Left of Greg 018 HBPRA for Law Enforcement

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Human Behavior Podcast. As usual, I am your host, Brian Marren. We have a special guest on tonight, Mike Lee, who's been a longtime friend of the program. He's been teaching with us for four years, been teaching alongside us, studied under Greg, and before that, had a very, very long police career, even at the higher level of Police Command. Before that, he was an Army officer as well, so he's been serving his country and community for a long time. So we welcome him tonight. We'll get into his background and some of the stuff we're going to talk about here in a minute.

First, I want to quickly introduce the man of the hour, as always, Greg Williams, who the podcast is affectionately named after, who will always be joining us tonight as well.

So before we get started, I just want to remind everyone, if you want more information, hit the website, www.arkadycognition.com. Listen to us on iTunes at The Human Behavior Podcast, or watch the videos on YouTube, The Human Behavior Podcast on YouTube as well. And please like, subscribe, share, tell your friends, tell your neighbors all about it, kind of grow that fanbase so we can get even greater information out to you.

So, that being said, let's jump right into it tonight. Mike, before we start off, why don't you go ahead and give us a little background on your career and your story, and then we'll jump in from there?

All right. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be here. You guys, I mean, I love working with you. I'm Mike Lee, just like Brian said. I'm a retired commander out of Portland, Oregon. I worked there for 25 years. Prior to that, I did eight years in the Army in the Infantry and the Engineer Corps as an officer. I worked pretty much all aspects of law enforcement, from SWAT to gangs, to detectives, to homicide, all the way up through the ranks, and retired as a precinct commander. I got asked to join this program with these guys and jumped right on it and did not regret it at all.

Yeah. Okay. So, I guess that would lead me right into the first question there, Mike. You know, you had all that experience—30-plus something years of experience, military, law enforcement—and then you went through Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis (HBPRA) training, not just a basic training course, but a train-the-trainer course to then go out and teach others about it. So, I guess right off the bat, what was your experience when you first went through that course and first got a really in-depth, from our perspective, of what Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis is?

Well, you know, Brian, it was eye-opening for me. I learned more and confirmed more things in three weeks of immersive training with Greg than I learned through all the training and my time on the street, and through my bachelor's degree, which was in psychology. I learned why people do what they do, not how they do things, but why they do things, which is the most important thing.

Yeah. No, I agree. And that's what I noticed a lot of people who already have that similar lifelong experience that you have have that same like, "Wow, where was this 30 years ago?" Or, "Where was this at the start of my career?" Right? You would have... it would have sped up that gap. So, what were the big things when you went through that training, because I know I had a similar experience where I went through training and then looked back at past experiences and went, "Oh man, that could have gone completely different had I known this." I don't know if you had any of those little moments or looking back in time.

There were definitely some epiphanies of how I had done things differently. You know, sitting back, taking just a moment to observe and looking for, like we're going to talk about, the anomalies and the things that go on out there, versus just saying, you know, just looking at and studying, and then looking for more to confirm what I think I'm seeing, versus going, "Ah, that's just nothing." I think people overlook things and more often than not, don't want to realize what true dangers are out there if we only look for them. And there's, I just see things in a way that now that I never saw before. I do it every day and still do it. I go out on the street. I mean, I'm thinking Most Likely Most Dangerous Course of Action (MLM in DCOA). Yeah, but now...

Yeah, no. And I agree. And Greg, I know you want to add, so I'll let you go ahead and jump in.

Brian, I think there's an experience that I'd like to share with Mike and get his take on it. I remember coming out of the Police Academy in the Detroit metropolitan area. And during the Police Academy, the best training videos at that time were black and white, and they were made by the company Motorola. Mike, you've been around about the same length of time, and you remember that. Even Jack Webb was narrating a couple of them. And your listeners and viewers, Brian, are going to have to go and do a little homework and look up Jack Webb. But the idea was, that was the old Dragnet guy. Yeah. And the format was, "Before you do this, you've got to take a look at that." And it was always that gruff, jacket-wearing cop with the shoulder holster and the .38. The ideas were sound, the principles were sound, but they made no attempt to say, "Okay, this is the relevance for this Area of Operations (AO)," or, "This is the relevance for your time or for your age." And what I think I heard Mike bring up, and I think it's a great point that I want to bring up as well, is the beauty of a human behavior-based threat prediction software program, infrastructure, whatever, is that it works anywhere. So whether you're working in Traffic Bureau as an officer, or whether you're a first responder on an EMS rig, or you're an eight-year-old going to kindergarten, and all of a sudden there's a baseline and the anomaly in the baseline is missing or it's something that's added, you can use an artifact- and evidence-based approach to determine the Most Likely Most Dangerous Course of Action. And, Mike, I guarantee that it's probably permeated every aspect of your professional life.

Absolutely. I mean, currently, I took a job a couple of years ago working for my sister. She's a physician in town. They had some issues going on with the office manager. I came in, cleaned it up, and they offered me a job, so I use it every day there. I mean, I deal with employees every day. I deal with disgruntled patients coming in. Sure, I deal with offenders, and, you know, I talk to them, and I'm reading them. I mean, I'm reading them just like, just like you taught. And, well, I'll never be as good as you, because you're the man.

But that... okay, for the viewers, every time he says that, I've got to send him a check. A royalty check, Mike. Thanks, Lee. I'll say that about six or eight times. Make sure I... make sure no money's right. Any time eight times zero is still zero.

But yeah, I mean, I use it every day in everyday life, driving down the street. You know, going home from work, I use it every day.

Brian, one thing I want to, you know, that there's been a lot of violence this last week and a half, and from workplace violence capers to school shootings, all that other stuff. What I want to disabuse our viewers of and our listeners at home is that you have to stop what you're doing and put on the mantle of Human Behavior Pattern Recognition Analysis, right? It's a computer program that's running in your brain constantly when you receive the training, and it's a switch you can't shut off. So it's on impulse power, Scotty! It's running in the background. And what happens is, it's like these lenses that autonomically pop in, and as you start picturing things, the gift of time, the distance, is that time slows down, and you start seeing these cues and clusters form. And almost everything is okay, almost everything is fine, and it's not a problem. But then, all of a sudden, your orientation changes because here's one, two, three, all of a sudden the little balloons start popping, and you go, "Wait a minute, I've got a cluster of cues here, and that needs more time." So it's a thing that's always with you, not some heavy thing that you've got to put in your pack and bring out and look at your environment.

And, you know, on that, because when it comes to training, we're talking about, and this is kind of part of why I want to pick your brain a little bit, Mike, you know, you see law enforcement training has come a long way. It's constantly improving; there's always people looking at it. And there's a lot of people who mean really well. So most police officers gain an extraordinary amount of that tacit knowledge just going out there, doing it every day, right? Just dealing with people. So you learn certain things that can be hard to articulate if you weren't given a framework or a lexicon to describe what it is that you're seeing. You know, there are certain guys that can just pick up on, "I know that because this," but, like you alluded to, even when you first started, it's, "Well, how do I articulate that? How do I say that?" And I think that's where a lot of sticking to the science, what we do, is you can do that, and then once you learn that, it doesn't matter what situation, it doesn't have to be chaotic or anything, as you start to get better at that. And I think it's hard to really, you know, everyone talks about prevention and predictive analysis and left of bang, but it's actually really, really hard to do that.

So I'll give you an example of a recent one I saw. It was a law enforcement video. A female officer pulls the car over, and she first goes around to the passenger side. And, you know, it's a grainy, it's the camera off of their body-worn camera. And she goes to question him. And right away, I'm going, "Whoa, this is all wrong! This is all wrong!" The behavior of what he's acting: he's keeping his hood up, he's blocking his face, he's moving around his hands, he's not complying, but he's speaking Spanish. But even though there was a language barrier, it was pretty obvious he wasn't going along with what was happening. So rather than right there, you know, right there, I'm going, I mean, obviously it's easy Monday Morning Quarterbacking this, to look back going, "All right, hey, this is where I need that time and distance. Now I can start communicating from here and calling in that backup." So instead, she goes around to the other side, and when she goes around the other side, the guy pulls a gun out, tries to shoot. Now, she had a great reaction to the incident, so it ended up he ended up being killed. The officer was fine, didn't get injured or anything. And her instincts were good, and her instincts and training were good. She did the right thing. Don't get me wrong. You know, I'm, "Hey, if you're going to try and kill a cop, you kind of deserve what you get," you know what I'm saying? So, but, and when everyone was going, you know, the comments on the video, "Hey, look at that training, man! She nailed it! Great job! This is what it looks like!" And I'm going, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute." You know, this could have gone catastrophically wrong. She could have been a quarter-second late, and she would have taken the bull instead of the ender. And you could notice his behavior all the way back here on this timeline. So why didn't we intervene right there? So I think that it's that intervention part of that, "Now this is when we step in," is a hard thing to learn. I don't know from your experience, Mike, on how that works with law enforcement training, is kind of what's the mentality behind that? What's that mindset?

I think a lot of times people get caught up in the moment. All right, folks that haven't had, especially folks—I mean, 99.9% of officers haven't had this kind of training. I mean, in reality, people don't understand these concepts. And understanding these concepts, just like you mentioned—law enforcement is under more scrutiny and oversight than ever before. It's not going to get any better, no. So, understanding that when you get in a situation, if you feel that you're starting to go down that rabbit hole, so to speak, now it's time. Let's draw back. Give yourself, like you said, the gift of time and distance, because that quarter-second would make a huge... it makes a huge impact. I mean, if I see something going wrong because I'm reading what they're giving off, versus just listening to the words, or not paying attention to all the cues that they're throwing off, you know, I've got to make a decision at some point. So I'm going to use... I'm looking at the anomalies, and what do normal people do on a traffic stop versus what's going on in this car? Exactly.

Yeah. And, Brian, I want to take umbrage with... tell me that... my thing is, and I know how you meant it, but I'm not going to put words in your mouth, and I'll let you defend it on your own. My thing is, every suspect deserves due process, no matter how deranged they are, no matter how bad the situation is. I know, and you were, your colloquial answer wasn't intended to say, "Hey, you know, shoot the guy if he wants to kill a cop." And that's not the way it came across. But I want to make sure that our viewers, our listeners, our audience understands that in that situation, the gift of time and distance with more training could have increased that time distance gap to the point where there was no shooting. Yes, that's a lesser-lethal force alternative. Now listen, it might have always ended in a shooting, or the person may have accelerated the car out of there and rammed another cop and tried to sell a baby. But in that time and that place, she was following a line that was going to lead to a shooting based on the training that she had and the intent of the bad guy. The bad guy is always doing; that's choosing it. Had she this type of training, with the psychological de-escalation component—a bona fide one, not some theoretical stuff... I saw one on TV the other day, they were shown on the news, and everybody was wearing a hood, and all the officers in this basic training academy. A guy came out with a screwdriver, and I was in a bad situation with a screwdriver once. A Michigan State Trooper ended up center-punching a guy that had a Philips head screwdriver that tried to kill us after a burglary. And that protracted case went off there. But it almost was as if the videographer tried to make the screwdriver not as bad as, let's say, a knife. Or the screwdriver, you know, wasn't a deadly weapon. And here's this deranged person that's out there, this poor, sick, mentally stressed human, a broken human. And it may be a domestic violence situation. What happened is the officers drew their weapons and started creating the distance, which is all the right thing. And then the person doing the training said, "Okay, watch what happens when we say, 'Drop the screwdriver! Drop the screwdriver!'" And things went haywire, and they ended up having to shoot the person. Or if we said, "Okay, listen, I'm going to put my weapon down, can we just talk about this?" Listen, there's a time to talk, and there's a time to go kinetic. But that gift of time and distance helps us to determine which is which. That, coupled with the experience of the field training officer, that, coupled with actually spending some time on the street and seeing that situations can go quickly awry. Michael, would you agree with me that in the situation of training, that the more highly trained your officers on the street, your officers are, that they're less inclined to use excessive force? Would that be a first thing?

I think it's a very first thing. But I think it relates to... I think you'll be able to validate what I'm saying here: is that when I first got into business, when you first got into business, it seemed like every scenario-based training we did always ended up in a shooting. That's it, not always shooting somebody. But now the emphasis says more, and geared more towards de-escalation, which, precisely, is exactly what this type of training can help you do, because you'll recognize those signs and signals that the bad guy is giving off, or whoever you're talking to is giving off. They'll tell you what their intent is. You can only take the time to read the signals and let it process in your brain, and then go, "Okay, let me get some distance, let me get some more people here. Listen, let's talk this out," versus trying to push the situation forward.

Brian, that female officer saw all the cues. Yes, it went right on sideways, and she might not have been able to articulate which domain the cues came from, but she certainly knew, "This is going sideways fast," and started to break contact. And everything from there was on the suspect. She had no choice other than to escalate when the suspect increased. And if I know you've got the board behind you, Brian, if I could have you just indulge me for a second, if you can draw out just a staircase with like five or six steps on it in a dark color somewhere on the board there where our viewers might be able to see it.

You'll be able to see here, right? So you mean something like this?

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Now, if you point to the very bottom, that line that you just drew, okay, let's call that a baseline for behavior. And then as we escalate, we would go up a stair. Now, if everybody back home goes, "Yeah, yeah, we're cops, we get this. This is an escalation of force metric or matrix or diagram. We all see that," and escalate and de-escalate. But if you point to that first step right there, and that first step, if we were talking about, you know, putting your foot on that step, that would be the officer presence. That would be actually showing up. Here's what the viewers don't understand about officer presence. Okay, I want you to start putting a tick mark under that little step there. Okay, for each one of these: one for uniformed, one for plainclothes, one for off-duty but still an officer, one for marked police car, a semi-marked police car, unmarked police car, private vehicle but witnessing a felony, speeding towards the suspect, parked, not in a car, on a bike. Do you start getting the "gosh, man" point, right? The officer has to make all of those decisions in the entire staircase where the bottom left corner is "leave the guy alone" and the top right corner is "killing." Every one of those steps is a decision that cop has to make in that nanosecond. Yet, what the people at home don't understand sometimes is, look at all those micro and macro decisions in that space and at that time. And it's dynamic, and it's chosen by the suspect. And that's why I'm saying the more training and education you get—and I'm not talking kineticism, I'm not talking putting rounds downrange, which is necessary training—I'm talking about training and up-armoring in the brain, right?

No, and that's the point. And we've made it before, I know Sean likes to say it as well, you know, everyone wants to go to the gym and work out, everyone wants to go to the range and shoot guns, no one wants to train the brain. And I think because there's a lot of analysis with it, there's a lot of, you know, experts out there who study, you know, "Hey, this is..." even just studying the psychology behind some of it. "Well, that's all great information for analysis and for studies and to have a better understanding, but how does that help me determine where I need to be on the staircase?" And I think that's taking that analysis and conceptualizing it. That's what I love about this program, the HBPRA, because it's... it now gives you that decision-making matrix. It gives you a way to articulate and understand, one, through experiences you've already had, and then now going forward, you start to recognize those sooner. And that is also, it also gives me the competence and confidence, right?

Now I want Mike to answer this. Mike, I'm a road officer. I just rammed a vehicle or escalated force, or done something, and now I've got a knock on your office door and walk in and tell you that my partner's been shot, or I had to shoot somebody, or I'm a somebody, or pepper spray, or whatever the situation is. There was an escalation of force. And now you, as the district commander or the unit commander or whatever else, is going to call me to task on that. What did you consistently see as being the biggest mistake? Was it failing to report, right, and not adding the artifacts and evidence? A weakness in the training when it should?

So it's always articulation. It's always being able to put the why behind the action. I saw it time and time again. You know, we have a union involved, so there's always that little piece of it. But when you start looking at when people come in and they take actions, they can't articulate why they did something. "He was hinky, he was acting furtively," right? "Well, what was he doing?" And this program, this training, gives you the ability to articulate, from, you know, from the various domains of human behavior, why that person was acting like that. We're all wired in the same way. Like they say, "Humans are the same all over the world." We all do the same things. And under stress, our channel capacity goes down, so we're only going to do a couple of different things that provide... I mean, we're going to be looking at the thing that's most important to us. We're going to be starting to sweat, our nostrils are going to flare, there's going to be... we're going to start flushing. That histamine released... if you know those things, and then why those things occur, you're going to be better off articulating it, not only to the commander, but more importantly, to the district attorney or to a grand jury when you're sitting there testifying why you took the action you did.

Brian, one thing I want to make sure... Brian, Greg and I have talked about this before, sidebar comments, and I truly believe it: I don't think there's a large number of bad cops. I think there's a number of cops that are fantastic, five out of a hundred cops that are on top of their game. They're out there ruling the street, we call them street guides. You knew when they showed up at the scene, things were going to get handled, and everything was going to be fine. You had 95 oxygen thieves out of that hundred that showed up. They were on the government payroll, when the eagle crapped, they were there to pick it up, you get what I'm saying? But the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. At least they were doing the service. I'm sure the military is similar. Rarely found a bad cop. What you did find once in a while was a dirty cop. But more often—and I know you did internal affairs like I did as well—more often, you found a dumb cop. And I'm calling the captain because he didn't educate him or herself on rules and procedures or laws or the evidence or the escalation of force. Brian, you get what I'm trying to say, is, I don't think they went into it with nefarious intent. And what happened is they missed an opportunity because they slept at the academy or their follow-on training and had no advanced critical thinking.

Well, and that's... that's how, you know, some... there's training is always with anyone who knows anything knows training is the answer. The better trained individual you have, that training itself is what the military would call a force multiplier, right? I can send in, "Hey, this one specialized unit of a few guys," or, "I can send this company-sized element and get the same results." Well, why? Because those guys have more experience and more training under their belt so they can do more. It's the same thing now. But then that goes into, you know, society as a whole. You know, we've made the comment before, is, you know, "A society gets the police force that it deserves." So if you're not going to invest in their training, if you're not going to pay them adequately and make it a competitive-level job, well, you know, what are you expecting out of it? You know, and that goes into it. And I think training is, of course, always the answer. And I'm sure, Mike, you've seen it in Portland, how that worked.

You hit the nail on the head. I mean, the small unit, the large unit... I did SWAT, what we call CERT, for eight years. I did entry work, and the critical thinking skills that are required... a group of folks, and we were an older group. I mean, the average age is probably 40-45 years old, right? But it's not that we were any better, it's just we were better trained, right? And we were able to critically think, and, you know, we only got a handful of shootings in those eight years. And, you know, I'd like to think those are unavoidable. But even now, I look back and go, with some of this training, we may have been able to prevent one or two of those. And exactly, it's things like this that make me a huge advocate of this program. They should be HBPRA, just like it's... it's incredible to think, because during a kinetic event, the last thing I'll be doing is, I'm going to be saying, "Okay, is it his, you know, his focal field of view, his functional field of view?" All these things are going through my head. No, but I can go back afterwards, and my brain can dissect this, and I can articulate exactly what I saw, the anomalies in behavior of someone who we had to take into custody with, you know, force. People called it excessive, but no, it's just the force necessary to take, you know, taking someone's custody. But if I could articulate it better now, knowing what I know now, versus back then... back then, sometimes it was a struggle, you know, "He was acting furtively. He had a hinky look about him." Now I can describe hinky. Now I can describe what the furtive movements were and why people do the things that they do.

And, you know, just one of the beauties of that, too, Michael, is if you think about it, Mike, when you take a look at the situation you just described, prosecuting attorneys, a human, the juries comprise with humans, the judge is human. I mean, literally the only person there is the defense attorney that's not... to another human that's saying, "I saw this, I felt this." And in that transparency that comes, that confidence and competence that comes from knowing, "Hey, listen, I made this mistake, and the suspect called me on it and ran, and then when I was chasing the suspect, this happened." That's what juries need to hear. When I came out of the academy, they said, "This is what you write: 'felon arrested.'" Same. I didn't turn it in. And, you know, my cousin, you saw that happen a bunch of times, you know.

Yeah, I know.

I want to tell you a real quick side note on that: both you guys know call sign Lucky. Not going to say his name on the air. Veteran, respected officer. Incredible, incredible officer on the street, incredible soldier before that. So we just happened to be in the same AO. I won't say the city or the jurisdiction we were working with. And it happened that we're sitting on a house, we want to do the search warrant on a house. And a guy in another house thinks we're there for him. He's got felony warrants, a homicide that he did. He comes out of the door on rear left of Lucky with an AK, and stuffs right on her balcony and just starts spraying with the AK. So Lucky jumps off the railing and into a dumpster. Thank God, that's why we called him Lucky. Do you get what I'm saying? And his real comment, like that you learn it over and over: "Suerte!" I had about this much room with which to reach up and try to push the AK up and in towards the roof of the place, and reach down and grab my expandable baton, which this agency didn't have. So instead of having an ASP baton, I had a flashlight—and I'm not going to say Streamlight or Celt-Light or any of the other stuff—but it was made and issued of plastic, and it was black plastic with a little orange tube that was in the center. So I grabbed it, and I swung, and I did a common peroneal strike to try to bring the person down so I could then disarm him of the AK, which was still firing. And that flashlight went everywhere wrong. And it looked like when something hits a black hole. Do you see that NASA video reality where it goes all like this, you know, it was the Death Star, you know, that womp rat didn't exploded. And I just had to think back at that, that, you know, there was a couple of years back, you could probably still find it online. I was in a video with a giant, that guy that was probably 6'8", 6'9", 370 pounds, that was attacking with a bat. And I used the Remington expandable baton to disarm him with it. Didn't have to hurt him, didn't do anything. My baton, in the U-shaped, wouldn't close that for that. But it was on their website for a long time. We're talking about using force every day, but the appropriate amount of force comes with the appropriate amount of training and equipment to back it up. When you're not given training or you're not given the right equipment, and you're still given a semi-permissive environment with kinetic influences, you have to fight, you have to run, sometimes you have to shoot, you have to ram. And would it be better for your folks to have gone through human behavior elements in their training so they're able to articulate what they felt and what they saw before they use the force, why they use the force?

Yeah. And that's a great point that kind of leads into our discussion on the, you know, situation I described with a female officer and the shooting, and the officer-involved shooting. And it's just sometimes you get into those because it's, "Hey, you know, we've got to do something." It's like, "Hey man, like I've said it with law enforcement, work with us, you pay by the hour, right?" And they're like, "Yeah." I was like, "So if we sit here for like three more hours, you're actually going to make more money because you're on overtime after that." And it's like, "Yep."

Oh, yeah. I see what you're saying. I see what you're getting about that. Get that tunnel vision.

Exactly. And then it's now it's on, and now our... our critical thinking, our decision-making goes out the window because we're already behind that curve, rather than setting that curve, being proactive, and going, "Well, no, I'm going to change the trajectory of the situation right now to go, and what's most beneficial for me?" And I get it, too. I understand the mentality when, "Well, you know, these guys are this, and they're the worst, and we had a job to do." And it's like, "Yeah, but, you know, what if something happens?" Right? So you get in that shooting. All right, what are the possible second, third-order effects for you and your family? And you look at some of the stuff that's happened: officers who at the time were going, "I didn't do... I did what I was trained to do." And now I'm on a jury, and I'm going to jail. And it's like, "So," I think that all plays a part into what you're talking about with building competence, which builds confidence. And Mike, what you were talking about, too, is, "Well, now I know how to articulate. Now I have a leg to stand on. Oh, I saw this, so I did this to mitigate it. That didn't work. So I did this to mitigate it. That didn't work." And now the... the decision was made, not me. And so, I think that's part of the benefits of the training.

Yeah, Brian, I agree 100%. I mean, the point that Greg brought it up about the level of force rising when the training goes down, the level of force goes up. Yes, if you don't have the training, you're going to resort to basic human instinct, which is self-preservation. You're not thinking about anything else at that point. But when you start getting this kind of training, and you know, you... you know, right now, I think the majority of training still revolves around, "Well, first of all, we've got the mandated things from the various political action groups, and so you've got to have this business." Well, then you have your training that's dictated, mandated by the state. And it varies from state to state, but they're all saying they have use of force laws, things like that. But we don't concentrate, as in law enforcement, we don't concentrate on the most effective piece of machinery we have, which is our brain. So it's the best tool we have.

Exactly.

Exactly. There's no, you know, there... you can draw a correlation or reverse correlation, however you want to, with the level of training and the amount of force used on the street. And I think some of these folks that found themselves in the court systems, now that have been convicted of doing crimes, you know, by a jury of their peers, for actions that I think were very preventable. I think that everyone—and again, we're sitting here Monday Morning Quarterbacking, I hate doing that, right? But, you know, having 25 years of experience and doing network, I feel that a lot of times we get caught up, people get caught up in the moment, and they don't have the training or experience or a mindset that's proper to be out there, you know, in a kinetic environment.

And then let's throw some science at this one. Yeah, on the board behind you, if I can indulge you again. Absolutely. You're in, and just do an upside-down. You kind of make it look like a bell, like the... and I'm sorry. You probably... yeah, just a second. Sorry. What Mike just said, based on all of his experience—four decades of experience, two and a half of those as being an officer—what he just said is called the Yerkes-Dodson Law or the inverted U hypothesis. So, Brian, connect the line on the bottom, and that line would be our baseline, and connect it down at 90 degrees. If you look at the left-hand corner, at the bottom of the bell, if you start going up that curve, what happens is that's arousal. So as arousal rises from your left to the right up that bell, as the arousal goes up, what's going to happen is that on the opposite side of the bell, your performance goes down. So Brian, trace it with your finger, the arousal from the left going up, following it from the baseline, and going up that left-hand curve, and make an arrow right about there. Okay, that's where the officer is. Now, let's say in that section, what's going to happen is on the right-hand side of the bell, because absolutely everything, even parasympathetic nervous system, right? But a down arrow on the other side. What you've got on the right-hand side of that is performance, and performance is going to go down. So what has to happen to offset that? What has to happen is training, not education, because education doesn't change behaviors, education just tells you why you did something. And Brian, you bring this up all the time when you're training, it can't just be muscle memory, because muscle memory doesn't help me think, maybe it doesn't help you think your way out. So the reason a guy like Mike Lee that went through a process just to get hired by a previous company to train this program, they only took the cream of the crop, they only took the best of the best of everybody. And Mike just put it into street terms, what you just wrote about the Yerkes-Dodson behind you: arousal goes up, performance goes down. And the only thing to offset that is training, or get your checkbook out and get ready to write... the city gets ready to write a big check. Mike, that's happened, I'd bet.

Absolutely, it's happened. You know, having worked with the city attorney on a number of cases that happened where either I was involved or supervising. Absolutely. I mean, it boils down to, if you can't justify, or do proper articulation why you did what you did... it's not saying you did anything wrong.

Exact.

They would rather settle something, you know, for a sum of money. They'd rather write a check and go through the legal process. And, you know, unless if they look at something and you're able to articulate exactly why, they'll... the city attorney will back you to the point they'll go to court. "Let's take this guy to court! They're not going to get a judgment against us." But if you sit there and say, "Hey, I did this," and, "You know, I can't really tell you why. I mean, he did some things, he did this, he did that," rather than saying, "Well, you know, I watched him, his stance. Instead of being sitting up, he was bladed. He was starting to look over his shoulders, he was looking around. I know through my training that..." and here comes that somebody behind you spinning up on that board. Exactly. Absolutely. You know, so you're seeing all these things. And now that you understand... you know, if I would have had this information 30 years ago, 40 years ago, I can't imagine where my career would have gone. I mean, I think I had a pretty good career. I did okay. But there's just things I would have done differently. And I would have done them differently because of my knowledge. But you're right, the training and the education are two completely separate things. With education, you know, it's the knowledge. If you don't have the training, the knowledge isn't put into practical application, so it's really tough to articulate that even to yourself sometimes. You sit there, you second-guess yourself. But I said, this training is incredible. And it's...

I'm passing it to you. I got two words right now.

Yeah, no. I think...

Obviously dehydrated from golfing, Brian.

Oh, yeah, he worked really hard today out on the lake. It was raining today. I didn't play. Go there. Oh man, you're living it up down there! But no, and obviously there's a lot that goes into, you know, the politics behind just like a Metropolitan Police Force. Okay, there's a lot involved there. There's the police officers' union, there's the district attorneys, there's the community groups, there's city politicians. And, you know, besides all that, so it's understanding why we decide on certain things. We get reactive. And that's like I use Chicago as the example. Okay, this was a couple of years ago. All right, we're at a higher, a thousand more officers. And you're like, "Okay, that's going to cost, I'm guessing, somewhere over the course of a career, a billion dollars for a thousand officers for training, healthcare, everything that comes along with that." Maybe a billion dollars. And you're going, "Man, invest in the people that you have right now that have the knowledge, and invest in the training. Get them better." Now we're getting a more highly specialized police force that's, you know, smarter, stronger, faster, and can understand predictive analysis so we can mitigate these things. And then, you know, it's... it's, you know, like we always say, "What if you do get into one of these situations?" You're looking at, "You're liable, like the training you went through, yeah, I've prepared you maybe for that situation, but when you made the decision, now the department says, 'Oh no, you made that decision,' so now, you know, you're at fault." And it's like, "Well, wait a minute, you provided me with tools! All I did was use the tools you gave me, and now I'm in trouble for this." But, you know, in their mind, they didn't do anything wrong. They went through that checklist, that escalation of force.

You're so much on it, Brian. You worked the road with officers and a task force. You got to see this stuff we're talking about firsthand. But you've also, as a decorated combat vet, seen this stuff from a rifle scope, you've seen it as a scout. The game is the same. It is information gathering: enough information to create intelligence, looking at the intelligence and applying critical thinking skills in determining what range of responses are likely based on what the bad guys are doing. And what's happened is we've turned that on end. We've turned it on then down. We're presupposing that everybody that makes a decision is guilty, all of the officers are guilty, do you get what I'm trying to say? And in that ridiculous worldview, what happens is we're trying to apply Frankensteinian things to it to try to show everybody, "This is what he could have done." I remember the first officer that came to me with a bag and said, "Here's the T-shirt of the burglar," and this and any other, and I said, "What's this for?" And he goes, "DNA." And I'm like, "We don't need DNA. He's in handcuffs, he's sitting next to me. You know, we got him in your house, we don't need the DNA." People are so jaded by television shows, like CSI, and all this other stuff. Good old-fashioned police work... the best officers on the road had training, and they continued to seek out, actively seek out training and education and got degrees and were passionate, like Michael was, about getting your psychology degree in sociology. Brian, you've continued your education even though you are a very highly trained killer. And I think Jim Mattis put it best when back in the Combat Hundred Days, he said, "Why are we sitting on this program? Why is it only going to MARSOC? Why are only Special Forces getting it? Everybody at the tip of the spear gets it, but every deploying Marine needs this type of training." Brian, I think this is a game changer. I think being able to think yourself out of the situation rather than fight yourself out is the wave of the future. We have to invest time and money in an alternative solution, because more guns isn't necessarily the answer.

Greg, I've got to chime in here. Not only does every soldier or Marine, or Airman or Sailor, need this training, I think more importantly, the first responders need this training, right? I think it's far more critical because we could pull out of every war right now, but we can't pull out of action on the street. We're always going to have problems at home because we can't take the human with it. It's the human piece we can't take out of it, right? And if we don't supply our first responders, our blue, our thin blue line out there, if we don't give these folks this kind of training and give them an up-armoring of their brain you spoke of earlier, if we don't do that, we're negligent. We're a negligent society for not giving these people the tools they need.

That's a great soundbite. And Mike, one of the things that I love about you in your career, and you're such a valued friend, is that you've always walked the talk. You've always backed up absolutely everything that you said. And I think, Brian Marren, that the point he made that Michael Lee just made about first responders, we wouldn't see some of the stuff that we saw in writing, we wouldn't see those reports if they had alternatives. And what's happened is we've minted these new soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, first responders, and we pushed them out there with the badge and the gun and said, "Don't go do no wrong." Yeah, but we didn't give an architecture for decision-making under stress, rapid decision-making under stress, and problem-solving.

It's making and problem-solving. And I think that's a great point to kind of start to bring it in for a landing a little bit. But, you know, it's that idea, we're not giving people the right tools, and then we're just expecting them to always have the right answer and the right tool for the job. And you're going, "Well, wait, we didn't set those people up for success!" And, you know, right before we got on this, Greg, I just actually reread the article you wrote, "Lessons Learned on the Amadou Diallo Shooting," which I wrote about in my master's thesis as well, because it's the same. It's, you know, you look at those situations, and people go, "How do they occur?" And then we want to just... we don't understand, but everyone just says, "Oh, it's because they were this," or, "It's because they're that." And, you know, we look at it as just, "Look, this is a... this is a failure in human cognitive performance. Simple as that." It's... it's a performance. That's all it was. It was a failure in performance. Okay, why was there a failure in performance? Well, if I'm not trained to perform in that situation, then I'm likely going to fail. I don't rise to this level and become Superman. I fall to my lowest level of training. And I think that's where it comes into play.

And just while you're on that point, and I hate to interrupt, but I want to make a point: if your car was knocking, if your timing chain was off, yes, aberration was wrong. You don't throw the car out and start with a new car. You don't repaint the flipping car. You don't add push bumpers to it. You address the situation that's affecting the performance. And there's a lot of good officers and a lot of good soldiers and a lot of good first responders out there that are stronger, faster, and harder to kill because they were up-armored in their brain. That's all I'm saying is that there's a training component that works, and there's experienced vets that are out there that can give you that training.

100%, Greg. You can't fix everything with a hammer. That's how cops fix things. We fix it. Sir, yes. Now we have... we're surgeons. We have to... we already look in that toolbox and see what kind of tool we're going to pick out, because society is so diverse and so wired into everything. We are under such a microscope in law enforcement, and in the military as well. I mean, if you do something wrong, you know, bad on you, it's a lick on you. But, you know, how long because of lack of training? Yeah, that's a lick on them.

Mike, I want to bring that point again that you just said. Listen, if you choose not to go to the training, or you choose not to use your training, it's on you. But if your administration doesn't provide that training for you, then doom on them, because they know better. And right now you're going to get it as hard in the streets of public opinion, and it's, you know, the court of the streets, that you are in any court of the land. So, you know what? If you know that going in, do the right thing. Do the right thing because it's the right thing to do. And if you don't have the training, go change the train. Go in and say, "Hey, don't buy us this new, you know, whatever vehicle or some other thing like that. How about sending a couple to training?" What was that number, Brian, that you used? A billion dollars for a thousand officers on there or something?

I think it's a realistic number.

How much training could you do for a billion dollars? School resource officers could you train? How many parents could be trained?

Yeah. And I think that's a good point to kind of end on there. So I want to thank you, Mike, for coming on. And we'll have you on on future podcasts. But this is definitely a great start. And you bring a lot to the table professionally.

Professionally. Brian, Mike, I know that I can reach out to you on LinkedIn if I want to look up Mike Lee and be able to hire you as a consultant or a professional. Is there any other resource that you would like to give us that we can use for our viewers and our listeners to look up, or is that the best portal?

That's the best forum, just reach out to me on there. I think all my personal, my phone number and everything's on there. Just reach out, I've got no problem with it. I'll answer you. I don't check it every day because I am kind of retired now, but, thank golf, I've used my question about your handicap.

Yeah. I think you did respond once while you were on the course.

I'll get back to you. I'm golfing right now.

It's just like I immediately had my head went down. It was like, "I'm not golfing right now!"

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, we appreciate you coming on here. And if folks want more information, I'll have links up on our YouTube site and the website. So, www.arkadycognition.com, The Human Behavior Podcast on iTunes or on YouTube. Click subscribe, click like, share with all your friends, and we appreciate everyone out there listening. Greg, thanks again as usual. And everyone out there, stay safe.

Thanks, Brian. Thank you. Thanks.

Thanks, Greg. I'll see.