Beyond Compliance: Takeaways from Panel on Organizational Excellence

Transcript:

Welcome. Thank you. You know, I’m a firm believer in life that, you know, there are so many moments in time where you can extend gratitude for the opportunities you’re given, so, not in an obsequious way. I do wanna say thank you to, to Benchmark for having us today, to present on this. This is some really, really important stuff and, like I said, there are moments in life where, I think, culturally can become who you are as a human being. Looking for moments of gratitude and being grateful for what you have. So again Steve, thank you for allowing us to be here.

We’re gonna put on a panel, this afternoon, talking about some of the stuff that, we’ve done in Minnesota. Real quick introduction, my name’s Greg Weber, I retired from the Eden Prairie Police Department, Did thirty one years there. It’s just southwest of Minneapolis by about, twelve miles. I know we’ve got Maple Grove in the room.

Anybody familiar with where Eden Prairie is? Okay. We’ll get in Yeah, we’ve got a Minnetonka guy here. We’ll get into that a little bit more, but, I’d like to, allow my, two, co presenters are here, the panelists to introduce themselves.
We’ll start with Josh.

Yeah. My name is Josh Blackwell. I’m the director of law enforcement practice at a company called, Insurance Program Managers Group or IPMG. We administer the Illinois County’s Risk Management Trust, which is a public entity trust.
It has over six hundred public entities. We have about two twenty law enforcement agencies we provide, services to. Prior to coming to IPMG, I had fifteen years at Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, in Tuscola, Illinois. Worked a variety of positions, started as a dispatcher, went to the road, worked the road a few years, worked undercover at a state police task force full over a year, was promoted out of there, was a sergeant for about seven years, and then ran for sheriff against the incumbent sheriff.

And it was a very successful campaign. So I became the sheriff of Douglas County and I had that position until twenty twenty one. I, I left, right when the safety act was taken taking place.
Awesome. Thanks. And colonel Dunn.

Yeah. I’m, Jeff Dunn, owner and founder of the Dunn Group, which is a correctional consultancy agency. I work with national secretaries, commissioners, and directors across the country to basically solve what I call their wicked problems, those very complex problems that they face every day. Prior to that, I was a commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections for almost seven years.

And then prior to that, I, served in the United States Air Force, as a pilot and then in some other capacities for about twenty eight and a half years. The the interesting thing, that makes Josh and mine’s journey a little bit different is that my first day in corrections was as commissioner. And so, we come at it from a little different perspective, which I think is part of the the secret sauce of what we hope to bring to this panel. So let’s get going.

Thank you. So how did we get here? In Minnesota, I will tell you that, there’s about three hundred and twenty five agencies that are insured by the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust. And, I call it the red flag or the alarm call that went off as we’re looking at PTSD claims and I know, the League of Minnesota Cities has paid out about, forty seven, forty eight million thus far.

And keep in mind in Minnesota, the five largest cities are not insured by, the League of Minnesota cities are self insured. So you have Minneapolis, Saint Paul, those larger cities. I would say if we we were to estimate, we probably in Minnesota paid out close to, a hundred million in PTSD claims. Now here’s here’s my fear.

I think that as a profession, we maybe jumped the gun a little bit, and we helped people out financially, put a roof over their head, you know, put food on the table. I fear one day what’s gonna happen is some of these folks that we helped out financially are gonna look back and go, man, I wish there would have been something that could have been done to to maybe pull me out of that darker period, and I could look back and have a full, a full thirty year fulfilling career. And I think that they’re gonna kinda miss out on that. So that that does sadden me a little bit that, as a profession, that’s what we did.

I think it’s important also to note that the folks at the League of Minnesota Cities, when we talk about the dollars and cents of it, there are very, very, very good people at the LMCIT that are, they haven’t lost sight of the fact that these are people. There’s a dollar amount on it but there’s there’s they wanna take care of the good people, that are are doing the law enforcement work in in the state of Minnesota.

So going at it, looking at, their claims rates, they recognized that some agencies had sixty percent fewer incidents than similar agencies. And the goal was to figure out why, identify what it is they do differently, that that that they have much lower claims rates, and then produce some, evidence based practices that we could hopefully help other agencies, emulate. They could, mirror what some of these high performing agencies were doing to hopefully, minimize, their claims rates as well.
Our goal, fewer and less severe officer injuries, fewer incidents leading to liability claims and reduced turnover. Now, there’s no scientific data. This is more my opinion. I think one of the biggest challenges we have, in law enforcement in terms of recruiting and retaining employees, anybody want to guess what that challenge is or what’s making folks not want to get into the line of work or leave?

Come on, throw it out. Public perception. Public perception, yep.

Who does that public perception affect?

Family. Family, thank you. I truly believe that that’s probably one of the biggest challenges of keeping people in the profession or going into the profession is their families are saying that. And we’ve seen those examples, through the Chiefs Association saying, hey we’re seeing people give that as a reason. And we’ll talk about this in terms of officer wellness. We we talked about it a little bit this morning in terms of extending what we’re doing to take care of the employee to the family because, I’ll give you some, I call them metaphoric stories, but I’m gonna give you some examples of how, if we don’t take care of the family system, we’re setting ourselves up or we’re setting the officer up to maybe have too much static inside their head because of what it is they do for a living, and that’s going to to diminish, good problem solving or good decision making on the street.

So our research approach, again was to identify these, evidence based practices. I’ll go over them shortly. We’ve adjusted them as we went on, and we’ll talk a little bit about that in terms of, you know, body worn camera reviews.

You know, it’s not just enough that an agency employs body worn cameras initially. We talked about that. We also, made note of or, notice that agencies that deployed tasers had lower claims rates. Well, I don’t know how you can really make that comparison because the taser’s kind of such a common place tool for every agency. There’s not really the haves and the have nots to make that comparison. So we have adjusted, some of our research and, looked at things that are are probably not the most accurate thing to look at. And, that’s one thing that’s been fascinating to me, during the research process is is the ability to to adjust.

So top performing agencies, what they’re doing well. And this is where I’ll get into some of those stories here if I can, be smarter than the little clicker here, but, after action reviews. Any agencies out here? Well, I should have asked early on, law enforcement practitioners, show of hands.

Okay. Insurance folks. Okay. So after action reviews. Looking at, what are we doing right? You know, I’ve often said in law enforcement that we routinely will, walk away from a particularly challenging call and, the comment is made, boy we got lucky on that one.

The next question out of our mouth should be why did we get lucky? And I think if we pick back the layers, we’ll find out that it’s not luck. If you have a good culture and people are operating in a manner, that they’re they’re doing things the right way, it’s not so much luck. But after action reviews, there’s a treasure trove of data out there on body worn camera reviews. I think body worn cameras were kinda put into the profession to say, hey, we’ve got this notion we’re gonna catch all of these officers doing things wrong. And in reality, it’s the exact opposite. We’ve got all of this information and I think, doing after action reviews and looking at positive performance of officers and then showcasing it because it’s human nature that officers will emulate what you showcase as an organization, what you celebrate.

Officers will emulate that. So we’ve got all that data there. You know, I think, you know, when you when you when you promote a new sergeant, something that I was, it was very important to me, you know, what makes a good police officer is the ability to go out and catch people doing the wrong thing and hold them accountable. Now you become a sergeant and you really almost have to put a different set of eyeglasses on because, you don’t wanna be constantly looking for your officers doing wrong when you know there’s that volume of data they’re doing right and you need to remind them of that and kind of level set those scales of maybe what, society wants to say.

I always said, if we want, if we put out an ad in the paper and say, come and tell us what we’re doing wrong, we’ll have a line a mile long. But people aren’t necessarily willing to come in and tell you what you’re doing right. So as organizations, we have to make sure we’re doing that. Advanced leadership training.

Again, you know, there’s a, a non synonymous approach. I think if you get into administration or leadership in an organization, you probably worked your way up and you know what it takes to be a police officer on the street. The officers on the street probably don’t tend to think about okay what goes through the administrator or the leaders mind on a daily basis? I’m not an advocate of turning our, officers on the street to being strategic thinkers.

I think they need to think tactically to stay safe. At the same time, having them, understand a little bit. It helps with succession planning as well, as you, you know, look at your staff that’s gonna retire from the job. Wellness programs, I think there’s that, common thread that we’re seeing.

We heard a lot about it this morning.

Two things, check up from the neck up, those proactive therapist, sessions where, we’re having staff go meet with a mental health therapist on a yearly basis. I would just say that, it’s not a cookie cutter approach. Please don’t look at it as a check the box system because you’re gonna have staff that is gonna say, hey, this was very effective. I could use two, three, four, maybe even five sessions. But the other thing I would say, much like I was indicating earlier, with the family system, if if your organization can do this, offer these services to families too because they truly are impacted by what, our practitioners do on the street.

They’re left home not knowing what their loved one does. As I meet with organizations, it’s interesting you always ask police officers when you get home from work and your family says, how was work today? Your response is?

Fine. Yeah. And we you know, I’m not saying they should become our our therapists, but at the same time, I think we’re kinda doing ourselves a disservice by not offering them a little more intimate knowledge of what goes on because, more often than not, when you’re at work, you feel secure, you’re around people who think like you and you’re kind of in that safety net. That’s probably good for your kids to go to bed at night formulating their opinion of what mom or dad are doing at work versus what they’re seeing in the media.

Peer support, legislation in Minnesota has allowed for some privacy so that, when people are opening up, we met with an agency just last week and I happened to talk to one of their officers and he said, you know, I think something that we can expand upon peer support is he said it’s it’s we we’ve trained officers that you can go to if you’re struggling. And he said in our organization, the peer support team is actually proactively selecting officers, going to them and saying, hey, how are things going? And it’s something that they they they tell their staff, in the onboarding process. This is what you can expect. Here’s the intent behind it.

Evidence room practices, probably the largest payout in the League of Minnesota City’s history was, some mismanagement of of evidence. I’m gonna talk a lot today about public trust and, my thinking here is if you can’t take care of an evidence room, if you can’t take care of things, how much confidence does your community have that you can take care of people? Okay?

Best example I can give you, I was listening to somebody talk and he said, hey, how many of you have officers that get injured on duty? Raise your hand. How many of them are orthopedic injuries? Raise your hand.

How many of them are given painkillers, because of the orthopedic injury, everybody raises their hand? And he said, so then when they come in and they’re on light duty and they can’t be on the street, you put them where? On the property room. And what’s in the property room?

Well, that’s where your pain killers are at and then you wonder why you have some of these problems. Please don’t misinterpret that in saying saying that every individual who gets injured is going to become addicted to pain killers, but if we can see the potential is there, we should try and avoid it.

Mental illness crisis response policy, CIT, is something that’s become very, very popular I think nationwide. I can speak from my experience in Minnesota.

When it comes right down to it, it’s a slowing down of the process.

And, you know, when we’re dealing with people who, maybe suffer from some type of mental illness, more often than not we’re going to deal with them again. Because we don’t necessarily fix the problem, we stabilize it, move on, we’ll probably go back. If we’re treating these folks with dignity, we’re slowing down and we’re allowing them to maybe even kind of self diagnose.

I truly believe we’re setting our partners up for a better interaction the next time because they they may not be able to differentiate between uniforms or individual, they just equate.

When I was having a tough time, some authoritative figure came in and kinda treated me in a manner that they were in a hurry and they rushed through it and and my dignity was taken away from me a little bit. So, we’re we’re seeing that. And of course there’s a price tag that goes along with that. We’re seeing, some some response times changes, but that’s something we just have to educate the community to.


Pursuit policies, locking down, you know, the ability to freely pursue, in motor vehicles. Probably not, one of the more popular ones when we talk about. I think you got a lot of good cops out there that are like, no, that’s that’s who I am. I I go chase down people who committed a crime.

I think actually, when you’re seeing the prosecution of officers that are involved in pursuits, these officers are kind of figuring it out on their own going, it’s not worth it. And then you get into the issue of of insurance, and there are there are some advocates out there that would say, hey, maybe we should take away, funded insurance by the municipality and have an officer take out their own liability. I think if that were to ever come to fruition, you’d probably find officers going, nah, I’m not gonna do that.

Not suggesting we do that, but, it’s a math issue. Lateral higher risk assessments, there again, you know, something I always said is when a person applies here, are they running to or are they running from? And, you know, sometimes, it’s okay. People don’t have a good fit in an organization but really do that assessment and go, okay, why is this person leaving, you know, maybe somewhere where they have that institutional knowledge?

The other thing I would say is if you have an officer, which we’ve termed the wandering officer that’s bouncing from department to department to department, now under a time of stress they hit the search engine to make a decision and are they withdrawing data from maybe a department they worked at two years ago or two different departments ago? So I think we’re finding that those officers that have that institutional knowledge and that longevity within the department tend to be a lower risk. And then emergency vehicle operations policy, we don’t have a mandate on that in Minnesota, but you know, gosh, not suggesting we become complacent, but, we’re going to intrusion alarms that statistically we know, are going to be false.

When you get to the scene game on, that’s no time to be complacent but should we be racing through town? Medical emergencies, we can do a better job at triage and explaining to the public that to you it may seem like, there was no sense of urgency when I pulled up on maybe a broken finger or something like that. But we’re putting a greater risk out there to ourselves and the public and, encouraging agencies to really step back and go, is this something we should be doing?

After action reviews and again, I I apologize, I I should have mentioned after action reviews in the, wellness programs by far are far out in advance of of the other, evidence based practices. But, we’re ninety three percent confident that, these agencies that, deploy after action reviews, are reducing officer injury severity, they’re reducing the overall comp work comp costs, reduce the liability claim, and then reduce, auto claim frequency as well. So, the numbers are out there. We can show that statistically and, it’s it’s one of these things and I I, when we deliver this message, we’ve been to about one hundred and twenty five agencies in Minnesota, I get the nods.

Okay? People get it. They understand what you’re presenting. But what we really wanna jump into now is how do we, how do we we we we, transfer knowledge into implementation.

And, sometimes I think there’s, you know, maybe a little bit of an out of sight out of mind concept where, the agency will nod their head and say, yeah, I get it. I understand it. Okay. Well, what are you gonna do, to change? And that’s probably, one of our our, last, pieces of of effort.

After action reviews, missed opportunities, you know, I think that, many agencies out there, have policies, at least in Minnesota. I know for pursuits, you have to do an after action review. It’s it’s part of the state mandated policy. But so many agencies out there really only open these up when something bad happens. And, culturally I think that that that can be a little bit frustrating for officers to say, hey, you’re not paying attention, to when when the good happens. You’re you’re only paying attention to when the bad happens. I get how that is with human nature, but I think we’re, well as the slide says, we’re missing some opportunities to really, identify good work, showcase it, celebrate it and again, human nature is that people will- will emulate it.

Measuring the value of organizational health and culture, agencies with, twenty percent plus less turnover than their peers, clear missions, Clear mission statements. I I will say that, throughout our work, occasionally you’ll see an organization that has mission statements painted on the cars, painted on the walls, but there’s something you can just detect. It maybe something’s not organizationally, too healthy here. And then there’s times where they don’t have it but you’re like looking at the the employees and, they’re really engaged. They’re really there for their partners. They’re taking care of one another.

And then focus or excuse me, focusing on normalizing officer mental health and wellness, I think we’re we’re we’re as it was brought up this morning, we’re headed towards, normalizing it or removing the stigma but it’s still there a little bit. Here again, just our panelists, we will get into, a little bit of a discussion here with the panelists because, as I said, we’re we’re at a point now where it’s, I don’t wanna say wash, rinse, repeat, but we know what the data suggests and what we need to do. The challenge we run into is how do we get organizations to say thank you for that information, now I’m going to put it into action. So, with that, I’m hoping we have a dialogue here today. I’m hoping you’ll, ask questions, you know, ask for clarification from our panelists. We’ve done an introduction.

So I’d like to just start out with, Josh. If you could tell us a little bit more, about, how you came to IPMG and and how this became important for you.

Yeah. So I’m sorry. Yeah. So, I came to IPMG back in twenty twenty two, January of twenty twenty two.

And, started as a risk manager, myself and another gentleman who also was former law enforcement. The only county risk management trust saw an increase in their law enforcement liability claims, and it became one of their number one losses. And so they decided we need to really invest in this. And they had been investing in services, but oftentimes they find that, you know, in order to talk shop, you need someone that’s done the job, right?

And so, that’s where I kinda came in. You know, just having been a law enforcement officer that kinda builds credibility, especially when you go into an agency and they’re like, Oh, you’re from insurance. I don’t really care to talk to you, right? But if you can go in there and say, Hey, you know, I’m from insurance.

I’m here to help you. In that, I’ve got all these services that don’t cost you anything. Right? And they’re gonna help you.

It sparks some interest. And the other thing for me is, you know, when I worked at Douglas County, I had an impact on the citizens of my county, but now I have the opportunity to spread that knowledge and that impact across the state of Illinois. And so, you know, to me, if I can help reduce claims, at an institute, that’s helping the taxpayers downline, which in turn helps all of us, helps the community. Right?

And so, I’ve taken a really strong passion of that, and and, we’ve we also partner with Benchmark to even, increase our service offering. So that’s kinda how I came around.

Yeah. Awesome. And and Jeff is a a leader and now a consultant. From your past experience, how do you how do you walk into an organization and start that assessment as as a an outsider coming in?


Yeah. So as I mentioned, my first day in corrections was as the commissioner, as the senior guy. And I’d been appointed by my governor to come in because there were some very specific, difficulties that the agency was going through. And so they wanted someone from the outside, new fresh perspective. Y’all are familiar with that methodology.

The biggest thing the biggest gap that I had was credibility.

And just like in the military, in the corrections industry, and it’s in law enforcement, I mean, your credibility is everything.

And you spend a career building credibility, and that oftentimes is what enables you to be effective as a leader because they look at you as someone who’s been there. They’ve done that. They understand.

They get what I’m going through. I can trust this person to have my best interest at heart. Well, I had none of that going into the agency. And so it it was very key at the very beginning, to begin to work to earn that and to come into it from a place of humility and say, listen. I I bring a set of skills here from from my career in the military.

But they’re only gonna be useful if you buy in and believe that I have your best interest at heart.

So, and if you’re a leadership, student like I am, one of my favorite, leadership guys is a guy named Patrick Lancione. You may be familiar with him. I love the data that he does, and and it was mentioned earlier this morning.

What is the number one thing that folks look for in a leader before they decide to follow?

You know, anybody got an idea? Alright. It’s trust. It’s trust. That’s that’s that’s almost I mean, that’s just like breathing air.

It’s it’s trust. Well, when you come in as a brand new guy, you don’t have that. It hasn’t been established. And, specifically, when you come in as an outsider, I was very fortunate.

I had, some help. I had some folks very early on who lent me their credibility.


So they basically said, I I am getting to know this person. I believe in this person, and I think you should too.

And so for the first six months as leading this new agency, I attached myself at the hip with what was at my judgment and proved to be correct, the most influential leader in the organization who wasn’t, you know, the the the head, the one who had the most credibility, the most, ability to influence people. And I had that person take me to the entire organization and introduce me to the thirty five hundred or so, employees that we had at the twenty six operating locations.

And so after about six months, then I was able to begin to speak slowly to issues, but that was after they saw me just be inquisitive and communicate that, hey. I really do have your best interest at heart. And so that was kind of my introduction. There’s some other things to that, but we’ll stop there for Yeah. Later.

So, you know, Josh, the same question for you. However, you know, Jeff, you coming into an organization not being known and having to do that. Josh, for you coming into your organization, like you said, you were elected as an inside person, so people knew you, they knew what you were about. What what what trying to bring about change, what challenges does everyone’s knowledge of you bring about?

Yeah. So it definitely helped me in my own agency. Right? Because number one, I had been been there my entire career, so I had an idea already what things do I need to change.

Right? And these things, were some things that I observed, but also just listening to other employees to see what what do you see we as an organization can improve on. Right? And so I kinda came out, above the eight ball there.

But when you look at other agencies, you know, they may not know me a hundred and fifty miles away. So how do I get that credibility, or how do I look at, getting buy in from them? And one of the things, there’s no secrets in law enforcement. Right?
And so chances are, I have probably helped another law enforcement agency somewhere else. And so I already start to build some of that credibility, but then we can have the nice advantage of looking at their claims data too. Right? So I can start to see, okay, based on their claims history, I see this entity is involved in a lot of pursuits.


Right? So going in there, I have some questions I wanna ask about that. What’s your pursuit policy look like? And I can start to try and triage what’s going on there.

And then from there, you you start talking to the staff, and you can really get a better understanding from that and then googling. See what sort of news stories are out there. Look at their Facebook. Right?

You can see a lot about an agency by just looking at their social media. And what are they putting on there? Are they putting social deposits in there where they’re showing shop with a cop? Or they’re showing, you know, community engagement?

Or are they just showing you things where they’re talking about, hey. We busted this local drug dealer for doing this. Hey. We did this.

Right? What is their mindset there? Are they looking at a holistic approach of how can I help my community, or how can I just help my agency?

So as a practitioner and then becoming an elected official leveraging that when you’re doing your current work as an insurance consultant. Can you talk a lot a little bit about that?

Yeah. So one of the nice things is being a former, elected official is number one, I have to know how to work with, all levels of county government. But number two is having familiarity with some, advantages of of laws. For example, in Illinois, there’s a section of the Tort Immunity Act that allows you to use tort funds to pay for products of risk management.

And so when I can tie that to a law enforcement leader and say, hey. Look. You know, how much are you paying for your your bullet proof vest every so often? Oh, I’m paying fifty thousand dollars.

Is that coming out of your general fund?

Yeah.

It’s coming out of my general fund. Well, did you realize if you include that on a risk management plan, as part of the county government and how this risk control device, I. E. A bulletproof vest, can help reduce your workers’ compensation claim, that you can now pay for that out of tort funds instead of out of your general fund?


Oh, no. I had no idea. Well, now you just have fifty thousand dollars you added to your budget that you can then use for some other sort of operational need, whether you need, you know, a new squad car or whatever the case is. But that one little thing, cops never have enough resources.

And by just using some simple administrative things, you can start to get by in that way as well.

Awesome. And and that dovetails kind of into the next question I was gonna ask about.

You’re building a portfolio of risk management resources Yeah.

That you’re walking through the door. Do you have some other examples of of products you can bring in and deliver?

Yeah. So so we work in a couple different spaces. We work in both the preventative space and then and then, of course, the post incident space. So preventatively, we provide all our agencies with model policies.

Those policies are accredited both through the state of Illinois’s, Illinois law enforcement accreditation program, but also they meet CALEA standards. So we provide those to our members completely no cost. There’s over a hundred model policies for the road. There’s another, sixty five policies for the jail, so we provide that.

We provide training. So we’ll do training not only in law enforcement related matters, but also employment practice. Right? I’ve seen plenty of, chief law enforcement officers get in trouble because they didn’t know how to properly fire someone or even hire someone.

That creates liability. So we’ll give them some tools that way. And then we do some another section would be a supervisory. So we offer the entity the ability.

If you want us to come in and just take an overall look at your operations, you know, based on our knowledge of of not only the industry, law enforcement industry, but also with litigation, do we see an exposure that you may have? And then we’re not just gonna point out and say, hey. You have an exposure here. We’re gonna bring you a solution.

So whether that’s a policy change, whether that’s training, you know, we also do grant support. So if they need, for example, equipment controls to help reduce maybe a workers’ compensation claim or a excessive use of force claim. We can provide grant support. There’s just a whole litany of services that we can provide both preventively and post, incident that really gets that buy in.

And one other thing I’ll say is a critical incident. You know, a lot of times, you’ll see entities getting involved. We’ll use Highland Park, Illinois here for as an example. So the chief there, you know, he came from another agency, and, you know, he here he had to deal with a mass shooting event several years ago.

Right? Well, now he is on on the front page of every major news organization.

Well, what did he do on the front end before that incident took place to prepare for that event? We provide press and media training. We wanna make sure they’re aware of that. We even have a critical incident team that is built of, press and media experts to where they can call at any time twenty four seven and say, I’ve got this critical incident going on.

Can you help me? And provide that service. And that gets the buy in. We can bring in counseling too.

I mean, there’s just a whole litany of stuff.

And then in terms of your your interface with Benchmark, is there something specific or specific things that Benchmark provides to you?

Yeah. So so with Benchmark, the nice thing is we can take, we have twelve critical areas we work with on the jail or excuse me, on the roadside and in the jail. But when we, start to do our presentation with the benchmark, we tie those in a lot of what the evidence based practices are are tied into the critical tasks that we’ve seen through litigation.

And the other thing is is that we we start to tell them what kind of benefit are you gonna gonna get out of this. They’re gonna say, well, I’m just taking a survey. But when we looks take a step back and look at this from a a a thirty thousand foot view, you know, one of the coolest things I’ve seen so far is when I’m doing these surveys, I’ll have one agent I have one agency, that has seventy five percent participation in their officer wellness program. And I have another agency that’s exact same makeup, same number of officers that only has twenty five percent participation.

Well, what are we doing here that is different? Why is this one agency have more participation than the other? And you find out that the high performing agency, theirs is monetary based, where the other agency that has low performance, it’s an extra day off. When you start to talk to that administrator and say, Hey, have you ever thought about looking at this at a different approach?

You know? Because if you say, Hey, you know, what about offering a thousand dollars? Oh, our city government would never go through that. Well, then you say, Yeah, but think about how much lost time you have if that person gets injured, and now you’re having to backfill that with overtime.

Right? And so you have lost time wages. And that small investment, making sure your employee is healthy, could have helped reduce that amount of time that they’re off work.

Jeff, anything from your perspective?

I think the only thing I would add to that is that, and we talked about this prior.

There is a definite difference when you think about analyzing risk from a, county or a municipality and a state agency.

They’re they’re very, very different, and so I would just, caution not to put those into the same bucket when you think about how you manage risk, how you assess risk, and and all of that.

So And then maybe you could expand on the federal government in terms of your experience in the air force.

Any any differences there?

Yeah.

That that that’s a whole another seminar. Yeah. You know, the the federal government has basically immunized themselves from any risk whatsoever.

And, and then if you challenge that, it takes you twenty years in federal court to make your case and you’ve bankrupted yourself on principle, you know? So, I mean, that’s a little sure little pejorative, and I I don’t mean I I’d used to say that for a fact. But, yeah, I think that’s a that’s a really, a a totally different animal. Now in one sense, at the federal level, there are many, many more layers of protection to help mitigate and address risk.


But by the same token, they very rarely, in my experience, result in actually connecting, the accountability of the risk to avoid it in the future. I guess what I’m saying is they’re very reactive, and they’ve got an office to react to everything, but maybe not as effective as actually delivering a solution that is, broadly applicable. Yeah. That that fair?

Yeah. No. Thank you. I was just kind of curious. The challenge, you know, going from something, of scale that large to maybe something where no the ability to be proactive. How do you you know, that that adjustment? What was that like for you?

Well, you know, I I think for me, there were a couple things in this in the switch from being a senior leader at the federal level to now being a senior leader at the state level.

One thing was I had more access to the actual levers of power. I mean, even though I was a senior guy in the air force, I was still four layers below the most senior guy, and he’s three layers below the president. And so, I mean, there’s just an awful lot at between me and the budget decisions and the resource allocation.

At the state, there was one person between, me and, the the most senior level, or I could go directly to the legislature. So in that sense, it’s the world has shrunk a lot. But I will tell you that, what was a new for me, and I know you experienced this even more, was this idea of when you try to operationalize something and in your mind and in your folks’ mind, this is the obvious right operational thing to do, and we should resource it and support it.

It then has to enter into the political calculus, and it just it becomes exceptionally challenging to get the most simple thing that from your people’s perspective is just this makes total sense.

And I I think we’ll get to it here a little bit. And what I would add to that is that what happens then is that your people will start holding you as the leader accountable for things that the legislature is actually doing because they perceive you to have a lot more influence and power than you actually have.

I’ll give you one brief example.


State of Alabama, for financial reasons, and I think there’s maybe some folks in there who’ve experienced this, changed the correctional officer retirement system, about three years before I got there. So now you have two tiers.

And it was widely perceived by those in the new system that they were getting the shaft, that that there that there were benefits for eroding and all that. And in that first six months I told you about, if there was one thing that came up over and over and over again was, commissioner, what are you gonna do about our retirement system?

And I was I did not I wasn’t briefed on it at that point. It took me a while to get up on step.

And so for the next three years, every time I would go back to that facility and visit with those officers, that was their number one issue. What are you doing about why can’t you go and fix our retirement system? And it does you no good to well, you know, I, first of all, have no say in that. There’s a hundred and forty four legislatures and a governor, and they don’t wanna hear that. They just wanna know what you’re doing. And so it sometimes you get held accountable as the senior leader for things that you don’t have any control over, and you just have to learn how to navigate your way through that.

Yeah. You know, it’s it’s interesting, Josh. You mentioned, the evidence based practices. I will say, you know, from a Minnesota perspective, one of the things that, you know, I found throughout the process is, I don’t think the intent to develop these evidence based practices were to be necessarily a tool for strategic planning for organizations, but we’ve seen organizations out there, very forward thinking organizations that are utilizing that when it comes to budgeting.
And the best example I can give you is it was a smaller agency where the chief went to the city council and said, hey, I’d like an increase in my training budget because the data that Benchmark has has amassed and the League of Minnesota Cities has amassed is showing me that I can hopefully bring down some of our liability and work comp claims if I invest in this. And it was a no brainer. She she said, here’s the money. The money came in.

And she said, now if I just would have went in without that data and said, hey, this is what I would like to do. She said, I would have had a much heavier lift.


Yeah. That’s, can I add to that too? That’s a great point. And it is something where, how can you dispute evidence based practices? This isn’t just some guy, right? There’s something statistical data we can back this up with. And that does carry a lot of weight with with with, local government.

Jeff. After action reviews and, you know, the military, I think, does it very well. Learning from everyday operations is the biggest missed opportunity, that Benchmark finds in our research. Most agencies that do this, well have a champion who brought the AAR culture learning from their military experience.

Why is it so important in the military culture?

I think in simple terms because the cost are so high for failure, particularly when you think about, combat operations.

You know, you you go out.

Unfortunately, something happens.

One or many lose their lives, and it drives an immediate why did this happen, and so we’ve inculcated that.

My background is also in aviation.

And in in my agency, when I was in corrections, I brought this in there. I would advocate for an expansion of the AAR process into a bifurcated system.

And what I mean by that is in in the air force and at at the National Transportation Safety Board, whenever there’s an aviation incident, there are two boards that that take place. There’s the safety investigation board that does its thing, and that’s all non punitive immunity.

You know, as a pilot, I can go into the board and say, hey. This is where I screwed up. I did this checklist item in front of this one. I missed this. I didn’t see this. And and I have immunity in that environment.

And that gets to the raw facts so as to be able to prevent the incident from happening. And then once that is done and that report is, you know, written and sanitized such that it doesn’t necessarily assign blame, just identifies root causes, then the accident investigation comes in and does the same thing again. But at the accident investigation, I have an attorney sitting next to me and is guiding me through that process so that I don’t implicate myself.

And so I think particularly in law enforcement and corrections, I would advocate for having a system in your AAR process that allows for that officer or that group to come clean without fear of, punishment so as to identify problems in policy training, culture, those types of things. And then another process does what we normally do now, which is try to figure out who’s to blame and and appropriately punish where where necessary. And sometimes that’s necessary. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting it’s not. But, those are just a few thoughts that I have on this whole AAR process. I think it’s vital for the organization.

I don’t think you can really be effective if you don’t have that feedback loop. And I think it actually applies not just to operations. It applies to finances. It applies to planning. It applies to health care. It applies to all aspects of everything that you do.

So And how how how do we build that culture in corrections or law enforcement agencies?

How do we make it so that it’s it’s second nature? It’s just what we do.

Yeah. I I think, first of all, it starts with training.

You you can train people how to do an AR and it doesn’t have to be this big bureaucratic instant. You know, for instance, as a pilot, after every single flight, whether it was one hour or ten hours, the pilots in the thing, which okay. Let’s quickly what went right. What went wrong?

What do we do to fix it? It may be five minutes. It may be a long time. Yeah.

But that was the last thing that you did before you quote closed out that mission.

And I think that’s pretty that’s a fairly simple thing to do, whether it’s at the end of the shift or whether it’s after immediately after an incident and the the supervisor brings everybody together and says, hey. Listen. Let’s do a quick hot wash here. What happened right?

What happened wrong? Document it and off you go. Yeah. So you can train that. But then I think ultimately, as with most things, it has to be modeled from the top.


Yeah. You know, I have to as the senior leader say, this is a priority and then do it with your staff. Yeah.

And then have it trickle down.

You know, it’s it’s interesting as you were speaking, it just kind of the epiphany came to me here was that I think if the insurance industry comes in and says, hey. You should be doing these things. Staff are gonna accept it one thing. But by nature, law enforcement corrections are paramilitary organizations and they understand that concept better. So maybe having it come from the military, I think the ability of staff to kinda nod their head quicker going, yeah, I can I can emulate that based upon that’s that’s how we operate? There might be a a smoother transition, if you will. Just just a guess on my Yeah.

And I just one last thing, and this goes back to this area of trust, and I hit this theme a lot, is whether it’s that sergeant in the correctional facility that has just had a particular incident, if he’s created a an atmosphere of trust between the officers he’s responsible for, he can look him in the eye. He can say, okay. Tell me what happened, and they’ll be honest with him because they know that ultimately he has their back. He has their best interest at heart, and he’s gonna do the right thing. If that doesn’t exist, then they’re gonna hide.

And you’re never gonna get the feedback you need to actually correct the situation.

So it goes back to how much time do you develop the trust mechanism and the trust factor in order to facilitate those types of procedures.

Yeah. And I, you know, I do think in in the work that, you know, I’ve done particularly in Minnesota, I would say that folks in emergency management and the fire service are probably much further ahead, than law enforcement. I have my own personal opinions of maybe why we resist it. But we could learn a lot from those organizations as well as the military how to do it effectively to the point where, some of the agencies I’ve talked to where, they’ve said, you know, the sergeant would would, you know, facilitate an AAR and, you know, some of these really high performing agencies, they said they knew they made it when the officers start doing it themselves.

And they’re going on a call together and they’re, you know, maybe after clearing the call meeting with each other, they’re not waiting for a quote unquote leader to facilitate it. They’re going through and coming up with their own lessons learned. When it comes to AARs, I know we have one organization where they basically do one at the end of every shift. And there again, from a strategic standpoint, the chief was explaining that, there’s an expectation of training and equipment needs after every shift.

And now he can go in at the end of the year when he’s building his budget and and tell his counsel or the folks that set the budget as finance people, I had this number of cases where this piece of equipment would have made a better transaction or this type of training. And it’s that type of data that people are much more willing to sit up and listen versus on a whim saying, well this this would be something I just like to do and you don’t have the data to back it up. Yeah.
So Josh, getting traction with your members to change, obviously you you go in and you see, hey, something’s gotta change in this organization to adopt risk management programs.

What are some of the things that you’ve done that have worked very well?

Well, we we we’ve, had some success in just, honestly deploying services, like I mentioned, when in their time of need. Right? So you may have an entity that, we’ve reached out to several times that’s very standoffish.

But they may reach out when they have an officer involved shooting or a pursuit, and you call them proactively and say, Hey, I saw you had this critical incident. I’ve got this stuff for you, right? I’ve got counseling services if you need. I got this. And then they’re like, Oh, interesting.

And so you start to expand or you start to get that dialogue and they start to inquire, Well, what else do you guys do there? Right? And so you have that interaction.

Some other stuff we’ll do is, as I mentioned, we provide grants. And so part of that is sometimes we’ll condition a grant, you know, like, Hey, you guys want tasers? We’ll help pay those for you. But can you send us your taser policy?

Let us take a look at it, right? At the end of the day, we wanna be able to try and engage or to try and look at that policy and see, are there exposures here? Are they doing a supervisor’s, you know, use of force review on that deployment of the taser? You know, what kind of mentality is going on there?


And so, you know, we use sometimes conditions based, but honestly, a lot of times it is just It’s relationship building. You know, it’s going, stopping by, introducing yourself, giving them a little about yourself, talking shop. And before you know it, you’ve been there for two hours, you know?

Yeah. And that’s an investment. And, you know, that’s something when we talk about the difference between a transformational relationship and a transactional relationship, I would say we never wanna set ourselves up where it has to be transactional.

Only showing up in a time of crisis to address it. It’s that proactive work being out there, being seen. I know who you are. You know who I am.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And then, you know, go into association things, like Illinois Sheriff’s Association, Illinois Chiefs of Police being there.

And just, again, having conversation. I’m not trying to sell anyone anything. And in fact, when we’re given the opportunity to speak at these events, that’s what we tell them. We’re probably the one vendor that’s here not trying to sell you anything.

All we’re trying to tell you is the, services that we provide to you that are totally free. Just call us.

Yeah. So in terms of adaptation or barriers to to adoption of of these practices, Jeff, from your perspective on a much larger scale, overcoming those barriers.

Yeah. So, again, I I think you go back to Lencioni’s work. You go back to some of the others really good literature on this.

I tend to ascribe to the great man theory of leadership, which is basically it starts at the top. The senior leader sets the tone. And after a period of time, the organization is gonna take on certain attributes and aspects of the senior leader. And so you were the senior leader, by definition, needs to have a lot of self awareness. They need to know what they bring to the table and probably more importantly, what they don’t bring to the table and and avoid this trap of what a dear friend of mine, coined as omni competence.

You know, I I felt for probably the first twenty years of my military career that I was being evaluated, that I had to be good at everything.


And it and I knew that I wasn’t good at everything. And so there were certain things that I was really just faking it because I knew I wasn’t good. There were some things I knew I was good at, but there were other things that and when I got to the point to be able to say, hey. I’m not good at that, but you are.

So let’s let’s get together. I think that self awareness as you go into the organization to then communicate honestly to the to the folks that work for you to develop this sense of buy in is is key. And so I had a habit of visiting facilities, and I would always meet with the warden. But then I went to the farthest post, that I knew was not the most desirable post and had a conversation with that brand new correction officer because it’s always the new guy who’s on the worst shift on the worst post because the guys with seniority have picked the other the better ones.

And I have a conversation, and it’s amazing what you can learn.

They’ll tell you what’s wrong with your organization.

And if you just listen, it’s it’s really not that hard. And then what is amazing to me is after I did that for a couple times, I could go to South Alabama to a facility, have that conversation with maybe three or four officers. And the next week when I was in North Alabama at a completely different facility, those guys knew about it. So the grapevine had communicated from north to south to say, hey, be aware the commissioner’s gonna walk all the way across the yard out to this post, and he’s gonna ask you how’s it going.

And here’s the thing, guys, he really wants to know. And so, you know, it it really was never rocket science to me, but just but it takes a lot of work. I mean, it took a lot of work to visit twenty six facilities at least twice a year. So that’s fifty two.

So that’s at least once a week. I’m driving somewhere to go meet with twenty or thirty correctional officers. And so it it it just takes a lot of work and effort, but it’s not hard or it’s not complex. Let me put it that way.

It’s not complex, but it’s hard.

And most folks just have struggle with being able to put that amount of work into it. And then because then you gotta come back, and you gotta basically say to your senior staff, hey. This is what’s wrong with our organization.


And implicit in that is and you guys hadn’t been listening.

And so that’s a whole new buy in that you have to have to get over. And sometimes, that means you have to invite people to go be a part of another team because they just never will get on board. But then a lot of times, you can bring people on board.
So So we’re coming up to our our our, clock here, but, this is kind of a loftier question. Will artificial intelligence change how we think about organizational excellence? If so, if it’s well, just your thoughts.

You know, it’s a great question. And I actually was listening to a podcast yesterday on the way up here, with the guy who is the CEO and founder of Boom Technology, Boom airplanes, and they’re building the supersonic aircraft that’s supposed to be a commercial airline. And so they were talking about AI and how they deployed in their organization. And I thought this was really interesting.

He said that what they’ll have their AI do is a lot of the paperwork side of it. Right? They’re filling out months of paperwork in in a matter of minutes. And I thought about that from a law enforcement perspective.

You’re starting to hear now there’s AI report writing suites out there. Right? Well, how is that gonna affect that that local agency? I think it can have some positive impacts in that maybe you have an officer who only has a high school education.

Right? And maybe they’re not well versed. Well, you have an AI reporting tool here that’s maybe using some vocabulary that might expand their knowledge. Right?

It’s putting it in a well comprehensive statement, but also it’s getting them time back out on the road, you know? And so that is gonna keep them proactive. It’s gonna keep them out there. It’s gonna keep your community seeing, people out there and hopefully have a direct impact, right?

So I think you have some benefits there. And then, from the health matrix side of it, you know, you’ve got a software that’s learning about each person and everything they’re doing, and they’re looking at things that you may miss as a leader, right? So you’re having that as kind of a secondary source of feedback. So I think it really has the potential to be, very beneficial, you know, for agencies.


Do you have anything?

Yeah. I personally think that in the corrections industry, AI is gonna completely revolutionize the way we do corrections because it is gonna give you real time awareness and predictive analysis on inmate behavior inside the facility and identify areas of potential conflict before they happen to allow for intervention.

And so I I mean, I actually think that just the surveillance tools alone and the ability to monitor human behavior, monitor human biometrics, those types of things through AI is gonna radically change. And what that’s gonna free us up to do is to invest more in rehabilitation and invest more into education and those types of things that that kinda close the loop for an inmate to come back and be productive in society.

It’s gonna help the security equation immensely so that we can then focus more resources on the rehabilitative question.

Awesome. With that, any questions from from any of you? Yeah.

I just think it’s fine.

You guys have candid opinions on body cameras and, you know, when I see a lot of videos online, there’s a cop that’s acting equally reasonable and the system acts like a new tech and it’s a simple officers change on body cams, and then, you know, has training changed or maybe the training for a start is just saying, you know, remind yourself your camera all the time, and does that change at all to maybe you take the law enforcement, then I’ll take the corrections because I have some very specific thoughts on that.

You know, I will tell you, I I was a big proponent of of, body cams. I I got out of the task force in twenty eleven, and I think by twenty twelve, I bought my own, just because I’d had a a person complain, see, and I used excessive force. I’m like, well, this is BS. Yeah. I didn’t use excessive force.

And, of course, we had dash cams, but I was outside of my car. So I’m like, well, how am I gonna do this? So I bought a body cam because of that, you know. And I think when you have agencies that have never had it, you get that, oh, no.


Big Brother’s gonna be watching me. But the moment you have someone complain on you or if you have to use it for a DUI to recall a standardized field sobriety, you’re like, wow. This is fantastic. And then you’ve got buy in.

And so to me, body cam is great. As far as the training, you know, I can’t speak. I haven’t been through the academy since two thousand and seven, so, you know, I don’t know how it’s changed to that respect. But we, at that time, had something called verbal judo, which is kinda how we trained.

You know, the other thing is I always, felt like I was on camera regardless. So having body cams on there made no difference to me. You should be conducting yourself in a professional manner at all times. Right?

And this is nothing more than an evidentiary tool. That’s how it should be viewed. Right? So I I’m a big proponent of it.

I think they’re great. And they they really do help, especially on AARs. You know, you’d be able to go back through and see how can we improve as an organization or as an individual.

So, just in a as a general rule, I think the corrections industry is usually about five to seven years behind law enforcement on these types of things. I, brought body cams in as a test, as a pilot, about a year before I ended up leaving the agency with, the sergeants.

And we got some great feedback, after I mandated that this would happen. I had to have a come to Jesus meeting with all the sergeants saying, I don’t I I hear what you’re saying. I know you think this is gonna it’s his big brother and all those things, but we’re doing it.

Six months later, they’re calling me back and saying, commissioner, it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s fantastic.

The agencies the correctional agencies that have gotten over that initial hump sing the praises of body cameras. And the biggest thing that they’ve seen is it has a deterrent value for an inmate.


So a correction officer rolls up to a situation, taps the body camera, it comes on, and it changes inmate behavior because the inmates now know that what’s going on is videoed as opposed to a he said he said type thing in which you’ve got twenty inmates that are all saying the same thing happened and only one or two officers that are saying no. This is what happened. And in the court, it’s you know, and officers constantly felt like that we were, quote, taking the inmate side. And so now the body camera comes on, and the inmates are like, oh, well, that doesn’t work anymore. So it’s actually had a deterrent effect, which has been an additional unforeseen blessing, I guess. So, yeah, I’m very much in favor of them.
I’ll say one other thing too. You know, just as a reminder, you know, litigation works in favor, of the nonmoving force. Right? So the plaintiff.

And so oftentimes, when you look at, complaints, you’ll see some very interesting language and, theories of liability in there. Right? But if you actually have body cam footage that that can dispute that complaint, you could potentially get that lawsuit thrown out at the summary judgment level, right, and save that entity thousands and thousands of dollars. Right?
And so from that perspective, it’s huge. Huge.

And I would also add you. The emotional well-being of the officer.

Absolutely.

If it’s the, question.

Yes. To to say, put this to rest. Again, we are about five minutes over. The nice thing about a situation like this is we’ll be around. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to to reach out the remainder of the afternoon and, or this evening tomorrow. We’ll be around. Thank you for your time and thank you for your attention.