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Chats with law enforcement experts and leaders
Hi, this is Sergeant Betsy Brantner Smith at the National Police Association, and this is the National Police Association Podcast. So I'm bringing on today a guy that really has some great innovations that I thought everyone, not just in the law enforcement profession, but everyone who supports their local law enforcement officer needed to learn about. He is a writer, he is a podcaster, he is a trainer, and he's the Chief of Police, so the sergeant here has to be careful about, you know, what she says, what she does. But I'm really excited to have him here. Chief Patrick Flannelly, welcome to the show.
Patrick Flannelly:Well, you very much for having me. It's it's an honor to be here and true to sergeant's nature. I've never had a sergeant really be too concerned about what they said to the chief. That was always your truth meter. Your truth meter always came from the sergeants.
Betsy Smith:Absolutely, and I have stood in front of the Chief many times, you know, to explain things that I said or did or other people did. But we're really grateful that you're taking the time to talk to us today because, you know, I reached out to you because you've really done a lot of fascinating work with law enforcement and you have some views that I think are so important to the profession because one of the things that you talk about is, you know, we talk a lot about officer wellness, but which you talk about, but you talk about physical wellness as well. And one of the things that we are seeing with police officers is we do, we get sick, we get injured, and we haven't done a very good job of treating police officers like athletes, and yet we expect them to perform like athletes, not just physically, but mentally. You've done some work, you've done some research, and you do training on this kind of aspect. All right, Chief, before we get into all that, I have to ask you the question I ask every cop that comes on my show.
Betsy Smith:Why'd you become a cop?
Patrick Flannelly:Yeah. Probably like a lot of us in law enforcement, it was a little bit in my family. I'm the youngest of eight. I come from a big Irish Catholic family from, the East Coast, Scranton. My mom's dad was a police officer.
Patrick Flannelly:And then one of her brothers became a Pennsylvania state trooper, and two of their children became troopers in Pennsylvania. My dad did a lot of work with police officers and worked with the state police and the FBI from time to time. So it was just kind of an interest that I developed at a young age. And I went into the Air Force right out of high school, went into the security police, and came back to Purdue University where I studied law and society, and then started with the Lafayette PD in 1995.
Betsy Smith:Excellent. And you eventually became Chief of Police?
Patrick Flannelly:Yeah, wasn't the plan. It was just kind of one of those things where I really had no ambitions to be a Chief, but I'm kind of a tinkerer and I have an insatiable curiosity. I used to drive people crazy. I was that person who was always asking why? Why do we do it this way?
Patrick Flannelly:And eventually, I just learned if if you want change, then, sometimes you just have to create change on your own and find the right people to align with and I was fortunate, had some great bosses that I worked with. Yeah, then one day I found myself sitting in the office like, oh my gosh, what have I done to myself? What have I done to myself?
Betsy Smith:You know, and in in law enforcement, especially law enforcement leadership, very often, if you're that guy who who asks questions, why are we doing it this way? What what's the number one answer we often hear, right? That's the way we've always done it. Did you get past that?
Patrick Flannelly:Well, again, I think it just goes back to this curiosity that I would have. And if something didn't make sense to me or if I saw a better way to do something, I would just research it and I would call people and that's the one thing that we all have as cops is good networks. You gotta have a guy, right? Like, if you're in Chicago PD, everyone's got a guy. So, you you find people that know and you call them and you ask them and yeah, just kinda bludgeons from there or burdens from there.
Patrick Flannelly:I I, you know, photography, I was a crime scene photographer as a young cop at the at the verge of this technological change from film to digital cameras. And I know we're gonna maybe talk a little bit about technology, but I, you know, I was walk going out on crime scenes with a Polaroid camera and I would have to leave my 35 millimeter back in back in the lab and we only use the 35 millimeter for, know, those really important crime scenes. Well, why? Because film is expensive. It takes time to develop.
Patrick Flannelly:You have to do work in the dark room or send it off to a lab and I was like, you know, we have these digital cameras now that you can take a picture. You can take as many as you want and they're free and people told me, oh, you can't do that and that's the that's the last thing you ever wanna say to me is you can't do that because I'm gonna say, why not? And I'm gonna find a way and I'm gonna come back and I'll say, well, here's here's how we can do this And yeah, so I started our digital imaging program for our police department. And yeah, that was in, I think, 1999, right when the Which was
Betsy Smith:cutting edge in 1999 for most, you know, midsize agencies.
Patrick Flannelly:Well, you'd go, you'd go, you'd send, you'd get dispatched to like a domestic or something like that. And you're going, you're trying to take a picture and you're trying to capture a red eye or a bruise. And if you're too close, the the flash on the Polaroid camera would wash it out. And if you're too far away, you can't see it. So you wind up taking, like, 10 Polaroids to try to capture one good image.
Patrick Flannelly:And I and I was like that's more expensive than taking out the digital or well it wouldn't even been the digital then but just the SLR with the film.
Betsy Smith:And it's also terrible for your victim to have to stand there and sit there while you try again and again to capture, you know, what's going on in one of the worst moments of their lives.
Patrick Flannelly:And we didn't train people to be photographers. So if you, in most of these cases of a crime scene photographer wouldn't even get called out. It was just patrol officer who, you know, the shift commander might have to run back to headquarters, grab the camera, and and run it out but people didn't have cameras in their cars. You had so much. And it wasn't that long ago.
Patrick Flannelly:It was '19. That was 1999. I'd already been on the department going on five years. And to think about where technology has evolved from there to today, it's yeah, it's it's the young officers can't it's hard for them to even fathom what it's like and II know I hate to sound like that curmudgeonly old guy like
Betsy Smith:back in my day. Yeah. Yeah. And but it but it's so true. And the the the technological changes that we've seen in this profession, and certainly that I have seen, I you know, I started, you know, again, now I'm gonna sound like a thousand years old, but, you know, we had portable radios and and the, you know, the the computer was back at the station, you know, we had no computer in our car, you know we didn't have you know we had we carried around little fingerprint kits and again you know forensics was a very much a fledgling part of the profession if you would and you know of course now you know it's it's a it's the wild west out there with everything and we'll talk about this later from you know AI and things like that everybody's got a smartphone every word so connected and there's good there's good and bad to all that but but before all that you two things you know first and foremost you really believe in education and I want to talk about that just for a minute because you know we hear you know we're at a time in our profession where it's hard a lot of agencies, not all of them, but a lot of agencies are still having a hard time recruiting cops and at one time a lot of agencies, like where I came from, know, you couldn't even apply without a bachelor's degree.
Betsy Smith:And then you had to have a master's before you could get promoted, things like that. We situations like the FBI, National Academy, Northwestern, where I went, all that. And now there's a lot of debate about education because it is hard to recruit police officers. Are we going to wait until somebody has this perfect education and all that? Talk to me about education in law enforcement for a minute.
Patrick Flannelly:Well, I mean, my personal stance is everybody benefits from more education. Now, the question becomes, should it be a requirement or a mandate? And I think that really depends more on the individual and their ability to learn and adaptability. So, when you're testing candidates and when you're looking at candidates, sometimes you might be better off with a 27 or 28 year old who's lived life a little bit versus a 21 year old fresh out of college who's never even had a job before.
Betsy Smith:So one of your passions is fitness, know, and we talk a lot about officer wellness from a mental health perspective, but I want to talk about officer wellness from a physical perspective, not just physical fitness, but and we were talking about this before the show started that we're seeing police officers either while they're on the job or, like me, after they retire, diagnosed with all kinds of, whether it's autoimmune diseases, joint issues, things like that. And that's something that you talk about. You train, you study. Talk about keeping cops physically well.
Patrick Flannelly:Well, the chips are stacked against us when you take on a a career as a first responder particularly for police officers, night shift is part of the job. So, disrupted sleep patterns that interrupts that a normal life so to speak when you have families which makes it a little bit harder to follow maybe a a nutrition plan or eat, you know, have a regular schedule for when you're gonna eat, what you're gonna eat, and we know that you're gonna experience trauma when you're out on the street. It may not be personal trauma. It may be the trauma that you're experiencing among others but there is a residual there and I would, I like to tell people all the time, I really just kinda got lucky. I got lucky because I stumbled into a few things personally.
Patrick Flannelly:I just had these epiphanies as I found information that was helping me where I really started to dive into the research and I realized like, wow, there's a lot more to I came from the fitness side and there's a lot more to just fitness than just exercising and having if I if I eat right, if I eat the right foods in combination with this, then, I get better results and when I get better results in the gym, I actually feel better and then, it actually helps me sleep or conversely, if I'm not sleeping well, I find it hard. I found it harder to get to the gym and get a workout in and then and then it made it really hard to, make good choices when it was come, you know, when it came time to eat and through this kind of path of self discovery and thankfully, even like the early works of like John Belante and you know, he wrote Dying for the Job and it like, you know, as a quick aside, like and he also, you know, ran the B cop study and for listeners that haven't, if you haven't read that study, you really need to get your hands on it and his book Dying for the Job because this is this is information that's been out there for thirty years and our outcomes are not getting any better and I think ultimately, the epiphany is that the the body is a system and I'm a systems thinker.
Patrick Flannelly:I like, you know, especially when you get to administrative levels and and policing, can't just think about the individual. You have to think about how the individual fits within the whole system and the body is no different. The brain and the stomach and your physical preparedness, they're all interconnected. They're all interrelated and if you neglect one area, you neglect all areas. It's gonna impact the whole system.
Patrick Flannelly:So, taking a taking a whole body approach with the best information that's out there, the newest information, and again, being a lifelong learner, I think helps and being adaptable helps because information changes as the science changes and we learn more, we we have to adapt and incorporate what new information is telling us. So, yeah II can ramble for days about like all of this stuff. So, I want to try to keep it as brief as I can but in a nutshell, yes, if you if you emotionally, if you're feeling, if you're struggling a little bit, if you anxiety, maybe a little bit of depression, you know, one of the the top I don't want to call it a cure because there's no cure but treatment for that is exercise. You know, exercise over the long term has better results than pharmaceutical interventions. It doesn't mean that pharmaceutical interventions aren't appropriate.
Patrick Flannelly:It just means that you have to consider both.
Betsy Smith:I know I would talk to my officers about, hey, you gotta get to the gym. And they're like, are you kidding me? You know, I just worked a twelve hour shift. I got kids. I got this.
Betsy Smith:I got that. I don't have time to spend two hours at the gym or an hour at the gym or whatever. And I would always tell them, then go out when you go home, go play basketball with your kids, walk the dog with them, you know, do something, go play, you know, when you go to their soccer practice, you take them to soccer practice, jog around the soccer field while they're at soccer practice, anything to get some kind of exercise. A lot of times I think cops think when you're talking about exercise, I've got to have a specific program at a specific gym. I think the same goes for nutrition.
Betsy Smith:And now we're learning, right? We've had the food pyramid flipped its, flipped upside down, which is appropriate. We're talking about inflammation and what you can do with diet. There's so much to talk about, right?
Patrick Flannelly:This is what I spend. I can spend eight hours with you talking about this. I can spend forty hours with you talking about this. And it it it's it might be the most important thing that any law enforcement leader does for themselves and their organizations. One of the one of the classes I teach, I call it lead yourself first and the philosophy behind that is that we police officers are a servant natured, right?
Patrick Flannelly:They they this idea of servant leadership, I think runs deep in our profession. It's because we're helpers and we wanna help and so what tends to happen is we put other people before ourselves. We'll run ourselves into the ground and really kinda run the run the tank dry and then when someone needs us, we're not at our best and and so it it really does take a little bit of, it's not selfish to carve out thirty minutes, forty five minutes to go get a good workout in and we we can it has to be individualized as well too. Twenty minutes, a couple days a week can be sufficient but then on your days off and other days, you gotta make up for that. I'd like to sit here and say, you can just go for a walk around the block a couple times and that's sufficient.
Patrick Flannelly:Well, that might be good for the day. It might be good for the moment. That may be all you can do and that's okay but there's gonna have to be a time where two days a week where you're hitting, you know, these maximum aerobic thresholds where you're running yourself. It doesn't mean you have to go for an hour but twelve to sixteen minutes in a very high intensity burst of exercise and then a couple days a week, you've you've gotta be lifting heavy weights and of course, then, we could even talk about things like jiu jitsu and ground fighting and and other things like that that just help, you know bring confidence to the street when you're out there and and you have to go hands on with people. I mean, I I you know, coming from a I I was really just a strong fitness guy and I was kind of one of those, you know, get in the gym, workout, and and not, I didn't meet necessarily everybody where they were and so sometimes that rubs people the wrong way as as I as I got a little wiser, as I got a few years under my belt, it's kinda like, okay, let's approach this from a from a different perspective and and so, one of the ways that I try to convince officers whether they're young or old to really invest in themselves is to take a look around them and look at the profession as a whole and when you see the physical effects of the job right in front of you, you can't deny the fact that that same thing is happening to you.
Patrick Flannelly:So, what I mean by that is eighty percent of the profession is overweight. Forty percent is obese. Twenty percent is morbidly obese. And we can make jokes about, you know, the cops eating the donuts and stuff like that and I put some of those in my slide presentations, you know, Chief Wiggum, you know, eating the donuts off the barrel of his gun but I I like to joke about it in a way but then I also I I want people to reflect a little bit and ask the question, well, why? Why is that?
Patrick Flannelly:Why are eight out of ten cops overweight? They're not that way when they leave the academy and sure, less than two percent of police departments have a mandated physical fitness standard as a job qualifying standard. We should change that but before we change that, we have to change the cultural mindset and understanding of why it's important in the first place. Sure. Violent assaults, surviving violent assaults is a clear and present danger to an officer when they're out on the street, but we're dying at cardiovascular disease rates twenty five times that of assault.
Patrick Flannelly:So, you you're 25 times more likely to die from a heart attack than you are from being assaulted on the street. And do you take that a step further to to emotional and mental well-being 12 times the rate to suicide. We're losing officers at 12 times the rate to suicide as we are to violent assaults. So, that should raise a big question. Why?
Patrick Flannelly:And you know, I went to the listening sessions back in 2015 at the White House. I was very fortunate to participate in some of those and there was great that came out of that. The sixth pillar in the twenty first Century Policing Initiative, Officer Safety and Wellness. We had a huge emphasis placed on mental and emotional well-being. We need to bring in resources, EAP, all of these things that, yes, we need as police officers but you know, since then, we haven't seen any improvement in in our suicide rates and some some data will tell you that it's actually gotten worse and our obesity rates haven't gotten better.
Patrick Flannelly:They've actually gotten worse. So, as a profession and as leaders, we need to we need to take a really hard look at that and ask the question, why? Like and as my friend, Doctor Jim Greenwald talks about who II work with frequently, he's like, you gotta get upstream, find out where the bodies are falling into the damn river. We just can't pulling people out of the River. We've gotta find out what's causing this and we we feel really strongly that if we can educate officers when they're young and it really doesn't matter any point in your career, it's not too late.
Patrick Flannelly:Doesn't matter if you're, I I've had officers lose over a 100 over a 100 pounds and get off light duty. Get back, you know, get back to work. Just from a simple blood test, beginning to understand what's going on, We educate them on this thing called insulin resistance and metabolic dysregulation and we show you that, hey, look, you're a cop. You chose to be a cop but you didn't choose to die young and your family didn't choose for you to retire and and then spend the next, you know, ten to twelve years before an early mortality suffering from an injury or debilitating illness that could have been prevented from a lifestyle change. An intervention at at some point.
Patrick Flannelly:So, it's a long way to say that we now know we have the keys. We we have the data. We have the understanding of what it takes to keep cops healthy. It doesn't matter if you're working eights, tens, or twelves. Doesn't matter if you're working seven on, seven off.
Patrick Flannelly:The, you know, the formula is there and it's gonna be individualistic to you. You don't have to worry about what what works for somebody else. We can show you a path that helps you figure it out for yourself what's gonna work and what's not and it's all data driven and I'm a data guy. I'm a technology guy. I did, I, I mean, I like, I like to know that if I'm gonna implement a plan or if I'm gonna do something, I wanna know if it works and I wanna be able to show the efficacy of of what I'm doing and why and you know, for on my on my own personal journey, you know, I had a I had a case when I was a a young recruit.
Patrick Flannelly:I got put with an FTO that was he was not my FTO. Mine was gone for a night. But he used to like to go to this gas station and hang out with an old Vietnam Veteran that was in there and they would smoke and drink coffee and eat donuts and you know, I'm a young whippersnapper like, I wanna go out and crime and he, all he wants to do is hang out in the gas station and I kind of, you know, maybe got out over my my skis a little bit and told him as much as a as a as a boot and he didn't like that and he told me he's like, you know what, Flannelly? He's like, someday, you're just gonna be as fat, miserable, and unhappy as the rest of us. And you know, I to this day, I thank him for saying that to me because not only did it piss me off and I was already upset for having to sit there but you know, that was that was a moment where I was like, you know what?
Patrick Flannelly:No, I'm not going to be like that and I can say now that you know, thirty years later, at age 59, I'm I'm running high rocks races. I've been a four time qualifier for the Spartan Deco World Championships. I do the CrossFit Masters. I'm I'm physical. I play golf.
Patrick Flannelly:I I'm doing all the things that I dreamed about that I would do in retirement and it's and it didn't happen by accident. It was very intentional. It was choice by choice, day by day, week by week, month by month over the span of my career.
Betsy Smith:See, and don't you think it would ultimately as a recruitment tool to let young potential officers know that we are going to give a damn about your health and your physical well-being, and there's things that we are going to do as a profession. I feel like the fire profession does a better job of this, at least testing, you know, with the testing with law enforcement officers, other than kind of testing our hearing and our vision, there wasn't a lot of physical testing where they tracked, like you said, doing our blood work and things like that. I can't tell you how many retired officers I know that become, and I'm one of them, cancer victims. And when you look at the things we are exposed to, you know, and that if maybe we did a better job of tracking that, I mean, there's just so and, again, we could go on for forty hours here because there is so much new science, and science does keep changing, not just with nutrition, but with our whole physicality, right?
Patrick Flannelly:Yes. Yes. And, you know, cancer rates, I didn't even touch on that. Cancer rates are on the on the increase in the profession. Even if you take out the the 09:11, bump from from the first responders, at ground zero, which, again, that should that should be raising the red flag.
Patrick Flannelly:And I do think wellness has become an industry and it's become kind of a there are a lot of charlatans out there. There's a lot of there's a lot of people that also want to help too and I think people come to this with a lot of great intentions and I was talking with II met Matt Dominic a few weeks ago and you know, he was on my on my podcast and he's he was one of the first people that did a study using heart rate variability measures over twenty years ago and if people don't know what that is, heart rate variability is something that you can capture from a from a whoop. My actually my whoop is here. My aura ring. I'm doing wear testing stuff too.
Patrick Flannelly:So, it it tells you if you're if your body is emotionally regulated or dysregulated, that's a very simplistic way of saying it. We're it would need a little bit more time to explain it but we can measure it every single day. You can wake up every single day or in my case for twenty years, I work nights for twenty years. I can wake up and look and see what my recovery score is and you know, I'm I'm in is this a day I can go hit it hard or is this a day that I need to maybe step back a little bit, take a little bit easy, change my workout for today. Ask myself why I didn't get a good night sleep.
Patrick Flannelly:And while I do think that we are getting better and and the information is is reaching a little bit further. I think we're still we're still have these issues where we're trying to silo everything like if I'm a if I'm an EAP counselor, I want to try to fix you through counseling,
Betsy Smith:right?
Patrick Flannelly:Like if I'm a fitness guy, I want to get you in the gym. I want to crush you in the gym because I know if, hey, if I can crush you in here, then you're going to be better on the street and you're going to be fit and and there's a great book written by a guy named Phil Mathotone who is not trained triathletes. Yeah. And the big book of fitness and health. And that was one of the books I read early along with Barry Sears's book, The Zone Diet.
Patrick Flannelly:That was the first time I'd ever heard anything about insulin and glycogen and what happens in my pancreas when I ingest carbohydrates or sugars, you know, which are the same thing and that the body doesn't know the difference and you know, it's it's just it's just a way of saying that you have to you have to look at all of the systems. You have to treat the body as a whole system. You you can't is great Glassman, the founder of CrossFit said, you know, he had put it best, right? And and probably the most simple way, you can never out exercise poor nutrition. And and even if you eat perfectly, right, you still have to be out.
Patrick Flannelly:You still have to exercise. So you have these people that fall in these different camps like I don't want to exercise. So I'm just going to watch what I eat. Well, now you've just you've neglected a part of the human system, the DNA that was, you know, that's 2,000,000 years old that evolved on movement. So no, it just doesn't work that way.
Patrick Flannelly:And know, we could spend a lot of time talking about our food, what's in our food, you know, the great, you know, finally, we got that food pyramid fixed. And it's it's particularly important for first responders because, you know, we we primarily in our program, we use a a low carbohydrate approach. I mean, we're not dogmatic about what we have people eat. There's there's a million different ways to teach people how to eat and to do it healthy. The most important thing that any nutrition program has to be supported by is data and is it working not just am I losing weight but are you know, metabolically, are you healthy?
Patrick Flannelly:What's happening in your labs which you know, you know, are with, are you, is your insulin under control? So, yeah, again, I like to really take deep dives into that, but I guess the big takeaway is for, you know, in policing, we've spent a lot of time on on bringing in equipment like we got gun guys. We got the tactical guys. We got the fighters. You know, we got we've got all this stuff.
Patrick Flannelly:You know, everybody wants the gear. Everybody wants the equipment but the most important thing that you bring to work with you every night is this, the six inches behind, you know, between your ears because that's what makes everything else go. It's your decision making center. It's the it's the processing system and if you're if you're not optimized from a holistic perspective, it doesn't matter what kind of gun you've got on your belt. It doesn't matter if you've got a drop leg holster or a regular holster.
Patrick Flannelly:Doesn't matter if you have shiny buttons on your uniform shirt or not. Like, we find all of these silly distractions and II think there's a part of us that knows like, well, I'm I'm doing this because I'm the one thing I know that I have to do is just really uncomfortable.
Betsy Smith:Gosh, I wish we're gonna have to bring you back for more of this. But tell people where they can find the podcast, where they can find you, where they can find your training and your research and give me all of it.
Patrick Flannelly:Yeah. So the Comptimizer Podcast, we're on all of the you know, wherever you listen to your podcast. And I'll tell you, I'll just point you to a couple episodes that I think are really important. One was with Doctor. Jim Greenwald and Gary Topps.
Patrick Flannelly:Gary Topps is is one of the leading science researchers in the world who's he wrote the book, The Case Against Sugar. He wrote the book, Why We Get Fat. And Doctor. Greenwald is a is a former orthopedic surgeon who, was was tasked with helping the Reno Police Department try to understand why officers were having so many cardiac events and why their occupational care costs were so high. This is over twenty years ago.
Patrick Flannelly:This is not something that just happened. So listen to that episode, or listen to the one with, Chief Cory Boxle and Officer Travis Bickel, because those are I ran them through our metabolic reset program. So go there and then just you can find me on LinkedIn. It's Patrick Flannelly at LinkedIn. And then I have the Comptimize or Substack where I basically take, if you don't want to listen to a two or three hour podcast, I well, I'm generally about ninety minutes, but I write about what we discussed for the people that don't that would rather read than listen, you know, which is me sometimes like I consume everything, but that that's the best way to get in touch with me and find me.
Patrick Flannelly:Yeah. Think that's it.
Betsy Smith:Perfect. That's perfect. I I'm gonna definitely have you back to talk about more of this, but I cannot thank you enough for spending all this time with us today. And if you'd like more information about the National Police Association, you can visit us at nationalpolice.org.
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