The differences between the local police and Secret Service connection

Chasing justice is on.

Hey everybody, Lieutenant Joe here. So, what's big in the world right now? What's important for people who are under stress, specifically our first responders, but look at all of us. We are all under stress in today's world, right, with what's going on out there. It's horrific, the things that are happening.

So, as you all know, I teach and train police officers, and school people, and business people. And as I'm looking across the world, I'm saying that the whole idea of wellness is a new concept now that we're all talking about. Everybody's, wellness for this, and wellness for life. And the more I looked into it, the more I found it is legitimate. We know in law enforcement, the number one job, usually of people who kill themselves, either during their career or afterwards, is law enforcement.

And after that, it's dentists, usually, which I don't get the connection, but that's usually how it goes. So as I started reaching out into the world to try and find people that could talk about this and kind of give us some information on what this is all about, I found my guest right here, Mr. Butch Stevenson. Butch will give you his background, but he's retired law enforcement, and I've known him for quite a while. He is a professional.

He has a heart of gold, and he believes in this, and that's what I think is important. I know a lot of people have a tendency to hear wellness and think, oh, some other touchy, feely mush and this and that. But the reality is we're learning more and more about the stressors of life, and these things are important to understand, because if we don't understand them correctly and deal with them, it can lead to tragic results in people's lives. So, without any further ado, Butch, welcome aboard.

Let me hear about your career and what brought you to this point that you're an expert here.

And while I was there, I ended my last seven years in training and accreditation. I spent 15 plus years as an instructor at the police academy and developing other programs to deliver for in-service. So during all that, I started going to some of the trainings for resiliency. And eventually, what really got me into helping more and more was back, it'll be 11 years before September 5th, when I got a phone call from my sister that she and my mother had found, my other sister had died by suicide and they found her. And she always had her issues.

We knew it, but I mean, not that I didn't know it was a problem, obviously I've always known it was a problem, but that's when it really hit home and sometimes you need that. And in law enforcement, as you know, you might not know somebody directly that has done that to themselves on the job, but we know someone who knows someone. So it's so prevalent and my goal, once that started happening and they saw what I was doing and the programs I was doing on the outside, the Sheriff's Office, my sergeant at the time, the sheriff, all the board members, sheriff on sending me to different trainings. And eventually going to Ballard for Blue Training and then moving on, I ended up, I was a founding member of a law enforcement suicide prevention task force at Monmouth University with the School of Social Work. And it culminated with, before I retired, I went to, became the resiliency program officer, which was a new concept in New Jersey that's taken off and became a master resiliency trainer.

And that was a program that was developed and spearheaded by a few local agencies in Burlington County, the Burlington County Prosecutor's Office and the Department of Criminal Justice. And it was, we went to our first training for it and it was live streamed around the country because we were the first state to do it that required law enforcement to receive this training.

So that got me on board and I started doing presentations all throughout that time for various community organizations, service organizations, youth organizations. And I worked with the Society of Prevention of Teen Suicide, the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, and not just doing presentations, but also promoting them and setting them up. So that's where it got me. My goal is, and when people ask me why I do it, you know, can you really make a lot of money on it? It's not about making the money on it.

If I can help one parent or one sibling to go through what I saw my parents go through, or what I went through, then I'm fine with it. I know that's what I'm here for. That's what I do for.

And I say, does anybody know anybody who's killed themselves? And everybody, every class, somebody raises their hands. And it's either it was a family member or another officer or somebody. And I know in my life, there are three officers. I know that I knew personally that killed themselves.

I get it. Not everybody does. But, like you said, New Jersey's now making everybody do it, which I think is fantastic. We're trying to solve this problem of officers killing themselves and anybody, you know, who just don't get this kind of suffering mentally that people will cause them to do this. That I said, hey, can you, can you make a class out of this that our company can put out there?

And Butch is doing that. So hopefully this this upcoming fall, we're going to be able to put out his class and he can maybe save some lives. You know, that's one of the things that's always important that we're trying to do is save people's lives. So first of all, I want to thank you, Butch, for being somebody who's involved in that. You know, as somebody who went through a law enforcement career and still deal with these cops, it's great that there's people like you out there that do that.

Now, one thing when I heard you talking, you talked about the Monmouth County Sheriff's Office and that's run by Sheriff Sean Golden. Now, I know Sean. for a long time. He was patrol officer, went around, became an elected official, and he's now been the Monmouth County Sheriff. He is an absolutely amazing individual.

He really is. You talk about, you know, there's a lot of people that say they can do things and lead. And then there's somebody who really can. Not only that, he's an administrator. Just absolutely amazing.

I got a phone call out of the blue one day, and he says, hey, Joe, why don't you come down to the sheriff's office? And I want to show you around the new place because he built this amazing facility.

He goes, well, you're a training guy. You know, you're out there in the world and you're writing. And, you know, I want you to come and see this. So I said, I came and took the tour. And to a person, they love this guy.

The cops, the clerical, everybody, they love this guy. And the facility was amazing. So for him to open that door for you, to get you trained so that you can do that, I got to give him his kudos because, like you said, he's a guy that follows through. He's got vision for the future. I just couldn't be more impressed with him.

And I just want to make sure when you brought.

I mean, aside from being a police officer, he was a paramedic for 20 plus years. So he understands the stressors of life and the job.

Right. That's what you're dealing with.

And that's what resiliency is. It's the ability to overcome and deal with your stressors and how to use it to maybe grow because of it. So that's where the concept started coming from. At Monmouth University, we were part of it. The group we developed there, we were part of.

It wasn't like we were trying to reinvent the wheel. We know there was programs out there to help, and there's been programs for years. New Jersey also at the forefront, with 186 Cop to Cop, which is an amazing organization. And our thing was, police weren't using it. We have these programs out there.

Why aren't police using it and why aren't they?

And we found that, you know, we sent out surveys and we started finding out. it's like you could probably answer the question right now. Cops see it as what you would see as a weakness. They would see as a weakness, or what used to be told, the old mindset, suck it up, deal with it. But the thing was, you know, and while I was developing the program and going through the different classes, suck it up, isn't wrong.

It isn't. We said to learn how to suck it up. And that's how we have to learn. So the resiliency, what it does, is it works on a mindset, you know, you can't have a fixed mindset where you have to be willing to change. Not everybody, not everybody, is open to that, you know, like I said, old school mentality.

So once you develop a growth mindset, that's when you can really start learning resiliency, because not everybody knows it and I didn't know it.

So, you know, the main reason was, like I said, is to overcome your stressors. And the first time I ever had to talk to somebody about something I was ordered to when I worked for the Interlaken police and one of the neighboring towns had a person that had an incident with a woodchipper, we'll say, and didn't survive. And they called us all in to talk to a stress management team. And that's when it first. it first started hitting me about how to deal with stressors.

All right. I dealt with it.

So, basically, with the program that I'm doing, it goes over, you know, what resiliency is, why we need it, you know, I mean, we do need it. And it's like I said, it's not just about the job. I mean, first responders, I mean, emergency preparedness workers, nurses, doctors, construction workers that are working at sites like Ground Zero or other organizations, you know, we see things that, you know, not the religion, but God didn't create people to see.

And I think that was a perfect thing. God didn't mean us to see this. The first article that I ever wrote, I always want to be a writer, I want to write, I want to write, I want to write, you know, I just had this in me that I felt like I needed to express myself. Right. So the first thing I wrote, I knew, I knew an officer, that two officers that killed themselves.

And I was close with these people. And it shocked me. I mean, it's like I never. I never had those kind of thoughts. But I wrote this article called The Tragic Toll of Police Work, and I sent it in cold to the FBI magazine.

Next thing, I know, we get a call back from the editor. Hey, this is great. We're going to publish this in our worldwide magazine. Now, you talk about being like amazed, like, OK, well, I thought that was amazing until I started getting emails from people across the world whose family members were in law enforcement. My mother killed herself.

My father killed some of my brother. It was overwhelming to me to realize that there's that there's such under underpinning for this kind of thing. Right. And over the course of my career, I've been to a bunch of traumatic scenes where I started to realize very clearly that the things we see in law enforcement, especially, and the military, are so overwhelming and not God intended for you to see. You see the horrors of what people do to each other.

It was like a cancer. And I could see some people being affected by seeing these horrible things. And I start to realize that that cancer builds up and up and up, because what do we do? You know, you talked about, you know, buck up, but we make jokes about it because we're trying to relieve that stress. And if real people that were not law enforcement ever went to a crime scene and they heard the things that cops were saying, they would think we're crazy or sick people.

But I started to realize that the jokes people were making were really just a way to deal with what they're looking at.

But his thing was he liked to drink and he liked to go to the Hooters place and look at the girls and he would spend his whole paycheck. like every day. He would go over there whenever he got paid, he'd spend all his money. And one night he's riding his bicycle home and he's going between two parts of a strip mall. He hits a speed bump and he goes down, bangs his skull, cracks his skull and dies right there.

You know, you talk about a pitiful kind of guy. Right. So I get there, detective, the patrolman get there and they call me out and I come up on the scene. And there's this veteran, dusty, old dude, patrol officer who was very experienced. He was a very, very good cop and two younger patrol officer.

And I show up and he goes, here. you go, detective. Look who we got here. And I looked and I realized what happened. And you could see the beer bottle and how he hit his head and on.

So the first thing that I did for me as a human being in that instance, even though this guy was an air do well kind of guy.

I said a prayer for him, you know, I'm a Catholic, so I crossed myself and I said a prayer. And this dusty old dude looks at me, he goes. You're saying a prayer for him.

And that just shocked me, like I wasn't used to that kind of, and I said, dude, that might be the only prayer this guy ever gets in his life. His mother just lost a son, his brothers and sisters lost their brother and sister. I'm saying a prayer with that, the two young guys that were standing there next to me, they crossed themselves and they prayed and he looked and he goes, oh, now I got three of you. Right. And that was a defining moment for me, because I talked to the two young guys later on.

And I said, you know, I know, you saw that whole thing, with the senior referent kind of guy standing there, but why did you cross yourself? And they said, well, we agreed with you. We thought it was the right thing. But it's kind of hard to do in front of the senior guy. And that, I think, opened my eyes to this whole thing that we do not recognize the pains and the traumas we see and put them in the right place, because if not, they will last with you forever.

They build up and build up and build up. And then our people kill themselves and it'll kill you.

I mean, they didn't show any signs. Right. I mean, to go, I mean, Robin Williams, who saw that coming? You know, you don't know. And you have to understand.

what people don't realize when it comes to suicide is that when? so the state PBA, they have Dr. Staff and Dr. Pizarro, who run staff, they're psychologists.

And at the time when my sister died, I was working for the state park police. And my old delegate from when I was with the Interlaken Asbury PBA, Gene Dello, at a PBA meeting, state PBA meeting goes, hey, have we talked to Dr. Staff? And I said, no, because you really talked to Dr. Staff.

And I was, honestly, I was angry at that point. I was angry at my sister. How can you do that? You know, I was, you know, I can do it to my parents, to my nieces, to my daughter, my nephews. So anyway, I talked to Dr.

Staff. And one thing I realized is, when people kill themselves a lot of time, it's they see as a selfless act. They see themselves as a burden because of all their stress. And maybe they're bringing people down and maybe they're causing issues. That's why they do it.

And it's because the stuff's building up inside. They don't know how to deal with it. So they think they're kind of giving their stressors to other people and they want to stop it. And that's why this is so important to learn how to do this. So you can, you know, use mindfulness to clear your head, to overcome things, how to build a resiliency mindset.

Now, there's a very famous guy who tried to kill himself by stepping off the bridge in San Francisco, the Golden Gate, very famous place for killing yourself. My wife's good friend, her husband, stepped off the Golden Gate Bridge and killed himself many years ago. And we're told that the reason people use that bridge is because when the fog comes in, you can't see anything. You just step off the bridge and off into eternity, you go. You know, there's that that impact instant.

I guess there's some pain, but then you're gone. And this young man was stressed out and decided that ending his life was the right thing to end his pain or whatever. And he jumped off and he survived. And he goes around. now he's on the Internet.

You can look him up. Guy, who survived suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. And basically what he says now is that he had so much pain and so much baggage that this was the only answer for him. And he got up on there and he was glad that he was going to clear it out of his head. He couldn't deal with no more.

And he stepped off. and he said, the very second that I stepped off, he regretted it. I regretted it. And I couldn't believe I did it. And I think in that lesson.

In that lesson for all of us is to understand that if someone is feeling suicidal, having suicidal ideations, thinking about it. You can save them or help them save themselves. if you can intervene and get them help before they do it. Right. Because I guess, you know, putting a gun in your mouth, there's no regrets.

Afterwards, you pull the trigger and you're gone. But this young man's point was the minute I stepped off, I wish I hadn't done it. So there is, there is. there are things that can help intervention. What you're doing is important.

Those parents, that's going to be very, very difficult for them.

You know, I think about our own area here, you know, and I don't want to. I don't like to mention names of that, but there was a big case here where a local baseball coach was accused of molesting some boys from the time they were young till the time they got to high school. And one boy finally came forward when it was bothering him so much, and that got out in the community. And it was a very high end community. Everybody knew each other.

And half the people were angry with the boy for saying this because they love the baseball coach. And the other half were incensed because this baseball coach would do this. And what we saw come out of that was what they call a suicide cluster of teenagers. This, this is a real thing that happened.

And then it wasn't a couple of months after that, that another boy. And then, finally, they realized we have to stop this. There's six or seven boys that came forward. We have got to intervene here because this is a suicide cluster. So young people are susceptible to that.

So if that's going on in your community, you see that happening. There is a danger there, wouldn't you say?

I did some brief training with them at a high school. And the clinical director there, Susan Talone, she was in mental health forever. And she wanted to get out. She's like, you know what? She was a nurse.

So she became a school nurse for school. And because she wanted out of the mental health thing, figured I'll work with kids. Well, it turned out that school had a suicide cluster start happening. And boom, boom. And they found, because of how susceptible one person does.

OK, well, the next one does it. Oh, my God. I can't believe my friend just did that. And my other friend just did that. So now it's like bowling pins.

And I hate to use an analogy like that, but that's exactly what it was. So if you start seeing something where kids are having it, I mean, like I said, the mindset of suck it up is fine, but you got to teach them how to suck it up. And when someone comes forward with, God forbid, something like you were just talking about, I'm pretty sure. I know which instinct you were talking about. I remember that going on, you know, whether you're mad at the kid or not, because, you know, you love the coach, you know, I would never lay blame on somebody, you know, but you pretty much help push that kid to where he was at by accused of being mad at or just going off about him.

They intervened and stopped the other boys from hurting themselves. But what was terrible was that the first boy who killed himself a year later, his father committed suicide from the stress of dealing with everything that was going on and his son killing himself. And you'd have to say that that mom was then at great risk. And I know there was intervention for her to help her out. But when we, when we look at these kind of things, you know, when I do the crisis intervention class and I say people don't, they're not in their right mind, they're thinking this is the right thing.

And you have to be really careful. So some of the things that you might see is, if somebody starts giving away their property, you know, says, hey, listen, I want you to have my my baseball card collection or you can have my motorcycle. And you say, what are you talking about? Now, I want you to have it. You're a good friend, but you take it.

Well, the reason people do that sometimes is because they realize they don't need these things. Yes. And I often hear from lots of people, school people, especially, and I've seen it with law enforcement. And I ask this question all the time. If somebody is saying things that make you think they're considering suicide, should you ask them if they are thinking of killing themselves?

And 99 percent of people say, no, no, I would never say that. I have something else. And I say, why? Because they say, well, I don't want to give them the idea. And so you've got to understand.

people that are considering killing themselves have already thought about it. You're not giving them an idea.

if it's there. It's like. they know it's an option, you know, but they never thought of it. So if you ask them, they say, no, of course not. You know, but not saying they're going to admit to it either.

But you're not putting it. So you need to ask that question.

So and he brought up about giving away things. So my sister was on medications and my mom and I had talked the day before saying she hadn't heard from my sister. in a day and a half. My mom would give her medications. And my sister was 42 when she took her life.

And I said, well, you know, maybe she's doing her thing. And then they found her and talking to the prosecutor's office.

They were great. And the one guy said, listen, I don't want you to sit there and say not, my sister. We all know how she died. She died by an overdose. He goes, he goes, could have been accidental.

Possibly. Do I think it was? And he said, no, I don't. I can't prove it. But let's look at all the factors.

And after all the interviews and everything, my sister was a medical professional that did deal with medication. So she knew what was whatever. They said. the amount of heroin in her system was so high, there was no way she was going to survive. There was no way she knew it.

And she hadn't used for quite some time.

But talking to her friends, they had caught her that day. So they've never seen her so happy. That's one of the other stuff.

And then, when they found my sister, my mom and my, my other sister founder. She was sitting in front of a collection of pictures of my daughter, my nieces and nephew, her, you know, her five favorite people in the world. And she was there in her last moments. We're looking at her five favorite people.

And that's one of the things that I tell people when you're talking to someone and they're, they're down and they're down and you hear that suicide. And then maybe you talk to them for a long time as a crisis intervention person. And then you might hear a change in their tone, you know, because I can't. If anybody's ever gotten engaged, you know, you probably think over that a lot. It's a lot of stress.

I'm going to do it or getting a mortgage or any big decision and fret over it until you finally make the decision. And then that weight comes off. And I think people who are on the suicide path, you're right. They're trying to figure out what they want to do. when they finally decide I'm going to do this.

I'm going to get my piece. It'll be over. The pain will be over. There is that change in attitude. And that's a key sign.

So people have to go to the hospital when they sound like that. When I was a school security director. And kids were doing, you know, drawing and writing and saying crazy things that were that looked dangerous. I called in for an interview with the kid. And I remember this one boy, freshman boy, had drawn this picture of people getting shot and killed and a picture of somebody in the middle laying there dead.

And I was talking to him and he said that was him. after he killed all those people. He's going to kill himself. Wow. And then he started crying.

And I said, how long have you been thinking about killing yourself? And he says, for a while. And the principal stood up and said, I talked to you in the hallway. I came out in the hallway. He says, you can't ask a kid if he's been trying to kill himself or thinking of.

I said, what are you talking about? We have to get to that. And finally, he calmed down. We went back in. I said, who else?

Have you told anybody you were thinking of killing yourself? And he's crying. He goes, yeah, I told my mom. And I said, when? He goes, I told her yesterday.

So what did your mom say? Mom said, knock that nonsense off, because people don't want to believe that someone's going to, you know, you're not going to kill yourself. Stop it. You're just having a bad day. And if somebody talks suicide, you have got to intervene.

You've got to get them some help.

And if you're in law enforcement in New Jersey, you have cop to cop, which is a phenomenal organization. It's retired cops. It's law enforcement. People understand the job that you can talk to.

And then I thought, which was great, the suicide prevention hotline, the national one, used to be a 1-800 number, and I couldn't give you what it was. It was just so long. But the federal government changed it. And this was a game changer. It's now 980..

And it's completely anonymous. It's not only talk, but it's also. you can text if you have an issue and you can call for somebody else.

It's my. the company I use is Riptide Training and Consulting.

My email address for the company is RiptideTandC at gmail.com.

Or if you can find me on social media, LinkedIn, just send me a private message.

Hopefully, my website will be done by the end of the summer and really get that moving. But those are probably the best ways to get a hold of me.

We know that recruiting is down. Everything's down. People don't want to be a cop anymore, but that can also cause a lot of problems. So we'll be back.

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Now is our time, my fellow Americans. America Out Loud Talk, Radio. Liberty and justice for all.

Hey, everybody, welcome back. So, I still have my friend Butch Stevenson here, retired law enforcement officer, wellness instructor, all around good guy. So, I said we wanted to shift gears a little bit, and one of the things I wanted to talk about is recently we saw an attempt on the life of former president Donald Trump, and we all watched the video, we all saw what we saw. The YouTube videos from people who were there, the confusion, and the miraculous.

event where he just happened to turn his head, and if any of you have seen it, they've done a lot of recreations, and they show that if his head was still pointing straight, it would have taken the back lobe of his head off, but because he turned his head, it got his ear, and he survived. You can say it's miraculous, you can say whatever, but it was absolutely amazing. So, the reason I wanted to talk with Butch about this is that when he was with the Sheriff's Department, he had some experience working with the Secret Service when Trump came to visit when he was running for re-election back in the day. So, Butch, why don't you give us that background of what you had with that, where you were, your position, what was happening?

Ocean Township, West Long Branch, you know, all the areas.

And we just, they positioned people all around the perimeter, all along the route. The Secret Service that we worked with were great, I was in the area, I was in the command post, in the area of the command post, and at the school, and we worked with them, they were fine, very accommodating, they let us know what to do, what not to do, how to handle things, and yeah, I mean, obviously, the president, he was a sitting president, and it was a different Secret Service, and so it was 100% different from what we just saw,

but they were great.

Were there briefings? You know, all these things that we're talking about.

So kudos to our corrections, brothers and sisters. So I'm glad you, I'm glad you brought that up. So one of the things, it sounded like there was coordination between the service and the locals, and you were briefed and you were set up and you found them impressive, I guess, from, from what it sounds like, they did the right thing. Now let's look at Butler, Pennsylvania, where former president Trump is now holding this rally. And, like I said, this is not to, to throw cold water on any of our brothers and sisters, but I think if we don't look at things realistically and lessons learned from situations, it can be bad in the future.

I'm not going to talk about the individual officers. There was, there's, we've gotten limited information from the secret service. We saw that the, uh, the head of the secret service, the director had to step down. Uh, I don't know if you saw her interview.

Well, the fact that nothing's happened since then kind of tells you there was not 19 terrorists. Now there could be more people involved. They're investigating, but her response was terrible. And, you know, leadership is so important in an agency. And you could see by the fact that she still has not gone to the, she went to this site, I think one time a week later, instead of get my me, I would be on a, on a plane getting down there immediately to take command of that situation.

I mean, I remember just hearing over the radio car, you know, red, red Jeep, check. I need someone to check it out on whatever street. boom, they were there. that could be going on, but the big difference. And I, I mean, we had communication constantly with the secret service, the locals, the state had constant contact with secret service where, I mean, I believe I just, I watched an interview last night where they were talking with some of the local and state cops.

that said, there wasn't much communication between the two.

So if you heard something, you could pass it along right away.

So that seems a long time when you're a dusty dude like me. I came across this company, a communications company, and they're called JPS Interoperability. They're in North Carolina, I believe. And I met the principals, amazing, brilliant men. And they saw this problem that agencies can't talk to each other.

Now we're all on different frequencies, because we get a better deal on the 400 frequency than the 800 frequency and the radios and local budgets. That's what's involved with all of that. And that's what you get, unfortunately, when you have disparity of all these different agencies. New Jersey is 537 municipalities. Everybody's got a chief.

Everybody's got a superintendent, you know, who can talk to who, right? Everybody wants to control their own situation. But this company, JPS Interoperability, when I met them, I met them at a school security event, and they brought in this device. It looked like a radio holder, and it had 20 slots in it. And basically, what they came up with was every agency involved in any kind of a thing, you could plug your radio into this device.

And then at that point, every single person was connected on every frequency. You could have one of those cheap walkie-talkies from Dick's Sporting Goods and plug that in there, and you could talk to an F-16 pilot. It was an amazing device. And what they had told me was that they had actually sold it to New York City several years earlier, and all the equipment was in a basement on 9-11.. It hadn't been distributed, hadn't put out, and we know what happened there, when nobody could talk to each other.

So I don't know if they had anything like that on scene. Obviously, it doesn't sound like you had it there. You guys had radios and human beings, which is good. Now you can all hear each other and say, hey, we need this, that, and the other thing. You described something there I thought was pretty interesting.

When you were getting all this information, now, I've been involved in tax situations. I'm a hostage crisis negotiator. So I've been in the command posts. I've been talking, doing all that stuff. So I get it.

I know what's going on. But for many people, they don't understand how much is going on when a thing like that is happening. You're talking about. you have such a large area to cover. And now you've got somebody who puts eyeballs on somebody and says, hey, go check that red car.

You've got to have a team. go there right away and find out who that is and clear that off, right? That's not a suspicious person, not a danger, right? When we look at the event in Pennsylvania, and we saw not just a good sight line from the sniper to the principal, but the best sight line could not have been better. The one that was left unchecked, all the people were inside the building.

They were not outside. And then we had civilians with cameras screaming, there's a guy in a roof, there's a guy in a roof, there's a guy in a roof. And that message seemed to get pushed around. And apparently, one officer went up the ladder that was there and saw the guy and came back down because he had a rifle. And then they still let the president come up on the stage.

That's the command, I don't get. You think you have any kind of a danger? Hold him off. Keep him in a car.

And obviously, one of the frustrations, what's bad is the one thing that's brought everybody together, left and right, wing, Republican, Democrat, is what happened. And they actually, as they said, transcend the aisle.

And one of the things they brought up is how could they have let the president, because if they could let him on stage, who's to say they wouldn't let Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or President Biden on stage? Right. If something like that happens. Who's to say that wouldn't happen? So, and it was just a major breakdown.

And every time they'd ask the director, Director Cheadle, a question, it always came back to, well, the FBI is investigating. I can't comment.

I mean, the FBI was the golden perch of law enforcement.

And a Secret Service. Just absolutely amazing. And now we see that it's about leadership, not the men and women out there doing the job. We know that. You know, when you were at the Sheriff's Department, you had an awesome leader, an absolutely tremendous leader.

And therefore, you had a tremendous agency. Agency. where I was at, we had a great leader, an OK leader, and then a horrible leader and followed by another horrible leader. And it basically took a preeminent law enforcement agency that we were and brought us down to. basically, you know, meager, just doing the least to get yourself in trouble because the leadership was horrible.

So leadership is key to every organization, no matter what they say. Fish rots from the head down. Yeah. So I think when we look at this, you know, who do we point to these positions? I guess Cheadle was a qualified person.

You know, she had run other companies. She had been in a Secret Service agent earlier in her career. But that, you know, we all know lots of cops who are really good cops, but they don't make good sergeants, lieutenants, captains or chiefs when they get in that position.

And they had one of the things they did, the director before Cheadle, he was a, he started at the bottom of the Secret Service and worked his way up. So he knew it from inside and out.

And he was a Trump appointee. And I don't want to, I'm not going to get political, but it was soon thereafter that they took him out and put in one of their own. And I mean, unfortunately, not saying that he was any more competent than Cheadle, but you have something that works. Let's just keep it there, especially if something as important as that.

and all the agencies under the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, Secret Service, everybody answers to the attorney general, the Department of Justice, who answers to the president. And I guess, when you go in, you want your people, you know, you want your own people. The problem we find is when people politicize these offices, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, she was a DEI appointee, but, you know, was she the best? I don't care if it's a man or a woman that leads any agency. I think women are absolutely capable of leading.

I know lots of great women leaders, but they have to be qualified, just like a man. You don't just put a man in there because he's a man. You put in the most qualified person. And did she come from her background as a Secret Service agent enough to run the entire agency, which has many, many tentacles? As you know, it's all across the United States, lots of people to protect, lots of things that they do.

Was that the right choice? And when we see this weaponization of these federal law enforcement agencies, I think that's where we're seeing problems. You know, what did Director Wray say? He's being interviewed by the Congress and he's answering questions. And I think he came out with more information, because I think he learned his lesson watching her a week before Cheadle going, I better give them something.

You know, at least if I give them some, you know, how many bullets were fired? I don't know. So he came with those answers. There were eight rounds. It was this, it was that, with this kind of gun, whatever, which was satisfying, because we want some information.

I would never interfere with an investigation, but we want information, right? We want to know what happened here. And the fact that we still don't know what happened here. What was the hotel in Las Vegas where that guy killed 58 people or whatever? Oh, at the country music concert.

I don't know anything about that guy. The Covenant school shooter in Tennessee. We don't know anything about that shooter, because there's political things that would make people really uncomfortable if they heard who the person was or their motivation. But they don't tell us. They don't release the manifesto for this one, but they do release it for that one.

It's a danger to the public because you start to lose faith in those agents.

Why didn't they just do what they were, just when you knew what was right? What? you're in a hierarchical order, a semi-military thing like law enforcement. You don't just make your own decisions. Yes.

Right, wrong or indifferent. That's how the system is set up to maintain control. Right. But what we see is this, it's not the men and women who are doing the work. We know that in every agency, there are brothers and sisters.

They're very good. The problem that we have is the top has been politicized. And that's why, when you're saying you had a great person in charge and then you change administrations and now you bring in someone who's not so great. There was the chief of the border patrol was talking the other day. He came on and he saw what was going on.

He was telling the truth about it when President Biden came in. This is an open border. This is dangerous. Not right. They removed him.

They pushed him out and got somebody else who would toe the line. But you're seeing the border patrol. people are very upset about how things are. So that leads me, I guess, to one of the things I wanted to talk about, with trying to tie all this together.

We've seen, I don't know when you decided to become a police officer, but when I took the test, there were three jobs and 650 people showed up to take the test. A few years later, the economy was really good and we had five positions. And I think like 200 people showed up. And as the economy took a dip and we needed people, hundreds of people showed up. That's not happening anymore.

You're not getting hundreds of people to show up to be a cop anymore. With the wellness and the resiliency that you talk about and how that hurts people, do you think there's a connection between people saying, I don't want to be a cop anymore, based on what's going on, and that?

I think that the resiliency programs that they're doing, I think it's going to help bring things back. But right now, it's just hard finding people. I know when I left the sheriff's office, they were in the middle of doing a hiring.

And it was where we would get, we'd ask for 75 people. We would get maybe 60 showing up. We asked for 75 people and we had 40 something show up. And out of that, only X amount returned their applications, because it was just a climate.

Are they the best? And I don't care who they are. I don't care their lifestyle. I don't care anything. If they are the best people, then that's who you want to have on the job.

When I teach about pre-employment background, I don't talk about, there's only a certain kind of person should be a cop. There's lots of needs for lots of different kinds of people. I don't talk diversity just for diversity sake. But there are lots of places in law enforcement for lots of different kinds of people. You've got to be the best of the best to come out and answer the call to your house when you need law enforcement.

Do you see the officers that are left on the job, that are out there today? And you talked about the different feeling. I've been around long enough to see cops when they went from heroes to zeros and back again, where now, defund the police, get rid of the police. The police are bad. The police are racist and all that.

Do you think that has an effect overall on law enforcement, on their mentality? I could lead them- Oh, morale.

It's going to hurt. I think you're starting to see a turnaround with that, because now you're having a lot of cities that defunded. the police are now trying to fund the police again. But it's a little too late for them now. I mean, hopefully it comes back.

And that's the problem is that it's sometimes hard to unring that bell.

wants to be running for president, right? Yeah. Candidate for president. And there's video of her saying things like, people who think that simply having more officers, it will lead to safety and security are absolutely wrong. Well, you can make an argument that just sheer numbers don't do that.

But the reality is when you don't have enough or you have cops who are not doing their job, other than when they get sent to a call because they don't want to get indicted, charged, arrested, beat up in the streets, you're wrong. She's absolutely wrong. How many times have you been in an agency where they did a personnel study and somebody came in and trying to figure out, based on the number of calls and the size of your town, how many cops you need? Oh, you need 12 more cops. And the town manager maybe gives you one or takes away two.

You know, all of us are overwhelmed. We know we can't answer the calls. We can't be proactive. And that, I think every cop in the world knows, the only thing that creates a safe community is proactive police work.

They're not answering stuff like that. You know, it's coming in the morning. They'll respond to very serious calls. That's it. Right.

Because their manpower is so low. I want to say they're running, I heard, anywhere between 4 to 12 officers at night,

It's important for every one of us as American citizens to understand that our police officers make a difference. They sacrifice their lives. They put off lots of things that everyone else does. You know, they work weekends, nights. Oh, boo-hoo, they work nights.

You know what? That's because it's a calling. This is a calling. You know, a lot of people I know that complain. Oh, well, who cares?

The cops get paid a lot of money. When you're a plumber or you're a technician somewhere, great jobs. Awesome. When you go to work every day, your family doesn't pray that you don't come home that night. That, you know, you could get killed.

Law enforcement, we all know that going out the door. You strap on the gun and the badge and the uniform. You go out in the street. You may die that day. That's an absolute reality.

And we have to be mindful of that. And when you see a cop, thank them for their service. Hey, thanks, officer. Appreciate your service, right? It does go a long way.

I know people do that. I do that with military and cops, and it's a good thing. So I want to thank Butch for being on here. And, like I said, we'll get you back. And everybody else out there, stand strong.

Do what's right.

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