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Episode 6 - Kathleen Dias (Charlie Pitt): Rural Policing, Quiet Pressure, and the Stories That Don’t Travel
150 Plays5 months ago
In this episode of Both Sides of the Badge, I sit down with Kathleen Dias, who also writes under the pseudonym Charlie Pitt. Kathleen is an award-winning columnist for Police1 and the voice behind The Rural Badge, a long-running project focused on law enforcement in rural and remote communities.
Our conversation moves through the lived realities of small agencies — isolation, limited resources, long distances, and the quiet pressure that comes with working where everyone knows your name. Kathleen shares how her background as a law enforcement spouse, writer, and researcher shaped the work she does today, and why so many rural stories never make it beyond local headlines.
We talk about risk, anger, resilience, institutional memory, and why “better” often matters more than “perfect.” This is a thoughtful, honest conversation about policing where geography matters — and where the stakes are often higher than people realize.
If this episode resonates with you, or if you carry a story that doesn’t fit neatly into a headline, I’d love to hear from you.
For more information, check out: www.beacons.ai/bothsidesofthebadge
Guest Links
- Kathleen Dias on Police1:
👉 https://www.police1.com/Kathleen-Dias/ - The Rural Badge:
👉 https://theruralbadge.com
👉 https://www.facebook.com/TheRuralBadge
Show Links
- Listen on Spotify:
👉 https://open.spotify.com/episode/1sf04Z0tAM682aN4FCibwt?si=0LagZVx6Q2WR2jOZxbPMTw - Listen on Apple Podcasts:
👉 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-6-kathleen-dias-charlie-pitt-rural-policing/id1843954017?i=1000747700997 - Follow Both Sides of the Badge on Instagram and Facebook
Recommended
Transcript
Exploring Law Enforcement's Hidden Aspects
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to both sides of the badge. Every badge has a front. What's talked about, what's photographed, what's argued over, and then there's the other side. The part that most people never see and rarely ask about.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's easier to judge it than to understand it. This podcast is about that side. The work, the judgment calls, the moments that don't make the news, but shape everyone involved.
00:00:28
Speaker
This is both sides of the badge.
00:00:32
Speaker
We can get going and you know after I kind of give this introduction I'll follow your lead. I can maybe fill in some gaps if I missed anything. so
Introducing Kathleen Diaz, aka Charlie Pitt
00:00:42
Speaker
Okay. Today's guest is Kathleen Diaz, who writes under the pseudonym Charlie Pitt.
00:00:48
Speaker
Kathleen is a columnist for Police One, where her writing on rural law enforcement recently earned the 2025 Jesse H. Neal Award for Best Commentary.
The 'Rural Badge' Project and Pseudonym Freedom
00:01:00
Speaker
She also runs the Rural Badge, a project focused on policing in places where backup can be far away,
00:01:07
Speaker
Resources are limited and everyone knows your name. Sometimes a little too well. ah We all know that one. Her work doesn't chase hot takes or easy answers. It's observant, grounded, and occasionally sharp in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who spent time in small agencies or big geography.
00:01:29
Speaker
This conversation today will be about slowing down and looking honestly at us because I do too, live in a very rural place.
00:01:41
Speaker
So, charlie or well, do you want me to call you Charlie today, or do we want to go by Kathleen? i can be I can be both. They're just different voices. It's all still me. Okay.
00:01:52
Speaker
I mean, mostly with the way we've been communicating, I've been calling you Charlie, so it was kind of natural for me to just spit out Charlie just a second ago. Charlie has very much become an alter ego, so that's okay. In fact, my editor once or twice when I've submitted something, it's been like, ooh, Charlie's angry.
00:02:12
Speaker
Can we maybe? Because I don't write for Police One, Miss Charlie. you know so like You're right. Let me go back and make that a little more professional. So yes, whenever you're comfortable with, it's fine.
00:02:26
Speaker
Okay, cool. now And that is one of the unique things I think about you is you are in a position where you can say whatever you want. And ultimately, if somebody doesn't like it, you can tell them where to shove it and go somewhere else if you want to.
Rural Law Enforcement Stories: Importance and Coverage
00:02:43
Speaker
Indeed. Very sweetly, as much as I can. But, yeah, that is honestly the great freedom of this. That's why I started writing under a pseudonym back in actually yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the rural badge account.
00:02:59
Speaker
And my husband was still active at the time, hence the pseudonym. But the whole point was to be able to say what I felt like needed said, um to tell the stories that I kept seeing in the news. But ah law enforcement stories from rural areas tend to only make local papers and local news channels, and they very, very rarely make national news, and you don't get twenty four seven coverage of them. on any of the, whether it's the big social media channels or news networks, and then they just disappear. You know, they don't they don't have the legs and and i don't I don't blame the news media up for that because their resources are limited as well.
00:03:44
Speaker
And I do feel like that's a little bit of an advantage that I do have.
Kathleen's Journey: From Military Brat to California Resident
00:03:49
Speaker
covering some of the things I do because um I'm not and never have been a law enforcement officer, but I am a writer and I have worked with the news media. I was not a reporter. i actually sold print advertising.
00:04:06
Speaker
And back when, I mean, like when I started, they were doing like wax rollers and light tables and X-Acto knives in the composing room. Okay. That long ago. And so I was writing ad copy, but it was a small paper because it was in a small town, but it was a daily with their own six unit press, like right behind my desk, really loud.
00:04:29
Speaker
And um the newsroom was just this big open bay over there. And I know how it works because the ad, the advertising is what keeps everybody else in the whole building paid. Right. yeah And so I understand what their limitations are.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I wanted to be able to pick up those stories, the internet being a cool new thing and get them out and say, does anybody else see this?
00:05:04
Speaker
Because it kind of felt like they weren't. No, and just having been, now now I've stated before and in other episodes I've had, you know, I'm active.
00:05:15
Speaker
I have said I'm in Colorado. I don't share with where I work, but I have spent a lot of time in small agencies and or rural agencies. So I i can speak firsthand that when there is a critical incident, you might see it locally. it You might even be able to make some of the bigger decisions.
00:05:31
Speaker
you know, news agencies for the state, but you don't see much outside of that. And it doesn't it doesn't last long. Once the the hype's gone, that's it. You know, even as the investigation continues, maybe even if it goes to trial, you might be lucky just to get the actual, like, local, local ah coverage.
00:05:51
Speaker
Yeah, and and it's not even just the news industry. Some of it's the mechanics of the small departments themselves. One example that I use... um is there was a young deputy who was killed in far northern California up in Modoc County in 2016. That's like if you don't know California that is about as remote as you can possibly get. It's as far north as you can get in California without being in Oregon or Nevada and it's all high desert and very sparsely populated and the thing is it's a really small department so
00:06:30
Speaker
The call that the deputy was responding to was actually one the sheriff was being dispatched to and his deputy beat him out the door. And he was greeted by a bad guy with a rifle and killed before he could get out of his car. And the sheriff was right behind him.
00:06:49
Speaker
They got into a gun battle. Sheriff
Experiences as a Law Enforcement Spouse
00:06:52
Speaker
wounded the bad guy, took him into custody. There were agencies, I think I counted like five county or state agencies plus federal agencies, you know BLM and Forest a Service and like everybody rolling for some of them almost two hours, code three, and obviously got there well after, but still they weren't going to stop until they got there.
00:07:14
Speaker
The problem is super small department, no one was empowered to talk to the press except for the sheriff, and he was part of the incident. Right, right. and and And you see that, I think, a lot just based on the policies. you know, a lot of people don't feel like they can they can share their their story. And it's not, I guess I've come to realize that it's not necessarily talking about your investigation or the politics within your agency and and and all that.
00:07:43
Speaker
You should be able to at least share your story and how things have affected you.
00:07:49
Speaker
That is a really cool thought. Yeah. Yeah. And I agree. i don't I don't think that one's personal experience is something that should be political.
00:08:02
Speaker
It shouldn't be perceived as critical of the agency or reflecting badly on it. If someone's having a hard time, um I can't speak directly to the officer's experience because I was the wife.
00:08:18
Speaker
I was not the officer, but I can say even as as the family member, as the spouse, I didn't feel like I could speak openly at all about anything that was going on, you know, whether it was about local politics or pay scales or critical incidents.
00:08:40
Speaker
I was to just be quiet. And I have to say part of the culture of I don't know if it's first responders in general or just law enforcement, but it's not just that like I can't talk to the news, but if something I say that is seems off gets back to his chief or his sheriff and they take offense, am I going to get him in trouble?
00:09:06
Speaker
um It's things I got older, It was very, very freeing to be able to start to let go of that. You know, my husband was involved in a critical incident and a fatal shooting in a really small town, again, in pra northern California, when I was still in my 20s. And my son was very young.
00:09:28
Speaker
And there was all the typical fallout after that in the small town politics. And it was really, really, really hard to deal with. Mm-hmm.
Marriage Dynamics and Personal Growth
00:09:40
Speaker
But the thing looking back was that I was mostly, I was afraid of making it worse. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense.
00:09:52
Speaker
um Now, knowing that you you spent a lot of time in California, let's backtrack and learn what happened before then and how you got there.
00:10:03
Speaker
where where's Where's Charlie from? Where did she start her her early days and what led her to make a drastic move, from what I understand, basically all the way across the country?
00:10:16
Speaker
um I was an Air Force brat. So my dad actually went in the Army in the 50s, stayed in for three years, and then spent 23 years after that in the Air Force. So he was a Vietnam veteran, but he was 30-something staff sergeant when he was there, he wasn't an 18 year old draftee. And he did not retire until my freshman year of college.
00:10:42
Speaker
So I grew up in cities and I grew up on military bases. So I was surrounded not by, you know, trees and things like this, but in Air Force bases tend to be in really flat, windy places. And there's a lot of metal fences and concrete and houses that all look just the same. And I mostly lived on base because my dad was enlisted. And so everything was within walking distance, you know, swimming pool and the library and all these cool things.
00:11:15
Speaker
um My cat is apparently going to join us. I hope you don't mind. no, that's awesome. Okay, this is Molly. Come on. Come on up here. Stop being weird.
00:11:27
Speaker
That's Molly. Hi, Molly. Hi. Beautiful kitty. Thank you. I've got four at home myself. I love cats. That's good. I trust men who are kind to cats are going to be kind to people. But anyway, um then I lived off base for any length of time for the first time at my dad's final duty station in Alabama.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so that's where I ended up going to high school and to university. And so my degree is from Troy University. And Every kid pretty much that grows up anywhere feels this compelling need to leave it when they can. and I had family in California, that's where my dad was from, and they offered to let me come out and stay with them and look for work. So I drove cross country and ended up marrying a young deputy sheriff from one of the Sierra Foothill counties instead of finding a job.
00:12:27
Speaker
And, yeah, and so we got married actually on fairly short notice and rather impulsively, but that was, it'll be 39 years this year. So we seriously called everyone on Friday night and told them that the sheriff's chaplain was going to marry us on Saturday if they would like to come. My parents actually made it from Alabama on that kind of notice, is ah like three hours before our little ceremony and he was off one night and then he was right back to his swing shift on Sunday night.
00:13:02
Speaker
stop Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Congratulations on 39 years. that's ah That's a long time, especially yeah um especially being the wife of somebody that is involved in law enforcement because we are one of those that have a very high divorce rate.
00:13:21
Speaker
You do. and And we were, you know, we were really young. I was 21 and he was 24, but we were aware of the divorce rate. We were aware of the suicide rate.
00:13:32
Speaker
We were aware of the rate of substance abuse that goes with the profession. and And we were really careful to just, you know, we we made some of our own rules about how we wanted to treat each other.
00:13:46
Speaker
And, you know, even things like, you know, if there was going to be alcohol in the house, nobody drinks alone, no matter what. And if you need a drink, you get a nice cup of herbal tea instead, you know, and that was something we had decided in our twenties. It was like, no, we're not going to be those people.
00:14:08
Speaker
Um, and it doesn't mean that there wasn't just a whole lot of ugly, hard stuff, but, um, Our marriage was very concretely also grounded in our faith, which is something I don't write about a lot.
00:14:19
Speaker
It's very personal, but still is a um lot of what goes into our background. And that's what we've come back to rely on when things have been ugly and hard. And you have those anniversaries when you look at each other across the table going, I'm not sure we even like each other today. know Because it's not about that.
00:14:40
Speaker
It's not about that. Mm-hmm. Yeah. How was it, um you know, diving in? Because your husband had already been a cop um for, in all honesty, quite a while before you kind of showed up. How was that? Did you know what to expect or was it kind of a shock?
00:15:00
Speaker
No, I felt like I did because of my dad's background. I had grown up in a uniform tradition. um My father was gone a full third of my parents' marriage. And so I was used to us being independent and my mother was.
00:15:16
Speaker
And where she learned the life skills she did, I have no idea because um she got married three weeks after she turned 19 and had my brother nine months later.
00:15:27
Speaker
You know, nobody taught her any of that, but she taught me how to be independent, how to have my own life. You know, she's the one who taught me before you leave this house, you're going to have your own credit rating and your own degree.
00:15:42
Speaker
Even if you don't ever work in that field, I don't care. These are the things that I want you to do. And and she was right because it was about growing. wasn't about, you know, clearly I haven't worked in that field.
00:15:57
Speaker
because we lived in the middle of nowhere for 30 years. but um But that was what I came to. So i was i was fully expecting the shift work and and um the irregularity of it, not being able to plan, that sort of stuff didn't throw me.
00:16:19
Speaker
What did was discovering that at least in rural areas because small departments, and this is thing this is part of why I started the Rural Badge, big departments and what you see on TV and in the movies is all of the you know the Blue Line Brotherhood and you know everybody's got a partner and this is your family and they hang with each other on days off and all this kind of stuff. And if that's so, that's not what happens in our experience in really small towns because
00:16:51
Speaker
they're usually so sparsely staffed that if you're off, everybody else is either at work or they're asleep. Right. So we didn't really have a relationship with other law enforcement families. I didn't know any other cops' wives. We got to know one a couple that were friends of my husband's before we got married and and we became tight, but that wasn't the basis of our relationship.
00:17:18
Speaker
um So it was kind of alien to me to discover that the things I thought were normal and that I expected, like the way when we lived in base housing the whole time I was growing up, the families lived out for each other and the kids were in and out of each other's houses all the time and a someone got hurt or was sick, or was away and needed help. You know, you brought food, you looked after their kids, you made sure their car got fixed, you helped mow lawns or walked the dog or or whatever needed.
00:17:52
Speaker
And that was notably absent yeah now in our new life. And that was really hard to get used to. And and honestly, that made me angry in a couple incidences because there were times when, well,
00:18:10
Speaker
well The guy we shared a duplex with when we first got married had gotten shot a couple of months before we got married and fighting a guy in a parking lot for his gun.
Gossip and Privacy in Small Towns
00:18:24
Speaker
So he got shot shot through both hands with a three fifty seven Magnum, spent months and months and months after his hands were put back together by a hand surgeon in San Francisco with his hands and his arms splinted.
00:18:38
Speaker
And he was single and he was our next door neighbor. And so was a good little military brat. I'd cook dinner. It was too much for us to eat. I'd make a plate.
00:18:50
Speaker
Dan would go to work because the shift started at five and I would go over and bang on the door and here's a plate. And within a couple of days, he'd come home from work and said, you you can't go over there at night anymore.
00:19:05
Speaker
People are talking about you going over to this single guy's house as soon as I leave at night. And that was our first big fight
00:19:15
Speaker
and because my next question was then where are they? yeah I'm not supposed to bring him food and he's disabled and by himself, where's everybody else?
00:19:32
Speaker
Because he had a canine and he had a lawn to keep up and he had a house I'm like, I would have thought, way i grew up there should have been this constant flow of people in and out of the store and there there was absolutely not so we we agreed on a compromise i would still cook extra i would still make the place dan would take them over before he left to keep the gossips down and it's like that was not my happy introduction to small towns um there's a lot of good things to help with the small town politics. Like sometimes people just need something to talk about and that's kind of what they kind of latch on to. It's definitely interesting in in a small town.
00:20:13
Speaker
Well and and I can see that because then I proceeded to spend the next several decades in a small town that I was the new ingredient actually.
00:20:26
Speaker
hook i was novel. I wasn't from there. i was the new wife, the young guy's new wife, you know, because I'm trying to think if there was anybody younger then my husband was at that time at department. and And I'm not sure there was other than cadets. You know, I mean, he used to bring cadets home with him at night and, you know, i wasn't working yet. So I keep his schedule. We'd be eating dinner at midnight with the cadet. That was his ride along. And some of those guys have retired now.
00:20:59
Speaker
So it was, yeah, it was, it was different. No, my, my wife actually, my current wife actually had kind of a similar experience. So when I became, um, got my first job in law enforcement, I was married and after a few years that, that fizzled out and we got divorced and, and then I met my current wife and I brought her from a whole nother state and a whole different culture and, and,
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, she was down um getting her hair done and she heard somebody talking about me and made a statement about you know, the new person he was with and and, she's like, holy cow, this is,
Challenges in Small Town Law Enforcement
00:21:43
Speaker
this is small. And then think, I can't remember exactly how it fell, ah you know, all came apart, ah came around, but they're like, she finally was, yeah, that's me.
00:21:53
Speaker
Hello, you know, raised her hand. And so that's kind of the the same kind of greeting she got, which wasn't all that great, honestly. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:22:05
Speaker
It is, and I know we don't have any experience with larger departments, so I don't know if it's similar that way or not, but but I think that was probably the biggest part of his job that I found it hard to deal with because the rest of it, you know, law enforcement is a paramilitary organization, and that was familiar to me.
00:22:30
Speaker
You know, I understood that, but, uh, the interpersonal relationship aspects of it were really, really foreign. And I do think a lot of that had to do with the small town atmosphere. And I was not used to that because military bases are not huge, um but they're all structured like small cities.
00:22:54
Speaker
and and And people don't get there and become entrenched. If you don't move in a few years, everybody around you will be. So it's still going to be this constant churn and you have to be very flexible and you have to be very accommodating and you have to make friends quickly ah and that sort of thing. and And small towns really aren't. You know, you might live across from somebody for 20 years and still be the new neighbor, you know. Yeah, yeah. Now,
00:23:22
Speaker
now Once you made it over in New Orleans, California, and you kind of settled in and stuff like that, what did ah what did Charlie start doing to, you know, take care of herself outside of trying to, you know, take care of the marriage?
00:23:38
Speaker
i I started out trying to look for work because I was, you know, a young woman in the 80s with a new bachelor's degree, and I had all of these, you know,
00:23:49
Speaker
I have all these career plans and that that was another bit of culture shock moving to a much smaller area. um was there were very few jobs to be had. I had experience mostly in retail.
00:24:04
Speaker
At that point, I didn't really want to keep working retail because the schedules are frankly awful. I like the work, but the schedules are terrible and you never have two days off together. um And so I looked for work and realized that in very small towns, you know, I had moved there from Alabama and everybody in California kind of looks at you like,
00:24:25
Speaker
you're from a third world country if you're if you move there from a southern state. And I'm looking around in this place going, you don't get it. There's more rednecks for square inch in this place. that Birmingham has a million people. even know like i don't know where you think I've moved from, but one of my first questions to my husband is, but where the 24-hour farm is?
00:24:47
Speaker
And after he stopped laughing, I discovered that was now a thing of my past. So this was the environment I was looking for work in and the pay scales were frankly awful and people were you know offering like $6 an hour even back then to do office management work and ah I had one young man at the employment development department look at my resume and all my stuff and say but what does a personnel manager do? And I went Apparently nothing here.
00:25:24
Speaker
yeah And so basically i I kind of decided for that kind of pay, which was less than I had made working part-time retail in Alabama. a I didn't want to never see my husband who was working swings with days off in the middle of the week.
00:25:42
Speaker
And so I started looking around for something more flexible and tried substitute teaching. um Only at high schools, not very good at classrooms full of small children, but I love teenagers and ah I felt like I knew how to relate to them.
00:26:00
Speaker
And I wasn't that old much older than they were, to be honest. I think I was 23 the first time I set foot in the classroom. um And I discovered I was actually really good at it. And I really, really liked it. I loved doing something different every day. The money was not great. There's no benefits because you're a contractor. On the other hand, it was very, very flexible.
00:26:21
Speaker
So if Dan had a block of days off, I could simply block that out on my schedule and and be available. And I've done other work full time a few times, but i I had always gone back to that when I had family needs that needed to be taken care of, whether it was his schedule or a child or a parent eventually who needed help.
Career Sacrifices and Childcare Issues
00:26:45
Speaker
Now I guess since we're we're still kind of we're kind of on that, how was it... want to make sure I guess I kind of say this right. Did did you ever feel as the wife of of somebody in law enforcement that you were were chasing him and and his career? 100%.
00:27:01
Speaker
um hundred percent and And I guess with that how did that, how did that go over? How did that work out for you guys? mean, obviously, well, it's been 39 years.
00:27:13
Speaker
At first, it was a little bit of a struggle, and then i kind of just accepted it. On the other hand, some of that, again, is is my faith background.
00:27:25
Speaker
I felt like that was part of the agreement that I had made. um You know, there are marriage ceremonies that and include quotes from the scripture where you go, I'll go.
00:27:36
Speaker
and and and I took that very seriously. um on As well, I think I'm probably one of the last generations of women who was raised to expect that.
00:27:52
Speaker
yeah And that that's normal for me. um And I have a daughter-in-law whom I love dearly and I have a granddaughter and I know that their lives and their expectations may be very different and I want to help them in that.
00:28:08
Speaker
But the rest of it is also that it was very hard for me to try to establish a career in a very small town. Like I talked about, there just weren't a whole lot of career track jobs available um in the areas we lived in, and there was even less child care available.
00:28:28
Speaker
By the time we had a son, where we had moved to an even further north town, to a place where it paid about the same, but the housing prices were lower. Where we lived was close enough to the Bay Area that people actually commuted and we were just getting murdered. We couldn't qualify for a home there on a deputy's pay.
00:28:48
Speaker
And so we moved way further north and were able to get into a starter home and have a baby. And there was not a single daycare in the entire town that accepted infants.
00:29:02
Speaker
And ties your hands. You know, so he's working shift work. I can't find daycare, even presuming we could afford it. And that does limit your career choices. so Yeah.
00:29:17
Speaker
You know, i've I found that. tough even in my relationship and you know it always it it still creates obstacles um so it's interesting hearing that you know it's kind of kind of the same but I'm going to throw out the adventure this guest though that now that he's he's done um it's now your turn and he's probably you know helping you out quite a bit more and supporting you like like you did with him he absolutely is um obviously he's um a resource and an inspiration for a lot of the things I write.
00:29:53
Speaker
and A lot of the topics that I write about arise out of both of our life experience, things that we ran into that now I have the opportunity to explore. and Going back to that military background and having worked in sales and things like that, i like I will literally ask anyone anything. So, I mean, like I get on the phone and I'll call congressmen or I'll call a sheriff I've never met in another state. I'm like, hey, I'm from such and such a place. I want to talk to you. You know, but guess what? 99% of the time they go, but okay, it's now good.
00:30:26
Speaker
You know, yeah and you just start talking um on, The social media accounts, is he's my tech support for things like, you know, it's not very busy. We don't you know make much money off like the gear that we sell or whatever, but he's the one who does all of that sort of stuff. I i look at like trying to set up a store website and just get overwhelmed with all of the options. Never mind, I don't want it that bad. and back out He's like, no, this is fine. We can do that. I'm like, okay.
00:31:00
Speaker
If you say so, I'm going go write something. no empathy I'm sure he enjoys you know being in the background now and letting you be the face of of it all.
00:31:12
Speaker
He's never really wanted to be the face. I mean, he'll he'll talk about stuff if people ask him directly, but um doing public facing stuff is is not his happy place.
00:31:24
Speaker
you know um And he's one of the guys, gosh, I hope people don't take this the wrong way, but a lot of old cops are kind of grouchy. And he's one of the ones who actually made it to retirement and is still a really nice guy, you know, and he's just kind of like, just let me. Let me do my hobby things and look after my family and we both you know we take turns looking after the granddaughter now while our son and daughter-in-law work. and
00:31:55
Speaker
you know Just do those things. and yeah he's he he keeps He keeps the background stuff running. you know When i finally went, okay, I'm going to set up a blog and I'm going to start writing stuff.
00:32:08
Speaker
that I want to write, you know, because some of the pieces are just too long for social media. um And sometimes I'll take one of the social media things that kind of blows up and then I can extrapolate on that and build into it stuff that like actually that the tech part of setting, he's really, really good at it. He's one of those who started out like writing code and building his own computers back in the 80s. And I just look at that and again, go, you know,
00:32:36
Speaker
yeah you Can give me know just can't I just have a keyboard and a piece of paper again, please? you know yeah' go I'm still a little bit of a Luddite on the inside. so um How was it staying home, being home, the worry, all
Coping with Law Enforcement Career Uncertainties
00:32:55
Speaker
of that? How was it?
00:32:57
Speaker
I had the advantage over younger wives now of being pre-cell phone and pre-internet. And the one bit of advice that I did get from the older cop's wife I made friends with when we first married was downtown the scanner.
00:33:16
Speaker
Don't even own one. Don't have it in the house. Because if you own one, you're going to listen to it. And over the next few years, I met a couple wives who had been listening in on very bad days, things that you cannot unhear. So I went, oh, okay, well, that just makes all kinds of sense. So I didn't.
00:33:38
Speaker
And because of that more isolated culture then I really just made it a practice that every night when he goes to work, I start doing my own thing.
00:33:52
Speaker
and I wrote back then too, but it was, you know, actually pen and paper. And I'm an absolutely voracious reader. and you know, I would watch what I wanted to watch on TV. And I had friends back East still that, you know, we would wait in it late at night. It was cheaper to call long distance. And so that's when I would catch up with my girlfriends from high school or college or or talk to my mom, because looking back now, that was... really late at night for her, but moms are like that. you know If you say you're going to call, they're like oh they'll pick up the phone any old time, and she always did. um and Because of her background as a military wife, I was able to decompress with her more than once. um She was also very old school
00:34:41
Speaker
and very Irish. And so she did not take the nonsense. If I started getting into my feelings about it, and she would be extremely sensible and straighten that right back out. And, you know, there can be a limit to how much sympathy you need sometimes.
00:34:57
Speaker
But on the other hand, there weren't the temptations that there are now. Like I've made it a few other younger wives kind of unhappy by, you know, when they're spazzing a little bit, you like stop tracking his fam.
00:35:12
Speaker
take that app off don't do that and it's very very very hard not to because and it's just the entire culture is saturated with the 24 7 information and I feel like it's got to be super unhealthy just really really unhealthy and you know cell phones really yeah he retired in 2019 and that includes an almost 10 year service gap uh So there weren't a lot of those years, maybe the last 10 years that we even owned a cell phone. And the first few years, they were just flip phones. You know, it was talk and text, all the apps and data service and stuff, especially where we lived.
00:35:57
Speaker
It just wasn't available. So I think there was, in a lot of ways less pressure than there is now. Even even after the shooting he was involved in like we knew exactly when his name was going to be released to the press. We left him.
00:36:12
Speaker
oh Yeah. We drove up to the nearest national park and we stayed there until late at night and drove the long, long way back home and didn't answer the phone. So until the next day, and that's almost impossible to do now, you know, i still had to deal with it the next day, but we didn't have to deal with it in the moment.
00:36:32
Speaker
And that little bit of distance, I i think was, was an asset. And, um,
00:36:40
Speaker
I kind of feel bad for the ones who have to grow up in the middle of it. You know, for me, it was more like the phone ringing at three in the morning when his shift was supposed to be over.
00:36:52
Speaker
And the dispatcher's always starting with, Mrs. Deist, this is not an emergency. I'm passing along the message that. You know, he's stuck on a call. He's on a, you know, he's got, yeah, keeping a road closed. He's writing a report, whatever. but that would be the phone call that that I could get. And then I can hang it up and I can go back to sleep.
00:37:12
Speaker
You know, so. Yeah. Well, then starting off the call with, it's not an emergency. Things are okay. That's that's very important. My ah my wife has... Managed to accidentally you know ah dial the three important phone numbers and get dispatch and didn't realize it. And they sent a deputy up to our house and I was on duty um somewhere else, didn't realize it. So the first thing out of her mouth was, what happened and is he okay?
00:37:44
Speaker
And they're like, what are you talking about? See, I can feel my breath catch even just hearing you say that. It's just like... That's the no. And that was one of the things that I came to do because every military brat knows that too. Her pulls up out front, two guys in uniform get out, kids go to the room, mom goes to the door and just stands there. Yeah.
00:38:06
Speaker
You know. That's the no. Yeah, that that affected her. you You brought up your husband being involved in in a critical incident and we were talking about you and and trying to, you know,
00:38:18
Speaker
well fit into this you know new kind of community I'm assuming that that was a a little why little ways afterwards but how did that affect your feelings about him going back to work even for a little while I mean I know a lot of times when when us and law enforcement are involved in a critical incident we get a little hyper vigilant for a little while until we kind of acclimate being back at work how was it for you when he went back
00:38:46
Speaker
He was not physically harmed in that it was a fatal shooting. um But the problem with that one wasn't the physical risk because he really handled that very well.
00:39:01
Speaker
And it was a very clean shoot. The investigators were back and then California's, uh, I guess it's DOJ. don't know who it is. Used to send up a shooting team for an OIS and a really small department, you know, and and they would come up from Sacramento and do the investigation. They were seriously there and gone the same day.
00:39:22
Speaker
It was that cotton dried. So that was good. and The problem that we ran into with that one was people that were supposed to be there to back him up were not.
00:39:35
Speaker
And that really rattled his confidence. And that was ultimately over the next year, the reason that he left law enforcement for almost 10 years. Because even when things go very, very badly, it's just an absolute foundational expectation that if you call for backup, people will be there. Right. And even though it was...
00:40:05
Speaker
a fairly remote area, there were people who could have responded, they wouldn't have got there in time, but still, you know, they're coming. They heard you. They heard you when they answered the call. And they chose not to come.
00:40:21
Speaker
And that absolutely wrecked his confidence. He'd been in law enforcement for 10 years. By that time, he had an advanced PES certificate. ah He'd worked for a couple. This was the second department he worked for. And honestly, this was the place he intended to retire. We left that town.
00:40:39
Speaker
We chose that town. It wasn't just like, the well, this was the first place that offered the job. We chose this town. We moved there on purpose. and And that just absolutely undermined everything.
00:40:54
Speaker
And to know
00:41:00
Speaker
how hard that was on him to watch him gearing up to go out anyway, every night back to work, fully expecting that the same thing could happen again with the same results.
00:41:13
Speaker
That was what was hard. I wasn't afraid he was going to be hurt so much as I was afraid of the effects of the hurt that had already been inflicted.
00:41:24
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yep, yeah. answer And that's one of the reasons, again, that I want to write about small towns and rural places, because rural politics can be absolutely devastating. They can be really, really brutal.
00:41:40
Speaker
And you absolutely have to take it seriously and personally, because there aren't 300 other people out there Possibly experiencing the same thing. It's all very often just you.
00:41:58
Speaker
And as a spouse, and it took me a long time to figure out and to name the emotion. wasn't fear. It was anger.
00:42:10
Speaker
It was anger. And that's one of the things I will probably write about one of these days. And I've put it off for a really long time because to be honest, people don't like to hear stories that aren't happy.
00:42:22
Speaker
and And I've written a lot of other stuff that isn't isn't positive, a like super uplifting, ah yeah the struggles that disabled officers face um and and things like that.
00:42:36
Speaker
um
00:42:39
Speaker
But i haven't written anything about us personally. And it is. that's That's really personal. And that was really personal. And I didn't really get it until...
00:42:52
Speaker
I was honestly at a church retreat that was just all other women and I didn't realize until we were a few hours into it that the keynote speaker was a cop's wife and probably 15 or 20 years older than I was then.
Dealing with Anger in Community Challenges
00:43:08
Speaker
and she actually made time to sit and talk with me on a break. And she's the one who named it. She shes heard me all out and then all she said instead of, you know,
00:43:21
Speaker
you've been to churches before, you're expecting people to spout scriptures at you or counsel you or, you know, tell you how you should be. And instead she waited until I wound myself down and said, if that had happened to me, I would be angry too.
00:43:36
Speaker
And it was like the light went on. That's it. I haven't been, my feelings weren't hurt. It wasn't sad. i was mad. And nice Christian ladies don't get angry, right? So I could say that out loud. I couldn't even name it to myself. I didn't recognize it.
00:43:55
Speaker
But it's not until you name something that you can find a way to deal with it. oh Now you bring up kind of the small town the small town politics. so One of the questions i was thinking of while you were talking is, is
00:44:10
Speaker
Was it, did they not go and help or because they didn't want to they were scared, or was there another reason that was holding them back? I do not know what the reasoning was.
00:44:24
Speaker
But I do know that the on-call deputy, my husband worked for a police department in the county, and the only available backup at that hour, because it was in the middle of the night, was an on-call deputy. And the sheriff's office back then did not patrol 24-7.
00:44:40
Speaker
um And i he simply said he wasn't going to come. And yeah, and there were some state officers who were available and also declined to respond. And I don't know whether it was complacency or because honestly, i was that angry. i i should have just asked him because my husband knew that that was the problem because I was so angry. He never told me who the other officers were. I don't know what he thought and I might do with that information, but I can tell you what I wanted to do was I wanted to call their wives and tell them this is who married to.
00:45:25
Speaker
Oh, you didn't want to call me. You wanted to show up at the house, knock on the door it go to be like, yeah, we need to talk ah because that's the thing. It's like, and and you're probably this kind of guy too. And this is what's expected is, you know, the, the whole thing in our house had always been it If he got called out or looked down the street and there was an officer in trouble, I mean, he'd be running out there in his boxers with his gun in his hand if that was all he had.
00:45:52
Speaker
But he would go. he would go. And the idea that someone else didn't have that level of care for him.
00:46:03
Speaker
um I don't know what the women in your life are like, but I can take a whole lot of abuse. You can be as mean to me as you want to. And I have thick skin and I have broad shoulders. You do not get to be mean to the people that I love. Oh, yeah. That is a whole other level of problem. And I think I'm probably working some of that out in some of the topics that I write about because I'm.
00:46:26
Speaker
I very much position myself as an advocate for these topics and for these officers. and And I guess ultimately really for their families who can't speak out for them or have said everything that they have to say. And they're just tired.
00:46:44
Speaker
yeah They can't do it anymore. They're out of resources. And I can't fix any of those problems, but I can make sure that they are seen. Mm-hmm. it's ah It's a bummer to hear that somebody involved in law enforcement wouldn't go help somebody else.
Rural Law Enforcement Difficulties
00:47:04
Speaker
Why is is beyond me, even today's in today's world um i do know that that there are some agencies that have some policies and or you know SOPs that talk about getting um you know permission from a supervisor and and what not now all I'll admit that there's been a time where I disregarded that um and just went so it's it's kind of devastating to hear that so I can imagine how angry you were um i know during when I was involved in my critical incident I had
00:47:40
Speaker
I'm like every agency that was even remotely close showed up. So it was how it's supposed to be. Yeah, that's how it's supposed to be. And and I do i know that that had a lot to do with the career detour that he took because, he other the guys he went to Academy with started retiring like way, way before 2019.
00:48:02
Speaker
But um that was that was our our best idea. You know, he he was burnt out. He needed a change. We couldn't find any other avenue except to leave the career field and go do something else for a long time and then eventually came back to it and and stayed in another 17 years.
00:48:28
Speaker
so Awesome. I'm glad he was able to, you know, get back into it and and still enjoy it
00:48:36
Speaker
never been in love with it, but he's always been very, very good at it. you know You bring that up, and and and my wife and I, we have that that conversation about whether I like the job or hate the hell. Actually, not even just my wife and I, am pretty much all of us, I relate it to a love-hate relationship.
00:48:52
Speaker
I love it about as much as I hate it. um yeah What do you think about that? um I think there's a lot about what really good officers want to do in the job uh, that they end up very frustrated uh, because reality never quite lines up with that.
00:49:14
Speaker
Uh, it's funny because we watched the movie code three last night and I watched it because some people, I really respect who are in the EMS field had reviewed it and were like, this is like a comedy drama, but some of them were like, no, this was actually so realistic and so intense despite the comedic moments, which actually law enforcement has a lot of really, really funny moments.
00:49:43
Speaker
But it's still super intense. that Some of them had said, you know, but they had to quit watching it and then restart it later and stuff like that multiple times. So we watched it because of that. And honestly, there were so many parallels with I think there probably would be in most first responders that there was so much good that could be done and it's so hard to do it.
00:50:07
Speaker
Not because you can't do it, but because you can't get it done structurally. There are so many obstacles to being able to you know like a you you see somebody who is a domestic violence victim and ultimately ends up a murder victim and you knew that was coming.
00:50:25
Speaker
And there was only so much you could do about it. You could keep going back and keep going back and keep going back and telling them you have to leave. And there are these resources and these things. And you put someone in jail and they're out before you finish the report. And that sort of stuff just builds up and it's frustrating. And it's just, it's infuriating.
00:50:47
Speaker
And there's absolutely nothing you can do about it and i think, The personalities probably that can kind of gloss past that are the ones that seem untouched by their ends of their career that are really good at compartmentalizing or saying, well, i did my part with the job and they just you know move on. and And then there's this whole other bunch of you that internalize it instead.
00:51:11
Speaker
and feel very irresponsible and identify very much with the victims or the children, always the children. ah yeah And it just grinds you down. There's everybody, you know, resilience and and wellness and all these sorts of things are such fashionable buzzwords, but everyone has limits and no one really knows where they are.
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, no, i I kind of, you know, go with that that whole love-hate relationship because, you know, you I love to be able to interact with the the community in a positive way and and I love to to even beat my head sometimes against the wall trying to help somebody who I know is is probably not going to take the advice I have to give them. um I hate missing out on birthdays and holidays and weekends and the sun for a lot of the at the time and the careers, you know, i big fireball in the sky, you know, but at the same time,
00:52:15
Speaker
it's nice to know that you've done good. You know, even if you don't really know it, you have to have that, that just belief in that faith that you did. And every once in a while, somebody will find their way back to you and let you know like, Hey, thank you.
00:52:29
Speaker
Uh, you know, you, you really did mean a lot for all these other reasons. you know, I've had that happen just a couple of times and ultimately that kind of gives me that boost to just kind of keep going.
00:52:39
Speaker
Um, so yeah, I mean, I love it, but I also hate it. Absolutely. No, and that makes really so much sense, and
00:52:52
Speaker
i don't see how you can actually be a proactive officer and not come up against that over and over and over again, you know. So I wouldn't want him any other way.
00:53:06
Speaker
You know, by the time he was a department head, he was – working primarily in the courthouse at that point. And so had an office in there and that was, you know, the hub. It wasn't, you know, his entire responsibility, but that was where the hub was. And what always got to him was the children that were so caught up in the court cases of all the adults around them. And a lot of them were terrified of the uniform.
00:53:33
Speaker
because none of that had been a positive experience for him. And, and you know, he started making a habit of of keeping snacks and candy and things in his desk to, you know, it's like the some of like little wild animals at some point. It's like, Karen, this is for you. You know, they won't come near you. You set it down where they can reach it, you know, and just try to rebuild that trust. i'm I'm not a symbol.
00:53:59
Speaker
I'm not a system. I'm a person and you're a person. and and you matter to me. You know, you're out on a fire line for doing evacuations and you save all the cool parts of your MREs to give to the kids that are being evacuated. and yeah You know, the apple from your box lunch to feed to the horse that's wandering by with somebody's phone number on his hoof, you know.
00:54:22
Speaker
the The one thing I... i like I guess they hate's a strong word, but it's probably pretty close is when a parent comes up to you and they look at their kid and they're like, and if you don't behave, he's going to put you in jail. so I would grab a little something nice out of my, but I was a canine guy for a very long time, so always kept little nice little things in my pocket. And I'd always pull something nice out and be like, I'm not going to do anything until you turn 18. You need to listen to your mom and dad.
00:54:51
Speaker
Here's a nice little something for you and just kind of leave it at that. yeah Exactly. they should turn that conversation around. Yeah,
Community Ties and Policing
00:55:00
Speaker
yeah. Yeah, that that yeah that was a work in the road. That was a pet peeve. It's like you can't, like, that that that creates the the them being scared.
00:55:10
Speaker
It does. It's so counterproductive, and it's like working in high schools, I was kind of the go-to sub for alt-ed classrooms because I'm kind of bomb-proof, and I just, ah you know, I don't care how obstructive a teenager It's just don't, you know, it's like, oh, let's go in there and just keep coming back and coming back. And I've done several long-term sets because those are hard classrooms to keep teachers in. And what you discover is, you know, these these kids are way bigger than the ones you guys are, you know, giving treats or stickers or whatever to
00:55:53
Speaker
But so many of them have just never had an adult that didn't leave. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, have a really, really angry 16-year-old boy raging at me across the table. You know, we ran out the last sub. I'm going to make you leave. going to make you cry. You know, telling him do it's just super low tone. Yeah.
00:56:16
Speaker
You can't make me leave. You can't make me lose my temper. And you can't make me yell. I was here when you got here. And I'll be here when you leave. once I'm older than you and I'm meaner than you and I'm tougher than you.
00:56:30
Speaker
But you don't ever act mean and you just keep doing it and doing it and doing it. And it takes the temperature just way down. And by the end of the year, you're, you know, moved on. I'm in another classroom because that's what I do. And see this kid from across campus, you know yelling at the kids from the regular class.
00:56:52
Speaker
she's not your teacher. That's my son. That's my teacher, you know, and it's like, okay, we made it through and it wasn't that I did anything. I just kept coming back, you know, and it's like, if you think about it, it's kind of sad that the one who kept coming back was a substitute teacher, right? You know, but it's kids like that. Just, yeah, they do bad things, but so a lot of them just,
00:57:22
Speaker
They didn't have a chance, you know. they didn't pay im sure Sometimes you were you were the first person to actually just listen. I'm sure you sure you have some of those stories where you just listen to them.
00:57:34
Speaker
Oh, tons. Well, that's like when I first started, when I was really young. I guess i was like 23 the first time I walked into a high school classroom as a sub. So I was only a few years older than the seniors, and which was kind of fun because you know I was young, little acute back then, and yeah boys asked me for my phone number, and I'd give them the sheriff's office phone number. The girl next to her was on probation, and she's like, you idiot, that's the sheriff's office phone number. yeah know So that that kind of stuff could be kind of fun. But other ones, yeah, where you realize it's like sometimes they'll talk to you just because they know you they're not going to see you again the next day.
00:58:12
Speaker
and you know giving a math test. And this is the only day this week I'm going to be in this classroom. So you're cruising up and down the desks and paying attention because they're taking a test. and Walk up one aisle and this girl says really quietly, i had a baby last summer.
00:58:30
Speaker
And you stop, back up a little bit and go, tell me about that. you know ah Because that's that's them reaching out.
00:58:41
Speaker
They're just like, Throw this out. Throw this out. See what you do with it. Oh, oh, okay. Tell me, and tell me about that, you know, and, and yeah, they, they do that. You know, on the other hand, it could be really funny sometimes if I was in an alt ed class and, you know, it's out West, they have a lot of open campuses, right? So this one was just several portables and there's some picnic tables out on their little quad because, you know, it's a rural school. There aren't that many of them and, you know,
00:59:12
Speaker
Dan would pull up to meet me at lunch in his patrol car and everybody scatters. and okay you know I've got all their probation officers on speed dial. but It's like, no, it's it's okay. He's here for me.
00:59:29
Speaker
They all come wandering back half an hour later. but How was that being a teacher? teaching all the kids and and knowing that your husband might have maybe shared some stories that maybe he shouldn't have, but you know you you know more about what's going on in the kids' lives than most teachers would.
00:59:56
Speaker
Honestly, most of it made me very compassionate for them. I just love them. Like i said, they didn't ask for this. In fact, I can be such a terrible judge of character teenagers, we actually had an an episode when we were there in the small town where he was a police officer in the first part of his career.
01:00:18
Speaker
ah He came home and asked me about it a specific boy, and I was doing a long-term sub at that time for a teacher who had taken ill, and and I can teach Spanish, so i was part of the day was teaching Spanish, and part of it was English, and and so I would have sometimes the same students in multiple classes. They're there for English they're there for And I'm like, oh, yeah, I know who that is. He's a good kid. You know, comes early, stays late, super nice manners. He does good work. i would And he's just standing there looking at me.
01:00:50
Speaker
And he waits till I'm done. And he's like, well, he got arrested for murder last night. what? And I'm like, yeah no. And so I went into this whole long thing. Cause like I said, this kid was in my class at that point because it was a longterm gig every day.
01:01:05
Speaker
And do no, no, this is, you they got something wrong. It was a mistake. It's the wrong person. And he kind of waited until I ran out of gas and then said, they found him driving an ATV, pulling a table, a trailer with the bodies of his sister and his nanny.
01:01:25
Speaker
And a shovel. Yeah. Yeah. yeah Oh, and I was, I was so, so sad. And that was also the last time he asked me for like a character reference for any the students that I teach because that's my answer for all of them. Oh, they're a great kid. And it's like, I never, but, but I love them, you know, and stuff like this, but it was like, no way he couldn't have, and he's like, yeah, I'm not even asking you about them again anymore.
01:01:51
Speaker
and but So yeah, I actually avidly defended a double murderer to him at one point. That's how that went. of
01:02:03
Speaker
Have you ever thought about that relationship that you had built with him and why it was so different compared to what he had just done? I think he was showing me what he wanted me to see.
01:02:16
Speaker
I mean, you don't, it's just like with you when you're at your work, when I'm ah in a classroom, I only see that student in that setting. oh You know, I don't know what his relationship with his family is unless he tells me or I know them in some other context.
01:02:33
Speaker
And that was the face that he presented to the world was the good student, the good boy. um and that's why eyewitness accounts are so thoroughly unreliable and character references can be as well. and That's why when you hire in a law enforcement agency, you send someone to the town to do a background investigation.
01:02:56
Speaker
You don't just ask a couple people on the phone or their mom or whatever, because I'm sure there was someone who had seen that potential at some point, but I hadn't.
01:03:08
Speaker
I just saw what I saw there in class and he was a good kid. I really liked him and I liked the one next to him and the one on the other side and the one in the way back. and You know? Yeah, no that's that's definitely interesting, that the stark differences there. I'm sure that that gets into some weird behavioral science and emotional and mental stuff that's probably way above anything you and I might be aware of. Yeah, i because I do remember the the trial for it because it was a small town and and there were expert witnesses from everywhere talking about everything from He and his sister were both adoptees from another country, and so they weren't certain of their documentation for their birth year and stuff. So they were even bringing in like anthropologists from universities to examine his dental formation and his skull to try and decide, is he really this old or is he older? Can we try him as an adult? And, you know, all sorts of psychologists and stuff that I'm like,
01:04:14
Speaker
that's one day i just i was teaching in spanish you know were talking about colors and furniture and clothing and you know the difference between doing who stand and you know that's so yeah i don't know how was it for children growing up as a having a father in law enforcement how was it for the rest of the family um we have only the one son and he had kind of a wild upbringing because uh He was only 16 months old when Dan was involved in that shooting.
Impact of Career Changes on Family
01:04:47
Speaker
By the time he was about two was when Dan had started not being in law enforcement. We had this detour. went back school and actually got certified as a commercial helicopter pilot.
01:05:01
Speaker
and We got some very bad career counseling. It turned out to be much, much harder to find work in that field than we knew. um But as one of our friends said, well, it was probably cheaper than therapy. so It was really expensive, but it was probably cheaper than therapy. So it may be more effective. I don't know. but ah So he actually grew up until he was in the sixth grade in that time period. And one of the things that Dan ended up doing was getting a private investigator's license in California. The standards for that are ah for licensing are pretty high. And that means that, you know, you do.
01:05:41
Speaker
You know, it's not the stuff you see on TV, peeking in windows and getting pictures of people having a affairs so much as it was doing trial prep. And so, you know, so he grew up because, again, we couldn't find child care.
01:05:58
Speaker
My mom and Dan juggled him for a while until he started kindergarten. And then it was just, okay, after school, figuring that out. And we couldn't afford to pay for a lot of daycare. So honestly, it was like he grew up, you know learning to silence Barney on the TV when the money phone rang. And to go do something in another room if dad was doing interviews. And he went on process service.
01:06:27
Speaker
scripts and still talks about one where all of us got chased by the guy we were serving with the favorites back in the car like when he was eight that was supposed to be an easy one and that was why it was just oh well we're doing this other family thing we'll do this on the way it turned out to be not so awesome um but you know he was like in the third grade and he thinks it's hilarious now uh you know sitting out in the hallway and the courthouse waiting for dad to finish with a hearing so they could go back to the park and do what they were going to do and that sort of thing. And then, you know, by the time he was in middle school, Dan was back in law enforcement and I was so no longer working full time with the paper. I went back to substitute teaching.
01:07:08
Speaker
And so then, you know, he kind of became a small town. everybody knows where he lives, everybody knows there's patrol car parked in front of the house, everybody knows I work at the school, where he goes.
01:07:19
Speaker
So your people are like, are you going to the party on the weekend? And he's like, have you met my parents? and And some of them, honestly, even the small town had not put it together where he was like, I would be standing in the classroom they were talking about. It's like,
01:07:36
Speaker
that right there. And then that's my dad. Come on. um But other than that, you know, yeah he's a reallyly he's a really good kid and he was he was pretty low key about it. So it's like, yeah, and there were times when he'd be walking home from school because he didn't want to wait for me and I had to you know turn in keys and tidy in the classroom and stuff like this. Hey,
01:08:01
Speaker
to's sheriffs the sheriff pulled up in front of the house and let him out of the car because he saw him walking home. Hey, do you want a ride? you know um and That sort of thing. so you know it was It wasn't a bad thing and it wasn't it wasn't really something he got hassled for. I remember a situation in another town where I actually went to the chief's house after seeing their kid at class and let them know you need to get your kid out of that class because the room that he was in had a whole lot of kids who were on a revolving door from juvie and they were out for him. ah
01:08:42
Speaker
And that was a problem, but that wasn't something. Somehow that's that's when we evaded. it just never was really that big a deal.
Community Policing in Rural Areas
01:08:51
Speaker
That's pretty good. I mean, the story you just told about, you know, kind of getting picked on and it being an issue, and I've have avoided that too with my children, but it is something you hear. um You know, I think my kids have had had it, at least from what they've told me, you know, pretty pretty well. They haven't... ah They don't like it when I'm like, no, you can't go here and no, you can't go do that. And if you're going to do this, it shall happen here type thing.
01:09:15
Speaker
But ultimately, every one of them, they're like, all right, okay, I understand. So they don't ask questions anymore. they you know yeah the eye roll that you know where you're pretty sure they rolled all the way back in their head. All the way back. Yeah, all the way back. Need an attitude adjustment or an exorcist here. Yeah.
01:09:37
Speaker
but I think a lot of that is probably a reflection of your relationship with the community then as well. and And that so that that wasn't something that was a negative. And i this is a topic I have written about before, too, that rural officers don't need to be trained in community policing because they are the community.
01:10:06
Speaker
you're the little league coach. um You go to church with these people. you stand in line at the grocery store or at the bank with the same people that you see at work every night. And they yeah you're going to treat people differently when you arrest them if you know that your kid goes to school with all the kids of everybody you've ever arrested because there's only one school.
01:10:30
Speaker
oh And I think that's that's something that I think that's one of the things that culturally is very, very different from urban policing. um And especially the places like, you know, you live in a place where the geography is enormous and we always did as well. So you can't like work in one place and be commuting from the other place where your family lives.
01:10:54
Speaker
oh It's too far. If you're going to work in that community, you have to commit. And, and you so being there yeah, it's a very different kind of a relationship. You know, the students would tell me, i know who your husband is. I know where you live. And I'm like, honey, everybody knows where I live. You have to drive past my house to get in and out of town. And there's only one road that goes in and out of town.
01:11:19
Speaker
get so Yes, okay. And I know your parents. It's nice to have a starting point. What do you want to talk about now? Yeah. I enjoyed actually living in in the town, well, in the community. you know some Some officers live outside and they they do the commute where 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour.
01:11:40
Speaker
But I really actually liked it. It just was nice for me, my relationship, and even in my relationship with my family, being able to you know, be on nights and swing in when I had the chance to grab dinner and and be able to see everybody. Because, you know, when you work a swing shift or even a graveyard, you might not see them for a week.
01:12:01
Speaker
Nope. You may not. your it Because asleep. You're asleep and then you're gone. And that's that's what you do. You know, and and yeah, that's one of the things that I've like had to explain to some people that aren't they like, oh well, what was it like for it? I'm like, he wasn't there, you know? And then as, as we got older, he was doing other sorts of things, whether it was, he was a department head at one place. He was an investigator for some years and those are like slightly more sane hours, you know? Yeah. You still have, you know, your occasional emergency and stuff like that, but you know,
01:12:37
Speaker
Courthouses are those places where nothing ever happens until it does, kind of like schools. and But on the other hand, they have a very predictable schedule, and that's really nice. And it is you occasionally get to talk to like regular people who aren't bad guys or other cops, you know. and Yeah. Yeah.
01:12:56
Speaker
so Well, let's skip forward to what it is you're doing now. Okay.
Connecting Through the 'Rural Badge' Project
01:13:04
Speaker
Not all the way forward. What got you to start the rural VADGE? What started that whole project?
01:13:13
Speaker
What started that whole project was a conversation that I had with on on a forum with a police wife from an urban area, actually several of them, because it was a forum setting.
01:13:26
Speaker
And I had felt like, oh, you know, The internet internet is a thing, and I mean, it's not that the internet was really new at that era, but we lived in a place where we still had dial-up, you know? So there just wasn't a whole lot of access.
01:13:42
Speaker
And a forum was about as high-tech as it was at high speed as it was going to get back then. And I thought, well, this will be a way for me to get to know some other people maybe who've done what we've done and and and that I can relate to. And that did not work at all.
01:14:00
Speaker
And ah kept having these conversations and realizing we were talking about completely different things. And I couldn't relate to them at all. And they had no idea what I was talking about. And it's like, you know, it's like I said about writing about things that aren't necessarily happy things.
01:14:21
Speaker
I can't be the only one. Mm-hmm. And so I had, I had joined Facebook some years before when my son was in boot camp because I was able to see pictures of him doing things there. And I got to know some other military moms that way. And there are some that I'm still friends with now all these years later. And that was cool. But it was like, okay, learned how to use, know, basic social media there. And it's like, I'm driving my friends.
01:14:51
Speaker
crazy on my personal feed going, did you see this news story? Did you that news story? Have you seen this? How did this happen? And nobody even knows. And they were all like, that's nice. Can you please not? i'm like, but if I'm seeing it, there's other people out there who are too, and maybe they all feel as a alone as I do.
01:15:11
Speaker
Right. And so I seriously like took a poll on my personal profile. I made up like three different names where if I did a public page, but what would I call it? and The rural badge one.
01:15:24
Speaker
So I stood that up and started figuring out how to make it work and people started finding it. And at first, because the algorithms worked differently 10 years ago, I was mostly sharing news links. So I was kind of running it, you know I had a background in publishing and so I was kind of running it like a little magazine, you know, was picking up news links from other places. starting discussions about, you know, here, did you see this? Did you see that? It wasn't so much original writing and pictures and things like that that are what gets you eyeballs nowadays. um And people started showing up and saying I knew there were other people out there. And then people started hitting me up in messages and saying, did you know about this?
01:16:10
Speaker
This happened and sending me links and then sending me pictures. And so I started doing things like changing the cover picture on the page, constantly using pictures that readers had sent me. So they're patrol cars. And then I had to train them like, you know, if you can take a picture your patrol car, turn the lights on. Because cars sitting there on the lawn is not a visually interesting things. You know, make it do something here. Find me a sunset and turn the lights on or something. And they would.
01:16:35
Speaker
Oh. Make it pretty. Yeah. Just make it pretty. people' It's a visual medium. let's Let's play on that. And then a a friend of mine that I got to know online because he also, ah he was a law enforcement officer and he was part of the original team who put together the nonprofit Humanizing the Badge.
01:16:55
Speaker
But he was also a dad. with two sons who wanted to go to the Coast Guard Academy. And at the time I was also doing social media for a Coast Guard related nonprofit, of raising money to scholarship moms to travel to boot camp graduation. And that was cool. We got to help them move. I mean, some from like Guam and really far away that wouldn't have otherwise been able to go. And yeah so he was just looking for resources and hit me up there. And um I sent him a bunch of stuff and
01:17:27
Speaker
we got talking about all of these things. And of course he was much more firmly grounded at that point in social media than I was. And so he started pestering me to set up an Instagram page.
01:17:40
Speaker
but like I don't know how to do Instagram. And he's like, that's what everybody's doing. You have to, I'm like, ah, so he dragged me screaming into that. And of course now those things are linked. And then eventually it was like, well, I want to write more, started the blog,
01:17:58
Speaker
um And eventually one of the blog posts that ah another friend who ran another public page had shared ah caught the attention of an editor from Police One.
01:18:10
Speaker
And that was about the same time that Dan was retiring, which freed me up to write under my own name. So she asked me if they could pick that up and just cross-post it and see how it goes.
01:18:25
Speaker
if it, if anybody would read it basically. And it went over well. And she offered me a monthly column. Right. Come out of hiding. I did. And honestly, that was kind of creepy. you know, it's like they wanted headshot, you know, for, for, for, for my author page. And like an author page, what, you know, uh,
01:18:48
Speaker
So yeah, I had to show my face and and have a real name. And even so, it was still several years before anybody really made the connection between that column and the social media presence.
01:19:01
Speaker
um And I have kept that pseudonym for social media because the voices are very different. um It's much more casual and much more personal. It's a pretty killer name, though.
01:19:12
Speaker
Charlie Pitt. I love it. Why do you like it? What's that? Why do you like it? I don't know. It's catchy. it's ah um i mean It's like you'd think would be in one of those 80s, cop shows. you know It turns out Charlie is charlie is ah short for Charlotte, and Charlotte Pitt is a literary character that I identified with very much from ah ah a series that I used to read by an author named Dan Perry, and Charlotte Pitt was an investigator's wife in Victorian England who either met or helped with her husband's cases, depending on your point of view. And I needed something that could be fairly androgynous because I was just trying very hard not to attract attention me or to Dan's work when he was active. And honestly, it's like it's not about me. i don't write about me.
01:20:13
Speaker
It's about the officers and their experiences and their families and that sort of thing. So I didn't care. I i still have a lot of people who address me as bro, you know, hey, brother, I love the page. And I just say thank you, you know, because I don't I don't care.
01:20:30
Speaker
That page is not about me. It's, you know, they get a lot of my personal opinions, but a lot of the opinions are things that I just feel have to be said. And most active officers and as but we've talked about, most of their families can't say it out loud.
01:20:48
Speaker
and I mean, I remember when we first moved up to this little town from the county that he'd worked out before, which, like I said, we couldn't even qualify for a house there.
01:21:01
Speaker
I mean, they wouldn't even talk to us. It wasn't that we didn't make enough. It was like we went into the bank to say, but what could we qualify for if We did and they said, yeah, can't.
01:21:12
Speaker
They wouldn't even run the numbers. It was that, um the pay was that low. And ah compared to the cost of living, especially. And so my husband, or my brother at the time worked for a sign shop and he had made me this little reflective sign for my back window and it said, pay your cops like your life it depends on it.
01:21:32
Speaker
uh And so when we moved up to this little town, I still had it in the back of my car and, uh, I didn't think anything about it. And yeah, dance chief called him in and said, she needs to take that out of her car because it's insulting people. Here, you are considered quite well paid.
01:21:54
Speaker
Wow. You guys are the well-off people here. And I'm like, are you kidding me? But okay. And I didn't want to get him in trouble. So even just like the equivalent of a bumper sticker, I have to take that out my car. Now I can say,
01:22:09
Speaker
If an officer doesn't get paid well enough that he doesn't have to choose between diapers and practice ammo, then you have a problem. I can say that out loud now. I can say if he has to work two extra jobs to be able to afford a reliable vehicle to get to work, then you have a problem and maybe you need a different plan. But I could not say that 30 years ago. I could not.
01:22:34
Speaker
Right. So I say that kind of stuff out loud and and I take you know i ended up they started out studying communications and ended up studying
Advocating for Better Working Conditions
01:22:43
Speaker
business. And so I'll pull out you know nerdy stuff from economics about failures of consideration and you know stuff like that and yeah and and work them into articles about you know pay scales. There are places in the United States where there are deputies, no joke, getting paid $12 and $13 an hour.
01:23:03
Speaker
that still happens where they're not being issued vests, where they're but out of their 12 or $13 an hour, they're expected to buy an IFAC if they want one. They're expected to buy their own gear. And people don't think that that happens anymore. And so I'm just standing over here yelling with my hands in the air going, yeah, it is. And it's wrong.
01:23:24
Speaker
And it's wrong. Yeah.
01:23:28
Speaker
No, you you do write about a lot of things, and and having read you know a bunch of your articles,
01:23:36
Speaker
they they do hit home. um One that that kind of stuck out to me is is, where have all the veterans gone?
01:23:47
Speaker
I liked that one. Where did all the cops go? and And it was interesting to kind of to kind of see how how turning a lot of positions into civilian positions have kind of pushed everybody out. So now you don't have the the veterans there to keep educating and teaching and and the younger cops that show up.
01:24:13
Speaker
It's a problem. and And it's been made purely from – it's been a financial decision. that a lot of non-patrol functions, there are even places that are investigating civilianizing investigator positions,
01:24:33
Speaker
huh
01:24:35
Speaker
have been civilianized. The pay scales are lower. They are non-sworn personnel. And I do understand the financial consideration about side. However,
01:24:47
Speaker
what happens is that allows absolutely nowhere to go for someone who is getting older or someone who needs a light duty position. And it's it's a rough job.
01:24:59
Speaker
Just by its very nature, you can't do this into old age. right And there used to be, you know, the guy who ran the evidence room and the guy that ran the front desk.
01:25:12
Speaker
And, you know, you watch, where we're re-watching Hill Street Blues right now. You may never have even watched that series through, but the writing is just oh phenomenal. And, you know, there is this iconic sergeant who runs the entire floor inside the office. He's everybody's go-to. And he has wrinkles, and he has gray hair, and he has wisdom, and he has experience, and he probably still could patrol.
01:25:41
Speaker
But the point is, there was some place to better use that oh or without wrecking his retirement. and And it is. and It's a real problem. People want to make everything about you know the brain drain and and and the loss of institutional knowledge.
01:26:03
Speaker
They want to make it about politics. And and of course that plays into it. every Politics plays into everything. And of course officers don't feel supported in what they're doing. And frankly, that has always been the case.
01:26:15
Speaker
hu There are a few exceptions in places that were really stellar to work for, but they were exceptions. And violence against law enforcement is not new. It was worse in the 60s and 70s and the early 80s than it is now. That's not what's running people out. What's running them out, frankly, is that they look ahead and discover they have nowhere to go.
01:26:39
Speaker
And if they don't have a retirement that they know they can depend on, if instead it's a four zero one k by its very nature, that is portable. Yeah.
01:26:51
Speaker
The wise person who has options and other skills will look at that and go, I think I will take my portable for a one k and go do something where my body is not broken on a daily basis. Or even worse, you have the officer who's gotten hurt in the line of duty and there is, if it is something he can recover from, but there's no light duty position for him in the meantime,
01:27:19
Speaker
the nasty little secret there with is that a lot of those officers simply get fired. Yeah. There's all kinds of, you know, more professional terms for it, but that's pretty much what happens. You won't be back within six months.
01:27:33
Speaker
And so we're going to let you go. And there goes is your health insurance and your retirement. um And there may not even be a disability retirement for them, depending on where they're working and how it was written. A lot of places you've got to be vested. So that means five years or more in,
01:27:49
Speaker
Even if you got run over by a tractor trailer that lost it while you were on a traffic stop, doesn't matter. You've only got 18 months on the job. There's no disability retirement from you. And that's not how people think it goes.
Support for Injured Officers and Systemic Issues
01:28:04
Speaker
But those things play into, I find it really aggravating when there will be some puff piece about, would say, a military veteran who's an amputee.
01:28:18
Speaker
And he makes it through the police academy and gets hired on and he's quite able to work patrol. He earned his position 100%. one hundred percent Honorably, he met all the standards and everyone celebrates it. If the same officer had lost the leg in a patrol position, he would not have been given the several years that it takes to rehab from an injury like that and regain your strength and your agility and the kind of prosthesis that will allow you to perform those functions. And I don't understand why that disconnect is not recognized.
01:28:59
Speaker
so about And I think it really is highlighted and in the agencies that are, you know, more rural rural and and smaller. um i think the big thing is is is they can't really afford, one, money-wise, two, somebody off the road that long because they need somebody to cover a shift. yeah And then the problem with some of that comes, you know, with your veterans is taking off and going somewhere else is now you've lost just that knowledge on how to how to investigate and how to be a cop and officer for safety and and not be complacent. And and we end up with,
01:29:35
Speaker
you know, a difficult time growing up to be a good cop in a smaller agency. Well, and that is one of the things that this is the kind of a job where it can take several years.
01:29:49
Speaker
I would guess probably not three years, but closer to five. before you have a really, really solid understanding of what constitutes an actual emergency.
Growth Challenges for Rural Officers
01:30:02
Speaker
you know, my dad, like said, my dad was was military and one of his phrases was, you know, he doesn't get paid to get excited, you know, talking about someone that he worked with. And guess what? Cops don't either. But it takes you a long time. You come in as a young guy and, you know, there's testosterone and adrenaline all over the place and a tendency to be really reactive about things and it takes a while to acclimate to that and and really get into a what's important.
01:30:35
Speaker
How do I handle this? How do I react when somebody else does that? And for that to become second nature. And I think it works a lot better if you have somebody else who's older and more experienced next to you. You know, nobody takes three-year-old horse with a hot nature out by itself trail riding.
01:30:55
Speaker
You snub it up to a bigger, older horse that's been there, done that, isn't impressed by anything, and he learns what not to react to as well as what to do.
01:31:06
Speaker
You don't see that anymore. No, and i and I was a field training officer for a long time. and and just realizing that even some of the smaller agencies that were close, you know, the younger officers been there,
01:31:20
Speaker
a year or two, maybe three, but they'd call me be like, I don't know what to do. So try to mentor them and and ultimately, you know, there's a lot of times where like, why did you just do what you did? Because there was a million other choices you could have done. That was probably the worst. But at the same time, they'd listen and and they they'd take that, um you know, and then so it stinks that that's what's happening.
01:31:47
Speaker
and we're losing good veterans you know out in the sticks where we are. But maybe that's one of the things we can try to, with your help, bring back.
01:31:59
Speaker
I hope so.
Public Service vs. Profit in Law Enforcement
01:32:00
Speaker
and Because I think a lot of – it was really fashionable for a very long time and still is in some circles to talk about running government agencies as a business.
01:32:13
Speaker
And the fact is that a government agency is not a business because a business's function isn't just to be efficient and effective. It is to generate a profit, to keep costs below a certain point, no matter what. You're trying to produce something, not just do something. it's This is a service. This is a a public good. And the very nature of a public good means that it it's something that by its very existence benefits everyone around it, even when they're not using it immediately themselves. So, you know, there's the common examples of things like, you know, clean water or public health or, you know, a nice sanitation system. But law enforcement, like the military, is is another one of those. By its very existence, when it's done well, it can benefit society. When you only just keep trying to crank the costs down as low and as low and as tight as you can get, it's not even that
01:33:14
Speaker
you're not going to produce anything it's you're not even going to be productive after a certain point because you simply can't it just doesn't work anymore and you know i've lived places and i'm sure you have too where you know there may be a single deputy patrolling an entire county for the whole night and if they have backup it's a game warden who's out there doing their game or crazy stuff at night with their binoculars and their infrared, you know, or whatever. And thank God they're there. Yay. But still it's like, he can't be everywhere.
Criminal Exploitation in Rural Areas
01:33:50
Speaker
And do you think everybody doesn't know that, you know, getting people to look at the idea of, you know, you can pull up a map on the internet for what high and high intensity drug trafficking areas. That's like,
01:34:07
Speaker
rural areas. And they do that not just because, well, that's where the roads go, but they also do that intentionally because there's no cops there.
01:34:19
Speaker
Yeah. Less likely to run into a cop. Absolutely. I've even talked to some like forest service officers and and park rangers that say they know there are cartels that specifically choose to traffic through their areas, they've got all the back roads mapped out because there will be no traffic patrol there.
01:34:40
Speaker
huh And if they can go from the places that are publicly owned to privately owned to publicly owned to privately owned, finding somebody who can even pull them over in that area gets to be a problem. And they know that and they use it. But that's not acknowledged by whoever is planning the use of those officers in that area, the resources that they have. you know Can their radios even talk to each other, assuming they can get there? you know That sort of thing. And the public does not see that.
01:35:12
Speaker
They don't see that.
01:35:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's one of those where... you kind of just stick your head in the ground and just kind of like, if I don't see it, I don't hear it, then everything's fine. So it's wonderful that, you know, you are out there advocating for better.
01:35:31
Speaker
think that's probably just the simplest, easiest way to put it. We
Resistance to Change in Policing
01:35:34
Speaker
just better. It doesn't have to be perfect. I don't think I've ah heard you say perfect at all. You just better. They can always be better, but better almost always requires change and change is scary.
01:35:48
Speaker
Oh, no, change means that's bullshit and cops are going to die. That's all what that's what cops think. Well, be that's what they say about cops is the only thing they hate more than the way things are is change, right? Yeah, exactly. And their bosses hate it even worse. And change a lot of times can challenge people's areas of control. Mm-hmm.
01:36:15
Speaker
and the things that they're in charge of you know, if you really look at something that is structural and say, this is not working, what could we do instead? If this is the goal we want to accomplish, it's almost always going to step on someone's toes.
01:36:29
Speaker
oh And it becomes a lot easier, honestly, to just settle into the inertia and keep going the way that you are. and And so you keep getting more of the same.
Practical Uniform Changes in Kansas
01:36:43
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:45
Speaker
I think that's a very fair... And now with what you've been working on and we're talking about change, what have you seen? but have What has your work shown you is possible?
01:37:05
Speaker
It's let me talk to a lot of people in a lot of different places, some of whom are trying out new things a So even just as simple as uniform changes, this sheriff I've talked to you a couple of times in Kansas who is a military veteran himself and actually new to a rural setting who told me he looked up one day when before he was sheriff, he was on a call and, why am I standing in a cow pasture looking like SWAT?
01:37:44
Speaker
yeah And it just kind of didn't make sense to him. And so when he started getting into decision-making capacity, he started making changes. like um And this is so counterintuitive. When so many people like, I didn't go back to tradition and looking like police officers again. He issued all his guys' Ariat jeans.
01:38:09
Speaker
Nice. said We are in a cattle ranching area, and this is what the people we police... wear pick any kind of footwear you want here's ah an allowance for that but honestly the area costs half what the tactical pants cost yeah and last twice as long and now we look like everybody else these are your options for a shirt everybody wears external vests because you can carry the stuff better um honestly it's like you had a couple of female officers who had smaller waists and Just as a practical point, that really limits how much stuff you can put on your belt. and
01:38:45
Speaker
But the external vest carriers, it's like, you know, I'm not worried about how people think they look. They're easier on your back. They're easier on your hips. And you can arrange your stuff differently on them. And honestly, who cares? And if you have a tattoo, so do I. You know? yeah And if you wear a beard, well, make it neat and trimmed because you are wearing a uniform. But honestly,
01:39:09
Speaker
we are part of our community. Let's be part of our community. And you know what? The world did not end. And he hasn't had an opening in his very small marginally well-paying department in three years.
01:39:23
Speaker
That might not sound like it is. And you know, you've worked for small departments, you know how far out of reach that can be, but it's, you know, he's made a lot of efforts to,
01:39:39
Speaker
tried to become a destination and a place that people want to stay, made ah changes to, it was able to convince county commissioners to voluntarily take on the extra expense to buy into the best available retirement system in the state for the very small department. Because like we've talked about before, if you know you have something that will allow you to retire with dignity u at the end of your career,
01:40:09
Speaker
ah that will also make for a very loyal employee indeed. yeah um And people who aren't afraid for their own living and feeling like they have to scrap for everything can put a lot of mental energy and emotional energy into other things. And I think it probably makes them better with their community as well.
Officer Safety and Funding Disparities
01:40:30
Speaker
um So I do get to see things like that. There's a research project I've worked on for a long time, tracking where officers get shot. Yep. shooting specifically just because they're generally very well documented you know ah things like assaults are a lot harder to qualify and quantify wow and i have had several department heads tell me behind the scenes because you know if they're a sheriff it's very political
01:41:01
Speaker
and They can't be fired, but their county usually has power over their budget. And if they're police chiefs, they're almost always at will. And so they're trying not to pick a fight they don't have to, but that they've taken the articles I've written and the numbers that I've kept tracking since this is our my seventh year, eighth year. I've lost track. I'd have to go back and count um doing that and that they have taken the statistics into budget meetings.
01:41:31
Speaker
and presented them as evidence of we have to have the right kind of training. We have to have this is baseline equipment. We can't not do it. And that's given them everything comes down to numbers. Everything comes down to money ultimately. And that's given them the ammunition that they needed to initiate those kinds of discussions because it's impossible to evade anymore. You can't not look at it when someone gives you concrete evidence of something. you Well, it's never happened here. It's never going to happen. Well, that's not true because most of these other places, it never happened until it did either.
01:42:09
Speaker
That's actually a um really interesting that you brought that up in that kind of format there. I didn't think about that when when I was reviewing that. it being able to bring those numbers to your city council or your county commissioners and show, because your research has shown, and I apologize, I don't remember the exact numbers, but us in rural communities are getting assaulted more per, I think it was per calls or per population?
01:42:44
Speaker
and Basically, the
01:42:50
Speaker
The representation of officers who were assaulted, and I'm again tracking only felonious gunshot wounds here, um is far too high for what it should be for the numbers of officers who are represented. There's a lot of numbers stuff that goes into it. Honestly, that is not my natural state, so I have to really
Risks Due to Isolation and Delayed Medical Response
01:43:12
Speaker
work at this line. I have to ask for a lot of help sometimes in it analyzing. It's like, I found this thing help me put it into some format that someone else can understand because this is the message I want to convey. And what it comes down to is the numbers that I have found is that like 90% of the officers in the country work for like
01:43:35
Speaker
some small percentage, like 35% of the departments because those departments are very big. Right. All the rest of them are scattered over these other really small departments all over the place from one-man show to you know up to maybe a couple hundred but patrolling a really vast environment.
01:43:58
Speaker
But those numbers over and over every year since I started doing this and I started doing it just to try to sort out for myself, whether it was my personal bias affecting my view when I would read these news articles and be like, dang, this is happening a lot in some really middle of nowhere places. ah Like, well, is it really?
01:44:23
Speaker
Or is that just how I'm kind of, personally programmed to interpret it because that's family to me. It's personal. And now when I started actually documenting the numbers and then asking for the National Fraternal Order of Police, I'm sorry, I can't even think of the words that go with the acronym now, started sharing their ambush data with me. And so I started adding that to the spreadsheets I was keeping.
01:44:54
Speaker
And every single year, with a couple exceptions where rate it was even higher, um about 30% of the casualties um were from the areas I write about, which I arbitrarily decided is a population of about 30,000 or fewer. Mm-hmm.
01:45:15
Speaker
or fewer And that doesn't mean they're all from small departments because that includes you know federal officers, Forest Service, National Park Service, BIA, even Marshall's Office and the FBI because they are the ones who investigate felonies and pursue fugitives out in the middle of nowhere. and They might be state police or highway patrol because those are bigger agencies, but they're also the ones patrolling rural areas. um So these things happen in those places.
01:45:47
Speaker
at way higher percentages than they should and the fatality rates are much, much higher than they should be. And I've talked with a couple of people who are in the medical field and, you know, really, really experts in emergency medicine and things that I am not and ask them, you know, what's your take on why this is happening? Because it doesn't even make sense to me except that very often those officers are alone and so there's no one to render immediate aid. Sometimes in some instances, a couple I can think of, one was in Oklahoma in a really rural area with no lighting um and another one was on an Indian reservation where the officer was not home for several hours or even overnight.
01:46:38
Speaker
So, you know, people talk about golden hours with medical response and that's long, long since flown. um And the other is distance from trauma care. You know, several of the things I've written about and what wasn't a shooting as an officer in Montana who was stabbed by a transient. He was trying to help multiple times and vests are really trash at stopping pointy things. um And the he was having to like relay the description of where he was for anyone else to come and find him.
01:47:13
Speaker
And so they had to figure out where he was and then send an ambulance and they had to go get him and then take him all the way back to this little critical access hospital and kind of get him patched up.
01:47:25
Speaker
And then they put him on a helicopter and flew him to the nearest big hospital. So, I mean, we're talking a very, very long response at the time. And, you know, yeah, all kinds of dire things happen in urban settings.
01:47:40
Speaker
But very often those guys will have somebody with HACMED training right with them and be within minutes of even a level one trauma center. And I'm finding that those things matter. I can't prove that, but those are my only theories on why the survival rate seems to be honestly a lot lower for rural officers.
01:48:06
Speaker
who get shot. Honestly, those seem very, very reasonable. I mean, like you said, this, the, the the quicker you can plug a hole, the more likely you are to survive that. Right. I think the other thing too, that could be part of it is at least in the area I'm in, um, a lot of the fire departments and EMS services, they're all volunteer. So now you're tacking on that extra time to get them paged out and them, you know, get their gear, get down to, you know, the fire department, grab the trucks and then and then get going. That tacks on more time.
01:48:43
Speaker
I know that's been a worry of a lot of officers out in the rural area that I know. I agree. um and And it can get even crazier than that. There was... One place so when we were young and we were looking to leave this expensive Sierra community, we found another place that was hiring way up the north coast. some place I don't even remember which town it was.
01:49:07
Speaker
And they were hiring and we went and talked to them, and you know, we're reading through, you know, what they have to offer. on And they' ah part of their benefits was actually so many Metta flights per year.
01:49:20
Speaker
per person because there was no medical care at all there. And so I pulled the life card on that one and said, yeah, you're not carrying a gun any place where like there's nobody who can even stick finger in the hole, you know, I mean, come on. and That's just like, no.
01:49:37
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. Um, what kind of response have you had from you know rural officers? I know you've talked about them reaching out to you and and sharing stories and stuff. How has that helped them, one, maybe have have a better relationship or get some better stuff from their agencies or even just feel better?
01:50:01
Speaker
a lot of it depends on whether we're talking about the you know more mainstream column or the social media stuff. ah The social media stuff I get a lot of people in the inbox sometimes that just want to talk and need a safe place to unload.
Social Media as a Support Platform
01:50:20
Speaker
And one of the things I've really made a name for there is I do not identify anyone without permission ever.
01:50:29
Speaker
And I don't directly quote anyone without permission ever. oh And so sometimes it's just a matter of, you know, I need to trot my tongue for a minute, you know, or they'll send me a send me a news line and be like, that was me, you know. um They just they just kind of kind of need a place to go. And I've gotten a lot of people saying, thank you, we needed this community and didn't even know it, you know.
01:50:57
Speaker
And with the more mainstream stuff, I think, probably really the place where it's getting more plays on, on LinkedIn. And I've made a lot of professional connections there.
01:51:09
Speaker
Uh, guys who are department heads and places. And I, and I think sometimes once in a while I feel, you know, I probably step on a couple of toes there. I try to do it more professional manner than I do on social media. Uh, but you know, so I know some of the articles I write, even for police one, um, touch some tender areas, uh,
01:51:28
Speaker
And, you know, some of my ideas for what change might look like are are not the cool kid thought. ah And, but even so, some of them will be like, nobody's ever said that before. I never thought about it.
01:51:44
Speaker
Or that's always needed to be said. And I didn't know how to. Thank you. And then they'll share the article and say, you have to read this because I took a thought and put it in a way that,
01:51:57
Speaker
is really mostly honestly storytelling. You know, even when the things are very technical or if they're economics or whatever, I try to find a way that personalizes it for people because otherwise you're just writing academics and you can tell people stuff all day.
01:52:17
Speaker
What they really need to know is not the stuff, but why it matters.
Fostering Constructive Online Discourse
01:52:22
Speaker
Right. And that's what I try really hard to do. and um, Mostly the feedback is really positive. You know, on social media, I'll to venture out mildly into politics. I don't usually talk about politics in current events because that's just a cesspool. But, you know, um I'll make a mild joke about, you know, I got kind of cranky because locally there was levy that needed to be renewed.
01:52:47
Speaker
and And all the same people that had been hollering about how much we love our local police at Back the Blue voted the levy out. It wasn't even a new levy. It was renewing a levy that had been in place for 20 years.
01:52:58
Speaker
So that's an instant budget cut. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute. So yeah, I made a comment the next day about let's criticize the defund the police movement in the cities.
01:53:10
Speaker
And then we're going to go to the ballot box and vote down that levy. Do you know what we call that? You just defunded your police department. You just defunded your sheriff's office and the ambulance service and You know, and that and yeah, that makes people mad, but, you know, it's not usually the officers that get mad about that. so I think when you and I first started talking, you had said something about, you know, trying to control some trolls.
01:53:38
Speaker
Well, sometimes I guess it's just better to just not read the comments. um I try to always read the comments, and honestly, I'm pretty merciless about blocking and deleting. If somebody's really, I mean, if they just disagree, fine, disagree. Even if they're cranky, you know, I will usually leave that. But if they're really if they're really insulting, if they're really vulgar, um if they're just provoking argument for the sake of it, I feel like I've spent enough time in eighth grade classrooms that I'm like, and never.
01:54:10
Speaker
We're not doing that. So my page actually has not grown like exponentially like some of the other really big law enforcement-oriented pages have because I won't let those arguments just spin out of control.
01:54:24
Speaker
But because of that, it's also grown a reputation as a place where civil discussion can take place. So I can ask a serious question, and I can even ask my readers, Here's this article. put it in the comments because if you put it in the post nowadays, the algorithm will quash But please read the article before you comment and then let's talk about this because I think this is something important. And we've had some fantastic discussions that way because when people grow uncivil, I call them out on it or I just block them.
01:54:56
Speaker
It's like, i don't I don't need that. here. There's lots of places including a lot of law enforcement pages where you can just go and rant if that's what you want to do. And that is not this place. People need a place to talk and I will not permit any sort of disrespect or politics on a memorial past for a fallen officer.
01:55:17
Speaker
Their families don't see that. Sorry, I was going to say it does seem like you've built a ah good place for people to actually just have a conversation, to just talk rather than just kind of berate everybody and just try to force their opinion. yeah You know, you're sharing your opinion, but you're literally asking people like, let's talk. That's that's what we need, not only for law enforcement in general, but especially with the the topics you're bringing up being out, you know, rural and small agencies and stuff like that. So I'll say thank you.
01:55:52
Speaker
Well, you are most welcome because it's, Like I said, it's not about me. Yes, I needed a place to express my thoughts, but there's so, so many more people out there besides me who need a place to be heard or to ask a question anonymously. um You know, I'll i' ah'll post a little misinformation if I need to, you know, if somebody...
01:56:17
Speaker
needs to ask a question that's really important to them and they absolutely cannot be identified, then I'll say it's from someplace entirely. That's the question remains the same, you know, and right that's, that's just, that's just fine. And I will do that, you know, uh, but there are a lot of questions that just are really common. And even some that have just ended up in some really phenomenal discussion, because somebody asked, uh,
01:56:45
Speaker
question one of them was actually about de-escalation and that one turned into a column for p1 because this discussion went on for hundreds of comments and people were making the most phenomenal recommendations for ways to handle someone who was angry who was hungry ah who was for animal wrangling for i mean i had to like just like divide it into whole categories of of how people were deescalated people were de-escalating bears, they were de-escalating bulls, they were de-escalating crack addicts and their moms. And it was just, that is just a ball. And i I don't think you can do that when everybody's just angry.
01:57:29
Speaker
And I get it. There's a lot of anger out there.
Empathy and Communication
01:57:33
Speaker
But even if you're angry, let's find a way to express that so that other people will keep listening.
01:57:40
Speaker
Mm-hmm. and maybe hear what you have to say. And I try not to cut people off just because I don't like their tone. I'm tempted. But I remember very specifically when the page was was still pretty young, I had posted something about an officer had gotten hurt or who had gotten killed.
01:58:02
Speaker
And somebody popped off in the comments with the whole, you know, it's not even that dangerous a job, buth blah, blah, blah thing, and, you know, this, that, and the other. and But there was something a little bit different.
01:58:17
Speaker
And so I asked him a question instead of just rebutting what he had to say. And we talked for a minute and it turned out that he was a trucker and one of his friends died in a really, really gnarly accident less than a year before.
01:58:32
Speaker
And yeah, he was angry. But what he really was is he was hurting. yeah And he needed his loss to be acknowledged right then. And I didn't know that was what was going on, but to give him a soft answer, at least at first, give him the chance.
01:58:51
Speaker
What's going on with that? What do you want to talk about? And find out he, this guy wasn't, he wasn't cop. i don't know why he was on the law enforcement page. You know, maybe one of those unsought things that floated across his feed.
01:59:05
Speaker
um that you know, hopefully that gave him a little better impression of the topic we were talking about.
Open Dialogue for Officers and Community
01:59:13
Speaker
Right.
01:59:16
Speaker
Well, that's that's awesome that that you're doing work that you don't even realize you're actually doing similar to what we do, helping people out, even just giving them an opportunity to just vent, share, and feel better.
01:59:36
Speaker
A lot of times. Yeah. Well, I know I've kept you for almost a couple of hours now, and I know there's a ton of things that I'm sure you still want to talk about and I would still like to talk about. So maybe we could do this again at some point. I would love that.
01:59:53
Speaker
but I'm sure both of us are ready to go finish out the evening with our loved ones. So if you don't mind closing us out, letting everybody know where they can find you, ah the Rural Badge, and your writings on Police One.
02:00:10
Speaker
Absolutely, I appreciate that. The Rural Badge is in an account on Facebook, and there's also a linked Instagram account, if that's more to your preference. There is a blog sadly neglected at the moment because of all my other obligations, but it does exist. And there's even a store there where you can buy logo gear. The logo was designed for me by an active ah deputy up in the Pacific Northwest. Fantastic graphic artist.
02:00:37
Speaker
um And my column on Police One is under my real name and it's called Policing the Remote and Rural. And so if you Google that or Google my name, ah you will find that whole history since 2019 to present day when I've been writing for them.
02:00:56
Speaker
Yep. Google Kathleen Diaz and first thing that pops up is, you know, award-winning writer for Police One, which is pretty cool. Still used to that.
02:01:08
Speaker
All right. Well, I appreciate it and thank you very much. um Is there anything you want to leave any of the listeners with? Any extra information? this I think we've covered it really well, but I so much appreciate the invitation and that you kind of tracked me down a little bit to to get this started. It's been a great conversation.
02:01:32
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you very much.
02:01:38
Speaker
Today I spoke with Kathleen Diaz, AKA Charlie Pipp, and I really appreciate her willingness to sit down with me and talk honestly about something that is overlooked or just ignored altogether.
Listener Engagement and Story Sharing
02:01:51
Speaker
If this episode resonated with you or stirred something up, I'd love to hear from you. If you've got a story or perspective or an experience that doesn't fit neatly into a headline, reach out.
02:02:03
Speaker
That's what this show is for. You can find both sides of the badge on Spotify and Apple podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening. I'll catch up with you guys next time.