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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Carlos, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ari. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:So I I wanna go back quite a few years. You decided to join the police force. What were you thinking when you made that decision?
Speaker 2:I was thinking probably as a lot of young men and women that enter this profession that you're going to make a difference. You go into it, you know, trying to change things for the better. The side effect is once you leave, you are changed by it. So there is the circle or that life experience, but it thoroughly met every expectation and more from, what I thought this job could ever be and even to where I'm at today. So the life lessons, professional lessons through a career like this were just, an amazing time.
Speaker 1:And you said changed by it. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Just by virtue of the fact that you you will see things that typically know the profession is exposed to. Yeah. I can kinda relate it perhaps to those that have done any kind of military experience. And and that more so being the the day in, day out, I'm gonna say the trauma. You know, there's plenty of statistics out there.
Speaker 2:You know, the average person in their lifetime maybe experiences five to 10. The average police officer, it's in the hundreds. So it's a cumulative barrage, if you will, on, on your senses. It's the type of profession that you go into. People call you because they need you.
Speaker 2:But a lot of times you see people at their worst. So it's not the positive contact going in to buy a pair of sunglasses. You're gonna come out happy because you're looking to look good. I actually wrote a book, but perhaps we can cover that later about it, but it chronicles just the experiences and the changes, I think, for the better. But you do have to have a certain maturity because it's not for everybody.
Speaker 2:Not everybody finishes his career with a retirement. I think on average, the police officer at least in The United States, the average male predeceases the average citizen by about a decade still. You know, we're getting better, I think. The hard drinking, smoking, some of the stories that maybe, the television has taken some liberties with. It can be a kind of a hard life that way, but I think most folks realize you want to get to that finish line and enjoy that retirement and parlay that to a podcast like I can do with you Ari.
Speaker 1:There's really, there's really no good reason that you call the police, right? You're always in need. There's always a problem. You're exposed to the most difficult situations on a day to day basis. What's the techniques, what's the tools that you know back then and today that we're using to really stay healthy and stay in a good mindset?
Speaker 1:A lot
Speaker 2:of it truly is the mental health, I'm going say, the law enforcement professional. It's pretty neglected. The old days was just kind of, you you suck it up, you handle it. You deal with those dead bodies, those kids in pain, those families in pain, and just try to get through the next shift. Now there's a great thing where you can talk to people, right?
Speaker 2:There's counseling. There's your peers. What a great way to vent, let a little bit of steam off and also to, I think healthy, relationships in your own personal life. If you go into it with that kind of a foundation, you should be able to weather most of it. We're we're still human beings.
Speaker 2:But at the end of the day, it's nice to have that that foundation built that if you know what it's like to be in a family, have a family, have that that loving spouse to to get you through kind of those those tricky times and someone you can speak to so you don't come home and and and kick the dog and and go for the bottle of scotch. You know? You you have to have a balance. And I I call it your your off duty life. It's as important as your on duty life and you have to care for both of them.
Speaker 1:Appreciate that. Thank you. And, I think it was, keep me honest here, three or four years into your career in PD, you made a very interesting transition. Tell us about it.
Speaker 2:Yes. So as a young patrol officer in a metropolitan city here in in California, Los Angeles suburb, running across the day in, day out investigative roles that your frontline or your primary, responding officer will get involved with, but you have to stop and hand it over typically to a detective if it becomes involved. You find evidence of a crime, of a robbery, a murder, whatever the case may be. The the patrol officer truly isn't set up for that. They just will triage the the intake of that situation and then get it to where it needs to go.
Speaker 2:And as I found in my last couple years on, patrol, just the encounter with narcotics, it was just every day. And I thought, oh, this is something maybe I'm interested in. I think I can make a difference here. And therein lies an opportunity for me to become a special agent with our California Department of Justice. They then in '19 and the eighties had a Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.
Speaker 2:They are the oldest, we're the oldest narcotic unit in the nation. We, evolved before even DEA. Goes back to the time of, the railroads and Chinese, heroin and that whole era, the bootlegging era. And so it's a rich history in narcotic enforcement. They were experts.
Speaker 2:Locals like us would look to them. And I served a few warrants with them as a patrol officer. I had, bilingual skills and was able to help them out. And they ultimately recruited me, I went to become a special agent for the Bureau of Narcotics.
Speaker 1:So, you know, what is it I think, you know, most of us are fed from very unreliable information, is CSI and then TV and all those What does the day in a life of an investigator actually look?
Speaker 2:You know what? I hard to describe. I'd almost equate it to, if you ever go to an amusement park and go, what ride am I going to go on? You're disappointed by some, some days it's boring. And then the next ride is just an unbelievable ride.
Speaker 2:You think you'll, you don't know how you're going to survive That's pretty much the day. You have a plan, but you have to be trained and be very nimble, because situations will present themselves, especially in an investigation. You can have the generic, we have a a source of drugs. There's a scourge in the neighborhood. Maybe we can, help the local police.
Speaker 2:That's what we would do as in the narcotic enforcement bureau. We would do like a like a buy program. And you'd undercover agents into an area and do these corner street buys, try to get at least that level, initial level of, of narcotic transactions out of the way, and then work your way up. As you arrest these folks, perhaps, someone's willing to talk and inform and not have a harsher sense. And they could give you someone higher up, someone who's maybe supplying the drugs and you keep working your way backwards and upwards, I should say.
Speaker 2:So therein lies a typical roadmap, but sometimes that can happen within a week, a couple of weeks, or may take years, especially if it's a heavy organization as we are plagued with now in this country. You see the international drug cartels, Mexico, then, you know, overseas. It's unfortunately a billion dollar industry and you're trying to have local and state police departments and federal departments deal with it with their few million dollar budget. So they're typically outmanned out, gun out resource, but, the crooks typically are greedy and that what usually does them in.
Speaker 1:So, you know, you've got the, let's say street level investigative kind of feet on the ground work, but through that you're collecting a whole lot of information and how do you piece that together? Know, you've got video coming off, you know, cameras, you've got a whole bunch of documentation, you have access through, you know, federal systems, you know, record history and records. How do you piece that together? And and before we kinda get to the really cool stuff that we're doing today, what did that look like, you know, back in the day?
Speaker 2:If you ever saw the cartoon, The Flintstones, that would be reminiscent of it. You're you're you're etching on stone, connecting all these different media, these files, these these handwritten logs, they used to call them payo sheets. Now everything's electronic. And I think we'll we'll go there in in a in a few minutes. But, you would, draft search warrants to collect documentation, to gather more history, maybe financial history on, on the organization being investigated or the individual in particular.
Speaker 2:But it took analysts. It took your fellow detectives, your fellow special agents, and as a team, just scouring that information, devouring it, putting it into link charts. And there are some, computer and some technologies in in those days, the last few decades, but nothing like today. I wish I had had a tenth of the technology that's here now that didn't exist then, but it worked. And there's also the human intelligence side, which frankly, to me will outpace anything AI can ever do because the human being is going to be right there and it's developing.
Speaker 1:Yes. What's the horror story that you were just, I don't know, looking at hours and hours over days at video or what's the worst horror story that you can remember kind of combing through data and trying to
Speaker 2:piece I things wouldn't say necessarily horror, but it it's just, it'll just make your eyes roll backwards, particularly when you're trying to figure out like who these suspects communicate with. Right? So you would get phone records and that that's out there. That's a technique. And you go over basically the yellow pages.
Speaker 2:You get any phone book, name, address, and it can be that thick and your eyes are just glazing over, but you're looking for that. Okay. Maybe there's a frequency report or a frequency activity that counts this person, calls this person every Monday at 04:00. Okay. So maybe.
Speaker 2:And with that said, it's finding those connections, those, relationships or the anomaly that took the manual searching to do. That was always, kind of manny, but kind of fun where you can narrow down your group. It's like, yeah, maybe we can exclude this person, but we need to focus on on this individual.
Speaker 1:I'm curious. Was it very much like just you working with yourself or was it almost a team sport?
Speaker 2:It was. It was a team sport. They me and my fellow partners had their cases, had their investigations, and, it was a luxury to have an analyst assigned to you. And they are brilliant people, smarter than than I ever will be because they aren't bound by the restrictions of everything that we're trying to deal with. They can just focus on an odd shape not fitting in a certain location.
Speaker 2:It was a team effort, but again, it required so much manual work. Therein lies the, I think the burnout factor too. And then the next day you're having to do the physical work of perhaps there's a surveillance involved or maybe an undercover situation or having to go to court and testify and it's a week long trial. You know, the case is always evolving that way. But again, being nimble and relying on your teammates.
Speaker 2:But now with the technology in play, definitely a better time and better equipped to deal with this scourge that's attacking our country along with other countries.
Speaker 1:So, you know, over the last twenty years, we twenty more years, we had some really nice innovations around DNA and other image analysis, but over the last three or four years coming with a really big data analysis through LLMs, the picture has completely changed. What are the kind of stark differences between the the ten years ago and and today in regards to how these investigations are conducted?
Speaker 2:It's the volume. It's the metadata. You try to exploit a computer, a phone, you know, the the these records where people are living and doing their criminality online. This is a media that's you know, it's protected under certain, banners of freedom and self expression, but at the same time, they're committing crimes while using it. That challenge is out there, but it's also too always a breadcrumb that's gonna be left.
Speaker 2:And if the investigators are smart, which they are, they're getting there, the education, the analysts, understanding this type of technology in play, you're really, you can't be invisible today. Your your GPS, you wanna go somewhere, you plug it in your your GPS setting in your car. You've got a history of something there. Your phone, your calls, camera on the street. You can't go to London or New York without having somebody catch you on camera, scratching your, your scalp.
Speaker 2:These are amazing things. They're not meant to spy on people as some in our country, obviously you get a little wrapped around the axle about, but it's nice where, you know, Hey, there was a murder at 2AM, sidewalk shooting. There's a camera out there. Somebody got it. Maybe it was a fast food restaurant or a bank, but that's been very beneficial.
Speaker 2:Going all the way even to, to body cameras that are now being worn on patrol officers. The older generation where I came from, some aren't real fans of it. I thought it would be a great thing. I think it is because a lot of times people will come to that front desk and they'll go, officer Ari Block mistreated me. He yelled at me and called me names.
Speaker 2:And a good watch commander sergeant will go, that's great, sir. Let me go get his body camera. We'll prove it for you. You know, I changed my mind. I'm gonna withdraw the complaint.
Speaker 2:Right there makes it worthwhile. Yeah. Conversely too, the officer is doing a bad job or some issue came up, you're on candid camera. But I think more times than not, it's beneficial. So the tech is definitely helpful in that metadata world that we're working in right now.
Speaker 1:I appreciate that. We say in different contexts, right? There's nothing like sunshine, right?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. To reach
Speaker 1:Yeah, I appreciate that. So, you know, tell us a few or one story of how technology recently has made the difference, right, kind of cracked the case or provided you that lead that you really needed obviously, the story is not public knowledge, you know, keep it as a, keep out all the details you can't share.
Speaker 2:You bet. And recognize too, I've been out of the game now a few years. Once I retired from the department, then it's, I can do this consultation role I have. But in working with some agencies that use this kind of technology, I'll say particularly when it comes to look at the, the school campus shooting that the college student, I wanna say it was Ohio, Utah, correct me if I'm wrong. But that situation where they thought, oh, they'll never find him.
Speaker 2:There was no witnesses. He came in the middle of the night. Technology brought that case together and they successfully filed on that suspect. And he's gonna serve multiple life sentences. I believe he pled out so he could avoid a death penalty.
Speaker 2:Therein was was technology at at its best. You could see they, you know, from even out driving traffic, his escape route. They put all that together and that's all in the court systems. That'd be a great case if you had to extrapolate some data on how perhaps they found him, tracked him. But there you go.
Speaker 2:It's out there and it's solving murders. It's protecting, keeping the public safe. It's not spying on people like others think they are. You know, the the data is is out there just for us to use, but to be good stewards of it, you got to be wise about it, legally obtain the information so it's solid and it stands up in court.
Speaker 1:What's the, so I mean, there's a double edged sword here. I mean, who has gone to London and just seen how many cameras are everywhere, you don't feel so bad in The United States but I think the average American doesn't necessarily have that experience. But nonetheless there's a double edged sword here. On the one hand you know if somebody rams into our car and has damaged us for life, you are hoping that somebody caught that on camera. But on the other hand, we all here in The Americas value our freedoms and privacy.
Speaker 1:How do you kind of tiptoe that, you know, very sensitive barrier? What's the processes and protocols that are in place?
Speaker 2:I frankly, I think I think the the the guide rails in place will always air on, is it legal? Is it moral? Is it ethical? You follow those three guidelines and then obviously the type of crime you're looking at. It's, maybe a kidnapping.
Speaker 2:Well, okay. Someone might get their feelings hurt that they're looking at the camera intersection that they may have driven through because maybe they were drinking that night. Well, they're not looking for the drunk driver. They're looking for that black sedan with tinted windows. And the kid was maybe out in his front yard and was snatched.
Speaker 2:And there was only three black sedans at night that maybe drove through the intersection. And again, you can do your good detective work, but the technology helped. You weren't looking for some low level or or monitor or eavesdrop on some low level person doing something insignificant. So therein lies, I think that the rules of the road, if you will, but to enhance the public safety, especially where life and death is involved, that that's huge.
Speaker 1:So you said three things, right? It's not just legal, but you talked about ethical. Moral. Where does the moral and ethical kind of question come into play where, you know, an officer might be like, technically this is legal, but we shouldn't do this. Do you have any story that you could share?
Speaker 2:Well, know what? The dilemma will always come with, like, example, I go back to like body cameras. That seems to be an issue where you just can't walk into a hospital, right? You're there. I'm there with family and it's an ER room and maybe it's a terrible thing.
Speaker 2:And then you're on camera all bloodied up. It's like, well, there's a privacy thing. There's an ethical dilemma. Yeah. You're trying to find maybe the crook that ran in there, but you can edit out those things.
Speaker 2:So there's there's a, an easier example of that perhaps, you know, and along the same things with with morality, or you're not looking to to spy on someone, in in a very private moment if, officer responds to a domestic, disturbance. Right? Everyone's quick to say, oh, the cops were awful, but alright. Turn on that body camera. And these two are fighting.
Speaker 2:Maybe the one has a black eye, the one has a bloody nose. You you have to show that, but it's in the context of the crime, the public safety, and to prove an innocence or guilt, or at least help get that way. You still have to do more detective work because obviously the medium is still, as you know, this is still two dimensional. Ran into this, in an incident when I was, working some undercover casework a hundred years ago. And the wire, you know, you have a wire on typically so you could record a conversation.
Speaker 2:The camera wasn't quite there, but it was always an option. You'd have juries that would contest it. Well, he looked like he was fine. Well, no, I was dealing with him and his eyes were bloodshot. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
Speaker 2:I knew this was going to be a problematic situation. So you have to combine the technology with the human interaction still. It'll never replace the human touch. It can help it, but sometimes it can, it can hurt it too. And that's the thing with body cameras.
Speaker 2:People rely on that sometimes too much, but the officers can testify to certain things. I'll say in the East one, PCP, if you're aware of that drug, horse tranquilizer in essence. And people would fight and they scream, oh, it was brutality. Well, you know, I may have put a few people into a hospital setting because they were on PCP. And he had no idea.
Speaker 2:Well, I had an exact idea. Body camera at night wouldn't have shown the perspiration. Again, the bloodshot eyes, the breath, the heart rate bouncing through the shirt because their heart palpitation, because the blood pressure rises. All these objective symptoms go back to the observation of the officer. Camera may not catch all that.
Speaker 2:Use it to help, again, morally, ethically, and the guide rails are there, but you're not relying on it totally to say, oh, that person should go to jail because I caught him on camera. You still have to do your detective work.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. What is the structure? Has the structure of kind of the investigative unit changed over the last ten years? Are we seeing more separation between field work and technical work because it's gotten so much more complicated?
Speaker 2:You know what, I'm gonna say not necessarily, but those who migrate into the investigative roles within their agencies typically are looking and they have shown the talent or the skill, the the knowledge, and the aptitude, more importantly, really to develop and and work that type of police work. Because, again, it's it's talking to people. You still ultimately have to interview victims of witnesses. Computer can't do that. AI can't do that.
Speaker 2:It can record the sterile conversation. But if there's some subtlety, maybe you indicate, or there's an indication that someone is being dishonest or nervous, you can probe, you can back off a little bit. That kind of skill set, it's still a a people oriented job. And that way the tech helps you, but it doesn't replace a lot of that, that good work that, that has to happen. So the investigator is actually probably one of the more well rounded, not that the patrol officer isn't, but they usually bring that patrol experience to the investigative side.
Speaker 2:And the more cases they deal with, the better they get, the better they are at, at at cutting through the, the the the chase to to get right to the heart of a matter.
Speaker 1:Appreciate that. Carlos, this has been so interesting. I have two last questions for you before we One wrap up the is, you know, what's the biggest myth that you would debunk kind of what the general public watch TV and like, you see these shows and it's like, no, that's not what it's like.
Speaker 2:Yes. So if I can just put my book up here, The BS Behind the Badge, it's on amazon.com, self published. It's a light read. Part of the stories that would go with that within the hour, like on a on a show, bad mouth, I don't want a bad mouth, a CSI show, but typical, the case is solved in an hour. The arrest is made, the interview, and they go to court and it's done.
Speaker 2:It might take years. As you mentioned earlier in this podcast, there's cases with blood samples and all sorts of other fluid samples that DNA really hasn't come to bear. And it's only happened in the last five years, really longer than that, but five years even better, touch DNA. Right? So you can get even more detail.
Speaker 2:Now they're realizing, wow, we can actually test this. And frankly, it's exonerated some people that shouldn't have gone to jail, but that it's also discovered people's like, this is our suspect. He's sitting in a jail across the country somewhere, but this is his DNA. That's the beauty of it, but that, that took decades to happen. So that's part of the, the BS behind the badge and that, and a whole bunch of other things like, like the accusations that patrol cops are always looking for the racial issue.
Speaker 2:And you can look at me as a Latino. My job was never to pull people over because they looked a certain way. I couldn't even probably really see them that well in the car anyway. All I saw was the back of a head, but it's the behavior that initiates the police contact. One of my earlier PCP contacts, and I mentioned this in the book, you know, at 2AM driving around at 10 miles an hour, it's a freezing evening, probably like in the mid, all four windows are rolled down and this guy's driving and he's got his blinker on.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking after about three or four blocks, something's wrong. He's gotta be drunk at least. There's an impairment in my mind. More than enough probable cause to pull him over. I pull him over right up when I get up on him.
Speaker 2:He is sweating like he's just been under a heat lamp for five hours. And again, it's freezing. I've got my wool jacket on and I said, let's have a conversation. Under the influence of PCP, he had a big batch of PCP in the back of his car. I actually ended up with a mild exposure of it.
Speaker 2:I was okay. I was off work for about a week and got back on. But this was in the days where, right, today I would have been challenged for pulling over a person of color driving a car at 2AM. But that's okay because that's the behavior. Those are the objective signs and symptoms.
Speaker 2:Again, legally, morally, ethically, I had the right to do what I did. That's probably a lot of the BS that cops have to deal with. These, these are people you want as your neighbors, as your kid's soccer coach. You know, not everybody's perfect. You know, the, the deaths, unfortunately, at the, at the hands of police, shooting throughout the year, maybe, I don't know, I think it's 50 or less.
Speaker 2:Do you know how many people die at the hands of medical professionals every year in this country? Conservative estimate, a hundred thousand people a year. We don't put body cameras on doctors and nurses, but the thirty or forty that died at the hands of cops, ah, we gotta put body cameras on them. We and I think too that emphasizes too, not that those other jobs aren't important, but the job that we had, it is. It's life and death.
Speaker 2:So it absolutely should be held to a unbelievably high standard and it should always be met.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's a really interesting comparison because, you know, there is an incredible large of, you know, medical suits against doctors for negligence. And yet you're right. Nobody ever thought of putting a camera in an OR. I mean, I don't know if that exists or not, but it's never come to my mind and I've never heard anybody So talk about it's interesting and the difference in numbers is definitely stark. Carlos, there's one more first of all, thank you so much for really, you know, sharing your story and this incredibly interesting conversation.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're welcome. I've enjoyed it a lot. There's one last question that is a very difficult one because it's very personal. If you had to go back to the most difficult part of your life, whether it was, you know, five years ago or twenty years ago, what is the advice that you would give to yourself?
Speaker 2:Frankly, it's the advice that I that I've lived with with my whole life is to be fair, keep an open mind because the minute you become closed minded, you you're out of this business. You cannot make these assumptions, especially in these life and death assumptions. Going back to, again, to someone reaching into their waistband. Okay. Well, could it be a gun?
Speaker 2:Do I kill them? Shoot them? No. But you have to wait a split second longer. And that's a difference between courage and fear.
Speaker 2:You know? The courageous part, you hang on. But should it be an issue where you have to take that life? You did it correctly with everything in your in your power and in your decision making. So really, the only advice I have is maintain your good character, your solid reasoning ability, and your wits about you, because this is a absolute contact sport.
Speaker 2:I know we consider ourselves peace officers, but truly you're you're a warrior first. The peace officer mission is there at the base. Recent shootings here, officers pulling over people, the domestic disturbance again, that seems to be the higher rate of call. I've had a gun put to my face in one of those situations, and we walked away. At the end of the day, didn't have to take that life.
Speaker 2:It came awfully close. We overcame it, but we went into the situation knowing this could be a reality versus I think there's a little bit of hesitancy, reticence on a lot of officers' behalfs now because they realized, oh, if I make that contact, I'm on the channel, whatever news or a camera's overhead or my boss is gonna say maybe I was a little too aggressive. I think, unfortunately, we're we're making our our our police force a little tentative, and that's what's gonna get men and women hurt and killed. They still need to be strong folks, be, again, moral, ethic, and legal on how they behave, but do it in a way where you come home at night and you cross that finish line, and it's worthwhile, and I get to meet folks like you at a chiefs conference.
Speaker 1:Carlos, thank you so much for joining the show and and sharing us what an impossible job it is. I appreciate you for joining today.
Speaker 2:You're welcome, sir. Look forward to perhaps another time. Have a good evening.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir.
Speaker 2:Take care. Bye.