Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates
Courageous Leadership with Dr. Travis Yates Podcast examines what it means to be a Courageous Police Leader. Join us weekly as the concepts of Courageous Leadership are detailed along with interviews with influencers that are committed to leading with courage. You can find out more about Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates at: www.TravisYates.org
Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates
Corruption Exposed: The Truth Behind Consent Decrees
A deep dive into the often-ignored repercussions of federal consent decrees on local law enforcement agencies. We explore the historical context, emerging trends, and an unparalleled response from the Phoenix Police Department to recent DOJ investigations.
• Overview of federal consent decrees and their intent
• Discussion on cities that have undergone consent decrees and their resulting challenges
• Focus on Phoenix Police Department's response and transparency initiative
• Analysis of misleading reports from the DOJ regarding police practices
• Examination of metrics showing the impact of federal oversight on community safety
• Call for accountability and an informed discourse on policing reforms
Article: Phoenix Rising or Falling?
Phoenix PD Website Discussed In Podcast
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Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.
Travis Yates:Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today and today's show is going to be a little different. It's been quite a long time since I've sort of given you an update of kind of what's gone behind the scenes and some of the work that we are doing. And if you've paid attention to the show and many of you are, and I'm so thankful for that I can tell by the data that we have regular listeners and you're sending to other people and the show has been building and building a billion In fact we're three X of listeners compared to where we were when we began just a few years ago, and I'm very thankful for that. But if you kind of pay attention to it, you've seen that we have spoken about federal consent decrees quite a bit. We've interviewed Sean Willoughby with Albuquerque, who's they're currently under a consent decree. We've interviewed Daryl Kripling with Phoenix, who endured a investigation by the DOJ and a potential consent decree. We interviewed Bob Scales, who's really sort of the master at the details behind this. He was involved in Seattle's consent decree when it began and he sort of was behind the scenes as an attorney and saw what was going on and you've seen us mention this and I've written a handful of articles on this. If you follow us over there and I hope you do go to TravisShadesorg, go to articles you can subscribe to those weekly articles.
Travis Yates:Something has never set right with me on this issue. Well, first thing that doesn't set right with me is nobody's hardly talking about it and it's certainly strange. And just to give you a quick summary, the 1994 crime bill gave the Attorney General of the United States the authority to investigate local police departments for civil rights violations. I think that sounds like it's needed, right. We'd want to avoid violating civil rights and we need to hold law enforcement accountable to that. But they gave that authority to the civil rights division of the DLJ and so for the last 30 years they have been going into police departments, launching investigations and then sort of forcing day agencies into a consent decree, which is the federal government running the police department through a consent decree monitor. It's a little more complicated than that and that's one of the issues is it takes a long time to bring people up to speed. But one of the things that I've noticed that never sat right with me is the total destruction that occurs in cities after they do this. I mean, this is a method designed to make police departments better, and when you look at the data and the metrics after the federal government runs a local police department, things get much worse. I mean, I could list off the cities under consent decrees and you're never going to go on vacation there Chicago, portland, seattle, new Orleans, go on and on. But just look at some of the metrics. This is before and after the federal government took over and they're still involved in these cities.
Travis Yates:By the way, new Orleans their crime rate went up 44%. Their violent crime rate went up 97%. Their budget implode 83%. Their staffing went down 36%. Seattle their violent crime rate went up 53%. Their budget went up 43%. Their part one crimes went up 33%. Their staffing's down 16%. Albuquerque their violent crime rate went up 80%. Their budget went up 38%. Their staffing is down 11%, and really every city mirrors this. Violent crime spikes, budgets implode, staffing, staffing gets reduced, and this is in every city.
Travis Yates:This isn't, this isn't some anomaly, and so it's always been strange to me that this has been happening for 30 years and nobody's talking about it. You won't hear this from major city chiefs. You don't hear this from the fop. You don't hear this from the icp. You don't hear some perf. You don't hear this from anybody, nobodyacp. You don't hear this from PERF. You don't hear this from anybody. Nobody's talking about it, which is very disturbing.
Travis Yates:In fact, I'm in the leadership space. There's a handful of people that kind of do that in law enforcement. They write or they speak or they teach. None of them speak about it. Right, and I guess in a sense I understand that it's not a controversial topic because what I'm saying is true. But people see that as a controversial topic, and I have been.
Travis Yates:Actually, I was removed from a stage in January of last year because there was a DOJ member in the room Didn't like what I said about consent decrees, even though it was true. I was canceled from a conference in Arizona, don't? They didn't give me the reason why, but it just happened to be at the same time. I was speaking about Phoenix consent decree and a few other things have happened along the way, and so I guess if you're in this space and you're trying to build a business, you wouldn't speak about this. But how do you not if you truly believe in leadership? And so I just thought the truth matters and so I've been speaking about it, but there's so much we don't know.
Travis Yates:I mean, I just told you the metrics, right, cities get worse, and I didn't really know what was going on in the city while the deal came, but I just know what happens after they come, that things get much worse. They've spent $250 million, in fact. I did the math the other day and over the course of 30 years, local cities have spent over a billion dollars to have federal oversight and the federal monitor alone, which is usually a lawyer that the federal judge puts over the department. I mean they're making anywhere from $400,000 to a million dollars a year To do what. I mean the whole thing seems kind of crazy. By the way, those organizations I mentioned earlier. Nothing against them other than the fact they're being quiet. Guess who gives them money as well? That's right, the DLJ. So the whole thing sounds very odd. In fact, if you would tell a civilian this, they may not even believe it.
Travis Yates:But Phoenix gave us all a gift, and that's what I wanted to talk to you about. The DLJ began investigating Phoenix well over three years ago. In fact, it ended up being the longest investigation by the DLJ when it comes to civil rights violations and they go to the city council several months ago and they said we've completed our investigation, what we found was really bad and so we need you to agree to a consent decree. Now I have a problem with that because if you found evidence of civil rights violations and you want to interject in a local police department from a federal government standpoint, well, go to court and prove it in court. Only one department in 30 years has taken the DLJ to court and they lost the DLJ lost. So if the evidence is that strong, it should be fairly easy to prove in court.
Travis Yates:But the dlj sort of uses the media and they use this pressure tactic and they sort of make these cities believe that if you just sort of sign off of this consent decree that you know we'll start making your department better. And this, this, it's just it's. It's insane because once these departments sign up with it, they can't get out of it. Ask new orleans, ask Seattle, you know, ask all these agencies that have been consent decrees for 10, 20, 25 years. They can't get out of it. It's just draining their budget and destroying their cities.
Travis Yates:Well, phoenix, I guess they were aware of the history of this and the history is what I just told you, what it does to cities, and Phoenix, quite frankly, can't really afford to get more violent crime. They so they asked the DLJ. When the DLJ said this hey, before we sign our department over to the federal government which is what a consent decree is we'd like to see your evidence, we'd like to see your report. By the way, you don't know who does these reports. You don't know who investigated it. You don't know anything about it. They just they come out with this vague executive summary. You can Google consent decree executive summary DLJ executive summary police department. You'll Google consent decree executive summary DLJ executive summary police department. You'll see these reports and they're all written very, very similarly. They're very, very vague. Well, they ask a simple question Before we sign over on average, probably $10 million a year, by the way, phoenix has already spent $10 million just on the investigation Once they sign up for consent decree. On average, for a city that size, it's about $10 million a year, with no end date, so to speak. So they asked this common sense question we'd like to see the investigation? And the DLJ said no, which is very strange, right? If they had evidence, why would they not want to show it to the political leaders in that city, and so there was enough pressure, I think, on the council, because the citizens have become aware of kind of what this has done in other cities where they sort of said they kind of hit the brakes, we're not going to, we're not going to simply agree to this.
Travis Yates:The DLJ came out with an executive summary outlining their investigation. Keep in mind, this isn't the details of it, it's almost it's a vague summary. They listed 134 incidents over the course of six years where the Phoenix Police Department violated the rights of citizens, and that in itself is strange, because the Phoenix Police Department responds to about two million calls a year. During that time frame they used force well over 5,000 times, and so just the few incidents they listed is what the DOJ has to prove in court is a pattern and practice civil rights violations, not a one off, not a few off, but has to be a pattern and practice which, when you sort of do the math in Phoenix, they literally listed about point zero, zero, zero, two, two percent of their activity was supposedly civil rights violations. So that was awful strange. But when you read this executive summary report, it makes the Phoenix Police Department look like the worst department in the country, which is what most of them do, and it's really designed to put pressure on the city to just agree with the DLJ.
Travis Yates:Well, my suspicions took the best of me, and so I was paying attention to this, and the city of Phoenix did something that I've never seen anybody do. In fact, it's what would happen if it went to court is as phoenix took, and they identified 112 of the 134 incidents. So they they looked at these vague summaries and they were able to pinpoint the exact incident and they put a public website up that listed the what the doj said. And then, right next to that, they put up they didn't have any editorial or any narrative, they just put up the body camera footage, the police reports and the administrative documents and they put them side by side. This is a public website. I'll I'll send the link to you, and they did this for transparency, to show the public. But you know it's it's a huge website, lots of data.
Travis Yates:Nobody in Phoenix media paid attention to it. Nobody really has paid much attention to it, but I saw this last summer and, heck, I had some free time, so I decided you know what Now? I've been concerned about this issue for quite some time. I can now kind of look behind the curtain and see whether this is accurate or not, because that's important right. If you're going to accuse anybody of violating civil rights violations, you would expect it to be accurate. And so I spent the summer for the most part all summer going through every single incident. I watched every body camera, I read every report and I went through it. What I found is nothing short of corruption at the highest level. In fact, I almost feel dirty that I know it because nobody else is talking about it, it's just me out here talking about it.
Travis Yates:It's very disturbing what I found, and I'm coming out with a report in the coming weeks and I wanted you to hear it first here. So the report's not out yet. It's just shy of 300 pages and I can't really cover all of it here. It's so disturbing and so wild and crazy, but I'll certainly pass it along to you when I get it. I would encourage you to follow my articles TravisYatesorg, go up to article and then subscribe to that page and you'll get this on notification.
Travis Yates:But I wanted to give you a quick summary of what I found because it is extremely disturbing and I certainly hope that you will send this around to people and make people aware of it, because this cannot continue. What's going on? First off, you see the destruction that's made in these other cities and right now, with President Trump, they've pulled back these investigations. But they did that the first term during President Trump, and what happened after that? They come right back. Well, that's not going to be good enough for me. This corruption is so in-depth and so egregious. This has to go away.
Travis Yates:I'm not saying we not hold agencies accountable for civil rights violations, but in its current form it can't continue like this. It is horrific what I found. I'm going to tell you exactly what I found. I'm going to cut right to it. I found the DOJ misled or lied 97% of the time. There were only four cases out of 134 where what the DOJ said actually matched up to the videos and the reports. And how did they do this? I'll give you the details on it. So an excessive force. The DOJ listed 36 incidents, thirty six that said they violated civil rights. No-transcript. All of those cases. They misled and lied Every one of them. So, out of the 36, none of them were accurate, and I'll give you the examples in a minute.
Travis Yates:When the DOJ tried to say that the Phoenix Police Department discriminated when they enforced the law, they listed 10 incidents. This is out of 2 million arrests. By the way, nine of the 10 were factually inaccurate. When the DOJ said that the Phoenix Police Department discriminated in response to people with behavioral health issues, they listed 10 incidents. By the way, this is out of 64,464 mental health calls and over 41,000 mental health transports. They listed 10 incidents. Nine of the 10 were factually inaccurate. The DOJ said that the Phoenix Police Department did not modify their practices when they encountered juveniles. They listed three incidents. By the way, the Phoenix Police Department responded arrested. They arrested 13,513 juveniles and they responded to over 80,000 juvenile-related calls. They listed three incidents. All of those were factually inaccurate. The DOJ listed 17 incidents that said the Phoenix Police were not held accountable by supervision or training. Okay, all six out of the 17,. Just one was accurate.
Travis Yates:And when I say not accurate, they did things. I'll give you an example of this. So if you wanted to say a police department was violating people's constitutional rights, the way you do that is, you don't give the details. So they either omitted information, they misled with wrong context, or they deceived, or the DOJ even added information that wasn't even present, or they misapplied case law and then many of their conclusions they form with hindsight bias.
Travis Yates:There was a specific incident where there was a guy on the top of stairs with a knife threatening officers. The officer spent, I believe, about 15 minutes trying to plead with the guy to drop the knife and finally the guy comes walking down the stairs towards him with the knife up in aggressive fashion. They end up having to kill the guy. Well, in the DOJ report they said the guy meant them no harm and the knife was always down to his side. I mean, just when you watch the video you don't even know that you're doing watching the same thing. And that was just one of so many. In fact, I filmed three or four videos on my YouTube channel. Once you can go to travisyatesorg, hit the YouTube channel and if you can't get that, you can go to YouTube and type in Travis Yates Courageous Leadership, travis Yates DLJ. You'll get them and I show you the videos and I tell you what they said. It's nothing short of insanity and I think I now know why the DLJ does everything they can to not go to court, because in court this would be laughed at. It would it would completely be laughed at. And, by the way, I'm going to say how egregious this is.
Travis Yates:The DOJ is a law enforcement agency. They lied I don't want to say lie, it's a tough term because sometimes things were out of context. They added information, but you know, essentially it's a lie by not giving the accurate details. 97% of the things they said were not accurate. What do you think would happen to a police department or a police officer if they did that in their report? They'd be in prison right now probably Right.
Travis Yates:And what I found amazing when I went through all these reports and videos is the Phoenix Police Department were amazingly accurate. They were accurate in so much detail to what the actual video showed. Meanwhile, the agency investigating them were the exact opposite. It's hard to put in words what I found. It's hard to sort of tell you how bad this was. I'm bringing this to you because I'm hoping that you have some familiarity with this and my concern is is if this was like this in Phoenix, because we only know this because the Phoenix Police Department published this website what has occurred in other cities when they didn't do this?
Travis Yates:Now, by the way, we have some anecdotal evidence. The ex-Louisville police chief on the stand was asked about the dlj summary and she said that they found multiple things that were not accurate and that's come across in louisville in the court proceedings, again when the dlj refused to answer any questions. And so if this happened in phoenix, how many places has it happened in? And I gotta got to tell you, man, the damage this has done, and I didn't mention this earlier. Out of the 15 most violent cities right now in America, nine of them are ran by the DLJ New Orleans, baltimore, philadelphia, birmingham, washington DC, milwaukee, detroit, indianapolis, louisville all ran by the DLJ under consent decrees. So they are destroying the safety of communities and, by the way, it's not just me. Roland Fryer, harvard professor researcher, did a peer-reviewed research on this and he showed that there were 900 additional murders in America based on after the fact, because consent decrees happen in cities.
Travis Yates:No one's talking about this, no one's saying anything about this. I don't think that's good enough, right? I don't think it's good enough. And so we're going to be doing more on this. If the report doesn't get the attention it should get, we're probably going to do a documentary. We're going to take this to the highest levels we can in this country to get them to look at this. It is atrocious. So I would ask you if you listen, if you made it this far. This is probably the other part of the problem, right? Is this issue could be boring to so many people, I mean, and we hear about corruption all the time and it just almost goes through one ear out the other. But this is extremely disturbing and I'm going to ask you, if you know anybody that needs to hear this, to send this to them. You can reach out to me and I'll send you a bunch of links, a bunch of articles. We've done a lot on it, but it's going to kind of culminate with this report. We're going to talk about this specifically in Phoenix and we need to shine a light on this.
Travis Yates:Wrong is wrong, whether you're the local police department or the Department of Justice. Wrong is wrong. It's wrong to put out publicly for the world to see that our department is doing all these things. And then you're not even accurate in what you're saying. I mean, they have destroyed the reputation of the Phoenix Police Department by lies and, by the way, it's not me. I would challenge you to go to this website. I'll have it in the show notes. Pick any incident you want, read what the DLJ said and go and watch the video. It would not even take anyone with law enforcement experience to see what I'm seeing. A first year criminal justice student would have come to the same conclusions. In fact, when I, when I started looking at this, I sort of thought, man, I'm probably going to go out and get some other experts to look at this Use of force experts, things like that.
Travis Yates:But it was so basic what they did. It was such a fabrication. It was pretty easy. I'll give you one quick fabrication. They made a big deal in the report that the Phoenix Police Department was picking on these homeless people. Now Phoenix, like most big cities, have a homeless issue. Businesses call in and so they make arrests on public drugs, they make arrests on trespassing, things like that, and so they made a big deal that these homeless people were being targeted by the police department. They kind of left out the fact that it was citizens calling the police department, you know, for quality of life issues, and the police department was taking action.
Travis Yates:No-transcript. Well, the DOJ doesn't get to pick and choose which laws are constitutional, unconstitutional. That would be courts, and the courts have already decided all the way to the supreme court that local, local ordinances can enforce laws like trespassing and public intoxication, and if those affect homeless people at a much higher rate, then that's. That's not an issue constitutionally. This has been ruled all the way to Supreme Court, and so they based their entire premise on this section that the local laws were unconstitutional. And they aren't unconstitutional.
Travis Yates:And if you were just a passive reader, you would go oh, that's just awful, that's just awful. It just doesn't take a rocket science to see what happened here, and so we'll be doing more on this. Man, if you made it this far, I appreciate it, and I just had to get this out there. I want to get this out to you because you've been with us and I want you. You've heard this first. We'll be doing that. We'll be putting the report out. Uh, we'll be doing articles on it, pieces of that, that, and it's done.
Travis Yates:I'm not doing it to embarrass anybody. I'm doing it because this cannot continue. I don't care whether you're ABC, police Department or DLJ. You should not be permitted to misrepresent facts the way they were, and there needs to be accountability at some level when it comes to that. So thank you for listening. I look forward to getting the report to you. I look forward to speaking more about this. I would love to talk about other issues, quite frankly, but this is a big issue and it's amazing to me how other so-called leaders aren't saying a word. I don't understand that right, right is right, wrong is wrong, and when it comes to courageous leadership, you say what's right, regardless if it's popular, regardless if you think people won't like it, you just have to. How else are we going to change things for the better in this country and in our community? So thank you for listening. I appreciate you, and just remember, lead on and stay courageous. Thank you for listening. I appreciate you. Just remember, lead on and stay courageous.
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