Speaker 1: For all your food is out there. I'm unwrapping a
Speaker 1: McDonald's steak, egg and cheese bagel. Look at this steak
Speaker 1: and the juice running down the side. Get a little
Speaker 1: bit on a wrapper here, and then the fluffy egg
Speaker 1: and real cheaze folded over the throw looking just so good.
Speaker 1: Grild onions on a butt of bagel. Two thumbs off
Speaker 1: from mcdonald' steak, egg and cheeze bagel for breakfast love
Speaker 1: it want to pop up? I participate in McDonald's. So
Speaker 1: we've talked to a lot of cops over the years
Speaker 1: doing this show, and even at a coped panel once,
Speaker 1: and they all seem to agree. But I forget the number.
Speaker 1: What percentage of cops did these cops tell us shouldn't
Speaker 1: be cops? Cops told us thought it was a quarter, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is extraordinary. And we've gotten that same number from
Speaker 1: quite a few cops. So a bunch of different cops
Speaker 1: have told us about a quarter of a cops shouldn't
Speaker 1: be cops, which is pretty troubling. Right. And John Kelly
Speaker 1: and his team at the USA today have been digging
Speaker 1: from quite some time into police records around the country.
Speaker 1: They found eighty five cops have been investigated from misconduct.
Speaker 1: Uh and and John joins us now to discuss Hello, John,
Speaker 1: how are you, sir? I'm doing great, Good morning guys. Excellent.
Speaker 1: This is this is quite a project. How long did
Speaker 1: it take? We've been We started gathering records almost two
Speaker 1: years ago, um, and and there were some records that
Speaker 1: we had that we're sort of foundational, Uh, records we've
Speaker 1: already had in place. So I mean it's been about
Speaker 1: two years, right, So good cops are a blessing to society,
Speaker 1: and thank God for them. Uh, bad cops and good
Speaker 1: cops will tell you this need to go. And I
Speaker 1: think we're all aware that there are you know, episodes
Speaker 1: of police excessive force and that sort of thing. That
Speaker 1: the aspect of this that really interests us mostly is
Speaker 1: you know, what percentage of cops are bad cops? And
Speaker 1: and how easy is it for the public to find
Speaker 1: out about it? Well, so it's really difficult, um in
Speaker 1: a lot of places, even even though a lot of
Speaker 1: the records underlying the conduct of police officers would technically
Speaker 1: be public records. And yeah, and and but there are
Speaker 1: roadblocks to getting them. You know, a typical you know,
Speaker 1: resident going down to the police station asking for this
Speaker 1: kind of thing is likely to encounter police agencies that
Speaker 1: would maybe not be forthcoming about whether the records exist,
Speaker 1: or run into a little bit of runaround, or be
Speaker 1: charged you know, dollar a page, fees to see the records,
Speaker 1: none of that experience with this on a large scale.
Speaker 1: And so we can in our in our team of
Speaker 1: journalists you know, includes you know, people who are experts
Speaker 1: in those public records laws, and so we can work
Speaker 1: around that by being very direct with these agencies. You know, listen,
Speaker 1: you have to turn these records over under the law anyway.
Speaker 1: So we've been gathering those slowly and then and then
Speaker 1: in effect transforming them into data that allows us to
Speaker 1: do a lot of comparison and analysis. Um that gets
Speaker 1: to some of the questions you were asking about percentages.
Speaker 1: Most notable numbers are results in your mind, John, So,
Speaker 1: I mean so far one of the more noticeable things
Speaker 1: to me, I mean, when I knew I knew that
Speaker 1: states de certified cops. You know that that that that
Speaker 1: that in really extreme cases, you know, a local police
Speaker 1: department will tell us state, hey, this guy's misconduct is
Speaker 1: so bad that or or the cops been convicted of
Speaker 1: a crime that you know, we want to make sure
Speaker 1: he can't be a cop somewhere else he or se um.
Speaker 1: I expected when we started gathering those from the states,
Speaker 1: I guess maybe a little bit. I expected that the
Speaker 1: number of those could be, you know, ten thousand um.
Speaker 1: The idea that that there are more than thirty thousand
Speaker 1: and substantially more was surprising to me. People who a
Speaker 1: state government have had to take the extreme action of
Speaker 1: saying this person's misconduct is so serious that we can't
Speaker 1: we in good conscience can't allow them to continue being
Speaker 1: a law enforcement officer, and we want to make sure
Speaker 1: that they're not one. Yeah, that that's interesting that that
Speaker 1: that many people were able to pass you know, the
Speaker 1: tests and the psychologist psychological tests and all that stuff
Speaker 1: and become cops and then did something so bad that
Speaker 1: they get banned. But then how many people don't get
Speaker 1: banned at that level, They get booted out of their
Speaker 1: own department, but then get to go to some other
Speaker 1: department and work there, right, And that's one of the
Speaker 1: surprising things for us. So, so there are a couple
Speaker 1: of big holes in that system, and you guys are
Speaker 1: getting in on a you know some early info from
Speaker 1: a coming UH story in our investigation. But in California,
Speaker 1: for instance, which has more police officers than anyone, they
Speaker 1: don't don't have a process for de certifying police officers. UH.
Speaker 1: Several other states also don't have a process. New York,
Speaker 1: which obviously has a lot of police officers, just started
Speaker 1: doing this, and so you have these states with huge
Speaker 1: populations of police officers who don't even have a process
Speaker 1: for for doing this, and so it's very easy then
Speaker 1: for officers to move around. But even in the places
Speaker 1: where they're decertified. To give you an idea, you know,
Speaker 1: we wrote about this police chief who was got in
Speaker 1: trouble in Kansas City for basically chasing a guy off
Speaker 1: the highway and yanking him out of his car at
Speaker 1: gunpoint while he was off duty, and the state of
Speaker 1: Kansas de certified him over that issue. But he lived
Speaker 1: right on the river, so across the river in Missouri
Speaker 1: he was not decertified, and so he became a police
Speaker 1: chief in two towns there time after that. UM And
Speaker 1: even more interesting than that, he was also the campus
Speaker 1: police campus safety chief at a college in Kansas, a
Speaker 1: state where the state government had deemed he was unfit
Speaker 1: to be running up to be a police officer. UM.
Speaker 1: So even within the same state where he was already
Speaker 1: be certified, um he was acting in that capacity at
Speaker 1: a college. John Kelly, director of Data journalism for the USA,
Speaker 1: today on the line talking about their investigation in the
Speaker 1: police misconduct and record keeping in the rest of it.
Speaker 1: It's making me think, what's driving that? Lazy legislatures, legislatures
Speaker 1: or the thin blue line thing or what what is
Speaker 1: what is driving this? Well, one of the things that
Speaker 1: we see the phenomenon that we see happening um and
Speaker 1: we talked about in a story that we put out
Speaker 1: today that focuses on these police chiefs as a sort
Speaker 1: of microcosm of the problem. We found three things. Uh. One,
Speaker 1: there are laws that legislators have passed asked that helped
Speaker 1: hide some of these records. There are prosecutors and judges
Speaker 1: when cops are convicted who will seal records or allow
Speaker 1: them to plead down from a felony to a misdemeanor
Speaker 1: on something that's a you know, a serious criminal act
Speaker 1: in because they know that the felony will automatically be
Speaker 1: certified the officer. But a misdemeanor will not uh. And
Speaker 1: then more than that, the thing we ran into a
Speaker 1: lot was as we called these departments and said, do
Speaker 1: you know that officers so and so or Chief so
Speaker 1: and so had this incident in a neighboring town or
Speaker 1: in a different state. And we kept running into two things. No,
Speaker 1: we didn't know that he didn't tell us that, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they called for a reference and the
Speaker 1: place that they called to didn't tell them that. Or
Speaker 1: in some cases we've had people that mayors and and
Speaker 1: and people that have hired these people into these jobs
Speaker 1: say we did. But I talked to him about it,
Speaker 1: and I felt like, you know, that he deserved a
Speaker 1: second chance. Uh. And then we had other We had
Speaker 1: a top that that came up in this that that
Speaker 1: was under indictment in Ohio and got a job as
Speaker 1: a sheriff's deputy in Daytona Beach Luge County, Florida. And
Speaker 1: you know, we thought it was pretty telling and somewhat
Speaker 1: of a microcosm of the larger problem that they later deterred.
Speaker 1: They later found out he was under indictment and they
Speaker 1: had to fire him just a little while after hiring him,
Speaker 1: and the headline in the local paper was that the
Speaker 1: sheriff promised he would start googling his police candidates. There
Speaker 1: you go. John Kelly is the director of Dantage Journalism
Speaker 1: for the USA Today. John, terrific job. I'm afraid we're
Speaker 1: out of time, but we'll have a lenk so folks
Speaker 1: can find their way to your piece and your team's
Speaker 1: pisa very easily. Well done, good to talk to you. Thanks,
Speaker 1: Thank you guys. And it sounds like there are follow
Speaker 1: ups to come. Maybe we can talk to him again.
Speaker 1: But that's that is really troubling. And there's gotta be
Speaker 1: enough people out there that want to be cops, that
Speaker 1: would be good cops that you don't have to keep
Speaker 1: anybody around who's bad, but let them serve somewhere else well.
Speaker 1: And the good cops that I know don't like what
Speaker 1: the bad cops due to the reputation of their agency
Speaker 1: or police in general. So it's in everybody's interest to
Speaker 1: be better about this. Be fair, but be better about it.
Speaker 1: We begin today's meditation with a few sipping exercises to
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Speaker 1: until eleven a m. Price of participation may vary