Dr. John G Peters

Quit looking for the magic pill. There is none. It's like management. You get management study after study after study and, oh, be the servant leader, be this leader, be that leader. Those are all good ideas. But at the end of the day, it comes down to that individual person. So let's quit looking for the magic bullet and let's study and become very, very good at what we can do because today there's more restrictions on officers.

Welcome to the Quest of Greg Podcast. Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the Left of Greg podcast. I'm Brian Marin, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. Here on the Left of Greg show, our goal is to increase your advanced critical thinking ability through a better understanding of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, you can check the episode details. If you have any questions or would like us to cover a specific topic. Please reach out to us at leftofgreg at gmail dot com. Today we are joined by author, trainer, and former police officer, Dr. John Peters. John is a highly experienced practitioner and expert witness with over 40 years of training and operational experience. We asked John to come on the show to not only talk about his experience in training, but also tell some stories about when he first met Greg back in the 1980s. During the episode, John talks about how policies and procedures have changed over his career, but that there are still things that are just as relevant today as they were when he started his career. started his career. Please don't forget to follow us on social media. You can find the links in the episode details. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends about it. Thanks for tuning in and hope you enjoy the show. Well, we'll go ahead and just jump in and get started and welcome a very special guest today, Dr. John Peters. We really appreciate you having on the show. Thanks so much for deciding or agreeing to come on here and talk to us.

Hey, quite welcome.

Yeah, And so, it's yeah. important to note, Blaine, that every once in a while in podcast world, you get a chance at your dream podcast guest because we couldn't get them. Can we stop at John T. Peters Jr. to see if he was available? We might as well start there, John. Nothing's out of bounds today. so yeah well after greg's initial shout there i'll pass it to you john to kind of tell tell our listeners a lot of them are in law enforcement or training world especially but but you know tell tell us a little bit about you know your your past and and kind of why we have you on the show and what you do do and then we'll get into kind of how you know greg i'm sure there's some some good ones in there that that our listeners would love to hear

Well, background-wise, I... I've always been interested in law enforcement since a fairly young age, and I think part of that came from my martial arts training where one of my instructors was a police chief. And after high school, I went to work for the FBI in Washington as a clerical employee. type self-defense through the FBI Recreation Association there for a period of time. And I became an active police officer in Pennsylvania, which is my native state, and I worked as a patrol officer and then a deputy sheriff and finished my undergraduate degree while working full-time and then went on to graduate school. After my initial graduate school experiences, I went with the police department in a suburb of Boston where I was a staff executive, which was the civilian equivalent of a deputy chief. I ran the administrative bureau of directive planning and research and wrote policies and procedures. From there, I went with a research firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, made up of mostly Harvard, MIT PhDs, and got a real taste for research. And on a research assignment to the West, going to California, I got to see how well California police officers were trained. and on my way back, I'll never forget it, I was on a TWA airline and I was flying over Kansas, I got the idea of starting a training business, which I did, and I was a defensive tactics institute. And in that company, we did handcuff training, we did flashlight training, unarmed self-defense training, baton training, what have you. And that's how I met Greg. I published a book on defensive tactics with flashlights. In 1982, and the Academy director at Macomb Police Academy in Michigan somehow obtained a copy of it and liked it and brought me up and I started a long association with Macomb and that's how I got to meet Greg and started a long association with him and here we are.

That's sorry, Greg, you're on mute there. For the first time in a long time, I have a different situation here. So you can explain that later. I'll blink fast. John Peter's books, listen, everybody knows no wiki and everybody has had, you know, books on tactics. The greatest thing about Dr. John G. Peter's books was that you could go to them and it was handcuffing and speed cuffing. And it was. Not only the principles, not only the how-to, but why.

And when? And when not to? And what the legal ramifications, what the medical ramifications were. So whether you were straight baton or side baton or whether you were ass baton or whether you were handcuffing or speed cuffing or flashlights using them in a variety of defensive impact tools. The idea was that John really winnowed it down to what a copper needs and what he needs to write in a report and what he needs on the stand. And John, I would argue. But even with Koga and all the other stuff that was out there in the market, Bruce Siddle, Old Side of House, your stuff was the beginning of how to write a book that's going to last a challenge for coppers. I truly believe that. Back then, Brian, I know the McComb reached out to John and said, we don't believe any of this. Come show us. And, John, that's pretty fair, right? That's

Yeah,

a fair assessment.

that's what I was told. In fact, we went out in the parking lot. outside the in-service academy building and john bruins uh the late john bruins who was the academy director there said i don't believe this stuff i'll use the word stuff and uh he said show me so put a couple people in the car drag them out of the car and he goes wow that really works i said yeah it does work and uh then i just kept coming back but I think one of the things, I wore fugitive for three years, and I really learned during those three years what worked and what didn't work. I mean, you know, who cares where the keyholes, which way they're facing? Nobody cared when you're rolling around on the ground. You just wanted to get cuffs on.

Yeah, right.

There's no demerits if you get the keyholes facing the wrong way on the street. But what you do get is to go do this another day. So I took kind of a pragmatic approach, I think, to things, and your kind words about the books really underscore what the focus of it was, to put the tools that officers were using on an everyday basis really in plain English and let them understand there are nuances and there is ramifications to everything, and there's also good stuff. So that's really the focus of our training. Well, for all those years. and and you know what i what i see it i'm sure you both have have seen it is you know you've get you know especially in law enforcement or military or whoever any type of when you got a group of folks who might do a lot of different martial arts or fighting boxing whatever it is and then they want to take that and go all right we can use some of this stuff you know in our in our job right there's certain things but there's no you direct translation that's not how it works because you know the the opponent isn't

you're the only one that has to follow rules right it's when you that's why when you watch even those UFC fighters and stuff they're both playing by a set of rules the same set of rules well that's very different than a police officer interacting with someone or or fighting with someone or someone resisting they don't get they don't have to play by any rules but you have to play by all of them so what what you see is kind of this not everything that works in in the dojo on the mat is ever going to work on the street and I think that's what everyone one now is trying to really focus on it's like well what what does work and so I'm curious is how you kind of found your way through that I mean because that's the ultimate test right there is you show up to a place and someone says I don't believe you and you're all right well I'll I'll show you and then usually after that everyone goes well damn that worked pretty pretty well so how did you kind of figure out what that was going from you know martial arts background training kind of more traditionally to how do you use this on an in a real life encounter situation situation.

That's a really good question, Brian. And I think what helped was, as I said, my jujitsu instructor was a police chief and he was retired military. He taught combatives in the army. he was a very no-nonsense guy if it didn't work he didn't use it and he kind of instilled that into us that look you can have all he called it the flowing robes you can have the flowing robe boys go all over the gym but he said you know what killed the flowing robe boys was a handgun so he said we're not looking at it from that perspective we're looking at it in close hand-to-hand combat what works what doesn't and we had to modify some of what harry taught us because harry was coming from the military and like colonel rex aplegate who wrote the book killer get killed i mean that was sort of harry's mentality so we refined some of this stuff in the field uh and i still remember one time i like swept a guy and he hit the sidewalk like a pile of bones And within a nanosecond, he was back on his feet and punched me right in the mouth. Well, experience will teach you some things, and I got taught that day that that probably wasn't going to work anymore. So you'd refine some of that, but I think a major influence in my background was when I was fortunate enough to study under Tacoboda, who invented the Cubitan. Kubota taught over in Japan. He taught at the police academy and in Japan he taught what was called Taiho Jutsu, which was police arresting arts. Now you have some organizations in the United States today that call themselves Taiho Jutsu whatever and they have a rank system and you can get a black belt in it, but traditional Taiho Jutsu there was no rank system.

When I hooked up with him, when he developed the Kubitan, and then we became business associates for a long time, and he really honed my skill set. And he could do in one or two moves what I may have been teaching five or six moves. He just streamlined it. And he said, why do that when you can do this? And, of course, he's legendary, still alive today and still teaching in Glendale, California. But he just had remarkable insights and, of course, his style of combatives, you know, anybody who came in contact with him immediately knew this was the real deal. And I think. A lot of the flashlight techniques came from original Kubotan techniques that came from original baton techniques, and it was just an application and a transfer of some of those with some modifications to other pieces of equipment, and they worked well.

Yeah, and Brian, just so you know, tech about it. And you can still go out and challenge him because he's on the mat. He's not a theorist, and he will be happy to choke you out. He was the one you hear me sometime, Brian, in class say about if your third move isn't the final move and you see me demonstrate that a lot, that all comes from Kubota because Kubota was in fact going in and winnowing stuff down to the essentials. And when John first told me about him and started showing me, John, you remember you had like some Super 8 videos just to. go along with the type of stuff that he would do during training and I was blown away and I go hey don't I know that guy from the killer elite well in addition to all of the stuff that he does on the mat he's also staged some of the best fights and been in some of the best films but he's always been the most humble guy and is you are a stick kubitan tie-in was perfect during that time for police work because the early days of police work were take the kill light light which was an aluminum tube with a headlight from a car on it and just whack whack them all your way out of every situation and you had to live through that too john you saw those you know early days where more was more rather than you know any duty to intervene or you know using less energy to get your mission accomplished

Right. I think before Graham versus Connor. came about. It was a little bit of the Wild West. You mentioned the Kell Light. That was developed by Don Keller when he was a deputy sheriff at LA County Sheriff's Department. And Don and I have become very good friends over the years. In fact, Keller predicted in the early 1980s that heavy-duty flashlights would soon become dinosaurs and many flashlights would take over. And what's interesting in talking with Don, I went to him and said, why don't you make a small flashlight that looks like a Cubiton? So if you look at the mini Maglite, the barrel and length of the light is the same as a Cubiton. And then Tony Maglica, who founded Mag Instrument, he came up with the idea, let's just reduce the Maglite and put that head on it. in a very smaller version and that was the start of the mag light which made it very or not the start of the mag light but started the mini mag light and we all know where that went and all the variations today from a number of companies but the techniques that applied to the kubotan also applied to the mini mag light and

Exactly.

it just made it so easy to use

Well, and even for searching. I mean, Brian, I apologize for keep cutting in, but Brian, you've got to understand what it was like being around John Peters. So here we are in the age of crack cocaine causing people to kill for an eight ball jacket on the street. It was just a different time. And so John comes in and says, why are you searching with your hands when you can search with this flashlight and this coubaton? And so as you ran it over the outer garments, it would click or make a noise and you knew there was something in the pocket. Okay, those things weren't being taught anywhere. I remember John coming into McComb and everybody had the different holster because it's a regional training institute and John wearing a one-piece yellow jumpsuit. So there would be no mistake about who was teaching the class that day, went from line, the first student in line all the way to the 35th. And remember, there's some that were basic training, some were 10 or 12-year vets and some were supervisors. And he went up and he grabbed the holster as he didn't like and he ripped them off. off and handed the holster with the gun back to the back to the person that was in the training and and i i sat there my chin hit the floor and i said i'm going to follow this guy because clearly he knows what he's talking about because john you remember that there were no security holsters uh there were there were swivel holsters and and pancake and the the reveal where you press the button and the holster opened like a clam shell brian to hand you your gun Yeah. tell him tell him you know that that's amazing to me

Yeah, and it was really interesting. We had a firearm disarming and handgun retention program, and we did almost exclusively instructor-level programs. So we trained people to go back to their agencies and conduct training. So what we taught them had to be right, because not only was the person in front of you relying on the information to be accurate, but then the people back home. We're relying on the guy who we just trained to have it right. So it's kind of like going down a big pyramid and suddenly, you know, we may have trained 10,000 people, but they went out and trained a couple hundred thousand people. So what Greg just said, I remember. speaking at the Texas Narcotic Officers Association about that very thing. Take your coubaton or your mini flashlight, rub it over the pocket, rub it over the ankles, stick it in the pocket, lift it up. If you have a mini light, put it in, light it up. And the response we got from that a year later, many people said you saved me from getting stabbed with a reverse hypodermic needle because that was the game back then. They'd reverse hypodermic needle, stick them in their pocket, knowing the cop would just thrust his hand in there and get stabbed and who knows what would be transferred at that point. So we had stories from people around the country, literally. They'd send us letters. One guy in Wyoming said, you know, I hated to drill and have gun retention class. He said, I just was so out of shape when I went through that class. But he said, I got in a bar fight a couple of weeks ago and I remember you saying, just hold on, you know, pull it up, pull it up, hang on, don't give up. And he said, I saved my life. basically based on

Right.

that technique and what we instilled in people and I don't care who you are money can't buy that and it just works and and that's what we're we're still out there teaching today and we're still out doing things to help people survive this horrific cultural demise around not only U.S., but the globe and how they're attacking law enforcement today.

so you know you're you're you kind of brought up a number of a number of issues there and a number of things that i see and like greg even brought it up with the whole you know the the holster example of you ripping off a holster it's like okay well you got to know what's going to look like in in realistic um situations so then what do we do as humans right we all right well let's engineer something better let's get the better light let's get the better holster let's get this better which is all necessary and I see it as kind of a comment that you're going to do that you're in a profession of people that care about what they do and are going to put some time and effort into it and think always think of hey there might be maybe there's a better way to do this but we often fall back on you know there's a better tool or a better fighting system or a better weapon or a better holster you know what is this thing and and so you know I'm kind of what i'm interested especially with you and greg on the call but but you know with you outside experience i mean our listeners are always used to hearing me and greg so that's why we bring other people Oh, on the show yeah. right um but the idea is you know what what over over that time that you've seen because things progress tactics get better gear gets better weapons get better technology gets better but what are the things that like still you see that

aren't getting better or maybe now need to be addressed that didn't need to be addressed 20, 30 years ago. Is there a change in that? Because you can see that over time with the different generations of people kind of coming up and who you're training, you know, what are those things that have changed or what are the things that are still relevant?

Well, there's a number of things. I think the thing that has changed the most are criminal prosecutions of law enforcement officers. You know, 20, 30 years ago, you heard maybe one or two of those incidents in a couple of years, you know, a cop would go rogue and go rob a bank. I mean, there were things like that. Or maybe he would take a woman who broke down along the road and take her off in a dark area and have his way with her. And, you know, people would get prosecuted over that. But today, I think the. vulnerability of the just regular patrol officer on the street to be criminally prosecuted is extremely high. Having said that, I think it's incumbent upon all officers to quit looking for the magic pill. There is none. It's like management. get management study after study after study and oh be the servant leader be this leader be that leader those are all good ideas but at the end of the day it comes down to that individual person so let's quit looking for the magic bullet and let's study and become very very good at what we can do because today there's more restrictions on officers on on their uses of force and what they can do but i'm finding over the years that training has been diluted in many many places we're hiring officers today that aren't always looking for a career some are just looking for a job and if they Don't like it, they'll move on to something else, where when I got into the business and when Greg got in the business, we were there because we wanted to serve the community and really make a difference. And as advertising oriented as that sounds, that's really what we were doing.

Right.

And you had to perform. And one of the things that I think today is people are looking for the easy way. Oh, give me the taser. You know, I can use a taser. A guy gives me a finger, bang, I shot him. Wait a minute. What happened to your personal physical skills?

Yeah.

And back in the day, we would work people on the mat and tire them out intentionally.

And we found that when they were so tired, they'd get back up and they had to rely on technique because their strength was pretty much, you know, weakened at that point. And when you have diluted strength, you have to rely on technique and it's that technique. And we put people on the ground. We handcuffed them. You go to a handcuff class, you get handcuffed hundreds of times over three days. Today, when I teach basic level handcuffing, you know, they're complaining after an hour and a half, oh, my wrist is sore, oh, this, oh, that. I go, look, you know, you got to undergo some of this because you got to know what's going on here. And I think over time, police chiefs. Asked trainers, hey, I've got all these injury reports after your training program. People are taking time off. They're filing injury claims. What are you doing down there? So HR put pressure on the police chief who put pressure on the instructors and said, hey, back it off, soften it, excuse me. And people did that. As they did that, a lot of the physical skills that we were accustomed to are not what they once were. And we're bringing people in today many times who've never been in a fight, who have never been punched in the mouth. And I go back to when I was in high school or even elementary school. If you have a problem with one of your friends. You do it sit out at recess time or

Right.

lunchtime and you lock home friends or

You're

you aren't

done.

today.

Right.

If you yell at somebody, you yell at a kid, that's domestic violence or domestic terrorism or it's a terroristic act or it's some law. So kids today, which isn't all bad. You know, they may be more respectful, but the problem is the first time you get punched in the nose should not be during a traffic stop because you're just going to lose them. I mean, the best laid plans just evaporate when you get into a fight. And at that point, you do what you have to do to survive. And every cop knows he or she really needs to win because the alternative is not good.

And, Brian, I have to bring up again what John is talking about in a number of ways is so important to this generation. So de-escalation, John is the one that invented and trademarked speed coming. So John did that.

because flash to bang the less time that you've got wrestling around with somebody and they're restrained because it is not only a temporary restraint the less likely you're going to cause an injury to that person that's so logical and makes so much sense we're not doing that anymore but that's because he had that uh discovery background that let's do with study let's test these things right and and i'll throw one at you john uh i don't know if i can say the agency so I won't say Wayne Oakland Macomb but the idea of doing the pursuit driving out at Selfridge if you remember those days and precision driving pursuit driving emergency vehicle operation so I was an instructor out there and we got the call back to warn and they said what are you guys doing out there and it's like well we're doing these evasive operations so it lessens the you know damage to the public and to private property and the public property and who will save lives. And they said, yeah, but you're going through tires and tire treads so fast and we have to change them. So we're going to disallow that program. Because those tires are not budgeted for being changed until next year and the amortization, we're going to pull that. So when people, Brian, ask you, why do I only get my driver's training as a copper in the academy and only then again when I get in an accident? Because an administrator is looking at the bottom line. And so, you know, the handcuff injury, I am not, John also pioneered. use of oleoresin capsicum and chemical aerosol sprays and manners to utilize them to, again, reduce risk, to mitigate the risk. And the idea was the first time that I took all of John's PTI, my instructor's certification, and got everybody from the administration in the same room, the deputy chief stood up when he knew what the display meant and what the 15 minutes that I had was going to be about, and he said, to quote him, fucking bug spray and turned and walked out of the room and that was the end. I didn't put on my presentation. We didn't get that. And then guess what, Brian? Two years later, the lawsuits mounted up to where now they came in and said, OK, hey, let's bring that program back. Why is it, John? Why is it we're our own worst enemies? Why is it that we have to leave blood on the mat before we learn something as coppers?

Well, I think historically policing has been reactive. There's a myth that we're proactive. Everybody talks about, oh, let's be proactive. Well, in some situations you can be that, but you're really reactive. And a big piece of this, I think, is it's not their money. You know, if a company had an employee. who was poorly trained, and that employee got sued, and the employer got sued under the doctrine of responding superior, and there was a judgment. Well, that company now has to sell X number of widgets to make up for that judgment.

In government, you don't sell anything. You get the money from the public through the budget process,

right

and it's not my money.

it it that's a that's a huge part of it and also um you know just as since it's A lot of organizations don't understand that training is an investment, not an expense, right? Especially this.

Right.

I mean, so we see that in the private sector, but now what's happening in the private sector is some of those companies, they'll pay top dollar to have all kinds of folks come in and talk and try to train their employees. And even if it's junk, they'll do it just because they think you can get them an advantage, right? So they're saying, okay, that's an investment. Whereas this, especially with its tax dollars, it's like, it's all about efficiency and we got to. We got to it's got to fit into the spreadsheet. And, you know, my opinion has always been like good training is rarely ever efficient. It's not an efficient process. It takes time. And especially when you get a group of individuals meaning we got these three things we're going to learn today well maybe i suck at the first one but i'm good at the next two but you're really good at the first one but you suck at those two like it's just there there's there's different uh skill levels involved in all this but everyone boils it down to it i was actually on a government program too which will remain remain nameless but but as one of the instructors and everything came down to hours time it was like well no you will spend this many hours on this skill set it's like well that that doesn't work like it this group only needs 30 minutes they don't need an hour and a half on that but that group over there they need three hours it's not gonna we're not gonna be done in 30 minutes but if it doesn't fit within that mold then it becomes you know people don't want to do it you get that lazy it's like hey just just check the box hit what they're doing and then you don't see the effect of that until you're in that situation and it's too late i mean then it's it's you're absolutely too late if you didn't invest up front you're not going to become that you know superman or superwoman in that moment you're you're just not and so i is that has always sort of uh bothered me and what I look at it as is and maybe you can speak to this over your career um as it's become so procedural that yes we're hitting every single line item in there but is there actually knowledge and skill transfer in that in that skill set that they learned or did we just check that box because it's so mandated and so procedural on how we do these things that it becomes just a check the checklist but you know when you're walking up to a situation you can't just say oh in this situation i use option a subset b it's like no no no it can be it's more complex than i don't know if you if you see that as well right

Yeah, I call it the checklist syndrome, where it's just a checkmark in a box. And you go to a lot of institutions today and they have. developed a program that's really kind of become a canned program because they keep using it year after year after year and the focus is on the check mark in the box where the focus should be on is the person competent competency is something that isn't really being measured very well even though some places say oh we give them a test well How do you know if they passed? Well, I looked at them. Well, no, that's not good enough. Give me a quantitative number. How did that person pass? And I'm involved in a lesson plan study right now where we're looking at hundreds of lesson plans and public safety from all over the United States. And surprisingly, over 90% of them have no competency measurement. It's just, here's the information. So we may have information transfer.

Mm-hmm.

And I say we may because some people still may not get Yep. it. But if it's a skill-based set and you have to have skill, how are we testing to know the person is competent on the other end? And that's what's lacking in a lot of these situations. We do it in firearms. And as Greg said, we do it in driving. But do we do it in other areas as well? For example, I went through two master instructor schools with a taser. Two. I've never drawn a taser from a holster, neither one of them. Because the focus was on. Can you shoot and hit the aluminum foil? Well, now wait a minute. We have to get it out. And there's been about 21 or 22 weapon confusion cases in North

Oh, yeah?

America. And I'm convinced it all goes back to training.

Yep.

And if the training were what the training should be, you would draw that weapon. from your whole center while wearing your duty rate. I was fortunate enough to be one of the experts in one of the lawsuits against Johannes Messerly out in California. I wasn't involved in the criminal. This was a civil matter. But I remember talking to the Academy instructor and I said, if I went through your academy from day one, how many times would I draw a handgun? until he graduated and he told me probably if you did everything we told you to do about 5,000 times I said what about a taser he said maybe once so again I think trainers And administrators need to take a step back and say, OK, it looks good on paper, but so did the F-111.

Yeah, yeah,

Will this fly?

yeah.

And if it flies, how do we measure that it's effective? Now, today, there's a big emphasis on de-escalation. I think that's great. I think it's the wrong word, but it's in the lexicon of law enforcement, so I think, you know, we're stuck with it. Yeah, we can talk. We can try to deescalate. But we have to take it to the level where maybe. My hitting the guy with a baton or even shooting him with a handgun is a form of de-escalation.

Right.

And I don't see it going out that far.

People look at it as this is the de-escalation tactic and it's like, no, no, no, that's a that's an outcome. And so if the outcome is to de-escalate the situation as a whole, not just this person or thing, it's what would we do? So like you said, in some of those cases, you know, there was a recent one and I know he was cleared. woman was pointing gun firing at all the people in the intersection and pointing at herself and pointing at people and the police officer first one showing up the scene in his vehicle just boom knocked her over hit her with his vehicle and then got out and arrested her because it's like people like well wait jd hitters like well she was an immediate threat to every single person she was just that like absolutely but but we don't look at that as like well can you talk to her it's like no not at that point you can't But you're both talking about something that's been lost in law enforcement for a good long time and nobody's searching for it. And that's what worries me. John, you said it when you said information transfer. Information transfer isn't training. That's not skills transfer. Brian and I were in a room and we were talking to some high monkey mucks and again you know not an attribution because we never worked there again but the first three questions out of my mouth when they got done talking were can you explain title 42 section 1983 of the U.S. code crickets then I said do you understand the definition of deliberate indifference crickets i said okay was your officer acting under color of law same thing and we got these blank stares and i was like look we can't help you we can't help you if you're not going to help yourself you have to understand like like for example you don't want somebody uh mistaken their gun for the taser don't put a holster on their gun belt and make it look like a gun i mean there's such simple rules that apply but what happens is we're trying first of all to like even with the the i believe with some of the virtual and some of the augmented reality, we're trying to match a situation that may never occur again rather than improve our critical thinking. And we're also trying to accelerate everything so it's at the X. We're on the bubble. We're in the moment rather than saying, what were all of these pre-event indications that could have helped us formulate a plan to mitigate it or avoid it altogether? Am I way off on that, John, or am I somewhere in agreement? We're in a group.

No, I think that's absolutely accurate. I mean, we're finding somewhat of a golf, I think, today between the people, the boots on the street and sometimes the administrators, not in every case, but in many cases. And I know when I went from the street, I used to say when I was on the street, don't those guys upstairs know what it's like to be out here anymore? And then I got upstairs and I said, don't those guys know what my ability is?

Yeah, yeah.

Right. There has to be some common ground there. I mean, like a Venn diagram, you have force, you have administration, you have budget, but there's a lot of things that will overlap. So, you know, when you're talking to administrators sometimes, Greg, and they're worried about liability, oh my gosh, you know, this guy just punched this guy. Well, okay, what would you have done? I mean, what's the option? I mean, you had to subdue him, hit him with a car. That was a great idea. Is it a deadly weapon? Absolutely. Did it kill him? No.

Right. And that proves that the use of force continuum was valid. The idea of you get the officer choices, the officer uses choices that are within those realms, you know, Brian, because you had you had rule of law and you had escalation of force in the military as well. But it's different in combat than it is on the street, you know. Completely, completely, completely different. Actually, there's far more differences than there are similarities in that I case. agree. and and uh but you know you're or and one of the one of the things you know we you both brought up and what we're talking about too where you see a lot of errors in training is that measurement and assessment because it's there it's the measurement assessment is focused on the training it's like no no how we have to measure and assess how this works on the street in real life that's the that's the true test i mean your thing can work great in this sterile environment that doesn't mean anything like i mean it has to be in the app the application in a realistic setting like Yeah. that's the only way you can measure it effectively and that's the big thing too with people learn especially when they're doing martial arts or some type of fighting you're like you bring something up and then you get punched in the face and you go that's never doing that again that didn't work right we've all had those moments but but yet we still sort of train to that manner of then you do this and then this happens and then it all ends it's like well no it's it's got a it's more complex with that we don't We don't bring that sort of complexity sometimes into our training events.

Well, I think a big problem today is there's not a clear distinction made or taught to officers between what is a force option versus what is a force standard.

That's

You

great.

can operate under the Fourth Amendment. But you may have 15 different force options. You have verbal, you might have kicking, you might have a baton, you may have a taser, you may have pepper spray. Who knows what your options are? Those options are all on a menu. I always liken it to going into a restaurant and they hand you a menu. Everything on that menu is a force option.

Right.

But those options have to be... used within the guidelines of the four standards. And I'm finding a lot of officers don't know the difference. They don't understand the fourth standard.

Yeah, yeah

And that goes back, I think, to the trainers. And I think today we have trainers who try to do their best. But at times, egos and personalities get in the way, or somebody says, oh, I'm going to put my name on that. Well, the minute you put your name on it, you're not going to change because if Greg says, here's a better way to do it, now can't be the XYZ plus Greg method. So you build in barriers right away. I think trainers today, first of all, have to go to training a lot.

Yeah.

You can't go to a 40-hour school and come out and say, okay, I know everything. It doesn't work. You've got to go to training all the time. I just updated my training resume yesterday, and I've... Already over 200 hours of training this year that I went to. Not that I gave, but that I went to.

Right.

You've got to stay current in the field, and the field today is not just thump and bump. If you're teaching defensive tactics, you've got to know what the legal side of this is, too. You've got to know what some of the legal outcomes are. And just going over a case. You know, tongue in your students very quickly, well, you know, here's Armstrong D. Pinehurst, and it only applies to the taser. Now you need to go back and read the case that applies to all defensive tactics. It doesn't apply just to a taser. But you've got to get educated before you can educate the other people that you're training. And I think there's a knowledge transfer. that's not existing today if greg's at the academy and he's going to get you know sent out to patrol or promoted a detective and and i'm coming in to take his place he leaves on friday i come in monday well what should have happened he's leaving on friday but i should have come in two months ago to train with him to understand what he's doing what he's saying To get that transfer because I may come in Monday morning and say something totally different based on something I was told that's inaccurate. So I think it's incumbent upon all trainers today to stay up in that field, whatever your field is, and know the good, know the bad, and know the ugly.

Yeah,

They

yeah.

weren't poor on the ugly. They'd be well and good.

And the scar tissue is what makes you stronger. And that's where resilience truly comes from. John, I'm with you on this. And this is my, and here again, I'm going to piss off the industry, but this is what my problem is with AI when it comes to shoot, don't shoot and the fat system and some of the other things. Okay. What you've done is you've taken a computer that can augment and support and make. training better from a human trainer to a human officer on the street and what you've done is you relegated it's going to determine what the standard is and what the decision points are and everything else and the problem with that is that's not how reality works all those branches all those uh taste smells sight sounds all those idiosyncratic things that occur as you're pulling up or as you're walking up or as you're hearing the call from dispatch That those matter. And when we say those matter and we testify in court that they matter and we write them in our report, but then we go into the trainer and guess what's absent? We've got a folding chair that says cover and concealment. And we don't equate the radio call and we don't have the human emotion content. And when we do, they say it's more important than having a legless vet in there spraying blood and having your weapon have recoil than it is making it hard but solvable and saying. And what are you thinking right now? As an FTO, John, I would say that you took a knee more and said, what are you thinking right now? Tell me about the process that you're thinking than you did boot it door and ram a car. Or am I way off again?

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think we're not training people and we're not educating them. And there's a difference between education and training. It's very, very different.

Right.

I think the educational piece were lacking many times. You know, as you said, what were you thinking? We're talking critical thinking here. We're

Yeah,

trying to get behind the wall and ask the officer, hey, what was going through your mind at this point? Because what you did, I wouldn't have picked in a thousand years.

exactly.

But if that officer can explain it. and justify it why not on the other hand if you say to somebody what made you do that well i don't know what else to do what did

Yeah.

you think about this this and this no and again we can take a lot of these labeled shortcomings and we can take it right back to You've got this many hours to teach somebody and make them proficient. Right.

And exactly. Here's the problem. We still have states in this country where you can be a sworn police officer for up to a year before you go to the academy.

Unbelievable.

Barbers. Barbers across the country. It'll vary a little bit by state.

Yeah.

To be a barber, you're going to have to complete about 1,500 hours of training. The listener right now, ask yourself, how many hours of training in my state am I required to do to graduate from the academy? 450? 600? I bet it's not 1500. Right. So we want to pretend that we're this really highly skilled, well-educated profession when we're really not. You've got to couple the training with the experience. Right. That's where your FTO comes in, and the FTO has to be good, and the FTO really has to take a position. Look, I'm not here to get invited to everybody's birthday party. Exactly. I got to do what I got to do, and look, there's no nice way to terminate anybody. There just isn't. But you know, sometimes you have to do it. Right? Right. And you're doing everybody a favor, including the person you're terminating, because that person may not have the skill sets. And if you don't terminate them, they could get killed. Another officer could get killed. And we don't want that to happen either. That reduction in risk is equally balanced and weighted as the intervention of training on the front end. Yet we're not looking at that when we come to budget talks and we sit around the table with the town manager. You know how much we're going to pay out. And I work for agencies that did. I work for agencies that said, if you come in and you make a use of force complaint against us, we have $6,000 to $10,000 that you can adjudicate at any point. at any point during the conversation just to make this human go away here's the here's the letter make them sign it and pay them off and we'll have an account now you go to that same agency and say it's going to be six to eight thousand dollars a day to train your agency on whatever and they don't want to hear it or or what's the limit on training brian and i uh go back and forth i'll send him a text on the training where it's in three hours become a uh use of force senior instructor And you can go back to your agency and teach something. Online. Okay, I wouldn't understand any of the case law in that time if I was allowed to read it, you know, pre-read it before the course. So why are we dumbing it down? Why are we saying it's the single most important thing right now? And I agree with you with the terms de-escalation, but that's the lexicon. De-escalation and duty to intervene are being thrown around. And most of the folks.

One don't know what they mean and two don't know how to fix it. They don't know how to get ahead of it. And education, first of all, I mean, Jeff Steffel wrote some great documents back in Michigan during the time that I knew John in Michigan. And Brian, Jeff Steffel, what he did is he took the most important case laws that were coming down in Michigan and saying, this is what it means to you on the street. This is what you can do. This is what you can't do. This is what you need. We don't have that anymore. We don't have that mentor mentee relation. And FTO is getting through that. that big ass book and making sure that you've discussed all the topics and I just don't think that's the same and and and John the emphasis on understanding the medical implications of the move that you use that's what's uh hurting people as well because they're saying that's a chokehold right it's not a chokehold or this is an armbar well it's not an armbar and so what happens is you got less than experts purporting themselves to be subject matter experts in a highly highly technical and ever-changing job we don't do that anywhere we don't do that with LASIK surgery we don't do that with bus routes but when it comes to police work we'll allow it and it's just it's maddening that's why like like Brian and I folks that are listening Brian and I got to talk to John last week and it was like old home week it was amazing how many things that we've seen and how many important cases have gone by but but john you have to agree that the benchmark rulings in most of those casings are as valid today as when they were we when they were written so many years ago and and those people knew what they're doing and most coppers on the street don't know

Yeah, I think there's a... The focus on efficiency, let's get them through.

Mm-hmm.

I think it's going to get worse. We have a personnel shortage almost universal across the country. I was just at a meeting a couple days ago and somebody said, well, what would you tell a young person today about law enforcement? I'd say run.

Yeah.

You know, what other job can you want to aspire to where you can get shot and killed, maimed for life, paralyzed, criminally prosecuted and sent to jail, civilly sued and lose your house for $50,000 a year? And even if you start at $85,000 a year. It doesn't. It's still not. Yeah, exactly. You guys both talked about this sort of reduction in risk and cost is a big part of it, but cost is always there and you're going to pay either way. I mean, when it was years ago, so these numbers are a few years old, but when I was talking to folks from Chicago who deal with the city and it was something like they budget over $50 million a year just for like police. lawsuit payouts right they that's just in budget and i think that year they had they

They went over a hundred million so they went over twice as much that as a payout and it's like well how much of that you know could a good training program investing in your officers reduce some of that well i mean what even if it's you what one percent well it's a million dollars i mean you know whatever that is you're you're getting back so the cost is is always there it's it's where we choose to to spend that money at and and if you're not doing it up front then you're going to do it in the long run right it's Yes, going to it's

yes.

going to cost you more in the long run and you brought up you know all of those issues facing people today and and how that changes in the way to look at it you know you have to almost you know be crazy to want to want to do something like that and and a lot of a lot of folks i see are you know they're they're scared right there so when we're scared we get fearful we net we're you know when we don't understand especially when we don't understand something we we naturally fear it so now it's like okay i've been in doing this you know business or i've been in this game for 30 plus years i don't want to rock the boat i'm on my way out you know i don't i don't want to do anything here here and a lot of these cities you see too especially um i think they have more power than they realize right i think they have the ability to change some of this stuff more than they think they're a lot of them just aren't working together especially between elected officials and and and the the police officers that agency but you know you're talking about especially a city you know that that the people you have working for that city that's that's who runs the city i don't care if you're a sewer worker i don't care if you're a police officer whatever your job is and it's important to the operation of everyone who lives in that city so it's like you have to if you want to take care of your city you have to take care of the people that work for the city and if they don't have that buy-in they don't feel like they're part of it you're never gonna you're never gonna feel 100 in so you're always gonna have one foot out right you're and that's just that's just how it works you have to protect yourself and your family so So are you even doing your job to its full potential sometimes just because of the attitude and the culture and the way it's talked about? It's like it's it's impossible. So there's just sort of me looking from the outside, I guess, looking at all these issues and and going, how do you. How do you cut through that? How do you navigate that, right? Where do you start? You know what I'm saying? That's my biggest thing. It's like, you know, all right, anytime I'm addressing an issue, it's like, okay, what can I control right now? What can I do that's within my span of control? And if you start there, sometimes the task is a little less daunting or at least somewhat manageable at your end. But there's all these factors. And so I'm curious as to how. How do you see as a start or a way to do something to make change or to see or

Yeah,

through it? Because, you know, it's like a pendulum swinging and got a little crazy out there and now it's swinging back the other way in some areas. But from your experience, where do you see as starting points?

I think the starting point has to be developing a culture within the organization that goes from top to bottom.

where you make training and education exciting and you want people to do that. You know, we've all, trainers are excited about whatever they're teaching. But how many times have we walked into a classroom and the guys who have 20 years in the job sitting in the back row hold up their newspaper and basically challenge you to make me put down my newspaper? Well, I can't change a knucklehead. I just can't do it. But hopefully I can educate that person and create an atmosphere where people are going, hey, man, this is great stuff. Let's go do this and get them at least interested in it because they're going to be the same people who will be first in line to complain about something.

Amen.

Well, they didn't teach us that. No, they offered that class. You sat in the back with your newspaper held up, didn't pay attention. I think that's a good start, and I take everything back to organizational culture and it goes to the leader. If the leader's not interested in developing people with critical thinking skills, if the leader's not interested in developing a culture where he holds people accountable, if the leader's not interested in creating that culture where education and training really take precedence, that's one thing the military is good at doing. Training, training, training. You get that as almost part of your DNA by the time you get out of boot camp. And they take every moment to somewhere do some type of training. It's the expectation, but in law enforcement, it's, oh, I don't want to go do that. Oh, that'll be boring. Oh, that'll be, how come he's the trainer? How come he went to, who cares how he went to training? If the guy has information or the lady has information to share, listen and try to use it. Training is out there. Training is given. But a lot of times people just blow it off and they blow it off because the culture of the organization doesn't make it important.

Yeah.

So to really answer your question, Brian, I think it goes back to the leadership of not only the agency, but of the city and often tell people if you can say if you can spend one hundred and twenty six million dollars to settle a lawsuit. Give me 10% of that,

Yeah.

and I'll trade the people for life,

Right.

right? Right. And they just laugh at you, and they go, what? Because it's not their money.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That makes so much sense. It's hard for people.

To kind of realize that that's why I kind of brought up it's like, you know, this is an investment, it's not an expense. And the issue with the, you know, the military versus sort of the law enforcement, you know, the military, that's all they do. They sit around and train for things that may or may not ever happen.

Never.

And then every once in a while, they get to go do something right. Whereas, you know, law enforcement is the exact opposite. They're out there doing something every single day and occasionally get to some training after their initial and I. I think that that just dynamic of looking at it is is is a big problem because we try to do stuff, too, you know, low calorie stuff. You're five minutes

Yep.

in the morning before you start your day that that does more for you than than sometimes going through a very intensive long course. Right. Because it's right there. It's at the front of your brain. It's something you're going to go do today. And building that in, like you said, that culture, it's and even you brought it down to price. We're the same way. It's like give us 10 percent of that. that and and you'll you'll that's all it'll take and then people go well no it's not it's like no literally for pennies on the dollar for a rounding error in some of these cases do you understand how much you could increase the effectiveness and and the response and and the type of individual you have at your organization and once you start what happens to that longitudinally over time that person now they

Right.

are taken care of now they want to stick around now you're not recruiting new people you're hiring from within you're and you're promoting from within now you're getting i mean that's what people those small investments just to change a trajectory a little bit well the beauty of changing trajectory is over time is where you really make it make back that investment and it's it's it's always hard for people to see that yeah

Yeah, but you also build trust. I mean, you're building trust not only within your agency and your personnel and with management, but you're building trust with the judges and the court system and the prisons and the community. And that's hugely important. You put a price on that, you know? Well, you're right. And I think to add to that, you need evidence-based training, evidence-based Yes. practices. This concept of best practices is just hokey. Yeah. Best practice means that what you were doing was wrong and now this is a best practice. Yeah. The problem with the best practice is tomorrow there may be a better practice. So now your best practice is obsolete again. What agencies need to do and trainers need to do is evidence-based stuff that's proven. You know, the British said it best a few years ago. They said the Americans adopt a product and then they test it. In the UK, we test it first and then if it passes, we adopt it. We kind of get it backwards over here. That's so true. And. That's so true. All of us have at one time or another drank the Kool-Aid and

Mm-hmm.

later found out it was bad Kool-Aid.

Yep.

And the only reason that happens is the person telling us didn't do his or her homework or...

Yes. didn't understand what was being told to them and they just accepted things at face value you know the one thing that that Greg talked about early in this podcast I was challenged does this stuff work yeah it works I know it works I'll take you out of the car I'll put you on the ground not a problem the training you guys do same thing look it works we can show you that it works But in a lot of places, it's just lip service.

Yeah,

Oh, yeah,

for

that'll

sure.

work fine. Yeah, that'll work fine. Oh, by the way, guys, if you see somebody using excessive force, you have a legal right to intervene. Great. Now I know I have a legal right to intervene, but I don't know what excessive force looks like.

Yeah. And then even if you did, even if it was how do I interview intervene? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to say? Who am I supposed to say it to? Like what? Tell me how to do this. I mean, that's the hardest part of it.

And the first time I do, now I'm branded a snitch.

forever right and we just we just had a whistleblower on a podcast and he said the same thing it was the right thing to do i had a moral obligation to do it and it ruined my career so how often do you think he's going to repeat that behavior and you know brian i hate platitudes but an old johnism is the not everything that can be measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured And the idea is that John made a living off of going in and being an expert witness in use of force cases and how things like, you know, excited delirium or positional restraint hypoxia, all the words that you can't use now because people think they're wrong, but they're not sure what they really mean. But John, you made your living on clearing that stuff up and being able to walk into a jury or a bench trial and say, these are the things that you need to consider. And I think that's an important facet, too. This is not stuff that you've just had in theory and went up on a shelf with your books. You're in practice all the time. You're constantly teaching, learning or on the road for defense counsel or for a prosecution. Tell us a little about that. How do you still stay relevant now this long?

Well, that's a really good question. I think it comes down to my personal belief system. I want to help people. I want to make the profession better. And there's a couple ways to do that. And one of the ways to do that is to go to training myself. Another way to do that is to write. Because when you write... You know those words are going to be around forever, so you take extra time to make sure that what you're saying is absolutely correct. And I think that's a big part of it. The third thing is take your ego and put it in a trash can because the minute you think you are better than what you are, you've closed out all potential learning, all potential input, and now you really start believing your own stuff.

Right.

And part of that is you have to acknowledge the shortcomings in the profession. I had a hard time when I first became an expert witness. A city asked me to help them out on a case and I said, well, I'd be glad to do that. And they said, we want you to be our expert. And I go, what's that mean? I had no clue. After a couple of years, the same lawyer for that city came to me and said, you need to take plaintiff cases. And I said, I don't know. I don't think that's a good idea. He goes, no, there are bad cops. And there are cops that do really stupid things. And he said, you're going to become biased and you don't want that. Well, I learned so much more about policing on

Mm-hmm.

the plaintiff's side than I ever learned on the defense side.

Mm-hmm.

For example. lack of training, bad policy, bad discipline. You look at this stuff and you go, how do people operate like this? How do you do this? So you point that out. So I think keeping an open mind and that openness has to be 360 degrees. Um, yeah, you can always refuse a case and I do, I refuse a lot of cases. Um, I refuse the case not too long ago where the defense attorney called me and sent me the file overnight, full retainer. I watched the video. I bundled it all back with the check and overnighted it back to her and said, I can't help you. Your sheriff's going to jail.

Hmm.

What do you mean? I said, he is going to jail. And he got convicted and sentenced to a penitentiary. So you have to call a friend of mine in Baltimore, a retired Baltimore internal affairs commander, calls it, you got it now, balls and strikes, and you have to call balls and strikes.

Right. Exactly.

It's that simple. And although sometimes we don't like to do it, it really has to be done. So when you evaluate a case, I don't care if it's in your own agency. I don't care if somebody brought it to you and said, you know, here's what happened. Well, the truth is going to be somewhere in the middle, and

Right.

you have to look at it. There's not anything such as a good case. There's always problems somewhere, and there's not everything that's always a bad case.

Right. Yeah.

You know, the guy did something right, you know, or the lady did something right, but you've really got to look at it, and you've just got to admit sometimes there are shortcomings. You know, the administrator might not be the best. The city manager might not be the best. The collective bargaining agreement may have hobbled everybody so much that they can't do the training they'd like to do. There can be a lot of reasons why budgetary constraints could be a problem. But every cop knows this. If you took your son or daughter. into an emergency department and the doctor who looked after your son or daughter and let's say had to form perform a procedure and your child died or was severely injured and you filed a lawsuit and you learned through discovery that the doctor had not yet been to medical school

Yeah.

What would you have done?

No

Oh,

one,

my gosh.

yeah.

No one would even question suing that doctor. How could a hospital bring in somebody? But the doctor said, look, I'm scheduled to go to the medical school in three months. There's no difference there than the officer who's outperforming sworn duties who says, oh, but I'm going to the academy in three months. Paul Harvey did a broadcast. I was fortunate enough to be on that broadcast. And one of the things highlighted in that broadcast is that police officers have one half the power of God. They have the power to take a life. The most important half of that equation they don't get. And I think when we frame things like that, again, we go back to that culture. administrators have to know they're managing quite an array of people, backgrounds, personalities, and cultures. And you want to have the best trained people. You want to have the best thinkers out there. You want to have people who can think on their feet. You don't want to have an airline pilot on a vertical descent. looking as partners on what we're doing now you

Right.

know you want somebody to pull that thing up and get going save the lives and i think that's the emphasis today and we're quick to buy into things although

Yes.

he said this okay well have you read the study did you pull the study should we read it so we just had an expert witness symposium in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago and that was a point that was made by one or more of the speakers just because somebody said it just because it appeared in A magazine for

Mm

police

-hmm.

doesn't mean it's accurate, doesn't mean it's viable. And even if it is, it may not be viable where you live.

Right.

I was a cop in the East Coast. First time I ever taught in Vegas, it was in the fall of the year. I'll never forget it. I had the academy staff and I said, look. Here's a technique that, you know, if you stop a guy and you're out in the road and I put the guy up against the car and they said, oh, we can't do that here. And I looked at him and I go, you don't have cars? And the academy guy goes, you don't know what it's like out here at 118 degrees in the summertime.

Oh, right.

If we brush against the metal of a trunk. or

Right.

left for a corner panel that guy would scream jump up and we'd have another set of problems and i thought to myself that's interesting i i never thought about that well then when i was teaching up in barrel alaska that's another set of problems i'll never forget the late police chief victor suzankis And he was, I believe, the chief in Menlo Park, California, I think it was. Anyway, he started the Blazer program that was popular for a while. And I interviewed him when he was chief in Connecticut. And I said, why would you leave California to come to Connecticut? He said, well, you can't be a national consultant if you only worked on one coast. Oh,

It's

I never forgot.

so simple, so simple.

That Vegas experience taught me that, too. Every place is different. So you've got to have the wherewithal in your people and your agency to recognize what worked in Washington, D.C. may not work in Butte, Montana.

And Brian, if you'll indulge me one more John story and John, I know I'm pretty forgettable, but I've got 100 at least more waiting in the wings for future episodes. But Brian, one of the things that John found in Vero Alaska and other parts in Alaska is some of the handcuffing methodologies wouldn't work because above the guardrail, there was another four or five feet of snow. And so when you had somebody and you were trying to handcuff them and they had their. They're backed up against that wall and they were only facing you. How could I safely?

apply the first handcuff because we all know that that's where the danger starts right there it's the most dangerous point is that application and spin that person around safely and get them handcuffed in that small area and john worked that and worked that and worked that and got a viable option for it and it's still being taught today john so when when i look at that maneuver every time i see somebody do that i think of you being uh fronted you know sniper up in uh barrow going yeah And copper, what do you do when this, and you thinking your way through that and say, how about this? That's magic to me. I'll never forget that.

Well, we actually refined that. Jerry Hamilton was an instructor, a defensive tactics instructor for the Idaho State Police, and he had asked that question also, and he said, we have snowbanks that are 30, 40 feet high on the side of the road. in upstate Idaho so you take that and you couple it and then you say to yourself okay what about the guy who just backs up against the wall and says come get me now

Right.

this is way before taser but you had to come up with something so you had to think a little bit outside the box but you also had to field test it before you really announced it to people because you had to make sure it worked

Right.

You know, like I said, I go to quite a bit of training, and I know you guys do too, and sometimes I sit in the back and go, are you kidding me? Really?

Not all training is good training,

Yeah.

right?

And there's a concept that I want the listener to really take with them today, and that is... Practice does not make perfect.

Right.

And somebody out there is probably thinking, what are you talking about? Well, it's simple. If you practice it wrong, you're just good at doing it wrong. Perfect practice makes perfect. So it's incumbent upon all of us to always practice and do it the best of our capabilities. Because someday we're going to be called upon to use it and we're not going to have time to think about it. Right. We're just going to act. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say, oh, practice makes perfect. And if I can, I usually go over and say that that's not true. Yeah. So, it And you brought probably. it up earlier in the episode too, we're talking about, because I know, you know, when you're talking about anything physical and hand on and, you know, whether it's handcuffing or defensive tactics or anything like that, right, there's some safety precautions and things you have to do there, but you also have to sort of. I want to fail when I'm doing when I'm in training right if I do something wrong I learn so fast you know you're like okay I'm never doing that again because I learned it I got a little pain and I got a little understanding and now I'll actually never make that mistake so even if it's just you know what would what not to do you can really get that in and focus on that in training versus you know what's set up to

I want to teach you everything and a good job. You got it right on your practical application. It's like, okay, we'll keep going and do it till, till they get it wrong and then make them think, I mean, those little things in training, what you just brought up is perfect. It's like, it's like, did they, did they do it or did they do it right? Or did they just do it? I mean, because.

Well, you make an excellent point, Brian. And I think to add to that, another part of that. then the IGRAM, if you will. It's not every technique works all the time,

Right.

but we have a mindset that if we learn something, it'll work on anybody. I was at the Las Vegas Police Academy again back in the early 80s and they had a retired pro football player on the patrol function. And he told me one day, he said, your wrist lock won't work on me. And I said, well, sure. And he goes, no, you won't be able to bend my wrist. So he gave me his wrist. I couldn't bend it. He said, you only bend it if I let you. And then he stood on a metal chair and held his arm out straight. And he said, go ahead and do a couple pull-ups. If I grabbed his arm, it didn't even move.

Oh, jeez.

And I did three pull-ups on his arm. He goes, I'll let you do it during the training. But just so you know,

Wow.

if we were on the street, none of this would work on me. His wrists were so big,

Yeah.

so thick, so strong. And I... Taking it aside later, I said, I learned an important lesson here today, and I appreciate your graciousness. And he just laughed. He goes, you're not the first one. He said, when I went through the academy, I told him that too.

Yeah.

But I think we get into a mindset sometimes that when we go to training or we're taught something, it'll work on everybody. No, it won't. It may not. Pepper spray doesn't work on about 10% of the people. But we come with this expectation, oh, if it worked on me, oh, my God, that was the most painful thing I ever experienced, that everybody's going to feel that.

Right. Not

And

so

again,

much.

it comes back to the trainer and the program to highlight those exceptions to the rule.

Yeah, that's a terrifying story, too. I mean, I'd be like, all

but

right, man.

that's the stuff that should keep you up at night right you should that's where training comes in you you educate for the things that you can predict you train for the things you can't Well, at the Alabama, at the Tuscaloosa Police Academy, when it was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, General Summerlin. Ran that academy and

There was a plaque on the wall that said, let no man's soul cry out for lack of training. And I thought that captured the whole purpose of training. And General Summerlin, I believe, was a one star in the Alabama National Guard. He was a retired captain from the Alabama State Patrol. And he ran the academy at Tuscaloosa at the. university and as many accomplishments that he had he was the most humble most respectful guy whose sole focus was on the troop we got to make sure the troop comes home at night we got to make sure we train the troops appropriately and we got to make sure they know what they're doing And that plaque, I took a picture of that plaque the last time I was there, and I thought, boy, that just says it all.

yeah that's magic that's great stuff and and folks when you listen to this when you tune into the episode pay that stuff forward get your yellow pad out re-listen to the episode write those gems down and get out there and do something about it don't just vacillate if you're not going to have forward motion neutral gets you nowhere you gotta move on this information Yeah.

Absolutely. And I'll tell you, you guys are doing a great job. You're moving it forward. You're some of the most creative people in this industry. And I know, Greg, we go back probably 40 years, and

Yes, sir.

you're still out there. Brian came from the military. He's as eager and as creative as they come. You guys have a great team, a great organization, and the fact that you're taking time from your overly busy schedules to do this podcast. It says a lot about both of you being dedicated to this field to help people, and all anybody can do is thank you, along

Hmm.

with myself.

That means Yeah, so much, man. I really appreciate that. New favorite guest now for me, Greg, because they actually came on the show and thanked us. That was pretty cool. Everyone That's else is original. just normally I'd say you're welcome for my time, but you know. But just a throwback to that 40 some years ago, John, Brian, John trained some of my earliest black belts at the dojo in Grosse Pointe. point and John you'll be happy to know that Brian Williams and Lynn Williams it's their anniversary today while we're doing this and all of those black belts Dale Kelly and Donnie Desandre Craig Baldry Shelly all of them wanted to make sure that I thanked you for that early work and that you were the only one that put me up on my tiptoes I was your dummy if you remember so you were the uke I was the tori the entire time

I remember, but just so you think that no good deed goes unpunished, I was sitting on the mat at the Albuquerque Police Training Center, and we brought Kubota in to do a special segment on the mini-mag, and he brought me out, not you, he brought me out, put me in the center and said, fold your arms. under you don't let me get your arms I knew what he was going to do I knew he was going to grab my wrist so I hid my wrist so he couldn't get him he took that mini mag hit me right in the center of the top of my head my arms came out and I reached up to grab the mini mag and he grabbed that wrist and the rest You couldn't hear me screaming for the applause and the lamp for the tramp money.

Oh, my God.

So there is there is a payback.

That's poetic justice, my friend. hilarious well i uh we very much appreciate not only what you're doing but especially for for coming on the show and and and talking about you know some of the things that you've seen and i'm sure we'll get some great feedback from this episode and and maybe if there's something specific down the road we can we can hop on and dive into i think that would be That'd be fun conversation, but we really do appreciate you coming on here, John, and I'll let you say something and give the last words to John, I think. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good idea. So folks, every once in a while you get to meet your heroes and you get to see them in real life and follow them around and watch their career. And I've always been honored to know and follow John G. Peters Jr. and all of his great work. Ryan will have a bunch of the links in the episode details. You got to look him up, folks. Look him up. Listen to what he's saying and tabula rasa. Start over. Get a clean sheet of paper and start over. Brian, that's what I would say.

Well, to wrap this up, to all the listeners out there, we're just trying to keep you alive and make your job better. And having the knowledge in our head doesn't do any good unless we share it. And these two guys are sharing it. They've given you a pathway to learn. They've given you a pathway that you may have never thought you'd experience in your career. I grew up in a little farm town of 800. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams that what I did would take me around the globe training officers in a number of countries. But I want you all to remember something. You have the power within you to keep on the educational bus, to keep on the training bus, and you're doing it because if you heard what I just said, you're listening to this podcast. You're interested in your career. More importantly, you're interested in these professionals and what they're doing. Never get off the educational bus. Always do everything to the best of your ability. And most importantly, stay in touch with guys like this because they will not lead you wrong. And we all have to stay up on things, otherwise we become stagnant. I thank everybody for your time. Thank you for what you do out there. Thank you for protecting the communities that you protect and serve. And most importantly, stay in touch with these folks because they're not going to give you bad advice. Thank you.

I appreciate that, John. I'm going to leave that as that earmark as I really very much appreciate that. So thank you. Thanks to our listeners out there. And don't forget that training changes behavior. That's all for today, folks, but if you'd like even more content, you can head over to our Patreon page. The link can be found in the episode details. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, follow us on social media, and please tell your friends about the show. Thanks for tuning in, and thank you for your support.