Between Two Hats

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, a podcast going beyond the badge to allow members of law enforcement, public safety, and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives. Glad to have you guys along once again. I’m your co host, Brent Henson, and in a lot of our episodes, I feel like I’m the outside know, just the guy without law enforcement or military background who know chimes in from time to time. But today’s guest is not only a retired sergeant, but he’s also an accompliced musician, a subject, my friends, that is well within my wheelhouse. I’m looking forward to talking to him about some of that stuff. But before we bring him in, allow me to introduce the lead singer of our band, mr.

00:58
Brent Hinson
Michael Warren.

00:59
Michael Warren
How are you, sir? That’s a stretch of the definition of that word, isn’t it? My goodness gracious. Well, I appreciate it, though. Hey, but you know what, though? As we’re recording this, you and I, we just got to spend some time together in person. And it’s always fun for me. I don’t know if it’s fun for you, but it was fun for me hanging out with you and Aaron and Jimmy in Shelby County. I thought that was a lot of fun.

01:22
Brent Hinson
And I tell you what. If folks listening to this podcast have not gone to a Virtual Academy training where you’re speaking, they’re missing out. Because you have one personality here on the very, you know, laid back and relaxed. But when you’re teaching in front of a class of people, the passion you have about law enforcement and training, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen. You really get into it, and you really get the class engaged. And I would encourage folks to seek out one of those training classes.

01:49
Michael Warren
Well, I appreciate that. And that right there is one of the reasons why I’m so excited about our guest today, because I’ve been blessed to have hear him speak a couple of times. And it’s one of those things where it’s been several years since the last time I heard him speak, but I can still tell you specific things that he said during his presentation that still resonate with me. And that’s how you know you’ve got somebody good.

02:13
Brent Hinson
Yeah. And listen, it’s like you said there. I was running the camera for you the other day, and you made a couple of points that just stuck in my noggin, I’m focusing on trying to make sure I’m getting you in the frame, but I’m also hearing what you’re saying, and you had a couple of points I brought home and told to my son. So I get what you’re saying.

02:30
Michael Warren
Well, I’m hoping that our listeners are going to get some points today because this guy is incredibly sharp. I almost wish were doing a dual podcast between the Lines and Crossing the Streams podcast together, because I think he applies in both. But I’m excited to talk to him. So why don’t you go ahead and tell our listeners something about him, because we’re going to find out a lot more, I believe.

02:52
Brent Hinson
Sure. Our guest today is a retired sergeant of a large police department in Nevada and founder of Critical Incident Review, a consultant agency that helps police officers, their leadership, investigators, as well as civilians, better understand what an officer experiences and how decisions are made during a critical incident. And while this podcast is about law enforcement, as someone who loves music, I may have buried the lead here, because he’s also quite an accomplished drummer. And not just your run of the mill GarageBand drummer kind of a musician like me, who sits in his bedroom and plucks away in a guitar. He is a pro. He’s spent some time on the road as a touring musician. And, oh, by the way, one of the most respected drummers of all time, the late Neil Pirt, hired him to do an instructional drumming video, something I’m sure we’ll get into as we go along in the episode.

03:42
Brent Hinson
It is our pleasure to welcome to the podcast Sergeant Jamie Borden. Thank you so much for taking some time to talk with us this afternoon.

03:49
Jamie Borden
It’s absolutely my honor to be here, gentlemen. Thanks for having me.

03:53
Michael Warren
Now, Jamie, I always tell people that look like me, which I mean look like me, they have a good haircut and they have a beard that I appreciate those and yours is on point. Just say it.

04:06
Jamie Borden
This is my freedom trophy, guys. This is the beard is a thing of freedom for me, many years, and I was always very staunch with my grooming standards for my folks and don’t come in with two days of unshaved beard on your face. As a cop took all of that very seriously. But as soon as I was retired, that was the first thing that went out the window, was grooming standards for me particularly.

04:33
Michael Warren
Absolutely. I always tell people, I said I’ve always wanted to have a mullet, but I was never allowed to. And now I’ve lost the physical ability to grow a mullet, so I’m growing a face mullet.

04:44
Brent Hinson
Wasn’t it Victor lawyer who said that when he went to one of the divisions, he could grow out a beard? Exactly what he did.

04:51
Michael Warren
Oh, yeah. It’s the first thing you start wearing biker T shirts and grow a beard.

04:56
Jamie Borden
Yeah, that was the one thing they made me do when I joined the narcotics unit, was grow facial hair. They’re like, everybody’s going to think you’re a librarian, man. Get some facial hair going. So that was the only time grooming standards went by the wayside, is when I was doing narcotics work.

05:11
Michael Warren
That’s fantastic. Now, Hugh, I want to ask, we have a standard fear of questions that we usually ask to get things going. But with you, I want to take a little bit different approach. Instead of asking you what got you into law enforcement, I kind of want to go along the lines of, like, is it the chicken or the egg? Which one came first for you? What came first, law enforcement or music?

05:35
Jamie Borden
That’s a great question. And I’ll tell you. I’ve been playing rockstar and cops and robber since I was six years old, since I could formulate a memory. And I just had everybody bullshit enough to where I got paid for both of them. So all I ever did was play drums and pretend I was a cop. That was it. My brother’s been a police officer, I think I was eight or ten years old when my brother took his first job as a reserve police officer. I always looked up to my brother as a mentor from the earliest days that I can remember in my life. So he was a very accomplished person, special Forces. He was in the top 2% of the shooters in the world. He’s one of the guys that could throw a bottle up in the sky and shoot it out of the air with a.

06:18
Jamie Borden
45 caliber. Nine times out of ten, he was just a great shot. He taught me everything I know about firearms, and I became passionate about that. So I was always a drummer. I was building little model drum sets at the age of six, seven and eight. I got my first drum set when I was twelve. And the whole time, in the back of my mind, I was always a fan of my brothers and fan of law enforcement. And I was with my brother at all the functions, and there was never a separating line. And the crazy thing is where I’m at now in law enforcement and where my career ended up musically, a national and international basis, both careers fed off of each other. They never canceled the other one out. Everything I did as a musician fed into my profession as a law enforcement officer.

07:05
Jamie Borden
It changed the way I looked at the public. I became a very squared, centralized member of the police department as a cross cut section of the community that I served. Music got me in touch with sides of the community that a law enforcement officer, in most cases, doesn’t have the opportunity to do. It’s a different language, it’s a different lifestyle. There’s a whole bunch of differences in it. But if you look past those differences that are on the surface, the deeper side of it is there’s so many tie ins between music and law enforcement service to the community. The only thing I ever wanted to do in music was please people with my musical creations. The only thing I ever wanted to do in law enforcement was serve my community, help those people around me that I always depended on as a person in the community.

07:55
Jamie Borden
I always wanted to be that pillar that people could lean on, and I’m not sure where that comes from. Which is also why in retirement, I will not stop supporting law enforcement because the people that take this oath that do this job are doing it, not because they’re trying to get rich. And we all know that law enforcement isn’t going to make you rich. You can be comfortable. But we do this and I’m not saying all of us. That’s why I say I protect law enforcement and not cops. We all know that cops are fallible. But the work that I do now, I refuse to stop doing the work for police officers that have taken the oath and served this community, the communities that they live in, the communities and they do it selflessly and they risk their lives. And especially in today’s climate, it’s a very hard place to work.

08:39
Jamie Borden
And my hats go off to every single law enforcement officer that’s doing this job today. And they show up every day and they do it with a smile on their face and they do it in good faith and they make decisions in an impossible environment to make decisions in. And I will always support you as an expert in this field. I will always be here. My wheels are just getting turning. I’m 57 years old and I feel like my wheels are smoking and I’m just starting to get traction. So I’m foundational in it and that’s the answer, brother. There’s never been a dividing line between music and law enforcement. It’s always been one and the same, just different hats. The last record I put out was called Between Two Hats, and that record was produced for law enforcement. All the proceeds from that record go to law enforcement.

09:26
Jamie Borden
Wounded blue. Thin blue line. So everything I do is between two hats, if that makes sense.

09:32
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things where it’s been my experience that people that are passionate about what they do, particularly in law enforcement, and from what I’ve seen in music, I am not a musician, but I’m a hell of a listener. I can tell you that. It’s what drives me. I can change my mood. I can change. But the people who are passionate are the ones who are often the best at it. And that passion very rarely dims. And that’s what got me when I got to listen to you speak about use of force and that type thing. And you can be passionate about both. And I think sometimes in our profession, people think, well, I don’t want law enforcement crossing over into my personal life, but it’s going to it’s just do you want it to cross over in a positive manner or negative manner?

10:21
Jamie Borden
And here’s the thing about that. When you talk about crossover, I didn’t ever set out to be a cop because it was a job that I wanted to do. This is not what we do. It’s what we are, right? It’s who we are. These are identities. Law enforcement is very similar in that respect that people set out to do law enforcement and at the beginning it might be, yeah, it’s a good job, it’s a solid job. There might be directional indicators because there’s some stability there and not so much today. But my point is this is that individuals that take this job, this is who they are. This is why officers that retire and don’t have anything in the works will often perish within a few short years because their identity has come to an end. And that’s something that I implore everybody to think about, is that if you retire, if you’re like me, I don’t idle well.

11:12
Jamie Borden
And I’m telling you, the world would not be a better place if I didn’t have shit to do. So I’ve stayed busy to a fault and engaged in both music and law enforcement. And the point about crossing over is if this is who you are, there is no crossing over. I am a musician. I don’t do music. I am music. I am a rhythm. I am those things just exist in me as an entity. Well, in my experience, guys, law enforcement is very similar and I know some people are listening and they’re not having a great time in this career right now, but you ain’t hanging it up. So don’t tell me that this isn’t who you are and we depend on you to stay who you are in this environment. I would tell you that there are people out there that if you’re making good faith decisions and you’re doing the right thing at the right time for the right reasons, you’re going to have the support you need, and it will be there.

12:07
Jamie Borden
I work with a lot of great people and I’ve worked with a lot of great cops, and I’m teaching all over this country. People ask me, why would you want to work this hard in retirement? Because I’m not retired. I’m repositioned, and that’s where I’m at. So there is no crossover. It’s simply who you are.

12:22
Michael Warren
And I’m going to give a shout out here to Brent and to Aaron, who are part of this podcast. They have their own podcast. It’s called Crossing the Streams and it’s a musical podcast. And they introduce each other to new music. But they said something in an episode I listened to recently. When you’re not the lead singer and perhaps you’re the guitarist, the guitar is what you use. That’s your voice as a member of the band. That’s how you convey emotion and passion and you tell a story with that music. And Cops, I mean, you talked about grooming standards. We talk about the manner in which an officer carries themselves and the way that they look that delivers a message. The folks that are passionate about this, that are law enforcement. You can tell a lot about a person the way they handle calls before they even start handling the call, simply by the way they walk up, by the way their car looks.

13:16
Michael Warren
All that stuff goes to be part of who we are.

13:19
Jamie Borden
Yeah. And I’ll tell you what, I was super staunch on grooming standards, and it’s for this reason. When I put that uniform on, it meant something. And you could see it, you could feel it, and you could hear it. When that presence comes through the door, when somebody has that kind of confidence, and when that representation of what and who you are walks through the door, that is the first step to officer presence. And without it, we’ve bypassed one whole component in the use of force continuum. In terms of training. I depended on, and I depend on it today, guys. I still depend on my presence to keep me out of trouble. I have a look to me, that look, I have a fuck around and find out look to me, you know what I mean? It’s not intimidating, but they’re not quite sure that they want to push those buttons because there’s an air about me, because of my background that says that if you fuck around, you’re going to find out.

14:16
Jamie Borden
And I don’t have to advertise it. And I never had to advertise it as a cop. I never had to overuse that authority. I never had to because I always put the emphasis on that staunch existence, that presence. And that presence is first helpful and then authoritative, right when authority comes first, we got problems. Those are the cops that we end up having issues with. It’s not authority. First we end up with authority. Cops that took this job to get the authority got beat up in high school. This is a very rare occasion. The cops that I knew were good as a field training officer. I knew it because they took the job not to get the authority. They took the job because it’s who they were. They ended up with the authority. And in that particular case, they use it very sparingly. Authority was something I did not want to have to turn to because authority is immediately followed by resistance and sometimes combativeness, and in most cases, at that point, some sort of use of force, which brought me to where I’m at today.

15:17
Jamie Borden
I have a foundational understanding of all of those components that lead to those decisions, including the scientific principles that back them. And I know what has to be done to get to a point to be confident and build competence in our officers. And again, you can see the tie in and all these things. I could talk for 42 days on this subject alone, you know what I mean?

15:38
Brent Hinson
Well, it’s interesting you said that. Not until you said that did I realize that’s my parenting style is that I’m helpful to my child until he doesn’t listen to what I say, then I become authoritarian. But that doesn’t happen that often because he has the respect for me where he knows where that line’s at.

15:56
Jamie Borden
That’s right. Yeah. Authority is going to come, and it’s something that in some cases, it’s helpful. It’s helpful to someone in that scenario. But not everyone helpfulness is just helpfulness. It does help build respect. It helps build a fortress around who you are in that environment. And then you can work from within that fortress with good decisions. And listen, that doesn’t mean that things are going to happen in an optimal environment, right. Where we have time to make great decisions. Sometimes time is constrained. Sometimes we’re making decisions that sting, and sometimes we’re making decisions without all the information. That’s called a critical incident, and that’s where things become problematic.

16:36
Michael Warren
We had Chip Hugh on as a guest a couple months ago, and the whole thing with the Arbinger Institute is seeing people as people, not as objects. You can be helpful to a person, you can’t be helpful to an object. When we’re always dealing with objects, we’re almost completely relying on authority as opposed to the buy in. Listen, I’m all for using force when force is needed, but it can’t be your first go to for every situation. Telling someone to do something can’t be the first go to.

17:09
Jamie Borden
You know what? And I couldn’t agree more. Here’s the problem with it. If somebody is predisposed to fight with police or to resist or to create a problem, you have to be able to identify that, because one of the biggest problems we run into in law enforcement today is a lack of engagement. And it’s because of the scrutiny that’s coming from the outside. Listen, if it’s needed, right? And I hate the term necessary, I hate the term proportional. Those things are undefined. They’re hindsight attributes to everything that we do as cops. And that’s a whole yeah. The officers are in the process of making decisions without all the information and the ability to read a human being for what and who they are. And those attempts to use a lower level of tactical approach, verbally or whatever, I will never use the tactic, the term deescalation along with tactics, deescalation, and I’m going to put this out there for all of our listeners deescalation is not a tactic.

18:05
Jamie Borden
It’s not a tactic. It’s sold as a tactic, but it is not a tactic. It is a goal. It’s a goal for officers to reach through a composite of tactics that may start at anywhere on the continuum. It may start at verbal, it may start with officer presence. It may start at the requirement to use deadly force. And that is incumbent on the behavior and the observations of the officer involved in those critical incidents. So reading a human being a human being in an event with other human beings is so wildly important here’s the thing. As cops, we don’t lose the right to protect ourselves in those environments. We do not lose the right as officers because we have the right to use force. We are expected to use force, and we are trained to use force. And by law, the officers are able to use force for particular things.

18:57
Jamie Borden
In one of these events, we don’t lose the right to self defense just because we’re operating under the color of law. A lot officers will fail to disengage or they’ll dance with somebody trying to get them into a perfect armbar or one of these things. Listen, if somebody doesn’t go into a control hold, when you put them in a control hold, they are a no person, and it isn’t going to work. You’re not going to overpower them. This is just human physics. I don’t care how big you are. If you want to put me in an armbar or a control hold, and I don’t want to go in one, you’re going to get hurt. Now, you might rip my arm out of the socket and beat me to death with it, but you’re going to get hurt before I go into a control hold if I don’t want to.

19:36
Jamie Borden
And officers, I’ve seen very fit big guys struggling with 160 pound assailant. And they fight for minutes until they’re exhausted, until they are forced to then use a higher level of force because they didn’t just engage with what was required to get this person into and again, all these conversations. Have tentacles, so forgive me if I go off on a tangent away from what were talking about, but that’s kind of where we’re at.

20:04
Michael Warren
One of the things that were talking about this week in a training that Brent was there for. And I asked the class, I said, do you think that today in law enforcement today we have a bigger issue with excessive use of force? Or do we have a bigger issue with officers hesitating to use force when justified to do so? And oftentimes that hesitancy, that reluctance causes them to have to use a higher level force when they finally decide to. There is so much going into that reluctance. Unfortunately, it’s to our people’s detriment.

20:37
Jamie Borden
It is. And just think about this. When you get involved in a fight with someone, you begin to burn energy. Right now, you don’t have reserves. By the time you reach 45 seconds into a struggle where you’re attempting to use 100% of your existing energy stores, decreasing your ability to fight at 100% down to below 20 at 45 seconds. By that time, if you’re fighting a subject that might be under the influence of drugs or who isn’t responding to that fatigue like officers always will. The officers are now going to be forced to escalate their use of force to control that person. We don’t have a lot of time. The longer we try to manipulate an individual who is not able to be manipulated, the higher the chance is that we’re going to use an escalated level of force. There’s cases, there’s 20 videos that reflect that today that have come out in the last 48 hours that show that exact scenario.

21:42
Jamie Borden
And it is a failure to engage with 100% of your ability to physically get someone into custody. That leads to, in some cases, a tragic use of deadly force because a suspect gets your taser, a suspect attempts to disarm your partner. At that point, we’re at deadly force. And the question is, could it have been avoided by putting 100% into that at the top, a punch to the face, whatever it took to stop that from getting to the point where deadly force was required. I’m telling you, man, as a cop, I hit a lot of people in the face, and that was my go to. You had a couple of chances. I’m not going to fight with you. I’m going to do everything I can do to get you into custody. And I still in decades I was working in law enforcement. I never struck somebody and didn’t have them thank me for not killing them after the fact, because I never degraded them.

22:34
Jamie Borden
I never used profane language with them. I never made them feel like less than a human being. Because I had to use force doesn’t mean you’re less than a human being, than any other human being. And I was respectful, but I would certainly not hesitate to punch you in the fucking mouth if I had to. And that’s where I was at. I went through my career. I was in IA one time, and that wasn’t for punching somebody. I was in a fight with 110 pound female, and you could have taken a DNA sample off my truck from her face. I had her squished into that truck. She whooped my ass, and she whooped my partner’s ass. This was the craziest thing, and it’s because I wouldn’t use the required level of force to get her into custody because I didn’t want to hurt her. Right?

23:18
Jamie Borden
Well, sorry. If you’re going to fight, and you’re going to have to pay the price anyways. And that’s not to say that I’m not a warmonger. I did not enjoy using force. I was good at it, and I could use force when I needed to, and I depended on that performance aspect of my career. But I’ll tell you, get to work. That’s all I can tell our guys, our listeners, our ladies and gentlemen out there that are doing this job when it goes down, and you’ve made that read, get to work, get that job done, because you’re going to have less to deal with if you do it now than trying to fight through it.

23:50
Michael Warren
Being prepared to use force does not make you more likely to use force. And in fact, it’s been my experience that those that are most ready, most proficient with use of force, tend to use it less often because they’re confident in their abilities and then they can engage. Part of the problem with engagement is that our people aren’t confident in their abilities should things go wrong. It’s like watching a junior high dance. It’s incredibly awkward and nobody really knows what to do until the very end and things go sideways. At least that’s been my experience. Maybe yours has been different.

24:23
Jamie Borden
No, you’re absolutely right. Listen, I fought in martial arts. I was a tournament fighting kung fu, and it was street kung fu, and I learned under one of the descendants of Bruce Lee. I was inducted into the Bruce Lee lineage. I learned how to fight at a very young age, and I fought professionally. I had people inside of my bubble trying to hurt me or score points, however you want to look at it. And I became very accustomed to that. I was good at it. I didn’t fear until this day. I don’t fear any human being because of my experience as a child and growing up. But that reduced the level of force that I’ve ever had to use in my career by I can’t tell you how much. And again, it’s that fafo factor where they read that in you. They’re not going to push those buttons unless they’re suicidal homicidal, where we aren’t going to affect any of their decisions.

25:17
Jamie Borden
At that point, they simply want to kill or die, and we can’t control that. But I will tell you that the people that I know, chad Lyman, Jay Wadsworth, all these guys that teach defensive tactics, they teach people defensive tactics so they don’t have to use them. That’s the key to this whole thing is the more confident you are with this, the less you’re ever going to have to do. Those guys, the guys that learn under those extreme teaching and learning conditions from Jay Wadsworth and Chad Lyman and all these greats out there in jujitsu and ground fighting and defensive tactics, they learn under those guys and they put in hours. They are invested. And I will guarantee you, a use of force with those guys will last under 10 seconds. When they do use force, it’s quick, it’s painless, and it’s effective, and they don’t have questions about it.

26:05
Michael Warren
There is less likelihood of injury to every party involved, including the person that we’re trying to arrest. When we do it like that, it’s that long, drawn out one, because I’m not real sure what to do, and I’m not real proficient in what I’m supposed to be doing. That’s when people tend to get hurt.

26:22
Jamie Borden
It’s longer is never better. When we’re in these conditions, the longer that fight goes on, and it’s a game of chance to begin with because we don’t know the skill set of the other person. And the longer that goes on, the. Higher the propensity there is for bad shit to happen. Get it done quick. And that’s what in this action versus reaction component of my teachings. I really try to drive home the fact that, listen, we got very little bit of time to make those decisions. So be invested, be ready to rock and roll and make that stuff happen quickly. It’s going to be safer for you. It’s going to be safer for everyone. And whether it ends up in a lawsuit or not, or whether you end up in some sort of internal investigation, it’s much easier to explain a shorter event than it is a longer event, because that’s when Why comes up.

27:09
Jamie Borden
We start to counterfactually reason through these incidents, and it ends up being problematic not only for the officer and the suspect, but in the long haul all the way out to civil litigation.

27:19
Michael Warren
Absolutely. Now, I want to shift gears here for a second because we’ve been talking about use of force for a little bit, but one of my favorite stories from your career had nothing whatsoever to do with use of force. And you would think, listening to you talk over the past ten minutes, that there are many people in society who think, well, this guy right here, he’s out looking for a fight. He’s looking for someone just to square up with him. He’s challenging people. He’s the guy that takes his badge off and lays his hat on the ground. Ain’t nobody wearing a uniform here. But that’s not the case because I remember you talking about a call that you went on that was a disturbance, some type of loud party or loud music. What can you tell our listeners about that call?

28:04
Jamie Borden
Yeah, so there was a couple of those that happened. My music career, being active as a drummer in groups around the country and taking this job, I would listen for those disturbing the peace calls where a neighbor would call in about the loud band next door, blah, blah. And there was a neighborhood where the police were very unpopular. It was a load of middle class, middle income neighborhood. Every time the police would drive through, the kids would flip us off and throw rocks at us and run and hide, and it just became kind of the norm. I took the opportunity to go to a disturbing the peace call where a neighbor had called in a loud metal band playing next door. I show up, the garage door is open, and I see the drums. I jumped the call. They’d given it to another officer. I jumped the call.

28:51
Jamie Borden
I took the call. I went over and had been looking for an opportunity to get involved with the kids in this neighborhood in some form or fashion to let them know that cops are people too. Anyways, I show up the call, I come in, and they’re like, oh, we know, blah, blah. The cops are I said, no, hold on a minute. I said just hold tight. I said, do me a favor. Drop that garage down. And I had called into dispatch. This was not an officer safety issue. I knew who the kids were. I said drop that garage. Let’s see if we can figure this out. So we drop the garage. I asked the kid, I said, hey, do you mind if I sit behind your drums? He’s, like, looking at everybody, yeah, go ahead if you want. So I sit down and I pick up the sticks, and I just start just ripping going through this whole thing.

29:31
Jamie Borden
And he’s freaking out because I’m in full regalia. And his dad comes flying out the door. I told you to shut up. And he sees the cop sitting behind the drums. So I said hold on. So I stopped, and the guy, he’s looking at me, and he’s looking at my name badge, and he sees Jamie Borden on it. And you could see the color almost leave his face. And he runs over to where he’s got this TV and a DVR, grabs all these CDs and instructional videos. He’s like, is this Jamie Borden, the drummer? I said, Yep, that’s and this kid his life. I could see his life change in that moment. And the dad is sitting there. The dad, he’s lost in space at this point. And I start to talking to him, and I said, listen, I’d rather have you guys in here doing what you love.

30:20
Jamie Borden
And I said, I’ve listened to you play. I’ve parked out here, and I’ve listened to you. And you’ve got talent. And I’d love to see you be able to process and continue to cultivate this talent. Let me talk to your neighbors, and let’s get this place soundproofed. And I asked the dad, I said, what’s your budget? He said, X amount of dollars. And like I said, they were kind of low to middle income. I ended up investing a couple of bought some of the soundproofing and things of that nature, and then came over and helped get this place soundproofed up. And then talked to the neighbors. And I said, hey, listen, these are the kids that are doing the right thing. They’re playing music. And you may not understand the music, but they’re doing what they love to do. It’s art. It’s not villainous. These are good kids.

31:03
Jamie Borden
Just give them the chance, and let’s set some parameters. And we ended up changing a we changed the perspective of police officers. I’m telling you, when we would drive through that neighborhood and it happened with all of the cops in that neighborhood, they were getting thumbs up and high fives. And all of a sudden, cops are now people. Because here’s a cop that was a drummer that helped them follow what they believed was their dream at the time. And one of them actually became a very famous musician. He’s a snare drummer and became very popular in what he was doing. And they were committed and dedicated. But the whole point of that thing was we took the opportunity as a department to get involved in the community. That one incident that lasted over the course of a month or two changed the view of what police officers were just simply because of a talent that I had that I allowed to cross over like we talked about.

31:58
Jamie Borden
I allowed that human being that I was outside of the uniform, be part of these kids life. And I got texts and phone calls from this kid for years after that. And this has been christ, this has probably been 20 years ago now, 1518 years ago, but a very interesting story and probably one of the most prolific times as a police officer that I can point back to about my career in music and how it touched people’s lives as a police officer.

32:28
Brent Hinson
Now, do you think that’s the exception, not the rule? Because I think the key is you want to humanize law enforcement. I think we all agree on that. I think we would get much better results. But do officers have the time to do that sort of thing, or should they just make the time? Or how can we resolve this?

32:46
Jamie Borden
This would be my advice. And I see this I’m going to tell you this right now. Every cop out there makes time to do this. If you followed a police officer around for 10 hours with a camera, you would see more interaction with the public that is absolutely lacking the fantastic or the sensational aspect of police work. I used to carry around a 24 pack of water. I live in Henderson. It’s 118 degrees at night. You know what I mean? We had homeless people that were dying of thirst on the road. I would carry around a twelve pack or a 24 pack of water, and I would see some of the homeless people that were regulars and I would stop and make sure they all had water. I would just check on them. I wasn’t alone. Everybody was. All the cops were doing that. We’re human beings.

33:30
Jamie Borden
The problem is this, guys, is that the only thing that people see is what becomes magnified by the media. And it’s never the humanity side of it. I told you guys the story of me interacting with these youth. Because you ask me, that’s not the normal story that gets told and use of force or any of these other things. It was just me being a drummer and a cop, right? And using that opportunity to get in front of a neighborhood and change their view of who were because were there. We would help those people no matter what. Come hell or high fire, we’d be there to help that neighborhood. And I just wanted them to know that we’re human beings just like they are. And with dreams and goals and desires, and we’re not mechanical robots running around out there looking for the opportunity to impose authority.

34:15
Jamie Borden
It was a big deal for that neighborhood. So my recognition of what police officers do out there is not shy of amazing our cops out there from day to day in the 40 million plus contacts we have across this country in any given window of time. Most of it is humanity based. There’s very few of these incidents that even end up in a nominal use of force. It doesn’t even land on the spectrum, right? It doesn’t even land. But you ask a college student how often police officers use force. One in two contacts. How often do they shoot somebody? Every fourth customer. That’s what they believe in our colleges. And that’s the media sensationalizing what it is that police officers are believed to do. And that’s not what we do. It’s not what any of that, you didn’t do that. I didn’t do that. Nobody does it.

35:07
Jamie Borden
But that’s all they see in the media. And with social media being so strong these days, that’s the only window they see law enforcement through. So I would just say, don’t change what you’re doing. Do more of it. Seize every opportunity to be a human being and show people who you are. Do not let your guard down and be safe when you do it right. It’s not worth the dangers that lurk out there. They’re very rare, but they’re there. It’s called the lottery fallacy. We all hold the ticket. If we have a badge and the authority, we hold a lottery ticket to a tragic event, and we have to be aware of that. We always have that ticket in our pocket. Make sure that you’re aware of it and be a human being. That’s all I can say.

35:47
Brent Hinson
We had Officer Dion Joseph on about a year ago, and he said something similar to what you’re saying. He said, you know what people talk about because he worked on skid row. And he said, people pundits. They talk about what happens on skid row. He said, I walk the streets of skid row. I interact with these folks. He said, I’m there. They see me. They know me. They know me as Officer Joseph or Dion in that respect. So you’re onto something where people who are not involved in the situation commenting on it when they have no sense of what’s actually going on.

36:18
Jamie Borden
Absolutely, yeah. And it’s a complete fallacy. The cops that are out there on the street dealing with it are looking at this media, the stream of media just going, what is going on?

36:29
Michael Warren
I want to ask you a couple yes or no questions real quick, because I want to follow it up. Sure. So would it be safe to say that you’re somewhat of an accomplished martial artist?

36:38
Jamie Borden
Yes.

36:38
Michael Warren
Okay. Would it also be safe to say that you are a pretty dag on good shot with your firearm?

36:44
Jamie Borden
Yes.

36:45
Michael Warren
Okay, and so you’re pretty proficient in the discipline of using force.

36:50
Jamie Borden
Yes.

36:51
Michael Warren
Okay. Then why didn’t it enter your mind when you had them drop the garage door to start whooping ass? Why wasn’t that the response? Because the thing is, it goes back to what I’m trying to show is just because you’re prepared to defend yourself and others doesn’t mean that you’re going to do it improperly. And I can imagine especially in society today, if you go up to some kids and you tell them, hey, go shut the garage door for a second, they’re going to go to this thing, he’s going to use that guitar against us. He’s going to beat us like an amp. You know what I mean?

37:26
Jamie Borden
Yeah. And here’s the thing, man, listen, and it comes back to this again. There’s a difference between being nice and being kind. Person who is kind is not necessarily a nice person. I am not known as a nice person. I’m known as a kind person. But if I’m pushed to a certain limit, just like with you or anyone else who’s competent in what they do, who will protect their families, who will protect what’s important to them, we’re going to do things that a lot of people won’t endeavor to do only because I know where the line is at. I know the line between what’s potentially going to happen and what is going to happen if I don’t intervene in it. And I’m not going to pull any punches and I’m not going to apologize for being a person that will use force if I have to.

38:10
Jamie Borden
If I’m pushed to that point, bring it. And you better bring everything you’ve got because you’ve opened a pack of dynamite that is going to be hard to put out. I rest my laurels on that. I’ve never had to be that guy. Even when I used force as a police officer, it was very calculated and it was very intentional and it was never this frayed fight for my life. It was always very calculated thing and it was quick and it was effective and I didn’t have to get heated about it. I just did what I had to do. So yeah, that never entered my mind. Right, right.

38:43
Michael Warren
I like using the phrase that when somebody is prepared properly, both physically, mentally, psychologically, what we get are responses. And responses are appropriate. They’re measured, they’re reasonable. What we see sometimes are reactions and a lot of times overreactions because they’re not prepared. And panic sits in and the amygdala takes over and it starts doing things because it’s just concerned about safety. I guess my whole point here is preparation reduces the risk for everybody.

39:17
Jamie Borden
It does. I’ll piggyback on what you’re saying because remember that officers get approximately two to 4 hours a year of defensive tactics training. That’s not even enough time to memorize the terminology that you’re using in the tactics that you’re being trained amen. It’s not enough. And I’m a huge proponent of conditioning. We can teach someone remember that exposure to knowledge is not experience, it’s not application, it’s simply exposure to knowledge. Exposure to knowledge is where we run into trouble because we’ve seen it, we think that we’re good at it. It’s called the illusion of ability. Most people have an illusion of ability. We don’t know. Even those of us that are trained and conditioned and prepared, we still don’t know what we’re going to do or how we’re going to handle something until it happens. We don’t know. And then we’re going to sit and second guess ourselves based on the outcome of that.

40:15
Jamie Borden
Right, even if we are trained and conditioned. So now bring in the problematic aspect of not being trained and conditioned and only having been exposed to the knowledge where you haven’t applied it. You haven’t succeeded and you haven’t failed. So you have nothing to build wisdom upon. You have nothing to build a conditioned response upon. And listen, we are taxed as law enforcement. There’s not a lot of time available for training, especially in the hiring condition that we’re in now. The people that are working their asses off and they don’t have a lot of time for training because most departments are at 25% to 35% below manning in a good situation.

40:56
Michael Warren
Right.

40:56
Jamie Borden
So where are they going to get the time for the training to even take effect? So, confidence is built through that conditioning. Competence is developed through that confidence. And it comes through not just training, but experience and application. That’s the only thing that turns this into a usable resource for officers. The more you invest, the more prepared you’re going to be, the more competence you’re going to show and the less you’re going to be involved in things that could potentially be tragic. And I think that kind of ties everything that we’ve been talking about together.

41:34
Michael Warren
Absolutely. So let’s switch to music for a second, okay?

41:37
Jamie Borden
Sure.

41:37
Michael Warren
What were the videos that the dad saw?

41:41
Jamie Borden
Well, so the years just before I became a police officer, I recorded two instructional well, I recorded one, it was called Advanced Drum Groups for the beginning Drummer and it was wildly successful. It was done through Starlicks. That came out because it was a 30 minutes VHS. Now remember I’m dating myself that’s when I used to ride a horse to work. It was a VHS tape, but it sold just a ton of copies because it was inexpensive and it was very easy to understand. I then got picked up by a company to do a video, a DVD, my first DVD called Stepping it up. And that came out. So they had the VHS, they had the DVD and they had another double bass drumming VHS that had turned DVD that they were looking at. So they had everything, every recorded work that I’d ever done as far as an instructor went.

42:39
Jamie Borden
And it was the kid that saw my name that had all these DVDs that went fumbling over to his TV and grabbed it all and was looking at my name and my picture and looking at me and trying to reconcile the guy in the uniform behind his drums to this guy on these DVDs. So quite profound, that moment. I’ll never, ever forget it. So, yeah, those DVDs had been out, and they’d done well. It was shortly after I became a police officer. I was performing with the guitar player from Aerosmith and the violinist from Kansas with a group headlining at the Bellagio in Vegas and Neil Peart and Budy Rich’s daughter Kathy rich, who was my manager at the time, came in to see my band play and he became a you know, asked me to come out and sit with them. And you can imagine me as a drummer.

43:27
Brent Hinson
How does that feel?

43:28
Jamie Borden
I mean, I’m going to tell you something, dude. I’ve been in a lot of incidents, and I’d never been so nervous in all my life. I couldn’t muster up a sentence. And I’m trying to not be all this goobly goop because I’d hung my hat on everything that Neil had ever said or done. I was a fan of his work, and what broke the ice with him is I came out and he goes he’s standing in front of me and he’s a looming figure. He’s like, six five. He’s just a big dude. And he goes, Hi, I’m Neil. And I’m like, inside? I’m going. Yeah. No. And I said, Hi, Neil. My name’s Jamie. I said, I’m a huge fan of your work. I really appreciate everything you’ve done. And at that moment, because I didn’t go loose goose on him like I wanted to, because this is my childhood hero, we became fast, you know, we both rode motorcycles.

44:21
Jamie Borden
Yeah.

44:21
Brent Hinson
I watched a video about Rush, and it’s almost like drumming was a passion of his, but he had so many other outside things he was interested in.

44:29
Jamie Borden
Neil was a complex guy, and he was a sweetheart of a man. One of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He would sit in this podcast with us, and you would never know who he was. He would have plenty of input. He was passionate about a lot of things, and he was very pro cop, and people didn’t know that about him. But he dealt with the worst and the best of the best because he rode that motorcycle across country, and he never did it below 95 miles an hour. He got to meet his share of police officers, but when he was a big fan of the fact that I was a cop, he would, in his bus would drive to Vegas. He would meet me at our outdoor range on his motorcycle on his way in to play in Vegas. His bus driver with the trailer would park.

45:17
Jamie Borden
He had stacks of ammo. My wife was one of his firearms instructors. I taught, know everything I knew about shooting. And we would shoot for 3 hours at the range. And then we’d jump on his bus and he’d take us into Vegas to the MGM Grand. And we’d sit on his bus while he planned his next leg. We’d have dinner with the group and then we’d go out and sit side stage. I’m sitting side stage, and Stuart Copeland’s on my right. The bass player from Primus is on my left. And I’m just sitting here going, what.

45:44
Brent Hinson
The where am I?

45:46
Jamie Borden
Where am I? And why am I covered in ants? But yeah, it was a phenomenal experience to get to be a peer with someone like that who was a mentor to me on so many different levels. And my 50th birthday, I am endorsed by Sabian Symbols and DW drums and Vic Firth sticks, all the same endorsement companies that Neil has. And so the symbol guy is a very close friend of mine, a brother, if you will, Chris Stanky, who is also Neil’s symbol guy from Sabian. On my 50th birthday, they brought out his set of the Clockwork Angels symbols that have all the imprint on them. It’s one of two sets that exist. I got one of those off of his road kit from him, off of his last show, from his last tour. And somebody asked me, well, what are those symbols worth? I said, they aren’t worth a dime.

46:45
Jamie Borden
They’re not worth a dime. They will never be sold. They have no price tag. You could not print enough money to get those symbols from me. So you know what I mean? But it’s just one of those things in life that it marks a time in my life and a friendship that was so valuable to me and very few people ever knew I was a friend of his that didn’t find out through him. And one of the things he really appreciated, I think, was the fact that I didn’t advertise our friendship. He was a friend of mine, and he’d come through Vegas and stop and see me. We’d hang out as much as we could. I’d go out to his man cave out in the Pacific Palisades and hang out around his huge car collection and we’d look at guns. I had him an M four built with R 40 engraved in the magazine carry.

47:32
Jamie Borden
In fact, he left that back to me in his will and I have to still pick it up in California. Kind of heartbreaking. But yeah, he had that forever. And it was up on his wall, right underneath his motorcycle that he rode when he wrote Ghost Rider. And I have pictures of all that. But anyways, I have to go pick that rifle up again. But he was just a fantastic person. What person gets to have that story in their life? I’m so fortunate and just I couldn’t put enough emphasis on what that relationship meant to me, my career in both police work and music and just yeah, just I’m a very lucky, profoundly gratuitous person in that respect.

48:14
Brent Hinson
I have to ask you a quick question. I read an interview in prepping for this episode where, of course, you started out in law enforcement. You left and became a touring musician, and then you said something that I haven’t heard too many people say, that it applies to my life, where you would dream about being a cop while you were out as a touring musician. And I remember I used to be in radio, and I left radio, and I would dream about sitting behind the console, and it wasn’t until I went back into radio that those dreams stopped. And it’s almost like I had finality that I’ve come full circle and I made my peace with yeah.

48:52
Jamie Borden
So and that’s a really important thing. When I came back off the road because I took a hiatus from police work when I went out on the road with the guys from Aerosmith and Kansas and when I came playing, we had the headline spot with MGM Grand and I would know three and a half, 4 hours a night. And I would have all this time during the day. Well, I’d wake up in the morning thinking I had to be at work at the police department. And I’d wake up and I would have that same excited feeling that I would have every day. I never regretted 1 minute of that job before I went on hiatus. And I’d wake up and I’d like, I don’t have to go to work. And it was a letdown I had all this time because now I’m off the road and I’m in Vegas.

49:33
Jamie Borden
And I thought it was at that moment that I would wake up thinking I was late for work and then be bummed that I didn’t have to go to work. I called the chief of police at the time, and the assistant chief, and I said her name was Yuta Chambers. She was my lieutenant when I was in Narcs. When I left, she was very disappointed that I left. We had a very good relationship, and I had done a lot for the department in a couple of different areas with policy and things like that. I called her and she says, Holy mackerel, I’m glad to hear from you and what’s going on. What can I do for you? And I said, well, it’s funny you ask. I want to come back. And she said, Put yourself in the next academy. It starts in four weeks. You’re going to have to pay for yourself, but we’ll hire you.

50:14
Jamie Borden
We just have a hiring freeze going on. So I got the money together. I put myself through that academy, which was a bummer. That was the second academy I went through. It sucked. I went through it. And sure enough, just like she said, they hired me about my fifth month in the academy and then paid for all of the previous academy, so they paid me back all the money, and so it was no, they really held to their word. And I’m telling you, man, to live both worlds, to be able to go to work at night, and I still continued to play every night and work every day. I did that for ten years, and I wouldn’t change anything in the world today. I’ll tell you, I’m stingy with my sleep now, I can tell you that. Then I was getting by on three, two, three, 4 hours a night.

50:59
Brent Hinson
It’s like something in your brain that says something’s unresolved. It’s like it’s reminding you.

51:05
Jamie Borden
It’s called a calling. Nobody dreams about going to work, brother. You dream about that thing that you are that you’re not fulfilling, right? Fulfillment and gratification are things that manifest in terms of what we wake up thinking about that we perceive as a dream. It was always my dream to be a cop. It was always my dream to be a successful musician. I’ve got both of those things on every level that I can imagine, and not to the extent that some people do, but I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything in the world. And my life has manifested itself into exactly what it needed to be to gratify my brain. And that’s what’s called a dream, brother. And be careful what you wish for. People say, oh, I want to do what you do. No, you don’t, motherfucker. I’m telling you right now, you put these shoes on for 24 hours, you’re going to question your sanity.

52:01
Jamie Borden
I know that, and I don’t hold anyone else to this standard but me. Yeah, it’s a be careful what you wish for kind of scenario.

52:08
Michael Warren
For sure, you were already accomplished, but how much of an impact did it make on you being able to associate with somebody who was so passionate about what they did and was so good at what they did and allowed you to be good at it too? That had to impact you significantly, your time with your buddy there.

52:29
Jamie Borden
Well, so imagine this, and you’ve all heard the saying, if you want to be good at something, surround yourself with people that are better than you, and that will always push you to strive to meet a status quo so that you can exist within this group of people. I have never been in competition with anyone in my life. I’ve always only wanted to better than I was the day before on the next day, and that has served me so well because I never focused on how good someone else was. I learned from them, and I was inspired by them on every occasion, but I never looked at it and was envious or competitive. I always just thought man, I’d. Love to be able to do that. And I would sit down and I would practice for hours. And I didn’t meet Neil because were just in the same room at the same time.

53:18
Jamie Borden
We attracted each other in some form or fashion. And when I say know, I was lucky enough to have him walk in the room when I was doing what I was already so passionate about, it just drove me so hard to continue to be respectable in that field. Because this guy hired me to do the drumming in the style of Neil Peart DVD. He hired me to represent him in a professional production, to teach people how to do what he did. Imagine the magnitude of pressure that’s on a 33 year old guy doing that’s been and of course, as soon as he asked, I didn’t even consider I said, yes, I’ll do it. And then the stomach issues set in, right? Because I imagine the magnitude of what I’d just committed to. But it was just like anything else. That’s the performance guys, that’s me going out on the road for the first time in FTO, not having a full understanding of what it is that I’d gotten into.

54:21
Jamie Borden
And I remember to this day what it was like turning into a cop. I remember feeling where I was at on what street when it dawned on me, man, I think I get this shit. And my decisions were my own and I was comfortable with them. And people started coming to me for help in decision making and I became an FTO and that was my performance metric, right? When that day hit, I always told my trainees, you’re going to feel it and you’re going to know it. Until then, you lean on me or you lean on the people that know more than you and accept the fact that you don’t know everything. And even when you feel comfortable, understand you’re going to need help. And I just went through my career like that. And it’s just surrounding yourself with people that push you.

55:11
Brent Hinson
I think that is fantastic advice because that applies in every job, I think. Because you go along and you’re like, I don’t know if I’m doing this correctly. And to have someone like you, say lean on others until you’re at the point where you feel like you don’t need to lean on them anymore and you’ve got it down.

55:28
Jamie Borden
Yeah, but understand the fact that there’s going to come a day where you’re going to be hit with something that you don’t get, you haven’t faced before and you’re going to have to seek out that help.

55:36
Brent Hinson
Right.

55:37
Jamie Borden
Don’t let your ego drive that. Let your desire and your need to better drive that and you’re going to go to people for help and that’s what makes you better. I still do that today. I’m foundational in my beliefs and my understanding of police work. I still to this day call my partner, my confidant, Danny King, who has been a brother and friend and colleague for many years. I still don’t trust my own decisions in a lot of things. I still look for that support. I look for that validation in certain things because if we don’t question ourselves, we aren’t getting better.

56:06
Michael Warren
That’s kind of what I was getting at right there for our law enforcement folks out there that are trainers. That’s the view that you have to take that investment that you do in somebody else so that down the road they can invest in others themselves so that this thing doesn’t end, it doesn’t go away. We don’t lose that. I think it’s even more important now and I think that you probably see that in the work that you do now. So what can you tell us about critical incident review? Because you made the transition. What’s that all about?

56:36
Jamie Borden
So with Force Science, like everything else in my life, I was committed to that entity, to learning everything I could. I became the first advanced specialist, which is their highest certification. I was the first one that went through that with Dr. Lewinsky. So it was me and him face to face for 600 plus hours. And I can’t even tell you the learning curve on that was straight up and down for a long time. And I’m still on a very steep learning curve even today. I’m an intense reader. I read all the time. I study and research all the time. I’ve always got new cases with new problems and new issues that I support with reading. When I say research, I mean me researching research. With Force Science, as soon as I got that advanced specialist certification, dr. Lewinsky called and said, hey, are you interested in teaching for us?

57:32
Jamie Borden
That’s the equivalent of Neil asking me if I want to do a video for him. That’s the equivalent. And Dr. Lewinsky, Bill and me have been close friends ever since I went through the very first class. And the way that whole thing happened on a side note, we’re in Hillsborough, Oregon, and he says, hey, there’s 85 people in this class. He says, hey, we got in this class. I want to let everybody know that we got one of the highest scores we’ve ever gotten on our test. And I just want to say congratulations to this class. I’m sitting by the pillar in the very back of the room like cops do. I raised my hand, and Doc Lewinsky picks me out. I said, Doc, do you give out the test scores? He says, no, those are confidential. I said good. I’m the one who got the highest score.

58:16
Jamie Borden
I claim it. Everybody else is at that point. Dr. Lewinsky is like this guy. Yeah, I’m a self proclaimed highest score in the room guy with Force Science. And I’m sure it wasn’t me. The point being is that I was very passionate about that information. And because of what it was doing for the department, I had been given the keys to the Use of Force Unit and revamping our policies. And I needed to know everything about everything that I could possibly know. And after a week in that certification course, I knew one thing that I needed to know more, and that was going to be an endless tunnel. I dove headfirst down that tunnel through my chief’s approval and in fact, his request, he wanted me to take this unit to the next level. So I did that. I created the Use of Force Training and Analysis Unit for the Henderson Police Department with Danny King, and we took that knowledge to a new level through application over time.

59:15
Jamie Borden
They asked me to teach. I said yes. And then I dove in and I went through five or six more Cert classes and just reading. Because, of course, the first presentation I ever did force Science was at Homeland Security in Virginia, Alexandria, and my entire command staff went to that class. So they’re all sitting on the back row and Doc Lewinsky and everybody there. I’m doing my first thing. I must have drank 27 bottles of water on that first 4 hours. I’m all cotton mouthed, and I’m sitting here in front of a bunch of professionals. It went just well enough. I knew that there was more I needed to know, and I did that for them for nine years. After about the first, probably three years, I became one of their senior and lead instructors. I became one of their most requested instructors simply because I brought the perspective of police work to science.

01:00:09
Jamie Borden
And I did it in such a way where I had the luxury of learning, applying, succeeding, failing, learning, applying, succeeding, failing, and then teaching. Teaching. When you throw that into the loop now that loop, that’s flattening, that curve ever so slightly. Critical incident review rose from this because one of the questions I got most often was, hey, this is great information, and you experienced this. We had this conversation. I believe all of this science is great, but what do we do with it? How do we apply this? And my life’s work was that I put together this class over about seven and a half or eight years. Force Science wasn’t interested in taking off on that tangent, which I completely understood. So I told them I had to pursue my own life’s work. My first class was in North Carolina in front of 200 people.

01:00:59
Jamie Borden
It was wildly successful. People got it. They understood my style of lecturing and teaching and my style of learning while I’m teaching. And it just became something that started to grow its own legs. And now the Enhanced Force Investigation Course, which is our primary course with CIR, is being taught across the country. Like I said before we started, I’m teaching in Henderson next Tuesday, I fly to Fort Worth and teach for a week. The next week after that, I fly to Delaware and teach for a week. I fly back to Salt Lake City and teach for a week. I then fly to Gilbert, Arizona, teach for a week. I then leave Gilbert and fly to Georgia and teach for a week. And that’s a combination of the enhanced force investigations course, including the cognitive interview, which I worked with Dr. Ed Geiselman on for years, and then the forensic video review and examination force analysis course.

01:01:56
Jamie Borden
So two very technical courses, but they’re taught in a way that cops can understand and investigators can take and apply this knowledge that they’ve gained in these classes. And it opens up a communication between my company, my staff, and these individuals out doing the job. So if they’ve got questions, it doesn’t end at that slide deck. My phone is always ringing from people that might have questions about a particular perspective or a stance on a particular issue. And I have as much fun doing that as I do teaching the courses. It’s nonstop. Brothers, I am inundated with this shit. Be careful what you wish for and love it, because right now I feel like my wheels are just getting turning. I’m having the time of my life.

01:02:39
Michael Warren
Jamie it’s one of those things where I believe, based upon my experience, that training is needed more now than it ever has been. Things are questioned more now, and the truth of the matter is we should have been investigating better in the past, not just assuming that were doing things correctly, that were doing things the way they should be done. I’m a big believer in continuous improvement. You’ve probably seen it and tell me if I’m wrong. Officers no longer have the benefit of the doubt when it comes to use of force. It seems like the default now seems to be to charge officers in uses of force rather than actually get to the bottom of it.

01:03:20
Jamie Borden
It is. That’s a trend that we see across the country. However, I will tell you the big large counties that they’re fighting this trend maricopa, for instance, Phoenix. It’s a huge county. When they go into a pre charging process, I get the case. And that case comes to me. I do a full evaluation on the case, and I write a full 50 to 60 page evaluation and narrative on that case. And the point of that is, they want an expert’s perspective on whether or not the officers, what they did was justifiable or objectively reasonable based on the standards, not looking at necessity, not looking at proportionality, but looking at the objective standard through a professional expert’s perspective. And I’m going to tell you, I take those cases very seriously because just like I do all my cases. But the simple fact that a charging entity is taking the responsibility of putting this in front of someone because they don’t necessarily have all the answers before they charge.

01:04:27
Jamie Borden
Based on a knee jerk reaction to a video or some other profound or salient piece of evidence means the world to law enforcement. And I will take that as deep as I can. And when the aftermath comes and they want to do a news report on it, I will take it. Although I will always refer to the report because that’s a public document. I will tell part of the news story is not why I believe this or not why this is justified, but the fact that this entity has asked for an expert’s opinion. My opinions are in the report, read the report and publish that. But I will take the podium and put out there that these entities are doing the right thing for the right reasons. And it’s a fine line that we’re walking out there because a lot of these very far left leaning liberal entities are and you know what I’m talking about.

01:05:18
Jamie Borden
And I don’t want to make this political, but they will charge an officer if the officer’s account doesn’t match the video, if a witness account doesn’t match what the officer said or what the video said, they will believe everything outside of what the officer said before they’ll believe the officer. And that will end up in a charging. And that seems extreme, but that’s what we’re seeing across the country. All we can do is keep fighting the fight.

01:05:42
Michael Warren
I had some dealings with an agency recently that just had some of their agency members charged in a use of force case where the coroner has ruled that it was not a homicide yet because of the optics and because of community pressure and to be very blunt, uninformed community perspective because very little information has been released. These folks were charged even if they’re found not guilty, their lives are never going to be the same. That agency is never going to be the same.

01:06:12
Jamie Borden
They’re not. And you said two things that do not belong in the same sentence, optics and community pressure.

01:06:19
Michael Warren
Absolutely.

01:06:20
Jamie Borden
Optics are what people think they see. Because I’m going to tell you right now, as a professional and an expert in the analysis and the review and examination of video, I’m going to tell you definitively that video will not match the officer’s account of what was happening. The optics, what we see in video is a produced digital representation of an officer’s real experience. That doesn’t count, right? It’s part of the evidence, but it’s certainly not all of the evidence. And then outside of the optics, the public pressure is based on those optics. And then we end up with a knee jerk reaction to what people think is happening with no input and no substantiating information from the officers that were involved in the incident that saw a very different thing, that made decisions on very different components. And those are what have to be part of the analysis.

01:07:12
Jamie Borden
That does not mean that officers don’t make mistakes and that in some of these cases, officers do use unjustified force. I’ve seen it. I’ve had cases against officers. But that can’t be the norm. That can’t be the starting point. Right? Officers are using force because they have the right to, and then they’re immediately being criminally charged. That doesn’t line up in my mind. It doesn’t align itself with fair and impartial policing. The only people who get extricated from fair and impartial policing are police officers. And think about that. There’s an article that just came out about that in a sheriff’s office in Tampa or someplace, where the officers are the only ones that get lumped into this category of people, that the standards are no longer fair and impartial. If you’ve wearing a badge and you’ve got the authority, it’s no longer fair and impartial for you.

01:08:07
Michael Warren
And I would propose that some of the best remedies for that are proper training of our people up front so that they do become competent which begets competence and it’s just thing that builds on each other. But then on the backside we have to have a professional and thorough investigation done by people who have been trained in human performance, video review, all those things that feed into the investigation. Quite honestly. We spend more money, we invest more time into people that investigate accidents than we do in use of force in many agencies. And that’s unfortunate.

01:08:45
Jamie Borden
It is unfortunate. The days are gone where officers and investigators, officers that are responsible for investigations regardless of their position on the department, and investigators that are responsible for these, the days are gone where the investment can’t be at 100%.

01:09:01
Michael Warren
Absolutely.

01:09:02
Jamie Borden
You’ve got to get the training. Everything we do is on video. So we have to have professionals in video that understand it, that can interpret it properly, so there’s no misinterpretations to alleviate the misunderstandings. Because officers are being charged, and let’s face it, they’re being charged. There’s three components misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and lack of knowledge. Well, those three things can be fixed through training, through exposure to the knowledge, and then building wisdom through experience.

01:09:31
Michael Warren
Absolutely. So if an agency was interested bringing you in for some of that training, where’s the best place for them to get information about it?

01:09:40
Jamie Borden
So criticalincientreview.com is our website. And through that, all you have to do is get onto the hosting a class thing. There’s a tag at the bottom, and you can host whatever class you want. And we oftentimes build custom courses that will include the human performance and application of that in the investigation and a video component. The video class is a three day class and it’s got a workshop component. And then we’ve got the investigative course that has a modified version of the cognitive interview developed by Ed Geiselman, who I’ve worked with for the last nine years to refine that specifically for law officers involved in critical incidents. And that’s an extremely helpful component for investigators to get to the why in these cases to avoid the counterfactual thinking process. That can create a very terrible bias for these investigations. But all of that’s available through criticalincidentreview.com.

01:10:39
Jamie Borden
It’s a click of a button away. Just email us and 2024 is filling up fairly rapidly. So if there are interested parties out there, get in touch with us soon so we can get you on the books. One of the other things is, you guys, I’m going to be out in the eastern part of the country later on this month. Get on the website and look at where I’m at because you’ve got a standing invitation to join me in one of those classes. I’d love to have you there so you can see what we’re talking about. But that’s an open invite.

01:11:09
Michael Warren
Well, when you start throwing invitations out there like that, I don’t want you to, later down the road start throwing around words like stalking, okay?

01:11:17
Jamie Borden
That’s not what’s going listen, man, there’s a certain contextual arrangement that goes along with that. You don’t fit the bill as far as the visual goes for a stalker. I know how to deal with you.

01:11:30
Michael Warren
But we’re going to put all that stuff in our show notes so that our people can access that. I want to give a shout out again, folks, you will not be disappointed going to a class that is taught by Jamie. He takes this stuff right here that is such high level and as our good friend Brent Greg Williams likes to say, he streets it up and he makes it applicable. That’s so incredibly important. I cannot recommend highly enough giving him a chance. It should change the way you do investigations and it should change the way that you train your people. But Jamie, man, we really appreciate you being here today, brother. It’s an honor for me.

01:12:12
Jamie Borden
Well, I’ll tell you what, the honor is mine, man, to get the opportunity to talk to you guys about this stuff. These are stories that I haven’t talked about in years, and it’s obvious you guys did the work. There’s a lot of research that went into little old Jamie on this thing. So I appreciate some of these stories coming up from the past and being able to share them with you and your listeners and, yeah, we’re here, man, and I’d love to stay in contact with, you know, my line is always open and for questions or whatever you’ve got, man, I’m around.

01:12:44
Brent Hinson
And listen, we have all the information, critical incident review. We have links to that, your LinkedIn, Facebook, and we’ve got some videos, some of your drum work. If folks want to find out more about Jamie, I encourage you to do it’s extremely interesting. You’ll find it all between the lines with virtualacademy.com Jamie. It’s been so cool to sit here and I’m usually the one that kind of holds back. And I don’t really chime in too much, but I’m able to talk chime in about music a little bit. And then hearing your passion about law enforcement, it’s been a really enlightening episode for me.

01:13:16
Jamie Borden
Well, hey, I appreciate it. And I do want to say one thing to your listeners. For those of you that are going to shit check me online. And you’re going to dig deep, and you’re going to start looking up the past of Jamie Borden, don’t dig too deep because you’re going to see shit that you can’t unsee. I lived through the did not always present like this. I had that long hair and pouty lips, and I was a specimen bro.

01:13:40
Brent Hinson
We’ll put a spam blocker on some of this.

01:13:42
Jamie Borden
Yeah. Just be careful that once you ring that bell, it ain’t going to get unraveled. Just putting that out there right now for the safety of all involved.

01:13:54
Brent Hinson
We appreciate the upfront honesty.

01:13:58
Jamie Borden
Right on.

01:13:59
Brent Hinson
But thanks a lot, man.

01:14:00
Jamie Borden
Yeah, you bet. It’s been an honor. I’ll look forward to talking to you guys in the future. You, Sam.