Uncovering Hidden Symbols Of Hate

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 badge to allow members of law enforcement, public safety and first response a place to tell their stories and also talk about the cases that have impacted their lives.

00:25
Michael Warren
How you doing?

00:26
Brent Hinson
I’m your co host, Brent Hinson, and if you’ve ever read the books, the Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons, our guest today is kind of like that character Robert Langdon. You know, the guy Tom Hanks played in the movie version? That’s how I know him. He’s a pro when it comes to Ruins and Noor’s pagan symbology. But here’s the kicker. He uses that knowledge to help those in corrections and law enforcement uncover how certain symbols are being used as methods of hate by white power, prison gangs, neo Nazis, and racial extremists. Michael Warren as Jim Ross, one of my favorite wrestling broadcasters used to say, business is about to pick up. This could get know.

01:13
Michael Warren
When we started talking about the topic for this episode, I was immediately taken back to junior high and high school because back then it was real popular for kids because you had to cover your books. You remember having to do that, getting the paper sacks and do that. Yeah, I remember people trying to replicate rat and AC DC. All those symbols right there. That was a sign of being cool when you had those symbols on your books. Probably not so much in a corrections environment, though.

01:43
Brent Hinson
I would think not. I think this is going to be a fascinating topic because as I was researching a little bit this morning, some of these symbols, when looked at in one context, are used as hate symbols, but in another context they’re not. So it’ll be interesting to kind of talk about that a little bit and learn how these are being used in a negative way.

02:05
Michael Warren
We often talk about it on the podcast, how context matters, and I think that we’re going to find out that it matters even more with the topic we have today. So I’m looking forward to the conversation.

02:17
Brent Hinson
Yeah, our guest today is going to be very interesting to talk to. He’s worked in the criminal justice field since 2006 as a correctional officer, STG specialist, and gang instructor. He’s also an author, already completing two books in his jail intelligence series, including 2000 and Twenty’s Norse Germanic Runes and Symbols Field reference guide for law Enforcement and Corrections, and 2020 Two’s the Jail Intelligence Manual. It is our pleasure to welcome to the podcast Dave Schilling. Thanks for joining us. And man, I think you’re going to have some interesting things to educate us on, I think, today.

02:58
Dave Schilling
Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.

03:00
Michael Warren
You know what, Dave? I always appreciate, because when we record these things, we record the audio, but we’ve got the video going to help us with the conversation. Always appreciate it when people’s picture pops up and they’ve got a great haircut and they have facial hair. You have both. So I appreciate a good looking guy like you, man.

03:19
Dave Schilling
Well, we have to stick together. Yeah.

03:22
Michael Warren
Not everybody can pull this off. Just saying this look off right here. There’s a reason why we’re an audio podcast. Just say that.

03:29
Dave Schilling
I don’t have a choice.

03:32
Michael Warren
Hey, but, man, we appreciate you being here today. So we’ll kind of start you out the way we normally do. How did you come into this profession? What was it that drew you in? Your career path is different than mine, and I’m really interested to know what it was that said, you know what? That’s what I need to do.

03:51
Dave Schilling
Quite honestly, with corrections, I kind of fell into it. I had just moved to Rochester looking for a job. My wife to be at the time, her father had been in the criminal justice field. He was a cop for many years. And he said, well, have you ever considered working at the jail? Said, well, not really, but I’ll put an application in. Things just kind of worked out from there. And I found out it was something that I really enjoyed.

04:15
Michael Warren
I have a very different view of corrections that probably was formed more so by watching TV and watching documentaries than probably what is real. When I hear you say that, it turns out that you enjoyed it. To me, that sounds foreign, because I.

04:31
Brent Hinson
Can’T say the same thing. Mike.

04:33
Michael Warren
Yeah, seriously, the thought of it, I don’t want to say it terrifies me, but it scares the living bejeebers out of me. How’s that?

04:40
Dave Schilling
That makes sense to me. If you only watch television and that’s your perception of what corrections is, you’re seeing prison fights and mafia style stuff going on constantly, guys getting stabbed and all the worst things. It’s very dramatic. And the truth is, most of the day is you spend going around talking to people, helping them solve their problems, just kind of getting through the day.

05:03
Michael Warren
I guess I should throw out a disclaimer. Right here, right now, I’m rewatching the series the Walking Dead. And actually, the part that I’m in is where they’re holed up in a prison. So we have to add the whole zombie apocalypse thing to my previous, quote, unquote, knowledge about working in corrections. When you came into the field, when you first got hired, how were your expectations different than what reality ended up being for you? What were you expecting going in there?

05:32
Dave Schilling
That was kind of the hard part, because I knew enough to know that television wasn’t reality. So I went in there. Kind of a blank slate, I guess, really, I didn’t know what to expect. The first thing I met was a bunch of the quote, unquote, old timers that were there, and I said, oh, hey, how’s it going? My name’s Dave, and I got. Yeah, good for you. Go away, kid. People develop a pretty thick shell a lot of the time working in corrections. But over time, you prove yourself, you gain their respect. What was different from my expectations is just how heavily regulated corrections really is as far as what you can do, what you can’t do, and what you have to do every day to ensure that people get everything they need, that their rights aren’t violated.

06:20
Dave Schilling
There’s a whole lot going on behind the scenes that people don’t really reAlize.

06:24
Brent Hinson
I think we got an inkling of that when we had Mike Cantrell on not too long ago. He’s the host of the prison officer podcast. I think you’ve been a guest on there, and he definitely shed some light on what it was like working in the corrections field.

06:38
Dave Schilling
Yeah, it’s nothing like television. We don’t go around and shove people around or anything like that. That’s the very last option that we would ever go to lay hands on somebody. What I didn’t expect a lot of the time was to end up being more of a counselor a lot of the time, especially nowadays with the white hair in my goatee. All of a sudden, you, hey, dad, can you help me out with something here?

06:59
Michael Warren
Now you’re the old guy.

07:01
Dave Schilling
The white hair does help gain a little bit of respect, I think, in that regard, people ask you for some advice, thinking, well, he’s probably been through a few things, so maybe he can help me out. And that works the same way with staff, too.

07:12
Michael Warren
But you know what, Dave? You mentioned it a couple of times, and I think it’s kind of important to point out, you said you went and you talked to the old timers, and eventually you earned their respect, and they came around, I think even more so in corrections than on patrol. You’re not just trying to gain the respect of your fellow correctional officers. There also is an earning of respect with those that you’re charged with controlling. Because you have that respect, then it makes your job more manageable. Would that be accurate?

07:46
Dave Schilling
Oh, yes. That’s a huge part. Actually, I left out when I was describing this was Rochester. We’re about 125,000 people. The inmate population is, out of all that from the local areas, is fairly small. So you see a lot of the same people over and over. If you’re brand new, they’ll test you out constantly. But can I get him to break this rule? What’s he going to do for me? What won’t he do? The big key to that is, especially when you’re new, really go by that rulebook. Obey that. You don’t have to be a nasty person when you do it. Just be firm. It’s the tagline and correCtions. Firm, fair and consistent.

08:23
Brent Hinson
But I was surprised. Even, like, the smallest of things. I think Mike mentioned somebody asked him to bring in a soy sauce packet one time, and it could start with such a simple thing like that. It could lead to something totally grandiose.

08:39
Dave Schilling
Oh, yes. In the prison system here in the state, my daughter works there herself. It’ll start with stuff like that. Hey, can you do me this little favor? And it progresses on, and next thing you know, somebody’s getting walked out the door because they smuggled drugs in, smuggled cigarettes in.

08:56
Michael Warren
And it’s not always just administrative things that happen to the person. Oftentimes there are criminal charges associated with what goes on. But you brought up something. I got to ask you this. I don’t know how, as a dad, I would feel if my daughter came to me and said, hey, I’m thinking about following in your footsteps, and I want to do this job. Was that difficult for you to accept? Did you try and talk her out of it? How did that conversation go?

09:24
Dave Schilling
I didn’t try to talk her out of it. I trust her. So it was nothing I was worried about. I did get her lined up with one or two people who I trusted up there to kind of watch over, mentor her, that type of thing.

09:37
Michael Warren
Well, it probably helps her out a lot with your experience being able to share things that you’ve learned, to try and shorten that learning curve for her a little bit.

09:47
Dave Schilling
Well, that’s just it. The big thing I told her was, it’s like the movie roadhouse. Be nice until it’s time to not be nice.

09:54
Brent Hinson
Say that all the time on this.

09:58
Dave Schilling
It’s my original training. Sergeant taught us that. Right. In academy, too. And it holds true even when you’re not being nice. Still be nice.

10:06
Brent Hinson
God bless Patrick Swayze.

10:08
Michael Warren
Yeah, that’s right. But you know, I saw a meme here recently that said that the best thing that old police officers can teach new ones is how to get to be an old police officer. Passing on that knowledge gained through experience. And oftentimes, at least with me, it was gained through negative things that I did that I could pass on to people and say, hey, don’t make the same mistake that I made.

10:33
Dave Schilling
Spot on. When I first got in there, experience with dealing with groups of people was from years past, when I was in the army. So I’m like, well, okay, what’s going to work as punishment here? Okay, well, it’s got to be group punishment, obviously. Yeah, that failed utterly and completely. That’s just not going to work. Everything’s got to be very individualized there, just like you. Most of my experiences were learned by making mistakes, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything because that was the learning process. I needed for all that to really stick.

11:07
Michael Warren
We’ve talked about training just a little bit, and it’s been my experience, very limited experience, that oftentimes some of the most undertrained professionals in the criminal justice field are those that work corrections, and yet they’re the ones that have the most constant, most close up contact with the people that could get them into trouble, get them into a jam. How has training been on your side of things? Has it gotten better since you started? Has it gotten more frequent, or are there still some improvements that need to be made?

11:43
Dave Schilling
There’s always improvements we could make, and a lot of it’s really dictated on what the budget looks like. Overall, I think training has actually gotten a lot better over the years. We have a very robust FTO program at my facility. That’s really key to a lot of stuff, I think, is to have a really good FTO program, a lot of corrections. You can learn in the six week academy that there iS. You can learn theory of it. Where you really learn it is in that FTO stage, is where you’re out there doing it every day. It’s a lot different than being a police officer in the street, where you’re dealing with a lot of the unknown factors. I think, within the facility, you know who you’re dealing with. That’s a given right there.

12:26
Dave Schilling
I think the biggest thing to try to teach people is to learn how to develop the proper gut feeling, so To Speak, on, hey, this Feels like it’s sketchy. I shouldn’t do this, or I should watch out, or lack of a better term, you almost have to train people how to have a 6th sense a little bit. Wait a minute. It’s too quiet in here, and people that are parents actually pick up on it pretty quick. Yeah.

12:48
Michael Warren
That parent with a two year old, when things are probably going the worst is when it’s the quietest, because there’s criminal activity afoot, generally.

12:59
Dave Schilling
Yeah. There’s stuff getting smeared everywhere. Who knows what?

13:03
Michael Warren
Let’s talk about your early experiences.

13:06
Dave Schilling
Sure.

13:07
Michael Warren
When you were in your first few years in your career, what would you say was, maybe it’s a one defining event where something happened, and you say, well, that was not at all what I expected. And it completely changed the way that you went about doing your work or the way you went about preparing to do your work.

13:28
Dave Schilling
The one defining event was in 2007. We had a suicide in our facility, and it was a successful one. And to that point, they hadn’t had anybody die there for many years before. And I won’t go into all the details on it, but it should have been prevented. Probably. But it really woke me up as to, hey, I really have to come in here and take very seriously when we walk, what we call well being checks, just walking around the cells every 30 minutes or less, make sure everybody’s okay. And a lot of people skim over that because there’s ten other things you’re trying to do. But it really drove home that we really need to have the basics down and follow them, because if you skip over that, next thing you know, somebody could be dead. We don’t know.

14:17
Michael Warren
Especially when you couple the fact that there is such a large representation of people suffering from mental illness in our lockup facilities, because when these institutions were shut down and these folks no longer receiving inpatient treatment, where they often end up is in your facility. And so there has to be that constant check because you are responsible for those folks once they’re taken into custody.

14:49
Dave Schilling
Oh, yes, absolutely. PlUs, nowadays, with fentanyl and everything else that’s around, it’s almost doubled with how vigilant you have to be.

14:58
Brent Hinson
Now, I’m sure as far as becoming involved in corrections, there’s a certain guideline handbook. This is how we do things. But there’s got to be, in relation to your book. There’s got to be some unwritten rules or unwritten things that you have to pick up on as you move along in your career. Is that what you eventually found out?

15:20
Dave Schilling
Oh, absolutely. And luckily, I was a little bit older when I came into the career. I was about 35, so I had the advantage already of having been around a little bit, know how to talk to people a little better. It’s not a put down to anybody that’s maybe 21, 22 years old. But with that life experience, I think comes a little bit more wisdom, though, too. You’re a little more willing to just take people as they are rather than maybe going into how you think you need to talk to people. One of the biggest things I try to teach newer folks is figure out who you are, be yourself, then be that person all the time. You shouldn’t have to put on a different face walking in the jail than you do on the street as far as how you deal with people.

16:03
Michael Warren
And it’s funny that you kind of started the whole episode off talking about most of your day is spent walking around and talking with people. Sometimes that talking with people is gathering intelligence. Sometimes it’s doing counseling. But if you’re unable to do that, you’re probably not going to be a very successful correctional officer.

16:23
Dave Schilling
That’s spot on. Correct.

16:24
Michael Warren
And there’s an officer safety aspect of that. And in fact, you wrote a book called the Jail Intelligence Manual, that talking is where intelligence is gathered. So why don’t you talk to Britt and I, like, we don’t know anything because we probably don’t. What is the importance of gathering intelligence in a correctional environment? Why is that topic so important that you literally wrote a book on it for people in the field?

16:51
Dave Schilling
Well, I feel that topic is really important because first and foremost, it contributes to the safety and security of the facility. If you have a housing unit where you have a group of guys who are extorting the entire unit, essentially engaging in illegal activity, they’re in charge of the drugs that are coming in or trying to manipulate staff, any number of scenarios. That’s all stuff that you’re going to pick up. If you’re getting out from behind that post, walking and talking, you’re going to overhear conversations, you’ll do your cell searches, you’ll find notes that are written, and a lot of it contributes to the safety of the facility directly. And at the same time, a lot of it might deal with outside activity as well.

17:31
Michael Warren
Let me stop you there for a second, if I could, because you mentioned specifically you might find notes. They know they’re going to be cell searches, right? Why would they go and use that? Is it because sometimes maybe people charged with that job become a little bit complacent and don’t do as thorough of a search as they should? Because I’ve searched itself five times and never found anything, because I’ll share my experience here. I cannot believe the number of people in a correctional environment that will get on a phone and immediately after the little recording comes on and says, hey, just so you know, this call is from this correctional facility. The call is being recorded or monitored. They get on there and admit to a crime.

18:16
Michael Warren
Why then would somebody who knows that stuff’s going on, why would they resort to that type of communication device, the note to talk about criminal activity?

18:28
Dave Schilling
Well, what a lot of it is, some of it’s complacency. I don’t doubt that more of it is the fact that we have a lot of different things we have to get done through the day. Cell searches being one of them. People are going to hurry through that stuff. The other factor is education. People might not even know what they’re looking at some of the time. And that’s kind of where my book comes into play with. Let’s get some training of what some of the different symbology is about, what they might be talking about, and you might actually be able to make a criminal case out of it in some cases or contribute to the guy’s current case that he has going on.

19:04
Michael Warren
In these cell searches that you were talking about, have you ever developed intelligence that perhaps increased the safety of either other inmates or for correctional officers?

19:15
Dave Schilling
Oh, I would say absolutely. There’s been guys who have made threats before, and they’ve been pulled out of the unit, that type of thing. There’s been guys who have sent notes to each other for trying to form a relationship with inside the jail with each other. And that was something we also had to watch out for as well.

19:32
Michael Warren
Why is it important to watch out for that?

19:34
Dave Schilling
There’s a law prea, the prison Rape Elimination Act. So it’s one of those things. Inmate sexual activity, that’s one thing. Yeah, I won’t give any details on any of that as far as who, what, even when. But if we know that guys are trying to get celled up together for that purpose, that’s something that we really need to watch out for, because we don’t know if they’re both going into this voluntarily or not. That’s really the big thing with that. And we’re trying to avoid anybody being sexually abused. Priya has zero tolerance to it. So that’s something we really have to watch out for because we’re trying to protect everybody.

20:13
Michael Warren
You’ve said that several times, and it seems like a lot of your activity, if not most of your activity, is geared toward keeping the inmates safe. That’s the reason for doing the checks it’s for all these things. It sounds counterintuitive, but it sounds like a lot of the reason for doing the intelligence gathering is to assist you in that job of keeping the inmate safe. It also keeps the correctional officer safe, but it seems like there’s more benefit on their side.

20:42
Dave Schilling
Oh, yeah, there can be. The side of it we really didn’t go into a whole lot was once we start collecting intel on who different gang members might be, and we start looking at that, and where that affects things is not just within our facility, but once they get sent up to the prison system, that information gets shared with whoever’s in the prison system at that time. Ideally, it’s not always a perfect system as far as info being passed back and forth, but that’s the kind of thing that’s really important for the prison. And also they can document these guys and track them at the same time.

21:15
Michael Warren
Now, you had said that you get a lot of repeat visitors at your facility. So I would have to imagine that having a robust intelligence gathering mechanism in place makes it much easier for you the next time they come into your facility. Because I’m not starting with a clean slate. I’ve already got information on this person that is going to help me, because if I know they’re a member of a certain gang, then I don’t need to find that out. I can go ahead and start addressing it that way.

21:46
Dave Schilling
Yeah, correct. And where that all falls in is we have a programs department there. They oversee all the different inmate programs for rehabilitation, for going to gym, for all that. But at the same time, they’re also in charge of our classification system. So that type of info would fall squarely into that. And it’s a point system. And the higher on the point system you are, that’s going to dictate when you come in the facility how many days you might spend an intake where we’re watching to see what kind of activity you’re up to. It helps us gauge risk, really, is what that does.

22:19
Michael Warren
So what you’re saying is that when somebody comes into your facility, there’s almost like a temporary place that they go for the purposes of developing intelligence about the person in the way, almost establishing what their norm is. Is that accurate?

22:34
Dave Schilling
Yes, spot on. And when you speak of intelligence, it’s not just for criminal activity, but we’re assessing them for mental health. We’re assessing their medical needs. We’re keeping an eye on them just to see how they are behaviorally, overall. What are they up to? It’s a place where we can keep an eye on them a little bit closer, just to observe them for a few days.

22:56
Michael Warren
Brent, it’s kind of like my misconceptions are popping up here, because how often on TV do you see somebody when they come into jail, they’re just immediately thrown into a cell and they walk away and no one’s watching them and no one’s paying attention to them. It sounds like there’s a lot more thought, intentional activity that goes up at the very beginning of their incarceration that makes it safer at the end.

23:20
Brent Hinson
Yeah, and it sounds like when you watch it on movies and TVs, they’re trying to condense this whole thing just to kind of move the plot along, whereas we’re learning that there is much more that goes into it. Now, you mentioned something earlier about these notes. I’m assuming at that point, when you’re going through these searches and you come across these notes, that’s where symbology comes in for you. As you start to see maybe these certain symbols that you’re unfamiliar with, and maybe it takes you down a rabbit hole, because this is something that is very intriguing. I mean, you have to really do some deep research to figure out what some of these symbols mean, right?

24:00
Michael Warren
Yeah.

24:00
Dave Schilling
And I think the biggest thing I tell anybody is if you’re going into this, you can learn the basics of the symbols for the gangs overall. But to really know about one in depth, it’s more of a lifetime study. It seems like felt that way. At least. It’s not just notes that we assess. We’re also looking at. Inmates spend a lot of their time drawing artwork. A lot of really impressive artwork, actually. And you’ll find a lot of stuff. Well, with white supremacist, for instance, you’ll see a lot of Viking type symbology, different runes that are strewn throughout. There are hidden within it.

24:35
Michael Warren
Going to have to explain that just a little bit further. You said hidden within it is almost like a where’s Waldo thing, where you’ve got a larger picture, but there’ll be something hidden specifically within that carries a much more significant and specific message.

24:51
Dave Schilling
Yes. One example I can think of is a fellow who had. He’s still around, but he has a very large kind of a circular swastika tattooed over his entire back. And from a distance, you wouldn’t think much of it. It just looks like it might be some kind of knot work that’s interwoven together. When you get close to it, all of a sudden you have some runes that are in there. You have the whole reference to blood and soil, as they call it, within some of the old Nazi beliefs. You’ll start seeing images of soldiers marching. You’ll see all kinds of different things that start to pop out of it. And it’s all very subtle, so you have to examine it.

25:27
Brent Hinson
Well, this is where it gets kind of murky, because like I alluded to earlier, some of these runes are still used in non racist forms, and so.

25:36
Dave Schilling
Correct.

25:36
Brent Hinson
There’s some context that has to go into certain things, I guess.

25:40
Dave Schilling
Yeah. Discernment is key to all this. My basic way of discernment is if you’re looking at it and you start seeing World War II imagery come in there. Anything that says 1488, the 14 words of David Lane, for instance. Anyone listening the 14 words of David Lane are, we must secure the existence of our people in a future. For white children, the 88 refers to the 8th letter of the alphabet, the H for Heil Hitler. If we start seeing that type of stuff creep in any reference to Aryans, for instance, that’s a key indicator as well. The origin of the word Aryan actually comes from the early 19th, late 19th, early 20th century. It was out of a book actually called the Secret Doctrine by a lady from Russia named Helena Blavatsky.

26:26
Dave Schilling
She said that the Aryan race descended from the original inhabitants of Atlantis. Hitler liked that idea. He adopted that, and it’s been in play ever since. And it’s a myth.

26:37
Michael Warren
So you might find some of this symbology in notes that are passed between inmates.

26:44
Dave Schilling
Yep. Symbology or specific wording? Yeah.

26:46
Michael Warren
Okay. And then you might also find it in body art tattoos.

26:51
Dave Schilling
Oh, everywhere.

26:52
Michael Warren
How important, then, when somebody’s coming into a facility is getting information about their tattoos? Because it would seem that would be a very important place to gather information that is going to direct your intelligence gathering.

27:08
Dave Schilling
That’s spot on. Correct. Everybody that comes into our facility gets their tattoo pictures done. It doesn’t matter what tattoo they have. And the reason for that is tattoos, a lot of the time, could almost be considered to be like a fingerprint. They tend to be unique to the person. There have been times that tattoos have been referenced to from our facility to identify somebody who was found dead. It was maybe the only way they could identify the body. It plays into a lot more factors than just identifying a gang member, necessarily. There are really quite a few factors to that. Plus, like you also mentioned the symbology that comes into play with when you’re finding gang tattoos, white power tattoos.

27:45
Dave Schilling
A lot of them tend to be very specific to that, although a lot of guys, once again, they might have some Viking imagery, a big Viking warrior on their arm. Then you’re looking around at the fill and the shading to see, is there anything that’s hidden away within that.

28:00
Michael Warren
It would seem, too, that if you have somebody who is a repeat visitor to your facility, that any tattoos that have been added since the last time might be an indication on what has been going on in that person’s life.

28:13
Dave Schilling
Oh, yes.

28:14
Michael Warren
And that might a change in affiliation, or maybe one of the most, again, from movies, thing that people talk about are the teardrops, but they can tell a story about what’s been going on in that person’s life since the last time they were incarcerated. Correct.

28:29
Dave Schilling
What I’ve seen is, well, you referenced the teardrops, and that’s kind of funny. I’m not sure if it’s a state or a regional thing, but somewhere along the line, they became like the spider web on the elbow. They became fashionable, and you’ll see all kinds of people with teardrop tattoos, and they have no idea. And then you get a genuine gang banger in there who’s earned his teardrops, and he’s like, hey, what’s this crap?

28:50
Michael Warren
Right? You wrote this book on these symbols. That had to involve a lot of research and intelligence gathering. Obviously, in your mind, it carries a great deal of importance. How do you teach this type of thing to a new correctional officer? How do you get the message across? Number one, that, hey, this is something you need to do, and then here’s the way of going about it.

29:14
Dave Schilling
Well, really, when somebody’s a new correctional officer, I’m not concerned with that. They’re able to necessarily translate all that stuff, anything like that. What they do need is a basic familiarity with the symbol and go, wait a minute. I’ve seen that before. At least put the connection together that, hey, there might be something going on here. Let’s get that checked out. That’s what’s really going to be important as a new officer. They have so many other things that they’re just trying to get the routine down, for one. So we try not to overwhelm them too much. But at the same time, some of the best leads you get are from the new guys who are like, wait a minute. I just saw that in class.

29:48
Michael Warren
Well, it’s interesting to me. You said you worked on this case out in Utah, so your expertise is being used across the country when it comes to this symbology. So it seems like that this symbology really has the ability to give correctional officers a much firmer understanding of who they’re dealing with and what might result from dealing with that person.

30:14
Dave Schilling
Exactly. For what it’s worth, I don’t think all prison systems are created equally. Some states do have some prisons that are extremely violent. California, for instance. Florida. It can be more Midwestern type states, like Kansas. I get requests from all of those states as far as, hey, can I run this by you to see what this might know? A lot of it is when we talk about the notes that are written. Somebody might write an entire letter out in runes to another guy in the hopes that correctional staff are too busy. They’re not really going to look at that and just hope it kind of skims through the system that way.

30:48
Brent Hinson
Now, one thing that I think we glanced over a little bit is, why are these gangs or these people using this specific runic alphabet? What draws them to this language?

31:03
Dave Schilling
Well, the runes, normally, they’re called the Germanic runes because they come from that system of Germanic languages from way back, Old Norse, specifically, onto languages like English, German, the Northern European languages, that type of thing. And what it’s seen as is a tie to what they see as being a glorious past. We had the great runic Revival right before World War II in Germany, where runes were adopted and given different meanings by the Nazis. So a lot of that is carryover from that as well. Guys tend to stick with that. And really what I tell people is, when you’re looking for this stuff and you’re trying to find indicators of what white supremacists might be up to, don’t necessarily look for a new trend. Look for something old, because it’s going to be something old almost every time. In this case, a language that.

31:52
Dave Schilling
A written alphabet that goes back to roughly 200 AD.

31:56
Michael Warren
It’s funny that you said this, that they might write an entire letter this way. I think in a lot of this, I’m basing upon how I think I would react. I think a lot of times when we deal with people in that environment, we look at them as less than. We look at them as less than intelligent. Perhaps they flunked out of school for whatever reason, but they were able to go and learn this ancient way of communicating. They’re not stupid. And if we go in thinking they are, then we’re setting ourselves up to be taken advantage of or to get hurt. Man, it sounds like it requires a lot of work, a lot of thought, a lot of training, if you will, to get proficient so they can communicate this way.

32:43
Dave Schilling
Oh, definitely. And in some of the prison systems, when guys go in and they join up with a group, and it might be one of the Asatru groups where they’re practicing their religion within the prison system, before a guy is fully accepted, they have to go through a number of different knowledge tests, one of them being the runes. They have to be able to recite, know what every letter is that’s there, and be able to tell what the meanings are and be able to basically be fluent in it. So correctional officers are behind the eight ball on this because we have 10,000 other things to do, and we’re not going to sit and learn one specific alphabet necessarily.

33:22
Michael Warren
You have all kinds of other things to do. I mean, you’ve got to write your own reports and you have to do all these checks, and there are certain things that have to be done on a daily basis, but it seems like. Please correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like having a dedicated intelligence unit would be incredibly valuable in a corrections environment so that they can provide context. If I came to them and said, listen, I found this, I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it’s important or not, but here it is. And having that sage that could guide me, it seems like it would make things a lot safer.

34:00
Dave Schilling
I believe it does. The reason I wrote the jail Intelligence Manual in the first place was I always joke, because small and medium sized facilities don’t often have the budget or the resources to support a full time person, much less a unit doing that. So this is a way for people to get going with this with the resources they have at hand, without having to have fancy software being bought in, without all the other extras necessarily. What it requires, though, is one or two people that are motivated to do it.

34:30
Brent Hinson
You know what it sounds like, Mike? It sounds like being a parent, and there’s like some new trend or some new initialized song title, and you’re like, what is this something? Should I know what that mean? That’s what it kind of feels like.

34:44
Michael Warren
Here’s what he just kind of alluded to. And when you go back to the 911 hearings, one of the biggest problems they found with the American criminal justice system is that the agencies within the criminal justice system don’t talk to each other. And so how is it on the correctional side? Because maybe these small agencies don’t have the budget or staffing for a full time unit, but it seems like if there was some type of network where the jails and the prisons and all this stuff could talk to each other and kind of had this place where they brought in the information so that I could go and do the correctional form of Google to find out about this particular message. How good are these correctional institutes at talking to each other?

35:33
Dave Schilling
Oh, man, we’re going anywhere from zero to 100 on that. It really depends on the mindset of people. I believe in the almost 18 years I’ve been doing this, it’s gotten a lot better. When I first came into this line of work, a lot of people tended to keep that really close to themselves, thinking, I have something, and I’m not going to share it because somebody’s going to steal it. That’s the worst thing you can do, because any intelligence always has a shelf life on it, and if you don’t share it’s useless over time.

36:02
Brent Hinson
I mean, you look at the DNA database, the fingerprint database. I mean, those things are nothing but tools to help you solve crimes or to make society safer. Why we’re not doing more of those types of things, that kind of boggles my mind.

36:18
Dave Schilling
There are ways that correctional officers from different places can network. I would recommend anybody getting into this. Join one of the gang investigator associations in your region. That’s going to be key to a lot. Develop those contacts. Go to conferences. Don’t be a wallflower when you’re at a conference. Just go up to people, hi, I’m so and so. I’m from here, looking to make some ties, and people are amazingly open to that.

36:42
Michael Warren
Well, it would seem like, though, too, that internally, we need to make sure that when an officer brings us potential information, that even if it turns out to be nothing, we should be grateful to them and tell them, hey, you did the right thing. You saw something that you weren’t sure of. Coming and talking to us about it, even though it turned out to be nothing, was the right thing to do. Because if we roll our eyes at them and say, listen, any person with six months on the job would know that. I can’t believe you didn’t know that. That we’re shutting them down from bringing us intelligence in the future. And as you said, intelligence has a short shelf life. And even though a lot of the symbols are old, there are new ways of incorporating them.

37:27
Michael Warren
And so we have to constantly be getting that new information.

37:31
Dave Schilling
Yeah, and without that, I’d rather have a pile of information with 80% of it be garbage. With that 20% of good in there, we can sift through that. That’s our job to do that. Or if we are lucky enough to be in an agency where we have an intel analyst that we can work with, start shooting it to them, where they can start to filter through it. One of the two, I think what people should be commended for when they bring you information is don’t tell them, oh, it was awesome, or it was terrible info. Commend them for their attention to detail.

37:59
Michael Warren
When I was assigned to DEA, we did a lot of work with phones, and you might have a phone number that by itself meant nothing, but it’s when you started having compiling them together that you started getting an idea of what the picture looked like. And it seems like the same thing here, that you might get a piece of the puzzle over here. And it may not mean anything by itself, but in a couple of months, maybe I get another piece of intelligence over here. And now I start to get this clearer picture. But that has to be regular and ongoing in order to be most effective.

38:32
Dave Schilling
Well, one example is visiting lists. If a place uses an outside vendor for visiting, normally those visitors will be checked the night before. Just run a quick check on them for warrants, that type of thing. But then go back into your own database and enter them as a known associate, as a visitor on whichever inmate. And it doesn’t matter who that visitor is, because who knows what that link chart might look like afterwards if you’re trying to work a case and it.

38:57
Michael Warren
Might not even be for their current stay, it could be for a future stay that you’ve got the information. And now things are starting to make sense because we’re putting all the pieces together, right.

39:07
Dave Schilling
And it might not even be a part of this person’s criminal network, but, oh, wait, this is a place where they go crash. It’s where they go hide. Yeah.

39:16
Michael Warren
So if they get a warrant down in the future and I need to go figure out where I need to go and look for them, to gather them up, then I’ve got places that I can start. I’m not starting cold.

39:25
Dave Schilling
Some of that is the hardest thing, I suppose, really, to teach to correctional staff is it’s these little puzzle pieces that you put in there. You’re not going to get immediate gratification from it. This is something you might see happen five years later. That’s just the name of the game. That’s how it all works.

39:42
Michael Warren
Very rarely does a scientist go into a lab and conduct an experiment and come up with the answer right away, the cure right away. It’s something that’s done over time, putting little pieces of data together that eventually leads to it. But you can’t get to that point unless you’re doing the little pieces of data, the little pieces of intelligence.

40:01
Dave Schilling
Right. And the other thing that I really work to impart to people is, as correctional staff, we’re not cops. We are different. We don’t go in and just interrogate people in a unit. When we’re working, we don’t interrogate at all. We elicit information. If anything, somebody starts talking, just pop out a question, oh, what’s that? And you might be surprised at the answer you get, because a lot of guys, that appeals to their sense of pride.

40:29
Brent Hinson
I mentioned you have got two books that you’ve written. One was the jail Intelligence Manual. The other one, the Norse Germanic runes and symbols field reference guide. And it’s a part of what’s called your jail intelligence series. So are you working on something in the future that’s going to be coming out soon, or are you going to be adding to that series?

40:51
Dave Schilling
Yeah. What I’m hoping to add to that series is another piece to go with the jail Intelligence manual itself. It’s going to be called the Jail Intelligence Workbook as a tentative title. And what that’s going to be is when a smaller facility wants to start implementing some of these types of practices, it’ll be essentially a book that they can open up, go from A to Z. Okay, this is how I go through. This is what I have to assess. What do I have available to me? What can I work with here? What do we currently have in place? What do we need to add? Do we need to start adding a definite tattoo picture sequence to when we book people in to make sure those tattoo pictures are put in documented?

41:33
Dave Schilling
Once again, if you have somebody who’s knowledgeable somewhat on the gangs, I don’t care what booking staff put down for a description on the tattoos. I’m going to look at those. I’ll relabel those. That’s fine. I just want them to be in there. So it’s going to be these little changes.

41:50
Michael Warren
I know that you do a lot of training for your agency, but do you provide training for outside agencies on these topics?

41:58
Dave Schilling
Yes. Actually, starting with you guys here, coming up pretty soon, going to be doing.

42:03
Michael Warren
Some recording for virtual academy. What can somebody expect if they were to bring you in to do some training with their folks? What type of information can they expect their folks to walk away with that’s going to make them safer and better at their job?

42:19
Dave Schilling
Well, we’re going to talk a lot about simply how to talk to people and how to gather information within a facility. As a correctional officer, you’re not going to be doing a huge amount of what we would call analysis. You might just not have time for it. You’re going to gather the pieces. What we’re going to talk about primarily is how to go about gathering those pieces without putting yourself at risk. Essentially, we have to teach people how to elicit information. A lot officers want to go into this, and they’d love to go up to somebody and say, I know you’re a member of the gangster disciples. You need to tell me about what you’re all up to, show me what your manifesto is, and you’re going to shut everything off.

42:57
Dave Schilling
I’ve had that happen before where people have gone in and done that, and I’m like, oh, no, but I’ll go into the unit and work that unit a month later, and the guy will shoot up to me and go, man, what’s that guy’s trip? What are you talking about? Oh, he’s asking me about all this weird stuff. I said, just ignore it.

43:13
Brent Hinson
Sounds like he’s been watching a lot of TV and films.

43:18
Dave Schilling
Exactly. I’m just like, are you going to pull out a nightstick next and threaten the guy? I mean, you just can’t do that. If you go in there and you come across as overbearing, you shut down the entire conversation. The whole idea is to let guys talk freely. We have guys, on average, from six to nine months within the jail over that time. Correctional officers, yeah, they have to obey the rules and all that, but they become very comfortable around us, especially if we don’t appear that we’re listening to their phone conversations. All that. As long as they’re being peaceful and the place is cleaned up, life is good. So that’s really the key. It’s a passive method of gathering intel, but it does work very well within that setting, because the more comfortable people are, the more open they are with stuff.

44:07
Dave Schilling
Sometimes just for our listeners out there.

44:09
Michael Warren
When we talk about people, inmates becoming more comfortable, it doesn’t mean that’s a compromise officer safety. It’s just a way of treating people as people for the purposes of ensuring their safety and gathering information that may help with the safety of correctional officers.

44:29
Dave Schilling
Because the big thing is you’re going to come across, it’s like, look, you’re on the phone, you’re doing your business, you’re not beating people up, you’re not extorting other people, you’re obeying the rules. And that’s where my job ends, right there. Even though it doesn’t quite right.

44:44
Michael Warren
Well, I’m just going to throw it out there. I think that society would be a lot better off if were better at talking with each other and listening often more than we talk. This isn’t just something that I think is applicable within the correctional setting. I think society needs to do a better job.

44:59
Dave Schilling
Oh, spot on. Correct. Everybody has a voice and wants to be heard, but not many people are doing the listening, unfortunately.

45:06
Michael Warren
And this here is for my friend Brent, as some people that I look up to very highly, Greg Williams and Brian Marin like to say, most of the time people don’t want their way, they want their say. And in a correctional environment, allowing them to have their say, oftentimes can produce intelligence that is going to help us down the road if we’re willing to listen and we’re intentional about it.

45:30
Dave Schilling
I think the key word there is intentional. When you’re listening to a person, they understand you have to have your head on a swivel, look around, but at the same time listen to what the person is saying. If you have to yank out a piece of paper, jot a few notes. I think one of the biggest things as a CEO is to go in and when you say you’re going to do something for somebody, follow through with that and make sure you do it. And if you don’t get that done for them, it’s okay to say, hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that done, this happened, and just own everything that you do.

46:00
Michael Warren
Own your actions, man, you almost sound like that inmates are people because most of us appreciate it when people do what they say they’re going to do. And if they’re not able to just say, hey, listen, I wasn’t able to get it done. Here’s why. Just owning up to it. So if we treat people as people, we’re probably going to get better results.

46:18
Dave Schilling
Absolutely. And not everybody in jail is necessarily a terrible person. It really depends who you’re talking about.

46:25
Michael Warren
I suppose, but even they can provide information to you. They can provide intelligence. Dave, as we’re wrapping things up here, I just want to say from me, I appreciate those in the correctional field because I am a pretty self aware guy and I’m pretty sure I would not do very well in that environment because I know who I am and I know how I do things, but I appreciate the folks who do because you literally not only keep them safe, keep each other safe, but you keep society safe with what you do. So I appreciate your service, my brother.

47:00
Dave Schilling
Oh, thank you. Thank you very much, Brent.

47:04
Michael Warren
Seems like, and this seems to be a recurring theme, that our profession would better and we’d be safer if we just listened.

47:11
Brent Hinson
Listened. In Dave’s case, reading more and researching like you’re always, you got two books going at one time. So it seems like that’s a solution to many of our problems.

47:24
Michael Warren
Throwing it out there, being willing to share. It’s not enough to gather that stuff. We have to be willing to share with each other and not think that somebody’s going to get praise or credit for it. It really shouldn’t matter.

47:36
Brent Hinson
And if you would like to find out more about Dave’s books, we’re going to have links to both of them in the show notes to this page, but you can also go straight to his source. If you want to talk about your website a little bit, Dave, I’ll allow you an opportunity to kind of promote.

47:51
Dave Schilling
That a little bit. Oh, sure. Name of my website is runereseearch.com. Rune research. All one word. I provide a little bit of information on the classes that I give. There’s a contact form on there as well. So anybody that wants to reach out, please feel free. I am open to helping anybody. Very quick turnaround time on emails, that type of thing. The only time you might not get a response immediately is if I’m actually working and I don’t have access to that email. But that would be about it.

48:20
Brent Hinson
Well, it’s a fascinating topic just on its own and just going over. Obviously I haven’t read the entirety of your book, but just looking at some of the passages from it and some materials related to it. Eye opening stuff here.

48:34
Dave Schilling
Yeah, straight up History Channel type stuff. Hopefully a little more accurate.

48:37
Brent Hinson
But you can find links to all that stuff in the show notes page of this particular episode. And you can find all of our past episodes between the Lineswithvirtualacademy.com. David, it’s been eye opening and really a lot of fun to talk to you about this topic today.

48:54
Dave Schilling
Oh, thank you. I appreciate being on here. This is great.