Being Chief Of Police In A Border City

00:04
Brent Hinson
Between the lines with Virtual Academy. We all have a story to tell. Hello, and welcome to another edition of Between The Lines with Virtual Academy podcast going beyond the badge to allow members of law enforcement, public safety and first response a place to tell their stories and talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. How you doing? I’m your co host, Brent Henson, and this episode, I think, has the potential to go in several different directions, because our guest today not only served in law enforcement for 30 years, but he was recognized for his skills and leadership as a recipient of the FBI Leader Trilogy Award in 2021. And from what I’ve read, he was an incredible athlete and respected coach. We’ll go into detail on all that in just a moment, but before we do that, we bring in our host, Mr. Michael Warren.

00:56
Brent Hinson
How are you, sir?

00:57
Michael Warren
I’m doing fantastic today. How are things in Tennessee?

01:02
Brent Hinson
Hot. Always hot here, hot down here. Whenever you come, it’s very warm.

01:07
Michael Warren
Well, I’m going to be coming to Tennessee soon, so if you could do anything to change that, it would be appreciated, because I am not a guy that’s built for hot weather. Just saying.

01:16
Brent Hinson
August is worse, but it just gets progressively bad once June hits.

01:21
Michael Warren
I was told a long time ago that people live in Arizona. There’s a different type of heat.

01:26
Richard Jessup
It’s a dry heat. It’s a dry heat.

01:28
Michael Warren
But you know what? So is an oven. Okay? It still blisters you, especially dudes, where they’re bald headed. You know what I’m saying? I hate putting suntan lotion on the top of my head.

01:39
Brent Hinson
Oh, I never considered that, Mike. You probably do get a little yeah, I got to stay at the sunshine.

01:44
Michael Warren
There is no pain like the pain of a sunburned head as you lay it down on that cold pillow. I cannot describe all the feelings and emotions that it elicits.

01:58
Brent Hinson
No wonder you wear that fancy hat all the time.

02:01
Michael Warren
Oh, that’s right, buddy. Hey, listen, I’m long past trying to impress anybody. I’m just trying to survive. You know what I mean? I got you. So I have to tell you, I’m really excited about our conversation today because I met this guy, man, it’s been a couple of years, at least, and we met at a conference, and it’s one of those things where you keep seeing the same people. I’ve never been described this way. Okay, but have you ever met one of those people that they are always smiling? It’s like they’re always dag on happy and in a good mood. And most of the time, as long as I’ve had my coffee, that puts me in a good mood being around people like this. So when you see our guest today walking up the aisle of one of those conferences, you know you’re going to have a good conference.

02:46
Brent Hinson
That sounds like something you want to.

02:48
Michael Warren
Be around as long as you’ve had the coffee, like I said, and I’ve gone through the pot this morning, but why don’t you go and tell us a little bit about him and let’s begin our conversation with him.

03:00
Brent Hinson
All right, our guest today recently retired as Chief of Police in San Luis, Arizona, which is the largest city with a port of entry located on the Arizona and Mexico border. He started his career in 1982 as a police officer in California and has gone on to work for several other departments, including the Yuma Police Department and the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Outside of law enforcement, he was a three sport athlete in high school, and this, kids, is your fun fact of the day. He worked with NBA players and coaches as one of the best shooting and ball handling instructors in the country. I got to admit, I didn’t see that coming when I was researching them this morning. So much to talk about, so little time. It’s our pleasure to welcome our retired chief, Richard Jessup to the podcast. How are you, sir?

03:50
Richard Jessup
Man, I’m doing great, guys. I’m doing great. I greatly appreciate that. It’s just stuff like that.

03:56
Michael Warren
The way that things started out there, I’m not sure that we can improve upon it. I’m almost wondering if we should end the podcast right now on a positive note.

04:03
Richard Jessup
It only gets better when I die. I know I’m going to heaven. I mean, that’s about as good as it gets. So at that particular point, it’s all good. That’s right. Let’s start off if we could.

04:14
Michael Warren
Let’s talk about sports.

04:16
Richard Jessup
Okay?

04:16
Michael Warren
And I want to talk about sports because I believe there’s a direct correlation to what you’ve done during your law enforcement career and also what you continue to teach about, and it’s the concept of team. What impact did playing sports and playing sports at a high level did that have on your law enforcement career?

04:37
Richard Jessup
Well, there’s so many things that you learn in sports, and I really encourage parents to get their kids involved in multiple sports. Actually, they become better athletes so many times today, as it was back in the when I grew up, everybody played multiple sports back then and developed skills. And today everybody seems to be going to that one sport mentality, and that’s how they get it. They get better and better at that particular sport. But I am totally convinced that when I was in high school, I played all three sports football, basketball, baseball. And I’m convinced that each sport made me better at the other sport because there were just certain things that you learn, certain things that you go through, different types of coaches that you deal with that made your game better. And basketball was always my first love, followed by baseball. I mean, as a five, eight point guard, I am not going to be on a football field running people over.

05:37
Richard Jessup
So I was fine with being Rich Campbell’s backup who had a very successful career in the NFL with the Green Bay Packers, but football made me a better player, and I took that mentality to what happened on the basketball court. And then we had a great coach, Glenn Miller, who was our coach at Santa Street High School. And it was one of the most dominant high schools in the San Jose area. Playing sports and then going into baseball and then obviously going into being a scholar, two sport athlete in college was just the icing on the cake. And then you learned. But all of those were team sports. I didn’t really play individual sports, but it developed the concept that you cannot lead without good people next to you, and you can’t be a great team without people who are willing to give up. In basketball, it’s like as a point guard, my whole goal was get people where they need to be, distribute the ball to the people that were open, and then allow for our team to win simply not just because of the individual skills that we possess, but because of their individual skills.

06:46
Richard Jessup
They may do things a little bit differently or have a little bit more talent in one particular part of the game, whereas I may have talent in another part of the game. And that really sets it off. And in the business world today, and even in the law enforcement world, having different players on your team makes for great success, because not everybody’s thinking the same. Not everybody plays the game the same way, but the outcome can be championship teams one of the greatest. I met a guy by the name of Jonathan Nee Nigel, when I was working with Paul Westfall and Bill Westfall, who were coaching the sons at that particular point. And we had players on the team like Charles Barkley and Oliver Miller and Mark West and AC. Green and Kevin Johnson and Jeff Hornesack and a group of guys, and they were very different, but they played the Chicago Bulls.

07:39
Richard Jessup
And we know what the outcome was the Bulls win the championship. And the interesting thing that I saw from Jonathan Need nagel was he started developing this concept of the brain typing, and he started looking at professional sports and what their brain typing was. And he saw that the same brain type on the floor, or individuals that had the same brain type on the floor began to compete against each other. Think about that in the business world today. And then he saw that those who didn’t have it were better cohesive teams. I e. The Chicago Bulls all had different brain types. Phoenix Suns had some of the same brain types, and therefore, who wins a vast majority of championships with Phil Jackson? And of course, Paul Westwell doesn’t win any. He gets to the finals, but he never gets it, too. And so I carried kind of that mentality of what I had learned from Sports into the law enforcement world as a chief, but also into the business world where I do leadership training to say, you’re not competing against each other.

08:45
Richard Jessup
The final outcome is, how do I use my talents? How do you use your talents and gifts to get where we need to go rather than where I want to go? And that’s really what Sports taught me in my entire career.

08:58
Michael Warren
Well, it’s funny when you talk about team building, oftentimes what makes a successful team is the willingness to relinquish control, to allow, as you talked about, at a point guard, giving the ball to somebody else, giving control of the game to somebody else in order to be successful. And Phil Jackson, in my mind, is one of the smartest, most intelligent coaches that has ever been in the NBA, but he was a very intense guy, and he was a fantastic coach, but he also relinquished control and allowed his players to utilize their strengths to make the team better.

09:37
Richard Jessup
Absolutely. And one of the examples was, obviously during that championship game was Phil Jackson calls a timeout, gets them together, they’re down, and so he draws up a play for, of course, Michael Jordan, and of course, the other team sit there going, okay, we know the ball is going to Michael Jordan. We know that he’s going to score. Well, it’s interesting because when they broke the huddle, the story goes that Michael Jordan came to John Paxton, it might have been either John Paxton or Steve Kerr, maybe, and said, hey, listen, they’re going to double team me. When I start to drive, you just get to a point on the floor where you can hit the outside bucket for three, and it’s exactly the way it got drawn up. Michael Jordan starts to drive. They double team him. He elevates, they both go up. He kicks it out to Kerr, who’s absolutely wide open, who nails the three end of the ball game.

10:31
Brent Hinson
Yeah, he talks about that in that documentary, the Dance, of how appreciative he was of Jordan for doing that.

10:37
Richard Jessup
Oh, yeah. But going back to the point, michael Jordan realized, yeah, I could take this. I may or may not make it, but I’m trusting my teammates so well, and I know what he can do that I’m okay with giving the ball to another player on my team to know that he’s going to be able to successfully complete the hoop. And that’s what teams are all about. You trust those people that you know, and you know what their talents are, you know what their gifts are that you’re unashamed of saying, hey, I don’t have to do this. I can give it to somebody else, and we’re still going to win the game. And I think so many times, especially in today’s society, it’s all about me. It’s all about what I can do. It’s all about where I’m going to get it’s all about where I have control, whereas great championship teams are always about the entire group of players that are involved in it and what those talents are to get us where we need to go to the next level.

11:36
Michael Warren
All right? So I’m going to take it to a different level because my favorite NFL player of all time is Peyton Manning. Omaha. Omaha, right. I love Peyton Manning. And what I love about, and I’m not talking about a particular game, I’m just talking about overall, was how he would audible when the situation called for it. But the thing I liked about it was that his coaches allowed him to do so. They relinquished control of this because, and we talk about it in law enforcement, the reasonableness of use of force must be judged from the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene at the time of the incident. And the coaches are calling a play from the sideline, but the defense isn’t lined up yet. We don’t necessarily know what personnel are in there. And we have to train our people to a level where we can trust them to make the audible.

12:32
Michael Warren
And I think that perhaps that’s one of the things that we lack in many places, not just in law enforcement, but in the business world everywhere, where if we train our people properly, we need to trust them then to make the audible based upon the information they have at the time.

12:48
Richard Jessup
Well, and that requires somebody who understands how to think one, how to recognize that the defense is set up in a certain particular way, that the play that’s been called is not going to work. And then the trust of coaches and other players in that individual leader to make the right call, because sometimes even the audibles don’t work. But at the same time, the ability to trust that player to make that type of audible call is significant because it can result in a game changing play.

13:23
Michael Warren
But think about this, though, because you just said it, sometimes the audibles don’t work. But that doesn’t mean we yanked a quarterback out of the game right there.

13:30
Richard Jessup
Exactly.

13:31
Michael Warren
Because we recognize that nothing and nobody’s going to be successful every single time. And the other part I would point out is that while it also requires that leadership, relinquish control, and train their people appropriately, it also puts an individual responsibility on the player to be prepared for the game, both physically and mentally, so that they can make that call.

13:55
Richard Jessup
Yeah. And as the old saying go, failure is the right to begin again, this time more intelligently. And you learn from even those audibles. Which is what made Peyton Manning so great, was because there may have been ones that didn’t work, and maybe they didn’t win the game because he had audible, but down the road, the championship came. Because now he gained the knowledge and the wisdom of other defenses that he had played against to go. I remember. And that’s what it is, because down the road, Peyton Manning, I mean, had great coaches too.

14:28
Michael Warren
Yes, absolutely, he did. I want to go back to something else you said a while ago talking about playing multiple sports. And the reason I want to bring that up is my son, Connor, he started playing tackle football a couple of years ago. He’s always wanted to. Finally, we let him start doing it. And he went to his coaches and he did very well. He goes, hey, what can I do to be a better football player? And they said, Start wrestling.

14:53
Richard Jessup
Yeah.

14:55
Michael Warren
And it’s interesting to me the difference that it made in his skill level and his confidence as a football player playing something that wasn’t football then. My youngest is a fantastic soccer player, Luki. And Luki, when I told his he started wrestling this past year and I told his coach that were going to start doing that and his coach said, I love it, he said, Wrestlers just walk different. And I bring that up because I’m disturbed in law enforcement how we tend to believe that all of our training and all of our expertise has to come from within the profession and we really need to be looking outward and finding out those things that are applicable in law enforcement. Our version of playing multiple sports is going to make us better in the sport that we play.

15:45
Richard Jessup
Oh, absolutely. And the other thing too, about that is that we get so narrow minded and we’re in a law enforcement profession. We stay there, we’re doing all the things that we can climb up the ladder, when in fact, the outside stimulus that comes in, especially from a teamwork perspective and how to build teams in law enforcement. Man you need those things. You need those relationships. You need that guidance to help you in your profession. Because let’s face it, none of us is as smart as all of us. And too many guys, I think, in the profession, Mike, sit back and they try to better themselves all the time by inward focus of climbing the ladder to doing the things that I got to go from patrol to detectives, then they got to go here, then I got to go there. And they look for those internal mechanisms when in fact, now, because of accountability sake and what’s been happening in the world today, we need to be outside and how we can incorporate the things we’ve learned outside in leadership and teamwork into that environment to make us even better.

16:52
Richard Jessup
Because then we begin to understand what the community does. Because if we’re inward focus and we’re not community focused, that’s who we serve. And yet so many guys focus on me. Me, and here’s how I get up the chain of command. And yet, when it comes to the real practical work that they’ve got to do outside of the department to build those relationships? It makes it very difficult because they don’t understand what the business community or the residential community is actually going through and how they perceive us to do that. So that cuts from the outside. I always look outward to do the things I do and to be engaged with people that were smarter than me from the outside that weren’t in my profession. But what did they have that I could bring into my profession as a chief of police that would not only benefit what we are doing, but benefit what my guys were doing.

17:46
Richard Jessup
It was never about me. Chiefs come and go, and you’re one election away from not having a job, and you have to be prepared for that. But what are the things that you bring into the fold that makes them a better team? When it came for promotions, I always look for the guys that were looking at their education, looking at their leadership skills outside the community, looking at some of the other intangibles that made them. What was their character outside of the department? Those are the things that matter most, because your character will eventually show itself out there, and that can be either good or it can be very bad.

18:28
Michael Warren
I always found that successful. And when I say successful in this context right here, I mean people that could make their players want to play again next year. And what I’m talking about, I always found that successful Little League coaches, whether it be baseball, basketball, football, whatever the case is, successful Little League coaches often made good leaders within the agency. Because if you’ve ever had the pleasure of coaching at that level, it’s a lot like being a frontline supervisor sometimes, the different personalities and all these things. And so when you talk about looking outside those types of activities, they don’t seem, at least at first glance, to have impact on your job, but they do if you develop them properly.

19:22
Richard Jessup
Absolutely. I mean, Monty Williams and Charlie Order are two very good friends of mine that I’ve known for a long time. And obviously we know that they played in the NBA, and it was very disheartening to see what obviously what Monty had done over the last several years in Phoenix to bring them up to a championship level team. And then, of course, because you don’t win it, you get fired and then turn around and go, okay, well, great. Well, I got 28 million. I’ll just take some time off. And yet the Detroit Pistons turn around and go, wait a minute, we have one of the best coaches in the NBA that’s available to us. Let’s make an offer. And money at first turned them down, and yet they said, Wait, no, we need your leadership. And of course, obviously we know he came through the ranks when it came to being a player, being drafted by new York and then going to San Antonio and Orlando.

20:09
Richard Jessup
But yet what people don’t realize is what he did in New Orleans when he drafted Chris Paul and how successful that organization came to get to the playoffs. And then he goes over obviously to Oklahoma City and does a few things there as an assistant coach. And his wife is tragic ingrid is tragically killed. He takes some time off and comes right back to Phoenix and yet builds them to a championship team as well. But it’s the life experiences, not only the playing experience, but the life experiences that not only made him a great coach but made him a great person. And you bring those two things into the fold and now your leadership skills are even better because now you can even relate to your players because you’ve been through some tragedies and you’ve been some life situations that other guys may end up going through.

20:54
Richard Jessup
But, boy, when the chips are down and somebody’s feeling down, I mean, one of the things we face, obviously, in law enforcement is this mental health issue now and the guys. But yet when you have that kind of a character and integrity behind you because of the things that you’ve gone through, and you’ve learned how to turn that into a leadership perspective, now you begin to influence the lives that are around you. And what greater leadership can you give to somebody to say, hey, when I step out of this position, we’re still going to continue down the road being the very best that we possibly can be.

21:29
Michael Warren
Well, Little League coaches, if you have a Little League coach that does their job well, the kids are going to want to come back and play that sport again next year.

21:38
Richard Jessup
Absolutely.

21:39
Michael Warren
And I think that also plays over into law enforcement. Do your people want to keep doing this job? Do they want to keep being in this profession and were they influenced to want to stay in the profession by you as the leader? Because if not, then you’re probably not doing a very good job as a leader.

21:58
Richard Jessup
Yeah. And as the old saying goes, people don’t leave jobs, people leave people.

22:02
Michael Warren
You know what, you can see it in agencies where in my agency were able to bid for shifts. People followed certain leaders.

22:10
Richard Jessup
Absolutely.

22:11
Michael Warren
Even if they went to a less desirable shift because leadership has that big of an impact.

22:16
Richard Jessup
Absolutely.

22:17
Michael Warren
But let’s go back in time a little bit. And I don’t often get to say this, all right, don’t often get to say this, but you started your career in 1982. And people do this to me all the time in class. When I tell them when I started my career, they tell me gleefully what grade they were in. So I’m going to tell you, okay, I was in 7th grade when you became a police officer.

22:39
Brent Hinson
I was five.

22:41
Michael Warren
So just saying that means you got a lot of life experience. Okay, but I want you to reflect back, if you could, when you first got into this career. What has been the biggest change in you personally? It probably has something to do with leadership, but what has been the biggest change from when you started this career to the end of it? Not in the career itself, but in you personally.

23:09
Richard Jessup
Wow. Well, when I started, we rode horses and had six shooters, and they were single shots. Having a car was great because I didn’t have to unmount the horse and go chasing after people to do that. So that was one really big change. You young bucks. I would say the biggest change I had really was in the leadership development area. I mean, when you start off as a beat cop and you start off on the road and you’re ready to go conquer the world, even in 1982, you’re ready to go conquer the world. You want to put all the bad guys in jail. You want to be the very best that you can be, and your whole goal is, how fast can I climb this ladder to do that? And I realized later on that everything that I had gone through at San Diego PD yuma PD DPS san Luis PD.

24:06
Richard Jessup
And yet some of the other experiences that I had faced in being a director of Security at the largest health facilities in Arizona, developing our tactical education and mentoring LLC, and being in ministry, there was really four things that I wanted to be growing up. And I was a pro athlete, which obviously getting to travel the world and play the game and play against some of the greatest players in the world was incredible learning experience. Being a coach and a teacher, being an adjunct professor now at Glendale Community College, and fulfilling that. And, and like my father, who was an educator and a pastor, becoming some type of spiritual leader to the teams that I had as well, because I saw that character and integrity of my father and being like my dad as a pastor, and yet being in law enforcement, those are the four things I wanted to be.

25:01
Richard Jessup
And yet by the age of 25 had accomplished all four of those things. Which one was going to take me down the road further? And it was interesting because my dad always said, be more concerned with your education than with your career, because your education will take you much further than your career.

25:16
Brent Hinson
That’s an interesting thing. I wanted to stop you right there with your father as a pastor, how did that influence you as you went into law enforcement? Because you’re coming up against some people, that there are some troubled people. So how did you use that to your advantage?

25:34
Richard Jessup
Well, I think some of the things, obviously the golden rules to treat people how you want to be treated. And so always dealing. Just because people do bad things don’t mean that they’re necessarily bad people. They made a bad decision. I use that philosophy this way because there was really only one time throughout my entire law enforcement career where I actually had to take somebody down to the ground one time, and I realized that the greatest utility tool I had was not on my belt. It was my ability to speak to people and get them to a position to where they learned that, okay, listen, there’s a consequence to the action and here’s what we’re going to do. And as a result of that, yeah, you’re going to get booked into jail, no question. You’re going to get before the judge. But after that, once you get done, what lessons did you learn?

26:28
Richard Jessup
And are you not going to repeat it? And very many times people would say, yeah, I know, and they would just turn around and put their hands behind their back. And I think part of that is because what I learned as a Christian growing up in my dad’s church, I saw my dad serve the community all of his life. He would give anybody the shirt off his back. And that mentality going into law enforcement, because everybody in law enforcement wants to be the tough guy. They want to be the guy that just takes people down and just is there a time for that? Well, certainly there has to because there’s people that are drunk, people on drugs. There are just people that are just idiots and they get us to that level. But knowing that we had to do that, because I think that there was a scriptural right to do that and at the same time having compassion on people, but doing what romans Chapter 13 talks about that those of us that are in government positions are actually ministers of the gospel.

27:23
Richard Jessup
So how do we treat people? And I always felt that if I treated even the bad guys with some type of dignity that it would be to my advantage. Because if I go in like gangbusters at five, 8165 pounds, dripping wet, I’m going to get my b*** kicked. And I had to talk my way out of it for years now, that’s the way that I did it. I never had to get to the point, did I have to kind of go hands on with some people? Yeah, absolutely. But I never had to take people down other than the one guy who was in Yuma, who was a drunk Marine at six, 4220. And I picked him up and put him on his head, and then I realized, what in the heck are you doing? You’re going to get eaten for lunch. And finally the cavalry came running and it was a great result.

28:10
Richard Jessup
I think he was more stunned that I picked him up and threw him on the ground than anything else. But it was that mentality that I. Learned from my father in church growing up as a Christian, that if I treat people with respect, it will come back to me at some point. And that’s what I did all of my life, even as I worked through being detectives and up the chain of command, treating those people not only inside your department with respect, but outside of your partner with respect, always being able to look in the mirror, knowing that your character and integrity, you’re still intact. Those are the things that I value the most. And I always had my vision statement, my mission statement, my values. I always had those things in my purpose, always had those things at the forefront of no matter where I was at and what I was doing.

28:59
Richard Jessup
And it’s a lifestyle I’ve lived now for 64 years that’s never wavered and never changed to that. It was like it goes back to raise up a child in the ways that he goes, and when he gets older, he doesn’t depart from it, which was something that I saw modeled from my dad every chance I got. But now it’s how I model it to my kids and my grandkids.

29:26
Michael Warren
I got to ask you, though, because this is not just a law enforcement thing. This is a leadership thing. You talk there about treating people with respect, and oftentimes leaders talk about treating our customers or treating those that we serve, treating the community with respect. But where the respect is lacking is internally. And we treat people one way within our organizations and then expect them to handle people differently outside the organization. And I’m a big proponent that I don’t believe that’s realistic expectation. We treat people we reflect the way that we’re treated internally when we handle people externally.

30:09
Richard Jessup
Oh, totally agree. And I think it’s one of the things that I think in the leadership world that’s greatly missing because it was interesting because in the leadership world, we always talk about vision and mission and values and those type of things. But I think the two greatest things that we do is, first of all, once we discover what our purpose is, then we can discover what our vision mission is and the value systems that we live by. What are those buzzwords that we teach in a class of leadership as to, okay, define what are your four values, what are your five values? What are the things that you live by? And I think that as we become better people and I am talking about the person in general, if you can act in a certain way, it defines who what your purpose is. And as you begin to look at that, it defines what your values are.

31:06
Richard Jessup
And those two things are what carry you through what other people believe your character and integrity are, because you model those things to them as a person. I sit back and I try to do you can never live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. And what I mean by that is this I’m on patrol one day, there’s a domestic going on. We get called, the guy drops the girlfriend off on the side of the road and then takes off never to be seen again. And now she’s stuck any place where she has no idea who’s there. She has no money to her name, she has no idea how she’s going to get back to Tucson. And yet as a police officer I roll into the situation and go, okay well sorry hey but there’s nothing I can do.

31:58
Richard Jessup
And yet it’s that little inner voice of your personal character and knowing that you got a badge on and knowing that you can make a difference in this person’s life to say hey listen, you know what? I’m going to take you down. Let’s get you something. We’ll take you to the station. I’m going to have somebody come down and pick you up. They’re going to get you on a Greyhound bus in Yuma and whatever that costs I’m going to pay for and we’re going to get you back home to Tucson. Those are just the little things that exhibit people really care so many times. We just get to that and that’s a personal choice for me. Probably 99% of all police officers would never even think about doing that because they’re like going, hey well I don’t have to take a report. The domestic is over anyway.

32:38
Richard Jessup
I’ll DC to it and be gone with this thing and I’ll never see this girl again. But yet there are certain things in our personal values lifestyles that turn around and go wait a minute, I have the ability and the means to help this person. And again being a scriptural guy you never know when you entertain angel unaware.

32:57
Michael Warren
Absolutely. But here’s the thing. I’m going to disagree with you just a little bit because I think the percentage is actually higher that would do that. With social media. We hear those type stories officers doing those type things more and more often now. And that right there is the whole reason we have this podcast is for people in the first responder world to tell the stories that have impacted them. Because when you tell that story right there, I would be willing to bet that it not only impacted that young lady’s life, it also impacted your life.

33:30
Richard Jessup
It’s true and I agree with you. I mean we do, we see a lot of people doing it. But my comment really is meant to say of the majority of people in law enforcement today, how many of people would actually go doing that? I mean we hear the stories of people all the time because of what social media has come to these days. Of the guy that bites the person a meal or the guy that goes outside and plays basketball with kids on the street and those type of things which we have to do more of. We just need more of our profession.

34:04
Brent Hinson
Doing it and that’s why we want to hear those types of stories. So folks listening go, oh, well, that’s something that I’d never considered. I want to go that extra step now.

34:13
Richard Jessup
Absolutely. And I do. And I hope we’re starting to make some inroads when it comes to that because the one thing, I mean, I lived through the Rodney King era and what we had to face with all of that when it came to the civil rights violations and all those things, too. And of course, all the good cops were like, absolutely, they deserve to get punished for it. You just don’t treat people that way and go from there. And then, of course, what happened up north in Minneapolis that again brings this awareness to where, wait a minute, a good cop who doesn’t do those types of things. And we all agree that we have some bad apples in the profession, but really, 99% of us are really there because we really do care and want to help people and getting those stories out. And again, it’s those stories that give all cops a bad name.

35:08
Richard Jessup
And that’s unfortunate because there are many guys that really are there to serve and do the best that they can do to keep their community safe. And we get those types of stories of things that we get to do not only on duty, but off duty as well absolutely. That help people out and we have the ability to help them. I think the scripture verse that says it this way, too is do not withhold good from those when it’s within your power to do so. And I think that carries over both not only on duty but off duty as well.

35:42
Michael Warren
You talked about mission and purpose and I think the person who said it best that we’ve had on the podcast is Lieutenant Jenkins from Culpepper, Virginia, where she said that she sees Culpepper as her mission field and that’s where she serves because being a missionary is all about service. When we see that. And the thing I appreciate about you, because I consider you a friend, but I also consider you a mentor, because you are a prime example of it is possible to be successful by the metric of getting promoted and treat people correctly. That you’re an example of, hey, you can treat people correctly both internally and still get ahead in this profession. Because I think a lot of people try to be the tough person because they think that’s what’s required of them in order to advance in the field.

36:40
Richard Jessup
Agreed. And I think that first of all, thanks, Michael, for that. I certainly did not know that, but thank you. But it’s who I am and building a successful team. I mean, I know what I walked into when I went to San Luis. And obviously we could spin that off to a political hotbed if we really wanted to with the things that we had to face down there, obviously. But the goal was always the same, was, how do I take this department and make it reputable again? And what you do is you realize that you have to surround yourself with the right people. And not only do you do that, how do you then train those people or get those people focused to what the overall mission is going to be and what we’re going to do? And to see what that team accomplished in six years is nothing short of amazing.

37:40
Richard Jessup
Especially with the reputation that San Luis PD had in the state as being one of the most corrupt departments in the state and going to being one of the most looked at departments as far as what character and integrity meant and making the tough decisions. Because I think part of the mission is you have to make very tough decisions, and sometimes that doesn’t make people happy, but you have to make those right decisions to do that as well. And I think treating people like people again, it’s having those conversations when somebody does something wrong to pull them in. Your office, my door was always open. And the only time that it was closed was if I was in a meeting or meeting with someone, and that was it. And I always had and I kid people because I have a bookshelf of all of the research that I had done on leadership over the years, and I had that bookshelf there, and it has 250 volumes.

38:31
Richard Jessup
I’m not one of those guys that likes to read books online or listen to books. I like to pick up a physical copy underline, mark the heck out of the book, and then go back to revisit some of the thoughts that I wanted to do. Interesting. It pulled you apart. I watched my dad do that, and so here I became that byproduct of what my dad did and sat down and went, wow, okay, I get why his volume takes up my entire room, but in that research part, I would come back to it. But any person in my department knew that they could walk into my office and take whatever leadership book they wanted off my shelf, go read it, and bring it back. And that’s where you get people to the next level, because maybe they haven’t had that, or maybe they haven’t gone to an FBI leader, or maybe haven’t they gone to an LPO, or maybe they haven’t taken those classes.

39:17
Richard Jessup
But what is it that they can do in their personal life when they begin to understand, how do I grow myself to be successful in this business? And I see law enforcement is a business. It is. But it’s also you touched on earlier my whole goal is servant leadership. That’s my whole goal. And again, one of the greatest books I ever read was on servant leadership. What is it? There must be a time where you can bend down and wash somebody’s feet or shine their shoes and turn around and say, okay, listen, I need for you to go do the same thing. Be humble in what you do, but also be respectful in what you do, knowing that you serve a greater purpose because you’re called by Romans 13 into this profession. You’re called there. That’s what your purpose is. And how you accomplish that is 66 books that you look at and go, okay, there’s the greatest leadership book in the world that has 66 books of it, and then turn around, and how do I now get where I go to now, what I’m getting in my educational knowledge?

40:21
Richard Jessup
How do I then go on and exhibit it and do it in the real world with a department or with a business that makes and affects a difference not only for the people that serve with you, but the people that you do serve. And when you got that kind of connection, you’d be amazed at what can happen.

40:38
Brent Hinson
I want to double back with that in mind, how you address the fact since you were a chief on a border town, how do you go and address that type of thing? And like you said, it’s a hot button issue. But what was your mentality going into that sort of thing?

40:56
Richard Jessup
Well, because I left law enforcement in then was involved in a shooting, and Lisa just said, rich, step away. We got kids growing up. Go from there. Now we come back to the little league coaching with my kids. But it was interesting because I really resisted coming back into law enforcement in 2013, really resisted it. A friend of mine was working for Ed, retired from Phoenix PD, took the chief’s position down in San Luis, and he asked me if I would come down and serve as his commander. And I said no. And the reason that I said no is because what San Luis represented at the time, border community corruption. And everybody knew it. And the whole joke was, well, who’s going to be the chief this week? We have been through chief after chief. And so finally I said, okay, I’ll come back, and I’ll come back.

41:51
Richard Jessup
And now imagine a mid 50 year old or early 50 year old coming back to the streets and being a patrol. I get there for one day, they fire the chief. Now, he had brought down a personal friend to be his commander. He takes over his chief. Within eight months, they fire him. I’m thinking, what in the world did I just do? Because now I’m like going, you have got to be kidding me. But after eight months, I turn around on patrol, and they’re like going, rich, we need you in detectives. We need your expertise there, go there, test for it. And I got it. While I was in detectives, went through an interim chief, another chief for three months. They fired him. Another interim chief. They brought in another chief who lasted a year. And I’m sitting at detectives and they fired him. And I’m like going, oh, good grief, I’m not going to be able to do this.

42:46
Richard Jessup
And the mayor came to me and says, rich, we need you. We’ve seen your resume. We’ve seen what you’ve done. We’ve seen the ladder you’ve climbed. You’ve been very successful. We need for you to run this department. And I was like, oh, heck no. Because by that time, I’m like going, wait a minute. I’m going to be here for what, six months to a year and go from there?

43:03
Michael Warren
I know the life expectancy of Lord have mercy.

43:08
Richard Jessup
And yet I turned him down three times. And finally the city manager came to me and says, rich, please. And I said one thing, you have to let me do my job. You have to council has to stay out of it. You have to stay out of it. Let me build this department. Because I knew what I could do. I knew what my strengths were. I knew what my leadership skills were. I knew what my philosophy is. I knew what my game plan to get us there was. And they said, we’ll give you the freedom to do that. And to their credit, they gave me the freedom to do that. So for almost six years, I became the longest standing chief in the history of the department. But what happened and what transitioned was I knew that I had to put some people on internal affairs investigations.

43:54
Richard Jessup
I knew that those people weren’t going to last because the activities they were doing was negligence at best and criminal. And so I began to very systematically weed out the people that needed to do it. And then I began to promote the people that I knew would follow what we wanted to do as a team and who bought into the philosophy of what we wanted to do. But the thing was, I didn’t just say it, I modeled it. And you walk in and you model a lifestyle or you model a leadership lifestyle, just say, here’s how we’re going to do it. This is what we can do to get us where we need to go. Was it some tough trudging to begin with? It absolutely was. And yet we’re talking about a community now that I just finished up three weeks ago with the Attorney General’s office, another ballot harvesting case of which a city council person was involved in and had a vice mayor that was left the scene of an injury accident, who ended up pleading and then resigning.

44:59
Richard Jessup
And now this city council person has pled and will have to resign. Those are the things that begin to happen in my border city, because the amount of corruption that was there was just rampant. But yet the department amidst all of that stuff began to thrive. And so we got obviously with the A League program here in Arizona and to see what began to happen systematically was here’s a chief who’s white in a predominantly Hispanic, 98% Hispanic community, who then not only gets to be the chief and lead a great team, but becomes the 8th department of State to receive accreditation. His entire command staff goes through FBI leader and graduates. His entire command staff goes through Northwestern and graduates. And any one of them could step in that position if I was gone. And then to turn around and find out what we did as community as we began to grow those things.

45:59
Richard Jessup
And then obviously God’s blessings, as far as that’s concerned, is getting on the Acop board for all of Arizona and being the president last year and then retiring and having the governor appoint me to two other commissions at the time. I mean, those are things that never, ever would have happened or dreamed have happened in my city because of the amount of politics. But yet God’s grace got us there. And those all play dividends on what an individual can do even in sometimes the worst of situations and the worst of departments. By the end of the day, when you walk out of there, your character and trigger are still intact and everybody realizes that to do that. And so those are the things that really begin to happen. And obviously because of were the center of illegal immigration, they walk right across the Colorado River into my city and then walk north in the county and come right in.

46:58
Richard Jessup
And yet the amount of drugs and fountainol and drug tunnels and everything else that began to happen and we discovered in my city, you began to go, okay, it’s not a normal world. It’s a very different world than most police departments because they don’t deal with those type of things, whereas we had to do that. But again, during that entire process, by the grace of God, I didn’t waiver in it. And I said, you know what? No, this is the convictions that we have to go by. And I think that decision that you’re going to make will go against what we need as a department and will take us not the direction that we want to go. But my team made very good decisions when it came to some of the things that we accomplished, what needed to accomplish, and now we’re a very reputable department within the state.

47:46
Richard Jessup
And people ask me all the time, rich, how in the world did you do that? Nobody wanted to go down there. I mean, they changed chief like we changed clothes every single day. How did you do that? But again, I think it goes back to what’s been said earlier. I don’t change my character. I don’t change my integrity. I make the decisions based on that. And when you do that, then the rest will take care of itself. If you do it, if you do what’s right, nobody will question you.

48:17
Michael Warren
What chief, though? And that’s kind of how you and I struck up a conversation initially, was you started talking about the unique challenges that your agency faced. And a lot of people in law enforcement have worked undercover, but not many have worked underground. And that’s kind of the stories that you were telling me. Give me an idea about the unique issues that your town faced when it came to you. Talked about tunnels. Give me an example of what you’re talking about there.

48:54
Richard Jessup
Wow. So when I first took over as Chief DEA and the intelligence community really had one idea that there was a tunnel that actually went from the Mexico side right underneath the fence, and came up at a business, and it was being used for human smuggling, and it was being used for drugs. This tunnel was wide enough to literally drive a truck through, turn around and drive back.

49:20
Brent Hinson
I’ve seen something like that on Unsolved Mysteries before. Blew my mind. It was just going right underneath the ground from Mexico to the state.

49:27
Richard Jessup
Oh, yeah. And during my time, there was actually three. But this one in particular was very sophisticated. It had a ventilation system to it to where air was coming in. They had airflow. And so it went from a house that was very close to where our entry point into Mexico is. It was a house that was there that was fenced, and they had literally been digging dirt out of there and got it to where it was, and they surveilled it for about eight months and then finally ended up taking it down. And then they have border Patrol has what’s called a vortex team, and they literally are a tunnel team and a response team that’s highly trained. And so they went in the tunnel, and then they began to backfill it all the way through when this began to happen. And that was the first one.

50:10
Richard Jessup
The second one came up that received really much more national attention than that one was the drug tunnel that was probably 200 yards longer than that one that came up at a KFC. And that one was very simply a drug tunnel. And so we had intelligence HSI had intelligence on that one. Kind of knew maybe who the players were, but needed something. One of my canine units spotted the owner coming out with two very large bins of what may have been tools. Basically saw a traffic violation, pulled the stop, and the amount of cocaine, fentanyl, brown, heroin was massive to the 400 pounds worth of drugs totaling millions of dollars. We ended up taking that one down, and he was actually part of the cartel and then, of course, Border Patrol came in and sealed that one up.

51:16
Brent Hinson
The latest wait, how do they do this without anybody hearing them dig the tunnels? That’s what I can’t reconcile.

51:27
Richard Jessup
I can answer that question by going to the next one. So the third tunnel that we discovered was even longer than that. It actually went from a warehouse in Mexico all the way into the residential areas of San Luis, and it was almost completed and finished coming up at a residence. It was literally a half a mile to three quarters of a mile long. It was 25ft down, had a rail system, ventilation, water, electricity. It had all of that stuff. And these guys had millions and millions of dollars to do this. It’s a drop in the bucket. And this was going to be a major one. I mean, you literally could walk into this tunnel. That one got discovered because they were rebuilding. So when Trump began to rebuild the wall, san Luis has a wall that literally was the prototype. We’ve had it for years.

52:21
Richard Jessup
And so when they decided, what wall are we going to put in and how are we going to do it? That literally became the wall because ours was 25ft high, and it had a site on Mexico and a site on ours, and it became very tough. So there’s only two ways to get drugs and people through. You either scale it or you tunnel it. And so they would do it. But the corruption on the other side san Luis, Rio, Colorado is a half a million people. The cartel’s hands is in everybody’s cookie jar. They’ve got everything from and I’m not going to be politically correct here. They have politicians over there. They have law enforcement over there. They got everybody on their payroll. We all know that stuff. And yet when they’re moving that kind of dirt out, I mean, they’re literally doing it by whirlbarrow and just digging and digging.

53:10
Richard Jessup
And this was fortified on all four sides, literally, to where you can walk it. And the only way they discovered this thing was when they were beginning to resecure and redo our wall to just make it a little bit taller and a little bit deeper because of the two drug tunnels that we had discovered before that a pumper truck began to sink in some of the sand. And they’re like, well, what in the world is going on? They pull it out and they start digging and digging and find that it’s a sinkhole. And one of the walls had collapsed in the tunnel, and it just kind of began to drain the dirt back down into it. And that’s how they discovered it. And then they sent all the cameras down there to do that. And when I left and retired, actually, the scientists from HSI, from around the United States were in that tunnel sending cameras through, trying to find out how sophisticated it really was, because they felt that was so advanced.

54:10
Richard Jessup
That they could use that technology for what they were discovering to find other tunnels all the way along whether or not it being San Luis or whether Nogalis or any of the other points calexico Algodonus or anything else that may have tunnels coming up in different locations as well. It’s a very well oiled machine. The cartel is ten years ahead of us when it comes to those types of things, and they’ve got so many billions of dollars of money that it’s a drop in the bucket for them to go ahead and dig, but a lot of it is hand dug.

54:44
Michael Warren
Okay, but you said one came up into a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

54:49
Richard Jessup
Yeah, it was an abandoned Kentucky Fried Chicken that a guy on our side who was a very high up in the organization of the Senaloa cartel, bought the place, had a very reputable business in the United States, construction and electric, had his own place, cars, the whole bottle of wax. Legally, could work in the United States legally over here doing it. And yet he was a high ranking member of the Sundelow cartel. And so with that KFC shut down, he bought it, and then all they did was and that one was good enough to where it actually went. So the Colorado River flows down, and there’s several different water inlets that come into the city. They were deeper than that water inlet, and they went down deep enough, came underneath that water inlet, and then came up at the KFC. I mean, it’s amazing what you can do with geotagging and drawing lines and stuff like that.

55:42
Richard Jessup
And that’s exactly what they did on that one. But that was very specifically a drug tunnel. And I’m sure before we ended up taking that one down, the amount of drugs that may have crossed in the United States was crazy.

55:56
Michael Warren
Okay, then you said the one was coming over into the residential area. How do you tunnel up into a place that, hey, it’s safe to bring people and drugs through there?

56:05
Richard Jessup
So there was what we think was and again, I’m going to speculate on theory here simply because the tunnel had not gotten done. It had literally gone through a complete vacant field underneath of houses, and then got past a street underneath more houses, and then made a left hand turn, and it was going to go down to the end of the block to one house. And this one house was owned by a very elderly lady that they were going to pay cash and buy her out so that they could go up. And so they got to that particular point, because I think when HSI and everybody began to interview her and again, I don’t have any report on it, but what I had heard was that she had told them, no, I’m not really. Ready to sell right now, but maybe in a year I will be.

56:56
Richard Jessup
So this was all completely set up. I mean, they would have paid her a million dollars for a house that might have been $250,000, but it was at a point to where they could get in, get out very quickly and not be seen to do that. And whether or not that was going to be simply the drug tunnel or whether and it was large enough, you could pull people through that again. But because it was sophisticated, when it had electricity running, you could get lights strung up in there. There’s all kinds of you had water stations, you had ventilation systems and those types of things too. Their cameras weren’t even long enough to even do it. They had to continually drill. And we had to work with the state and BLM to try to get authority to drill a hole down there and send the cameras as far as they could go and then go to that end spot and drill another hole and drop the camera back down there and go again.

57:50
Richard Jessup
That’s how long this thing was.

57:53
Michael Warren
And the reason I bring all that up is because I don’t think that people have a real understanding of the resources available to the drug cartels to try and corrupt police agencies, city governments, county governments. And it’s not excusing the actions. That’s not what I’m trying to do. But it’s much like the residents, no, I’m not ready to sell. But if somebody drops a million dollars in your lap, there’s some incentive to change your mind. And that’s why we need people in the profession with very high values, principled people, so that they can resist that type of temptation.

58:37
Richard Jessup
Absolutely. And especially when it comes the amount of money that the cartel has is just I think it would blow everybody’s mind to figure out how many billions and billions of dollars that these people have, and they’re willing to spend it. Because obviously, as we know, the largest consumer of drugs in the world is the United States. And so there’s a commodity. And now when you start getting into the human trafficking side, that’s residual income year after year because of the way in which that is set, you’re going to pay $10,000 to come across. And when you get there, for the next ten years, you’re going to be working. You’re going to pay us 50% of that. And it’s such a well oiled machine that if people don’t think that there’s cartel on our side running stuff from East Coast to West Coast, from north to south, then they’ve got their head in the sand.

59:33
Richard Jessup
Because there are so many people here, including those in the law enforcement profession, that are part of their network. Sometimes to take those people down can be a little bit more difficult because you’ve got to tie things together. But the thing is, we know it exists. We know that there’s corruption. And now one of the biggest things we face as departments is obviously the recruitment and retention. And we just need good people who understand this profession is never going to go away. But we need the right people in those places now that will make good decisions. And it’s why I think that the leadership part that we’ve done up in administration for so long has to reach the boots on the ground. It has to go to that guy that’s out on the street that every single day he makes right decisions, doesn’t turn to blind eye and then when he’s confronted with some type of temptation out there, can turn away from that.

01:00:30
Michael Warren
And I think that’s another important point right there, is that oftentimes when we’re talking about that kind of money, okay, they’re not necessarily asking officers to do something. They’re just asking them not to do some things. Correct. And a lot of people are able to justify it in their mind. I’m not helping them move drugs, I’m not helping them human trafficking, but they’re not doing their job. And we need people that recognize that’s just as wrong as actively aiding them in their endeavors.

01:01:07
Richard Jessup
Absolutely. And, and it doesn’t matter really what agency you’re from, whether or not because all of the things, everything that comes across the border ends up somewhere in the United States. It doesn’t stay in my city, it doesn’t stay in Yuma, it doesn’t stay in Phoenix. We are just the gateway. And it gets to every single state in the United States. And that’s just the southern border, let alone what’s going on the northern border because we really I’m kind of ignorant as to what’s going on up there. But now you’re starting to see human smuggling going on up on the northern border and then what flows into your ports of entries and stuff like that on the East Coast, West Coast, down in the Gulf areas and stuff like that. People just are like, oh well, it doesn’t affect my yes, it does. And I think it just hit national news.

01:01:57
Richard Jessup
Whereas one of the canine units for Border Patrol was assisting Department of Public Safety with a traffic stop. And what was there? 2 million fentanyl pills. I think that was the count, 2 million. And they estimate that to kill 48 million Americans.

01:02:16
Michael Warren
And that’s something that has changed here recently. It used to be that they would talk about the size of drug bus by the street value of the drugs. Now with fentanyl right, we measure it by how many people the load could kill. And it’s absolutely frightening to me the amount of that drug that is coming into this country.

01:02:42
Richard Jessup
Well, they got it. And obviously we know from the intelligence community, we know where it’s all coming from, obviously China. And again, because it’s such a sophisticated network that the cartel has, because it’s not just when people think of cartels, they think, oh, it’s Mexico. No, it’s not. It is literally worldwide. Things are coming from everywhere in the world to Mexico and then being funneled right up here because they have such a great I use the word great because it’s a system that vast. It is. Okay, we get to uncover what we get. What about the stuff that we never know about?

01:03:22
Michael Warren
And that’s the next question right there, because I don’t want people to be paranoid, but I do need them to be realistic in what their view is. Your people, in conjunction with other agencies, has done some great work when it comes to detecting and combating this narcotics trafficking. But the truth of the matter is, it’s probably just a small percentage of what is actually out there. I mean, chances are, and statistics probably say that there are at least two, if not more tunnels in operation right now in San Luis that we don’t know about. And it’s not restricted to your city either. It’s all along, and each of those things represent a danger to America. And so as we’re wrapping things up here, leadership is the foundation of combating that because it’s leadership that is courageous enough to recognize that there’s a problem. But even more important than that, though, it’s leadership that inspires their people to do the right thing at the right time for the right reasons.

01:04:32
Richard Jessup
Yes, and it’s probably true. I don’t even want to speculate how many other drug tunnels that I don’t even know about when I left, because San Luis is one of the fastest growing communities, not only in Arizona, but also in the United States. I mean, they’re grown at something like 26%, which is crazy. And I’ve got two prisons that we deal with, a private prison for US. Marshals, and also the state prison as far as that’s concerned. And there’s just housing going up everywhere as far as that’s concerned, and close to the border. And tunnels are very easy. It’s sand, so it’s very easy to dig. And I would not be a bit surprised if there were other drug tunnels that were even operating within my city, let alone some of the other places as well. Not only the drugs that we don’t get. I don’t even know if in my wildest dreams if I could even venture a guess as to how many drugs come into this country that go undetected.

01:05:38
Richard Jessup
Here’s one. Quick. So they had a produce, because if anybody knows the Yuma community, especially San Luis community, we are six months of the year. We’re the lettuce capital of the world, literally, or the United States. And so people come here and they work for six months, and then they go over to Salinas over in California. That’s the migrant. And we go above by 18,000. People cross my border every single day. When it came to the workers for fields and those type of things, too, and with that, obviously, things come and go as far as that’s concerned, too. But the produce that’s coming across from Mexico to the United States, because it’s the same fertile ground, and they grow it over there. So they had one where they had all of this produce inside of a semi truck, and the fentanyl drugs was in the middle of the truck in the produce.

01:06:28
Richard Jessup
And yet that’s what’s finding your way to the store, that you go buy your lettuce or you go buy your vegetables or whatever, and if it hasn’t been properly cleaned, washed and everything else, who’s going to die from broccoli?

01:06:42
Michael Warren
You don’t know because Donuts will never do that to you.

01:06:45
Richard Jessup
Exactly, they won’t. I mean, it’s never that sugar thing, but that just puts it in a whole different perspective to say that truck driver got paid a lot of money to bring that across. Unfortunately, the dog hit on it for some reason, they unload it. And here’s all this powdered fentanyl in the mix of your produce that’s going to land at your local store. That’s a scary thought. But the amount of stuff that goes undetected, it’s mind blowing. You come back to it again and now you have all of these places, obviously on the West Coast that are legalizing drugs and doing those things, too, and now providing places for people to actually go use those drugs. I think of it this way. We’ve become so open minded, our brains have fallen out, and how can we in the world because now we’re enabling people to use that.

01:07:46
Richard Jessup
And of course, then you start to look at the statistics. As far as the legal marijuana issues, well, boy, did that exasperate the illegal substance.

01:07:56
Michael Warren
It didn’t do away with it. It didn’t do away with it.

01:07:59
Richard Jessup
So, I mean, here we face that vicious cycle of now there’s more marijuana being grown illegally and sold illegally than legally.

01:08:08
Brent Hinson
Okay?

01:08:09
Michael Warren
It was a boom. It was to that particular economy. But, Chief, as we close things down here, I just want to say how much I appreciate you being here today, but I also want to say how much I appreciate your career. What you’ve done to advance the profession, what you’ve done to advance your people, what you’ve done in the fight against these things that cause harm to the citizens of America. Thank you for doing that. And Brent, I’m telling you, buddy, I could talk days and days about tunnels real quick here. When I was making the transition from young boy to young man, I was a big reader. And one of the first, quote unquote, adult books that I bought was called The Great Escape. And I read that book, and it was all about tunneling. There’s a part I mean, the reason why more prisoners didn’t escape that night was because they misjudged how far they had actually gone.

01:09:13
Michael Warren
And when you think about how accurate these tunnels are, where they can tunnel hundreds of yards, make a left hand turn, and about to be ready to go up into a residence. It just shows the money that’s invested and the sophistication of the people that are doing it.

01:09:27
Brent Hinson
And I got to tell you right now, the Chief is obviously a sought after speaker, and we’re going to put some links in the show notes where folks can find him. And if you want him to come speak at your agency or wherever you’re at, I’m sure he would love to talk to you because he’s got some great stories to convey and some wisdom to pass on to everyone else. So, Chief, thanks for making time for us today. It’s been a lot of fun just talking to you because like Mike said at the beginning, you just put a smile on your face whenever you talk to you. It’s a lot of fun.

01:10:05
Richard Jessup
It is. My client, thank you for just having me. And obviously I’m available whenever you guys want me to come back on and share even more stuff. I can do that. I’ve got senior citizen rights now that I can share decades of information. But no, the old saying is, even though I’m out of law enforcement, I love what I do. I absolutely love it. I can’t think of a better way to go. And I think so many times we in law enforcement, we finish up our careers and then so many guys don’t know what they’re going to do. And if they really began to game plan it out as to not only have a great career in law enforcement and serve their communities and then once they retire, something that they’ve been called to do or something that they love to do afterwards makes it even more rewarding.

01:10:53
Richard Jessup
Because now I get to put everything from being an athlete to a college professor to owning tactical education and mentoring and speaking all over the country and those type of things. I mean, that’s just things I love because now it’s time to give back. Now it’s time to really what kind of wisdom can I give the gangs coming up? And not only just in law enforcement profession, but in any other business or something like that, where people really understand and can look and go, how is it thinking we can be successful? And I do. I smile a lot. People say that, however, they just don’t see me make bad moments.

01:11:31
Brent Hinson
Well, we want to say thank you for sharing your wisdom and giving back to the community and spending some time with us today because it’s been fantastic. I personally enjoyed it.

01:11:41
Richard Jessup
Brett thank you. Anne and Michael, good to see you again, brother. So whatever you guys need, man, let me know anytime.