Force Multiplier? Call it a “Do-More-Without-More” Machine

The gap between too few officers and too many leads is widening—and that’s exactly where smart tech can actually serve people, not just impress them. Erik sits down with retired Grand Prairie veteran Kevin Cox—who built an intelligence center, stood up a drone program, and now helps agencies turn noisy data into usable truth—to unpack what really moves the needle: DFR done right, LPRs with guardrails, and analytics that turn “we should follow up on everything” into “we found the right thing fast.”

Kevin charts the path from early DJI airframes and battery headaches to today’s drone-as-first-responder pods that launch in minutes and arrive with context. He explains why language matters—ditch “force multiplier,” speak in terms of speed, accuracy, and accountability—and how policy and audit trails preserve public trust. We go deep on data: merging messy master-name indexes, mining body-cam transcripts for the one overheard clue, tying LPR hits to CAD and RMS, and surfacing the top leads so detectives can be heroes more often. Deconfliction isn’t a buzzword here; it’s officer safety and case integrity, with live alerts that keep units—and neighboring agencies—from colliding.

We also take on a thorny topic: the rise of privatized policing. Kevin lays out the risks of HOA-style enforcement and a two-tier system, and shares a saner alternative—use private sensors to summon public law enforcement, keep state power public, and make oversight non-negotiable. Finally, for officers eyeing a second act, Kevin offers a candid roadmap: which tech roles fit different temperaments, how to prep years ahead, and how to translate street-earned skills into product, consulting, or sales without losing your sense of service.

If you care about faster outcomes, safer officers, and cases that hold up in court, this conversation is your field guide. Subscribe, share with a teammate, and leave a review telling us the one tool you think most improves time-to-truth.

Join our Discord!! https://discord.gg/BdjeTEAc 


🔗 Visit us at  TwoCops

Peregrine.io: Turn your worst detectives into Sherlock Holmes, head to Peregrine.io tell them Two Cops One Donut sent you or direct message me and I'll get you directly connected and skip the salesmen.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Gear, Old Friends, Bourbon
• 2:30 Kevin’s Career Path & Intel Center
• 7:40 Early Drones to DFR Reality
• 13:50 Airspace, Batteries, and UAS Limits
• 19:30 Tech Budgets and Program Scale
• 26:29 “Force Multiplier” vs Public Language
• 31:24 Policy, Oversight, and Accountability
• 36:34 Data Overload to Usable Leads
• 42:14 Peregrine’s Role: Synthesizing Agency Data
• 48:44 Deconfliction, Safety, and Live Alerts
• 54:14 DA, Discovery, and Case Integrity
• 1:01:34 Beyond Single Pane: Real RTCC Value
• 1:08:14 Culture, Buy-In, and Vendor Fit
• 1:15:44 The Privatization Concern
• 1:21:34 Tech as a Smarter Security Lever
• 1:26:34 Headcount Reality and Tech Tipping Point
• 1:31:44 DFR’s Next Five Years
• 1:38:24 Purpose, Service, and Sales
• 1:44:44 Feedback Loops and Building Better Tools
• 1:51:34 Transitioning Cops into Tech Careers
• 1:59:04 Skills, Fit, and Honest Self-Assessment
• 2:06:34 Networking, LinkedIn, and Positioning
• 2:13:34 Translating Street Skills to Tech
• 2:21:04 Final Thoughts and IACP Invite

Transcript

SPEAKER_07: 0:00

Claimer, welcome to Two Cops One Donut Podcast. The views and opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of 2 Cops One Donut, its hosts or affiliates. The podcast is intended for entertainment and informational purposes only. We do not endorse any guests' opinions or actions discussed during the show. Any content provided by guests is of their own volition, and listeners are encouraged to form their own opinions. Furthermore, some content is graphic and has harsh language, your discretion advised, and is intended for mature audiences. Two Cops One Dona and its host do not accept any liability for statements or actions taken by guests. Thank you for listening. All right, welcome back to Cops One Donut. I'm your host, Eric Levine. Today I have with me Kevin Cox, my experiment. How are you, sir?

SPEAKER_00: 0:56

Thrilled to be your experiment. You are a guinea pig today.

SPEAKER_07: 0:58

You are my guinea pig. So for those watching and listening, I got a new switcher. So you can see. That's Kevin. Now you can see him. And then you got our wide angle. Oh. So I'm going to be controlling this while we talk, and then we even have look at that fancy thing. Where we can both be seen at the same time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17

No, I need my monitor. I need a monitor there, and you need one here. Yes. I got to get that eventually. Eventually, Eric.

SPEAKER_07: 1:23

That was 60 bucks. Today was the day. That was 60 bucks. So cheap. That was$60. Bottle of bourbon cost me a lot more than that. Speaking of, yes. Let me hold this up. Kevin Brown.

SPEAKER_00: 1:37

Not advertising, but gifting.

SPEAKER_07: 1:38

Bardstone.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40

Bardstone.

SPEAKER_07: 1:40

Bardstone. Oh my god. Double barreled Discovery Series. I have never had this. This is series 13. Lucky number. And it is October. So let's crack this guy open. Tell me a little bit about this, sir.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

This is brand new to me, too. I read reviews on it, hadn't been able to find it. It wasn't easy. But I've got a friend at a place in Plano that uh he'll give me, you know, hey, I've got multiples of these in. But um smells good.

SPEAKER_07: 2:05

Your glass there, sir. There you go. Get you about halfway up that queue.

SPEAKER_03: 2:10

There you are. Thank you. Same for me. I remember this is how it started last time. It is how it started last time. I know.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16

Except the my taste in bourbon has gone way up since then. That's four years ago.

SPEAKER_07: 2:22

Okay. It was. Yeah. Yeah. So for those listening and wondering, um, we did. We started, me and Kevin did this four years ago, uh, when you were leaving Grand Prairie.

SPEAKER_00: 2:33

Yeah, I had just retired in uh June of 21. Yes. Yeah. So I jumped into the private sector.

SPEAKER_07: 2:38

So in that, can you kind of I just want because we're not gonna do the same format we did last time because we've already had you on. So if they want to go back and watch that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:46

I could it would be better this time, I hope.

SPEAKER_07: 2:48

Yeah, well, hopefully. But with you retiring and being in the private sector, just can you go back and kind of give people a brief overview of your police experience and kind of what you specialized in?

unknown: 2:59

Sure.

SPEAKER_00: 3:00

Um the started uh I was retired from Grand Prairie in 21. The last few years that I was there, I built and managed the Intel Center. Uh, and I use that word carefully, an Intel Center. Okay. Because there's we now know there's so many different distinctions. Yes. Um, so the before that I'd worked in patrol, I'd worked in field training, I'd worked uh I'd worked in uh the worst named unit in the world, problem solving. That was that was the worst name for a a a unit ever, because everything's a problem. Yes. So it became at times kind of like the X-files of police work at the agencies, like whatever didn't fit in a category anywhere, send it to Kevin's guys. Call him. So you get angry bees, neighborhood disputes, fugitive work. Right. Yeah. So uh we got a little bit of everything. Then we moved from there, uh kind of split things off. There was a crime prevention unit. So there was some it was an interesting time for me because it's like not everybody wants to go to what some people call like um soft policing, you know, or all the community fair stuff and everything.

SPEAKER_03: 4:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 4:03

I I was not itching to do it, but in that unit, it actually opened my perspective up a ton. I actually really looked much wider at every how the city ran and how the all the perspectives of the people that were way above me in the chain of command. I interacted a lot more with them when that with that unit, uh, because their focus is is often a little different. So I learned a lot from the working inside of the problem solving unit. We then kind of morphed into a human trafficking unit after a while. Um I had a couple of guys there that were in the unit that were just ravenous to go after that, and they were very good at it. So we worked alongside a lot of the DHS task force group guys, and because Grand Prair boarded that 360 corridor, it was just it was more business than we could take care of. Uh we did that uh for a good long while. And um see then I went back over to patrol, then came right back out, uh, not long, and into the Intel side of things. And Intel is where I probably I had two really awesome parts of my career, and they ended the first one, obvious, when I worked dope in the first part real early, really early. That was great, and it was timed right, you know. Uh nobody should do their dope work when they're 40s, you know. Yeah. I mean, there's a certain look to that, but you know, uh, you've got to have more of a story built up if you're you know 40 something years old and you're trying to sell dope or sling it or buy it, you know. Yeah, you should have more of a track record out there.

SPEAKER_03: 5:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:34

Uh if you're you know 20-something looking, 15, yeah, it's it's okay to be the new guy. Um, but so I did that on early. That was exciting. That was as addictive as any drug I did. That was uh I I that was 24-7. Loved it, lived it. Um, when everybody else is going and getting married, I was chasing eight balls of math. So not to use. No, no, no, did not ever catch them. Just to be just to be clear. Yeah. Um, but the other part of the other kind of end cap to my career was intelligence. And it was fantastic. It was what was in my wheelhouse that had kind of I'd been growing with it. I mean, I hit my chief up for drones in 2010, uh, which was early. Way early. Yeah, yeah. But I I saw where things were kind of going that way. Right. And he held me back a little bit, and he did, he was right to do so. He said, I think the FAA and the White House are kind of trying to work this out a lot. You know, this could take a few years. Let's let's let them settle this out before we dive in. So we just so I basically was just keeping up with the technology. And I just told my chief, I said, I don't want us to be late to the party when this really breaks loose.

SPEAKER_06: 6:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 6:46

You know, and we weren't. We were not late to the party. Uh no, we were early.

SPEAKER_07: 6:51

It's still trying to kick off.

SPEAKER_00: 6:52

Yeah, with the party's still going.

SPEAKER_07: 6:53

Yeah, it's still trying to kick off. There's a lot of agencies right now, uh, including my own, which I'm from a very large agency, and we still don't have a full DFR program. So for those listening, DFR is the drone first responder program, and that is where you no longer are deploying a drone out of the trunk of your car, which is kind of a common practice now with the little DJIs or or similar branded um uh drones, but now we actually have these pods that sit up on top of buildings or on landing pads in the middle of you know, city property. Usually it's off of city property, and it's all controlled remotely from uh either a real-time crime center or an actual drone first responder room where it's just for that stuff, and that is what we're kind of talking about. That's just now happening, and you guys were trying to do this in 2010.

SPEAKER_00: 7:48

So yeah, we were we I watched it for a while, and I guess probably uh in 16, 17 things started picking up a lot. You know, a few agencies were starting to get clearances or you know, but it it was kind of baby steps. Uh I want to say in 17 and 18, right in there, I too many years ago now. I don't remember it as well, but uh that's when the right drones were being made or better drones for it. And the there was a pathway to get clearance to fly. Now flying where I was at in Grand Prairie, Texas, was the alphabet soup of air classes. Right. I mean, it was I mean, we're at the bottom of the the runways at DFW Airport next to Arlington, and we had our own airport right next to us, and then a sometimes used uh reserve base on the other side. Um and then we I mean we just had so many airspace issues, it was complex. So the we started kind of small, three drones, I think is what we started with. We s a couple of like early Mavics and then a a big uh uh what wouldn't we call it, a 210.

unknown: 8:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 8:55

That's how long ago that was.

SPEAKER_06: 8:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 8:57

And the I mean we learned everything as we went. We had a couple of friends that were helping us. Um and they I mean in the beginning, I mean, really the only thing out there were DJIs. And uh developed a friendship with a guy named Wayne Baker, who went on to retire and go from drone work and fire service and stuff to go on, he's been at DJI for years now, at least five. Okay, and uh and I know there's all kinds of stuff swirling with DJI and things like that right now, politically and and technically. But the he helped us build our first kind of team and set the first training. And that went from just a few people and a couple of drones. Yeah. And then by the time I left, I think there were 24 hour rotations of I think there may have been at the peak, it was 22 pilots, I think, on the roster.

SPEAKER_02: 9:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 9:53

And uh more aircraft than I can even count. Uh, we had these huge tables set up with battery banks that timed. I had one guy in my unit named Marcos, he was the most organized because I'll I'll call it that instead of giving it a DSM designation uh disorder. But fair. He was incredibly organized and he managed to get all of that organized because batteries were life then. Yeah, and what I was spending on batteries, just it was hard to explain that to an administration. Say, oh yeah, hey, I need another five or six thousand for batteries this year. I don't need it again next year.

SPEAKER_07: 10:32

Continuous rotation. Yeah, the the way that the drones are trying to get to today is they are specifically trying to make it so officers no longer have to swap the batteries out themselves. So the way that the drones are trying to work now is in theory, is the drone lands itself in the pods, a battery is changed out through the mechanics of that pod, and then the drone can go right back up in the air. Because most drones typically last about 20 minutes on a flight time. And and that's the trunk ones, the the it just it all depends on the weather. If the wind is bad, temperature. Yeah, temperature.

SPEAKER_00: 11:10

If it's super cold or super hot, your batteries suffer for that.

SPEAKER_07: 11:13

Yes. So that's that's some of the technol technological um things that we're trying to deal with, and then the battery life, how long those will last because the more flight hours you get behind a battery, the battery life starts to dwindle.

SPEAKER_00: 11:26

And I don't think there's ever a time, even though we're moving into DFR, uh, it's a it's actually kind of there's two lanes of traffic here, in in just my estimation. I'm not in the middle of the drone game anymore. Um, but watching it closely, and there's still a lane of travel for the tactically fielded drones. There's still a big use for that. And there's a variety of types and things that are get you that get used in that area. Whereas DFR is a responder drone, it's used in a little more narrow scope, but it accomplishes a lot.

SPEAKER_06: 11:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 11:58

Uh, there's all kinds of uh they'll call it force multipliers, but that's just a weird term to me. Um, it it's a huge efficiency lever in things and what it can do and when and how fast. The trick now is everybody figuring out batteries.

SPEAKER_06: 12:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:13

There's this, I kind of consider it this golden point of UAS aviation and public safety. And that's when you can get something really up there in the air to be able to loiter, hang around, and fly for an hour.

unknown: 12:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:25

Once we get there, that's going to be a big kind of crossover point where these become boilerplate everywhere because it's at that point, it's too efficient to not pay attention. We've had lots of new normals in law enforcement.

unknown: 12:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:38

And I mean, look at the cars and how they're outfitted and kitted now compared to 30 years ago. 30 years ago, you had a box that had a switch with three positions on it, you had a button for a siren, you had some version of something strapped onto the dash that had a notepad on it.

SPEAKER_06: 12:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 12:54

And that car probably cost 25 grand.

SPEAKER_06: 12:58

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 12:59

Kitted up.

SPEAKER_06: 13:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:01

Right now you're rolling out$65,000 to$100,000 in a car.

SPEAKER_06: 13:04

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 13:05

Okay. These this is that new normal technology that happens routinely now. DFRs. When I first I was with a company at that time that did that was breaking into DFR, and when we first heard the the numbers that that was going to cost an agency, we were like, oh, I don't know how fast we can move that normal that way. It's moving that way. Uh remarkably fast. The price tags of two and three and four hundred thousand or a million a year for drone programs.

SPEAKER_06: 13:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 13:36

That was unimaginable. And when I started mine, it was, I mean, they were shocked at what I was trying to say. I need they looked at them like, I mean, literally, I I had some chiefs refer to them as toys, you know. And they believed they were really going to just sit on a shelf somewhere eventually. They just weren't going to use.

SPEAKER_07: 13:50

So, question, two questions, actually. Um, one, you said you don't like the term force multiplier. What about force multiplier turns you off?

SPEAKER_00: 13:59

It it it it almost as far as within public safety, we get it. And it kind of applies to all kinds of things. But are you talking about headcount? Are you talking about speed to outcome or accuracy to outcomes? And the there's all kinds of things that go with that. So the when you talk about force multipliers, it's a funky kind of term for the public to absorb.

SPEAKER_06: 14:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:26

Uh first, force just sounds great to the public now, right? No, not so much, right? Yeah. So force multiplier may mean to the public more force.

SPEAKER_07: 14:36

Fair.

SPEAKER_00: 14:36

So instead of force multiplier, there's got to be a better terminology for this to explain in an easy, digestible way for the public what drone programs do, what all kinds of technologies do. I'm heavy on the data side now and analytics, what those do. It and for force multiplier, it feels like an old term. Really nice. Um what it what it these things do can be dramatic. Uh, what we were able to do with drones was dramatic. What I can do right now with my own, with the company I work with, what we do in efficiencies and capabilities is stunning. It was a stuff I dreamed of, you know, just years ago. That's how fast it's moving. But I'd love for us to come up with a better term uh than things that fly around the air than force multipliers. Right. I I guess uh And that's not me being you know like super careful about every word I pick or anything, because people know me, I'm not always super careful about every word I pick.

SPEAKER_07: 15:30

Yeah, I think the the fair part behind saying force multipliers, you have to explain it. So if I'm gonna say it, even if it's publicly or privately in a in a town hall meeting, but uh publicly like on a news conference or something like that, I would always take the time, like, hey guys, the you know, we'll use LPRs, for instance. LPRs are a hot button issue right now with privacy and big brother and stuff like that. So when you start to talk about it, I tell people, I'm like, the only place that the agency is currently putting LPRs is in public areas. And this is meant to be a force multiplier. And what I mean by that is we can't afford to hire more officers. If an officer could stand there on the street physically by himself and get this information, that's where these cameras are going. So start to put it in those terms. I said, but since we can't hire more officers, now we have cameras standing in their stead in in, you know, multiplying the amount of cops that we could have out there that are static and watching 24-7, which is meant to help. But I do get where they're coming from when they're talking about, you know, having a a force, you know, how that can how that can come across uh you know poorly. It's like verbal judo, verbal judo. Now now what do we say?

SPEAKER_00: 16:47

And I think we have so many technologies out there that are accomplishing that force multiplier goal. I think it's good to flesh that out in front of people so they really understand where they're landing in this. Um, because there's confusion uh in the public and frankly, confusion within public safety uh about what we're doing and how we're doing it. And it's getting sorted out. And this is uh I mean the these are things that that are normal paths that you travel as technology changes. Right. Uh, you know, the when people ask, you know, like, well, do you think they're gonna do away with this or that or the other? I said, well, I think if you follow the path of powerful tools, get powerful policies, workflow, and oversight. Power needs powerful things behind it. And I think when you have those in place and you are really up front with everybody about it and how you're using it and all of the checks and balances in it, I think you these tools will be preserved. Right. I think when you don't explain that fully. And we and so many people didn't understand that in the beginning of tech making big leaps in law enforcement. Yeah. Uh I remember way back, remember pepper spray came out? Yeah. Inflammable pepper spray. We learned hard, horrible lessons. Yeah. And the but we grew on it. Yeah. Uh same about tasers, we grew on it too. Now, tasers, I I can't even imagine how many lives and injuries on both sides that's saved. Pepper spray too, but it pepper spray is like that last thing you want to use.

SPEAKER_07: 18:12

Yeah, yeah, because it's the gift that keeps on giving to everybody that's there.

SPEAKER_00: 18:16

But we learned how to explain it to everybody. We learn how to use it better, we develop policies, workflows. All of it flows to everything that we're doing, like up to what we did yesterday. Uh the I like I love being on the very cutting edge of that technologies, you know. And I remember when I was gonna retire and I hadn't planned on retiring at that time, I just got an offer that was just too good. Uh so, but I had drones, data work, and the LPR sensor technologies. These are the areas that I was interested in going into a second career on. And at that time, drones were, I mean, that was a scary landscape. Companies came and went over a period of months, you know. So that was not big uh for me, but the but I was approached by a company that wanted me to come over and build something. And I loved building things. I did it through my whole police career. I would work inside of units that were new or new initiatives. That was great.

SPEAKER_07: 19:14

And you were building for law enforcement, so that is a way to keep serving. Yeah, I think cops resonate with.

SPEAKER_00: 19:20

So the I was very lucky when I retired. Uh first I had somewhere that I was gonna go directly to. I talked to probably 25, 30 cops a year, and I mean not just a casual conversation, but have a call with them about what their ideas are, what they want to do next. And it's much harder uh for so many of them. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have been approached, you know, uh about hey, when are you thinking of retiring? And they, you know, they knew that I was getting close. I was 28, almost 29 years in total time. Yeah. And I was happy. I had built something great, it was ready to be handed off to somebody. And how many cops do you know that leave a little bitter, a little burned out, done with it, walking away? Right. Yeah, I I I didn't leave that way. Uh, I left good. Yeah. And then I realized as soon as I was outside law enforcement, but on the technology sector side of the private, I was probably within six, seven months to a year, I was probably meeting and talking to more cops than I did in a week at my own police station, you know, all over the country. And that was great. It's been great ever since then. Um, and I tell people, you know, when they ask me, you know, okay, you went from there to there in police work, you did these things. The opportunity uh that I was given to build out an intelligence center was single-handedly the thing that gave me that career opportunity afterwards. I had achieved that he assumed it was gonna in my wheelhouse, and so he gave it to me, and then I didn't sleep for four or five years. But the uh it was great, and I learned a ton. Uh, you fail a lot. And I realized that actually failing and stuff like that is not bad. We don't we typically do not like third failure in law enforcement. It's on the tech side, it's okay. You're gonna have to fail if you're gonna push forward and get past points.

SPEAKER_07: 21:18

Yeah, that's a I've we had this conversation not too long ago at work. I'm just you know, I had an officer that was actually, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to fuck up, I don't want to mess up. I'm like, I want you to. Like this, I want you to mess up because you won't make the mistake again. More than likely, you won't make that mistake again. Every, you know, I I always relate stuff back to jujitsu. Like, you suck at jujitsu for like your first year at least, you suck, but you keep making mistakes and you fix them and you get better and you get better and you get better. Um, learning from failure is you know, especially in a safer environment, is is amazing to do. And I kind of want to go back to what you were talking about with the advancement of technology and another way to put people at ease. This is one because because I am I'm a big proponent of technology, I think it's a great thing to have. And I am also that guy that's like, I don't want big brother to overstep. True. And I don't want to ruin a good tool, you know. I don't want to be the guy that that gets a good tool taken away from police work because this stuff can help solve a lot of crimes. But with the advancement of technology, and one of the things that I used to help put citizens at ease, I goes, yes, it it may seem like we're going into this crazy police state and stuff like that, but you want accountability for officers. Like that's always the big push is like accountability for officers. Well, nothing helps keep cops more accountable than the advancement of technology.

SPEAKER_01: 22:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 22:46

Because now you've got, yes, you got LPRs out there all over the place, but guess who else they're watching? They're also watching the officers. You've got all this technology that requires, you know, logins and tracks every piece of data that these cops are touching. We never used to have that. You you've heard the old stories where they'd be using their NCIC and stuff to look up ex-girlfriends or try to find a girl's number and stuff like that. And there was no checks and balances on that stuff. Try to do that today. Try to go out there today and do that without there being a track record.

SPEAKER_00: 26:13

Yeah, the the I think I think most cops now that are got through this within the last 10 years are fully aware of what an auto trail means.

SPEAKER_06: 26:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 26:22

Okay, they get it. Yeah. And there's been examples in most departments where somebody got hemmed up that way in some way. So in some ways, we had to go through that learning curve, just like what I talked about in all kinds of you know, learning experiences. We had to go through that too in law enforcement for people to figure out, you know, by object examples.

unknown: 26:40

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 26:41

You can tell them all day long, don't do that. Until somebody has a consequence. You know, I I there's a phrase that I I've used forever. I don't even know when I came up with it, or maybe I stole it. I have no idea. But it's there is no change without a consequence. That means you do not change human behavior without a positive or negative consequence from it. They otherwise they just will do the same thing right. So it doesn't always have to be negative, but sometimes it's positive. But there is no change without that. And that's what we saw. You get that change over time. You do, because somebody had a consequence.

SPEAKER_06: 27:15

Yep. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00: 27:16

Somebody got a hero bar or somebody got days off, you know. But the uh every and technology is one of those fields where that applies, just like force, just like pursuits, all kinds of things where you you've got guardrails in there, uh, but somebody's gonna have to be that trailblazer to form that new policy in a department that gets made.

SPEAKER_07: 27:34

Yeah. And and you and I kind of talked about it offline just before we got started, but I like I like the ability to hold cops accountable because I think in police work, one of the things that we have a hard time doing is policing our own. And it's not that I think cops are out there doing nefarious things. I don't know. I I think 99% of them are out there doing the right thing all the time. It's just let's just say, like in the detective's office, for instance, there becomes a culture in an agency that is inundated with cases. You don't have enough detectives, so they can't investigate properly, and you have no way to prove this. And now, with the way that technology is, um, company that you're currently with, one of the checks and balances that they're able to do is show leads, show leads. I've got to cut you off already. Uh so showing leads, things like that, um, showing things that we miss through human error. Yeah, case management. Case management, things like that. So it it's not that I want to, it's not that I'm going out there and like we need to hold these detectives because they're they're intentionally doing no, I don't think they're intentionally doing it. I think when you've been at a place for so long, and this is how you were taught, and that's how the people before you did it, that's all you know. Well, technology is gonna change that. And change with cops is never welcomed. Cops do not like change for the most part. So with this advancement in technology, it's one of the ways I want to help push police accountability in a way to help train us into a new way of thinking, not burn us because they're sure.

SPEAKER_00: 29:11

It's not all, it's not all big brother on big brother, really. It really isn't. Um just like in our in my company's in Peregrine's case management areas, it used to be you had folders, everybody still does have folders, right? Yeah. That we're gonna change that. But the the folders are sitting on these desks in three different stacks, uh, stuff that's you you've got suspended, nothing on it, stuff that's closed, and stuff that's open. Right. They've got stuff. And that's how it's been forever, right? In case management now, with our stuff, you can see your own stuff and where you've got it going and what's missing. But whoever's having to kind of run the unit can now quickly see, okay, uh, we don't have these things and have a conversation real quick. Whereas a lot of times you didn't find that out unless you dug deeply into the case or it wasn't even obvious. Or you find out really late that stuff was missed. You know, because the DA is gonna find it, or a defense attorney is.

SPEAKER_03: 30:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 30:08

So the more systems you build in that help earlier in the process and keep things moving, because when your suspended cases become more open cases, you're gonna need that management to help that make move efficiently. Uh and I I remember as things like patrol division, shift report every day. That was just a kick in the shins. The that was an hour out of the patrol sergeant's time at the end of every shift, and it was terrible. It was just and it was just and it didn't have a ton of value.

SPEAKER_06: 30:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 30:42

Our stuff that's automated. Yeah. And we just build it however they want that shift report to look and what they want in it, and it's done. And it gets sent to all the right people at the same time, every day, without fail. With officers, it's the things that we can automate and the things that we can improve quality on without being a hammer, you know. Yeah. Uh it's it's not that way. The the tech we have technologies right now that are improving our the like drones, are super efficient at some things and can help outcomes. The you have LPR technologies, video sensor, center technologies essentially, that do a lot of the lift for us. I mean, how many of us rolled through a parking lot in that hotel, you know, that we know every doper in town is going to be there this weekend or whatnot. And we're just running plates manually, just hoping we've come up with something we know, we do. Not that somebody else knows, but just us. Go forward to now. Now the LPR cameras are rolling through and hitting things left and right, but now you look at your screen, and instead of looking at one, I'll use the term silo of information, now you look at how that piece of data, that link, that hit plays across all of your systems and maybe even your regional systems across a Metroplex area like we have. And now you see this much bigger picture uh relatively instantaneously. That compared to 19 also hell two thousand, you know, or even later of keying on a keyboard, hoping you're finding gold, you know, yeah, uh the number of stolen cars that get recovered now. Tremendous difference.

SPEAKER_07: 32:31

Okay, so you're bringing up a good point that I want to address, and I want you to kind of tell me what you think about this. With the advent of technology and how advanced it's getting. You remember back when you were a detective and going through a case, you had your phone calls that you had to make. So you had to follow up on your leads for those listening. This is kind of the way a case management would go. You get your case. You read over it, you're like, all right, here's witness one, two, if there is any. Here's my victim. Um, and maybe or maybe not any potential suspects. And then you kind of look and you're like, any businesses or anything else that I could follow up on around the area? So first you call your victim, okay, just kind of tell me what happened again. Okay, cool. Um, do you guys have any video of it by chance? Because back in the day, that was gonna be a no.

SPEAKER_00: 33:21

Um, or it was gonna be on some weird codec box on a shelf somewhere that nobody knew how to get it out of.

SPEAKER_07: 33:26

Yeah. So then you okay. Do you have any idea who it may have been? No. Okay. Uh, do you know where your stuff may have been taken? Do you think it was pawned or anything? Is there any identifiers? Do you have any pictures of it? So maybe we can go find your stuff. No. Okay. Well, shit. Um, all right. Uh let me see if there's any witness. Okay, call the witness. What did you see? I saw uh it looked like a guy wearing all black. How tall is he? Um, between 5'2 and 6 foot tall. And you're like, okay, how much do you weigh? Uh between 125 and 225 pounds.

SPEAKER_00: 34:02

95% of the population. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 34:04

So you're like, okay, shit. All right. I got no witness. I've got the victim doesn't know anything. There's no cameras because back in the day, nobody had cameras. We didn't have ring and all that stuff back in the day. So your leads were pretty simple. Now, fast forward to today. Everybody has a ring camera or something like it. Uh, every business has multiple cameras around it. Witnesses have multiple videos and stuff like that. You've got a really good chance of finding a plate in the neighborhood because LPRs are all over the place. So you just look at the time frame. Oh, it happened around 1:30 and 140 a.m. So you go back to the LPRs and see what's scanned in the area. Now you've you're getting leads on everything.

SPEAKER_00: 34:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 34:51

So if you're getting 10 cases in a day and you've got 400 leads because everybody's got something, how are you ever going to get through a case?

SPEAKER_00: 35:03

Because now you have more data than you've ever had. Right. You've got the best, the best of a disaster that you could ever get. You have a huge problem. It's a good problem to have.

SPEAKER_07: 35:13

But it's not a good problem to have because one of the things in police work is you shall follow up on all leads. Like that's a general order.

SPEAKER_00: 35:22

Well, and you're you can get and the reason why that happens is court cases.

SPEAKER_07: 35:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 35:25

And and there's some hard and fast rules about discovery, and you're gonna get caught up when you had stuff in your hands that you didn't act on, and it can be just literally human error. Yep. Right. But you're gonna get caught up in that because it's somebody else's job, defense attorney, to find every single one of those. Luckily, a good DA is gonna see that ahead of time.

SPEAKER_06: 35:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 35:47

But dealing with the inf the amount of information is not necessarily overload, it's just a very rich environment uh that you're dealing in a case folder now, and now your case holders are slowly transitioning to a case file that is digital. This is where I love being where I'm at now because I experienced all those things too, and I knew everybody else that did. And as even before I left the police department, I mean, literally, detectives are on the way to a scene and they're saying, I need this video off of our cameras, these things off our LPRs, I'm gonna need a drone, I'm gonna need for crime scene work for our overflights and stuff. They're calling all this tech in.

SPEAKER_06: 36:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 36:28

On the way to the call.

SPEAKER_06: 36:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 36:29

And this one major crime sergeant, he and I talked, well, he I wouldn't answer the phone sometimes, or I just hand it over because I knew see his name, I would just put on a speaker. And Sarah would pick it up and she would talk to him. And so he would already tell me what he's already running through, and I would say, okay, I'm a moy. You know, and then I would wrangle those things. The wrangling now of all those pieces now is doing what what I do now.

SPEAKER_06: 37:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 37:01

And that's taking all of that massive amount of information and getting it down to usable stuff, yeah. And getting it down to the stuff that floats to the top fastest. And so there you're gonna find, okay, we're looking for this. Okay, we need a red car. We need a guy named Nick drives a red car. That's not a lot. Yes, it is. Yep. It is in my world. Yep. Okay, it is, it is my in my world, that's a minute and a half of work to come up with something I'm starting to get traction on.

SPEAKER_06: 37:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 37:34

So now where you've got 150 cars that went by the LPR cameras around an apartment complex during the, you know, because you're timing off a 911 calls or somebody calling in or something. There's usually some timestamp usually is out there for a lot of the, especially the worst of crimes. And so you're working around that, you're gathering all that data. Now, how do we sift through this quickly and get to the best of that? Okay. That's part on the ground. None of what I do is ever going to take the place of a detective. Right. None of it. We just take a detective and make them heroes all the time. That's right. And uh, some of it is there was a quote by uh a customer of ours, and we've all heard the term, you know, garbage in, garbage out and data and information and stuff. It's like he he said it, and this just was the quoting this person garbage in, gold out. Yeah. Okay, because that's the sifting process. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So you get tons, not garbage, but it's just a volume, and then getting the gold out of it quickly.

SPEAKER_07: 38:35

Yeah. That's the old school way of policing. It's uh for those the garbage term is for if you don't know, your garbage is free reign once you put it out to the roadway. And police for the longest time, if we got desperate, we would go through your garbage.

SPEAKER_00: 38:50

Oh, I did garbage runs.

SPEAKER_07: 38:51

Yeah, and we would find gold. Yep. But garbage in, gold out. So that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00: 38:56

So your your mountain of data uh and how fast you can move through it, and that's that's the new kind of almost frontier in law enforcement. Yeah, is we've got all these sensor systems, and they're just gonna continue building in different ways, and there'll there'll be flex and how those appear and what they can do over time. But if you look at kind of what's out there for gathering, see that's the interesting part about, and then Sonai's part being with Peregrine is we don't actually gather the stuff. We do, right? The officers are the officers, the sensors, all those other companies and tools do all of that. We take all of it with a lighter footprint. Nobody ever screams about you know us because we're just taking and synthesizing that stuff into usable pieces of digestible data for people to look at and figure out this is our guy, this is not our guy. So it's a nice spot to be in on where I'm at now because this gets better and better and better and it and it gets better fast. Like we have a platform that's I I wouldn't say ever finished, right? But if I tell you this is what it can do, it can do 100% of that when I present it to you that day.

SPEAKER_06: 40:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:07

Six months and a year from now, it will do even more.

SPEAKER_06: 40:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 40:10

We just don't ever stop developing. And so I look at what we can do now for an agency and this mountain of data and garbage, if you want to call it, like the one chief did. We can get more gold and we can get it faster.

SPEAKER_07: 40:24

Yes. And and that's kind of one of the, you know, we'll we're not trying to pitch you guys, I promise you. I I am always trying to pitch it because I want to improve law enforcement. And for me, this is one of the ways I've been talking about Peregrine for five, six years personally. Um, and one of the reasons being is because that's I the way I kind of coined it was turn your shittiest detective into Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a way to do it. But my point being, I'm always trying to get the good tools out there for the public to know right away. I don't want you to be blindsided by it. I don't want you to be misinformed. I'm going to tell you how I see it as a cop and if I think it oversteps or if it doesn't. Well, like Chat GPT, for instance. Chat GPT is kind of like an open source version of asking whatever information you want about all the information in the world. Well, if I were to flip that and use it as an analogy of kind of what Peregrine does and why I think all law enforcement agencies should have it, is now you've got your own internal chat GPT in a way, and it takes, it doesn't take all the information in the world, it takes only the information you own. Right. So as a cop, if you're out there listening, any reports that we've written, any evidence that's been collected, any tickets, tickets that have been written, all of these things, uh car data.

SPEAKER_00: 41:46

All the other stuff that comes into your system now.

SPEAKER_07: 41:48

Yes, all the stuff that we're intaking, rather than having to have a detective sift through it for weeks and months at end, if that's what they need to do, or crime analyst having to sift and go through and compare data and come up with you know algorithms for you know certain statistics they need to get. This takes all that, simplifies it, does it for you and in the way that you want it to, and boom, there you go. It's your data. You know what I mean? So that's how I try to do that for for people on the outside that are like, what the hell? He always talks about this shit. What is he talking about?

SPEAKER_00: 42:22

It's it is taking the abilities of the people that you have and giving them a tool that greatly enhances their capacity to do things, their speed, accuracy, all of it. And it's not like we're ChatGPT really in that sense. We're not using everything out in the other world, we're using the data that you're getting into your system. Right. And it's we don't add anything to it.

SPEAKER_03: 42:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 42:55

Whereas when you go out with chat GPT stuff, you're you you it's built that way. Right. You're constantly adding and refining. We don't add in a billion other things that we think might be relevant. No, it pulls from your data and you determine the relevancy. Like when our screens show uh one thing that we do, just that just a lift. And I wish I wish a lot of systems just did this out of the gate, but they don't. So this is part of why we exist. Everybody, all the agencies, and mine had it too, and they still do. I asked them. There's a mastername index that's got the same guy in there 30 different ways. Oh, that's right. Okay, yeah. We all we've seen this so much. Yeah, we can go in there and merge all those.

SPEAKER_07: 43:35

John Smith S-M-I-T-H, John Smith S-M-Y-T-H or John Smith Jr. Zarinsky.

SPEAKER_00: 43:41

Yeah, you know that's been it's their problem, child. They've been in there a lot of ways, right? And take uh names of drugs, charge titles, all those things we can merge. Yeah. And we do it through a program called Match, and it's algorithms. And what we do is we basically give you one record for Bill Brzezinski or whatever. We give one record. There's probably a Bill Brzezinski. Not me, but we take that one record and then we tell you, hey, this is where we got all this.

SPEAKER_06: 44:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 44:12

Whereas when you get stuff out of the interweb yeah of a chat GPT, it's hard to determine where that came from. And I've even I've even valid try to validate things it did not validate off a chat GPT. Yep. I try and use Chat GPT as a way for me to automate things, tasks, things like that. But I've asked it things, and I'm like, because I have certain special knowledge of certain topics in life, I know that can't be right.

SPEAKER_06: 44:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 44:39

And when I dig into it, I find out, oh, the sourcing on that's terrible.

SPEAKER_06: 44:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 44:43

So if the sourcing is at the agency level and only there, okay, you know your own data. We clean things up.

SPEAKER_06: 44:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 44:51

We do not add, we do not strip stuff out and delete or anything. We just use models that tell us how to put records together that make it even more efficient. So when you do have Bill Brzezinski, you're getting all of them at one shot, and you can just say, Oh, I'd like to see all that. Oh, I also see that all these other agencies around me that have our platform, they've had him too. So now all of a sudden there's this bigger window into oh, okay, there's there he is there. And you get to validate that too, and you can see their files that show who that is too. So things like that, these these uh uh cleanups actually are really important. Yeah, because there's there are there are times when you get focused on the wrong person or you can't get out of what I call a data trap, where you've got all this garbage you're having to deal with and you're never gonna find your way out of it.

SPEAKER_07: 45:39

Yeah, like like trying to look through cell phone warrants and you just going through uh page after page after page of stuff that makes zero sense.

SPEAKER_00: 45:49

You bring up a cool thing that I that I hadn't seen until I got to the company, but uh before running an Intel Center, you had people that did that analysis and you had tools. The tools didn't relate to your data that you had in your home agency, though. It just related to the data itself. It gave you it could put it on a map. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it didn't tell you how it relates to the millions and tens of millions of pieces of stuff you have in there.

SPEAKER_06: 46:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 46:13

So when it all of a sudden relates to an address, and now you see all the records for the address and all the people there, and then all of a sudden you're able to move through this. Yeah, you see it's it's kind of like if you go out and you do some blue water fishing, okay, and if they've got a scope they can put down, usually they can run one down about 25, 30 feet down. Yeah. Still, you know, a bright sunny day, it's still got enough visibility in there. There's an entirely different world there. It's the one that's scary because you jump off the back of a boat to cool down and you're in it, right? You don't even realize what you're in, right? But it's when agencies start to see what's really under the surface, and it's tremendous volumes. But it's kind of tough to make that work, right? That's I love doing is making all that that you've just saw and you're really excited about it. Now what do we do with it?

SPEAKER_06: 47:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 47:08

This is the dog chasing the fire truck kind of thing. I've got it, I don't know what to do with it. That's what it was before good analytics got involved with data. And when you can take that and then add in sharing and the ability to communicate more effectively with within your agency and outside. Uh within your agency, the larger the agency is, the more complex that's get that gets. Uh that's I was stunned at how much deconfliction actually works at the agency level, not outside the agency.

SPEAKER_03: 47:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 47:43

It does work outside, but there's a tremendous amount of deconfliction that needs to happen within an agency the larger it gets.

SPEAKER_07: 47:48

Yes. Can you can you kind of go into for the because people would be like, what's he talking deconflicting? What's that mean?

SPEAKER_00: 47:54

It's a way of determining, it's like if you have suspect A and you're looking at them in a database, but nobody else knows you're looking at them, they're looking at them for string of robberies. You're you've got him on an actual homicide. You're only looking at your guy in your context. Okay. This is like somebody saying, I'd like for you to paint a picture, but I'm only going to give you enough of it to complete a quarter of it. Please figure the rest out on your own.

SPEAKER_06: 48:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 48:24

Oh, that's horrible, right? So you have a homicide suspect over here, it's the same as theirs, but they never knew. These two never talk. And you we can all go through stories about how this doesn't ever work.

SPEAKER_06: 48:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 48:35

Now, if you can see, hey, if this person is contacted in any form by the our agency or another, like in this case, a parent agency. I'm not trying to be too pitch-heavy here. There's not a lot of examples out there in the world like us.

SPEAKER_06: 48:50

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 48:50

But if you reach over, then you find out that your next door neighbor agency over here actually just stopped that car and has that person right. And it's happened live, like this with us, where an agency has got someone stopped, the detective gets an alert, they're able to contact over there and say, Hey, I actually know who's driving, I know the right strike, but I need the names of the people in that car really badly, but I need you to play it really cool. That's what we call that walled off stop thing. You know, uh, that was never possible. No, never, uh uh. Never. So the you can see when things are touched or you know, something goes live, and you can know as a detective now things you never ever could have known. I mean, it'll come out later when the case for some reason goes terribly bad in some ways, that the patrol division contacted a guy six times while your detective was working up a case.

SPEAKER_06: 49:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 49:45

Right? It'll only come out later. Yep. Now it comes out live. Yes. Everybody knows. Yeah. That's just one thin, tiny little example of what you can do with good analytics.

SPEAKER_07: 49:54

And part of and part of the de-confliction is also safety. Absolutely. Officer safety is a big thing. If I'm set up on a house and I didn't de-conflict, and all of a sudden I see my subject that I'm looking for, and it's for B and V of a vehicle. Meanwhile, you're out there, just like you're talking about, you're watching them for homicide, and you've got SWAT coming in. And I have no clue. Without the de-confliction, there's a chance that we could have, you know, cop on cop issues going on, or our UC vehicles are in the area and they get taken down by other odds. Like these things have been in that car before. Yes. So all of a sudden you got a bunch of guns pointing at you, and you're you're the cop and you're not liking that so much, and you kind of in front of the house. Yep, exactly. So these are things that we need to do. We need to pay attention to. Deconfliction's a big deal. And yes, we do sound a little pitch heavy, but the whole point of the podcast is to improve policing. So this is one of the reasons why I preach this stuff just like I do jujitsu so much, is I think it is a I think it's a fast fix. That in in a in a world where everybody wants instant fixes, I this is one I can offer you. This is one I can tell you from my own personal experience will give you an overnight change.

SPEAKER_00: 51:14

If in the agencies that we deploy in, and now there's more than ever because now we're national, yeah. Uh it was this is a company that was very focused on the West Coast for a while, and which was a good thing. Uh, when you try and scale everywhere too fast, you can't control the quality of that. But the now that we're all over the place, we get a lot more feedback all the time, like every day. It's great. And you hear where people say um, like there was an agency that had didn't even have all their data fully processed in with us and moving through their system. They just had some of it.

SPEAKER_06: 51:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 51:45

And they had spent two days trying to figure something out that they needed quickly. Well, the data went live. They said, Great, we're on. They get them a few logins, they're done in minutes.

SPEAKER_07: 51:57

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 51:57

Right? They now have that piece of information they were just killing for, right? They were just really needing it. And the results happen fast.

SPEAKER_06: 52:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:06

And it reinforces because you have something that you have to account for in all agencies, and that's buy-in. And that's buy-in from all kinds of levels. Uh so you're buy-in from patrol, buy-in from investigations, buy in from dispatch, buy in from administration. Buy-in is really how they're using it and getting good outcomes and how they value it from that. Right? So you want to build things that you have that great outcome, high value, and you have it fast.

SPEAKER_06: 52:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:35

You can have all of those things, you've got a very, very powerful tool. So the and I remember the the one thing I looked at when I used to buy stuff for an Intel, and believe me, vendors hit you up night and day.

SPEAKER_02: 52:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 52:53

When you looked at what they could offer, what you did, you tried to put the highest priority on the things that touch the most areas.

unknown: 53:01

Right?

SPEAKER_00: 53:02

Right. So if you get the most bang for your bike. Yeah, so if you're you're buying drones, oh, I can show you all the different things that that has payoff in.

SPEAKER_06: 53:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 53:09

You LPRs, same things. Video, same thing. But when you have a tool that says we can touch everything, yeah. Every single thing, and for every single section of your department, you figure out who you want in, what their abilities to move through the system are, what they can see, what they can do and not do. But the entire universe is yours now.

SPEAKER_05: 53:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 53:31

Everything that comes in. Okay. And it touches everything. From I mean, you could have this working for code enforcement, animal control, the police department, the fire department, emergency management, your dispatch center, the DAs are getting on this. That's a big one. The DA is a big one.

SPEAKER_07: 53:48

So I I kind of give you guys the my big push for the district attorneys getting behind uh technology that integrates all of the internal data. And the reason I'm so big in that is currently what we're having a we're going back to the problem that I talked about before is too many leads where a detective can't keep up. They can't physically, they don't have the time in the day to follow up on all the cases that they already have and get and follow up on all the leads that they're getting on these cases. Now, what they'll typically do is they'll create this hierarchy. They'll say, okay, this is a very important case because the victim level is much higher than you know this person over here whose car got broken into and they got their iPhone cable stolen. So now they've got this priority. Okay, this person over here is a victim of an ag assault. So they're going through all the leads that they can find. Well, it just so happens that 15 cops showed up to that call. Now that's 15 body cameras that they got to track down, and that's 15 more um dash cameras that they have to get. Okay, sounds awesome, right? Like I said, too many leads can be a problem because now we have 30 leads. The detective's got to download all of those, upload it to the case. On top of that, he's got to know who was out on the scene. How is he going to possibly do that if an officer didn't list themselves as being out there? Officers, officers are dumb sometimes. We're we're not dumb. We're we just we try to do the minimum with having the most fun.

SPEAKER_00: 55:19

So don't we? That was Eric's statement on mine. Yeah, we tried to I was just trying to get the most done.

SPEAKER_07: 55:26

Yeah, yeah. We try to do the minimum and the most fun. That's that's just kind of the way it is. And you'll get officers, they'll hear this high priority call, and then they want to help the victim out, they want to get out, they want to be the guy that saves the day. So they all get out there and they realize I don't have a job. And I don't want to get stuck doing a job that I don't want to do, like tagging evidence or uh standing at a crime scene at a crime scene tape and not letting people through. So what will they do? All right, nobody I'm leaving. Meanwhile, what they don't realize is their body cam caught, you know, maybe a glimpse of the suspect, the suspect vehicle parked around the corner or something. And that video doesn't get tagged and uploaded because that officer thought that he had nothing to do with it. And so now the case can be thrown out by a good defense attorney who finds out that those officers were in the area of the call and didn't disclose that evidence.

SPEAKER_00: 56:23

And or they they find out that there was possibly exculpatory evidence, or all they have to do is introduce the fact that there could have been right. Yes, that there could be what DA wants to go into trial and find out that that happened in the middle of it. Right. The yeah, because sometimes it's not necessarily what you did or didn't do, it's how someone else can portray that.

SPEAKER_07: 56:41

Yes. And so now you guys are starting to see the whole picture, is the the DA is gonna have no choice but to dismiss the case because it's gonna look like he was trying to hide evidence. And then if he doesn't disclose that evidence and that's found out later, there is a possibility he could be disbarred. Now it's not it more than likely it won't be if they can prove that it wasn't intentional, but it's career limited. But it's yes, and so you don't want to have to go through all that, it's not worth it. So that's why I'm that's why I'm so preach-heavy on this particular item we're talking about here.

SPEAKER_00: 57:15

This area technology grabs everything that's going on and you see it. And what's cool is when you see it like in one screen. Like it's not all there. You're you're gonna go, it's truncated pieces of it, so you know I've got all these things, and I'll I'm gonna open that up and look.

SPEAKER_06: 57:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 57:31

Okay, now I know every single officer that was there because their body worn cameras also say that they were there. Yes. And now imagine you have 10 officers or more, it's a big scene, right? Let's say 20.

SPEAKER_07: 57:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 57:45

And that's not uncommon. You could get 20 cops in a scene.

SPEAKER_07: 57:48

And air one, and two drones.

SPEAKER_00: 57:51

And you have all this audio going on in body one cameras. If imagine an officer talking with somebody, they don't un they don't know the whole story that's going on over there. They're at the edge of the scenes and they're talking with somebody and they're standing next to people that are talking about what happened. Yeah, they're not even actually interviewing them, but it's all being recorded.

SPEAKER_06: 58:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 58:09

Let's say Detective A finds out they're looking for Nick. I use Nick a lot, Nick. But they're looking for Nick. Well, in a system like ours, not to brag, but if it's in a transcript and you say, looking for Nick, every single word that's that is Nick, it scrubs it is gonna come out of there. Yeah. And now you're gonna find out the officer that was technically not even in the scene, just standing amongst the crowd, kind of visiting the event, actually got somebody talking about Nick. No, he went to his sister's. Uh, and so someone will get him out of there. You hear that, that that is the gold.

SPEAKER_06: 58:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 58:51

Out of mountains. Absolutely. Right? So when that detective goes back later, they're gonna have that. Yeah, it's not gonna be immediate, but they will have it because when they plug in, look for Nick, this address, everything that was related to a Nick, this address, we know it's a red car, and this time frame for all cameras, for all other things, all body on cameras. All of a sudden, you've got a conversation going on between some people you don't even have identified, but the body on camera gets them, and now we have more, right? It wasn't even at the scene, it's somewhere else. This is the kind of scenario that can play out completely legitimately, right?

SPEAKER_07: 59:27

And and I think that's kind of this is where I get into the accountability side. Like everybody wants to hold police accountable, everybody wants their DAs to do better. Well, help them work together, help them put a rock solid, you know, case together, and that's what this will do. So again, I try to tell people you want overnight fixes because that's what everybody wants, is these overnight fixes? Well, you got one right in front of you.

SPEAKER_00: 59:51

Speed to outcome here is different. Yeah. It is this is a very different time for agencies when they climb onto platforms like ours.

SPEAKER_06: 1:00:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:01

Speed to outcome is very different. And the we're just, it's like I'm very passionate about it because I see where this goes.

SPEAKER_06: 1:00:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:14

I've seen technology, I understand how it moves through agencies and public safety at large. This ability is just to begin.

SPEAKER_06: 1:00:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:25

The next five years are going to be just damn impressive. Just at what you're gonna be able to get done and the outcomes you're gonna be able to get with the accuracy and speed. Uh i i if it takes you ten years to get to an outcome, that's not so hot. If it takes you ten minutes, that's hot. If you get the right outcome accurately, it's even hotter. So the in a world full of Chat GPT, this is the this is that side of technology to be on. Not quite over there. That's great for figuring out how to paint your house better. Okay, that there's many, many things. But I mean, you can dig there a lot of ways and get good stuff.

SPEAKER_06: 1:01:06

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:07

But when you're able to mine your own data very quickly and very accurately, your outcome, your possibilities are much better.

SPEAKER_07: 1:01:14

Yeah, it's it's and it's really probabilities, not a possibility. Like, I'm excited because just that technology in itself, and I'll kind of flip it on a different angle, is medical. Think about prognosis and diagnosis and all that stuff about just taking symptoms that doctors, you know, because some doctors were C plus students, some were A plus students, and you got the same with with detectives and police, you know. So you you've got this technology out there uh that can take all of these different symptomatic things that most people I don't think can really keep in their head without, you know, doing research and doing all the things. And now you're finding cures and fixes for things so much better.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:56

Because they'll build very custom made products using AI that is built off of data sets. Like we use large language models, okay, for a lot of the background this stuff, and it's how we train the system to do things and how it's learned. Yeah. Um, and the one thing we don't do is we don't generate. We're not generative, right? Right. We're just using what exists inside of this kind of universe, not the entire universe, this one. And this is the safety net, and then inside of that, you still have many more safety nets to go through. You can say, I want I I want to validate that. All of your sourcing should be instantly available to. There's and some people take issue with this. So Okay. Now I'm interested. Oh, now you're all excited about it. When it comes to there's this hot button phrase that comes up all the time single pane of glass. Oh god. Okay. I don't know. I'm kind of done with it. I hate it. It single pane of glass actually has a home, but it's a visualization of what's going on at a particular time place and things like that. And it may be a window through things. Okay. It may be that. It may be an aggregation point to do things. But it is not a lens through which you see everything you have behind you. There's two things. And there's always sensors are great, cameras are great, LPR is great. I love all that stuff. Love drones too. The cool part is getting all of that to work for you better, not just work. Okay? Because right now we're kind of we're still in the no, I wouldn't say infancy. We're in a little bit headed towards adolescence of using these technologies more effectively. It's really cool to have a 20-foot-wide, you know, laser projection system in your RTCC and it shows every camera in the city and every traffic stop, every school, and all that stuff. It's a little bit much, but it also requires a headcount.

SPEAKER_06: 1:04:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:05

Does everybody have the headcount 24 hours a day? No. So we know we a big trend is focusing your hours of headcount, you know, in 10 or 12 or 14 hour days and stuff like that. You know, just trying to figure out how to use the humans you have to the technology.

SPEAKER_06: 1:04:22

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04:26

All right. Make all of that available to everybody else all the time. Okay. So now and and people, and I I'll tell you this, uh when Peregrine was young, younger, it it's been around for about eight years now. It's not a brand new startup company. It's just more national now. So it's new to people. But in its younger version, I remember telling someone, it looks kind of like an analyst tool, not a department or an agency tool. Well, now that's different. The the UIs are different, the user interface is very different. Right. And how you move through the system is different, what it collects is different. The ability to type in things and have it produce results for you. Or do it automatically. All these things have come out of this uh over time. But the the thing that it doesn't need it doesn't need someone 24 hours a day constantly looking at that to get it right. Okay. This is where the the thing that should be the underpinning of any real-time crime center is this type of platform. I would love it to be ours, but have one.

SPEAKER_06: 1:05:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:36

Because all the sensors in the world are great, but you're gonna have to plow through that mountain.

SPEAKER_06: 1:05:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:43

Right. Get something to plow through that for you. That's really when I, you know, I give I tell people, I go, I didn't understand until I got to Peregrine the depth of the talent pool. Yeah. And the number of Ivy League experience, not just Ivy League grads, but the backgrounds of these people are incredibly impressive. What they've done and what they're before they got to us and what they're doing now is also impressive. It's not just they got a degree from here and there. These are extremely sharp people that build brilliant systems. You can't build a box of software that you get it one way and you have a pull-down menu and a checkbox, and you can't have that your way. Uh I I won't use the chain name of the fast food restaurant, but there was an advertising uh uh kind of campaign a long time ago that said you could have it your way.

SPEAKER_06: 1:06:44

Ah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:45

It's that way with us.

SPEAKER_06: 1:06:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:47

I hope that other technologies do it the same way.

SPEAKER_06: 1:06:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:06:52

Have it your way. Yeah. You know, and I hope that more of this is what happens for public safety, emergency management, fire service, and you name it all over the place. Uh, we need even the private sector being able to relate in ways that make sense to everybody over to law enforcement uh without it becoming confusing on how that's happening. That's why I'm gonna be clarity.

SPEAKER_07: 1:07:15

That's why I nerd out about this stuff because I I am constantly trying to improve law enforcement. I'm always looking for the next latest and greatest. I, you know, I want to get my hands on it, I want to try it. The new taser comes out, I want to play with that. If there's a new body cam that comes out that does live translation, I want to mess with it. Like, I want to mess with all this stuff and I want to see it for myself because we've seen things. I've seen LPRs that have come out, and I'm like, oh, that that's awesome. And then you you get some hands-on experience with it, and you're like, this is garbage, this is not what they said it was gonna be. And you know, we go out to IACP. I remember when wandering the booths. Yeah, I remember a guy was bragging about their their LPRs in their 60% accuracy rate. 60%. I was like, That's a hard sell. I was like, but it was such a new space that nobody knew what a good pitch was at the time. And I was I just remember looking back and laughing. I'm like, oh my god, you're bragging.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:15

60 60 was good, yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:08:16

Like that's terrible. Like, I'm like, I don't, I don't like that. And and there was stuff out there at the time that was you know near 90-95% accuracy when they first started coming out, and it's only gotten better and better. And and that is why I think we're having this conversation that we're having is because of our excitement of how we can improve law enforcement and our it's a need to serve, even when you tie like it never goes away. I don't think it does.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:43

It hasn't gone away from me at all.

SPEAKER_07: 1:08:44

I don't my dad's been retired now since 2018. Um, you've been retired, and it it's he still serves in a different way. Now he works for a DA or for a defense attorney. He works for the enemy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:57

Here's the thing, I'll say that just one word about defense attorneys. The we talk a lot of trash about him. I know, but we don't know. Can you imagine a world without them? No, no, no, you didn't the balance has to be there.

SPEAKER_07: 1:09:10

Everybody's entitled to a proper defense, and I 100% believe that. And if they didn't have that, the system would take advantage of everybody that's out there. Correct. So I I'm with them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:21

The um, but the I don't see ever again, and I and I made this comment uh 10 years ago. I don't see police departments doubling in size over time. Though that is done.

SPEAKER_07: 1:09:38

Right. Okay, that's where force multipliers come in. Yes. So uh with that, let's let's change gears a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:47

I want to I want now you're trapping me somewhere.

SPEAKER_07: 1:09:50

No, no, no, no, no. I just want so you've gotten uh you've got a different lens now. You had you had a lens of what you thought police work was gonna be, and then you went into it and you lived it. You lived it for you know what, 30 years? Close to almost to 30 years.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:08

Most of my adult years, no matter how juvenile I acted.

SPEAKER_07: 1:10:11

Yeah, well, I haven't my sense of humor hasn't matured since about 14. Yeah, my turn. So yeah, farts are still funny. Watching somebody else get hit in the nuts is still funny. Um burps are funny. Uh I love it all. Um so my uh that hasn't been.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:26

I'm painfully aware you enjoy all that humor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:10:29

So in that, you've been out of the game. But you've been around the space. Yeah. So how are you looking at policing now as far as training, as far as recruitment? Uh like what are you excited for? So this would be a three-parter. What are you excited for? What are you fearful of? And where do you see the future going?

SPEAKER_00: 1:10:52

Um I'm fearful of. Okay, we'll go with fear go first. And it and I'm and it it's not so much of a fear as concern because cops never talk about fear. So the uh but I am concerned that we're moving every month, year, decade, whatever it is, we're moving closer and closer to the possibility of a bifurcated system where you have more, and we've seen this movement in the last five years much more poignantly, uh, or much more demonstrably. The private policing, basically, which is more a bigger push towards agencies that didn't exist before. It's kind of that concept, okay, there were hospital district police departments. Okay, I get it. They are kind of their own little world and stuff, and they're very specialized. I get it. But there's a push now for housing additions, huge housing additions, they have their own police departments, really. And most of them are actually made up now of agencies working overtime in there.

SPEAKER_06: 1:11:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:57

Okay, which I get it. There's an economic model to this, but there's a lot of other things that are lost in this too. But I see I'm concerned that I see where the people that need us the most are the people that have the least.

SPEAKER_06: 1:12:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:12:14

When you have the system moving towards those that can afford private policing inside of a HOA where the entry-level home price is$850,000 or a million, and they have an actual legitimate license, state licensed police development that has those powers. How they're doing it now or how they do it sometime in the future, right? The ability to pay for those services is I I won't say unlimited, but it's it has no definable like limit. Whereas taxpayer dollars can only afford so much. So I do worry that over time we are gonna be split up between a publicly funded law enforcement system and a privately funded one. And I don't like to see that. I don't think that's healthy for the world in general. I agree. Uh I I think we should be pushing towards the communities being able to provide law enforcement and public safety, emerging, all of these things from within. Help, I get it, grants and all kinds of good stuff and support. But the reliance upon the professional model of policing we're is gonna require that it happen in that context, not in a bifurcated system. Where yeah, they have's and have nots, literally. I do worry about that. Uh I understand everybody wants to be feel safe, but when we get to the point where we're licensing, you know, uh state authority, you know, to private endeavors, uh, or that becomes there's the the potential for corruption in that is just too high.

SPEAKER_07: 1:13:55

It's already police have so much power. I mean, it's a it's it's one of the things I always would try to remind rookies or recruits, especially recruits, like having a badge and a gun uh is an ultimate power that needs to be respected at all times. Like you you gotta constantly remind yourself that you have the authority to take someone's freedom away and take basically them away from the life that they know. And that is nobody else has that. And now imagine privatizing that. And then you're starting, you're you're if you privatize that, the the level of potential corruption in in privatizing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:14:37

How do you structure oversight that's effective that way? How do you how do you structure you know standards that are really enforceable and visible? Yeah, it's but I I do worry that we kind of move that way because there's been efforts introduced in the last two or three years to try and do more of this. I understand people's desire to feel safe and have their home and neighborhood secure and their schools, I get it, okay. But I do worry that it's an imbalance.

SPEAKER_07: 1:15:06

Yes, I agree.

SPEAKER_00: 1:15:07

I I think it's it's not that's this is not about keeping cops, you know, and and saving jobs and stuff. That's not what this is about. This is about a much larger, bigger picture thing.

SPEAKER_07: 1:15:16

Yeah, I agree. And I think that we've seen examples of just I've seen some shorts and some some reels and stuff on Instagram, for instance, where you see an officer working an off-duty gig for an hoa, and I hear what he's enforcing. He's not enforcing a law, right? He's enforcing house rules, the pool rules, right? Yeah, and I'm like, bro, you can't do that. And I don't think he's intentionally getting like corrupted that way, but basically what's happening, if you don't, and if you're out there listening, you don't quite understand it. The officer's job is to enforce the law, not your house rules. He can he can ask, he can suggest, but other than that, he's also just him being there in his uniform is a presence in itself, a form of intimidation and using the color of law.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:07

Well, and if you want to play the game of breach of peace, yeah, hard enough, guess what? That won't be able available anymore. It will, it will go away. Yep. That's something you reserve for when you have to do it, not when you elect to do it for all kinds of purposes.

SPEAKER_07: 1:16:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:22

And and now three kids inside the pool at an HOA. Yeah, while it technically may be a breach of peace in some way or a trespass, how are you how do you how should you really take care of that? Yeah, you know, and then And do you need a law enforcement officer sworn and trained by the state to do that?

SPEAKER_07: 1:16:39

Yeah. And then you get run into the well, they're giving me this extra money, and I got Christmas presents are coming right around the corner, and I want to keep this job. And that becomes an issue. And I would run into that working bars. I didn't I wasn't a guy that worked bars a lot, but every once in a while you just you're helping out a buddy because he couldn't make it and you owed him a favor, or this was my case anyway, and or or you, you know, there's a birthday coming up, and you're like, okay, I need to work a gig. Let me ask a friend if I can work his bar gig for him. So you you go to work these bar gigs, and they're asking you to enforce these house rules. And I'm like, no. And they're like, well, he always would. And I'm like, well, he's not. Yeah, and he's not here. So that it happens. It happens. The privatization part, and I, you know, and then and then let's flip the script a little bit. What is the benefit to having that? Well, now you've got enforcement, you've got a cop that's in a place that regular dispatched patrol isn't. So you've got an extra body out there helping the city. It doesn't cost the taxpayers anything because they're there and I get it. And they can hopefully squash a call. So I I see both sides of the house.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:51

And this is why, you know, I remember uh a previous company where I worked, they they had LPRs at the entrances to HOA developments and stuff. And if you look at the economies of scale here, it's tremendous. You're paying, uh I don't know, a few bucks a day for that little electric minion that's gonna tell you the stolen car rolled in at 215 in the morning, it's not there for poetry class. Okay, right? A minion. I like that. So putting an off-duty cop there costs a tremendous amount every hour, and they're in one spot, they're paying attention or not, but they're in one spot, they're not, they don't know what goes on at every entrance and six entrances, right? So things could happen and people roll out and nobody know any different until the next day.

SPEAKER_06: 1:18:34

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:35

Those cameras are extremely efficient, especially when they do attach out to the police department, and then you can have a law enforcement convention inside uh an HOA, you know, and solve some problems. So I'm okay with the thing that like technology that brings law enforcement to it, but not comfortable with the idea that we have little law enforcement universes all over the place that have interests that are motivated by all kinds of different things that should be in the mix.

SPEAKER_07: 1:19:05

Yeah. No, I agree with you on that. Um, that's a good point.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:08

I think that's a I think technology is actually a good leverage here.

SPEAKER_07: 1:19:13

How so?

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:15

If those communities are really interested in doing this, they use technology to bring law enforcement resources to you when you need it. Yes. Instead of I mean, and I think there'll also be, I mean, the number of communities, communities that can really afford this as an independent entity is pretty thin anyway. But I worry more about the derivative of that. Uh how we get discount services running around and doing stuff. You know, the there is a a good position for technology and security services, technology and law enforcement, you know, linking and stuff. There's there's a nexus that can be found here. Yeah. That's the right balance. Uh I'd prefer not to see more of the uh special district ideas. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:19:58

That's fair. Okay. All right. Okay, that's so that's fear. Okay, so we've got um, what are you excited for and what's the future? Oh, excited. I I mean what do you what are you seeing today in policing?

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:15

Where you're just like, this is I I see this kind of almost a tipping point that we're at where we where law enforcement finally gets it. They're not showing up, they're not coming. Okay, there's only so many we're gonna be able to pull into this career right now. Maybe it'll change. It'll it would I can't see that horizon line where that change is predictable at all. So that is also a concern, really. But the I see them coming to those root realizations. I mean, you see agencies jacking up those starting salaries, just trying to get people in the door.

SPEAKER_06: 1:20:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:52

And not everybody, I mean, I started at 1122 an hour.

SPEAKER_03: 1:20:56

Damn.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20:57

Okay, you've got to really be dedicated to wanting to do this. Right. Not it's not a job, man. That you've got to really want a career in this because you've got to really want to do this for a lot of the you know, hard, deep reasons. Uh starting at 90 to 100,000 a year, and I'm talking here in Texas. I'm not talking about in California. You know, there's there's some wild stuff that goes on there, but for money. But here, um I get we've got to get them in the door because we have to be able to be responsive with a headcount. I see a point coming where technology is going to really be able to effectively and ethically be able to tilt this balance and get it into the right workable norm. We aren't there yet. We're trying to find our way, I think, in what is the headcount now. Well, technology is moving so fast, we're not exactly sure where to be. So a chief has got to hedge his bets on. I need humans for right now. I I I'm not totally bought in over here, but I but I think you'll see this almost deterrent where you're gonna see headcounts are gonna be allowed to go to some point where they're comfortable because the technology is so solid and so pervasive and safe, yeah, that they're they're able to depend on these things. And these things could be 10 things long, right? Yeah. But that's exciting. Yeah. That we're getting closer to that point where we're gonna find this new kind of stasis where this is the head count we need for this community. And I think that's also a very individualized thing. I do not believe in these one model fits all kind of things. I've I've been part of the workings of figuring that out before. And it matters what you do for your community, what's important to the community, what's important for the police department, who's doing what in the police agency, all those go into the mix of how many people you need.

SPEAKER_06: 1:22:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22:54

And I think that response to crimes will be different, and I think it will be more professional. And I don't mean that it's not professional now. I think when I say that, I mean there's gonna be an element of it that is refined and very effective and very professional and transparent to everybody and how good it is. That's gonna increase. Yeah. Okay. Because the headcount that you're gonna get is gonna be held to a higher standard because there's more technology driving them to better outcomes. So what they're doing will change too. I think the response to crimes is going to change in how that really looks inside the police department and outside.

SPEAKER_06: 1:23:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:40

Uh so the this is DFR is a good example of how that can work. We're we're really early in DFR. And I think people don't really feel that yet, but I promise you, we're we're early in it. Uh, five years can be a huge difference.

SPEAKER_07: 1:23:57

I think you're going to see drones in the air all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:00

All the time. You're gonna see a pervasive, and I called this out years ago, that they're you're just going to see it, and it's gonna be very normal to hear that little worm buzz occasionally. Yep. And the sometimes it's gonna be delivering stuff, which I still don't fully get. But um I'm all right with it. I'm I'm good with it.

SPEAKER_07: 1:24:18

As long as you can get me my little trinkets faster from Amazon, hey, I'm all for it.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:22

Things we waited for two weeks we gotta have in two hours now.

SPEAKER_07: 1:24:26

Yes, you get mad when it takes an 24 hours.

SPEAKER_00: 1:24:29

The I I ordered a belt and it was ridiculous. It was not a belt I needed. It was it's absolutely ridiculous. I ordered it, they said they shipped it. FedEx says it's on the way, it's gonna drive today. My uh go figure, I have a ton of surveillance cameras around my house. Figures. So I'm alerted when FedEx rolls up. Okay, and the guy goes in the back of the truck, goes back in the driver's seat and drives away. He didn't have my thing. Uh I was enraged because it took more than two days to get something that actually wasn't in stock to my door, and it's gonna take a day longer and arrive today.

SPEAKER_07: 1:25:13

From another country.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:14

Oh, no, no. But it's still just what we expect now as far as immediacy, yeah. And so the and DFR delivers a degree of immediacy that we can it's almost kind of like we can see the potential in it. It's doing stuff and it's doing good stuff. Um, but as far as outcomes and the pervasiveness of its abilities, its impact, I like where I'm at. Not just not just in paragraph. I love manna. Love the company.

SPEAKER_06: 1:25:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:45

The technology in this area and what we can do with what the data we have and the more data that we're going to get and being able to synthesize these things and move quickly to what are uh impactful outcomes. This is really important.

SPEAKER_06: 1:26:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:03

And these are the things that I'm excited about.

SPEAKER_06: 1:26:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:06

The the next five years is gonna be just Eric, I'm gonna be very, very busy. Yeah. Uh I am. Um the uh before I when I got out of law enforcement and I went to the the first company that I went with, I was in consulting. Really, what I was it was a translator between tech and police, those guys and law enforcement.

SPEAKER_07: 1:26:28

Yeah, trying to teach the dummies just how this cram works.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:32

They had never been introduced to this kind of stuff. And so then then the technology platforms became more and more platforms that we're talking about. And so, but it was interpretation and conversations, yeah. And the now I'm actually in a sales position. I don't know if I told you that I'm actually doing sales where I'm at.

SPEAKER_02: 1:26:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:52

Yeah, which was a shift. I never would have considered it before. Uh the companies objectively, it's very unique, very special. I never ever was going to go into sales.

SPEAKER_06: 1:27:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:06

I love this driver's seat. I I am closer to the law enforcement people than I was even in consulting. I'm more intertwined with their department and their people. And I'm more intertwined into their outcomes. It's not me, it's not my company that's ultimately getting the outcome. It's a woven thing together. Yeah. People use the name partnership all the time. Oh, okay. I I see it kind of how you weave technology and the right partners and companies in. That's your tapestry you're in, right?

SPEAKER_06: 1:27:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27:38

So how you weave that together and how you don't is really important. And I like being that close to what I'm doing now. Uh in what we're doing.

SPEAKER_07: 1:27:49

Yeah, I I found, I have found personally, and a lot of the things that I I'm really into in law enforcement that help me. I don't I don't look like it's an iPhone. I have zero relationship with Apple. Nothing. I could give a commodity. I could give a shit less. You'll buy another one a year from now. Yeah. And probably an iPhone. But I am I am married into it because of just how long I've I've had an iPhone since they come out. Yeah. Because it was the first of what it did. I was a I'm a tech junkie anyway. I like that stuff. And it it does what I need it to do, but there's no relationship there. Versus, like kind of what you're referring to and what we're we're we're talking about with that life of service, these companies that I've gotten just in ingrained with first two is another one. Uh I Naraj, the guy that's right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:43

When you talk to him, yeah, you feel the energy from him and the passion he has for it.

SPEAKER_07: 1:28:47

Right. And and it when I get behind the tech in my my absolute drive to serve, like that, that's everybody's got their drives. Like, you know, some some people are food driven, whatever. Like I am service-driven. That's just how I'm wired. That's why I like to teach. That's why I like to do what I do on this, because I feel like I'm helping. I always want to help people in just as many different ways as I can. So then when I get into companies like we'll go with first two, there's that that dopamine drive or whatever you want to call it that I get behind because I'm I'm not even at work and talking about them, and I see what they do, and I know it's helping. I know it's helping other people. So it goes to be like the same thing with where you're at in your career, is you you went from serving, and then you've got that unknown area where you're like, ah, is this gonna and now you're in sales in a spot that you probably never wanted to be or thought you would be until it hit that service, that drive for service.

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:51

And for me, I mean, okay, uh, I mean, I'd been on the other side of the desk. I had been being pitched to all the time. Yeah. And so I know what I don't know, the slide deck, just pull my eyes out of my head. But the um the uh having a conversation or relationship with someone, even if it ultimately doesn't work out, it may be two years from now. Right. And I remember I remember the same poor sales rep that called me from a company over and over and over again. And it was just, I was so busy. I didn't have so finally I said, Okay, you you are absolutely gonna get shot. I'm gonna ask somebody else to work with you on this that's actually really gonna be more of an end user of this in a in a property crimes unit. Yeah, let me organize it there. And it still didn't work out. Okay. Relationship was still there. I ended up working with that person later.

SPEAKER_03: 1:30:47

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:49

They remembered it. Yeah, and they remembered that it was there was a relationship there that they managed to establish just over phone calls, right? Because they didn't pitch me, they just they were persistent in trying to just get some time with me. I couldn't do it because it wasn't something that my unit really needed because I had that kind of rule. If it's just touching one thing, go talk to that unit or see if they got budget for it, or something like that. I need to touch large areas. So the relationship thing is really important to me. And uh it's I I still like hanging out with my blue family, yeah. You know, as weird as they can be. The uh and what's odd is also there's getting away from the mic, sorry. Um, I know you're doing this trying to keep up with me moving around. Oh, you're fine. The um it's funny, the the other thing that happens when you leave law enforcement, uh especially after a long time, you retire, you know.

SPEAKER_06: 1:31:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:31:48

The six months later, and I hope it's like this for everybody. Six months later, it's a different lens that you look at at what you were doing.

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:02

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:04

It's a very interesting uh kind of point of reflection on what you did. The how you look back at things changes. And the what's you you get a little more honest with yourself about what worked, what didn't, what how you did. Not so much about how others did. We have all had people that just did not cross our paths well, yeah. Um but the the relationships that I had in law enforcement uh kind of get sustained in a way with what I'm doing now. And so So it's not just sales, it's it's being part of it. And I'm no, I'm here, right? Here's that, you know, orbit. I'm a little outside of it. But it when you can serve it, awesome. When you don't serve it well, shame on you. Yeah. You know, uh, but and and those are you know, you see that in different companies or different types of industries where they're commodities.

SPEAKER_06: 1:33:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:21

A phone. Who do you know at Apple? Not a damn person. Not a damn person. Yeah. Who was who sold you that phone? Not a club. Nobody, nobody, right? Yeah. Right. The but it's one of those things that it's you gotta have a phone. That's it. It's a commodity, you're buying it. Whereas in law enforcement, I think the things that we do, be it drones, LPRs, video cameras, the things that I do with with data, these are things that absolutely require a relationship.

SPEAKER_06: 1:33:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:51

Uh, because if you it we're sticky in a way, you don't go through the effort with us. When we show up, we bring people and we build things out in a very almost bespoke manner.

SPEAKER_06: 1:34:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:06

That you don't decide, yeah, it's great, but I'd really like to have a new fleet of patrol cars next year. So we're gonna do that. It doesn't happen. Yeah, right, because we become highly valuable.

SPEAKER_06: 1:34:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:18

Well, shame on you if you don't stay with that agency and stay close with them.

SPEAKER_07: 1:34:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:23

They're counting on you.

SPEAKER_07: 1:34:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:25

Right?

SPEAKER_07: 1:34:25

Absolutely. And and one of the things that I've noticed too in these types of these specific types of companies that do this type of thing. Um, Axon, you first two, y'all, uh, you know, these companies that get they get so ingrained in a way that they're the police department's victories are your victories. Like you get so invested when you find out we caught this, you know, pedophile that we wouldn't have caught without what you guys were doing. But it was y'all's teaching and coaching that helped us figure this software out or figure this piece of equipment out to get us to that point.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:06

That's who we want to be. That's what every company should want to be.

SPEAKER_07: 1:35:09

It's not that, you know, you become, I like to say, you guys become the Chick-fil-A, and that's that's what I look for. I look for any piece of tech that I'm getting or any piece of gear that I'm getting for police work. I want that company to be the Chick-fil-A of what they're doing. Uh, you can see that case right over there that I got. I was looking to buy a pelican case for my equipment for going to the conference. I wanted something that was going to protect what I had. And so I'm like, all right, let me get this pelican case. I'm looking. It had these variations that I wasn't quite looking for, so I was trying to see if I could get specific. So I call. I was treated like a number. And I'm like, damn. So I started looking up. I looked up uh pelican um competitors. I typed that in. So I looked that up and uh found a company in Texas called Condition One. I was like, all right, let me see. Over half the cost, less for the same type of case I was looking for. And but it the site was a little confusing for me at the time. I was trying to figure, you know, the configuration I was like, if I click this, is it mine? So I call, call them up, answer, treated me. Got a human. It got a human, treated me like a Texan. Uh and they're like, Yeah, we're based right out of Texas, you know. He's like, hey, if get it, try it out for a month. You don't like it, send it back, no problems. I was like, holy, like, okay, cool. End up getting the case, love it. Send them a review, let them know. They ended up sending me a coupon for the next case that I get, like 25% off or something like that. Not a huge deal, but it's the effort that they took to get behind what I did. And they wanted it, it wasn't like a survey monkey, how do you like our product? It was somebody that actually reached out and said, How do you like our product? So far. And I'm like, this is amazing. So that is one of the things that I think when you're in a company like a Peregrine or like a first to or like an axon, the quality assurance of getting behind what you're doing, not just the product, but its results. What is it doing? Are you are my trophies your trophies? I want them to be.

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:21

Like, yeah, but I I draw a distinction there because I've seen companies use a law enforcement agency's efforts as and they can't.

SPEAKER_07: 1:37:29

Oh, as well. Yes, okay. Fair, fair, fair. Yeah, I do recommend it. I do, yes, that's not what I mean.

SPEAKER_00: 1:37:36

They need to claim only the victory of the agency because if you're really good, everything else is perfectly clear.

SPEAKER_07: 1:37:44

Yes. And and and that's like for me as a cop, I like to send those victories to the company. Hey, thank you guys. This is what you helped get done. I want the person that talks to me, you know, my representative that talks to me from the company, I want them to know what they helped do. Yeah, I think that's important.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:01

And that's it's it's an interesting, you know. I I watched this with a previous company and how the feedback loop kind of worked. And with Peregrine going from West Coast, yeah, and some others, but I mean, dramatically covering the US, you know, and heading across all states now. The inflow of what we call the we have a program called Slack, and that has a channel in there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it has a it has stuff in there about you know wins. And that's a lot of places where we get feedback. Yeah. We make sure everybody in the company knows that hey, you're you're doing this with them.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:37

You know, the uh if you sell the tires that go on the cars, I'm not sure that has that kind of mission feel to it, right? Right. Okay, I get it. But the the amount of just uh I guess satisfaction, you want to call it that in a broad term, to working in a company that supplies the tool, gives the training, and uh keeps giving them more. Yeah, uh it's very satisfying when they win with our stuff.

SPEAKER_06: 1:39:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:09

Because I can't win on the field anymore.

SPEAKER_07: 1:39:11

Yep.

unknown: 1:39:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:13

It's if you can't win on the field, it's another way to serve. The sideline is a good spot. You can still do things there. So the uh winning from you know, jumping out of cars and getting, you know, hamstring pulls. I I I'm okay with you know letting some of that slide now.

SPEAKER_07: 1:39:32

You know, at our age, yeah, I'm with you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:34

I mean, I've still got two torn shoulders that have not been repaired from my law enforcement.

SPEAKER_07: 1:39:41

Stem cells, brother. Stem cells. Stem cells.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:43

Yes. Yeah, I've got cartilage torn in both shoulders.

SPEAKER_07: 1:39:46

My dad had seven surgeries. Um he had at a point in his career, he had I'll give you the short version of a long story, but he chases a stolen vehicle, they all bow out, he catches the slowest one. Slowest one happens to be like six foot seven, five, you know, five hundred pounds. Yeah, and my dad is five foot seven and maybe 160 pounds at the time. So he was a feisty guy. Um, they end up fighting over his gun, da-da-da. But the guy finds a piece of cement that had broken off of a like, you know, man-made creek type thing in a park. Yeah. And um, he just destroys me, hits my dad in the head, hits him in his shoulder several times to where it dislocated and fractured all the stuff in his shoulder. Um, goes through his career, shoulder problems, shoulder surgery after shoulder surgery after shoulder surgery. That's a hard thing to say. Uh, so he has all of those and nothing. All it did was limit his mobility, didn't really help the pain. Uh, gets the stem cells. I'm not gonna say he got 100% recovery, but the pain's gone, mobility function was way up. Yeah, um, and so now, ever since then, I'm like I'm at the point now where I wake up three or four times a night.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:02

It sucks. I got tingling in my fingers and stuff. It's just it doesn't get any better, but it's just cartilage, so it doesn't fix itself.

SPEAKER_07: 1:41:08

Or the diabetes, one of the two.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:12

That no. But yeah, um, yeah, the but if you can't play on the field, it's a good thing to be able to support those that are.

SPEAKER_07: 1:41:22

Yeah, yeah. And I I think it's important. Like um, I had this is very rare. This does not happen a lot. I don't know why it's happened with me in my life. I have four AED saves.

SPEAKER_05: 1:41:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_07: 1:41:37

Yeah. What are the odds? Four. Yeah. Two were cops.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:43

Wow. That's even rarer.

SPEAKER_07: 1:41:45

Right. And it wasn't because they were shot or anything like that. It was heart episodes. That'll happen. Yeah. Yeah. And having that, like every time I had a save with an AED, I sent a letter to the company. I was like, like the best. Yeah. When you get saves, stuff like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:03

It's and it's nice to see, and it just picks up the volume in that channel, that Slack channel, just keeps picking up.

SPEAKER_07: 1:42:11

The more popular you all get, more people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:13

And it's like, you know, if you're selling it, you're in contact with them all the time. I think there's, and especially if you're someone with my history, not everybody like we don't have, not all of our salespeople are former law enforcement. Right. Right. Um, so our what we get out of it is probably a little different, not entirely, but uh maybe our level of satisfaction is a little different.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:36

You know, or how we feel about it. But the uh it's a little, it's I don't know, there you you just can't there's only so many places in the universe you can put yourself that you get to serve indirectly but closely. So I mean the people that are doing the background, I mean, these guys that code this stuff, that do all the background stuff, the people that work with like my agency that I retire from is about to have all this. And I I've just set up the meeting so that that's our kickoff meeting where our deployment specialists come in and they become part of the family fully because they're gonna spend months, three months working with them, building the whole thing everywhere. Well, when they get wins, those guys know it. Yeah, you know, they go, I built that, you know. Yeah, I made that, you know. So the uh it's I don't think the the people that are on the line building the Chevy Tahoe police package may get the same satisfaction as someone like that's using tools that are kind of frontline, like in a different way.

SPEAKER_07: 1:43:46

Yeah, so I get that, you know, it's just a distance, I think. Yeah, like Star Chase or the Grappler or yeah, like I love the grappler videos, those are fantastic. I see those every time, and I'm just I I kind of try to think of myself as what if I was one of the guys that helped make that thing or got it out there, like I would be pumped.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:03

I'm like, yeah, I helped it. It's like uh the the drone guys, you know, uh I I I'm a uh and I'm a fan of Skydio. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:44:14

That arm thing that they give.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:15

Oh man, I'm a fan of that. I'm a fan of SkyDio. Yeah, uh I just like drones. I have been for a while. I love drones, yeah. And and I see the future with this. Um the I'm a fan of theirs.

SPEAKER_06: 1:44:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:27

They're and I and I guess it's part of the reason why Peregrine is also that's the same type of ethos. It's this, okay, we've got a drone. You don't stop there. Right. You're constantly innovating, you're constantly moving the needle further out. Yeah. Right. And they do it, they do it well. And I love watching their stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:44:46

Uh grapplers and stuff. The TED Talks like that Skydio puts out there. Like it's not a TED talk, it's just them putting on a demo, but you're like, this is awesome. Like the way they present it. I saw the the most recent one. Okay, so we're gonna tech nerd out here for a second for those listening, but the most recent one that I saw Skydio do, and they're not a paid sponsor or anything like that. This is just me being a police nerd. Um, all of a sudden a Tesla comes out, a Tesla truck comes out. And I don't know, there's love tra Tesla trucks or hate 'em, to me, as a kid, uh 80s child, that's how I pictured a future truck.

SPEAKER_00: 1:45:19

We used to draw things like that. Look at that.

SPEAKER_07: 1:45:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it it is not an impressive piece of uh machinery by any means as far as aesthetics, but when I pictured a future truck as a kid, that's what I pictured. And so I automatically like it. Uh, you know, and then the stainless steel with kind of the DeLorean look, you know, to it. So that pumped me up as well. So now you've got an all-blacked-out Tesla truck coming out, and this arm deploys out of the back, like not just any like robotic arm. I mean, it is like a futuristic can manipulate and move in any direction. It brings out this drone out the back. And you look at this drone and it doesn't look like a drone that you've ever seen. It's a fixed-wing drone, but it's launching off of this arm because the arm's scooting back in a way to like project it in the air like it's a NASA mission all of a sudden, and then it just shoots straight up in the air, takes off. It's got hours of flight time where I just told you guys earlier, most drones are like 20 to 40 minutes, and here you got this new piece of technology and the way that they present it, and then they show it fly. Yeah, I mean, I was the the police nerd in me was screaming. I thought it was I thought it was cool, and I love that shit. So, yes, when you talk about SkyDio, I have been singing their praises. I've never even used them, I've never used Sky Dio, so I can't even speak from personal experience, I can just speak about the way they present their stuff and they never stop. And and yeah, and they never stop.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46:47

That's I like that same feeling, the ethos of my company is we don't stop. Yeah, you know, we we do, we're big on when we and and Skyo is this way too. This is the product that we're selling to you. It's not promises, it's not something that it might become someday. This is here you go. Same way here. Now, that's just the beginning. Yeah. Here it is, it's finished, it's exactly what you want the way you want it, and but hang on, it gets better. We're building more, you know, and we're gonna improve that constantly because there's no end to that, you know. And the more agencies bring in more data from the more sensors and tight and sources in general, the more we can do for them.

SPEAKER_06: 1:47:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:29

The uh it's it is nice not being in the hardware side of things. Yeah, that's a hard life. Yeah. But uh the all of the things that I heard from the outside about software. Oh my god. Yeah, every yeah, nothing's ever finished, it's always half banks and stuff. It's incredible to land somewhere on the sales side, no less, that I know that when I'm there and I say, this is what we can do for you. We're gonna deliver on that. And then wait until next year. Yeah. Okay, wait for the updates on this.

SPEAKER_07: 1:48:02

You know, let's talk about something that I think is overlooked in law enforcement. When we get me, let's say I we get Peregrine or whatever, and I start to learn it, or or we get SkyDio, or we get any of these things. I think one of the things that cops lack um and don't do enough is when they have an issue, they don't relay it to the companies to improve. I think that that is a critical thing that officers need to start learning to get comfortable with. So maybe you can take this back to Peregrine and any other companies that are out there listening. Give us an easy avenue to send in issues. Yeah. Especially like when they're happening. Like that's that's a big deal. Because you'll get uh a piece of software or or a piece of tech, and then um they do an update, and you're like, awesome, cool, new update, but it makes something fall apart on the back end, and you're like, what the fuck?

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:01

Like these. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I just did an iOS 26 update, and nothing in my world is right anymore.

SPEAKER_07: 1:49:07

Right. So my point being is that in that officers, if you're listening to me out there, one of the things that you need to start getting comfortable with is reaching out to these companies when you have an issue, when you run into something, or if you have an idea to improve it. Hey, we really like how this does, but if it did this one little extra thing, it would really help us out.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:27

Well, and that's oddly, without I and it wasn't by design or anything, but how I actually ended up retiring and going into the private sector was the fact that I became a huge feedback loop for the LPR company that I contracted with uh into my Intel Center. I and and I've known others that have done this too, where you're not trying to just help them, you're trying to help your brothers and sisters and law enforcement all over the place.

SPEAKER_04: 1:49:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:51

And you're saying, hey, uh, I don't know why, but that fire engine keeps coming off and logging as a motorcycle. And then you work a little bit collaboratively with them with a few phone calls, you realize it's the large wheel with the big center hub. For some reason, optically and the algorithmically, it sees a motorcycle tower. Right. Oddly. Yeah. Right? Because and it this is part of the learning curve of being an operator or practitioner of technology in the law enforcement field and learning to work with your vendor.

SPEAKER_06: 1:50:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:22

And and I I also preach this a lot. And it was before I ever got into private work. I realized the value of the relationship that and what both sides get out of it when the relationship is is very good. Yeah. The uh how you treat your vendors is important. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:50:37

And what do what do we end up doing as cops? Ah, shit doesn't work.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_07: 1:50:41

And they stop using it. I mean, the the as hard as it is to get buy-in for officers on something, you can lose it in an instance. And the second you lose it is very hard. And that's why I am listening. If you're an officer and you're listening to this right now, don't give up because you run into an impasse or something that you get frustrated with or whatever. Reach out to the company, develop.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:05

Find your customer advocate, find your customer support, find your sales rep. Okay. And the more pervasive and more kind of all-encompassing a product is, the more likelihood there is that you'll know who these people are.

SPEAKER_06: 1:51:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:17

If they're not, somebody at your department is a point of contact for them. Find them and tell them. Yep. Because a lot of these companies, I mean, I the one I'm in now is very, very interested in hearing back.

SPEAKER_07: 1:51:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:31

And in that sense, it is a partnership. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 1:51:35

It's a symbiotic, mutually beneficial thing.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:37

Yeah. And we do a lot to get information to find out ways that we could improve or change or grow the product in ways that people need it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:46

And but to hear back, good or bad, doesn't matter. We're very thick skinned. Tell us how it's working for you, you know. And this goes for all technology platforms. Yeah, that's that's and it doesn't need to be a LinkedIn post in front of the world. You know, it doesn't, you don't have to do that. God, it can just be an email, you know. Um, the LinkedIn kind of drives me crazy with some of the stuff on there. Just yeah. Uh, but I'm a big user of it, I love it. I mean I I'm on I I read LinkedIn all the time, and it's almost kind of like a news channel for me for the industry itself. Uh, but I also get to see how other agencies are using different technologies and things like that too. So um, and I keep track of people that I know, you know, and how what they're saying. But the but feedback is is incredibly important. Having the relationship, it's not just a money exchange, especially when like with our company, we touch everything you want us to touch in your agency. And then everybody that the agency wants to have to be able to play ball with that gets allowed to do it. So we're very ingrained in the agency. So the relationship's really important. The feedback is important. Uh, it's not a you're buying it a commodity, a thing, you know, it's not like you're buying just stuff, supplies for the year, and you could go get it to some other vendor. We're special in that way. We we're unique and we're very tailored, and so we want that strong relationship, even when it's not good news, but we still want it, you know, it's right, it's incredibly important.

SPEAKER_07: 1:53:20

And I this brings up a good transition. I think for other officers out there listening, whether you've been a cop five years, twenty years, whatever it is, if you find yourself where either the job is not as desirable for you as it once was, the job's not what you thought it was going to be, you're close to retirement. I kind of want the the way I kind of want to end this is I want I kind of want you to go through the what it is like, what to expect for the officers when they switch over from law enforcement to the private sector. I don't think we ever really touch on that enough, or if any, and I want officers to know that there is either light at the end of the tunnel, uh, or there's there's other ways to serve, or like, you know, however you want to view that, but transitioning to private sector afterwards, you can start fostering that years before you better be about to go get out. Yeah. So can you kind of go down that what you recommend? And and I want people to I want them to know what their options are.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:26

I I talk to probably 20 to 30 people a year, just guessing. Uh and I don't mean just chatting on a chance meeting at IECP or something like that. I talk to people like in depth on the phone, they'll reach out, or someone will usually it's a referral. Hey, there's an officer over here, he's thinking of you know getting out. It doesn't fit his home life or who knows what else, or end of their career. They they they're at 29 years and they really want to go do something else. And so I I'm glad to have the chat. I really am. Um part of it is qualifying what they want, what could they be passionate about, what will feed them. Okay, it's if it's if somebody just says, I just need something that pays me$75,000 or more, okay. Go on the internet. Okay. But if they want to work in technology, I I got enough experience to understand what that journey looks like and feels like. Uh, I also, it's not lost on me that I was very, very fortunate in how I got into it was not having to spend six months working through, you know, uh what do they call it? They uh there's a system for candidate processing, uh, but it's these automated bots. Oh, yeah. You could not use enough of the right word enough times and you're not considered anymore.

SPEAKER_07: 1:55:48

Yeah, the algorithm's got to catch you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:50

Yeah, the candidate tracking system, which is something I forget what it is, but uh they're those are torturous, horrible machines. Yeah, yeah. The uh, but if they want to work inside of technology that serves law enforcement, I try to figure out okay, who are they? Are you someone that needs a very mature company that has defined workflows, expectations, the travel is X percent of their time, the earnings potentials are these, and everything is very finite. Okay, you find that in companies that have been doing it a long time that are usually public companies that are larger. And so I try to classify them. Okay, are you searching for that? Is does that feed you? Is that where your happy spot is to be in that type of environment? Or do you want to be in kind of a high growth but relatively mature? And I say relatively that's really important, but like Taxon is a very mature company 25 years, I think, probably by now. Yeah, lots of growth always in the company, right? So they're on they do not sit still, right? But it's a mature company. They've got their they've got their drive down, right? Right, yeah, but they're they grow all the time. Okay, that's a place. So there's uh let's say like a I don't know, like a Motorola, right? They've been around I don't even know how long, right? Yeah, theirs is not uh they're not as agile and nor are they as frenetic as you move down the the the spectrum here. And it's not down in a bad way, it's just different. Axon, fast mover, big, big goals, tons of growth in all kinds of ways and stuff, but they have a system down, it's it's more developed over time, yeah. And then there's everything else, everything else is different versions of startup, right? And most won't make it, but it's the tolerance for risk, and can you work in a lot of ambiguities in the beginning? You know, because cops like work in ambiguities, but their system at the police department is policy bound and has all kinds of structure to it, right? Not everybody falls into an unstructured environment that's the wild, wild west, right? And there's a period of time early in those startups that it's like that, and there's high risk that the company's gonna just turn the lights off, you know, in six months or a year or whatever. A lot of them do. So, and then understanding how your compensation works and what you should be looking for with each of these three tech types of entities or personalities of companies. Um and different people match different things. So I have a conversation with them to find out what rings your bell. You know, and some work here, right? Some think they work here, okay, but I really press them to really be introspective. Right. You know, because I've done this, you know, once uh before. Now I'm in a uh Paragon is a startup, yes, but they're more mature than most. They really are. Uh there's startup only in some kind of some technical classifications, I guess. I don't even fully understand all the funding rounds. And at what point, how many funding rounds do you have before you're not a startup? I don't know. Right. Yeah. But uh I know part of it is your structure, your development, your product, and things like that. That can matter. So a startup in one type of area is not the same as a startup in another area in law enforcement uh supplying technologies. So the the person that can jump in here, all good, it's gonna be a crazy ride. Okay. The last company I was with was a crazy, almost four-year ride. It's there's tons of experience to learn from and do good. And if you can survive there, you can survive in any of this, but you may not be happy there.

SPEAKER_06: 1:59:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59:58

This is the thing I tell people don't necessarily believe this is a starting point for you. These other two may be the right starting point because they may be the ending point too. You may enjoy this, but you may not enjoy that, and you're thinking you're building towards that. It's not always that. You know, uh, I know plenty of people that are axon have been there for a long time, they're very happy there. It's challenging, but they like that pacing and that pressure. Like I do better under that moderate to high pressure.

SPEAKER_06: 2:00:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:24

Some people don't.

SPEAKER_06: 2:00:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:26

Right? Um so I talk with them a lot and I try and figure out you know, if I I really want them to question themselves enough to know which one of these kind of three things that they fit into better.

SPEAKER_06: 2:00:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:40

And then if but it's some of them say, Oh no, I'm definitely this person. Okay, tell me about that. You know, what what are those things that you think you know make you fit that? And the people that typically it's the hardest to fit into startup coming from law enforcement. Yeah, it really is. Um, because like I I've never worked in sales before. Well, I I sold some drugs before, but those legitimately fish in a barrel, though. That's a yeah, it's a high-demand market. They can get over the fact that you might be a risk. Yeah. They learn the hard way. But um, but the it's whether or not you're gonna go into sales, whether or not you're gonna go into support roles. There's all kinds of other things like consulting, yeah, and customer success. Some cops really get a lot out of that taking care of the law enforcement you know, agencies they work with. They they like that role, and they do very well sometimes in that. So that's the kind of the filtering mechanism that people need to go through that I tell them about. And then it's a matter of, okay, remote, not remote, sales, support, travel, things like this. They're not thinking of all those things. Uh, and then you you think, okay, there's higher income here, greater risk, less here, and less here, you know, where wherever you're gonna land, there's different compensation types and levels. And they need to get comfortable with that. Somebody that's leaving law enforcement at 10 years with no retirement built in, all that other thing, all those other things, they may have a lower risk tolerance to that. They may prefer a salaried role that is pretty solid and stable across the board. Um and in retirement, you have some safety net, you know. But I I don't look at it like I'm not in sales because of my safety net. Yeah, I'm in sales because I'm very passionate about what I'm doing. Yeah, it's it's this a it was a big leap for me, but I really wanted it because of where I'm at. I could list 25 companies that I would not do this with.

SPEAKER_07: 2:02:43

Right. And but you may consult. You know what I mean? Like for for people that really listen, like you don't just because sales doesn't fit you for this company, consulting might.

SPEAKER_00: 2:02:54

Yes. And there's other roles, there are support roles, you know, that you might fit there. Yeah. So uh, but the the other thing is uh just like you were alluding to, what have you done? Yeah, man, that matters. Yeah, okay. I'm all for SWAT, I'm all for patrol, all for canine. But you just I just listed three things that do not have dramatically large second career opportunities.

SPEAKER_03: 2:03:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 2:03:23

Now, all of these things bring certain traits that different parts of the market will have higher value to and there'll be a better connection with. But if you want to have a there's retirement gigs and there are careers, and you gotta figure that out too. Do I just want to make extra? You know, yeah. For 10 years, I'm good. Or five years. Okay. You're a retirement gig. Okay, and that's cool. It it serves your needs and you're fulfilling someone else's needs, right? And that could be a 20 different roles, right? If you're moving in a whole different career, okay, there's a l it's there's a much more serious approach to this. And the you need to really look back. What do I have on my table? And it's like I just worked with somebody, and I say I worked with them, I'm helping cops, you know, moving into other things. I just worked with somebody that I just went down the list and I said, tell me what do you bring to the table for the things that you said you want to do. Most of the time it's really short, or it's I need some help. Yeah. You know, or it's outdated. Yeah. Oh, okay. Like, okay, well, I you know, uh, use of force instruction probably is not gonna help you in the tech sector. I mean, not at all.

SPEAKER_04: 2:04:44

Probably not.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:46

So and it's not that that's not valuable, it's just that use of force instruction is valuable in a certain area.

SPEAKER_07: 2:04:51

So go work for force science.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:53

Actually, that'll help you. I I talked to another guy, he had a lot of uh defense skills, force policy, and stuff like that. He'd actually been involved in a lot of it. So, hey, here's an idea. Why don't you become a subject matter expert, you know, and work with attorneys?

SPEAKER_06: 2:05:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:05:14

And you can work on it in a variety of different ways because once you're cons once you do get subject matter expert labeling and you do well, you get called everywhere. Everybody wants you, right?

SPEAKER_07: 2:05:25

Look at Vaughn Kleem for course that dude.

SPEAKER_00: 2:05:28

And it yeah, and there's much smaller versions of that, right? But if you want to go make a hundred to two hundred thousand a year, it's out there. Yeah. If you are subject matter in certain things that attorneys need. But I know this my brother's not a pellet attorney, so I I have some weird insight into this.

SPEAKER_07: 2:05:44

But but one of the problems that I've seen, and this this comes from the NRT CCA stuff mostly, is people will hit me up all the time. Hey, I'm I really like this company. Uh, I really like, you know, what do you think the odds of me getting hired there? And I'm like this is where that don't be delusional. Yeah, don't have this, like you've worked, and this is no offense, it doesn't mean you can't get the experience, but you worked for an agency of 16 people in a city that gets a thousand calls a year, yeah. They arrest 20 people a year. The odds of you having the experience to work for these companies is very low. And you get some people that they don't see anything outside of their fishbowl. Where you you worked for what I would consider a medium to large size agency for the nation, yeah, which has a shit ton of calls. I mean, you guys have a ton of calls. Um, and then so you've got that experience, but then you go around the country uh uh in the private sector now, and you get a chance to see the level of experience and calls and and cultures around the nation. And then you're gonna have somebody hit you up and be like, Yeah, I want I want to come out and work either where you're at, or I was wanting to work for this company, and then you gotta have that realistic conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:08

And I do, and I I don't I don't candy coat it. I'm I'm I'm very respectful because the work they're doing is still really important. I did that work, you know? Yeah, and and what what's funny is people there's a I mean inside and outside law enforcement, there's a a particular uh perception of smaller agency cops as knowing less. What I have found is some of those guys are extremely resourceful, adaptive, and they take care of stuff on their own.

SPEAKER_07: 2:07:38

Right. Because they have no choice. That's some trades that are valuable.

SPEAKER_00: 2:07:43

Yep. Uh the thing that they don't get opportunity at is technology, leadership roles, and really deep subject matter expert areas. Right. Yeah. These are the opportunities that aren't provided by a smaller agency. It's not because they're lesser cops, it's they just don't have those opportunities there.

SPEAKER_07: 2:08:00

Yeah. And that's if I came across ways to do that. Oh, no, no.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:03

I just always do when I talk to people about this and I and I put it to them, I tell them, hey, here's your strengths coming from a small agency.

SPEAKER_07: 2:08:11

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:11

Where does that play well for you?

SPEAKER_07: 2:08:13

Because they typically run a whole call where you go to like where I'm at or where you're at, it's like you get the information you pass on to the detective.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:20

You're like, next. So um small agencies have some advantages that larger ones I like don't. But over a whole career, someone working at, you know, Dallas or Fort Worth and Atlanta, Chicago, there's a likelihood that they're gonna get exposed to a broad range of things and maybe become expert in some of them that may be valuable in a second career. Um so the there, but there's a lot of avenues out there that not everybody thinks of, like being a subject matter expert in testimony.

SPEAKER_06: 2:08:51

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:52

Yeah, there are people that drill down to stuff and they're considered their department guru in something. Guess what? Somebody else somewhere else may value of that, but you gotta think about it. And I also tell people uh get a LinkedIn yesterday.

SPEAKER_06: 2:09:05

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09:06

And do not fill your resume with everything that you've done.

SPEAKER_06: 2:09:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09:13

Nobody in the private sector, let's say in technology, is necessarily, and I'll tell you a funny twist on this too. Nobody's gonna care whether or not you were a great um handcuff teacher. Handcuffing technique teacher. You don't need to put that on there. And I'm telling you, I've seen these things, you know, where there's four pages of resume, and I go, okay, first let's get this in one, maybe two, if you really do some crazy wild stuff that's really applicable.

SPEAKER_06: 2:09:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09:41

Most of this should fit on one. Um, and then let's tune that in to highlighting the things that are for the employer that you're really wanting to work for.

SPEAKER_06: 2:09:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09:50

And your LinkedIn page too. It should change over time depending on what your interests are and where you want to go, but it should start five years before you exit, or you think you're going to.

SPEAKER_03: 2:09:59

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09:59

Whether it's retirement or just earlier. And understanding the rest of the world is very different. Yeah. What they're looking for and what they're not, you need to think about. So the uh uh oddly, I did not put narcotics work in my background on my resume and stuff, or nor my LinkedIn stuff. It's that was a long time ago. And it doesn't seem really relevant. Yeah. Turns out I hadn't put it on there, but it did come up just in conversation during the interview process. My interview process with the peregrine was really long because uh they'll call they people said, You've never carried a quota or done sales. I go, I get it. That's the mechanical part of this. I can learn those things, and I promise you, I will learn those things. All the other stuff is what I know that I bring to the table. And they they got that. But one of them, he was like, okay, you know, but then all of a sudden it just came out that I'd done narcotics work, and all of a sudden he was like sold. Not literally that, but yeah, yeah. At that point, he was like, I know what that entails, and I know what those guys have to do.

SPEAKER_06: 2:11:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11:11

And what I didn't understand was it's the same thing I've said, you know what? Bartenders can do sales.

SPEAKER_04: 2:11:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11:17

Bartenders can do all kinds of sales. They make great cops. Service industry people can do a lot of stuff, man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because you handle people in all states of life, and you've got to kind of move them in certain ways. And they're just service industry people are an untapped resource.

SPEAKER_07: 2:11:35

100%. I would take I would take a barista or a bartender over a college, a fresh college grad, anyway. Oh, yeah. They got life skills and they've been through stuff and they've lived hard. Yes. For sure.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11:48

That is not easy. Um they the times they have to work and the pressures and the the relationships in the workplace and outside, it those are good picks. The narcotics thing was, and I remember bringing this up in a sales meeting once. Someone was like, Oh, sales are so hard. It wasn't my company, it was previous. And uh they were moaning how hard it was. And I was like, You have more inbound requests for your product than you could have time to deal with. And and so I raised my hand and I said, uh, let me put hard selling in perspective. Hard selling is you know being the new guy in the neighborhood, and you're in a storage unit at 245 in the morning with two guys you don't know. And if you don't gain their confidence, that's where you're gonna stay the rest of your existence for the next 10 minutes while you die.

SPEAKER_05: 2:12:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:12:38

So that's actually hard selling. Yeah. You know, uh gaining report rapport, confidence, trust. Yeah, do it in 90 seconds. Tell me if it's easier now. Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_07: 2:12:48

So trying to convince somebody that you need to find the supplier because you got a bigger buyer that you you've got the you've got the uh credibility for the weight that you're trying to push, like stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:12:58

Yeah, all of these things and how God tried managing snitches. Oh yeah. Okay, CIs. Sorry. Sorry, confidential informants. I come from a different time.

SPEAKER_07: 2:13:08

The uh yeah, you can't call them homeless. They're uh the unhoused all good. All different things. All good. I roll with it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:13:16

I do the uh in where I'm at, I touch all kinds of uh really not now. Now I'm I handle all everything in the northern third of Texas. Okay. Most of my previous four years was anywhere on the map that was a major city or county. Okay. So I got uh I exposed to a lot of different terminologies and ideologies and all kinds, yeah. I've seen the unhoused tremendous swaths of uh personalities of cities, states, and agencies. And it can be shocking. You have an idea. There was an agency that's a large national site, you know, national level agency that I ran into that I was so shocked at the politics and where they landed on the spectrum because I just had an idea they did they landed somewhere else. And I was like, oh, okay. So this is an entirely different approach. We need to retool everything to make sure we understand where they're at. It's kind of like take people as they are and where you find them in life. Yeah. And that's that was the lesson with one particularly large agency taught me that rule in law enforcement, you take things as they are right when you show up. Yeah, it absolutely translates to what I'm doing now. Okay. Yeah, it really does. Yeah. And having that perspective, you know, will help because you won't be caught off balance, you know, with an agency that's telling you these things and you're trying to catch up. Okay. Listen to who they are. Yeah. Learn them. But the um it's but for people wanting to get in, understanding that what skills I never thought narcotics work with translate technology, but yeah, it does apparently in sales because it's still selling. So good to know. Yeah. The uh don't estimate underestimate what you've done isn't translatable. But reach out to people like me and others to help you not have a resume that nobody wants to read. Yeah. LinkedIn and having those connections, really seek them out. And don't be afraid to like, like, if you like somebody, if they wanted to work with Peregrine, if they reach out and they say, Hey, can I have 10 minutes? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_06: 2:15:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:15:27

You know, I mean, how many times would I wanted that? Maybe, you know, I I've been very fortunate in my career, my second career path, you know.

SPEAKER_05: 2:15:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:15:35

But I understand the value of having people help. People will help, they really will. So don't be afraid to get on LinkedIn and just reach out to someone and say, hey, this is who I am, a little bit of my background. I'm looking to shift. Can I get 10 minutes of your time just to bounce stuff off of you and just get an idea? I'm not trying to have you connect me with a hiring manager. Oh, do not send me things that say, hey, I've applied at your company. Okay, well, I'm kind of out of it now. Right. Because you're part of HR's process, you know, so and I don't know you. But can you connect me with a hiring manager? I don't even know who that hiring manager would be necessarily, you know, and I don't know you, so that's that's an unfair imposition on me. And I hate having to say no, but I've I've come up with a polite way of saying, heck, I really can't help you there. Yeah. You know. Uh but reaching out to people, literally just asking for 10 minutes, 15 minutes of time, people will do it. And doing that across different areas. Yeah, connect with people on LinkedIn. It's not like you're asking about on a date.

SPEAKER_06: 2:16:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:39

You're just saying, hey, you're doing something that I might want to do. I'd like to connect with you, and maybe I'll send a message to you. You don't have to write away. A couple weeks later, you send a message, hey, I connected with you on this, and this is what I'm looking at. It may not even your company may not ultimately be where I go.

SPEAKER_06: 2:16:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:53

But can I have 10 minutes?

SPEAKER_06: 2:16:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 2:16:56

No.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:56

Especially cops. Yes. They're in this, they will help cops.

unknown: 2:17:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 2:17:00

Absolutely. Yeah. That's it's it's fun because I've got to see, I've seen a lot of the people, you know, starting with my own dad, and then just the transition of all my friends. Like Dalton Webb, another one. He's my mentor in the real-time crime center. And watching him transform over into the private sector and thriving, and you switching over and other people that I've met along the way jumping over. Uh Lenny, one of our buddies, you know, just watching these guys that kicked ass in police work and seeing that, you know, they they still had the drive. The drive was still there.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:34

And you're not cashing in on anything when you do this, uh, especially when you're doing it from the perspective that I'm actually gonna go out there and help these guys.

SPEAKER_06: 2:17:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:43

You know, and that means that you need to select a company that you can be passionate about.

SPEAKER_06: 2:17:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:48

That you can say, I believe in this. Uh, I remember I I worked, I sold cameras uh in high school and college, I have a little camera shop, but it was mostly pros that came in there, or at least advanced shooters. And I learned something. I I was an amazing kid selling stuff on the things that I really believed in, which were mostly really, really high-end stuff that always worked really well. All the gadgetry stuff and everything, I knew it didn't work. Yeah, and so I didn't sell it well. I was the owner's like, well, you're not you're getting like 2% commission over there and nothing over here. You know, I was like, Yeah, but they're happy. Yeah, I'm happy. Yeah, they're re they're returning. And so I I did that. Well, it's the same idea later and then 40 years later in life. I'm like, sell what you're passionate about that you really believe in, and that really serves a impactful purpose out there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: 2:18:42

So that's good. I'm good. I um it's a good way to to kind of close it out. I wanted to the the private sector thing with with cops and getting out. I just want them to I want them to know that their options are they're there before they're done. Like you don't have to wait till you punch the clock and you're like, all right, now I gotta go start looking.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:02

Way too late.

SPEAKER_07: 2:19:03

Start, yeah, start getting that that wheel greased right away. Like as soon as you think that you want to do something outside of this.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:12

I mean start talking to people that are doing those things because they'll tell you, you know, things that are super important.

SPEAKER_07: 2:19:18

Yeah. Yep. Me, for instance, I've still got 10, 15 years, but I've already developed these relationships with all these different companies and stuff that I'm passionate in.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:28

And you know a lot now just by being close to all this. You know, there was a the chief revenue officer at the uh at the office at the company I was with before. He told the other people that were cheerleading for me to get on with the company. He said, I do you really think he's gonna be okay with it when he when we pull back the curtain, they see really the craziness behind all this. Yeah, you know, and I was like, cops work in chaos. Yeah, that's how we thrive. They they have they look forward to this. I mean, nobody wants to sit still, give it to me. Right. You know, like there's very few people. Uh, serve that this is why service industry works so well sometimes. It is chaotic, constant problem solving. Yep, a a bizarre optimism in life, you know. Uh so the don't discount that just because you've been a cop, that this does not translate.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20:21

Yep.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:22

Make it translatable, build skill sets that matter, and do it in a time frame that actually meets your exit point if you've got a point where you're really exiting. Uh and if if you're exiting because you didn't have a choice and it's public in newspapers, that's gonna be a tough one. Yeah. I've had those calls too. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Are you the same guy that I just googled five seconds ago? Right.

SPEAKER_07: 2:20:47

Yeah. Do you have an incident in Milwaukee somewhere? Yeah. Shh, I don't think we have a place for you, sir. Right now, right now, it's not a good fit. Um, but all right, brother. Well, before we end this, do you got anything else you want to get out there?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:58

No, I'm good. Uh I the I I'm you're gonna be an ICP, right? Yeah. Yeah. The I'm sending out messages all all week long right now and uh trying to get people to come by and you know, see me at the booth and stuff. We've got a huge booth this year. Do you? This is a big breakout year for the company. This is when we went fully national everywhere. So this year means a lot to us, and we've dedicated a ton of resources there. I think there's like 80 or some odd people from our company that will be there.

SPEAKER_02: 2:21:26

Oh, nice. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 2:21:27

So in a in a bald face pitch, do come by, see us, spend a small amount of time with us to see if this is something that we're offering that fits you. If it doesn't, awesome. You know, we're still gonna throw a couple good parties. So nice.

SPEAKER_07: 2:21:42

I'm excited about it because I have no pressure now. Like we just did our conference. Yeah. And so now it's like, try to get new members. That's it. That's pretty easy for me. I just gotta go around and talk to people.

SPEAKER_00: 2:21:52

So yeah, and I've already told a few people to come by the booth and see y'all too.

SPEAKER_07: 2:21:56

Oh yeah. Yeah, cool. Well, I really appreciate it, brother. Well, uh, we'll see how this cut turns out, but I appreciate you being on, man. Good. Thank you very much. Yeah. So while we roll out of this, I'm gonna try this new switcher out and see if it ends the way that it's supposed to. Let's check it out.