Let’s Talk CJ

11:15:37 Welcome to Episode 25 of the let's talk government podcast, the 911 terrorist attacks and the impact on first responders.
11:15:45 I'm joined by Dr Thor Dahle Dr. Carl Lafata and Dr. john Reed from the law enforcement program in the Department of Criminal Justice at Minnesota State University man Kato along with myself my guests were active peace officers in 2001, when the 911 attacks
11:16:03 occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC.
11:16:07 Thank you for joining me today as we start our new academic year. And I'm going to ask each one of you to talk about what you remember from the actual day of the 911 attacks and how it impacted you.
11:16:19 Very closely to the date. As a first responder so I'm going to call on dr Dolly first go ahead.
11:16:27 Yes, I distinctly remember the day at the time I was a lieutenant I worked night shift and but we were having a staff meeting that day. And so I'd come home i'd slept a couple hours and got up I was getting ready to go, and saw the attacks had occurred.
11:16:41 And, you know, had a deep personal impact when you see something like that occur.
11:17:03 And as I was getting ready to go. Or I went into the staff meeting, and it was so new, because it had just been a matter of a couple of hours.
11:16:59 We, I don't think anybody really knew exactly how to process it, or take that immediate next step. In fact, I was actually frustrated during the course of the staff meeting because we didn't really talk about it at all.
11:17:10 at least for that. The beginning of that day until it started to sort out. And of course, then that's when it started to change things about people's fears about what was next what's going to be attacked next gen schools be closed down.
11:17:25 I remember getting called by my wife said, asked me if I should take the kids out of school I said, Look, it's not likely that a school in our area is going to be the next target that that's a natural reaction is you want to bring everybody together.
11:17:41 But it's also just fear there's not that that logical processing of the event took a while and it did for our agency to what's the next step, what do you do, is there anything to do immediately and it just, it took a couple days to start sorting that
11:18:00 out what's the next step, do we need to do anything and if so what is that, and then over the next few months that's where a number of things that were completely unrealistic occurred, people about threats that just weren't going to happen.
11:18:14 And it just took a while to settle that all down.
11:18:19 Did you remind our listeners what agency you were working for. I was working for the Fargo police department.
11:18:25 So, and I would, what I would consider one of the top places that you would say would be the next place for terrorist attack, but because it was so abrupt, and everybody everywhere was afraid.
11:18:39 And Fargo was in North Dakota, but as on the border of Minnesota as well so far as part of a Metropolitan Community at the time was probably about 200,000 people.
11:18:48 Okay.
11:18:48 All right, Dr Reid, what do you remember from the attacks what was going on with you. Well, I think, first of all, it's hard to believe that it's been that long ago, especially when you're talking in class, or talking to younger people about this because
11:19:04 all of us are talking like it happened yesterday and we we really recall it, but we got to understand that most of the people that were teaching or instructing on this weren't even born at the time.
11:19:17 So that's one of the things it's hard for me to believe it's been so long. But I think one of the big things was disbelief.
11:19:26 The time was like Dr Dalli was a lieutenant, and was in charge of a group and cis of crimes against property and somebody had a TV on up in the homicide unit.
11:19:40 And we were all watching it, and I'm not trying to date myself here but it was almost like the story of the war the world but on TV. It's like is that really happening or is that something that the media has created.
11:19:59 And it's just showing something. And the more we looked at it, it was, it was just hard to believe something of that magnitude could happen, because it never happened before.
11:20:11 And I think Dr Dalli brought up about this issue of what to do next and we're fearful we got this issue. And this issue but what what exactly what we do next.
11:20:26 And I don't think anybody knew because at that particular point I think the coin number of flying by the seat of our pants because we had never ever encountered anything like that.
11:20:40 So, it was quite a shock, you know from the, from what happened, but it was also quite a shock because we had never been attacked like that. In each other, you know the world war two things here in our country.
11:20:58 And Dr. Murray Can you remind our listeners where you are Lieutenant at yeah I was enjoyable, Kentucky, which is a northern part of Kentucky has a population at the time this happened it was before merger so at a population of about six or 500,000.
11:21:21 Thank you. All right, Dr Lovato working for a state agency What do you remember. Yeah, I was a trooper with the Michigan State Police at the time and I was on day shift for some reason at the time I was typically a Midnight's trooper but I was helping
11:21:34 out, went to help out the K nine handler for the post at a school event he needed another trooper to help them out with, with the presentation and so I was stationed at Battle Creek which is on the west side of the mountain.
11:21:50 And I was helping this this troupe. Get ready for the presentation. We're in a high school auditorium, it's packed with students, and we got a radio signal, there was a special radio signal they gave us to return to the post no questions asked.
11:22:07 and we got that signal we looked at each other you know in our careers we had never heard that signal before you know outside of training, and then all of a sudden the principal and the students, or the teachers came in and hug pressure the students out
11:22:17 of the auditorium and we hightailed it back to the post.
11:22:23 You know lights and sirens because of the code that we had gotten and they wound up calling all the troopers from the posts that were off duty everybody got returned to the post troops got called from off duty back to the post and we're all just sitting
11:22:35 in the squad room and uniform packed into this room watching the TV seeing what was going on and just kind of waiting for orders. And it's kind of interesting at the time I was still on inactive ready reserve with the military as a former Army officer
11:22:50 and I thought for sure. I was going to get called up for duty so it's kind of preparing for that and getting all those things in order and that never materialized but there was a lot of confusion, and a lot of just waiting to see what our role would be
11:23:19 Thank you. And then I was an officer with the Minneapolis police department which is the larger city of the Twin Cities here in Minnesota.
11:23:27 I usually work nights, but we were putting in a new mobile data computer system, and we were doing a train the trainer that was our very first day of it.
11:23:36 We're supposed to start at 8am, of course the computers were not working. So we were all sitting in the training room, and we had one person that was late and he walked in, and he said, a plane just hit a tower in New York, and we're like okay stop because
11:23:50 he was a joker. He's like, No, no, turn the TV on and we turn the TV on and literally within the next minute we watch the second plane strike the second tower and literally the everybody in the room stop talking.
11:24:03 And we looked at each other because we were all in uniform, because we were all officers and sergeants and. And we're like, oh my gosh I think that just really happened.
11:24:12 And then we had a tone come out on our radio. It was a tone city wide for police and fire to let us know that we went into what's called emergency call back, which means everybody who is active on on duty right now goes to uniform and out on the street,
11:24:28 and all of our fire stations were on alert and we went on 12 on 12 off. So needless to say the fact that the MDC weren't working was okay. It actually took them three weeks to get it working so we could go back to training.
11:24:41 We don't have enough squad cars in Minneapolis to put every patrol officer out on the street if they're in uniform, even if they're split in half. So people were put out on foot beats.
11:24:51 I was normally a night shift or so I was sent home and told to come back at 6pm and work my 6pm to 6am.
11:24:58 It was really weird there was an eerie feeling in the city.
11:25:02 We have a Transit Police that covers the Metro Transit area which is the entire Twin Cities area, and they put everybody out there was literally an officer at every stop.
11:25:13 And then we started having the hate crimes come in that day. We started with that so.
11:25:19 So I very specifically remember watching the second plane fly into the tower and the silence the entire courthouse City Hall was silent at that point so I so I'm going to pose to everybody and I'll start with my own what were some immediate changes to
11:25:35 either you as a law enforcement officer or all your first responder community within the first couple of weeks.
11:25:42 And I know ours was we actually started guarding things guarding critical infrastructure. The Bloomington police department. Pretty much deployed most of their force to the Mall of America, because that was considered a prime target here in Minnesota.
11:25:56 But we also had the river dams we had Xcel Energy big power plants, bridges, all sorts of critical infrastructure trains highways freeways our state patrol got deployed all over.
11:26:11 And we were also working better with our fire department, we actually had Fire Department out doing some random checks they would go out and check some critical infrastructure and do some planning, and we've never had that before usually they just responded
11:26:24 to calls.
11:26:26 And then we had quite a few hate crimes are Somali American community in Minneapolis was attacked. And it was just be the perception of the other, we would have Somali Americans walking down the street and their religious garb that would literally just
11:26:41 get jumped on by three or four people.
11:26:45 The talking about terrorists go home when there were no Somali Americans at all connected to this kind of terrorism. So we did experience quite a bit of hate crimes and we did a lot more patrols in their area to help try to have a greater present so.
11:26:59 So, so let's go in reverse order here, Dr Fatah what was some changes you saw.
11:27:05 I'm saying is you'd mentioned in terms of guarding infrastructure even things that you wouldn't think we're necessarily high value targets I had mentioned, prior to the recording, about how we would have to check these these obscure radio towers to make
11:27:20 sure the lights are on the locks were busted and if those towers went down it really wouldn't have impacted anything because our radio system was spotty at the time anyway so, so there was a lot of I would say reaction but also overreaction you know we
11:27:34 didn't know what to do so we kind of tried to do everything. You know, and, you know, at least not specifically but but in terms of the administrators of the state police and other departments and so we just were kind of deploying this things.
11:27:47 Calm down, we had more of an idea of what was was going on. I think our resources were deployed, more, more. Logically, as it pertains to hate crimes, one of the things that was interesting is around the time of the attacks which is prior to the big thing
11:28:04 in Michigan was and I would say nationwide is racial profiling. It was a study of your people were studying do police racially profiling so the Michigan State Police would have collected data on our daily logs that were entered into a computer, and they
11:28:19 found you know for example that the Michigan State Police stops more people of color in Detroit and fewer people of color in the Upper Peninsula, go figure that's kind of the demographic makeup of those areas.
11:28:30 After September 11 that all went away and the public was like Yeah, please racially profile, you know, especially if it's this group this group in this group and of course we didn't do that but we got lots of calls about suspicious people that were just
11:28:45 existing that were driving down the road that were just walking to work things of that nature and so we had to really deal with those kinds of calls you know obviously attacks but also just the fact that people were calling about every little thing and
11:29:00 expecting us to run out there and identify people that were doing nothing more than living their lives they were you know many cases citizens and, and were illegal immigrants soon so you know there was, I think, a public relations as well as an education
11:29:17 component that we really had to adopt, not by design but by necessity to let people know you know you're in Michigan, this is an area that has the largest concentration of Middle Eastern folks outside of the Middle East, and you're going to see people
11:29:32 that look like you believe are the terrorists and the reality of it is, you know, there, there, there weren't any issues that materialized from that population but people were still as I think has already been mentioned here very frightened.
11:29:49 After even do you like to go next.
11:29:52 Yeah, Yeah, I think a lot of.
11:29:55 There were a lot of, especially administratively where people were looking for plans on how we dealt with these particular things obviously we encountered a lot of the same things that you all mentioned.
11:30:12 One of the biggest things that we found at the particular time we had personnel assigned to, you know, check for different issues related to grants and those types of things and we saw a big shift in grants for training.
11:30:29 And as we were talking a little bit before we went online here.
11:30:35 We were talking about kind of how we always tried to do a localized approach to everything and we went from localized to systems approach and I'll give you an example of that here in a second, and then kind of went globally.
11:30:51 To look at this global approach to things, and that went from everything from Incident Command systems which everybody went to, and you're talking about some of the equipment like the radios and so forth.
11:31:05 but we were looking at a more systematic way to to curtail or to even deal with events such as this happening. One of the things that really sticks in my mind that we would have never been allowed to do was we were set to mountain weather Virginia.
11:31:27 On a FEMA grant, and when I say we, they came in and rather than one or two people from the police department.
11:31:35 They sent 70 people to up there for two weeks to plan an exercise that FEMA actually plan to exercise came to label. A got all our policies developed an incident.
11:31:55 And then, as 70 people we went up there as a group, and did this training for two weeks, and it was how do you do media on these sites, how do you communicate, how do you deal with events, similar to anthrax scares and things of that nature.
11:32:16 And in the particular incident we did, we had a large event with about a million people, that the majority of them were under a Expressway, or an interstate for this event.
11:32:33 And as part of the problem they present is with us. Obviously, there was an anthrax scare and somebody blew up this expressway with, you know, 800,000 a million people under with all those injuries and stuff like that, which obviously was something that
11:32:53 you know is hard to even fathom to deal with how would you deal with that.
11:32:57 But they were actually playing a lot of training for those types of things. And, you know, as Dr pata said you know and you spoke up to, you know, we looked at a lot of staff allocations how our boundaries were developed and should they be reconfigured,
11:33:17 and probably one of the biggest things was redundancy, and that being as far as communications, more so than a lot of other things but it was still looked at as an issue that we had to deal with across the board was a great examples and FEMA for our listeners
11:33:36 is Federal Emergency Management Agency.
11:33:40 And that one really grew in strength after the 911 terrorist attacks, it was kind of a smaller agency before them. So, all right, Dr Dolly, do you have any examples.
11:33:50 Well, immediately after the attacks that I was at evening, I think I was working evening shift. But, kind of like you had described, we were given assignments to try and protect every vulnerable place people could think of initially and then at first
11:34:10 I think they come up with very many, but as a few days went by suddenly it was bridges and power supply.
11:34:19 And, you know, critical areas for power supply water and quickly became apparent we couldn't sit at every single one of these places that somebody came up with a target now if you own got more attention than others.
11:34:31 And a lot of it just became extra patrol the airport got a lot of attention, because of the air that Nexus with the airplanes so we had a lot. We have people out there, constantly 24 hours a day.
11:34:47 For a long time, but it was interesting how some of these ideas came from, you know, the media. Talk Radio we didn't have a lot of hate crimes that came from it.
11:34:57 But there was a lot of contentious talk on in the media, kind of pre social media but talk radio people saying a lot of nasty things editorials that were, you know, accusing certain populations, but we didn't have those, those street crimes, but there
11:35:13 were these theories about what was vulnerable like the water supply, they're going to poison the water supply. So we initially start protecting places where water is taken out of the river and water towers and then somebody starts to investigate and say,
11:35:27 Well, what would it take to actually get into a water tower to do this. And after a little bit of research like okay this is extraordinarily unlikely water supply, being taken, similar to like here in North man Kato man Kato.
11:35:41 Your, we were drawing it from a river. A large portion of our water.
11:35:45 How much poison would you have to put into the system to do anything to anyone. And it was like truckloads. So, then people start time and so it was initially a lot of running around trying to protect all kinds of places, then a much more deliberate process
11:36:03 So it was initially a lot of running around trying to protect all kinds of places, then a much more deliberate process of assessing what were actual threats, and this was a positive thing was this development of the emergency command unified command,
11:36:14 which we had, we were, I don't know fortunate or unfortunate have sort of started prior to this because of a history of major flooding. So we had some of that already in place, at least the relationships with the fire department, state, local authorities
11:36:29 to bring in assets, but just to even have that structure of what to do in a major event.
11:36:34 We kind of activated that now that went next level in the coming years. After that, what we considered our EEOC at that time urgency Operations Center was a tiny little room compared to what it eventually became so it was, It was a lot of trying to address
11:36:53 people's fears, like Dr fire dimension to educate people but what are the real threats.
11:37:00 And, like a lot of things as a little bit of time went by and people started to become a little bit more reasonable about this, their, their fears started to be delayed and, and our day to day activities like initially wrote, you know revoking everybody's
11:37:24 time for a few days and after this until we found out what is the actual threat. And the idea that we're not dealing with another another nation state. know, contrary to like Pearl Harbor, it's another nation that has a lot of assets that's attacking
11:37:28 the country, versus a group of terrorists. They're not settling me landing on the beaches in Florida. So, it just took a while to to sort all that out once it did, then things became much more reasonable and then this process of getting assets and much
11:37:43 financing from the federal government began but that you know took years to do.
11:37:50 So I'm going to ask everybody to, and I'm just going to open it up about long term impacts but before I do that I'm going to kind of set this up but I was one of those officers that jumped into the Incident Command System The National Incident Management
11:38:03 System based off of the forest fighting model.
11:38:10 Emergency Management.
11:38:10 Homeland Security exercise and evaluation programs I would create exercises for our SWAT team and our departments, so that I saw a difference long term is that we started exercising with other law enforcement agencies as well as fire in MS, which had
11:38:26 not really been done before that. However, the flip side of that is must most of our training for those first couple of years after was focused on large incidents.
11:38:37 Right, so our individual skills and communication and our defensive tactics we did the minimum there, but most of our training was on active shooters and large incidents.
11:38:48 And I think that may have impacted long term. Our officers, because there's probably a period of 10 years and there were those lower level skills were just kind of skimmed over and then we went to the higher incidence.
11:39:02 So, I mean, open it up to the three of you please just jump in what were some other long term impacts or impact on the entire first responder community from the 911 attacks, like the one we recognized right away was our inability to communicate with neighboring
11:39:17 jurisdictions, our radio system operated on UHF versus the other local agencies were on VHF.
11:39:24 We use scanners to compensate but we really struggled to directly communicate with other agencies around us. So one of the first projects became obtaining grants to change our radio system, which was a lot of money as millions of dollars so that was one
11:39:41 of the major first steps we had already had pretty good working relationships with the neighboring jurisdictions, because of these major flooding issues that we've had.
11:40:06 for these incidents changed our training at least for the first few years, but I'd say that that radio system was the thing that people noticed the most, although it took years to do, you got to get the financing, you know, create the project.
11:40:12 And I'm quite sure how the initial grant I believe was around $6. million $8. million.
11:40:17 I'm quite sure how the initial grant I believe was around $6. million $8. million. And it was really just the first step that took.
11:40:21 I think even just to get the first part of it operational was four or five years. But when that happened, even the everyday officer recognize it because suddenly now, you can easily here every other jurisdiction around us, and they could talk to everybody,
11:40:34 which is one of those things that may seem funny now.
11:40:37 Why hadn't that happened before, but this was the kind of incident that made it happen.
11:40:44 Yeah, I think that was our biggest issue too was the radio system. And what a change in radios.
11:40:52 Mike for mention what a change can affect other other things that, as he mentioned VHF and UHF I think that was a big one.
11:41:03 That, but we found that if we were switching to one of those, then we had to go on to our, we're not just buying a small radio to go on somebody said, then we're looking at if we're switching our whole system we have to go by whole communication or dispatch
11:41:21 system to deal with those. And as he mentioned those things aren't cheap and and there's so many empirical parts of that for. I think that was really difficult for us in policing because we weren't ready to experts we were so called policing expert and
11:41:41 knew about that. But we actually had to hire a consulting company to come in and write up exactly what we needed for grant, the grant and so forth, because we were looking at actually where you're repeaters go.
11:41:59 And the repeaters actually give a boost to the, to the smaller radio so they can everybody can talk to one another. So there was a lot of issues with that I think one of the big ones that I wrote down was funding.
11:42:15 There were tons of grants out here to begin with, but then those started tapering off a little bit. And the feds at that particular time were requiring things like ICF to be covered.
11:42:29 Each year for several years, and you got to understand if you hadn't been part of this.
11:42:38 In, in real time, that you're asking all these police to change something that they've been doing forever. And when I'm saying that I'm talking about when you're communicating car to car you know a lot of agencies use the 10 code system like we're never
11:42:56 going to get away from that because that's the best way to communicate and they've been taught that for for generations or two or three generations and then all of a sudden we're saying we're throwing that out the window and we're going to do plane talk
11:43:12 how we're talking right now so everybody will be able to understand what you're saying because it would be like one department, like in 10 minutes something.
11:43:25 The state police had used another system called signaling like signal seven or whatever. And it was confusing to a lot of people that hadn't grown up in the police department with that.
11:43:39 So those were probably the two biggest things for us.
11:43:44 You mentioned communication and one of the things that always struck me as odd, I wouldn't say funny but I had was that, you know, for years, growing up you heard you know this is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System, and we're under attack and that
11:43:58 thing didn't go off and it's like wow, what a waste of time and money. That thing has been. So, but, you know, we never really use 10 codes in the state police because for example in our jurisdictions, you know, the Battle Creek post was all of Calvin
11:44:14 and half of Kalamazoo county and that spanned, you know, six, seven different jurisdictions have different radio frequencies and so we never really had the 10 codes.
11:44:23 But there was this this move away from that to plain English because what obviously you all know this what happened when all these other agencies from around the country were sending delegations to the Twin Tower site, they couldn't communicate with each
11:44:38 other because at 1033 have one department meant it meant something completely different to another and.
11:44:42 So I would say, outside of the southwestern West Coast departments you're really seeing you know the plain English taking over, largely because also the federal government incentivize that as well but I think one of the things that really changed for
11:44:58 that I could see from from the road officer the line officers perspective, was the training and how it became more fear based more militaristic more.
11:45:12 You know I came up during the era of, you know, to training in my initial few years in law enforcement before the state police the community policing era and it was hey let's build bridges and let's communicate with people and then it went to after September
11:45:24 11 all of a sudden, you know this movement to basically becoming a domestic almost extension of the National Guard. And the interesting thing about that is you know the statistics haven't really changed since then there's about one in five police officers
11:45:40 around the country is a military veteran so you had these folks that without military experience that were saying let's go to this more militaristic model and they might have seen a movie like platoon or full metal jacket and that this is what it is to
11:45:51 be militaristic and really what it came down to was this weird cartoonish, you know, parody of military behavior and, you know, what it ultimately what it has done 20 years hence, is it's actually driven a larger wedge between the police and the community
11:46:09 then then existed before September 11 it wasn't. I think the unifying effects of the attack lasted about six months and I went to so many saluting local heroes events and different things and then after about six months that kind of went away.
11:46:21 And again the push to militarize law enforcement through federal grants equipment purchases and things of that nature. Again served to, I think, put us in the position where we are right now where you know yeah there's still overwhelming support.
11:46:37 Across Ages across demographics, for law enforcement but it's a little less than it was 20 years ago.
11:46:44 Well, you're actually leading me into my last question for everybody, before we get there. One thing I did notice long term is that events were automatically considered terrorism, until it was proven otherwise.
11:46:58 And an example of that was the 35 w bridge collapse in 2007.
11:47:03 Everybody said it had to be a terrorist event it had to be a bombing they were attacking our bridge which I don't know that. How big of an impact that has on the entire nation, but it had an impact on Minneapolis, until they started looking at footage
11:47:16 from the cameras on the freeway and saw that it is really did collapse. So, in any, any time now it's that event is a terrorist event until proven otherwise, where before 911, it was well we don't know exactly what happened until we prove it's a terrorist
11:47:32 event so that shift in thinking is not just in first responders that's that's nationwide among the population so it's very, very interesting so. All right, so, Carl mentioned this a little bit and you can always jump back in but how did 911 impact the
11:47:51 peace officer law enforcement community relations that they had been working on before then.
11:47:57 Better worse depends on the population. What do you guys think I'm throwing it out there.
11:48:05 I would agree as a part of it.
11:48:07 Maybe last a little bit longer, but that there was a people saw what happened at 911 New York and that idea of heroism both for police and fire all these people that went in there doing their job and lost their lives in the process that that feeling that
11:48:25 this is the group of people that may be protecting you from these events because they could be anywhere, and it could be anything really.
11:48:34 As you mentioned trains derailing, if, if, if, especially if it was a dangerous one with chemicals or boilers or there was an explosion there was much more concerned that this could be related.
11:48:48 So I think the initially, there were there was that positive aspect but I would agree that we started getting access to a lot of money from the federal government for equipment, and some jurisdictions used it properly and some jurisdictions didn't.
11:49:04 Suddenly, you could get a Humvee, whether you really should be the jurisdiction that habit or has it or not.
11:49:12 All kinds of potentially militaristic uniforms or guns or, and it was really up to the individual agencies to decide if they should put in for it because in a lot of cases if you put in for it you are almost guaranteed to get something.
11:49:27 And so we had some examples of misuse of government money misuse of training.
11:49:35 This the Incident Command System The National Incident Management System.
11:49:44 We had to go through all of this training and honestly, if you would have if people would have seen what we did for some of that training, it was it some of it was just about laughable.
11:49:47 But it was, you know, some into some respects was grasping at straws trying to get people on the same page but I remember taking a course on acronyms for federal law enforcement agencies, And I don't think that was really necessary it.
11:50:03 And unfortunately, I think our relationships with some of the federal agencies improved.
11:50:09 But accessing this money, change the focus away from community oriented policing and more to this Homeland Security era of policing, where the greatest threats were greater where there was a focus on intelligence lead policing which was supposed to be
11:50:36 So a lot of this effort time and money.
11:50:39 I'm not saying it was entirely wasted. But it took the focus away from where it had been which was neighborhood issues neighborhood concerns.
11:50:55 You know problem Oriented Policing and made it more of a focus on Homeland Security, and protecting large events like if you especially for large jurisdiction football games and.
11:51:00 And all of these events that could were turned into potential targets were no one had thought of them at least not in that same sense as possible terrorist target.
11:51:10 And you got, you know, agencies that got Bearcat anti you know mine resistant personnel carriers that you know were these little tiny jurisdictions and you got, you know, these, these, these small communities with with homes that are in very close proximity
11:51:26 and I saw a few of them obviously in places that I've lived over the course of my police career where you know they've got these high powered assault weapons that that, you know, there's no way that's usable in in that small town you know you're going
11:51:38 to do more damage than good if that thing goes off and very little in the way of training so most states don't mandate or the feds don't mandate that you have experience or training rather in the use of the grenade launcher that you did 37 millimeter
11:51:53 grenade launcher that you just acquired you know and and so you know you've got undertrained people that that are possessing equipment that they have no idea what they're doing with and, by the grace of God.
11:52:07 Nothing you know you don't really hear too much about that things going wrong with that, but in terms of you know again the availability of that equipment in the changing uniforms and the change in mindset all kind of spoke to this movement away from
11:52:24 community oriented policing and to this us versus them that has been typified. I think in recent years in particular by this thin blue line this division between either you're with us or you're against us either terrorist or you have a good guy you're
11:52:38 either the you know the on the side of chaos or righteousness and I think it's all been, you know, part of there wasn't one event I guess is what I'm saying that caused it not even September 11 but September 11 was the catalyst that started this ball
11:52:52 rolling that caused us to to I think go to a more militaristic mindset.
11:53:00 Yeah and I tend to agree with what Dr will father, and Dr. Dolly, just mentioned it people that hadn't experienced this it literally all of this equipment or the overwhelming majority of it was free.
11:53:21 And I think that was the primary thing the most people are most of the agencies that took a lot of this, they really didn't need a particular piece of equipment but it was free we got to take it.
11:53:38 and.
11:53:38 As Dr will father said, literally, you could get about anything that you want to short of an army cake or something.
11:53:44 And the issue with guns that was brought up. We were all these em six teams that were automatics that had no use for the overwhelming majority of things you would encounter.
11:54:02 You know, other than if you were a SWAT team or something that you would even need those in a police department. But in addition, at the particular time they were even given away military uniforms and camouflage pants.
11:54:18 The camouflage shirts. And, I think, as I mentioned, this was specifically contrary to everything we were learning about policing and community policing in particular, If you think about it at that particular time.
11:54:37 We're even telling citizens.
11:54:40 You know we're trying to work citizens on on a lot of different issues from a community policing standpoint, but in other hand we're saying hey if you see anything, because we got so parent nodes part, not paranoid so quickly.
11:54:55 If you see anything. give us a call.
11:54:59 And, and I see a lot of this stuff that you see calls today where people get the police called on us as well we told people to do that. And, you know, we need to get our message out there and have the right message that we're sending out but I think a
11:55:17 lot of that was started and carried over by this militarization of actions that we took early on that sitting back and thinking about it. I don't know if those were all the correct things to do or we should have done.
11:55:36 So as we wrap up here, there were some good things that came out of the response to 911 and some changes that were made, but there were also some things that are very questionable.