Setting The Standard

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 bads to allow members of law enforcement public safety, and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about cases that have impacted their lives. I’m your co host, Brent Henson. Glad to have you guys along today. It’s going to be a fun one because we have a guest who used his three decades of law enforcement experience to help create a first of its kind law enforcement accreditation program in Arizona. And not only that, but he served 25 years with the Novi Police Department, a career that pretty much ran parallel with a guy who runs things around here. That is Michael Warren. You were a novi. He was a novi. Coincidence?

00:50
Brent Hinson
I think not.

00:51
Michael Warren
You must have been a detective in a former life, because you’re absolutely correct. But I do have to give a thank you to both you and to Aaron for the timing of the scheduling of this recording.

01:05
Brent Hinson
I have nothing to do with that. Aaron’s the guy.

01:07
Michael Warren
Let’s just throw this out here, all right. As we’re recording this next week, I will actually be at the Arizona Chiefs of Police Conference, and it’s kind of fortuitous that we’re recording this before, because if Kevin says anything that’s out of line, then he and I will handle that face to face next week when we’re together.

01:25
Brent Hinson
OOH, fisticuffs. I like that.

01:27
Michael Warren
What happens in Laughlin stays in Laughlin. I’m just throwing it out there.

01:32
Brent Hinson
Wait, so where’s the conference at? Is it not in is.

01:35
Michael Warren
I understand it’s going to be the last year that it’s not going to be in Arizona. That’s? Yes, because to go to the Arizona Chiefs of Police Conference I have to fly to Las Vegas, Nevada, then get in a car and drive down to Laughlin which is right across the river from the state of Arizona which it.

01:54
Brent Hinson
Makes sense that’s much more, I guess, attractive to folks going to conferences or a lot to do in that area. I can see it, what happens there.

02:01
Michael Warren
Yeah, but listen, there’s a word you left out. It’s cheap, and that has a lot to do with logistics. When you’re putting on a conference, I.

02:11
Brent Hinson
Can say so, but when they have those conferences, they don’t plan them for Des Moines, Iowa. That’s all I’m saying.

02:16
Michael Warren
They get the destination, know the only thing that they need to do a better job of, in my opinion, is planning the month of the year in which they know Arizona. Great place to visit. Not anytime except for November to February.

02:30
Brent Hinson
I can see that.

02:31
Michael Warren
I’m looking forward to the conversation today. This guy is a lifelong friend. Although when you did say three decades, I got a little nauseous, a little weak need, because if you’ve been working that long and I know what the minimum working age is. That means that our guest is old and then if he’s old, then I’m old too.

02:53
Brent Hinson
Yeah, you’re roped in there because your careers are pretty well parallel there for a while, so you’re lumped into that three decades.

03:00
Michael Warren
I like to think that I hit the pause button somewhere along the way when it came to my age, but others would disagree with me. So why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about our guest and then we will get the conversation going.

03:12
Brent Hinson
All right. Our guest today, as I mentioned before, is a 25 year veteran of the Novi, Michigan Police Department, joining the organization in 1993. Throughout his tenure, he served as a dispatcher, police officer, detective uniform sergeant, and was appointed training and Standard Sergeant in 2013. In 2018, he joined the Arizona Association Chiefs of Police to develop the Arizona Law Enforcement Accreditation Program. That’s a program he was able to take from concept to reality in just three short months. It is our pleasure to welcome to the podcast Kevin Ray. Thanks for joining us today, Bob.

03:43
Kevin Rhea
Thank you.

03:44
Michael Warren
Look forward to it. K Ray, it is good to see you again. Although you and I talk pretty dag on regularly. In fact, we talked yesterday.

03:52
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, I actually see you more now than back when I lived in Michigan.

03:56
Michael Warren
Yes. Now, Brent, I’m going to throw this out there. I’m on the phone with Kevin yesterday. Kevin is married and his lovely wife Robin, I have known equally as long as I have known Kevin. And I could hear in the background going, mike, you should start charging him tech support fees for all these phone calls. We were working on some stuff together, but I will say Kevin and we’ll go into our careers here in just a second. It’s funny looking back, I can’t really remember a time where weren’t friends. And I know that there was a long time before we became friends, but it seems like the most important part of my life you’ve been a part of and a big part of.

04:40
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, and I appreciate that. And that’s something that I’ve really considered over the last couple of weeks as were leading up to this podcast. And I affectionately call you for all of my tech support, there’s two ways that I could solve a problem. I could either look it up on YouTube or I could call Microsoft. Not Microsoft. Microsoft. I like that. Hopefully that sticks.

05:04
Michael Warren
Kevin, though, is an incredibly considerate guy, Bret, because you and I are an hour apart and that causes some issues for us sometimes. But Kevin is always very considerate about what time he calls me take into consideration because Arizona is one of those places where sometimes he’s 2 hours behind me, but there are other times where he is 3 hours behind me.

05:27
Brent Hinson
Yeah, that throws me off too. That whole not going along with the daylight saving time thing.

05:31
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, we’re really one of the only places in the country that actually get it right and don’t participate in daylight savings time. But, yeah, I do try to be considerate about when I’m calling back to the East Coast, and my role only rule is if I’m eating supper, it’s too late to call home, and don’t call me at four in the morning or I’ll call you at midnight.

05:53
Brent Hinson
Fair enough.

05:55
Michael Warren
Now, Kevin, I’m going to start off with you like I do most of our guests here. You in particular. It’s a little bit longer than some of our guests. You’re further removed from it, but what made you decide you wanted to be a cop? What made you decide that was the career path?

06:09
Kevin Rhea
You, you know, my wife jokes all the time that she know, middle aged and she still doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. And she always jokes that, I knew what I wanted to do since I was five years old. So I actually grew up in the city of Novi, went all the way through the Novi School District, and it just so happened that one of the Novi police officers lived in my subdivision and actually lived right across the street from the bus stop. His name, believe it or not, was Charlie Brown. He was a corporal with the Novi Police Department. And I would see him all the time coming home in uniform, bringing a squad car home, and I would always get an opportunity either before I got on the bus or after in the afternoon, to kind of pick his brain about what being a police officer was all about.

06:56
Kevin Rhea
So I knew very early on that was a career that I wanted to pursue, and so much so that his daughter had posted a bunch of pictures on Facebook last week. And I relayed this story to her when I was going into my senior year of high school. I told him one day, I said, Corporal Brown, I’m in my senior year of high school. When I graduate, I’m going to go immediately to the Detroit Police Department and go to the Detroit Police Academy because they accepted applicants at 18 years old. We’ll leave out some colorful language. He said, no, you’re going to go to college, you’re going to get your bachelor’s degree, and you’re going to come back and work for the city of Novi, which at the time, and even today, are one of the few agencies in the state of Michigan that actually require a bachelor’s degree for all their police officers.

07:45
Kevin Rhea
So naturally, I took his advice, went to Fair State University, got my bachelor’s degree, came back, and started working for the city of Nova in 1993. It was the best career advice I had ever gotten. I have no idea what my career would have looked like had I followed my own juvenile instincts and gone to the Detroit Police Department at the age of 18.

08:08
Michael Warren
Kevin, I don’t know how differently your career would have looked, but I can say with pretty much certainty that your pension check would have looked a lot different.

08:19
Kevin Rhea
Absolutely. If there would have been one.

08:23
Michael Warren
Yeah. And God bless the officers down in Detroit. Detroit, Michigan, is a unique state. Just throwing it out there where if a jurisdiction gets into such financial distress, the governor can appoint an emergency financial manager and they have the power to void contracts. Detroit got that way. They went to file bankruptcy and they cut their officers pay by like, 40%. They cut their pensions. People. And those are people I really felt bad for. You got some 80 year old retired cop and all of a sudden you cut their pension in half. Well, it’s not like they can go out and be gainfully employed easily at that stage. So God bless those folks down in Detroit.

09:07
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, it was very difficult for them back in the late 90s, early 2000s, where the suburban police departments, they were making four times what the police officers in Detroit were making. The Detroit police officers were making like $30,000 a year. And that’s just way too little money for the risk that they have to take on. And so, fortunately, at the city of Novi, were able to, in a matter of four or five years, hire six people from the Detroit Police Department and bring them out to Novi. And they have all served very honorably and very long careers. So it wasn’t a swipe at the Detroit Police Department. They do great work with the limited resources that they have. I just wish that they had the backing of their political leaders and their residents to really give them the opportunity to make what they’re worth.

10:03
Michael Warren
Kevin, I don’t know if you know this or not, but Brent is actually a native Michigander, actually grew up in Flint. And were talking before started recording how he’s been to Norfield Downs. And so were talking about that a little bit. But the three of us here on the podcast, speaking in broader terms, we’ve been to Detroit, desperate as times been in Detroit. There areas of Detroit that are absolutely beautiful. Some of the architecture and the buildings down there are absolutely gorgeous. And every time I see those things, I think to myself, man, what if we could just turn it around? What if we could make the investment where it’s a safe place for everyone to live, not just in certain little pockets? But it’s hard to get to that point if law enforcement doesn’t have the resources necessary if the educational system doesn’t have the resources necessary to produce that type of outcome.

11:00
Kevin Rhea
Well, you’re absolutely right. If you look at the city of Detroit as a whole nationally gets a bad reputation because of high murder rates and violent crime rates, and things like that. But if you look at the city of the whole, the downtown area beautiful. The stadium area, very safe. Greek down. Wayne State University area. Very safe, very beautiful. The problem is that has not resonated throughout the neighborhoods in the city of Detroit. And a lot of that has to do with the number of people that have moved out of the city of Detroit, moved out of those neighborhoods. So now you may have one house on a block that’s occupied, but you still have to provide city services to that one resident. And so if there was a way to get those residents to move into more populated areas and service those areas, I think that they would be a lot better off.

11:54
Kevin Rhea
But some of the financial challenges that they’ve had over the last 25 years has been a result of people moving out of the city and only leaving one or two occupied houses per block.

12:06
Michael Warren
But because realistically, the city is a city that is built infrastructure wise for a couple of million people, but you only have a few hundred thousand that live there. But all those things still have to be maintained. The waterlines still have to be maintained, the roads have to be maintained, the.

12:22
Kevin Rhea
Trash has to be picked.

12:23
Michael Warren
Yes, it becomes very expensive for a shrinking tax.

12:28
Brent Hinson
Yeah, much like Flint. It’s a General Motors thing. At least part of it is that when GM moved out, a lot of people went with it and know you’re left with an area that’s not very populated.

12:38
Kevin Rhea
Absolutely. As a matter of fact, my wife, all of her family, and she grew up just north of Flint and her dad was a mill right at Buick for 42 years. And once they closed down Buick City and Flint, that kind of led to the demise of the city of Flint. But hey, Michiganders are very proud people. They don’t want any pity. They just want to make things better for themselves and their families.

13:05
Michael Warren
Absolutely. So speaking of making things better, you have this plan. You’re going to go to Fair State. You’re going to have a law enforcement career in Novi, and you accomplish that. And you and I another similarity is both of us started off in dispatch, and so I would be remiss here if I didn’t give a shout out to a couple people that you and I work with frequently while were in dispatch. Tim Walton, who is a police officer now in South Lyon barb, it was Barb Hare and now I believe it’s Barb Bennett. We worked many an afternoon shift together. But I try to explain to people some of the unique challenges that dispatchers face. And I don’t know how it was for you Kevin, but one of the things I struggled with was the lack of closure. You take this hot call coming in, someone’s screaming, they’re being assaulted, someone is having a medical emergency, they’re not breathing, whatever the case may be, and you handle the initial gathering of information, you put it out over the radio, and hopefully somebody comes in and tells you what the end result of that call was.

14:23
Michael Warren
And I really struggled with that piece right there because I wanted to be a part of the solution. And I know were, but you just didn’t see the solution.

14:31
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, I agree. That’s a very frustrating part for any dispatcher, any communications personnel. It’s one thing to be on scene and try to create some type of order out of the chaos, but it’s another thing to be partially removed from the scene, but you still have to hear the disorder and chaos that’s going on, but there’s nothing you can do about it other than send people to help. And so our time in dispatch was very well spent. Those four years gave me, really a much bigger look at what police work was all about. So when it was time to go to the academy, I think that were more prepared than your average academy cadet.

15:18
Michael Warren
Now, Brent, this may seem a little bit weird, but one of the things that brand new officers often struggle with when they get on FTO is talking on the radio. It can be very intimidating, getting on a radio and talking, knowing that not only are your folks listening, but surrounding agencies are listening as well.

15:39
Brent Hinson
Yeah, I worked at a grocery store, and I had to get on the intercom to know we have a cleanup on aisle seven. And I was nervous about that, so I can’t imagine it’s so crazy.

15:49
Michael Warren
But Kevin, I think, will remember this, and you may remember this incident, too. Brent Wixham is one of our borders. At the time, we dispatch for the Wixam Police Department, and they actually had a gunman come on to the site and started shooting and killed the plant manager and had gone into this massive building. I know you’ve seen the auto plant buildings there, Brent. It’s huge, and you don’t know where he’s at. And we had some dispatchers working, and as soon as I heard about it, I go in. Kevin comes in. My man Kevin, always looking out for his partners. I will never forget. My man comes in, and he’s got a tray of drinks that are just filled with caffeine, because we still don’t know where the guy’s at. We know this is going to be a long haul. And we sit down, we start working this.

16:39
Michael Warren
And Brent, you’ve worked radio as a DJ, and oftentimes you try to paint word pictures for people. Imagine you’ve got your officers on that type of scene, and you’re hearing one of them say, oh, he just popped out of the glass part of the factory, and he’s firing at the expressway. And all I see is my console. Everybody that’s on scene can see a part of the building. They can hear things that we can’t, and you as a dispatcher trying to take that information in and turn it from information into intelligence, something that can be acted upon. Kevin, I know you always advocated for this dispatchers. They need to get out in the city and see what is going on. Not necessarily going on the hot calls, but getting that visual of what we’re talking about on the radio. Hey, if they say that they’re northbound on Novi Road at Twelve Mile, I need to know what that looks like because how populated it is may change what our response, what we’re going to send out there.

17:40
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, absolutely. I was a big advocate of, especially when I became a supervisor, of getting the dispatchers out in the patrol car a couple of times a month, just for two or 3 hours, not only to get some of that geography that you were talking about, when they do get a call, they’re not looking at a map. They can actually picture in their mind what that area looks like, but also to build camaraderie with the officers. It’s not like you’re sitting on the other end of the radio and these are like nameless, faceless people that you’re sending into these difficult calls. These are friends, these are colleagues, these are people that you care about and you’re concerned about. So being able to really forge that bond between the dispatcher and the police officer is really important.

18:31
Michael Warren
The time in dispatch was limited because eventually were promoted to police officer and went to Wayne County Regional Police Academy after, I think it was 17 weeks at the time. And after 17 weeks and 12,436 push ups later, we graduated from the police academy. And I think it’s funny, one of the things that stuck out to me at the police academy had nothing whatsoever to do with our learning or training. It had to do with that time before morning know, that morning formation we had. And there was one question that was always asked every single morning. Do you happen to remember what that question was?

19:16
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. Where was Eric Tapia?

19:18
Michael Warren
Yeah. Where’s Tapia? And Tapia sat beside me. And sat behind you in the police academy. Right. Because it’s all alphabetical order. Tapia ended up getting hired by Novi, but he wasn’t hired at the time. But we had to be there really early. Okay. And we started off with PT, which means you had to be in your PT uniform. And every single day he showed up with like two minutes to spare. But what uniform was he wearing?

19:46
Kevin Rhea
He was wearing his regular class uniform.

19:49
Michael Warren
Except for the white socks. You had to wear white socks at PT. You had to wear colored socks in class. That’s the only part of his PT uniform that he had pre positioned on his body. And every single day we wondered how many pushups Eric Tapia was going to cost us because and we could see him. You couldn’t see necessarily Eric Tapia because it was dark in the morning. All you could see is he ran across the parking lot were these flashes of white from his socks as he’s running across there, trying to make it in time.

20:23
Kevin Rhea
You said earlier 12,000 push ups. We probably would have only done about six, but we did another six for Tapia.

20:31
Michael Warren
Exactly. Listen, there’s some you know you’re going to get no matter what you do, right? But there were some that were attributed to one person and one person only. And then he ends up getting hired by Novi, and the three of us ended up going through the FTO program together. Eric retired recently. It’s so much fun when you see people like that you have those shared experiences with. When you look back on your experience, and we talked about this a couple times, when you look back over your career, and for my listeners out there, I want you to understand that Kevin did some super high quality work. Kevin served not only as a police officer, he served as a detective, he served as a supervisor. He got our agency through the accreditation process. Not just one, but twice. He’s done some incredible work. So when I asked Kevin this question, I was a little surprised by his answer.

21:30
Michael Warren
And I asked Kevin, what call was it, what incident, what case was it that had tremendous impact on you? Your answer? I don’t want to say it’s a routine type call, but the reality is we handle a lot of this type calls in law enforcement. So why don’t you talk us through this incident that made such an impact on you?

21:55
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, so there’s a few that come to mind, but when you and I were talking, the one that immediately popped into my mind is we all go on hot calls. We all go on death investigations, homicide scenes, bank robberies, other armed robberies. That’s all good stuff. And you remember those calls. You remember those calls for the rest of your life. I remember every death investigation scene I’ve ever been on, and I can remember the position of the body, and I can remember details about those death investigations that I’ve been on. But the one that really stood out was there was a woman that was married to a very influential deacon in the local church. He was a very high profile guy, and he had been both physically and mentally abusing her for years. Finally, one day she got the courage to come into the police department.

22:55
Kevin Rhea
And I got assigned the call because it was in the area that I was working. And so I sat down and I talked to this lady for hours. Come to find out, I was able to build enough probable cause to actually go up and make an arrest of her husband. What that did was that bought her enough time to get out of that situation. And again, those domestic situations are something that police officers go on every day, but it’s the ones that you can make a difference. Give them the space and the opportunity to go to a shelter, get out of that situation, take the kids with them and really kind of set her up for success in the future by getting her out of that situation. There’s no doubt in my mind that the abuse would have continued had she stayed.

23:47
Michael Warren
You and I, we worked with some old cops who, in retrospect now, when I was calling them old cops, they’re younger than you and I are right now. But when they would talk about responding to domestics in the old days, that was the days before domestic violence laws, where in order to make an arrest, a misdemeanor arrest, the misdemeanor had to occur in your presence. Very rarely do these domestic assaults occur in the presence of the officer. And they would talk about how you would go, and they would try to goad the man into taking a swing at them, because if the man did that, then they can arrest him for that, and they can provide that safety for the female. And listen, folks, I know that males can be abused, but we’re speaking in generalities. Generally speaking, females tend to be the victims on these types of calls.

24:40
Michael Warren
Oftentimes Kevin and I’m guilty of this whenever we would respond on a domestic, and I would even go so far to say when we responded on a domestic, that was a lobby call, because that means it’s not ongoing. It’s probably a late report. Hey, she’s probably coming in to report something from two weeks ago. It oftentimes put me in a bad mood before I even got there. So how was it that you were able to spend that amount of time with this lady in order to get enough information to do what needed to be done legally and for her?

25:16
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, well, I guess I just have the dispatchers to thank for that, because they gave me the opportunity. They took calls that were in my district and gave them to other officers to take and also kudos to my supervisors at the time who realized the significance of the case not only from a safety perspective for this woman and her children, but also the high profile nature of the suspect. I really have them to thank. And she was able to get out of that situation. And literally every year on the day that she came in to make the initial complaint, she would call me. She would come into the police department. I actually ran into her one time. I stopped her for speeding, and she’s like, you don’t remember me, do you? I go, yeah, you’re the one that sends me a card every year thanking me.

26:10
Kevin Rhea
Just as much as we hope to make a difference in people’s lives, people remember that because I used to tell my officers all the time when I was a supervisor, that people don’t call the police to tell them that they’re having a good day. They call the police on their worst day. They call the police when they need help, not when they think they need help.

26:36
Michael Warren
We’re going to talk about domestic violence in generalities here because you said some things in this story that stuck out to me. Oftentimes the presence of children in a relationship will often give a victim pause in reporting the violence. I’m pretty sure that you saw it, that there’s this dual role that the suspect, the assailant plays. It’s not just partner or husband or wife, whatever the case may be, but they’re also parent co caregiver. Why would kids then make it? Because we want to protect our kids. Why would that cause somebody to hesitate to call the police or to seek help for these things?

27:24
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. Because they don’t leave bad situations because of their kids, and they don’t want their kids to be subjected to a lot of the rhetoric that goes along with one spouse leaving the home or another spouse being arrested for domestic violence. Even after this suspect was released, I still had to go back up there a couple more times because he was trying to get to the kids and things like that. So the kids can often be used as a weapon by one parent against another.

28:00
Michael Warren
For our listeners, I encourage you to pay more attention to the news. In some cases, they will exact revenge against their partner by taking the kids, kidnapping the kids. But there are times in extreme cases where they will actually cause the death, they will kill their kids in order to get back at their just can’t I can’t wrap my head around that.

28:31
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. I just had just last month, a friend of mine from college when I went to Ferris, his daughter had five kids, and she was involved in a murder suicide where her boyfriend had killed her, and none of the kids killed her and then killed himself. And so now this friend of mine from college is 55 years old, and he’s raising his five grandkids.

29:00
Michael Warren
It’s bad enough if you call and report the domestic violence and one parent’s taken away, and now you’re left with one. In that case right there, it meant both parents are gone, and none of us have a crystal ball that we can look at and say, well, you know what? If there had been earlier intervention, perhaps it hadn’t gotten to that point. But the truth of the matter is it’s more likely that it wouldn’t have gotten to that point if there had been some type of early intervention in that troubled relationship.

29:31
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. And that’s why I really encourage any of the police officers that are listening to really take that part of your job seriously. You’re part of being the warrior. Is. Important when it comes time to exert your influence. The warrior mindset is important, but at the end of the day, you’re a guardian of the community as well. So you have to really balance those two roles. And being a guardian of the community means that if somebody’s reaching out for help, you need to understand that they’re not reaching out for help because it’s Tuesday. They’re reaching out for help because they need help. And you need to listen to their concerns. If you can do something about it to make their situation better, that’s your job. You need to do it.

30:20
Brent Hinson
You said something earlier about the victim coming up to you and saying, do you remember me? How often does that happen to you guys where you run into somebody that you have helped throughout your career and they recognize you and they say, do you remember me? Does that happen often?

30:34
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, it happens a lot, because if you think about it, the only contact that a citizen has with the police department is maybe if they’re stopped for a traffic violation or if you respond to a call to their house. And nine times out of ten, you stop that person and you will not remember who they are by the end of your shift. But the actions that you took on that traffic stop will be a reminder for them for the rest of their life. So it happens very frequently. I’m not afraid to admit that people say that to me all the time, and I say, no, I don’t remember you. How did we meet? And then they tell me the story back, and then that might jar my memory. But yeah, it happens pretty frequently that people remember me more than I remember people.

31:27
Michael Warren
And then another thing that you talked about was the assailant in this case was a high profile guy, that held a position of respect and authority in the church that they attended. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a church. In fact, just within the past couple weeks down in Ohio, there was a deputy who was killed by her husband, who also was a deputy. Oftentimes, whenever there is any type of high profile aspect of the case, or if there is a livelihood aspect of the case, that is another thing that can give someone pause in reporting this. She was reluctant because she enjoyed her church. She enjoyed the relationships she had at church. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for this deputy down in Ohio, because they worked, they responded to domestics, and it ended up costing her life. So why are we, as human beings, so reluctant to admit that we’ve been a victim of something?

32:35
Michael Warren
Because it’s not like your victim there didn’t do anything wrong. But it was almost shameful to her what was going on to her.

32:42
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, it was. And that was probably the biggest barrier to her coming into the police department to report it to begin with. I do remember her saying, I shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right. I shouldn’t do this. He’s my husband. God put us together making statements like that. And so she was trying to make excuses for his behavior to try to kind of lessen her guilt of coming into the police department and reporting it. But she didn’t see the situation for what it was. She needed an outside objective third party to see the situation for what it really was and to get her help to get out of that situation.

33:28
Michael Warren
I for 01:00 a.m. Thankful that you were the one that took that. Because if we’re honest with each other, officers handle things differently. The same officer may handle it differently on a different day, depending on what else is going on. Thankfully that your supervisors and the dispatchers that were on duty that day allowed you the time to do what was necessary for that case. Because, Kevin, it had to be incredibly reassuring to you every year when you would get that thank you saying, thank you for making a difference in my life. Because it’s just that reminder that the good you’re doing isn’t always readily apparent, but it doesn’t mean that you’re not doing good.

34:14
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, it did. It did feel good. And that’s why this incident happened in 1998. And I still remember it now in 2023. So whenever you can make a difference in people’s lives, that’s what’s really important. I mean, all the other stuff is important, but you go to an accident scene, then it may be a 16 year old driver who just got their driver’s license, and this is their first collision, and they’re traumatized. Just being able to be there to make a difference in people’s lives and follow up a couple of days later with a phone call. Hey, just checking on you to make sure you’re okay. That makes all the difference in the world.

34:57
Michael Warren
Absolutely. Because Kevin was such a go getter, he did end up becoming a detective. Did some great work there and then because he not only does great work, he’s also a smart guy. He got promoted. One of the things I wanted to talk to you now about was your role in training and standards, specifically as it relates to being the accreditation manager for those who maybe aren’t aware of what that is, what is accreditation all about? And I always say the word wrong. It’s accreditation, but I can’t get my tongue to work. Accreditation.

35:29
Kevin Rhea
It is accreditation. Accreditation is making sure that you are following a set of best practices for the safe, efficient, effective, nondiscriminatory delivery of professional law enforcement services. Think I’ve said that before?

35:46
Michael Warren
No. It sounds like you may have given that spiel a time or two.

35:49
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. So what it means is we have a set of standards, whether it is a state level accreditation program or whether it’s the national kalia accreditation program. We have a set of standards of best practices that we think are germane to all police departments either in the state or across the nation. And we determine that if agencies put these standards in their policy manual and then show proof that they’re actually following their policy, that it’s going to make them more effective and efficient, and it’s also going to decrease their liability in the future because officers are following their policy. They’re not just making stuff up as they go along.

36:31
Michael Warren
Would it be safe to say that the process is designed to ensure that agencies aren’t just saying that they’re doing all these things right? They actually have to show proof that they’re doing things right. It doesn’t matter what the policy says. It matters what you do.

36:49
Kevin Rhea
Oh, absolutely. If you look at some of the high profile incidents that have occurred across the country, they typically come from agencies that have not held any type of accreditation. If you look at 2020 and all the incidents that occurred in the state of Minnesota has zero accredited agencies. They do not have a state program and they do not have agencies in the program.

37:15
Brent Hinson
So so there’s no nationwide standard that everyone has to adhere to.

37:19
Kevin Rhea
There is mean. We can go into semantics. We can go into some of the presidential executive orders. Actually, the Department of justice, as a result of a presidential executive order last May of 22 by President Biden, he directed the Department of justice to come up with national standards. And the problem with national standards is the federal government can police the federal government. The federal government can’t necessarily police state and local police departments unless they’re put under some type of federal review or federal consent decree. And so the way that the federal government is working through some of these national standards issues is by working through the state accreditation programs and also the national accreditation program to try to make sure that those entities incorporate those national standards into their standards manual.

38:21
Michael Warren
I want to talk to you about Sergeant Kevin Ray. When it came to the accreditation of our agency, how would you describe the workload that was necessary for you to complete in order to make sure that it not only was attained, but it was retained over the course of time?

38:41
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, so let me just back up a few years to where I was in the detective Bureau, and I think this is important to point out. When I was in the detective bureau at the same time as Michael Brent, like you said, our career paths mirrored one another. We were both dispatchers. We were both police officers at the same time, went to the academy together. We were both in the detective bureau at the same time. Michael was working as a task force officer and I was teaching Dare in the middle school and elementary schools. So again, you can see kind of the divergence of our career there where Michael went more to the warrior side of the aisle and I went more to the guardian side of the aisle. But were both promoted to road sergeant within a year of each other. And then Michael was the first training and standard sergeant, responsible for all the training supervision of our record section and everything that has to do with that.

39:43
Kevin Rhea
It was a new position. It was created specifically for Michael in mind. And then after Michael served a few years in that position, I was the second one. And to tell you that it’s easier to create a position, it’s easier to be brand new when you start a new position than it is to be the guy that follows the guy that started it. So I definitely had my hands full when I went into that role as training and standard sergeant, having to follow up on Michael and the success that he had in that role. But right about the time that transition was taking place, we had gone through an extensive study of the police department to figure out the best ways to utilize our staff. And the one item that hadn’t been checked off by Michael was accreditation. I think he was a little afraid.

40:36
Michael Warren
Of that because that would be an accurate statement.

40:42
Kevin Rhea
Because at the time, the national accreditation program, Kalia, was 482 standards. And we’re not talking about just 482 standards, because a lot of standards had multiple bullet points. So you’re really talking well over 1000 different data points that we had to meet in our policies. And so with the policy manual that Michael created, I was able to take those standards, develop any new policies that were required, get them signed off by the chief, get them implemented, get people trained on them. And then were able to start to develop proofs of compliance, showing that not only do we have the policy, but we’re actually following the policy. So it’s one thing to talk the talk, it’s another thing to show that you’re actually walking the walk, saying it like that.

41:30
Brent Hinson
It sounds, well, that you follow this and this. But as a whole, that’s got to be incredibly difficult. You have to get all these standards together, have the chief sign off, and then get people to comply to those standards. I mean, that’s a lot of work.

41:42
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, right, it is. And like I tell people, a lot of times, if you’re the accreditation manager, you may not be able to find a proof of compliance. Say, for example, you arrest somebody and you put them in the backseat of your car and you seatbelt them in and you bring them to the station. Well, what’s missing a lot of the time is the fact that in your report, it doesn’t say that you seatbelted them into the backseat. And so cops are very good at doing their job. It is the most honorable profession that I am so fortunate to have been a part of. Cops are very good at doing their job. Cops are very bad at documenting what they do. And so, fortunately, through some of the training that Michael had already given on report writing, we would do report writing training every year.

42:35
Kevin Rhea
We saw a lot of benefit of that. Writing good reports is really the most important part of a police officer’s job. And they don’t even realize, know, the number of times that I pulled my firearm out of my holster during my career pales in comparison to the number of times that I picked up this pen and wrote a report. By writing good reports, we saw a lot of positive effects. Michael, we saw our court time go down because defense attorneys didn’t have anything to challenge in our police reports because the police reports were solid. So there was an economic benefit back to the police department where we could redistribute some of that court time over time and move it to another place. So there was a lot of benefit to the police department to writing good reports. And the biggest benefit was in the accreditation process, because just like I talked about, the police officers may not write that they seatbelted the prisoner into the backseat of the car.

43:32
Kevin Rhea
That was one of the standards. And so how do you get officers to comply with that? Well, you tell the sergeants, hey, the next time somebody gets arrested, this is what I need the report to say. And it kind of sounds like you’re gaming the system a little bit, but what you’re doing is you’re creating that culture of competence within the organization because the officer is going to be told to put it in his report the next time. The next time he’s going to put it in a report, and the next time, he’s going to put it in a report, and then the supervisor is going to start kicking back reports to other officers that don’t have it in there. So really, by telling them what they need to put in the report to satisfy a standard, they are really creating a culture of competence within the organization.

44:13
Brent Hinson
Was that easy, too? Because I got to think, if you’ve been on the job, let’s say, 20 years, and somebody, a young buck such as yourself back in the day says, you’ve got to do this now, why? I don’t want to do this. I’ve been doing this the other way my whole career, and it’s been working out fine. Who are you to tell me this?

44:29
Kevin Rhea
Well, that’s why they give supervisors stripes. At the end of the day, your job as a supervisor is to make sure that your officers are following the policies. And if they’re not following the policies, it’s important that you hold them accountable until they follow those policies.

44:48
Michael Warren
Now, Brent, I’m going to speak selfishly for a second here because Kevin just talked about some of the benefits of the program. From my perspective, the biggest benefit is that there are training requirements inside the standards. It is much easier to get approval from the administration for certain trainings if you can say, hey, listen, we got to do it. We can’t finish the process. Because before that it was me coming to it and trying to justify it. If it’s mandated, all I got to do is just point to that and that’s all the justification that’s needed. So it actually improved the quality of our training and as a result, it improved the quality of our officers. It improved the quality of their actions and their decision making, which just goes back and you get better proofs then for this. So it really is this thing that it tends to build momentum and it takes a little bit of time.

45:48
Michael Warren
I mean, Kevin will tell you he beat his head against the wall many a day trying to get people on board with this. We were fortunate in our agency that there was unwavering support from the top. And as long as you have that consistent support, it makes the job easier. It doesn’t make it easy. It makes it easier. And then when you’ve got somebody like Kevin who’s dedicated to the process, and I would propose that even more so than being dedicated to the process, kevin was dedicated to the people in our agency. And he recognized, he saw ahead, he saw things that other people didn’t see. And because he had their best interest at heart, eventually he was able to win them over.

46:35
Kevin Rhea
Well, and I appreciate that and you’re absolutely right. What the accreditation process ultimately does is it forces those difficult conversations between the supervisor and the police officer. A lot of times you could have supervisors on a twelve hour shift and they go their entire day without seeing every officer that’s on their shift. So it really forces these difficult conversations between the supervisor and the patrol officer. And at the end of the day, it makes them better supervisors. As a matter of fact, next week, while Michael’s at the conference, we have Jack Enter coming in to speak to all the Arizona Chiefs. And if you’ve ever heard, or if you’ve never heard Jack Enter, I would encourage you to. He has a book out there called Challenging the Law Enforcement Organization and he is the foremost authority on bad supervisors. He and Gordon Graham are two of the know, my favorite saying by Gordon Graham is, if you show me a tragedy in law enforcement today, I’ll show you a supervisor, not behaving like a supervisor.

47:47
Kevin Rhea
So it’s really important that this accreditation process helps build some of those bonds and forge some of those difficult conversations between the supervisor and the officer.

47:58
Michael Warren
Kevin, you deemed this process to be so important that once you retired from the police department, you took a new job. Brent talked about it in the introduction. But you moved to Arizona and you started a new job. So tell us what that new job is all about.

48:16
Kevin Rhea
Sure, absolutely. So I was sitting at home. I was about a month away from retiring. Like every retired police officer, I told myself, hey, I’m going to take six months or a year off. We had already planned to move to Arizona. We were building a house, and that’s another story I’ll get into in a minute. But were building a house. So we had already planned to move to the state of Arizona. But I’m sitting at home one day and I get a call from Bob Stevenson, who is the executive director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police and a former police chief in the city of Livonia. It was like 07:00 at night, and my phone rang and I said, why is Chief Stevenson calling me? And as soon as I picked up the phone, he said, Kevin, it’s Bob. Are you moving to Arizona still?

49:04
Kevin Rhea
And I said, yes, sir, I am. He’s like, I got the perfect retirement job for you.

49:09
Brent Hinson
Retirement job?

49:10
Michael Warren
I said, okay, I don’t think you understand how retirement?

49:13
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, yeah. What retirement job could a guy from Michigan who’s never been to Arizona have for me? And I was expecting him to know chief of police of some small five person agency up in the White Mountains. And he said, no, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police is starting an accreditation program, and they need a program director. And I think with your experience, not only with Kalia, but also with the Michigan Chiefs accreditation program, that you would be perfect for that role. And I said, okay, thanks for the information. I’ll check into it. So I sent an email off. I had a couple of zoom meetings with the executive board of the Arizona Chiefs as I was sitting in my office in the city of Novi. And the next step in the process was going to be I had to fly out to Arizona for one day, go through an in person interview, and this was about two weeks before I retired.

50:13
Kevin Rhea
And so I was kind of lamenting the fact that I had to fly out to Arizona for 24 hours and then fly back. But then I got a phone call from the president of the Arizona Chiefs, and he said, yeah, we can skip that in person interview. We want to offer you the job now. So I actually had the job with the Arizona Chiefs to build their accreditation program about two weeks before I retired from Novi.

50:38
Michael Warren
Where is that program sitting at now, as far as number of agencies involved, that type thing?

50:44
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. So just a quick note about our retirement system in the city of Novi. We had to have 25 years of service and be 50 years old. It just so happened that I turned 50 on June 13. I had my 25 years on the 14th, and I retired on the 15th.

51:01
Michael Warren
It’s almost like that was planned.

51:04
Kevin Rhea
Yes, it had been planned for about ten years. You have the retirement countdown on your phone. I always knew the date that I was going to retire. So we packed up the house, we moved to the state of Arizona. July 6 was my first meeting with the Arizona Chiefs, and when I got to the meeting, they handed me the standards manual and says, here are our standards now go build a program around it. Oh, we forgot to tell you during your interview that we want agencies enrolled in the program in September. So I had from July 6 to September 11 to kind of build the infrastructure around what an accreditation program looks like. I had the standards, the chiefs had agreed on that I just had to build the infrastructure, the budget, everything around that. So we had twelve agencies join the program that September, on September 11, 2018.

52:04
Kevin Rhea
And now the program has grown to 51 agencies, 24 of which have already received their accreditation. Plus we’re starting to offer different programs, a communication center program, a property and evidence program, because those areas within the police department that deserve a little more scrutiny. If you’re talking about the property room, the easiest way for a police chief to get fired and indicted is if something comes up missing from the property room. So those are the standards that are really most critical. So we created separate programs just for communications and just for property and evidence.

52:52
Michael Warren
And for anybody who’s listening who may still be doubting the value of these types of programs, not just in Arizona, but across the nation in Arizona. Kevin, your operating budget is underwritten in large part by a non law enforcement organization. Who would that be?

53:15
Kevin Rhea
That would be the Arizona Municipal Risk Retention Pool.

53:19
Michael Warren
Now, why would they do that?

53:22
Kevin Rhea
Well, they are the insurance company for 90% of the agencies in the state of Arizona. And what they have seen the executive director came to me last year and said, I don’t quite know how to tell you this. And I said, what is it? He said, Last year, the number of lawsuits that they had to defend had decreased, and the value of those judgments that were successful had decreased to the point where they were able to return $40 million back to the communities in which they insure not only in cash, but also in reduced premiums. So following these best practice standards will decrease civil liability on the agencies. And we can’t say definitively that it is, but it’s something that I’m working on proving that it does. I have my bachelor’s in criminal justice, my master’s in public administration, and I’m currently in a doctoral program at Liberty University.

54:29
Kevin Rhea
And that’s going to be the crux of my thesis. I want to prove once and for all definitively, whether or not accreditation reduces liability risk.

54:39
Michael Warren
All I’m going to say is that in our line of work, that’s what we call a clue. When you see the reduction at the same time that you see the increase in the professional standards of the profession, then it’s something that I think that people need to take notice of. Kevin has also started his own conference, so we’re going to be at Arizona Chiefs next week. I’ve also been blessed to have been out to two of his conferences that he runs strictly for those involved in the process or who are interested in becoming involved in the process. And Kevin puts on a heck of a show. But Kevin, if you could speak to any brand new chief and they’re coming into the job and their agency hasn’t gone through one of these processes, what piece of advice would you offer them?

55:30
Kevin Rhea
Do it as quickly as you know, there’s a lot of barriers to accreditation, but the agency desire should not be a barrier. Going back to our time at Novi, we would tell people just like what Brent said, how do you get buy in from the know? We would tell officers what to put in the report. And it really got to a point where I had to say, look, not everything bad that happens in your life is a result of accreditation. Because we would hear stories all the time, well, we only have to do this because of accreditation. Well if accreditation didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have to do this. Or we’re only getting accreditation to feed the chief’s ego. And really the officers don’t see the big picture. And as an agency head, you really need to see the big picture. And that’s something that was critically important all the time that Michael and I have found success in the city of Novi, every time we would get promoted, it wasn’t because of our ego, it was because we saw a bigger picture.

56:41
Kevin Rhea
And as a police officer, your picture is very narrow and rightfully so, making sure that you are able to make it through to the end of your shift so you can go home and see your family. And then you become a supervisor and the picture opens up a little bit more and then it’s, how do I keep my people safe so they can go home and see their families? And then once you get in an administration, it gets a little bit bigger and it’s more about how can I protect the agencies so that the people that come here and work are safe and can go home and see their family. The more you get promoted, the bigger the picture is, but also the bigger the responsibility is. So for police officers, when they talk about they only have to do this because of accreditation, it’s just because they don’t see the bigger picture.

57:32
Kevin Rhea
As to the benefits that accreditation brings to your agency. So if I were a new chief, the first thing I would do is go in and meet my staff and let them know that they’ll have my support. And then the second thing would be to let them know that we’re going to follow a set of best practices that have been proven across the country and across the state of Arizona to really increase their efficiency and effectiveness. So accreditation has gotten kind of a bad rap, kind of like the city of Detroit when we talked about earlier. Accreditation is really a time proven method of proving that you’re running an efficient and effective and nondiscriminatory police department. And it’s a challenge for chiefs, right. Because they don’t want an outsider coming into their agency telling them what’s wrong with their department. Right. So it’s really an ego check for the administrators as well.

58:30
Kevin Rhea
But you need to set your ego aside and do what’s best for the agency.

58:34
Michael Warren
As we’re wrapping things up here, I would say that I would remind those in positions of authority that the higher up you go in an organization, the more it is required of you to look up and outside the organization rather than down and in. You still have to look down and in. But that perspective has to change somewhat. And I think there also has to be an intentional change in perspective. There’s a big difference between I have to do something and I get to do something if I have to do this because it’s required by the standards. That’s a lot different than saying, hey, I get to be a part of this process that makes my agency better and it makes my profession better and as a result it makes me safer. And I think that if there’s a better job of communication that’s consistent then that’s the type of mindset that we start to get.

59:31
Kevin Rhea
Yeah. And a lot of administrators, they’re concerned that they may have a bad incident and that bad incident will affect their accreditation. And I try to tell the chiefs when I talk to them frequently that one bad incident or a couple of bad incidents may not affect your accreditation. Because accreditation is really all about process. Right. So do they have processes in place to handle the bad things when they happen? Because bad things are going to happen. We can’t avoid that. But do they have processes in place to handle when those bad things happen? And just by way of example, there was a large agency in the state of Florida who was accredited and they had an active shooter at a school and they had their accreditation removed for a couple of years because of that incident. But that was a systemic failure throughout the entire organization.

01:00:26
Kevin Rhea
So there’s a difference between a bad thing happening and you having the processes in place and a systemic failure from the leadership down. Those are the kind of things so one thing. That was different in the state of Arizona that I wasn’t quite used to is I come from a state where there are 582 police departments in 83 counties, and I moved to the state of Arizona where there’s 100 police departments and 15 counties. So geographically about the same size, we have 40% of our land mass is tribal land. We have more tribal land in the state of Arizona than any other state in the country with 18 federally recognized tribal police departments. So that was an adjustment period. I would just encourage all police chiefs to just jump in, put your ego to the side. If you have any questions, whether it’s about your state or the state of Arizona or even about the national program, feel free to reach out to me at any time.

01:01:34
Kevin Rhea
Also, we are fortunate enough in the state of Arizona to join an organization called Accrednet. And Accrednet is really a federation of all of the accreditation directors from across the country in one organization. And we meet monthly via Zoom and once annually in a conference. But we are fortunate enough to be selected by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to give a presentation at this year’s IECP conference in San Diego. And that session is called law enforcement accreditation. The intersection of effective policy, risk management, community policing and police reform. So that really hits the four tenets of accreditation and why you should do that. So if any of your listeners are going to be at IECP in San Diego, come check out our session. It’s only an hour. Tuesday, October 17, from 02:00 P.m to 03:00 p.m in room six A at the San Diego Convention Center.

01:02:39
Kevin Rhea
It’ll be myself, the directors from Ohio, Texas and North Carolina.

01:02:44
Michael Warren
And folks, for our listeners, I can’t recommend highly enough you go in there and listening to that and then hanging around after the class to ask questions, because the questions are going to be what guide you. But Kevin, I want to thank you for your service with the city of Novi, but also the service that you are continuing to provide for law enforcement. And Brent, as we close here. We also have to give Kevin a big thank you because he’s primarily responsible for one of our previous guests, Chief Jessup. I was introduced to him through Kevin. I’m hoping to goodness I get to see him next week at the conference because he’s a heck of a good guy and you can always tell where he’s at because he’s always laughing, which is a good thing because that means he’s always happy. But Kevin, thanks for coming on with us today, man.

01:03:28
Michael Warren
I appreciate it’s. Good seeing you. Can’t wait to see you next week.

01:03:31
Kevin Rhea
Look forward to it.

01:03:32
Brent Hinson
I’ve been sitting here for the past 20 minutes realizing I’ve been saying accreditation wrong all my life and it’s been bugging me. So thank you for pointing that out. And if I can make this quick analogy so you don’t have the most glamorous of the jobs, but it’s a lot like if I make it like baseball, instead of going out and trying to hit a home run every time, just get on base. We’re just trying to follow this set of standards. Just do that, you’re going to win the game.

01:03:54
Kevin Rhea
Yeah, I think that’s a good analogy. I may not be playing the game any longer. I may not be supervising or managing the players anymore. Kind of like that owner up in the skybox that tells the manager what they think.

01:04:10
Michael Warren
The best strategy would be an ambassador for the game.

01:04:13
Brent Hinson
It sounds like your strategy has worked out well for you and the agencies you’ve been a part of. And hopefully some folks are listening today and they’re like, wow, I got to find out more about what this guy is, what he’s really getting into. And we’ll put all the contact information where folks can reach out to you and find you on LinkedIn or what have you, and we’ll put that on our website at between the Linesofvirtualacademy.com. Kevin, thanks so much for taking time to talk with us today. It’s really insightful.

01:04:36
Kevin Rhea
Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. And Michael, I look forward to seeing you next week at our Arizona conference in Loughlin, Nevada. You’re absolutely right. It’s the last year. Next year you’re going to be spending a lot more time in the state of Arizona. So there we go. We brought the conference back to State 48 next year, so we’re looking forward to it.