Is POLICE CULTURE the problem? Dr. Frank Tortorello (Cultural Anthrpologist) shares his insights

Hi, everyone. Thank you again for tuning into the Policing in America podcast. I have a return guest, and I'm very excited to reintroduce Dr. Frank Tortorello. Dr. Frank, he's a strategist, he's an author, he's a cultural anthropologist, and he's also keeping his finger on the pulse of everything that's going on in the world of policing as well as other things. But Frank reached out to me because he saw that I was doing some follow-up on this Memphis, and we got to talking offline a little bit, and we said we need to come on and discuss some things. So, Dr. Frank, I am so excited to have you on again. Welcome. Thanks, Sergeant Tom. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. Absolutely. Well, thank you. So, we're going to jump into it, and tell me if you want to start with this idea of the podcast you sent me on the Leaky Character Reservoir. Am I saying that right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. So, it's an interesting podcast, and if you link it on your page, it's interesting to take a look at it because it was developed by some Army officers, some of whom are psychologists, and the issue that they were looking at is how come so many Army officers are getting relieved because of character issues. And I won't go too much into what they're actually discussing, but I thought it would be interesting for your listeners to take a look at that as maybe an alternative way, an alternative framework, an alternative set of glasses to look at the Memphis issue. So, the interesting thing to me and the suggestion I would have is to take a look at what those Army officers are discussing about character, and maybe think a little bit about what that might do to change the way we talk about incidents like those in Memphis. The point I'd want to make is what's the character issue here? Is there a character issue? Is this really more of a moral issue? I know right away we jump to legalities. We talk a lot about race, and all that is critically important. No argument from me. What I'm very interested in is, personally, given that I'm a cultural anthropologist and I look at values, what were the values that these officers thought they were enacting? So, that's interesting, Frank. So, I want to... I'm going to pull on a bunch of different things, so help me so that I'm not all over with this. So, when we say values, I immediately think of, because this is how my lens looks at it, it leads me back to this idea of culture. And this is what's taking, in my opinion, a lot of oxygen out of the room, this boogeyman of police culture, as if there is one culture that runs through 18,000 police agencies. So, can you speak a little bit about what you think culture is, and if it has a space for this? And if so, how does that tie in to, say, values, character, and, of course, courage? Because I know this is an area of your expertise as well. Sure. We can look at, let's say, courage as a value. And we'd know that, for example, there are those in the world who think that a suicide bomber would be someone who's courageous. We don't tend to think that, but there are other cultures out there that think that a person who blew themselves up in the name of a certain set of other values would be quite courageous. So, right there, I think, is a good example of how you have a distinction in the culture, despite looking at the same, quote-unquote, value, right? It's the same value, courage. We don't think it is, quote-unquote, they do, right? So, that's one way to look at culture. And once you realize that, you can realize that you have very different cultures and very different police departments. They're all police. They're all protect and serve. But you can have really radically different interpretations of what that means, and not only across the police departments, but then situationally, and then amongst the officers who comprise the department. So then, Frank, we then have to say, if culture is, I don't know, a lens through which you view actions, right? We can look at it from that perspective. Well, that lens then is still going to be shaped by the personnel, right? Because it's not an overarching, I'm trying to explain it in a way, like it's not a motivating factor the way dopamine is, the way you're searching for a dopamine hit or hunger, right? Like this esoteric idea of a need being met. This culture is sort of driven by the human interaction. Is that correct? Or am I not thinking about that clearly enough? I think you're right on target. The idea of a culture as a mechanism is, in my estimation, just dead wrong. Culture is never a mechanism. It doesn't cause you to do things. At best, your culture is an invitation. Sometimes, if your culture is limited, there are things you literally can't imagine. So for example, we would not see this headline in our culture. A young woman was arrested on the streets of New York for not wearing a hijab. There is no such person in our culture currently who is the person who was arrested for not wearing a hijab. That doesn't happen in our culture. There is no such person. You can't be that person. Does that make sense? So the culture can give you guidelines. It can give you possibilities. And it can close off possibilities. But ultimately, at the center, it's people making decisions about what they want to do and who they want to be. So one way to look at what happened in Memphis is, who were these officers being? Not what were they doing? Who were they being? Is maybe a different way to look at this. That's fascinating. All right. So who were they being? So you're looking at this now from your perspective, from your educated mind and the research, who were they being? We don't know, right? So let's look at aside from just being racist or part of a racist, systemic culture, let's look at them from a human perspective. We know a little bit more on that. What were they trying to be? Bullies, thugs, killers, murderers. We can sort of play around with any of those and start there. One of the things we'd have to do, though, is have a conversation about what those terms mean to make sure we're on the same page. The next thing we'd have to do is watch very carefully how they were moving. Because what people do oftentimes is they talk with their body. And so I'll give you an example of that that I learned from the Marine Corps in studying the military for a long time. And I think I used this in our former chat. Did you ever see the movie Saving Private Ryan? Sure. And you remember the opening scenes where all those soldiers during World War II were jumping off those landing craft and they were running into the face of machine gun fire? Yeah. If you ask many veterans, they don't have to wonder about what was going on there. That was courage because of the way, the direction, literally, that those soldiers were moving. So they were using their bodies to talk about what they valued. When somebody is acting physically violent, violently, sometimes we call it self-defense. Other times we call it murder. It's the same bodily activity. What's different is the intention and the character or the values involved. Interesting. Okay. So now that brings us back to this natural evolution of the character. And from your point of view as an anthropologist, first off, let's define character. Let's come with a common definition and build it from there. What is character? There's an inbuilt positive connotation to that concept in English, I think. So character is those beneficial, positive, other-regarding, other-prioritizing values that hold you steady despite temptations, despite things like, I'd rather be self-indulgent and not finish this report. I'd rather not make sure that my tie is tied today. So a lot of what I think we've built into the concept of character is the idea of right action. And what we tend to mean by right is action that is well-mannered, solicitous, and respecting of others, those sorts of things. So that's one place to start. That's certainly not the only definition of character. And by the way, in the way I'm using it, we can say what sort of character were each of those officers trying to achieve? Mm-hmm. And while there is no definition of a character, there's no definition that we could buy. If that's the case, then we're now in some interesting new territory. Right. So is character something that you learn more so than something you're born with? And I ask with this caveat, you see little kids when they're babies, they're not necessarily mean, but they may grab a toy from another child. They're not thinking, I want to hurt you. They're just like, I want this, it's mine. And then we teach, and we learn this idea of sharing, and then we reward when they do share, and we praise. So what do you think about character? Is there an innate reservoir that you start with, or is it something we create and then start to fill? Yeah, I would disagree with those army officers on that point, I think. There isn't a reservoir, I think, that's much too of a mechanistic explanation. It's very old-fashioned in a way. But it's a place to start and it leads us in some interesting directions, which is why I sort of recommended it. I would say in the sense intention is critically important and we even recognize that in the law, right? There's first-degree murder and there's manslaughter, right? So there are variations in the law that recognize intentions and what those intentions might mean. If you don't quite know what you're doing, so I could walk into, let's say I'm doing some research in a culture other than an English-speaking culture and I reach out to shake someone's hand and I'm using my right hand. That could be a terrible, terrible ethical blunder in that culture, but I didn't intend it. I didn't intend the offense. So that does count. The question is whether or not, I think if you're going to then apply that to something like the events in Memphis, we can ask, what exactly did you intend to each of those officers? Were you intending an arrest? Were you intending to restrain? Were you intending to gain control of a situation? I think all of those are perfectly legitimate questions, but I think a lot of that, especially in cases like this, we often don't get to ask those questions because everything is immediately wrapped up in sort of either a media or a legal environment and narrative. So it's very hard to ask those questions. And it seems like there is a culture of immediacy. Oh gosh, I just used the word culture. It seems like there's an expectation of the immediacy of response. So what you think back in 2020, what happened with Chauvin and in no way is it excusable, but yet you look at his actions, how he was more callous and flippant and just sort of sitting there holding someone down who's unconscious at this point. Certainly not as violent as what we just saw, right? So you can now start comparing and contrasting things just from a research perspective, if we're going to create policies, right? I want to create policies that are going to impact and minimize actions like this. But my goodness, the world blew up with that. We've seen this now, which appears much more violent from that perspective, and yet we're almost confused at this point. We're almost befuddled. I think so. I think we've gotten ourselves, and unfortunately my field of study, the social sciences have not done anyone any favors for a very long time in terms of trying to help make this clear. And one of the reasons why I try to speak about the details of these kinds of things and give you different opportunities to take a look at things from different angles is because we are susceptible to making judgments. In fact, in a lot of cases, larger American culture is geared toward getting you to indulge what you think you want or what you think you see. We're expert marketers on ourselves. A lot of our politicians do this. They want us to make snap decisions, and then they'll give us the setup to make them. And it's really hard, and I think your last guest, Mr. Joseph, he was talking about taking a breather before he reacted. That means self-discipline. And where in today's culture, I mean, if you just, I'm just throwing this out there. If you were to sit back and ask yourself, where are the positive examples of why it's a good idea to pause before I make a judgment? Where is that in our culture, in our everyday culture? You deserve this car. You deserve this dinner. You deserve these clothes. You deserve a vacation. You deserve this bank credit card. It's not about pausing. It's not about, in a lot of cases, thinking. And so we're up against it, and we're, in a way, doing it to ourselves, my opinion. You know, and I brought some, I had some books here to the side as I was preparing, and I look at one of them, and maybe you've seen this before. It says, On Being Certain, Believing You're Right Even When You're Not. And this is a book I refer back to often because we all want to be right. It's very valuable to be right. I think you and I have, and others in our spheres, also appreciate when we learn that we're wrong because we think, oh my gosh, I've looked at this for so long. I've been using these studies. I had no idea. New data has come out. And for some reason, the societal thought of this is so negative. Oh, well, you were wrong about that. Yeah. Okay. And that's why I'm reading the books, so that I can keep calibrating and keep learning. Isn't that something we should value? Yes. But, okay, so you and I could go down a cultural, anthropological black hole with us as a species. So I'll try, if I can, to bring it back. So with policing now, one thing I don't understand is why you have big agencies. You're an East Coast guy. You've got the big NYPD. The West Coast has LAPD. The middle, you know, you've got Chicago. These are big agencies. They're progressive. They're forward-thinking. They're attached to big universities that help them. But yet policing sort of gets this big, broad brush. So what happened in Memphis may as well have happened here in Los Angeles. Is that a product of how the message is being delivered, how the information is being delivered by our media? Is that a product of us as a society just not pausing and thinking it through because we are such system one emotional thinkers and we're not as thoughtful as we could be? That's a hard one. I don't know, to be honest with you. I'd have to think about that. I don't have an easy answer off the bat. But I guess what I can say about it is that if you're not getting down to the level of detail we started with, start from the incident and work backward. Don't start, and what I mean by there is stick with the people. Forget about the hormones. Forget about brains. Forget about the mind. Those are traditional, social, psychological, and psychological and psychiatric and medical terms. And as soon as you reference those, to me, you're off track. You're going to be off target in terms of coming up with an explanation and an understanding that's going to put you in a position to do something effective. So let's look at, I'll give you an example. When I was doing some research with the Marine Corps, the idea of turning civilians with their values into Marines with Marine values is about a 13-week process. It's very intensive. But what the Marine Corps noticed was quite soon after that, these new Marines who were very, as they say, squared away right after their boot camp, they would go off to their different schools to learn their trade, whether it was radio communications or aircraft engines. And that commitment level, that squared away-ness started to decrease. Not necessarily noticeably or obviously, but it wasn't what it was at Parris Island. So what happened? Is that the individual Marines problem? Is it the local Marine units problem? I think looking at something like that is a good way to try to start to understand, could this happen in LA? Why not? Because we don't understand exactly why it is that people, let's say in this case, officers, why they choose not to follow what we would otherwise define as protect and serve. Until we understand that, so you're in training, I guess I could just ask you, what are the reasons you've heard that officers do something like this? It always gets distilled down to the phrase that has now become very unsatisfying. It's a bad apple. This is what, right? And we know that that's unsatisfying and it's not going to lead us anywhere because the thought is then, well, I'll just get rid of this person and problem solved, right? And it's unsatisfying. And if that's the case, you're not getting down to, as they say, the brass tacks. If somebody were to say to me, hey, Frank, go find out why these officers did this. The first thing I do is sit down and talk to them and say, what happened? Now a lot of people will say, well, we really can't trust what they're going to say. Maybe, but maybe not, depending on what they think the consequences of the chat are. If it's simply to understand and they're not afraid of going to jail for the rest of their lives, you get a different kind of answer. I don't know how you can undo that, but I know for example, in the world of espionage and spies, people in jail have given reasons why they've spied against the United States or committed espionage or whatever. So there may be a possibility of achieving understanding here by talking with these officers or officers, former officers like them, and I should say former officers, but we can't ask the typical psychological questions because often what people say, their words, like you and I talking. of psychologists are trained to look at what we're saying as an indicator of something deeper. And what they're interested in is not what we're saying to one another, but what we're saying to one another means, what that means to their system or their scale, where they're trying to measure what's going on inside of us. They think that's where behavior comes from. I stick with behavior coming from us. So you did this before, and I just love that you do it because it challenges me. So we're, we're stick to the people, not at the minds, right? And I, I love how you say that, because I want to go right to a system one type of thought. I want to go right to an emotional hijacking. And then that translates into this messy conversation of culture. And well, these, now, now we start talking about, well, the hiring standards were lower. So we used to have a different person. What is your take? When you say that's not even, don't even look at that. Because you can have the reverse. You can have lower, lower hiring standards and excellent officers. Can you, can you explain that? Why do you think that's the case? Yeah, you can you can lower your hiring standard, but the people you hire because you create an excellent training environment, because you have excellent environment, because you have excellent leadership, because you have a excellent, high standard of performance within the department. People live into that. They grow into it. So from the hiring standard perspective, they may be quote unquote substandard, but they turn out to be excellent people. They turn out to be excellent officers. Why isn't that possible? Has anybody done a study? No, we could say that. No one's done that study. We love the other one. We love using that as a way to short circuit. And I'm, I'm being a little bit, I'm overstating this. We use that available narrative to short circuit what we really need to be doing, which is finding out whether there is a relationship between lower standards and poor performance, lower hiring standards and poor performance, or there isn't, or there isn't, or there's in the opposite. What that, what we get to avoid by saying things like that is any sense of responsibility for really understanding what the culture of a particular department is, what's going on situationally. Some officers who, who might otherwise not participate could participate if, if a very well-respected leader takes the lead. That's, you know, that's what my leader's doing. And I'm somewhat immature. I'm young. I really want to be part of the group. This is not, this is not magic, right? I have to talk to the officers individually. And then even, I would even do a group interview with them and watch what they do with one another. So Frank, are you familiar with, I'm looking it up right now, Zimbardo's work. It's called the Lucifer effect. Okay. And he did, he did some of his work in Abu, Abu Ghraib, right? And he looked at how you can take normal people. And I think we've seen this phenomenon throughout our anthropological history. There's a book called Ordinary Men, right? Where we took people who were just regular police soldiers, right? And we just turned them into monsters. What is that process that, that is happening? And, and could you explain that for the listener, maybe a little bit, how these guys might not be bad people, just, you know, full stop. There, there's a process of this. So I guess I would, I would ask this question to you and to the listeners, why isn't that process exactly the same process as Marine bootcamp, except with different values? When you say the, so are we talking about the process of policing, like the, the, the, the recruit training? How, why is that not like, or because I, so the first thing that pops into my head when you asked that question was, well, there are Marines that leave that bootcamp who go on to do bad things, maybe say sexual misconduct with the young, right? So there is no, it's not necessarily guaranteeing anything. Never, because the person always has a choice. So nobody, you can have the best training program in the world and a person can unintentionally or intentionally leave off of the training. And you, you don't, it, anything other than that recognition, if you don't remember that, then you're bordering on expecting robotic performance. And the last- We don't want that. Don't want robots. We can't, we can't be robots. We are not built to be robotic. We can act as if we're robotic, but we can't be robots. Yeah. There's too many variables, too many variables in this organic system. Well, the, the only possible biological basis or physiological basis to have robotic activity is if we had the same kind of instinct structures built into us as let's say a spider or an ant. And we don't. Our neurological system prevents us from being that way. So for a spider, if you have a ground hunting spider, which is one species, it has one kind of neurology, and you have a web building spider, they can't decide on their own to become the other. A ground hunter cannot become a web builder, not just because it doesn't have the spinners, but because it's, it's sort of, as we'd say, it's not programmed to be. But that's because a spider is susceptible to programming. What we're susceptible to, to, to being is convinced that we ought to act one way or another. And that can happen in a second. So we are susceptible to influence. Sure. Yeah. And you were going to say that could happen in a second and go, we'll go with that thought. Yeah, it could happen in a second. And let me give you another kind of example. I may have used this last time, but there was a Marine Sergeant in Iraq in around the 2004 or 5 timeframe, and they were doing late night raids on houses looking for, for insurgents, bomb builders and so forth. And his training, absolutely outstanding training as most Marine training is, especially combat training was hostile action means hostile intent, dot, dot, dot. They didn't necessarily say fire, right? But sort of the implication when you're on an operation in the middle of the night with looking for insurgents. So this, this Sergeant goes into this house and all they have is flashlights. And, and of course it's chaotic, it's noisy. The family members are waking up, the people in the house are waking up and someone grabs the rifle barrel of this Marine. And he reports, I was depressing the trigger because hostile action, one of the hostile actions is somebody grabbing the rifle, rifle barrel, means hostile intent. There's the intent issue again, interestingly. And he's depressing the trigger because he's supposed to fire. Now what's at stake? Not only his life, but the lives of his Marines and then the mission. So this is, this is high stakes. He's depressing the trigger and then he stops. Excellent training. He knows what's happening. He knows what to do. And he stopped and he was puzzled as to why he stopped because now he thinks he was a bad Marine. That's my interpretation of why, what, what he, why he wrote the article that I'm referring to. So he essentially tells us the reason he was looking into the eyes of a frightened elderly man, elderly Iraqi man, and he thought to himself, I'd react the same way. So even when you have nearly automated behavior, because they, he reports, they practiced hostile action means hostile intent means do what you need to do. Hostile action means hostile over and over and over and over again. He chose not to depress the trigger. So even when you find a case, you have a decision. It's always the person making a decision. Now, Frank, this, this makes me think of something. Hostile action equals hostile intent, but they didn't give the answer. Does that mean, could they have primed him? Hostile action, hostile intent, neutralize. If they would have programmed that, but they didn't hostile action, hostile intent, dot, dot, dot. Now you have to figure it out. Do you think that was intentional? I don't know if they were that, if they were that, I'd have to go back and look at the actual training program, which I haven't been able to do, but I think that's exactly the next step. If you were, you and I were conducting research, I think we would agree. That's what we need to find out. Why did the Marine Corps training and education command leave that piece open? It's because I suspect because they wanted to make sure that there was some way to recognize that you're going to encounter novelty and you always do encounter novelty in the world. And so you can't have, and don't want robotic behavior. So now, Frank, this has opened up a door for me, which is we train police officers. You use force to overcome resistance, to affect an arrest or self-defense. And it's always this, if then do this, or if this, then that, it's always this metric of doing these things. And it becomes very binary. And there was an old saying in policing, I'm sure people have heard this. You ask someone, you tell them, and then you make them do it. And that's an old, it's not anywhere in the training literature, but it's an old ism. And it's gone. We now say, ask, ask again, get resources, think about it differently. But you still have people. who just ask, and then they fall back on, hey, it's legal, I'm going to do this. And so now I wonder, gosh, the fact that it was hostile action, hostile intent, dot, dot, dot, and yet they were trained. They trained on these things, hostile action, hostile intent, but was there ever anything in that training? Hostile action, hostile intent, that didn't always necessitate a smooth press, right? They left that for the brain to have in its little heuristic of responses. And the way I would put what you just said was, they left it up to the person, they leave it up to them, which is really, really delicate, right? Because you're dealing with the lethal application of force, you're dealing with the security of the Marine, you're dealing with the security of the Marine squad, you're dealing with the mission of the Marine Corps. All of that is at stake. And yet they trusted the Marine to quote unquote, do the right thing. But the tricky part about that, it seems to me, Tom, is that it's not necessarily understood what is the right thing, because he would have been fully justified pulling that trigger. So now you're that Marine's supervisor, let's say, and we can play with the terms here as if you were a police. So let's say you were the commanding officer of that Marine. You have at least two value choices by which you can interpret what that Marine did. You can say, hey, Marine, you blew it, because you put, in that moment, you put yourself and the rest of your squad and our mission at risk. Or you can say, congratulations, Marine, by not shooting an elderly, unarmed Iraqi, you did not produce other insurgents who might blow up other Marines, or shoot other Marines, or become committed to countering all our efforts in Iraq. So now if you were that Marine's supervisor, which one would you pick? Why? And where would you learn that you even had that decision? I don't know of any training, any training at all in the time I spent in the Marine Corps, which is about, not in the Marine Corps, but working for the Marine Corps about 10 years. I don't have any training that handles that kind of very detailed, very specific, very concrete value conflict, because that's what it is. Those are two radically different values, good Marine, bad Marine. Frank, there's so many times when officers will hear this phrase, and why didn't you shoot? Or you know you could have shot. And it's just interesting. It is rare that somebody, well, at least it's rare, and when I hear these stories told to me, somebody says, yeah, I was in the locker room, and someone said, hey, man, that's pretty impressive that you were able to hold off on that, and you didn't shoot. It's never that. Why not? You could have shot. Yeah. Why not? So now we have to reverse back then. And now we have to say, is it a culture that is creating this, or is it a lack of character training, or is it a lack for character development, or are we not hiring people with character to begin with? That's a lot of questions I just threw at you. How do you navigate that? It's all of it. Oh. Because if that's what's going on, if that's going on in the locker room, that is where people get their values from is from conversation. They learn values. The values are not built in. So just like we don't have instincts, we're not built as a species to have instincts. Really? Can you elaborate on that? Sure. Yeah, please. We have two kinds of nervous systems, right? We have an involuntary nervous system, so you don't have to remember to pump your heart. And then we have a voluntary nervous system, which is the system we use to slow our heart rate down if we're a sniper, right? So we can influence our involuntary, our automated, our automatic nervous system by using voluntary nervous system. And it's not what is using the voluntary nervous system, it's who. People control their voluntary nervous system. So I'll give you an illustration of that. Same nervous system in both sides of this illustration. A person with Parkinson's disease shakes, right? Yes. A person on their wedding day may also shake, right? So you have the same nervous system, very similar activity in the nervous system. The source of the first one is entirely out of the control of the person. Parkinson's disease is an issue with the sheathing of your nerve cells. The second one, that's up to the person. And in fact, what I'd say, the person who is shaking on their wedding day, they are using their body to express a certain kind of value orientation. I'm scared about the future. I'm so happy about the future. It can be anything like that, but we'd have to talk to them. So in the first case, Parkinson's has nothing to do with the person. The second one has everything to do with the person. I can give you another one, vomiting. So somebody can have a stomach bug and vomit. Somebody can see a fellow Marine who is wounded and vomit. And the last thing you would expect me to do is to go up to that Marine and say, do you have a stomach bug? Right. Why are you puking? I don't understand. Well, we don't understand. The person is horrified and sickened, morally, ethically sickened, right? So using their body to express a value orientation. It's, oh, Frank. So I want to ask a few of these questions from an anthropology perspective, but what about this idea of like the maternal instinct? Because that's what I think of when you said we're not really designed for that. How do you navigate that? Don't we have examples of women who kill their kids? Sure. And so then we'd be tempted to go look for something in their biology that's broken, a tumor, some kind of miswiring in the brain, right? Right, right. Except we do that and we don't find anything wrong. I'll give you an example from the world of policing and mass murder in the U.S. Paddock, Las Vegas, right, even Paddock, nobody could find a motive. And they thought, well, clearly there's got to be something. The guy's got to be broken, right? So they took his brain and they sent it to a very noted neuroscientist to take a look at what's going on. And the neuroscientist said something interesting. Even if I find a tumor, the ability for me to say that that tumor caused that behavior is almost nil because tumors and what they do to and with the brain is variable, right? So it's not a machine relationship where you have cogs and you find that one of the teeth is missing and so the thing is not connecting. That's not how people operate. So even when we go looking for physiological causes, it's rare to find them. There are certain kinds of issues where people, you can say that in a way they're broken. Parkinson's disease, right? So I can't really control myself. I have to shake. And that's the wrong pronoun. It's not I have to shake. It's my body is shaking. Yeah, yeah, I do now because it seems so natural when I first heard I have to shake, right? But no, you're right because there is almost this separation. And that's the disservice my field, social science, has done because we have not ensured that we're using that kind of language precisely. And so we invite a lot of people to mix up brains with people. So when you said before, my brain, you know, or the brain, right, and you referred to your brain and that heuristic and so on. And I said, my standpoint, it's the person because brains don't think. What do brains do? I mean, they process, right? It's a I mean, it's not thinking, I suppose it's, it's, it's processing information. Do we know that? What? What? I mean, if we got down to what do let's go back to high school biology, what do brains actually do? I know there's chemical reactions, right? There's chemical reactions. It's sending signals to stimulate nerve endings to beat the heart or send a pain response or digest the food, right? Is there such a thing as a signal beat this guy to death? Because if there is, we shouldn't, we shouldn't be holding those former officers. We should find that out first. Because if it is, it's not their fault. Ah, see, Frank, now I just caught what you did, right? Because that's the person, not the brain. Yep. Right. It took it hit me just like that. That was the aha moment because if it is a signal in the brain, well then let's just treat the signal. Why are we putting policy in place? But you're saying, look, this it's, you can't blame the brain any more than you could blame the heart. I'm going to try that. True, from your perspective? Yep. Oh, geez. You can blame the brain for causing the person to shake in Parkinson's disease, or you can blame the neurology, right? Yeah. But how do we use blame? Is a blame gonna be embarrassed? Is a brain gonna be embarrassed? No. No. As soon as you use the word blame, you're already in the world of people, and ethics, and values. So really, two different kinds of explanations. If you wanna talk in terms of brains, you're gonna talk in terms of causes. If you're gonna talk in terms of people, and why they do things, you're gonna talk in terms of reasons, not causes. Wow, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see, I see what you mean. Well, okay, okay. You got me on your side. For the moment, I'm understanding what you're saying. Sure, yeah, yeah. I'll forget, because I'm not as deep in this when we hang up. Okay, so then, if this is the person, and I'm not looking for causes, I'm looking for reasons, I wanna be able to positively set up guardrails to keep your reasoning clear, or your purpose clear. So then, does that go back to character? Sure, yep, and character. So let's say that we want officers of high character. Off the cuff, we'd want officers who respect people despite serious provocation. We want them to respect the chain of command. We want them to be self-disciplined, and all the things that I'm sure you've heard before. There's nothing unusual or magical about any of this. The question is, how do we maintain it? And from an anthropological, cultural anthropological perspective, the way you maintain it is to make sure that the officers are talking to one another about what they're gonna do in these kinds of situations, and then somebody involved in that conversation to make sure that the right values are being discussed. Because the locker room example you gave me before, doesn't sound to me like the right values were being discussed. Right. Right. So Frank, language then, from a cultural anthropological perspective, language is vital. We need to have conversations on these things. Absolutely. And then those conversations should be somewhat deep, and uncomfortable, and challenging of assumptions. Yes, they have to be. Because if not, by not talking about it, it's easy for somebody to think you actually don't care about it. Or it's something that we're gonna, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, the stuff we do on the street. Right. Right, that's what starts to happen. So let me ask you, from a perspective, we're not trying to criticize the individual at all. It's more truly a genuine inquiry. The chief came out, forgive me, I forget her name. The chief came out and she was being lauded and praised for her quick response. She said, this isn't a racial problem. She said, this is a character moral problem. Right, she mentioned that. Now I'm actually, now I'm pausing because she's saying kind of what you're saying, which is pretty interesting from that perspective. She said, this is a human problem. Which is great, actually. So did, would you, if you're in that spot, Frank, you're a chief of police and you see this and you have a call for action, what are you gonna come out and say? Because people want a response, but yet you want your response to be measured also because you wanna talk to these officers and figure out what exactly is the genesis of this. So what does chief, you know, chief Dr. Frank Tortorello say? If you, the ability to react quickly depends, I would imagine in these kinds of cases on what the policies are, if there's a union involved, the legalities, you know, what are the laws in the state? What are the federal laws that might be involved? So there is, I imagine, a very complex conversation that has to happen about what am I as the chief enabled to do given employment laws, union rules, whatever? What am I allowed to do? So one of the first things that I would do is make sure that what action can I take and on what basis? Is it a legal basis? Is it a policy basis? Is it an ethical basis? I'd find out where I stand in each of those realms. And then I'd make a decision for myself about what I thought I saw. I would check with some of my closest advisors and then I would do whatever action I thought appropriate. Within the bounds of law and ethics. And that's the immediate response. But then the question is, what do we do now? Who do we turn to now? How do we get our hands around this? And because of all those things, all those different facets that you and I have been talking about for the last little while, it is not easy. You almost need a planning department, not a training department. You need a planning department that's populated by people who have not just a training perspective, but an ethical perspective. Because remember, with the Marine example I gave you, that Marine sergeant, the best training is still susceptible to a person saying no. And then we make it more complicated because just above that, good Marine, bad Marine. Yeah. And depending on how you look at it, you could switch it. That's right. Right, depending on how you wanna see it. Yes. Either one of those. Yes. Yeah. And I don't know who's tackling this. I don't know anyone who's tackling this. No one. Anyone that is, no, you're absolutely right. And I think from us, the kind of conversation we're having, we could look at this and just be just sheer impressed that the person had the ability to make this decision under these kinds, because you know what happened. This decision was made in fractions of a second. Yes, that's right. And housed in that small infinitesimal point in time is this person's, you know, how they'll be looked at and how he will, or she will look at themselves for almost eternity. Yep. And if we take that example and we apply that to the situation in Memphis, how long did that attack take place? How long? Minutes. And this Marine demonstrated that in tenths of a second, you can change your mind about what you're doing. So now let's look at what happened in Memphis. Yeah. He had minutes to decide otherwise. And here's a Marine with everything on the line, his life, the lives of his Marines, he's duty bound to protect. Yeah. And the mission in the Marine Corps. And he made that decision. So now where are our expectations for people? And this is where I think, again, my social science, social psychology, psychology, psychiatry has not done us any favors because we're using the wrong model. We keep using this machine model, the idea that there are instincts and that we are essentially emotion machines. Yeah. Because that suddenly detracts from being able to do the kind of fine grained analysis that you and I have just been talking about. Because right away, people, it's easy. Well, you know, emotion hijacked. It was the lizard brain. It was, right? Right, right. And as soon as you start down that road to the brain, to the mind, the hormones, it's over. Frank, this is insightful because you have credence because every policy that has been enacted, every law that has been enacted is to address exactly what you're saying, the brain and the chemical and all that. And we keep asking ourselves, why does it keep happening? Yeah, and if you stay true to that logic, my question is how come the US government is not on a full tilt program of finding chemicals to control people? Right. Right, because we already do that in a lot of ways for people who are, let's say, stressed. Yeah. And a lot of the, let me change that. Many of the Marines who I talk to with example, for example, when I was doing research on stress and PTSD and resilience, one of their chief complaints was either from a spouse or from the Marine, him or herself, was that they are no longer themselves because of the power of these psychotropic chemicals. Yeah. And so yes, you can turn someone semi-robotic with chemicals. And then we watch people use drugs, we watch people use alcohol, and they're doing the same thing. So yes, there is a point to and a relevance to what the brain is doing, what hormones are doing. It can make it harder, those sorts of things, but it can make what you're trying to do harder. So if you're not sleeping, right, you do wanna take something like Ambien, right? Because you do need the energy to think through some of the complex issues that we're talking about, especially if you think you're a bad Marine for not pulling a trigger and saving the life of an elderly man in Iraq. Right, and I wanna make that point for the listener because what you're talking about is complicated. Some people will, they say, but he's saying the brain has no importance, it's the person. I wanna make the distinction. The heart is gonna do what the heart does, but we can still improve the heart's performance, right? I can do things tangentially by a good diet, and I can do things directly by exercising and such. So it's not as if the brain is a non-factor. It's that we're spending too much time giving it all the credit, right? That's your point. The brain is obviously there, right? Without a brain, we aren't without a brain. We're just overdoing it. And you're saying we're completely stepping over the person, which can't, like, where is a personality in the brain, right, when you do the autopsies? Where is this personality? That's right. I could never look at a brain post-mortem and say, oh, this was a optimist. Yes. So if you follow out the logic of the way people, many people now have been trained to talk about how and why people do what they do, and it refers to the brain or it refers to hormones or it refers to the lizard brain or whatever, you know, the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, cortisol, whatever, ghrelin, all these different sort of chemical, biological, physiological explanations of why people did what they did, they're essentially telling you that our lives, everything we do is like we are shaking because of Parkinson's disease. Does that make sense? So when you say, you go to someone and you say, you know what, I really care about you, it really has no moral content because where it's coming from is the brain. The brain is operating you. Yeah. And the brain doesn't know anything about morality. Yeah. The brain doesn't think. Right. Gosh, it's so good, Frank. I love how you constantly challenge me on this. Frank, I'm coming up on the time. And if I want, I really enjoyed the idea, maybe because I'm a conceptual framework person. So I really liked the idea of this leaky character reservoir and how it could get drained and refilled. So if I do want to focus on that and I want to train officers to have more character or if there's supervisors listening and say, hey, look, in these moments, we want to refill this somehow. What are some takeaways that we can do in real time? Short stuff like in roll call and such. Yeah. There is almost infinite opportunities to the extent that you want to make them. Small things that you can do. Walking by and saying, and stopping and saying, how are you? Stopping in your tracks, which oftentimes people will then stop because they think you want to. But that's the point, right? So you're walking down the hall or you're walking to roll call, stop and say, how are you? See what kind of reaction you get from people. They'll be puzzled, right? So you can start disrupting the normal narrative which is important when you think about what you told me about what happens in the locker room. Yeah. Well, you were justified. Why didn't you take that shot? Versus you being the person, you choosing to be the officer who says, it took a heck of a lot to not take that shot. Right. And then what are your after action reports? I don't know. And I'm literally asking that. Do you all get together like the Marines do and talk about how things went or didn't go? As departments, if it's a small department, as units, if it's a particular unit. Is there a- Yeah, I mean, there is, but there's so many levels. And oftentimes the debrief happens, like the official debrief and the outcome of it could happen a year later. Okay. And so any moment you may have had for learning is lost. And so that's something that you could change to keep the character reservoir filled. Okay. Because people may be walking around for a year wondering whether or not they were a good cop. Yeah. And why would you want them to be that stressed? Right. Or maybe there's something they need to come to terms with. Yeah. That would be a way. Another is good leadership, setting the example. And we all know that there are times when you have to say something like, I understand, I get it, but we can't do that right now. But that kind of being as honest as you can about things that are happening structurally helps to remind people that yes, we're all dependent on the decisions of other people, some of which we may agree with, some of which we may not agree with, but that doesn't mean we have to lose faith. Yeah. It's well said. But if you do, find another job. Because you're no good to your fellow officers when you're no good to your department. Yeah. Unless you're gonna fight. Unless you're gonna fight it. Right. It's something that I've had a kind of conversation that I've had numerous times with different people in this day and age about leaders who don't necessarily enact the kinds of values that you would hope and expect and that are respectful. And so there's a lot of people out there wondering why they keep working for an organization where they don't either trust or believe in the leadership or the mission. If that's the case, you only have two choices, it seems to me, from a cultural standpoint. You can either try to keep your head down and endure it, which isn't very good, and usually doesn't work out very well in the longterm, either for you or for your fellow workers, or you can try to change it. Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be a job. I like that it's very clear. You mince no words, sir. And I appreciate that. Okay, I'm gonna follow up with you on this. We're gonna clean this and I'm gonna put it out there, but then you and I have to follow up and maybe write something. And start talking, like you said, this is a space that's not being addressed. And we just, we have to do it. So I'm trying to end season two with three things, three things of gratitude. So thank you, Frank, for wanting to be involved. Thank you for coming on this space and sharing your knowledge. And thank you for making a difference, because you are making a difference. Thanks, I appreciate it, Tom. Absolutely. Pleasure, love having these conversations. So thank you for the chance. Absolutely, sir. We're gonna be in touch. Okay, take care. All right, take care. Bye-bye, you too, bye-bye.