's throw some bonuses at him. Oh, it's this, oh, it's that. And at the same time, our own police organizations I'll mention one of them the ICP puts out a recruiting document that says we should only recruit guardians. We must get away from the warrior mindset Now. First off, you don't understand the definition of warrior and guardian, because they're almost identical. A warrior does not mean violence. It just means prepared and ready if need be. But the people you talked about, roland, that have been run out of this profession are that, are those warrior mindsets that made us all safer, that made your community safer, but they're being told we don't want you from the very organizations that we think support us and creates the crisis.

Roland Clee: 24:07

And you know what? Where is it going to end? Well, we're going to see some very bad examples very soon. We have about 150,000 illegal aliens in New York City. Well, you know, Roland, you know we got. We got about 10 million across the border.

Roland Clee: 24:25

But this crisis right now in New York City, with their right to shelter law, this consent decree from 1979 that the city was in receivership to the state when this thing was settled and it's only applies to the city, this is brought New York City to its knees and every department, including sanitation and police and fire, have been told that they're going to take 15 to 20 percent cuts. We're reaching the point where you're going to need enhanced public safety, not diminished public safety. And now you're taking me. So the previous staffing, before the migrants arrived, the migrants, the illegal aliens arrived was 35,000. They're expecting that the city of New York is going to be down 3,000 officers. They're going to three thought. They're not going to be vacancies. They're going to delete those positions and they're not going to have a safe sitting anymore. They're going to have a crisis and they're going to have a crisis where no one wants to step up and take the job that is going to play out in front of us and I hope that there are just enough negative examples where it triggers the immune response around the country where we say, oh, we can't let what just happened there. I mean, they're turning New York into escape from New York like the movie and it's not good. Out in San Francisco, they've got national guard troops on the streets of the Tenderloin dealing with the crisis, hundreds of people just dying in the streets out there. And then, of course, in Chicago they totally hit the mirror.

Roland Clee: 26:12

Brandon Johnson. He wants to get the cops out of all the schools and then he also wants to reduce their forces and reimagine them with community violence interrupters. The community violence interrupters they're these credible messengers are generally people who are convicted felons and gang members who claim to have disavowed their past life. They claim to be desisting from crime, but in fact we keep finding them in it as drug users in criminal situations, and we're using these dummy corporations as 501c3s that they went through because the police can't pay convicted felons. So we're seeing a lot of money get lost along the way. The Biden administration established billions of dollars for community violence intervention, which is, in fact, the police replacement program. It is the way that justice is reimagined in the United States.

Travis Yates: 27:12

Yeah, and it's amazing to me how you see this clearly, Roland. I of course see this clearly, but so few people understand what's going on. And if you don't understand what's going on, you're incapable of correcting it. And if you think that it's going to get bad enough to where we wake up and the pendulum is going to swing, well, it's pretty bad now, so the pendulum may be broken, right?

Travis Yates: 27:32

It may not be coming back unless we intervene and get in the way of it. And I know I hear from law enforcement every day and their frustration levels and their depression is real. I mean, they are living this, they see it, but they sense that their leaders don't get it and don't understand it. And I want to be very clear. I'm not blaming the president or politicians or anti-violence, whoever. I'm blaming us. I'm blaming our own leaders in our profession have permitted this. I don't think I can't think of another profession that would permit an outside entity to start destroying that profession without stopping them. And it's just really amazing to me and it takes people like you, roland, to step up and to start informing people of this, because it's possible that the next generation of law enforcement, the next leadership of law enforcement, is going to understand that and reverse it.

Roland Clee: 28:28

What you have said recently, what John Kelly has said recently, is that leadership isn't the command staff. Leadership needs to be taking place at all levels. We don't need to be treating training like a reward when we're giving you a tool to do your job better, giving you a tool that you can't use outside of work, that you can only use it within work. And what we've done, you know and that is something that I would say that I've seen change from, from, say, 1996 to 2016 is that that total reversal. I had a detective speak to me about something and he says, oh, I'm just a lowly officer. And I said I don't buy that. You're taking orders from me and I'm a community service officer, but you need to put your boots on and let's go.

Roland Clee: 29:26

But the attitude that has been is that a lot of these people act like they are. They have no say, that they're just hopeless victims waiting there. You know they don't get to decide on anything and they don't participate. They don't get into what they need to. But I think a lot of officers have just been conditioned into into this bad attitude over the years. I think it's infected a few folks and that's why these new guys that are coming on that we need to let them know that policing was this noble adventure but you, you were honored to go and to and to serve your community through and that spirit has has dissipated. I still see it and I still see glimpses of it here and there, and I'm glad to do that.

Roland Clee: 30:24

But the idea that we're going to take a picture every time we're mowing some of these lawn in uniform Well, now we've got the officer taking the picture of the other officer doing that and emailing the picture to the Pio so we can put it on Facebook. Why don't you just mow the lawn and let everyone else see it, but let your actions be seen for what they, what they are, rather than Self-promoting? That and it's the worst thing to do is to start showing you you hang out in an apartment making some of these breakfasts and doing their dishes, when you've got your hand out Saying I need more money for staffing and we're 200 officers down and we can't answer the calls that we have. We don't answer property calls anymore because we don't have the staffing, but we have time to cook breakfast.

Travis Yates: 31:08

Yeah, you know this is all a self-correcting problem. But I see, like you said, we act like we're helpless. But it this we got, we got this way through leadership. We can get out of this with leadership. But it's gonna be a different paradigm of leadership role and it's gonna be the things that you talk about Each and every week. I mean you hit some sacred cows on your sub stack. Once again. Your sub stack is peace officer Dot, sub stack comm. I can't believe that you stole that name for me. What a great name on some stack and it was available. Not a lot of cops writing, I guess, on sub stack, but it's, it's really phenomenal. But I mean when I say sacred cows, I mean you've hit recruiting and consent decrees and juvenile justice and department of justice and School resource officers. I mean what kind of feedback have you gotten me? By the way, everything that you've written is dead on. It's dead on, but it's. It's something that no one wants to talk about. What kind of feedback have you gotten from that writing?

Roland Clee: 32:05

well, you know Taking on BLM and I've taken on antifa. But I tell you who I was really scared of was this SRO's, and I did get. I did get some feedback and it's mixed. I've gotten some incredibly positive feedback from saying that, but the three key reasons that we have cops in schools are defeated by data and by meta studies.

Roland Clee: 32:28

I know that there's gonna be a study out there that somebody says all these, all these attacks on schools, we're prevented because you have Resource officer in the school. We still only have resource officers in 51.3 percent of the schools. So you know, if I, if I, was a lunatic, you know who want to go shoot up a school, I'll just choose, choose part of the other 48 percent of schools or something like that. But the the idea that they can document a lot you know I've stopped this many and no statistically, statistically, there, you're not doing it and that's okay. We just need to stop saying that. This is the reason why you're there.

Roland Clee: 33:08

We need the officers in the schools and we don't need the replacements in schools. What we need is we need officers in the schools for the right reasons and it's and that's the reason why that's such a touchy subject is because, like you said, that's a sacred cow to a lot of people. And then you know four out of five are just top, top rate officers who earn their posting there, but that there's probably still a Fifth 20 percent that are that are there and they would rather be terminated than trip than be transferred out of, transferred out of school. They've gone completely native. I mean, the trip was the 80s, you know, but they've just been ingrained into into the whole school culture and you know they live for, they live for that they, they live for the hours and the holidays off. And you know you need, we need officers to be officers.

Travis Yates: 34:03

Yeah, we need some of our best and brightest in schools. That's where the devil will come to play sometimes. We need to be ready and prepared, and that certainly has changed through the years. And and the only thing you probably haven't talked about up till now is the dare program, and I hope you get to it. I wrote a master's thesis on how dare makes you do drugs more. That's what the study said, and these dare officers lost their mind, right? I mean, it's an a sorry, but data doesn't lie. And you, what I love about your writing role is you. You use data Constantly, because data it's really difficult to argue with. And Do you see a lack of that in the profession? I know you did that. I know you did that for your agency for many years using data, but how powerful could data be to get us out of? Some of these issues were in.

Roland Clee: 34:45

Bill Brun was on a Manhattan Institute a conversation online a few years ago and I think it was during one of the first George Kelly talks and and he said that the problem with the law enforcement research is like is like the world just talking to one another instead of really letting the data speak, and we we get things turned around. We get things turned around very easily. I had a robbery sergeant Community communicating with the robbery sergeant in another jurisdiction and they were putting out an email every day with a list of all the robberies that happened, and one of the recipients of that of that email was the was the head of the crime analysis unit and I was like I Went downstairs to talk about this. I was like he should be sending you this information. This is, this is totally, this is totally backwards. And so you know we're not, we're not using the data that we're, we're going into the crime Eve, we're patting one another on the back, but I always know that there's an officer who can take me at midnight on Saturday night to the top of parking garage to hear gunfire.

Roland Clee: 35:55

You know we don't, you don't need the science. It's like in the. It's like in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie last action here he's riding around with the kid and the kids is the bad guys are in there and sometimes that's all that we need and we're using technologies like shot spotter and Predictive policing. Those things aren't helping us. Those things aren't helping us.

Roland Clee: 36:20

When you have officers on the street who have the human intelligence To tell you that if you go, that if you go to these, to these night clubs that you're gonna pick, take a bunch of gunsoft people, then you know they'll be listening to them and and using that data as as a starting point, rather than, you know, chasing people around and putting out, putting up bulletins for stolen guns with a picture of a gun on it and it's like, like we were going to recognize this particular block from. It's just, it's just ludicrous. So you know, I think we just need to really Clear our thinking. We need to take a pause, step back, take a look at what, what our actions are and what the outcomes are, and Because right now, what we're doing is we're measuring output, not outcomes.

Travis Yates: 37:09

Yeah, I always find it ironic that, you know, we, we lowered crime to historic lows in the 90s, early 2000s with literally nothing more than a notepad in your car and even not, didn't even have an MDT terminal, internet half the time right. And now we have all this technology, were shot spotter and real-time crime centers and all this stuff, but nobody is going back and going. Did this help us reduce crime? Because it's obviously it hasn't, and no one wants to evaluate it because most of those ideas are a sacred cow. Someone championed it, someone brought it in, and how dare you say anything bad about it? But I think you're right, roland. I think we need to get back to the basics of what the mission is, which is reducing crime and making our community safer.

Roland Clee: 37:52

I said a cold case conference and you know some of the, some of the people read off with what's on the Bosch's desk in there in the TV series they get you know just for their podcast, where you get off your butt and go knock on some doors and that's a fact. You know the the officer who murdered Walter Scott in South Carolina was a man, a body camera and it was captured by an iPhone camera. But we're we automatically assumed that our, our all our shivings are so thoroughly invested. We were to figure this one out. We used to figure out murders before there were cell phones. We used to figure out murders before there was DNA and excellent crime scene extraction of latent prints from normally non-conduced materials. So we were talking about the DNA at this conference and sometimes it's like the DNA doesn't tell you anything. You can use the DNA, you can find out who's DNA it is, but that information is useless unless it's related to something relevant in the case. But yeah, I just wanna reiterate the Walter Scott case. That's conspicuously absent from all the high profile police shootings that are listed and when people list these ones, that officer was a criminal. He was a rightfully convicted of murder.

Roland Clee: 39:26

We used to find the bad apples. We're not finding bad apples anymore than we were before. Body cameras you know they're doing it on body camera now. Well, statistically, we are still finding the bad apples because they can't help themselves and cops don't wanna work with criminals. Cops spot criminals a mile away. So when you start seeing the cops don't wanna work with this person or work with that person for a reason, they cancel their back when that person's unit number comes up on the radio. There's a reason for that, and so we need to go back to some of the old ways where we become so reliant on talking about technology and you think now, if technology is helping us this much, how that is crime compared to before. It must be much, much worse than before Just because we've got all these technological aids like LPRs and facial recognition and other things like that. So, yeah, it's just something to think about. What is a real crime rate?

Travis Yates: 40:32

because it's up Amazing stuff, roland, and this is like drinking through a fire hose. I think I told you we wouldn't be here long, but I could keep talking for days. This is so fascinating and I can't thank you enough for being here. Someone wanted to contact you. I know you do consulting. They need to be reading your material. What could they contact you at?

Roland Clee: 40:51

They can reach me at Roland Clee, at commandstaffconsultingcom, and I'm on Twitter at RolandClee. I'm on sub-staff, obviously, but to find me, if you know my name, if you just punch it into Google and do RolandClee policing, you'll find me easily that way also.

Travis Yates: 41:17

Well, Roland Clee, I can't thank you enough. You are dramatically changing the profession for a better. I wanna challenge everybody listening to this to go connect with Roland. Read what he writes. It will challenge you. It will make you better as a police officer, a person and a leader. Roland, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Travis, and if you've been listening, thank you for doing that. I appreciate you. And just remember lead on and stay courageous.

Intro/Outro: 41:47

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