147 - Forgiving Leadership Bitterness: Jake Sapp

Of all the trauma and grief an officer can experience in law enforcement, many police officers say it's the betrayal and mistreatment by police leadership that has hurt the worst.  Today our guest is Jake Sapp who worked as a cop in Kansas City for fifteen years before leaving it all behind for a civilian job.  The problem is that he didn't leave it all behind; the damage done by bad leadership left it's mark in Jake, and that followed him to the next career.  Today we're going to talk about how a cop stays healthy emotionally when his dreams are dashed, his career is ended, but the bitterness remains against bad leaders.

Music is by LesFM

Hey Chaplain podcast episode 147

Tags:

Police, Anger, Bitterness, Calling, Career, Communication, Compassion, Humility, Insensitivity, Leadership, Manpower, Military, Quitting, Teaching, Kansas City, Missouri

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Let me tell you a story. I was talking to an officer just recently, and he said, Chap, I know I'm not supposed to have hatred in my heart, but these supervisors that are long gone, no longer with the department, because these supervisors, I think I hate them. And this has been years now that's gone by, he's an older officer. And I hear that repeatedly from officers all around the country, where the hurt caused by admin, caused by supervisors, caused by the chief or the sheriff or whoever, sometimes a direct frontline supervisor, is something that has stuck with them. Even more so than all of the horrible things they've experienced on the job otherwise. Welcome to Hey Chaplin. My name is Jared Altic, and I'm a chaplain with the police department. The Hey Chaplin podcast is about talking to police officers who say, Hey Chaplain, I've got a story to tell and some hard-earned wisdom to share. The guests on Hey Chaplin come from across the world, from the LAPD to Scotland Yard, from Thailand to Texas. But they're sharing their wisdom with you so that you don't have to learn everything the hard way. And as a patrol chaplain, I think that you need to hear encouragement, especially on difficult topics. Hey Chaplain is a free resource for everyone because of those supporters who are quietly helping the show behind the scenes. If you want to help the show reach more cops, chaplains, and other first responders around the world, please follow the link in the episode description to support the show. There have been a small number of people, both inside law enforcement and outside, who have been giving as little as $5 a month to help pay the expenses of the show. You don't have to do that. Thank you for helping me encourage police officers. Of all the grief and trauma an officer can experience in law enforcement, many police officers say it's the betrayal and mistreatment by police leadership that has hurt the worst. Today our guest is Jake Sapp, who worked as a cop in Kansas City for 15 years before leaving it all behind for a civilian job. The problem is that he didn't leave it all behind. Hello, Jake. How are you today?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

I'm good. How about yourself, Jared?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

I am doing well. Thank you for driving over here. I actually have you in my office today, and it's a pleasure to have you here. So this is the future chaplain listening to the interview and doing the editing. And I realized that there are two issues here. First of all, to adequately recount the death by a thousand cuts experience that Jake had in his police career. This really needs to be maybe a two or three hour conversation. And I didn't do that. I talked to Jake for about an hour and change, and I was pushing him to give me an example of this and give me an example of that. He gave me half a dozen really good stories, but we probably needed a lot more than that to fully paint the picture. And that leads to another problem. I need to talk to Jake from about 10 years ago because Jake today has grown and he's forgiven. And even when he's complaining, what he gives with one hand he takes back with the other. And as a chaplain who's talked to hundreds and goodness, maybe maybe thousands of cops, I can tell that he's not really angry anymore. And he's healing from the bitterness. I want you to hear the healed version of Jake and learn from him, but I can't do his career story justice, at least not here, not at this time. So let me summarize. Jake served in Iraq and then found his way to law enforcement in Kansas City. He worked in the busiest, most violent part of our metro for over a decade, accumulating lots of trauma and secondary trauma. He probably did too much high-intensity work for too long, bouncing back and forth between jaded cynicism and compassion fatigue. One of those stories happened in the bad motel with a dead baby call.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I can see her losing it, and I can see my partner doing CPR on an infant. And I remember thinking at the time, none of this bothers me, right? This, I'm gonna bury this deep down. None of this bothers me. I'm fine. And I even told my partner, like, I just bury it all down, basically, is the way I told him. Like, this is how I deal with this, as I just bury it all down and I'm fine.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

But even as Jake was working in patrol and later in traffic, he had something else he wanted to do.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

The last week, at least when I went to the academy, was sort of the show week, um, or the week before. But it was like show week. Bring in all the cool specialized units, and then you can see what you might want to do.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

And every recruit wants to be a canine handler or SWAT.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Right, detective, yeah, homicide detective, homicide, all the things, right? And as I was going along, I'm like, I want to be an academy instructor. That's what I want to do. And so I started having conversations with them. What do you need to do? I went and got a bachelor's degree. In fact, I got my bachelor's degree while having two kids. So it's it's possible to do it, I guess. Yeah. I don't know that I would recommend it all the time. You have to have an understanding wife for sure.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

But but you got a law enforcement related degree, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Right. Oh, yeah. I I I joke now that I got my degree in underwater basket weaving, but it's actually a it's actually a bachelor's in criminal justice. But we all joke that have it. It's about as useful as underwater basket weaving. Yeah, yeah. So I do I do have my bachelor's in criminal justice. I went through a bunch of leadership courses, became a Missouri post instructor for like in going through the instructor development program, which was a very in-depth and very rewarding program to go through, but went through all the things, did all the things. In fact, I was on track and supposed to replace the next academy instructor.

SPEAKER_01 6:44

And you guessed it. That did not work out. You can imagine how things go when you rub the wrong person the wrong way.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

And they could just destroy my career based off just something I said sort of glibly. But you were excited for something.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

I was. Oh, very much excited. I was very, yeah, I was very, very excited. Yeah, heaven heaven forbid we have good morale. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Exactly, right? Yeah. That was I was I was excited because I had found that I enjoyed teaching. I very much enjoyed teaching and instructing.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

And all along the way, Jake repeatedly ran into about every variety of bad leader and had about every kind of conflict that stole his love and enthusiasm for the job. As he told the story of his career, I thought, man, if he could just string together two or three positive interactions with his supervisors, he could probably ride this out. He could probably have had time to recover from all of the other stuff. Now picture Jake as a physically and emotionally exhausted motorcycle cop standing in the rain, drenched to the bone, getting chewed out by a supervisor in his dry air-conditioned cruiser.

SPEAKER_00 8:01

So I'm a drowned right at this point. I'm like, this is ridiculous. My sergeant finds me and said, Hey, I I hear you've been complaining about this other sergeant. And we just don't do that around here. No, thank you for you know all that you've done today. I realize you're and we were we were talking, he's in a vehicle, and I'm in still it was still raining, and I'm just dripping, and he's talking out of his window, and I thought, this can't be what leadership looks like, and I can't keep doing this anymore, where I'm told to do more with less, and the administration keeps just harping at me more and more to to deal with this. And I thought, I'm done. I'm done with this. I'm I'm gonna find a job outside of law enforcement.

SPEAKER_01 8:44

Now let's get back to the interview, and we'll discover how this affected Jake even after he left law enforcement. Yeah. So you you're you're having a difficult career. You are staying in very intense work and it's wearing you down in multiple ways, like it would anybody. But then what you aspired to, you have the door closed. And then when you even do change to go to other units, you're having just this is it an insensitive leadership style where they're not they're not taking care of their people, they're looking at the processes instead. And they just are deaf to you know how to take care of other people. Is that is that accurate?

SPEAKER_00 9:36

I think it's sensitive is probably a good word to it. Not saying that they are um intentionally cruel or intending to be the opposite of sensitive, they exercise the same leadership they've seen, which is the same leadership that's been you know around since I don't know how long this has been a thing, but you know, at least since the 70s, when you can talk to some of the the cops still around from the 70s, yeah, you realize that actually police leadership has changed almost none. I remember in the academy they were taught about the the Hyatt Tower collapse, which at that time I think prior to, and uh I could be misquoting this, but I think it was I was told like prior to 9-11, it was the largest loss of life in America in a in a building or in the United United States.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Yeah, that's the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse in 1981, uh, over 300 casualties, a third of those were fatalities, one of the deadliest structural collapses in the history of the United States.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

And they had made a comment that the fire department provided psychological aid in the form of, hey, talk to counselors, talk to therapists. Yeah. And the police department said, if any of you go do that, you're fired. And not much, even though they talked about that as a hey, that's a thing, and you should probably ask for help. It's not the culture of leadership. It's not the culture of leadership is not to ask for help, it is to keep driving on, to keep doing the job.

SPEAKER_01 11:05

And even when you are offered time off or the opportunity to go get help, that can be viewed with suspicion. You were telling me that about after that call you had at the motel and you had received some help or someone offered that to you. Can you go back and tell me that again?

SPEAKER_00 11:21

The major at the time, uh, God bless her soul, at least tried. She said she reached out and said, Do you do you guys need to take time off? And I was like, Why, I'm fine. It doesn't bother me at all. Like that's not that's not who I'm supposed to be. And there was a small part of me that thought, is this sort of some sort of test? Is she testing my resolve? Does she actually mean it? But if I do, if even if she's even if she's correct, even if she's being truthful and she really means this, what is everyone else gonna think of me? Right. You know, is other people gonna think I'm weak because I took a day off? You know, what's the avenue for this? No one's doing this, right? There's somebody is somebody else gonna get forced over time if you take a day off, forced over time or you know, any of that stuff. And so really what it was is ignorance. I had no clue what I was emotionally doing, the toll of my body was handling. And we talked about this beforehand, that you can only bear it for so long, and then it comes out in ways that you never expected. And at the times, you know, and I've hurt, you know, my family in ways that it's it's one of the reasons I I chose not to do continuing law enforcement is because I realized that I was not going to be the person I needed to be for them because the way I had handled it. Just too much. Yeah. 15 for me, 15 years of never having processed through uh the things that I had experienced, that my bitterness towards my leadership, I think specifically, was not going to make me the husband and father that they needed me to be. And that's why I decided to leave. But yeah, I look at times like that, and I had to go through uh veterans uh and first responders program and warriors ascent to understand that I have to feel those feelings. You can't, you can just bury them, but you can't selectively numb emotions.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Well, what you said about how you handled it is exactly the point. I mean, we've learned so much in the last maybe 20 years about critical incident stress management. And and we've we're continuing to learn more and to modify and tweak and to apply to individuals what is most helpful to them. But how someone handles it, it's not as easy as, well, just give them three days off. Uh, in some ways, that can actually backfire because now you're taking away their purpose and their identity and you're isolating them.

unknown 13:44

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

And so if that three days is three days of binge drinking, that was not healthy. Right. Right. And that happens sometimes. Yes, and so, and so you you have to figure out with very active and conscientious leadership what is right for this individual. What can we apply to this person for this situation that would will really help them handle it? Some of them need time off, some of them don't. Some of them, you know, need to go do something different than their normal job for a little while, you know, uh give them give them 30 days or something in some other unit, you know, right doing something completely unrelated and then bring then they can come back. There's all sorts of creative solutions, but I want them to handle it, not just stuff it down, not just bury it, because it will come back. Stress is a zombie and it's gonna come crawling up out of that grave, whether you want it to or not. And so, and it's gonna happen at the most inconvenient time. Yep. So, so I want them to talk about it. I feel like that's a special role that the chaplains have, where we're one foot in the agency, we've maybe even ridden in the car with you, and let's just talk about it. Let's just just tell me what happened. We're not gonna do therapy, we're just going to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

And let's get this out and let's normalize talking about it. And and generally, that is a very good first step. But a lot of people don't have that. Do you think that your supervisors were and this isn't an excuse for how they led, but do you think they felt betrayed that you were leaving? Is that why they were being the way they were? I I wouldn't like you should have just been a loyal soldier, regardless of what kind of leader I am.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

There there may have been some of that, but to humanize them and to be truthful, I don't I can't assume that they weren't under pressure as well to perform. They weren't still still feeling a level of pressure as well. And knowing that I left meant I have one less person to fulfill the needs and and the things I need to get done.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

So I think in your part, in your part of your agency at the time you were there, you felt it was systematic. It wasn't just a bad leader, it was a layer after layer of bad leadership, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:05

So my I was eight, I think it was eight years on. Uh I'd almost like to say the sergeant's name. He's he's since been promoted. But I remember one day I was in roll call and this is seven, eight years on. He says something, and I was like, Oh, hey, Sarge, you're it's actually this. You know, uh roundabout way telling him he's wrong without trying to bruise his ego. And he goes, Okay, well, I'll look into it. Like, okay, heard this before, got it. Move on. He calls me about 30, 45 minutes later. Calls me on the phone and says, Hey, I was I was wrong, you were right. Like, it's exactly what you said, and I I said, Did you just apologize? And he said, Yeah, well, I mean, I was wrong, you were right. I'm sorry about that. And I said, I have never had a supervisor on this department apologize to me. I said, You've ruined me on leadership. I said, Because now I have ra I've raised the level of what I think a good leader on this department is, and that's so unfortunate. I can count on three fingers, three good leaders I had. And it the the bar was low. The bar is so incredibly low to be a good leader and caring for your people, empathy, and humility. Yeah, really that's it. If you want to be a good leader in law enforcement, I really realize I'm like the bar is the bar is incredibly low on law enforcement because you're it's almost like the military, you're you're kind, you're not stuck, yeah, but you're sort of because of that that carrot of retirement, you sort of feel stuck.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

But the military and maybe specifically the army does a very good job of teaching leadership where you are invested in the success of the people below you. 100%. Okay. I know the army does that really well because a lot of our best leaders in the police department are people who are like NCOs and and they've been taught that. It's like I'm successful, people below me are successful, and so I'm actually interested in that. And the problem is that doesn't get applied evenly because we're humans, and sometimes we're just focused on the problem child or the the star of the class or or whatever, but but we're just not evenly applying that across the board, and then not all sergeants have that kind of background or they even know to do it. A lot of them were very successful officers, that's why they got promoted, and now they're in leadership and have had very little leadership training, and so they're just kind of trying to keep their head above water and they fail miserably. Where, like you said, if they just showed, if they were just able to communicate effectively that they cared, a lot of officers would forgive everything else. It's like, yeah, you messed up the schedule and you did this administrative thing wrong and and whatever, but I know you have my back, I know you care about me. But then in police culture, it can get so toxic that I frequently hear people complain, like, oh, the young cops these days, they just want you to hold their hand. Um, no, I think they want the same thing humans have always wanted. They want to know that the people above them care about them. Right. You know, I'm not canon fodder, I'm not here to be used up and thrown away. I I want to know that you actually care about me. Right. That that that matters. And if you could just manage to communicate that in an authentic, believable way, I think they'd forgive a lot of other shortcomings.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

I mean, you look at it throughout history. I mean, if you study just some of the greatest military leaders sending their men into combat, sending their men, knowing that not all of them are gonna make it back, and yet they have this insane level of respect for their leadership. And some of it is you look at some of them, I mean, the Marines have chestie polars, a great example, right? They lead from the front. Yeah, they're doing it themselves.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Suffering all the same ways their men suffer.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

I one of the one of the great leader sergeants I had was writing reports with us to getting out there and taking it. Now he couldn't take as many of us, but and he wouldn't do certain ones, which it's fine. You're you're a sergeant. This expectation is not there, but he would being in the trenches, like you said, knowing you care. And what I don't understand is in the world we live in, there's so much more available information about what good leadership looks like. Yes, and so many people want to ignore it or go, oh, that's that's not me.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

They either ignore it or they hear it, they maybe even pursue it to find it out, but then there's a breakdown in actually knowing how to apply it. Because, like I said, there's all kinds of weird leadership pressure about do I look the part? Do they respect me? Am I being taken seriously? Am I meeting the expectations of my superiors? And and all of that gets in our head and then interferes with us effectively doing what we maybe know we should do, and instead it comes out as pettiness and and a sort I'm looking for, that kind of of overbearing, and I'm thinking of a French martinet. Yeah, but that's I'd have to explain it, so I'm not going. All right. I like it though.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Yeah, I'm I'm curious.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Now is the word you were going to use then. Yeah, the word I was looking for was martinet. I don't think I'm gonna leave it. Micromanaging is the a little bit in over your head and the stress of it is resolved by punishing the people below you. And the show band of brothers, they took Lieutenant later Captain Sobel and made him that character, which he was to some people. To some people, he was the most cruel, unnecessarily bad leader they ever had. It probably wasn't to everybody, but it was great to show that in that miniseries. That he was this cruel, um, they weren't in basic training, but they were in paratrooper training. He he was this difficult, insensitive leader that was petty and unfair. And because everyone who's been around military or paramilitary leadership has seen an example of that. There's a parallel in parenting. Children become insecure and and begin having difficulties if they don't know what's coming next. You have to provide as a parent, you have to provide consistency. And so if you want to mess a child up on purpose, change rules every day. They never know it what's what is against the rules, what's not against the rules, what is a minor infraction, what's a major infraction. Just keep changing it. And that chaos and turbulence will do permanent damage to a child. It's not much different being a supervisor at a place of work. If you want to make people unsettled and upset, just keep changing things. And and you just randomly bark out an order and lose your mind if if they didn't anticipate and read your mind, that that kind of bad leadership is toxic.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

So I left. I went, I left law enforcement, you know, got out, so to speak, and went to my next job. And in my mind, right, the the the clouds have parted, the sun is now shining for the first time. You know, I my stress is reduced by two-thirds, and and it's everything's gonna be great. And to some degree, that was true. My stress was reduced by two-thirds. I did have a lot less stress I was dealing with, um, which was good for personal issues that would come up in my life. But what I found was because that view I had of leadership, that sort of bitterness I had uh in the military, you know, it's it's stars and bars, right? All the stars and bars are a-holes. That's the sort of the mentality. But my view on leadership had been so, so grossly tainted. And again, that that I that don't that I don't put all in the department. I'm putting that on myself, in fact. And so I've now left law enforcement, and I'm finding this bitterness towards my leadership in my new job. Uh, and they've not, it's not all same, same. Uh, it's in fact, it's one thing you find, and you can often just go to your managers and say, hey, can we can we sit down and talk and just work through some of that stuff? But I had taken what was my law enforcement style, and that's just stop talking to my supervisor because or my manager because that's all I need to do. We'll just avoid conversation at all if it's out outside of a professional setting, and that'll work out. And that didn't. My manager called me in the office and said, had to another manager with him and said, Whatever your problem is with me, we got to get this sorted out. Like this is not how we, you know, this is not how we can communicate and work in a professional setting. This isn't this isn't how things go. And I remember respecting him so much from that. And he he respected my honesty and and talking through some of his leadership stuff, but it kept reinforcing this mentality in my mind, or this this idea in my mind that wait a minute, I might have a problem here. Like my view of leadership might be part of the problem. Like, I'm taking stuff that uh isn't mine and and handling it. And I remember, I remembered back to emotional survival for law enforcement. You said you're gonna have Gil Martin on, so I'm not gonna steal any of his thunder because I I translated it differently for for my work. Yeah, and that's what I realized I was doing with that leadership, with those betrayals. I felt my department was I was just taking them and holding on to them. And what was what it was doing was it was tainting my view of leadership in general and making me realize that hey, just because you magically law enforcement doesn't solve all your problems, a lot of those problems may be stuff that you just haven't dealt with for all those years. Like you've just never worked through and never had whether it's never had the opportunity to or not, or chose not to, you've brought all that stuff with you. And you've chose to bring it all with you because it's there, right? Because you could let it off at any point. But that all that, all those, whatever you want to use, the analogy of a backpack or garbage bags or whatever it is, you've brought it all with you at this point. It's not magically gone just because you're in a new place. Maybe because you are in a new place, it gives you the opportunity to work through some of those things that now that you're at a slower pace, I can work through some of these issues. Yeah, and I can better handle what life is bringing my way and not having not having to keep drinking poison is the way I would describe it to people. Yeah, and and trying to heal. And I said, for some people, I said I just couldn't heal because I was still drinking poison. I said, maybe you can just stop drinking poison where you're at and heal. I said, I needed to get away from there. How big was KCMO at the time you worked there? Oh how many sworn? We started with I want to say it was 15, 1600 when we started. And when I can't remember what it was when I left, 11, 1100. But when I started, this is where I understand where some departments are coming from. I joined in 2006. My department was uh massive at that time, at least at least for me. My sector at the time consisted of, I believe it was, I joined, I was the ninth person in that sector. So there were so many officers, right? Officers for days. We would you would have the conversation where you tell your squad, like, hey, you guys go have dinner together, we'll cover your area. I remember going to call simply because you were bored. You were like, eh, that sounds pretty, that sounds pretty crazy. Let's just go over and see what they're doing over there. We're we're backing up people almost out of boredom, or because we hear the call and we go, it sounds like it could go one way or the other. Let's just go back them up. You know, what it's what's it gonna hurt to have four people there instead of two? Yeah. And then the steady decline of officers, you know, the the big downturn in Ferguson, where we lost people and just the continued decline through George Floyd, it was do more with less. And it magnified. This is where I think the leadership issue was such a big deal because when you have a larger department, you can you can put up with it. It it's there's there's more officers, the the sort of the the frustration from the leadership is thinned out. They're not as stressed because there's a lot more people. But when you start losing all those people, uh then you've got a lot less people. And and no chief, no sheriff wants to turn around and and start axing the captains and the deputy chiefs and uh, you know, those people. The the upper echelon is sort of their friends and or came up with them, right? They don't want to, that's the last person they want to axe. And so the people that suffer the most are usually the people at the very bottom. But that's just the the nature of of what I saw as sort of the the frustration law enforcement and the and the stress in law enforcement that increases because it's it is do more with less. There are a lot less people wanting to do it. You know, we had an hour of uh PT time that you could do on duty, and that went away because we didn't have the manpower to support it, the the staffing to support it. But they're talking about how important working out is, right? You know, it's the best thing you can do, for which I've I've come to realize they're absolutely correct. It is the best thing you can do for you, and yet it went away. We have less people. So we're gonna take away one of the things that was we're actually saying is the most important thing that you you can do, we're gonna take it away. That's a large part of the problem, is just less officers. Less and less officers means more and more work.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

You you had in your circumstances a lot working against you, but when you got out, some of it came with you to your next job. Oh, yeah. What would you tell a young officer now?

SPEAKER_00 30:11

Among the the sort of you know, find different places to go, I would think that one of my big things would be, you know, feel feelings. Like when those tragedies happen, however it is, you you have to feel those feelings. I'm working off duty at a hospital, and this this father brings in a little girl, and I mean, she is this if she is not the same age as my daughter, like I would be shocked. And he brings her in and she is she's lifeless in his arms, and you can just tell. And I can't help but see my daughter. Like I could just see myself carrying my daughter in this ER like this. And it had just, it just tore me up. But I knew, and I knew, so I knew I'd been taught at that point you have to feel feelings, but you have to choose when you feel those feelings. Because in that moment, I've got to be the cop. I have to be the person that's got their head on straight and thinking about this. And I thought, put a pen in this, we'll deal with this later.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

It is good to compartmentalize during the emergency. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Oh, yes. You we need you can't break down. You have to be there, but you have to sort of tell your brain at that time, we're gonna feel that feeling later. We're gonna deal with that later. That right now, I the these people need the calm presence. I need to be clear-headed, I need to focus on the task at hand, and I need to be the logical one working through all this. But later, later we're gonna address that. And I remember the whole situation calmed, it resolved itself. Um, she unfortunately didn't live, worked through everything, I'm done, I moved on, and I went, I knew where a very, very quiet and private bathroom was in that particular hospital. And I'm like, I just balled. Like I let it all out, balled my eyes out, and that's what I needed. And I moved on. Does it still sort of, you know, you remember it to this day, yeah, but the emotions, I didn't bury them. I processed through them those emotions. So find time to work through those emotions on the call at that moment, not the appropriate time, but find time to work through that. However, that looks for you. It is good that there's not an in-car camera in the chaplain car. I I I I I hope I hope that that's uh a safe space that you know. I hate to use that term because it's sort of become this sort of political politicized there's a lot of stigma that comes with it, but it is a space where I'm wrong in somebody else's tragedy while I'm in their tragedy.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Right. But then when I get back, that's not my tragedy. And I need to let out all those feelings. And and if I'm yelling or crying or whatever, I need to let that out. But it's not just the tragedies. We spent a lot of our time talking about the administrative abuse, the administrative negligence, the administrative miscarriage of leadership. Um what can a young officer do if the people above them are just failing? They're failing, they are not being good leaders. Maybe they never were good leaders, maybe they're not being a good leader to you right now, but they're failing. What can I do about that?

SPEAKER_00 33:08

I this I think this is the last piece of advice that anyone's gonna want to hear, but it's true. You're just gonna have to forgive them. You're going you have options at that time. You can sort of let bitterness start to seep in, and you're not gonna see it, but it'll start and it'll get its roots in deep. And before you know it, that bitterness that is towards one person or towards you know, just these people is suddenly coming out towards everyone. Or I mean, it's just having this, you know. I went to some very dark places when I let I let that bitterness root in me, and it rooted itself deep. And I went to some very, very dark places, some, you know, some would the world be better off without me type places. And so you have options. You can let that bitterness seep in, and it will seem innocuous now. And it's just directed this one portion person, right? So it's not a big deal, but it's gonna build and build, and it's gonna root deeper and deeper, and it's gonna pay dividends like a credit card, you're swiping, but the creditor's coming sometime when you don't with interest when you don't expect it, and it's not he's not coming in the way that you think.

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Yeah, my favorite saying about bitterness is that bitterness is taking poison, hoping that the other person dies.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

Yep. And that's and that's what you can do, right? You can keep drinking this poison, but they're not getting hurt by it at all. All it's doing is hurting you. So you have to forgive them. You have to let it go. You have to just sit there and go, okay, yep, got it. Uh, or you choose to change your circumstances, right? Maybe it's a different, maybe it's a different agency, maybe it's getting out of law enforcement, which to which I always heavily cautious people that talk to me about getting law enforcement. I say, even when I was leaving, some guys were like, I'm thinking about getting out. I said, I know that I'm done. There's no part of me that will regret this decision. I know within me, I've resolved within me that I that this is this is it. I'm done. If you have, and at my last job we called this the blue flame, if the blue flame burns at all, even if it's at an ember, even if there's just a tiny spark of a blue flame, my recommendation is don't leave. Yeah. Because you're gonna have to go. I'm know I'm done. When you know you're done, you know it. And if there's a part of you that thinks, I don't know, I think I might regret it, then you stay until you're resolved. Yeah, and you'll know. Yeah. Because rush rushing out of it into the civilian sector is not magically going to solve all your problems. No. And again, if you feel like that's what you're called to do and it's not your calling, it's not done, then stay in it.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

I have young officers where they've been on for five minutes and they're like, I hate this department. I'm like, you don't know this department. You know the dozen people that you actually interact with every day, you the one supervisor you've actually worked for, that you don't know the department. Right. You know, one tiny slice of it, and it was random bad luck that landed you here because you didn't have any choice. Right. Wait to move to another place, wait for the cards to be reshuffled. It may can it may totally change everything. And then those who are further along, moving to a different location, starting over fresh in a different department, sometimes that can be a solution before you just hang it up and and quit. You have to try to make a very difficult decision and it should not be made in a moment of feeling upset.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

Yes, that's that's and I think that would be another great piece of advice. Making decisions based in logic, not based in emotion. Because if you make a decision based in emotion, emotions will betray you. Yeah, because what happens change. Well, yeah. And so what happens is you make a decision in emotion now, and later on you can't trust yourself because you go, well, in a moment of emotional weakness, I made that decision. What emotion am I what what decisions am I capable of? Like I you begin to question yourself. So make the decision based in logic, right? When you're this is the supervisor, is bad. He's the worst, like I can't stand him. Don't make that decision based on emotion and don't just, you know, I'm done with all of this, right? I knew that I was done with all of it. You know, I had opportunities to go to smaller agencies with sheriffs, I heavily respect it. I opted not to keep my posts, like I opted not to do any of it. I said, I'm I'm I'm done with this. I'm I'm okay with shutting this door. But if you got called into law enforcement, because I firmly believe you don't just nobody joins law enforcement because they're going, oh man, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make so much money doing this. But if you feel called into law enforcement, it was there for a reason. So is that reason gone? And if that reason's not gone, then like you said, maybe it's time to reevaluate where I'm at, like change something. Don't don't rush into just doing it because things do change all the time. That that supervisor that you can't stand, who knows, right? They could be fired the next day, they could be transferred, and they could, they could leave. Yeah. So don't don't just go rush into making these decisions. Uh, but do evaluate, logically evaluate sometimes. Hey, would I be better suited in a different department, in a smaller agency, in a larger agency with more opportunity for growth? It's individual. Like I can't say, yeah, you know, I I interact with people at my church all the time that are are deputies, and I talk to them, and you know, they could make all the money in the world going to Kansas City compared to where they're at. They're they're deputies. There's just no way they're gonna make as much as the city cow will ever make. And it's a shame because we could we could go down the road of how I think uh deputies can be more well-rounded than uh patrol officers, to which I know city officers right now are just wanting to jump down my throat to some degree uh over that.

SPEAKER_01 38:48

It's the generalist versus the specialist argument, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Right, right. So uh I may have endured more tragedies, but I can tell you I never once wrote a search warrant uh in my entire 15 years. So I say all that to say I talk with them and you know they could make more money going to work for KCPD, but they they like the smaller agency feel, they like where they're at. And inversely, some other folks have gone to work for Kansas City. And you have to do whatever your whatever's best for your family, whatever's best for you.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Yeah, but don't make all those decisions based on emotion because don't do it because you're angry and don't do it because your feelings are hurt that you know you've been mistreated.

SPEAKER_00 39:27

Right. And it feels like betrayal. I mean, we we joined what we believed with this brotherhood of blue, right? I look up and I can see this thin blue line, you know, American flag, right? We all join with this idea that it was this this community, this brotherhood, sisterhood, this family, right? Well, family can hurt you the most. Yes, and it's going to because ultimately within that family is a bunch of people. And those people have their own emotions, have their own things, have their own desires, just want to move up, whatever it is, want to look good, you know, want to get the promotion, they have goals. And so some of them are just gonna step on everybody along the way, and so it's gonna hurt the most because it feels like betrayal is the is the best way I could describe it. But we're all still wearing the same uniform. So where's the love is the feeling then when you don't get that? Well, I thought we were all in the same team thing. That's when it's so much easier to let that betrayal set in. But if you could take yourself out of it and go, hey, these are just people, right? These are they have their own motivations, their own desires, their own stuff, right? They're, you know, what does they say? You know, you never know what battle someone else is fighting, right? And and as it turns out, like, you know, some of those sergeants, you you you meet, you know, they've multiple divorces or that's what I was about to say.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

If you if you could let them get through a, you know, finalize their divorce, they'd be a different person a year from now.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Oh, then they and then they just get remarried and divorced again, though, because of because of who they are, right? Yeah, and that's what you you find. Like, so I look at you know, the the two individuals who like I knew when I'd actually forgiven them, when I could pray for their well-being, and when I could look at them and realize that I don't think they even ever will ever comprehend what they did to me because they just didn't that's just who they were as people. And although it doesn't make it, it doesn't excuse anything, it does allow me to go, man. How sad is that? Yeah. Right to do that to another human being and just unconsciously destroy uh what another human being desired so much and do so so callously uh that you don't even think about you know what you've done. Like that's you start to look at those people and go, uh, that I could see how they could act like that. Doesn't make it right. Doesn't mean they're what they're done, what they're doing or who they are is correct, but it does make you humanize them and go, I could see. And I once had a sergeant tell me, you can look at any leader and learn from them, even if it's just not what to do. I a lot of bad examples that led me to go, that's probably all they know, right? They didn't there's not a leadership training, they don't get any leadership training. They lead as they've been led, they lead as they've been led, time and time again. They don't know any better, and that's just they're doing what they think is the right thing to do. And so you have to give them a little bit of grace to agree because they don't they don't know any better. And whether that's willful ignorance or not, I agree. You know, they there's a fine wealth of information out there to help them grow. They've chosen not to, and so that's all they they know to do, and it's just that that's continued cycle continues over and over again, where you know, they just this is what was done to me, and this is what I do to you, and just deal with it.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Yeah, Jake, thank you for coming in today, and thank you for your service, both in the military and in law enforcement.

SPEAKER_00 43:00

Oh, I'm really honored. Thank you, Jared. I really appreciate you the opportunity to come on this, and hopefully, hopefully this helps some young cop in some position, some deputy, not make the same mistakes that I made. I once told a young man I could mentor. I said, I could be a really great mentor. I said, because I've messed up so much. And there's so many bad things I could tell you not to do. So if this if this really helps one person, one individual, uh not make some even uh, you know, a small minutia of the mistakes I've made, then it is time well spent. So thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate what you do. I'm sure you get told that a lot, but what you do, and uh you're probably gonna cut all this out, but I truly, what you do is of such value to be a voice to someone, to be sort of an objective third party that someone can come to and have that conversation with. And I wish that I saw more of that, where more chaplains made themselves available uh in not just critical incidents, but just frequent roll call visits uh to be there because I didn't see my chaplains nearly enough. And I don't think that was a knock on them. I think it was a large department and there was few of them and not enough resources to go around. So thank you for what you do, just being uh an objective, honest, and open person that can just be a shoulder to I say shoulder cryon seems like a very poor word usage, but being a sounding board to just listen and let people uh process through the stuff they process through. They need to process through because to your point earlier when you said it that really helps.

unknown 44:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:44

Thank you. I want to thank Jake for coming in and also thank him for his patience. We actually talked after the interview about what we might do with this material because obviously it should have been a multi-hour interview that I don't really do on this show. But he gave me such good material, we could have split it up into two or three versions of the same interview with completely different stories and anecdotes, and then like we could release different versions on different platforms, and people would be able to find different Easter eggs from the Spotify version to the Apple version to whatever. We're not doing that, although, if you want to download the show on every platform, by all means go ahead and do that. I'll appreciate the downloads. But Jake was a good sport about all of this, and there was so much good conversation. And let me just do this. I encourage you to find former police officers who have made peace with what happened in their career. They have good attitudes, they found forgiveness in their hearts. Find those people, engage them, talk to them, let them tell their story and learn from their experience. The views expressed here are the personal views of the hosts and our guests, and do not necessarily represent the views of any law enforcement agency or its components. If you like this episode, please share it with a cop or someone who loves a cop. Thank you for listening to Hey Chaplin. And as always, let's pray for peace in our cities.