Introducing FOCUS: Threat Recognition For Law Enforcement

Welcome And Why This Matters

Announcement 0:01

Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Gates, where leaders find the insights, advice, and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

How A Trainer Career Began

Recognition Then A Sudden Removal

From Below 100 To Leadership Training

Seconds For Survival And Pre-Attack Cues

De-Escalation Culture And Rising Assaults

The Case That Changed The Mission

Building FOCUS With Real Research

Certification Rollout And How To Help

Travis Yates 0:12

Welcome back to the show. I'm so honored you decided to spend a few minutes with us here today. And I have to tell you, I often am not sure if anybody is out there, if anybody is listening or watching that we've been doing this show for over two years now. And a friend of mine encouraged me to do this. And I was admittedly skeptical. And I knew obviously that once you start a podcast, you have to continue it. That was also my concern with, of course, bandwidth of time, because everyone out there listening is used to listening to a podcast on a regular basis, and then it just drops off the face of the earth, right? And you don't know what's going on. So I knew I'd committed to this, but I didn't know if I was going to be completely wasting my time. Uh, but two years later, I have to tell you that more of you have listened to this than I have spoken to in person, and so that's obviously good. And then just last week, we booked a training, a leadership training off of someone listening to this show. And so I know some of you are out there, and I am so grateful that you spend your time listening to this. We try to give you content that can help you and push you forward. You know, I am so familiar with so much leadership content out there, I am somewhat skeptical of a lot of it because it all sounds, quite frankly, the same. You know, they're all like quotations from John Maxwell, and everything there's nothing new under the sun. And we try to bring you something different, and it's been the honor of a lifetime to do that. I have pondered what I'm going to talk about today for some time and a little bit of trepidation in doing so, because I don't want you to think that I am somehow changing course or abandoning what we're doing here, because quite frankly, that is not the case, it's only going to enhance what we're doing here. And I would tell you that what I'm about to talk about is not a shift, it's going to be an expansion. And I certainly hope you will be along for that ride. But to do that, I'm going to have to give you quite a bit of background. So please be patient with me. And so here we go. And I'll just sort of give you some background on what I've done in my career. You may or may not know that, but I've been involved in training for quite some time. Uh, this started back in the police academy in 1993 when I went to EVOP training. We called it LEDT at my agency, law enforcement driver training. And I just thought it was the greatest thing I've ever been involved in. I was like, Are you kidding me? They're they're paying me to drive a car like this and to do this. And so I just I asked the instructor at the time, I'm like, How can I do what you do? And he says, Hey, you get three years on the department, and then you apply to be a basic instructor. And normally they give you some kind of crappy jobs for a while, and then at some point you can apply to be a driving instructor. And I was all about that. And sure enough, that was the route that happened. Uh, with a couple of years on, I inquired at the academy, I'd like to get involved in training. And they said, Here's a class you can teach, and it was the worst class that nobody wanted. It was called Criminal Elements. So I went up there for a few years and taught this really boring, mundane criminal elements course to folks. And then, lo and behold, with about three and a half years on, an opening came up as a driving instructor. It's a part-time assignment, but I got that opening. I went to some extensive training on that and just went crazy. I just ate it and breathed it. And for well over a decade, that's what I did on, you know, it was part-time on my department, but it became almost full-time away from the department. And we had some successes on the department. And I had found myself early on becoming the head of that unit only because of rank. You know, I was as I found myself the only sergeant in the driving unit at one point. And so they were just said, you're over it now. Even though I there were other instructors with much more tenure that were much better than I. So I found myself with the leadership responsibility in that unit. And I, you know, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I ran the unit for 10 years. I was involved in the unit for 15 or 16 years. But early on, and we're talking 97, 98, a long time ago now that I think about it. Uh, we had done some things on the department that had reduced collisions dramatically, and we had changed the way we were training. I won't go into what we were doing, but I was pretty excited about it. And and this is sort of pre-a lot of internet stuff. Believe it or not, a lot of departments didn't have driver training back then. That's sort of a common standard now, but back then they didn't. And I started getting phone calls from around the country of people saying, Can you help us out with our driver training program? Or we're launching a driver training program. And a few people were calling and say, Can you come train our department? I thought that was just crazy, right? I go, No, I can't come train your department. I have my own department. But what I decided to do because it got busy, I ended up, and I'm on a date myself, I ended up burning CDs of our curriculum. Some of you out there going, What's a CD? Well, just keep listening, maybe you'll figure it out. And I was mailing these CDs around the country, my own time, my own expense. Uh I bought a computer, you know, to do this, which probably weighed 500 pounds at the time. And I came up with this idea around '99 that if I could put up a website uh and put all this information on the website, then people would kind of leave me alone. And uh somehow I did that. This is long before it was easy to put up websites, but I figured it out and I put all this curriculum on there, and it was called police driving.com. Kind of a crazy thing. And I put the website up and I thought, okay, I can get back to being a police officer, right? And doing my thing here, and and this stuff will just kind of take care of itself. But the opposite actually happened because unbeknownst to me, early days of the internet, it was the first website of its kind, and the thing went international. I all of a sudden my calls went, I was getting calls from London and over all over the place. And I was like, what's going on? And at some point, police one contacted me and asked me to write a monthly article on the topic, and I started doing that, and that continued, and that continued. I actually wrote a monthly article on Evox for 10 years. That's 12 articles a year for you mathematicians out there for over 10 years, all on Evoch. And uh it was pretty crazy. And this is this is about the time I would say 02-03, I started getting invited pretty heavily to go speak to other departments and speak at conferences on the topic. It was really kind of nuts because I never really intended to do this, never thought it was even something to do. And I actually turned a lot of it down at first and resisted it, and then I went to one and I really loved it. I loved meeting other people and meeting people outside my agency and come to find out we're all very similar, we all face similar problems. He would know the departments may be of different sizes or different localities. But as time went by, um, and actually I'm getting ahead of myself. So uh near the end of that, and a lot of cool things happened. Um I went to ILEDA in 2007, 2008, and I'd went I'd been to the FBI National Academy in 06, so by this time I had promoted up to the rank of captain, middle management, and I was starting to go to some leadership stuff, and that started percolating my brain, right? Which is what I talk about full-time now. But at the FBI National Academy, my roommate, Andy Ryan, uh, he tells me, Man, if you're into training, you would like ILEDA, International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association. So I said, sure. He goes, I go every year, you can come up next year and you can stay with me and we'll have a good time. So I did that in 07 and I went back in 08, and lo and behold, I win the Trainer of the Year Award in 08 for a lot of this EVOX stuff. Pretty crazy. And um, and I found out that that stuff I was writing on police won, everybody at the conference was aware of it, and a lot of people were coming to the trainings that I was because I was doing I would do training there as well. It was all sort of surreal, uh, but I knew enough about leadership that when I won that award, I didn't want anyone at my agency to know it. And you would ask yourself why. I've written a few articles about this, you know, never outshine the master, is that uh is one of those laws that I talk about a lot. Not that I was trying to. In fact, I came back to my agency after that award, and I would consider it one of the top three highlights of my career. It was just incredible. Ed Nilwiki, who founded ILEA, uh, it was called the Ed Milwiki Award, and he won it the first year it came in existence, which was 2007. So I was the first one to win it after Ed Milwiki. It was just incredible. And but I went back to my department, I didn't tell anybody because I was running the driver training program. I was kind of at the peak of that. I was people were traveling in out of state to take the training there. I had line of duty film films spend a week there with us, and I was doing interviews with USA today, and I was just I was just trying to spread this message because if you aren't aware, at the time it was the leading cause of death in law enforcement. Now we have gotten a lot more aware now, and a lot more things have happened, and I'm very proud of that. Uh, but back then, man, it was a disaster. We were dying like crazy because we would do silly stuff in cars, not that it was all silly, but not wearing our seatbelts and just driving crazy, and there was no awareness of it. And so I'll always be thankful to Police One and Alita and so many of the folks early on there that helped bring an awareness to that and helped me get involved in that. And uh, but I knew enough about my agency, unfortunately, and that's not unique to other agencies that mean I didn't want really them to really know my involvement at this level. And what happened is about six weeks after that conference, a commander went to a staff meeting, and I wasn't at that staff meeting, and he saw this an article in a magazine about me winning this award, and he thought he was doing a good thing. He announced it at the staff meeting uh with the chief and the chiefs there and things like that. And I read, I actually was working nights. I came in and I read this in the staff meeting notes, and I thought to myself, oh no, right? Uh, this isn't good. And sure enough, within 10 days, they removed me from the driver training unit. And it was a pretty dark time because as I said, and man, I hope you're still here because I'm this is a lot of background to get to where I'm going, but I think it's important to know why I'm going where I'm going. Um I will tell you that um it it broke me, right? I mean, I lived for this stuff, and uh and we were doing so much good around the country. Uh, but after a couple of weeks, I picked myself up and I thought to myself, well, let's just see what God will do with this. I've always wanted to kind of do this more on a national level. Uh let's see, now that I have time to do that, let's do it. And that's where Below100 was born. Uh, I I won't tell that whole story, but I'd pitched below 100 to the National Law Enforcement Memorial, didn't go anywhere. And then I pitched it to Dell Stockton at Law Officer Magazine, and that is why you know below 100 as you know it today. If you're not familiar with that, go to below100.org. It's been adopted by dozens of states around the country, and it has a huge driving component in it, and that is sort of why that was born. I don't think below 100 ever happens without the cowardly leadership that I dealt with at my agency. So, you know, things will work out uh the way God wants them to, even though you may not know it at the time. And and so for the next several years after that, I was entrenched in this below 100 program, traveling all over the country, uh using virtually all my vacation time. My department did not support this whatsoever, of course. But that was an honor. And so many of you listening today is that's where I met you with below 100. But as my career evolved, and somewhere neither telling or that, uh, I started teaching another class. I was still teaching this class called Drive to Survive, which was my e-box stuff. I had expanded uh to courageous leadership by this time, but courageous leadership is about 12 or 13 years old. That happened because I was complaining to Sergeant Keith Winzel of the Dallas Police Department about all this poor leadership I'm witnessing, and that that's the problem with law enforcement. And he told me to quit complaining and do something about it. And I didn't want to do anything about it because I knew how unpopular leadership was in this profession, because most of you listening to this would initially shy away from a leadership class because you probably worked for somebody that went to a leadership class that's probably a terrible person to work for. That's a terrible generic thing to say, but it's just the truth. And so I thought, man, I had by that time I'd been to a lot of leadership stuff. I mean, a lot of it. I was a trainer for IECP, I've been to the National Academy, I'd I'd been to a program called, I've been to a lot of leadership stuff, and quite frankly, I wasn't that impressed. I can remember, I'll never forget going to the National Academy and them and them sort of bragging, you know, patting us on the shoulder, saying, You're in the top 1%, and the leaders this and leaders that. And I thought to myself, well, then what's wrong with the profession? If all of our leaders and upper great leaders have supposedly been to this training, why are we still acting the way we do? Something is amiss here. There's there's there's there may be a lot of head knowledge, but there's no nothing with the heart coming out of it. Where's the caring? Where's the love? Where's the nurturing? Where's the actual leadership happening? And so when we develop courageous leadership, it was very important to not just develop another leadership class, but to develop something that people can come to, that they can immediately, regardless of rank. In fact, I demand lower ranks are in the class because that's what leaders leadership is for everybody. But that you can come to this class and you're not only motivated and encouraged, but you're getting things you can do immediately, regardless of your rank, and well over 12 years into it, with the book that comes with it, I think we've accomplished that and we continue to do that. Now, that class has never been as popular as I'd like. And I think it's because of the reasons I discussed earlier. I mean, it's just in fact, I hear it every time I teach the class. In the first break, which is typically around 50-minute mark, people will come up to me and say, Man, I had no idea that this class was like this. And I go, that's because they come with this bias of other things they've been exposed to. Not that every leadership class is bad, but a lot of it is. I'm just gonna be honest with you. I've been to a lot of it, and it's it's sort of I describe it as kind of leadership one-on-one, check the box, management this and management that. And ultimately, there's a problem somewhere because our profession would not have gone through and continues to endure what it's going through if we had outstanding leaders that have been to leadership training out there, and so it was really important to bring something practical for every rank, and that is pretty much where I've landed for the last 12 years. I don't do the drive to survive class anymore. If someone really wanted it, I would probably bring it out. But I, you know, there's but there's other people now that are involved in evoc at a much higher level than me. I'm not involved at it at all anymore. Uh, and I would probably get to give over to them. But leadership is sort of where I feel like God has me. But around this same time, I had included another class that I was teaching called Seconds for Survival. Now, that's where I'm going today. So I'm if you've made it this far, thank you. I'm gonna try to get this thing where it needs to be. But it is so important, I think, to talk about um sort of the foundation of why I'm where I am today. And the reason I launched Seconds for Survival, the main reason is because when I was a rookie cop, Sergeant Jim Clark with the Tulsa Police Department, kind of an old school sergeant, would talk about these pre-attack indicators, these behaviors that occur prior to violence and what you should do about it. And Jim was a very intellectual guy, and he would always talk about case law, and he'd show us these old grainy videos on VHS tape. And those of you who don't know what a CD-ROM is, definitely doesn't know what a VHS tape is, but you get the picture. And that was all that saved me so many times in my career. And I ran across a few other instructors uh in my career. Kirk Hensley out of North Carolina is another excellent instructor on this topic. And I just started seeing a lack of this information, and I thought, you know, I know enough to be dangerous, I suppose. I really enjoy this topic. Let's put a little class together and see how it goes. I remember I tested the class here locally at a college, and it was it's a lot of video, and we talk about these indicators and what people can do, and it went really well. And so I just stuck it on the website and started doing it, and that class became more popular than my leadership class, right? I mean, and frankly, from a marketing standpoint, it's not hard. It's a lot sexier, it's survival, it's officer safety, you know, it's videos, and it's a lot of fun. And I that class has quite frankly taken me more places than any other training I've done before it. It's kept me quite busy. But if I'm honest about it, it never really was something that I thought was my lead class. Like I would often, people would call about the survival class and I'd say, Hey, I teach this leadership class. And you know, I would sometimes talk them into letting me stay a couple of days and teach both classes, and because I was always kind of bringing leadership along because people didn't quite always understand what that was. And quite frankly, it's much easier to sell a class called Seconds First Survival, right? I think I went to over 40 states with this class. I started teaching it, I think I've taught it almost every narcotics conference around. It was just really insane. A lot of people helped me with that. Nate Mendez out of California exposed me to a lot of people. So a lot of people saw the class and then helped push that class to a lot of people. But over the last several years, I have felt God pulling me to do more with that class. Now, as we often do when God sort of tugs you, is we sort of resist that, right? I would say things like, This is not that's not what I'm here to do. Like, I'm a leadership guy. Leadership is what is what's been placed on my heart, that's what I talk about every day, that's what I write about every day. And this class is great. And and by the way, this class, the survival class, has saved lives. That's not me making that up. I've literally had officers contact me after the class, describe a scenario, and they have told me they believe the class has saved their life. But, you know, as is typical with me, I'm pretty stubborn and I didn't always see the value in that. And even though I love the class and I love the research behind it, I loved everything about it. It was it's really a fun class. I just thought leadership is the answer to everything. If I can fix leadership, everything including this will fix itself. But then over the last couple of years, it really shifted. When I started teaching Seconds for Survival, which is just so I can describe it to you again, it's a it's a class on behavioral cues. We also call them pre-attack indicators or pre-incident indicators. It's the behavior that violent people do before they attack, and essentially, not to get too deep into the class, when you make a decision to attack, your body gives cues or signals that that that action is about to happen. Think about it before you make a decision, your brain makes a decision, but there's some things you don't even really control from your body that will kind of cue that that decision is about to come. And so if you want to do escalator or you want to mitigate force or you want to try to survive an attack, it's very important to get ahead of that attack. You can never wait to be attacked and then fight back and have a fighting chance. The 50-50 chance is not a chance I want. But we saw a lot of success with that class, and a lot of lives changed. But and what I used to hear when I taught it was, hey man, this is a great reminder because we were given this type of training in basic academies, and there were other folks talking about this. Over the last couple of years, I was running into law enforcement, I had never heard of this type of training. And that blew me away. Because long before I was teaching this, I mean, you if you've been in law enforcement for longer than 10 years, you've been familiar with this training. You've probably been to something like this, or you were exposed to something like this. My state, the state of Oklahoma, they mandate this actual class in the basic academy seconds for survival. Now, there's a backstory to that. I didn't even know that. Someone came to my class and took photographs of all my slides. Then they put a four-hour mandatory session in the basic Peace Officers Academy. Now, all they had to do was ask me, and I would have gladly given them the presentation, but they didn't. I found out about this when a local college uh was had to teach this as part of the training, and they looked it up online and saw that I was the instructor, and they called me and told me this. So, anyway, no big deal, but uh many of you are familiar with this. But what has happened in the last couple of years is people said they weren't familiar with it. So I started looking around the profession, and if you follow my writings, I would encourage you to go to courageouspoliceleader.com, courageouspoliceleader.com, and I've written a lot of stuff on de-escalation, written a lot of stuff on what I'm talking about right now with pre-attack indicators is the profession has moved away from this type of training. Now, I can't tell you why, other than de-escalation is the buzzword of the day, and but it's not a it's not a new terminology. We, you know, maybe they they have fancy names for it, but de escalation is nothing new. But how we apply de escalation is new. We would never tell a police officer 20 years ago that if someone is showing violent tendencies to talk to them like Chick fil A. Ever, because that's dangerous. And de-escalation is a sound tactic in nonviolent encounters. But today, so often, not that I'm speaking to everybody, but oftentimes we're training de-escalation in all encounters. We're placing it in policies for all encounters. We're mandating it for all encounters. And consequently, you may not know this, since 2020, the officer assault rate, meaning how many times an officer has been assaulted, has increased every year since 2020 to the last year we had the data, 2024. It's an all-time high. Let me tell you how high the assault rate is. When I started teaching seconds for survival a little over a decade ago, the all-time record assault rate was around 40,000 a year. Now that's underreported because not every department, only about 50% of the departments report assaults. And that's also underreported because that means they were assaulted and they documented in a report or charged somebody with a crime. Oftentimes we're assaulted and that doesn't occur, but let's just say it's 40,000. It's now close to 90,000 in 10 years, and no one's talking about it. No one. And I'd say, hey, anybody interested in a train the trainer course in this, and you can train your own department. And a lot of hands would typically go up. And so I got the feeling there was a thirst for this. But that then again, I that little voice in my head goes, Ah, but Travis, you're you're the courageous leadership guy. You need to talk about leadership. And then a pivotal moment happened. And if you're following my writings at courageouspoliceleader.com, I've written about the Anthony Gann case. I really encourage you. And I've obviously had a podcast about that as well. I really encourage you to read that article or listen to that podcast a few podcasts back. I get a call from a lawyer out of Omaha, Nebraska. And he says an officer has been charged with manslaughter. He's looking for an expert witness in the case, and he describes this case to me. And it is a it's a use of force case. The officer's been charged criminally that involved a lot of pre-attack indicators, and then of course the use of force. He gets done telling me the story, and and I said, listen, and by the way, the sheriff had cleared the deputy, and this was uh this was a a prosecutorial and grand jury decision, and I've written a lot about how how ridiculous some of those decisions are. But he gets done telling me that, and I said, Listen, I do a fair bit amount of expert casework, um, but this criminal use of force case, I think I would feel more comfortable hooking you up with some friends of mine. I know some of the best use of force experts out there, Von Klaem and Jamie Borden, and these a lot of these guys that they just do this stuff nonstop. Because once again, I'm the leadership guy. Let's turn this over to a couple of use of force people. And the guy goes, I already have a use of force expert. And I'm thinking to myself, well, why are you calling me? And he says, I'm calling you because I need an expert in behavioral cues and pre-attack indicators. And I thought to myself, I didn't verbalize it, but I thought to myself, we got ourselves a problem if I am the expert in this. Because this, as I said, was just sort of a side gig for me, right? I'm the leadership guy. And so I said, What do you mean? He goes, I I keep, I I basked around and people just keep coming back to you in this class you teach called Second First Survival. So, long story short, I took the case, but I started diving in and doing a lot of research on this because I quite frankly hadn't done much. And I started looking around the country, and this class is just this type of training has just kind of become more rare. It's not, I'm not saying it's not out there. It's not out there at the level it used to be, and it's definitely not integrated in police academies and in service trainings the way it used to be. And the other thing that I did notice is there's there's some of it that's out there, but it is most of it. I'm not I won't say all of it. I'm not bad mouthing anybody because I'm gonna get to where I'm going to from a collection of a lot of great people out there that's been doing this work. Is it much of it does really good at talking about it, but applying it to the operations of a police officer, applying it to case law, applying it to the use of force standards and the practices, right? So you can you can teach somebody to know that an attack's about to happen. There's a lot of civilian courses because, quite frankly, there's there's a lot of money in those types of courses. But how do you teach this to police officers, especially with all of the drama that's around them and all the scrutiny that's on them? And that's something that I had done, I believe, very well in Seconds for Survival and applied it there. That's why I think that class was so popular. It just was lacking. And then I get to thinking about you know, an officer being indicted or an officer being fired. And I had a kid just on the heels of this phone call that took this class, and he came up to me and he said, I love what this class was, I love what it said. You applied it to case law, it's completely legitimate. He goes, but if I do this, I'm afraid my police chief will fire me. And I got to thinking about that. That sort of haunted me for some time. And I got to thinking about that, and I thought to myself, there's some police chiefs that would. And here's where the expansion happened, not a shift. That's when it hit me, and I thank God that it hit me the way it did. This is leadership. Yeah, this may be a survival class or a safety class or a more of a tactics class, but it's leadership. The most important role of a leader is to ensure a safe environment for the officers and the citizens around them. I don't care what type of technology that you're into, or the flavor of the month, or whatever checkbox from IACP you're checking, and whatever you're bragging about yourself on LinkedIn. I don't, all that pairs to nothing if you're not doing everything you can to keep your officers safe. And it hit me. This is courageous leadership. Because talking about this and training in this and moving forward on this will take courage because it literally goes against mainstream narrative of law enforcement today, which is talk like Chick-fil-A, no matter what you're observing, which is everywhere. You've seen the videos, you've seen the ridiculousness of this, and I've posted a lot of them. And so once I came to that conclusion that this is not a distraction from courageous leadership, it's part of courageous leadership. That's when I decided that I needed to do more. And I got past myself and got past my ego to do that. So my first thought was to do a train the trainer course. But when this kid tells me I may get fired, I think to myself, well, a train the trainer course isn't good enough. Because you can have a great train the trainer course, and you can train, we did this in below 100, and that's why I've done this a lot. And we trained thousands of people in Blow 100. We developed below 100, then we developed a train the trainer course, and we gave this to thousands of people, and then they went out and they trained thousands of people, and it spread like wildfire. So my first thought was what I'd done before, which is I'll develop a train the trainer course, and then this will spread much further than myself. But then when this kid tells me this, I think, we need more than a train the trainer course because people don't understand this. And so I had gotten my doctorate degree, uh, I finished that in 2023. I'm not sure I would recommend that for anybody. I'm not sure even why I did it, other than the fact that in 2018 I knew I was getting close to retirement, and my default was education. I grew up in a household. I was the first in my family to ever get a bachelor's degree. And I just grew up in a household that was education. That was the answer to things. You're gonna go to college, you're gonna do this. You know, you're not you're not gonna live in this house if you don't go to college, right? You can as long as you go to college and you study and you get good grades, we're gonna take care of you. But it but that's it was just important for my family. So my default about retirement was let's just get some further education. And I had a great mentor, and I'll mention his name, he's long past us now, is Bill Heck. And Bill Heck was my um mentor when I got my master's degree in criminal justice, and he told me in 1998 when I got conferred, he goes, I need you to go to get your doctorate. And I go, What are you talking about, Bill? He goes, I think you'd be great at research and and and teaching and things like that. I said, Well, what do I have to do to do that? And this is before online school. He goes, Well, I've got a connection down at uh Sam Houston State University in Texas. They've got a great doctorate degree. I can get you into that program. You have to move down there. I go, Bill, are you crazy? I've been at the police department for four years. I got a I got a young wife. I've got, you know, what are you talking about? I'm not gonna up in my life to get this degree. But his voice sort of rang true. This is so important for all of you out there in leadership, is you never know the impact you're gonna have on people. You may not see an immediate movement from somebody, but you just simply don't know the impact you're gonna have. And his voice was in my ear for many years after that. My as growing up, my my my parents' voice was in my ear, and I just decided in 2018 to go get my doctorate degree. Now, as I said earlier, I was in all things leadership, I still am. And so my default was let's get a doctorate degree in strategic leadership. And it took me five years. Um, it was the the most intense work I've ever been involved in. Now, people have asked me, well, do you have to be smart? Absolutely not. You have to be stubborn, right? There every you get every chance you want to quit a program like that. In fact, 50% of the people that that go into dissertations don't finish them. And I didn't even get into my dissertation for four years. It was all class work up until then. But I'd gotten that, and uh, I wasn't quite sure why I'd gotten that. Um, but I think this is why, uh, because I did I did learn about research. I'm not sure what else I learned, but I did learn about research and how to conduct research and things like that. And so I think to myself, when this kid tells me this, well, we need more than the train the trainer class. We need validated research. If you don't know the dirty little secret about what's going on in really all professions today, is once you have validated research behind something, boy, they can really push this to the highest levels. Now, not all of it is valid. You should see some of the research that I see. It's one thing I learned in my doctorate is you can fake research. I mean, you can you can really fake it, right? And you can, it's got agendas behind it, and you have to really look into the if you ever read an academic paper, you need to really dive into it and go, Who's funding this? You know, who's behind this? Because you can just like uh the media can move a narrative, just because it's called peer-reviewed research, they can move the narrative. But that's gonna help, right, to get research behind it. And so I think to myself, we've been training in these types of things for years. I mean, Charles Rimsburg, way back in the day with Caliber Press, and I mean, I bet for 50 years in law enforcement, we've been talking about pre-attack indicators. So let me go find the research and let me start documenting the research, and I'll implement that research in this course. And I didn't find any. None. Uh, I did find some research, but the research I found specifically on law enforcement pre-attack indicators was essentially research that said there is no research, but there should be research. I mean, it was really crazy. There's one study that the research was they asked a series of law enforcement trainers, what do you train on when it comes to pre-attack indicators? And they asked a series of officers, what do you think are pre-attack indicators? And they collected them all the answers together and came, they came up with 23 behavioral cues that they believed were pre preceding violence. And then at the end of the study, they said, well, these should be studied. I mean, so nothing was validated, right? And what do I mean by validation? Well, I mean a study that looks at real-world encounters, and they they tell you the predictability of when this behavior happens, will violence occur? It just doesn't exist. Now, I could go down some rabbit holes on why it doesn't exist, but there's no reason why it shouldn't exist. When you think of all the grant money and all the researchers out there, and all of the high-level trainers and organizations and multimillion dollar police organizations out there, nobody decided to look into this. And at the same time, where they have spent millions and millions on, you know, speaking like Chick-fil-A, at all costs to the officer safety. I'm not throwing all that out because as I said earlier, there is a time and a place for de-escalation. But after what I have done here, we got it wrong. We have it wrong. And the data is on my side. And I hope you can read some of that uh because I've written a lot of it already. I've actually pulled departments and states that have mandated de-escalation in all instances and found that there are times that officer injury and use of force have more than doubled. It's atrocious that nobody's talking about this. So I don't find any research on law enforcement. But you know what really surprised me? I found it in every other profession. Let me say that again. There was no scientific research to validate the pre-attack indicators before violence for the law enforcement profession. But there are systems that exist based on peer-reviewed research in a lot of professions. Corrections, clinicians, doctors, nurses, EMTs, they all have a validated system, a framework, so to speak, to where when certain behaviors happen, they take precautions. They don't talk to them like chick-point. And there's there's in fact, I found over 25 existing systems built by research four professions in the United States that talk about this. None of them are law enforcement. And I just to this day, I discovered this almost a year ago. To this day, I don't understand it. I don't even know what's going on. So, in the words of Keith Wenzel, I decided to do something about it. So I have built the framework and I've done the research. I have spent the better part of the last year conducting a research project on this topic. And I won't go into complete details here because I'm trying to get to the point where this is going. I went uh back five years on every public domain video I could find, and there's two main channels uh on the internet that do this, and we're talking hundreds of police encounters. And I analyzed every single video, and I had supporting structures to also analyze those videos, and we documented the indicators that would occur before violence, and we have come up with eight sentinel cues, eight things that are high predictors of violence. It's not even close. There's there is, you know, I mentioned that earlier study of 23. There probably is about 23 altogether we found in the you know, I would say a couple of dozen, but there were eight. But when you see it, you better get ready. And it's not even close. Uh some as high as 94% chance that violence is about to occur. Some that I didn't even know about. I'll just tell you about one of them. One of them, uh of a high predictor of violence towards law enforcement was when suspects walk away. I didn't know this. I've been teaching seconds for survival for over a decade. This wasn't in my class. I had no idea. But it appears to be a tactic being used to put the officer at ease. Oh, maybe they just don't hear me, or maybe they're just going somewhere. And when the officer walks up to them and gets closer to them, they turn around and attack the officer. It was over 30%. Over 30% of all attacks on law enforcement. The suspect prior to that was walking away from the officer. So that's just one surprise I found. There were other surprises that won't surprise you, you know. Uh hands being concealed, that's not going to surprise you. That's over a 50% rate. But it was um pretty pretty incredible what we found. And we place this, and now just knowing that isn't good enough, just publishing that research will not be good enough. We've got to put this in the hands of people, and it has to be a system. Now, systems are not unique to law enforcement. I talked about below 100 earlier. That's literally a system. Do these things, check these boxes, and you will be safer. Most people have heard of Alert, A-L-E-R-T-T, that's the active shooter protocol, that's a system based on methodology. Uh a lot of you have heard about the Stops program. That's a traffic stop program built in the 80s that is a system that can help you in traffic stops. Well, no one had built a system to stay alive during suspect encounters when it comes to this. Because think of the problem. Every cop out there I'm talking to understands what pre-attack indicators are. You know that when you see certain behaviors, that you should be concerned. But if you've watched any of these videos out there, you know that they, while they may be concerned, there's a hesitation or they're unsure of what they're supposed to do. Uh, just last week I posted a video where a suspect was giving a ton of indicators, and the officer says, You don't have any guns on you, do you? Well, why is he asking the person that? Because he believes he probably does. But he doesn't know what to do. Well, what you do is you've got to put them in a place of disadvantage. You've got to turn them around, you've got to get them handcuffed, you've got to get some distance, you've got to take action. But the officer is unsure because there's no exact system in place. If you went to 10 of these trainings, they're probably telling you 10 different things. So it was really important with the research to put together a system that is very clear that the officers can articulate. And that's what we have done here, and this is called focused field observable cues for unknown situations. It's an evidence-based methodology to determine threat recognition. And inside this training to help you document it, we have what is called the focus risk index. That's a numerical score given to indicators that will dictate when and where the officer should take action. Now, that's not unique. I didn't invent a numerical score. And all of those other systems and other professions I just discussed, that's what they use. And so I am fully aware that this goes against some of the Chick-fil-A training out there that we have endured. The people will attack this. And they can attack it all they want, but they really have no grounds to attack it because all that I have done here and my team has done is to mirror similar systems for other professions. So this focus risk index score will help the officer after they take action. Now you say, okay, you see the behaviors. Well, when the behaviors cross the threshold in this system, you have to take action. You don't wait to get attacked. And let me tell you why this is important. In the research, when officers were shot or shot at, on average, five pre-attack behaviors were observed. Five. That means the officers watched them do five things that should have told them that an attack was about to happen, but they didn't, then they were attacked. In the incidents where the officers were not attacked, but it was also a violent encounter, there was an average of 1.5 behaviors seen. Now, why what's the what's the difference there? Well, at 1.5 on average, the officers are then taking action. They're not waiting to be attacked. They're putting handcuffs on them, they're getting distance. And that is what de-escalation is. De-escalation should be doing what you need to do to mitigate having to use force at a high level. And what we're seeing in the existing climate of law enforcement is we're seeing deadly force actually increasing as de escalation training is being embedded in the Profession because not the de-escalation training is bad, it's bad if you apply it to violent individuals. In fact, out of all these five years of data we have, we saw almost every officer trying to de-escalate. None of it worked. And think about this. If a chief brags about their de-escalation, wouldn't they have the videos to show it working? Where's those videos? And if you have them, send them to me. If you have a video of someone displaying violent tendencies where de-escalation tactics worked, where they changed their mind because of verbal de-escalation. That's typically what's being trained today. Send me the video. We did not find it in our research. What we found was is we found suspects displaying pre-attack indicators, and instead of instead of the officers taking action on that, which is would be to place them in a more of a position of disadvantage, get distance, place handcuffs on them, turn them around, do something other than just standing there like you're taking an order from them, they continue to stand there and it gives the suspect time to finally make that decision. It was clear as day in the research. And so what focus is going to be able to do, and we've given people a research-driven approach to this with a system to document it, is they're going to be able to get ahead of an attack, and it's going to either a prevent all use of force or it's going to prevent higher levels of use of force. Meaning you may have to handcuff somebody early, but you won't have to shoot them. And so I don't know why I'm doing this because this is not something that I set out to do. I don't know why this didn't exist, because it's 2026 and there's nothing new under the sun. But somehow God handed me this. I'm going to see this to the end. What does the end mean? This will be in included in Courageous Leadership. So I'll I'll continue to teach the Courageous Leadership course, but we're also launching focused training. And it's a one-day certification where you're going to get everything you need to be able to implement this the very next day on shift. And beyond that, we're also launching a train the trainer certification, which is a multiple-day course where you can then train your entire department in this area. This is going to save lives. And I only know that because the Second for Survival course has saved lives. But the mountain in front of us is we are literally going to be talking about things that most people are a little bit worried to talk about in today's climate. But we've given a system to them with research where we invite critique, we invite debate. Good luck with that. Good luck with that. And so this initial research project is complete. We're actually writing it up right now. We're going to give this away. I've been selected to present this at the Force Science uh annual conference in September in Austin, Texas. I hope you can make it. They're giving me an hour, but it's going to be enough to present the research and to explain to all of these use of force trainers out there what this is. That's pretty amazing because I'd never trained at the Force of Science conference before and they reached out and they said, We heard about this, we'd love you to talk about it. And we have several uh cities we're going to in the next several months teaching this one-day class. I could have done this in two or three days, but my goal is to give this to as many people as possible. And when you go to the one-day class, you're going to get access to a membership where you can continue seeing the updates and seeing the reminders throughout your career. I've always been bothered by these great classes you go to, and then the class just ends, and you're like, okay, that's it. Well, how adults learn is this drip training, right? And so we're at the same time, we're building a membership portal to where when you take the one-day course, you'll get access to this membership portal. And we're going to continue to talk about this because this initial research is only the beginning. My goal and our team's goal is to basically build a cadre of researchers that are continuing to do research in this topic. This is how we turn the table on the violence against law enforcement. This is it. I am telling you, this is it. And the reason I brought this to you, and if you made this to the end, man, we're almost at an hour. Thank you for that. Because we need your help. If you can host a class, I need you to reach out. There's two ways of hosting the class. You can purchase the class outright, and you can put as many people in the class as you want. Or you can just give us a room to host and we'll charge per seat to come do the class. Now, we're not out here trying to get rich on this training, but the truth is research is expensive. And this research has got to go beyond me. I may do it for free, but most researchers don't do it for free. And if we're going to truly build a coalition of this, we need thousands and thousands of trainers and researchers and police officers to get on board. And that all takes money to do. And so, of course, we're charging for the class, most classes charge for it. So I'm not too concerned about that. We're going to make this affordable to everybody. And you know me, if you call me and go, I don't have any money, you're going to get to come to the class. We're not trying to withhold this class from anybody. And then we're going to have a huge online presence to where if you can't get to a classroom, you will be able to take this online. I'm waiting on the online rollout because it's really important to get in front of as many people as possible on a personal level. So when it does roll out online, we have the ambassadors we need to make that successful. So the closing thought is this, and I just want to remind you, this is not a shift of anything we're doing here. We're just going to, it's an addition, it's an enhancement. It's all leadership. I've always said this leadership fixes everything. This is part of leadership. And so if you're following the podcast, you're following my writings, I'm not going to separate these two. Uh, I've gone back and forth on this. Well, should I should I start an entirely different podcast? Should I should I start an entirely different substack or entirely different? No, we're not separating any of it. We're gonna, it's all gonna be in the same place. So I certainly hope that if you're only coming here to listen to my ramblings about bad leaders around you, that you'll put up with this as well, because it's really important. And consequently, if you're only here for the sexy tactical stuff, but you'll stick around for the really important leadership stuff. It is all the same. And I think if we came to that conclusion as a profession, a lot of things would start correcting themselves. And then lastly, as a reminder, please, please, everybody listening out there knows a classroom, you know a room, you know a college, you know a police department. Connect me with them. Let's get this on the calendar, let's provide the training, let's spread the word. The next 12 months is vital. It's vital. I saw it in below 100, but we launched out there like a missile, and the rest became fairly easy because there were a lot of ambassadors to it. And I didn't even get a chance to talk about the team that we have behind this. Uh, but we have some of the top use of force and researchers out there involved in this behind the scenes that are advising us on this. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be incredible. I value your prayers. This is a lot of work on top of a lot of work, and I'm so blessed to get the opportunity to do it. But this isn't about me. This is about a coalition of ambassadors and team members and trainers and certified officers that will take this farther than I ever could. And then one day when God takes me home, somebody else will have the mantle and they'll continue this. This is about saving lives, and I'm honored that God's placed it in my hands, and I will honor that every day. Well, thank you for listening. I'm I'm just like I said, if you're still listening at this point, I feel like I need to personally thank you. Uh, because I don't usually get on this long and talk, but I think it was important to bring this message to you very early. I'm going to place an article in the comment section because I also wrote an article about this as well, and maybe something you could send around. But um, this is important, and I can't do it without you. Thank you for being here, and just remember lead on. Stay courageous.

Announcement 52:35

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