Seeing Beyond The Threat

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. We’re a podcast going beyond the bats 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. I am your co host, Bernhardt, and today we’re going to be circling back to a topic we first touched on earlier this year in episode 37 with Dr. Stephanie Zoltowski. That being how members of law enforcement interact with those in the special needs community. More specifically, as it relates to our guests today, those with autism. Because not only does our guest have a law enforcement background, he’s also in the unique position of having a son who was diagnosed with autism. And Michael Warren, as someone who himself has a chronic medical condition, as I do, one of the things you try to do is educate and raise awareness to those in the general public who may not understand where you’re coming from or what you’re going through.

01:05
Brent Hinson
I think awareness is key to try to just have people understand your point of view, your perspective.

01:11
Michael Warren
Well, Brent, I’m excited about the discussion today because Doc and I, we’ve talked before, and one of the things we want to talk about today is how sometimes what we think we know in law enforcement maybe isn’t very true. And being unaware can cause problems. I remember early in my career that when I found out that those that are diabetic can sometimes exhibit the same exact behaviors as somebody who’s under the influence of alcohol. It’s one of those things. I mean, how many times in law enforcement have people been taken to jail for drunk driving when they actually were having a diabetic reaction? They were actually in a medical emergency. And because we didn’t know, we didn’t handle it correctly. And ultimately, that’s what I hope that our listeners get out of today, is to constantly be learning and learn from the mistakes of others.

02:12
Brent Hinson
Knowledge is power. I mean, once you get that information out, know, have a different perspective, different point of view, and know about these different things that can make a tremendous difference in someone’s life.

02:22
Michael Warren
Well, Brent, I know that you may not believe this, but there have been times in my life that I have been known for being very hard headed, maybe even pig headed, maybe stubborn as a mule. But the truth of the matter is, if we go through life and our perspectives never change at all, we’re not.

02:43
Brent Hinson
Learning that’s a life wasted, as I’ve heard.

02:46
Michael Warren
But I tell you, lives wasted in today’s society have much broader impact than it just between you and I. It can affect our families, our communities, and the professions.

02:57
Brent Hinson
I hope people coming to this episode, they have an open mind and they’re willing to listen and learn because that’s only going to help them in their careers going forward, whether they’re in law enforcement or just everyday John Q. Public like I am.

03:10
Michael Warren
What we try to talk about in this podcast on all of our episodes, obviously is law enforcement related, but we do try, I think, to make it as applicable across society as possible because we don’t live in Silos, we don’t operate in Silos. We certainly shouldn’t be learning in Silos.

03:31
Brent Hinson
Yeah, absolutely. I’m looking forward to the conversation today.

03:34
Michael Warren
So why don’t you go ahead and bring our guest on. He’s a smart guy. Be careful.

03:39
Brent Hinson
Well, our guest today, he served as a combat medic with the US. Marine Corps before starting a 20 year career in law enforcement, first as an officer with the City of Salisbury, Maryland Police Department, and then as a sergeant with the Boyanton Beach Police Department before retiring in 2016. He’s a graduate of the University of Louisville’s command Officer development course and holds a doctor of philosophy degree in psychology. We welcome Doc Davis to the podcast. And I just want to clarify this. You got your nickname Doc before you got your PhD, is that correct?

04:09
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, I got doc when I was still in the Navy. Navy corner with foreshadowing.

04:15
Brent Hinson
That that’s what they call that in literature, right?

04:17
Ronald Doc Davis
Kind of seems that way sometimes.

04:19
Michael Warren
Hey, Doc, man, it’s good to see you again, brother.

04:21
Ronald Doc Davis
I appreciate it. Mike.

04:22
Michael Warren
Now Doc and I, we met at Aelita a while ago. I was fortunate to run into him again this year at Aelita and I was able to go to his class. And that class, it kind of spurred some conversation between Doc and I. So, Doc, I’m going to go ahead. And again, our listeners probably are tired of hearing it, but I think it should be out there. It amazes me the number of people in this profession that literally have done a lifetime of public service. How did you go about joining the Navy? What brought you there?

04:57
Ronald Doc Davis
Going into the Navy, I’m originally from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and going into the Navy was about broadening horizons, kind of expanded opportunities. I enlisted in 93. It was after the first Gulf War but before the second, just kind of wanted to do my part to help and to also set myself up for increased opportunities moving forward.

05:21
Michael Warren
Now, is the Navy like the army where as long as you test well and there are openings in that particular MoS. Do you get to choose your MoS, or was it assigned to you?

05:34
Ronald Doc Davis
No, you get to choose what job you’re going into at the MEPs Military Entrance Processing. Based on your test scores, you can talk about wanting to get into whichever specific career field you want. The recruiters tried to push me to go nuclear because of my test scores, and I was having none of that. My uncle was Navy. He was on an aircraft carrier and because he had access to the radiological spaces, he had to wear one of the detectors. Radiation detector.

06:07
Michael Warren
Right.

06:07
Ronald Doc Davis
And every month his radiation detector had the highest level of radiation because he was the only one who made it on the flight deck and got exposed to the sun.

06:17
Michael Warren
Really?

06:17
Ronald Doc Davis
So all the guys who worked the reactor spent so much time under the decks, the only radiation they picked up was from the shielded reactors. And the sun was giving my uncle more radiation than they were getting. And I’m like, yeah, I really actually enjoy seeing the sun sometimes.

06:38
Michael Warren
Listen, it takes a special person to work on a Navy sub. And in fact, there are a whole bunch of testing that is done to make sure they’re suitable for that.

06:46
Ronald Doc Davis
There’s a whole bunch of jokes about that, too.

06:48
Michael Warren
Well, I worked with a guy that worked on a sub. He was a cook on a sub, and I’m pretty certain that it rendered him unable to get a tan. The entire time I worked with that dude, he was always pasty white. It didn’t matter if it was summer or winter, my man always pasty white. So we always told him it was because of his time below the surface.

07:13
Ronald Doc Davis
That might be contagious because I pretty much glow in the dark.

07:18
Michael Warren
Listen, man, there’s a reason why I don’t do these things with my shirt off, because we don’t have those kind of filters on here. So you go in and you chose medic. And why medic? And I know that they always say, hey, make sure you choose a job that’s going to help you get a job in the civilian world. Did that play into your decision at all?

07:42
Ronald Doc Davis
No, not really. I had a background working in areas where I would have to help others. So again, being the medic was about helping and doing for others.

07:54
Michael Warren
Working as a medic in that type of environment, it’s a little bit different than it is in civilian world. Sometimes you not only are the medic, but you serve as the dock, the literal dock, because there may not be facilities around to take the person to immediately.

08:11
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, it depends on the situation. The combat medics, whether they’re Navy, Army, Air Force, the combat medics do have a higher level of training because of the fact that you may be in situations where you are the end care. That’s all they’re going to get. You’re not always able to immediately evac people. You’re not necessarily going to be able to get them to that next level of triage. So sometimes you just have to be able to step up and handle it yourself.

08:40
Michael Warren
They make movies about stuff like that. Shoot, I can’t remember the name of the movie, but Desmond Doss, the World War II hero, the stuff that he was able to do under adverse conditions. I have to imagine, though, that training and that experience prepared you incredibly well for your future career in law enforcement.

09:03
Ronald Doc Davis
I think it was a good lead over again. When I was getting out, there was a lot of politics going on with the nurses unions, trying to get a lot of the military training to not be recognized. I don’t know if there was a fear that the military medics were going to start supplanting or replacing nurse positions, but I was literally facing the prospect of having to start over and redo basic anatomy after having coming. Out of the military where the last battalion surgeon I had trusted me enough that I’d had guys come in and a guy got his hand caught in a fan of a humvee and took him over and sutured everything back together. Another guy comes in with a cyst on the back on his left shoulder blade, and I’m the one who removed that. You go from that level of medicine that you’re performing and then you go out into the civilian world and like, yeah, you’re going to have to go back and rememberize the bones and the body and the muscles and all the different cells in the blood and they’re like, no, I can’t see me going through that again.

10:19
Ronald Doc Davis
It was bad enough the first time. So when I went back home, I had the opportunity to interview with the Salisbury Police department. About 100 sworn officers, very solid training agency, really good skills for the officers that work there one of those places where no matter what type of law enforcement you’re interested in, you have the opportunity to experience and get the reps in and learn and progress. So that was my first cop job.

10:51
Michael Warren
It’s kind of interesting the story you tell about the nurses, because in most states it’s only been in the past few years that if you have somebody that was a military police officer and now they’re transitioning into civilian policing, they used to have to go through the entire academy, basic police academy. Again, there was no recognition of their previous service. Now most states have some type of shortened police academy a couple of weeks just to teach them the laws. Listen, we have limited resources. It just seems like that’s the way to go. And the training that’s provided in the military and the circumstances that’s done under, I would be willing to bet that your first police department was very pleased with the product that they brought in when they got you.

11:39
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, those comparative compliance programs are absolutely a good thing. As long as we’re making sure that we’re vetting people and the military obviously has a standard that they’re going to maintain that’s not even questioned. So it’s a good thing you bring them in, you go through the comparative clients program where you’re putting them through all the high liability issues, getting them familiarized with the local the state and local ordinances and statutes. It should be a shorter transition. Cop is cop, no matter where it is. It’s just a matter of learning what the rules are locally.

12:14
Michael Warren
So your career there. It starts off you had a good base because they were a good training department, but you didn’t stay there for your entire career.

12:23
Ronald Doc Davis
I got tired of being cold.

12:26
Michael Warren
Okay, buddy. All right, I have to interject here. Okay. Maryland may be cool, okay. But from a guy who lives in Michigan, I’m going to say it may probably didn’t get cold.

12:38
Ronald Doc Davis
Okay. Remember Eastern Shore? So in between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. So it’s not just the temperature. It’s the fact that it’s wet, cold.

12:48
Michael Warren
You got tired of being cold. So where’d you head next?

12:51
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, at the time I got cold, boynton Beach, Florida was running a national advertisement. They had a melted snowman on the beach. And I’m like, Hell yeah. So I went and it was actually when I say I got cold, the ink in my pen froze on a traffic stop.

13:09
Michael Warren
Okay, yeah, I got you that’s.

13:11
Ronald Doc Davis
When I started looking, I found that advertisement. I was online filling out the application.

13:17
Michael Warren
That know, Doc, would you agree with me that right there is incredibly effective advertising? They knew who their target audience was, and they hit the mark.

13:34
Ronald Doc Davis
Whoever did their advertising on that one did their job.

13:38
Michael Warren
Listen, you got to play to your strengths. If your strength is we got nice sunny weather. You got to find a way to get that out there. And they did it. So you make the move. How was the transition?

13:50
Ronald Doc Davis
Well, before we get into transition, going back to the PR firm that did that advertisement yeah. Boynton beach doesn’t have a beach.

14:00
Michael Warren
I think we have to talk to the founding fathers about that. Name the city.

14:05
Ronald Doc Davis
They had one, but they sold it.

14:10
Michael Warren
That is awesome.

14:11
Brent Hinson
That’s like when you apply somewhere and they’re like, we’re building a brand new building. It’s going to be state of the art. And you get there and it’s an old building.

14:19
Michael Warren
That is awesome. So you get there and you find out there’s not a beach. And you go, that didn’t work out.

14:24
Ronald Doc Davis
As well as but, you know, I ended up coming down. It was a good time to come down. And Boynton was a lot like where I had come from. Boynton is 25 sq. Mi at the time, it was about 100 and 5155 sworn. And it was the same thing that I had come from. It didn’t matter what type of law enforcement, what area of law enforcement you were interested in. They had that issue going on. You wanted to do white collar good. You wanted to do street level narcotics, okay. You wanted to do the UC stuff, okay. You wanted to get into community oriented policing. We got that going on. So no matter what you were interested in, they had it. And you could expand your knowledge in that realm.

15:07
Michael Warren
Would it be accurate to say that you often were able to use your passions to its fullest if you had that passion. You’re obviously going to probably do a better job if you’re working that area than if you’re forced to do something. I really don’t care about traffic or I really don’t care listen, I don’t care about this particular area.

15:30
Ronald Doc Davis
Look, every agency has got its Idiosyncrasies about how you get into the specialty units, but the opportunities were there.

15:39
Michael Warren
That’s awesome. So what were some of the positions that you held while you were at that agency?

15:44
Ronald Doc Davis
For the longest, I just stayed on road patrol was just kind of the jack of all trades, master of none. Ended up getting into. We had a contract with the Community Redevelopment Agency, so I went into a directed patrol style unit that was funded by the community Redevelopment. They wanted targeted patrol in specific areas, so from day to day, you never knew what it was going to be. Whatever the hot button issue of the day was for that group, we kind of got assigned to handle all of that. So that one was fun. From there, ended up back on the road shortly. Going into my promotion to sergeant from sergeant on road patrol for a while. Ended up taking over building and developing our hostage negotiation team, also the stress management team. So essentially any critical incidents that our officers went through, so any police involved shooting, any major crashes, or if our officers responded to a very traumatic call, we actually started utilizing the Mitchell and Everly peer support model created by the doctors out of Towns Hopkins.

16:57
Ronald Doc Davis
That ended up being a really good thing for the men and women at my agency. Really helped a lot. Later on took over code enforcement.

17:06
Michael Warren
Let me take you back to the negotiation assignment. And the reason I want to take you back there is because on a previous episode, we had Gary Nessner, the FBI’s primary hostage negotiator during the 90s, did some fantastic work. I mean, the behavioral change stairway model and all that type of stuff. Incredibly great guy. But one of the things I learned from Gary is that I would suck at his job. Okay? That became very clear to me. And so I want to ask you, what was it about that assignment that made you say, you know what, not only do I want to do that job, but I think I can be successful at that job?

17:49
Ronald Doc Davis
With the negotiation, it’s very much about interpersonal skills and communication. Additionally, it becomes important to understand personalities and personality types when you look at the field of negotiation. Based on the FBI statistics out of their hostage and barricade system, it’s estimated that about 52% of the people that negotiators deal with have some sort of a mental disorder, which it makes sense that mirrors what the American Psychological Association estimates as societal levels. It estimates that about half of America will qualify as having a mental disorder at some point during their lifetime. So kind of makes sense. Before I moved to Florida, I had already finished my bachelor’s in psychology, so I had that basic understanding, especially with abnormal psychology, the different mental disorders.

18:48
Michael Warren
It wasn’t a new interest for you then. This was something that you had undertaken study of before, and then this came open, and it was a way that you could apply it practically.

18:59
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, absolutely.

19:00
Michael Warren
Brent, I do want to point out that when I said I couldn’t do that job, I would suck at that job. And I asked him, what about it? The very first thing he leaves, well, you got to have interpersonal skills. It’s funny how he got that little jab in as soon as I said I wouldn’t be able to do it. Well, here’s why. Bam. You don’t have any. First off, Mike, you are a broken human. All right. Anyway, I’m fascinated by that particular job right there. And the reason is because it’s incredibly difficult. If you’re working a perimeter, you may be at the scene of a barricade, and if you’re the one that’s providing perimeter security dude, that kind of assignment used to drive me absolutely baddie. I mean, it was so monotonous. You know what I mean? But, see, to me, that whole negotiation thing had some of the same characteristics, because you often had to say the thing same thing.

19:59
Michael Warren
You’ll cover the same ground over and over because many of them were in mental crisis. Dude, I don’t know how you guys and gals do that job, but the ones who are good at it, they make a tremendous difference in the outcome of those events.

20:13
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah. Again, going back to the FBI, when we look at their statistics from incidents where we have to go tactical versus we’re able to successfully negotiate, it’s really amazing, the difference in the numbers. Unfortunately, when we go tactical, it’s not always just the person holding hostages that ends up hurt. It’s also hostages. It’s also bystanders. It’s also law enforcement, and the injuries.

20:43
Michael Warren
Go beyond the physical ones. When we had Gary on the podcast, we talked about Waco, and part of the injury that was incurred was the reputation and respectability of law enforcement because of the way that it ended. Listen, kudos to you folks who can do the job and do it well. Just know that if you’re ever looking to put together a team, I’m not somebody you should be calling, because I will jack that up for you.

21:12
Ronald Doc Davis
I think additionally with Waco, the one other injury that maybe didn’t get discussed and doesn’t get discussed enough, really is the psychological injury to the negotiators, to the tactical members that were part of the initial raid. If you ever go back and you look at interviews I mean, even a decade after Waco, you look at interviews of some of the individuals that were there, and when they talk about it. They are still very emotionally raw because of the outcome of that. You know, obviously, Gary was there, and he can speak to the specifics of what did and didn’t happen much better than I can, having only investigated it through all the open source materials. But it’s hard on law enforcement when they have a situation that doesn’t end quote, unquote. Well, you have a negotiator trying to stop somebody in cris from completing the act of suicide.

22:14
Ronald Doc Davis
That leaves an impact on them. I had two negotiators who were trying to talk a 16 year old girl into not jumping off one of the billboards on the side of an interstate about a 70 foot jump. And unfortunately for them, they were not successful. The kid jumped. If you don’t believe in a higher power, you’re not paying attention. This kid jumped 70ft approximate and lived. She collapsed both lungs, but did not have a single broken bone in her body. Took her to the trauma center, reinflated her lungs. She was fine.

22:48
Michael Warren
That is absolutely, in my view, proof of a higher power, because I can sleep on a pillow wrong, and I can’t move my neck for a couple of days. So the fact that they can survive 70ft, there’s something else out there that has a hand in things.

23:04
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah.

23:05
Michael Warren
I want to take you, if I could, for a second. You and I talked about a particular call that had tremendous impact on you. I think that it’s ironic, based upon what we just talked about, how differently that call could have ended and how the rest of your life would have been on a different trajectory. Why don’t you just walk us through what the call was about and how you came to be in the place that you were?

23:31
Ronald Doc Davis
So this was before I moved to Florida. It was up in Salisbury, Maryland. A little street called Collins Street. And I had next door neighbors who were rival drug dealers, and they had been a long term project. I mean, were constantly dealing with these two individuals, just nothing but problems. And I had finally got enough to walk a warrant through one of them, and I was trying to serve it, and the guy wasn’t there. Well, who better to tell me where he’s hiding than his competition?

24:05
Michael Warren
Let the police help you handle your competition problem.

24:08
Ronald Doc Davis
You want to make more money this week? Help me get rid of your competition. Absolutely. So I go next door to talk to the competition, and before I even get onto the front porch of this house, which it’s an old farmhouse that’s been divided into a Duplex, and the front porch is about 1012ft deep. And before I even get to the steps to get onto the porch, I can already smell the marijuana coming out of the house. So I’ve got a trainee with me. I send him around to block the side door, and as the front door opens. There’s about seven people in this front room. There’s nine of them in the house. We end up getting everything locked down and contained, and we recover five 1oz rocks of crack cocaine. So total weight was 151.5 grams. We had called for backup, and then because of the madness of the moment, I hadn’t heard them ask for clarification.

25:09
Ronald Doc Davis
So they toned it. And I got my entire city, plus about half of the county that was next door, respond. So when I turn around, the entire street is completely blocked by police vehicles, get everything calmed down, and I’m getting evidence bags out of the trunk of my car. And on the opposite side of the street, there are these three little old ladies that are sitting there whispering to each other and pointing at me. And I had that typical cop us versus them mentality thing going on. And I’m sitting there going, this is crazy. These two assholes over here, always dealing with guns, always dealing with problems. And we hit the house. Nine people. There was only two of us originally. We end up recovering, like, four guns, all this dope. And I’m like, at that point, okay, I’ve had enough. So I turn, and with as much sarcasm as I could muster, I ask them if I could help you.

26:07
Ronald Doc Davis
Can I help you? And this lady looks at me and she goes, oh, no, Officer, we’re just so happy now that they’re both going to be gone. We’ll actually be able to sit outside on our porch tomorrow. And in that moment, I felt about two inches tall, and I stopped. And Collins Street is small. It’s not huge. And I realized I did not know anything about the other houses on that street. I only knew about the two. And it really made me start looking at every neighborhood I was in differently, because in almost every neighborhood, there was only one or two houses that I knew anything about. And yet here’s all these other homes, and in a lot of cases, they were really good, truly hardworking people. Many of them living in buildings that I wouldn’t let my pets stay in because they couldn’t afford or didn’t have the history to get into anything better.

27:05
Ronald Doc Davis
And here I am looking at them with the same disdain, the same negative views that I had for the criminals that were essentially making them prisoners in their own homes.

27:19
Michael Warren
We train to look for threats, right when you’re coming into an area, you’re scanning, you’re looking for potential threats so that if a threat appears, that you’re able to deal with it. But the unspoken piece of that is once you determine something is not a threat or something you don’t believe is a threat, we no longer see it. I don’t have a story exactly like yours, but I think about the invisible faces, the bodies without faces that I would go past in neighborhoods, and I would no longer see them. The only thing I saw was the troublemaker’s house or this particular vehicle right there. And how many of those people did I ignore throughout my career who were supporting what were doing there? And I blew them off.

28:05
Ronald Doc Davis
Not only that, but when you build relationships with those houses, it’s amazing how much more support you get individually and organizationally.

28:15
Michael Warren
I would propose that it probably would make us safer too, because you’re going to get information about potentially dangerous things and people from those people if you have those relationships. I love how you tell the story when you say, listen, there were some streets that I knew. One house. One house could tell you everything about that house. But that was the only house that I knew and it was at the exclusion of all the other ones there. So when you had that happen to you, what do you mean that it changed your perspective not only on that neighborhood, but the rest of the neighborhood? What did it change in you?

28:52
Ronald Doc Davis
It really started to change the US versus them because them is impersonal. Them is kind of this abstract and like you say, the invisible faces. So it really made me start looking for who else was in that neighborhood. It made me start realizing that you couldn’t treat everybody the same. And this goes back to you talk about being on that perimeter position in a negotiation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had officers on the perimeter or tactical officers tell us, well, just tell them this. Well, you cannot talk to somebody who’s depressed the same way you talk to somebody who is absolutely beyond raging over what they view as a violation of their world order. You can’t talk to them the same way you can’t talk to a schizophrenic who’s hearing voices or seeing things the same way you talk to antisocial personality who is your career criminal.

29:59
Ronald Doc Davis
You just can’t. And unfortunately, how much training do we get on mental health in law enforcement? We don’t realize that people aren’t the same when we go to use of force training. You’ve got what, four options? It don’t work that way in the real world, Doc.

30:18
Michael Warren
There’s old saying that goes that if you believe everybody’s an asshole, it’s amazing how easy it is to find assholes. And if you think about that though, if that’s our view of the world and if we truly believe that about everybody that we come in contact with, then how are we going to talk to them? We’re going to talk to them like they’re assholes. And if you talk to people in that manner long enough, guess how they start to act like assholes or they.

30:46
Ronald Doc Davis
Realize that you’re an asshole and treat you as such.

30:49
Michael Warren
Well, I’ll be honest with you, they realized it a heck of a lot sooner than what I realized it. But at some point I did. But the thing is, though, if you talk to people that are suffering from some type of mental illness or mental breakdown, it can make the situation much worse even more quickly.

31:09
Ronald Doc Davis
Absolutely. I mean, the whole concept behind the use of force is either the person’s going to comply to avoid potential pain, or they’re going to comply to stop whatever pain is being applied. Well, what happens when you’re not mentally capable of comprehending that connection?

31:35
Michael Warren
Wait, stop right there for a second. So you’re telling me that there are some people who aren’t capable of recognizing that?

31:43
Ronald Doc Davis
Well, let me put it to you this way. Have you ever been so mad you could not form a sentence?

31:48
Michael Warren
Have you been spying on me? Because he answered, yes, we all have.

31:54
Ronald Doc Davis
Look, that’s part of being human. In that moment that you were so mad you could not form a sentence, if somebody had hit you with a taser, would you have been able to comprehend, this stops when I behave?

32:08
Michael Warren
No, because I don’t think tasers ever stop. All the times I got shocked. Well, never stop.

32:14
Ronald Doc Davis
Pepper spray, baton, pressure point, any of them?

32:17
Michael Warren
No, because I’m not thinking logically. I’m not thinking with my healthy, logical mind.

32:23
Ronald Doc Davis
Okay, so let’s take that a step further.

32:25
Brent Hinson
Okay.

32:26
Ronald Doc Davis
In our brain, we have this little device called this little structure called the amygdala. It’s your fear center. Its job is to scan the environment for threats. When it sees a threat, it activates the limbic system, part of the HPA axis. The limbic system gives you that adrenaline and Cortisol dump. It also steals the oxygenated blood away from your frontal lobe, the part of your brain responsible for I wouldn’t do that if I was you. It steals the oxygenated blood away from that part of the brain and shoves that oxygenated blood down into the more primal animalistic brain centers, more survival based brain centers. So somebody who’s in crisis, that limbic system is in full effect. Their ability to think rationally again, that frontal lobe, the oxygenated blood, is not getting there. So, yeah, when they feel pain, you ever accidentally get yourself zapped by a 110 outlet?

33:26
Michael Warren
Oh, yeah.

33:27
Ronald Doc Davis
You pull away really quick. Right. What happens when you’re stuck and you can’t pull away? Do you relax or do you fight harder to pull away?

33:35
Michael Warren
Fight harder.

33:37
Ronald Doc Davis
This is what’s happening to the person in cris. When you’re applying force to them. They’re going to fight harder to escape the pain because they’re not able to think rationally enough to comprehend. If I comply, the pain will stop.

33:54
Michael Warren
But then that goes in direct contradiction to a lot of the training that law enforcement receives. Because when you go to arrest somebody and you have to use a pain compliance technique, if they resist, then what do we do? We fight harder. Well, that just makes the situation worse, doesn’t it?

34:16
Ronald Doc Davis
But herein lies the issue. We have to look beyond what they’re doing and try to determine why. Is this person resisting because they’re in crisis or is this person resisting because they’re that criminal asshole? And this comes into everybody’s favorite buzword deescalation. Look, deescalation is not something I can do to somebody else. Deescalation is an opportunity that I give you. Deescalation is an opportunity for you to make the right decision. The only thing worse than using too much force is not using enough. Again, we have to try to figure out not just whether the person is resisting, but why. If they’re resisting because they can’t comprehend that compliance equals less pain, then we have to figure out what we’re going to do. Do we have this person geographically contained? Is there a reason, based on tactics, that we’re forced to go directly into hands on, or can we leave this person let’s say we’ve got them cornered in a room, there’s no weapons involved.

35:22
Ronald Doc Davis
Can we give them more time to work through things, or do we have to go directly into that force confrontation?

35:31
Michael Warren
Well, you just said something I thought was incredibly insightful when you said that deescalation is giving them the opportunity. Okay, but would you agree that there are many times that if we handle things improperly, we deny them the opportunity to deescalate themselves?

35:51
Ronald Doc Davis
Look, the only person who can deescalate somebody is themselves. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of things we do to make situations worse.

36:00
Michael Warren
I’ll go back to Dr. Zoltawski when we had her on here. One of the things I thought that she did a magnificent job of talking about was understanding the difference between a tantrum and a meltdown. A tantrum somebody’s doing intentionally and tried to get their way where a meltdown. They’re overwhelmed. And oftentimes the best thing to do is to let them have the meltdown as long as they’re not hurting themselves or some other person allowing them that opportunity.

36:27
Brent Hinson
We talk about generalities and theory, but in the moment, sometimes these are split second decisions. How do you train someone to recognize those in the moment so they can assess the situation?

36:38
Ronald Doc Davis
It becomes very difficult. And again, we’re asking law enforcement to do things that, in many cases, they’ve never been trained to do. With regard know, Stephanie’s thing with the difference between the temper tantrum and the meltdown, externally, they look the same. The difference is what we call the locus of control. An individual having a meltdown. It’s essentially if you want to compare it to a seizure. If somebody was having a seizure, could you force them into stopping by applying a force? No. And that’s the same thing with a meltdown. With the meltdown, the person doesn’t have control over that behavior. You can think about it like an electrical short circuit in the brain, whereas a kid having a temper tantrum, I’ve seen a lot of those where the parent grabs them. One SWAT temper tantrum ends the child having a temper tantrum is able to control it meltdowns no, the locus of control.

37:41
Ronald Doc Davis
It’s a biological thing. It’s not something the individual is actively doing.

37:46
Michael Warren
In the words of a couple people I love greg Williams and Brian Marin. They talk all the time about when you’re able give yourself the gift of time and distance. And that gift of time and distance is often what allows us to make that determination. Because a lot of the time that we encounter people that are in crisis, there are people around with additional information about their history that will help us determine what we’re dealing with at the time. But too often we’re in a rush. Because I’ve said this before on the podcast, I think we have to reframe what we mean by we want people that have a bias for action, because action doesn’t always have to be about going hands on. A bias for action is about doing the right thing. And sometimes doing the right thing is assessing so we can make that determination or hopefully make that determination again.

38:45
Ronald Doc Davis
It’s important to gather as much information as possible before contact is made. And this fits into everything we do and what we’ve even talked about here. With regard to that 16 year old girl who was on the billboard, the intel they had when they were deciding which negotiator was going to be primary, the male or the female, the information they had at the time was that she had been sexually assaulted a year prior. So they decided female should be the negotiator. The part they missed was the reason she was on the billboard is because she’d had an argument with mom that morning. She had moved on. Mom hadn’t. From the incident, mom found out about conversations between the girl and her boyfriend and what their plans for the weekend were, and mom grounded her. So the reason the girl’s on that billboard is because she’s upset with a female authority figure.

39:48
Ronald Doc Davis
Do we still think the female is the best negotiator?

39:51
Michael Warren
And I want to defend the officers out there. And I know you think the same way, because you and I have had the discussion oftentimes you don’t have the gift of time and distance.

40:01
Ronald Doc Davis
Absolutely.

40:02
Michael Warren
You have to make those instantaneous decisions and you make the best decision possible with the information you have. But I think part of the problem is the manner in which we train. We’re pushing the encounter rather than taking the time that’s available to us.

40:23
Ronald Doc Davis
Right. And please don’t think I’m bashing my oh, no, they did a phenomenal job. Again, it comes down to you have to evaluate situations, and it goes back to what you were saying. A lot of times we make these situations time critical through our own actions with the advantage of time and distance, sometimes we can do a little more observing. We can ask dispatch to give us more information. We can contact the people that are on the scene to ask them questions. So, again, it’s not to bash the officers, because, let’s be honest, police officers on a daily basis make decisions in milliseconds that allegedly much smarter. Doctors, lawyers, and judges take months and or years to debate and still will.

41:13
Michael Warren
Often disagree even after all that. Yes, I think it’s important. This is such an important topic because I don’t think that people have an appreciation of how prevalent people in mental crisis are on the calls in which officers respond to there was a national sheriff’s association did a study a few years ago on the prevalence of mental illness inside our jails. And the percentage of people who are locked up in our jails that are suffering from some type of mental illness is, astounding yet, they’re locked up in many cases with people who aren’t. And it creates some incredible safety issues for the inmates. It creates incredible safety issues for the correctional officers, quite honestly, that we just aren’t equipped to deal with at that scale.

42:06
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, there’s actually a two part article that just came out. Part two just came out this week was put out by Caliber Press, written by Nick Greco out of Illinois. He’s the CIT trainer for the Chicago police department, and he does a lot of really good work up north, and he talks about the fact that back in the 60s, when Kennedy did the work that he did to begin the deinstitutionalization process, we really started to see the problems. And then you move even further ahead from that. In 75, when the supreme court ruled that you could not institutionalize somebody who did not pose a risk of harm to themselves or others, I think that was the was it McDonald case. The McDonald decision sounds right, but essentially with the Kennedy steps back in the 60s, were supposed to be building community centers to help provide mental health care to these individuals so that they could be taken out of these cold institutions and brought back what they were calling into the warm embrace of the community.

43:15
Ronald Doc Davis
And the problem is, these community centers never got built. They never got fully funded. And essentially, what has replaced the institutions, the old, quote, unquote, insane asylums, what has replaced those is the number one mental health treatment facilities in America are the jails. There was an article that came out, I saw this week the three largest mental health providers or institutions providing mental health in the country cook county jail, la county jail, and another jail.

43:46
Michael Warren
And they are staffed by law enforcement personnel, primarily with very little medical support, where at least the institutions that used to be around did have a much larger representation of medical staff who were better prepared and better educated to deal with that. I don’t want to make excuses. I’m looking for solutions. But we wonder why we get bad outcomes when we send in people who are ill prepared to deal with that type of situation. And then we sit back and we ridicule decisions that the officers made and wonder, well, you know what? Why didn’t that quote, unquote, professional do a better job?

44:29
Ronald Doc Davis
Because again, it’s not an area that we specialize. It’s honestly, it’s not something we’re supposed to be doing. You go back to the origins of CIT in memphis, and the original premise was that this was going to be the beginning of getting law enforcement out of doing mental health, and yet now it’s regarded as the primary method of training law enforcement to do mental health work. And it’s because it’s just the best tool that we have.

44:56
Michael Warren
We’re not trained, we’re not educated, we’re not allowed to make diagnoses, and we certainly don’t have the time because that’s a time intensive endeavor. Yet whenever there is a headline when things go wrong, the diagnosis is what leads the story. Schizophrenic shot by police. It’s unfortunate because no one is sicker about those encounters that go poorly than the police officer is. You talked about the psychological impact of those types of encounters. It tears them up.

45:35
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah, absolutely. And when I’m teaching, I always come back to circumstances, dictate tactics, especially in my crisis classes. I get very deep into the diagnostic criteria, not because I want the officers to go out there and be diagnosing people. I tell them straight up, you shouldn’t be. But it’s important that we understand that just because you hear a label doesn’t always mean you know exactly what it’s going to look like. It really doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with somebody who’s displaying the signs of mania, does it matter if they’re on the manic side of bipolar or the manic side of borderline personality disorder? Manic is manic.

46:09
Michael Warren
Yes.

46:10
Ronald Doc Davis
And that goes back to, I think, thomas Strens, one of the original FBI negotiation instructors, even before nesner got in there, he wrote a book, and I can never remember the title, but the subtitle is the bad, the mad, and the with. The psychology is important. It’s important to understand all of that. But at the same time, we respond to behaviors, we don’t respond to labels.

46:35
Michael Warren
One of the things that really bothers me, and I know bothers you, is that even though we have gotten better on the training side, even though we’ve gotten better on the response side, we’re still not learning from our mistakes. And in fact, there was a place down near you that I believe that was successfully sued for the way in which they handled an encounter. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?

47:07
Ronald Doc Davis
That case actually settled. One of the agencies down here was involved in florida, involuntary psychological evaluations are referred to as baker acts. A lot of state it’s 51 50 or emergency petitions. Every state has their unique statutes, and there’s actually a website called the treatment advocacy center that has done a really good job of consolidating where you go to one place and you can look at the statutes for every state. What this agency had done is essentially they had a pattern of completing Baker Acts on autistic children that were in the classrooms, causing problems. Now, in Florida, in order to conduct a Baker Act for a law enforcement initiative baker act, there’s three criteria. Person must have a mental illness as defined in chapter 394. They have to either refuse an evaluation, be unable to determine for themselves the need for an evaluation, and number three, they’re either going to suffer from neglect or pose a risk of harm to themselves or others where a lot officers make the mistake.

48:18
Ronald Doc Davis
In Florida, and again, this is kind of not just a Florida thing, but it’s a national thing. We’re victims of. We’ve always done it this way, very much so in law enforcement, especially if we’ve always done it this way and nobody’s called us on it. So in Florida, again, the three criteria, most officers have no idea. Criteria number one is, even there, they have to have a mental illness. Well, they’re autistic. They have a mental illness. Well, except you have to look at what it says as defined in 394. So you go to the definition section for mental illness, and there’s a little part in there that says, for purposes of this part, it does not include a developmental disorder as defined in 393. So now you got to go to a different law, and you look up 393, and you go to the definition sections, and you look up developmental disorder, and it includes intellectual disability, what we used to refer to as mental retardation.

49:19
Ronald Doc Davis
It includes Willie Prater syndrome. It includes down syndrome. It includes autism. So you have an autistic child engaging in a self injury behavior. So my son is very prone to self injury behaviors. He will punch himself in the face so much that he will actually create lacerations in his face, rip his skin open. He’s headbutted the walls, put his head through five sheet rock walls, four windows. He’s headbutted the tile floor twice, hard enough for me to take him for Cat scans. Those are stereotyped autistic behaviors based on the statute. You cannot baker act for that. They were baker acting, these kids, for autistic behaviors. They were sued. I think there were six families originally, along with a group called Disability Rights Florida and the NAACP were all part of this lawsuit. And a few months ago, the agency settled. So it never saw a courtroom, but they settled.

50:32
Ronald Doc Davis
They paid out $440,000 to the families that were still party to the lawsuit at that point. And then the Disability Rights Florida and NAACP went away because they no longer had standing.

50:44
Michael Warren
It’s one of those things where, to me, that’s the type of outcome that should be heralded from the rooftops so that other agencies don’t make the same mistakes. But I would be willing to bet that there are still agencies in Florida that are continuing to do the same thing? Because they don’t know about it. They don’t know what they don’t know, even though they should know I’m not giving them excuse.

51:10
Ronald Doc Davis
Well, again, that lawsuit did not get a lot of exposure. Very few people actually know about it. The agency involved obviously does not want a lot of publicity surrounding it. But I can tell you I still have trainers, supervisors telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and I actually pull the statute out and show it to them, and then they go and it’s one of those things where you look at your FTOs, your training officers, they’re doing it the way they’ve always done it. How many of them have actually read what their state statute includes? And I talk about Treatment Advocacy Center, one of the shortcomings of their system. They list the Florida statute and they put in there exactly what I just told you regarding the three criteria, but they don’t include the definition of mental illness with the exceptions. So you look at it and you go, okay, they have to have a mental illness.

52:13
Ronald Doc Davis
Okay, well, they’ve got one. Well, they have a mental disorder as defined by American Psychological Association. But under your state statute, does it qualify for that? Psyche val when you look at the purpose of these involuntary evaluations, the purpose is to prevent a person from intentionally harming themselves. You got a kid who’s having a seizure, and because of where they fell, they’re throwing their head into a brick wall. We’re not going to do an involuntary evaluation on them for that because we know it’s not going to help. Well, it’s the same thing with the autistic individual and self injury behaviors. As OD as it sounds, that self injury behavior is not intended for self harm. It is an extreme example of a Stem. And we’re starting to at least get more recognition around the community for what stimming is. These SIBs. It is born of frustration and trying to essentially calm themselves down to get past whatever thought process is going on in their brain.

53:27
Ronald Doc Davis
They’re not saying, oh, I want to hurt myself. So you then take them for this evaluation. You’re now taking them out of their comfort zone into a foreign alien environment where really it’s actually making things traumatic on them, so you’re actually making things worse.

53:45
Brent Hinson
I have to ask this question. So you’re talking about the 16 year old girl, the attempted suicide, and you guys went back after the fact and realized that she had a disagreement with her mom, and you realize, okay, we made the wrong call about male or female? Is there anywhere where you guys can do those case studies like that? And they go into a database where people can read what happened in the case study, and what went right, what went wrong, or things to do differently so we can try to at least start to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again at the different agencies.

54:19
Ronald Doc Davis
I’m not familiar of any database that tracks those. What I can tell you is that those types of debriefings are very frequently the absolutely most well received aspects of training conventions. You’ve got Nicna, which is the National Council of Negotiation associations. I know there’s over 30 state associations, but some of them are combined like western states, I think has six states in it. And these groups, for the Negotiators, again, they have their annual conferences, and debriefs will frequently be some of the most attended and most well critiqued training. And it’s where teams are coming in and they’re debriefing their incident just like you’re talking about, except it’s live, as opposed to just being the paperwork in a database somewhere. The closest thing we come to that is it’s more just statistics and that’s the FBI has what they call their hostage and barricade system, Hobus, which is a database where they’re tracking statistics on all of these incidents.

55:22
Michael Warren
I couldn’t agree anymore with you. The NASA actually runs this newsletter, for lack of a better term, where people in the aviation industry, no matter if you’re a private pilot or a commercial pilot, and what they do is they collect the near misses and they tell the stories about how they almost had these bad things happen. Sometimes they were looking at the wrong dial or they didn’t check the map or whatever the case may be, but the idea is to try to prevent as much as possible the bad thing from actually happening. And Doc, I think you would agree with me that in law enforcement, sometimes out of pride for ourselves and for our agency, sometimes we don’t talk a whole lot about our near misses.

56:10
Ronald Doc Davis
Absolutely.

56:11
Brent Hinson
Well, it’s like you said with the agency down here in Florida, they had to pay out in that lawsuit. They didn’t really want to talk about it that much.

56:18
Ronald Doc Davis
Yeah.

56:19
Michael Warren
For our listeners, I attended Doc’s class at Aelita. If you’ve listened to this podcast, if you listen to me, you know that I attend a lot of training. I get to see a lot of presentations. I have very high standards for presentations, and Docs was one of the most impactful ones that I’ve seen. Listen, if you want to improve the quality of interactions between your people and people with special needs are people and just people, period. This guy right here is a wealth of knowledge, but the way in which he presents it and the credibility has when he does it is unmatched. It’s fantastic training. So Doc, if somebody wanted to find out about that training so that we can mitigate some of this risk, how would they go about finding out about your training?

57:12
Ronald Doc Davis
Honestly, the easiest way to get me my phone is always on. In order to not be murdered by my wife. It’s on silent from 1030 at night till 630 in the morning, Eastern time. But if you call twice inside of ten minutes, it rings through. Anyway, the cell is 561-846-1502 and the email is Davisrdoc@gmail.com.

57:38
Michael Warren
And folks, I just want you to understand the presentation that I saw. He included pictures and videos of his son. I don’t want to minimize this, and I don’t want to make this more dramatic or people think I’m overdramatizing it, but when you see somebody use that type of material, it takes this from the abstract world and it brings it down into the concrete world, because here’s a guy that’s a law enforcement veteran. If I’m being transparent with you, one of the things that I would worry about is if my child had contact with law enforcement based upon what I know about some of the training that law enforcement receives or even worse, doesn’t receive when it comes to dealing with people in crisis.

58:27
Ronald Doc Davis
In order to be fair, I’m going to throw Canada under the bus on this one.

58:30
Michael Warren
Their fair game.

58:34
Ronald Doc Davis
17 year old autistic individual goes to visit his grandmother grandma. Her property backs up to a school, and the 17 year old decides he’s going to go sit on the swings and swing on the school property. It’s on the weekend. No kids there. Two Canadian officers come up. They go out with him. He’s not identifying himself, so they end up arresting him. There’s no crime other than failing to identify himself. 2 hours later, the 17 year old kid is in an emergency room because in the cell for 2 hours, he engaged in self injury behaviors to the extent he had to be hospitalized. His family, in the meantime, had already filed a missing persons report, and the Canadian police finally figured out, oh, wait a minute. We have that kid. That’s the one we arrested for refusing to identify himself. One of the things that a lot of people don’t realize about the Autistic community is approximately half of all autistic individuals are nonverbal.

59:41
Ronald Doc Davis
They don’t communicate by speaking. The ability to communicate verbally in no way is connected to intellectual capability. You or your listeners can go out and do a YouTube search for Elizabeth Bonkers. She graduated Rollins College here in Florida and was one of the class valedictorians. She actually gave her valedictorian speech even though she’s nonverbal.

01:00:07
Michael Warren
Wow.

01:00:08
Ronald Doc Davis
In order to communicate, she has to type. You’ll probably be able to relate to this. Remember the old pilgrim typing? You got one finger, you hunt for the key. When you find it, you land on it hunting peck. Except with one, not two, one finger. That’s how she typed her graduation or her valedictorian speech. One finger, one letter at a time. And then when it was time to deliver, she stands there, hits enter, and the computer speaks for her. A lot of other nonverbal autistic individuals will either use American Sign language or what’s called the Picture Exchange communication System PEX, which is essentially pointing at icons. It’s almost like speaking an emoji, but pointing at icons to represent words.

01:00:58
Michael Warren
I would be willing to bet that there is a large part of the law enforcement community that knows nothing about those types of communication devices.

01:01:10
Ronald Doc Davis
Again, it’s something that we’re seeing a lot more awareness of autism nationally, but it’s still not where it needs to be. My autism class, I actually got certified through Iatalis to make it easier for various states to accept it and for the officers to get credit for having had that training.

01:01:31
Michael Warren
Doc, as we’re wrapping things up here, man, I personally want to thank you for your willingness to share at Ilita, the class that you did. Eye opening, eye opening. In fact, it was so eye opening that we brought you in a virtual academy and did some content because I found it so powerful. But for folks that are out there, listen, if you’re looking for a way to get your agency up to speed, if you’re looking for a way to improve those interactions, to make things safer for your officers, for the people they encounter, I cannot recommend highly enough Docs training. You will not regret it. It is money well spent. Your people will better. Your community is going to better off. Take time. Give this guy a call. Listen to what he has to say.

01:02:19
Brent Hinson
We’ll make sure that we put links, even though he says he’s not a genuine webmaster. We’ll put a link to your website where they can find you. There your LinkedIn. And also you’ve mentioned some other links throughout the episode. We’ll put those in the show notes, and I’m going to do my best find that YouTube video so folks, if they’re interested, they can kind of see that as well.

01:02:36
Michael Warren
Hey, Doc, brother, it was good seeing you again, man. Thanks so much for coming on here and talking to us today. I appreciate the brent, you know that old phrase, man, if I only knew then what I knew now. When I talk to people like Doc, I realize how little I knew then and how much better I would have been.

01:02:56
Brent Hinson
And like you mentioned before, we started recording another guy who talks something very similar to this chip Heath, talking about seeing people as people and understanding where they’re coming from. Seek to understand before being understood. I think that’s a powerful statement. I think that applies here. And I think if we had that mindset, we’d be on a different trajectory of where we need to go as a society.

01:03:15
Michael Warren
I think absolutely. If I were going to add a subtitle to the episode today, remember the old ladies on the porch?