Evan Meyer welcomes Chief of Police Ramon Batista to this edition of Meyerside Chats. Interested in any of the civic topics below? Please tune in to Meyerside Chats on the Santa Monica Daily Press.
Ramon Batista is the current Chief of Police for the City of Santa Monica. “Putting values into action” is one of his fundamental approaches to law enforcement leadership. The strategy for doing so was successfully administered during his time as the Chief of Police in Mesa, AZ, and documented in his thoughtful and informative book, “Do No Harm.“
Meyerside Chats seeks to eliminate the “us and them” narrative and toxic polarization by praising those who lead by example, virtuous community leadership, and authentic conversation. The intent is to showcase the humanity in those that take on the often thankless jobs of public service through civil discourse and honoring differing points of view.
Recorded by santamonicamusic.com.
Summary
– Background on the journey of Ramon’s path toward becoming police Chief.
– Importance of connecting with our youth | 2:30
– Impact of President Obama’s Strategies on 21st Century Policing
– Origins of his book, “Do No Harm,” & how it is implemented in Mesa, AZ
– Importance of small interactions with officers. Just say “hi!” | 8:30
– How to approach officers when you get pulled over | 12:45
– The truth about ticket quotas | 16:00
– A holistic approach to officer wellness/stress management | 17:00
– Managing resistance in an organizational culture shift | 27:00
– Community trust-building with law enforcement is critical & ongoing | 31:30
– Ramon’s book “Do No Harm,” as a visionary guide | 36:00
– Guardian vs. Warrior mindset & when to use each | 37:30
– Unmanned Aerial Systems (Drones) – The capabilities & opportunities in Santa Monica | 39:45
– Management of dispatching, how it operates, & the new “Live 911” system | 51:30
– Status on the shift to increased neighborhood patrol | 57:30
– Mindset of continuous improvement & building the leadership for our future | 1:06:00
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Listen to the podcast here
Meyerside Chats Chief Batista
Thank you for joining the show.
Thanks so much.
You probably didn’t know this. It’s a surprise, but we’re going to be dancing for everyone. I brought instruments, too. It’s a pleasure to have you on. You have written a wonderful book, which I have had the privilege of reading. It’s pretty amazing that you have put this all together through your experience, and there’s so much good stuff in here, centering around putting values into action. You have gotten a lot of this from business books like Jim Collins’ Good to Great.
I want to talk a bit about this book because it could be super influential in how we do things, how we lead by example, how we communicate with each other, and how we build consensus together, which is a lot about what this show is about. In there also there’s some background about you and how you got started. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how did you get here as the Police Chief of Santa Monica?
I have wanted to be a police officer since I was a kid. I got to live out that childhood dream in Tucson, Arizona. I was born in Los Angeles, but things happen. My parents needed childcare. It was expensive in the mid-‘60s when I was born. My grandparents in Arizona were like, “We got a free home here, no mortgage.” As a bonus, my grandparents were going to have a lot more access to me, their grandson. That was part of what they were trying to do, and it worked anyway.
I can remember the first time I wanted to be a cop. I was maybe ten. I stayed on that track and pursued it. One of the things that I have taken from that experience as a kid to now is that I realized how important it was to make sure for me now that we have a connection with the young people in our community. Every day there’s a young person that’s growing up, has a heart of service, and is trying to figure out which direction to pour that into. Could it be public safety, or could it be world care? They need exposure and role models. I would’ve thrived if I had that, but I didn’t.
I found myself as a kid riding my bicycle up to police officers. They were doing traffic stops in order to try to have some connection with a cop. As you can imagine, it was weird because they were trying to make a traffic stop, and here was this kid riding up on a bicycle, staring at them, trying to start a conversation. It was a lot of work trying to convince my mom that I wanted to be this police officer. She always wanted me to be something else. She had dreams of me becoming something else and not a cop. That was challenging because she didn’t have any exposure to police officers either.
I got over that hump, and I got to spend several years in Tucson doing a wide variety of things. I did everything, and I was fortunate to have that exposure in a police department that was all about community and accountability. It gave me a strong foundation for whom I had become. Back then 2015, our police department was one of the first police departments that were selected by the Obama Administration at the time to be one of the departments that going to go around the country and talk about the implementation of 21st Century Policing. One of fifteen police departments in the country had got selected to do something like that.
I was immersed in the ideals of advancing policing and getting ourselves to a better place. The subsequent election in 2016 made it so that the ideals of that program never old in the way that I think it should have. Here we are several years later. We’re now at a place where we need to make sure that we restart that conversation. A portion of that book was those thoughts that I had about how I thought that policing should improve and how we should continue to extend ourselves to be those stewards that our community wants from us.
They want to feel safe. They want to know that we’re efficient and effective and that we can get things done. At the same time that we’re doing that, we’re stretching our legs and being progressive in a way that we’re looking at the environment and changing with it because policing is a little bit like the Catholic Church. It takes it a long time to come around. I don’t think it always has to be that way. I spent several years being the Chief in Mesa, Arizona. I did a lot of great things. I got a lot of good things accomplished there.
You implemented the strategies in this book.
I did. Although I never called them the Principles of 21st Century Policing while I was there, I followed that same guidebook and felt good about the success I saw looking back. Afterward, we started getting into the pandemic. We were in a phase of being shut down. My friend and I, Mark Ziska, got together and thought about what we had accomplished and thought we write about it. That is how Do No Harm was brought to life.
It was during the pandemic and the period when we didn’t have a lot of outlets. I had a lot of things on my mind because of the things that I was seeing that were occurring with the protests that were occurring after the murder of George Floyd and the way that some of those protests were being handled. I could see what the answers were, and I didn’t have an outlet. We wrote about it.
I enjoyed reading it throughout. It puts many different pieces of things that I have learned in business. Good to Great is an example when it comes to values, trust, communication, and building relationships. You mentioned something about being the kid on the bicycle to go talking to police officers at the traffic stops. Not everyone takes that approach. You found interest at an early time. Most people won’t do that.
Even now, I don’t see a lot of people go up to officers and speak to them like they are a person in the community. You describe a little bit in this book about why that is, but that would be one of the things, at least in my opinion, that would build more trust and connection. There is that authentic conversation between two people, not us and them. How do we get there?
Not only am I working internally in conveying the message that every interaction that we have with our officers in public is meaningful. For example, if you run across an officer walking in or out of a coffee shop and an officer holds the door open for you, that is going to be memorable for you because that’s likely the only interaction you are going to have with a cop. Unless you have the misfortune of getting in a traffic accident or you’re burglarized, whichever are the two biggest reasons why regular folks interact with the police. They are being stopped in traffic, traffic accidents, or burglary. Those are the two big things about how folks interact with the cops.
Unless that happens, that one moment is meaningful for the regular person that happens to run into an officer. I tell the officers, “That is important. That small interaction is going to be the thing you said in that person’s mind for that day.” You never know what the impact that is going to have and how they are going to react to it. At the same time, I’m having those conversations with the officers and trying to move us from this period of anxiety and social unrest that happened in the last few years and rebuilding that.
At the same time that I’m having those conversations internally, I’m also having conversations externally with every member of the public that I run into. I like to say the same thing. Often I hear them say, “What can we do?” They want to help with this relationship thing. You don’t have to say, “Thank you for your service.” I appreciate it when you do, but you don’t have to say that. If you smile and say hi, you wouldn’t believe how far that takes us in our day, maybe even in our week, because the officers are exposed to a lot of stuff, chaos, and things.
[bctt tweet=”If you smile and say “Hi,” you wouldn’t believe how far that takes us, police officers, in our day, and maybe even in our week because the officers are exposed to a lot of stuff.” username=””]
I’m still carrying the things that I saw several years ago. Luckily, I found a nice little spot to put them into, but those things are pretty much going on day to day, week to week, for police officers. When they run into a citizen who says hi and smiled, that makes their day. They may not show it, but internally, that’s part of the thing that keeps us going. You’re like, “Thank you.” It’s an amazing thing. I’m working on both sides of it, trying to make sure that we bring folks together, and making sure that we have a connection with young people in our community. It’s because of my deficit and what I grew up missing.
You are right in the idea that if you don’t make an active approach to speak with officers on duty, the only time you see or speak to an officer is when, for most people, is at those traffic stops, when you’re pulled over, or you’re the victim of something. That’s not fun for anyone. You have to have this uncomfortable thing, and everyone was trying to do their best. The person getting the ticket is trying not to get a ticket. The officer is trying to be civil, but even at that moment, I always thought, even with the parking tickets, the parking ticket is always like, “Here is a ticket. You’re in trouble. You better pay this, or there are going to be consequences.” It’s in angry colors.
It’s got a whole bunch of aggressive things. A lot of government documentation feels that way. Anything and taxes feel that way from the state. He is like, “Do this or else.” I’m like, “I didn’t mean to do that at all. Why are you yelling at me?” That’s how I feel when I receive that stuff. You make an innocent mistake, you get yelled at, and there’s a big punishment. I always wondered if there was an opportunity at the ticket level when you’re dealing with a police officer at that moment, that 1 or 2 times that you get in 1 decade or 5, whatever that is. You can change the entire conversation through those interactions.
I was a motor cop for several years, leading a group of motor officers. I was their Sergeant. For most police officers, you’re going to find that they have given more warnings than they have given citations. There is no trick to it. The best approach is to be friendly with the officer when you get pulled over. If I look back and think of the many times that I gave somebody a warning and didn’t write the ticket, it was in the 90-some percentile that folks were being friendly and acknowledged.
A huge component of that is on me. If I walked up and said, “How is it going?” Right away, disarm him, “The reason why I pulled you over is X, Y, Z.” There’s that engagement that’s going on. I’m telling you that I can remember the folks that were like, “I thought it was this. I thought the speed limit was X. It’s usually close to what they were going.” I’m like, “No, it’s fifteen miles lower than that, normally. It was 25 to 45.”
In those conversations, I found that I gave people a break because they were friendly. They acknowledged it. They gave me their registration or license, and everything was in order. It was like, “Slow down.” It’s not even a written warning. I find that that’s the demeanor of most officers that I run into that I know and have engaged. They don’t go out there with the sole purpose of writing traffic tickets. Motor cops are a little bit different because that’s their job. Even those, you would find that folk’s demeanor and how they approach is part of the results that come out of that. It’s an interesting dynamic at a traffic stop.
I remember growing up and always thinking there were ticket quotas. I don’t know how that plays into it for some versus not others. One of the things that always concerned me was when they were dealing with all these different types of people. During the day, they do have all of these interactions that can be extremely stressful.
They go high, low, back, down, up, and down.
You have to go home with your family with that. Whatever you saw, whatever you dealt with, whatever there could have been gore, it could have been something domestic that was particularly disturbing. For the last few years, it’s even been more challenging with all of the poor rhetoric and media around police officers impugning the entire police organization, law enforcement, in general, for some bad apples.
There’s a lot of stress there that is even more than the normal amount of stress you have. It pooled in the last several years through COVID, the riots, and all that stuff. These guys have done incredible work. You have written a little bit about the importance of this in this book or employee wellness. Are there programs or thoughts that you have on the best ways to improve employee officer wellness?
I will touch back on the quotas. That is a great example of how we have evolved over time. I have no doubt that in the early beginnings of things and even some police departments like Ferguson, Missouri, were found to have been employing traffic citations as a way to sustain the financial well-being of that city way back in the day in 2014 or 2015, whenever that investigation unfolded. We learned from those things. We continue to evolve and move forward.
In this day and age, department like Santa Monica does not support or follow the guidelines of quotas as one thing to point out how we are constantly learning and moving forward. On the topic of resilience and wellness, it is important that we understand that the officers go through this full range of emotions that happen to them. They see and experience things in their one 40-hour week that most people may not see in their lifetime. It’s the full range of folks that get angry and want to fight to helping somebody in a situation where they’re in dire need of a human being stepping up and filling a void for them. There’s so much that they get exposed to.
What I have written about and what I espoused is the importance of ensuring that resilience and mental well-being are taken care of internally. One of the things that are tough in any organization and any bureaucracy, especially in city government, is that internally, the workings of the organization and the fact that we are a city entity, a government entity, accountable to the people makes it, so we have a lot of rules. That environment in and of itself can sometimes be stressful to employees. Not only are they dealing with the things that happen to them externally, but also internally, how they are treated. They make a mistake, and how big of a deal does that get turned into somebody’s mistake?
My view on this is holistic, and I’m looking at all of it. We have to make sure that, internally, we treat people with fairness and transparency, the same kinds of things that we are asking the officers to do when they go out there and talk to people in the community. If they’re not being treated fairly, with transparency internally, and given a shot to renew themselves after they make a mistake, how is it that we’re expecting them to go out there and practice the same thing with the people that they run into that make a mistake when they break a traffic law and do, at that point, look at the person and go, “I get it? You were distracted because of whatever watch the stop signs. Move on.”
It’s because he has been treated the same way internally. He is a human being and made mistakes. His job is public safety, but as public safety, a component of that is at that one particular moment. He educated somebody on the importance of stopping at a stop sign. He did his job the same way that internally, if an officer makes a mistake and we figure out a way to renew him from that mistake. There’s an acknowledgment of, “I made a mistake. I won’t put myself in that situation again.” That’s what I need to hear, and that’s what I want in order for us to be able to move forward.
This job that we have taken on got a lot of responsibility with it. That’s why we train so much on being specific about life and death issues because lives are on the line. There are some mistakes that are grave concerns that we can’t recover from them. That could lead to somebody’s termination of employment. That is something that we all go into understanding how risky this job is and how much is on the line when we say we’re going to go out there and protect other people’s safety and how we represent that aspect of government that does that.
[bctt tweet=”We train so much on being very specific about life and death issues because lives are on the line.” username=””]
Nonetheless, those are all the reasons why I think about the importance of ensuring that we take care of our folks internally and that there are mechanisms for them to be able to de-stress and unwind, especially during some of the heated issues and difficult moments that they encounter. We have found success at the Santa Monica Police Department with groups of officers that do this internally themselves. We have a group that volunteered to say, “We’re going to be part of the peer support team that ensures that our officers are doing okay. We continually check on them if they have been through something traumatic.”
On top of that, we got professional clinicians that are on board that help us with advancing that care but certainly, initially, it is on our peer team. In the way that I start with myself, our leadership team, and our command staff, the way that we lead and manage our officers so that they understand that we look at everybody as a human being and nobody is perfect. For those mistakes that we make, we can recover.
That is exactly the road that we’re going to pursue. People don’t feel like they are coming to work, which is supposed to be in a safe space. They don’t feel they come into work, and they got to be looking around their back because they don’t know where the next thing could come from, and they could hurt them. If you think back from the earliest stages of human life, they come out of the cave, and they would be like, “What can hurt us?”
Police officers who have to wear this uniform and do this work are constantly thinking about what can hurt them. I don’t want them to be thinking about what can hurt them inside the organization. I want them to feel safe in the organization. We practice high levels of accountability and responsibility for one another. I never have a concern internally that if we have somebody that makes a mistake, we’re not going to address it. We can love our officers and folks at the same time that we hold ourselves accountable. You can do both. You can have high expectations and accountability at the same time that you’re continuously looking for ways to take care of them.
[bctt tweet=”We can love our officers and folks at the same time that we hold ourselves accountable. You can have high expectations and accountability at the same time that you’re continuously looking for ways to take care of them.” username=””]
Are there specific modalities or ways that you manage or promote the management of stress reduction?
I had sent two of our officers to this nationwide symposium on wellness and resiliency. I can’t wait to sit down and talk to them about what they learned, what programs are out there, and what ideas they came across about how we can improve the things that we are doing. I feel fortunate that I have come into this police department that has practiced a lot of progressive ideas in policing.
For example, one of the things that are still difficult is to try to get officers to open up and allow themselves to be vulnerable with their peers and say, “I’m not feeling good about that last call that we took. I feel bad about what I saw and what we experienced,” and to be able to do that in a way that’s a safe space, because officers are supposed to be tough, have all the answers, and all that. Yet, they are human beings, still susceptible to the same challenges that we all have.
Santa Monica has always been progressive on a lot of different fronts. One of them has been that they have been tackling this issue of breaking down a stereotype of allowing officers to say that it’s okay that they are looking for somebody to listen and to be there for them in those moments of crisis, deeper thought, and support.
My idea in sending these two officers to the symposium was that it’s great that we’re already doing good things. Let’s continuously stay on top of it and see what else is out there that we can do in order to further this mission of ensuring that our officers will retire one day after several years, whatever it is that they have to do on their terms that they figured out, “It’s my time to retire. I feel good. It’s time to go.”
They can close that chapter of their life versus they go through a series of incidents or mistakes that leads to early retirement or not a high level of job satisfaction. I want them to feel good about what they are doing and coming to work. A huge component of that is how we support them internally so that they can be successful out there.
I know that you do think holistically about this, and a sign of the way that you treat people in case X is the way that you need to treat people in case Y. The way that you want to be treated is how you should treat others, the golden rule. A lot of times, in some of these conversations, we come back to these preschool concepts. That is often we haven’t grasped as adults, or we have forgotten, we have gotten distracted, however our opinions started to shape our narratives of our life. You forget the most basic things.
In policing, it’s interesting because there is always this fog of chaos of something is always going on. You finish one assignment and one mission, and the next thing you know, because of the nature of what we do, there’s something else that piles up on top of that. It is easy to get caught up in that moment of adrenaline and on the next thing.
I got good folks to help ensure that we have those speed bumps in order for us to slow down a little bit in order to catch our breath and make sure that we’re taking care of our folks. They’re resilient in order to go out there and do the best that they can be in stressful situations. My biggest thing is that I want to make sure that they are good about what they’re doing. They can go out there, make good decisions, be focused on what’s in front of them, and not be carrying baggage around from what could be behind them. That is the part I want to minimize, if not eliminate.
One of the things you bring up in the book is about resistors, people who resist things, not like diodes or transistors. For those reading, the chief knew that. For clarification purposes and for the people who like to dissent for whatever reason, you gave five types of resistance categories, but all lead back to this loss of control. You probably have a ton to say about this.
Change is always challenging. You could probably apply it anywhere, but we use it a lot in policing. Police officers often dislike the way that we’re doing things now, but they dislike even more the idea of changing. They were like, “What do we do?” I am the proponent of always ensuring that we are stretching our legs, not staying stagnant and continually growing because, as human beings, we are wired to continually look forward, even though sometimes it’s a little scary or what have you. Organizationally or individually, we need to continue to always have a vision of where we want to be.
Along that path, some changes will occur in areas where folks have a lot of ownership over something. The thought that dynamic could be changed is scary to the folks that have that ownership and invested themselves into creating what they have. It does become challenging. I’m thoughtful about the fact that those folks have invested their time and energy in doing those things.
I’m careful when I come across those situations to not break their spirit and not harm their synergy in what they’re doing, but at the same time, I have to figure out whether or not I need to continually nudge in order for us to get to a better place or work within what they are doing in order for us to continue to move the organization forward.
There are many times that I don’t want to lose folks. I don’t want to lose their energy and what they are bringing to the table. At the same time, I have to be focused on the greater good and the fact that the organization has to continue to improve and continue to get better because I’m tied to the expectations of the community in the police department. The fact that rightfully so, our residents in our community want more of us, not less or not the same sometimes.
If we identify either internally or with the help of folks telling us that we need to make specific changes, we need to be responsive to that, and we can’t ignore that. In the process of those things, you are right. We run across folks that want to hold onto their systems, beliefs, and challenge of nudging, moving, and continually advancing.
It goes a step further in the idea of building trust with communities, where one of the questions is somewhat predicated on the idea that if you’re going to build trust within the community, we want them to feel that they can trust the police officers. You say something like, “People who obey laws know that there is a legitimate reason to trust and obey the people or the authority that’s telling them to do it.” How do you see the resistance around the general idea of policing or officers? How can we move this forward?
It starts off by ensuring that you have and you build trust within the organization. You can’t go out there and begin the work of trying to elicit trust in the community until you get your house in order and until you understand internally if there is a lack of cohesion or alignment within the organization. That requires trust building internally. That goes back to originally what we were talking about earlier in making sure that you treat your folks internally with fairness.
How do we go out there and ensure that the community and the public at large will listen to us when we speak, portray, ask for witness information, or respond to a call for service? That all comes from the behaviors that we have been exhibiting in that community, how we have shown ourselves to be human, and how through a continual emphasis on the things that we got right are put out there and talked about. It is how the officers behave. It is those stories that are told. Sometimes we don’t realize that the interactions that we have in the community, both positive and negative, have these ripple effects.
It all goes back to principally speaking that folks start off from a position of trust, and therein lies some of the challenges in policing in the country. There have been many moments, especially for African Americans in this country, that have experienced a level of policing that was not co-measured with what was occurring in other parts of the country.
Those experiences are the things where we fell short. Those experiences are the things that hold us back from getting to those levels that we need to be, and therein lies the work that we have to continually do in building trust because we are never going to be done trying to show people that this organization that holds so much power is going to be careful in using that power with benevolence and ensuring that they’re doing it fairly and equitably.
That’s the responsibility that we have taken. From my perspective, that’s something that we are going to have to work on always continually. The work of building relationships and getting people to trust us is never-ending. There is a new generation coming in one after another. We have to be doing the work of ensuring that folks trust us, and that’s not easy, but it starts inside. We project and work through that in our actions and in the way that we take care of people every day. It’s like a full cycle, and it never ends. In my estimation, in policing, we’re never going to reach a point where we reach the best we can be.
Everyone is happy all the time, optimal case, optimal utopian relationship.
We have to continually work at getting better. That work is never going to end.
There are too many variables and disruptions that happen that would make for perfection in a sense, where every single person optimally thinks about every person in the police department perfectly. In general, it’s hard to achieve perfection, but part of the idea is that if you believe it, you get closer.
The title of the book, Do No Harm, is visionary. A vision is something that is hard to achieve. The idea of saying, “Do no harm,” in our profession of policing is hard to achieve because we’re dealing with a country that’s got 330 million people. I forget what the estimate is. The estimate is that the number of weapons in the country far exceeds the number of people.
In this country, there’s a sliver of society that is hell-bent and always doing harm. Many of those folks are armed. If I’m saying, “Our challenge in policing is the do no harm in our interactions with the public.” It’s difficult when you think about the fact that a sliver of the population is hell-bent on doing harm, and they could be armed while doing it. Even though the odds are stacked against that, I still think, and my vision is, that in policing our charge and what we should be trying to do is to do no harm in those interactions that we have, where we can make a difference.
[bctt tweet=”Policing is charged, and we should be trying not to harm those who we interact with, where we can make a difference.” username=””]
It’s a great vision of trying to make sure that in every interaction that we have, we don’t harm somebody, given the totality of what we deal with. It’s pretty difficult, but that’s what I want to do. That’s where I keep saying internally of where our level of excellence, training, decision making, and identifying the issue in front of us, making the best decision possible so that the outcome is nobody gets hurt. That’s what we’re striving for. That’s the idea.
At the same time that I say that, I also want to make sure that we are protecting the public, arresting bad guys, and doing our job to keep public safety. It’s not like I’m saying, “We’re going to stand back and not do anything.” I’m saying, “We’re going to go out there and provide the best public safety that we can to keep our community safe.” At the same time, while we’re doing that, we’re going to employ every tactic, training, and ideal to keep people safe in the outcome of those things. It’s not easy to do.
It’s not, but the way that you break it out is that there are two types of police or law enforcement. There is the warrior mindset and the guardian mindset. Can you explain a little bit about that? You are promoting, coming from a guardian mindset.
There are times in every officer’s shift when the moment could come that they’re called in to be a warrior and to go in, display courage, and save the day in a situation. We’re dealing with that sliver of the population that I talk about that wakes up in the morning with a thought that they are going to go out and harm somebody else. For those, we have to always be aware that they are in our population. For those instances, our officers have to go into that mindset of courageousness and warrior mentality in order to save the day.
The vast majority of the time, we’re operating in a guardian mentality where we’re making sure that our community is safe and we’re doing everything we can to deal with the everyday issues that happen. Not every situation calls for us to be in this hyperfocused life-or-death type of stance with the people that we’re dealing with. Here’s the difficulty right of that. It doesn’t mean that for the officer, even though he is got to be calm and cool, he is not thinking in the back of his mind. He has got to always be aware of his surroundings and what can hurt them.
Therein lies the great challenge of what I’m asking. We have the capacity to get better and improve continually. We recruit and hire some of the best people and are intense. Once you’re in, you’re part of a group of folks that are all focused on the same issues and have the same mentality about service to others. They come to the table with that. I said, “Every day, there is a young person with a heart of service that is coming out trying to figure out which way they are going to go.” We want those folks. By and large, they’re in our ranks.
[bctt tweet=”We leverage those young ones with a heart of service coming out and trying to figure out which way they will go to get us to this idea of trying not to harm our interactions with the public.” username=””]
My job is to leverage those things in order to get us to this idea of trying to do no harm in our interactions with the public. There is no doubt that there are those moments when our officers are called to summon all the courage that they have, despite whatever they’re fearing that’s right in front of them, and be that warrior to save the moment. Luckily, we live in a society, and certainly, the City of Santa Monica is a pretty great place to be. That’s not something that we often have to draw to. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have a whole host of other issues that we contend with in Santa Monica and have to address. I feel good about the overall safety of our city.
That’s a good segue into this exciting new territory and surveillance of drones and unmanned aerial systems. This is a fun one because you can get into a bunch of sides of the drone conversation, but tell me a little bit more about your experience with it and how you see that helping Santa Monica in the future.
Santa Monica had a UAS program for a long time. We partnered up with a company that also has a UAS system. What we are doing is we’re using one of their employees as the main pilot and their UAS system. We’re responding to 911 calls for service with their UAS, their pilot, and our officer that sits inside a room with TV monitors that he can see what the UAS can see, and he can hear what the officers and the 911 dispatcher are dispatching back and forth the call for service.
We are sending the UAS as soon as the call comes out because it’s got no impediments. It’s flying around buildings and getting to the call. He can get to a call much quicker than most of the officers can get to it. Once it gets there, it can lay eyes on what’s occurring through the officer and then relay back to the responding officer what’s occurring.
Some situations have happened, for example, where a guy experiencing some crisis is walking down the street. He’s breaking things. He breaks the guy’s windows at his apartment. The guy calls 911. We get the UAS overhead quickly, but we don’t see anybody. The UAS operator down below, the one that’s looking at the monitors, calls the complainant. He’s like, “We’re here. We’re overhead. Which way did the guy go?” The victim came out, and he was like, “What? You’re here already. He went around the corner this way.” That officer relays that information to the responding officers, and sure enough, they catch the guy about a block away or whatever.
Did they catch him with the drone?
He directs the officers to where they’re at. They make the stop and identify him as being the guy that had done it. In a situation like that, normally, by the time the officers would have responded to the victim’s house, and the guy had already now been walking probably 2, 3, or 4 blocks away, no way that we would have figured out who he was. Unless he was the only one walking down the street, it’s impossible for us to nab that person and identify him as the culprit or suspect. That’s one example of where the UAS has been valuable because they’re quick.
Once it gets out to a particular call, on its way back to home base at the main station, it will zigzag across the city and respond to different calls. If there is a traffic accident in a particular intersection, a man down in an alleyway, unknown trouble, unknown disturbance at a different place, it will bounce from call to call, and it will give updates. It will say, “I went to such and such cross street. No one’s blocking the intersection. There are no cars that match the description on either corner. This accident is clear, so you know.” It lowers the priority of that call because they are not there anymore.
That person that was in the alleyway is up and walking now. It’s not like they’re down or need medical help. It looks like they’re up and walking. They give updates as to that information. That allows us to reprioritize what calls we’re going to make with the scarce resources that we have. I will give you a quick story on a prowler call that we had. Prowler calls are historically difficult for us to catch the bad guy that’s prowling around because at night, as soon as a person that’s lurking around hears a car or what have you, they lay low.
Define prowler.
In the middle of the night, somebody says, “I think I saw somebody in my backyard.” That is a prowler.
It hasn’t done anything yet, but you get a call that they are out there.
If they’re in your yard, that’s probably not where they are supposed to be right off the bat.
What if you are on the street? Can you be a prowler?
You could be a prowler if you’re looking into people’s cars or somebody’s window, stuff that we can narrowly say focused identify as they’re up to something. We deploy the UAS overhead. It flies high that people can’t hear it. They identify somebody that is nearby where the call’s at. It’s the only person that is in the area, and it’s at night. Because we can pick up the heat source, we can see them. That officer directs the officers that are responding into where this guy is now hiding. As soon as he hears the car, he gets in the bushes and ducks low. Normally, we will never find that guy because we drive right by him. We’re out of the area because we will check and can’t see anybody.
There’s no trigger for him to hide anymore. He doesn’t hear it. He doesn’t know. You have more time to observe.
For one of the first times in a long time, we were able to find a prowler when we got a prowler call. That was it. There have been numerous instances where the UAS gets deployed. There was a theft going on at the Apple Store on the Promenade. We get overhead as the guy is leaving the store, fighting with a security guard. He runs down to the Promenade and ducks into another store. We stay overhead watching that store, guide the officers in, and that guy comes out after he has stolen something from that store and gets immediately arrested.
All these things that are happening that we otherwise would have never had a chance at. We would address them. The UAS can get to the calls in a much shorter time and address the service need that was before, “Sorry, we got a lot of calls. We can’t get to your call yet.” The officers can get there with the UAS and have communication with the person that’s making the 911 call. We are delivering a service that before we couldn’t deliver. It is working out well.
Privacy concern is addressed by the fact that the company that we’ve done this pilot program with is a private company that they’re in charge of maneuvering the UAS around buildings and looking out for other aircraft and things like that. They have operating guidelines that say, “You’re not going to do surveillance on people without a warrant or reason.” When we deploy the UAS in that situation, they’re going because there is a 911 call that says, “We need your eyes, ears, and assistance in this area for this. There’s a disturbance.”
It is localized surveillance for a specific cause. It’s not for widespread surveillance. That word gets a bad rap, and it gets generalized.
You have the pilot up there that understands and is not going to risk their company’s well-being, their contract, or their reputation by doing something they’re not supposed to. You have the police officer that’s looking at the monitors and screens. He knows what the operating guidelines for Santa Monica are. He is not going to break the rules. You have this check and balance going on between two different entities that check each other to make sure that they’re not engaging in any surveillance activity that is not a part of the 911 call that got them dispatched to go look for something specific.
With the best practices of accountability, they would hold each other accountable to them. We were chatting earlier a little bit about the dispatch situation. I don’t know if it’s a situation, but how the city runs the dispatch program, which is interesting. I called the dispatch a handful of times or 911. I have a handful of situations where I would see a guy, follow him safely and call maybe ten times.
I’m like, “There is no way on Ocean Avenue they are going to get this guy. It’s Saturday afternoon. You can’t move ten feet.” I was at the Ocean and Broadway, and I followed him to the 7-Eleven on 7th and Wilshire. I called a bunch of times. I’m like, “Now he’s here. I’m letting you know.” They’re like, “What’s your phone number?” I’m like, “It’s the number on the thing.”
There is a little disconnect there, and what I did was not common. A lot of people aren’t calling repeatedly to give updates to dispatch about the locations of criminals, but there is an opportunity for people to help. I don’t know if that’s on the dispatching front specifically. It’s a two-part question. One is where is the opportunity on dispatching, given that the police department does not operate those particular operations. Secondly, is there an opportunity for people who do want to be involved to actively support and help the police department?
For clarity, it’s important that the public knows that under the current configuration, 911 and dispatch centers, for both police and fire, do not fall under either the police or the fire department. It falls under the office of emergency management, which is under the city manager’s office. The time will come in the future when we will have a conversation about moving the 911 center under the umbrella of the police department, simply because we are the biggest user of 911 and the dispatching center. That doesn’t mean that the fire department would not have a stake or a foothold in that. They would because they are our partners in many aspects of what we do. We will move to a place down the road where the 911 center will be operated under the auspices of the police department.
I have heard a lot of stories similar to yours in the short time that I have been here, where folks have said, “I called, and the person seemed to be asking me a series of questions that didn’t make any sense.” What I try to explain is that even though it doesn’t sound like it, in the background, a lot of times, the dispatcher or the call taker has already moved that information forward. We are already beginning to get some of that information and starting to drive in the direction of where that call’s coming from.
The supplementary information that the dispatcher or the call taker is getting from you is to ensure that the officer has the best picture available as to what’s occurring before they get to the call. It’s frustrating for folks that don’t know that, but time is of the essence. The dispatcher or the call taker is trying to get as much information from you as possible. At the same time, typing it in.
You talk about difficulties. You are trying to talk to somebody that is having the worst moment. You’re trying to get as best accurate information as you can. You’re trying to type that into a format and send it forward. The cop that gets the call or the firefighter that gets a response to this crisis call has the best information and has the best chance of being successful once they get there.
That interaction right there that’s occurring is difficult because, at the moment, the person wants an acknowledgment that helps on the way. I don’t quite know right now the moment where some of that stuff happens because I haven’t taken it over yet, but I know that we will be working on those things. So much happens at the 911 center that can impact the outcomes when we get to a call. Those things are important, the 911 center.
We’re going to roll out something that is going to be helpful in the future, and it’s called Live911. With Live911, as these 911 calls are coming in, they’re going to be able to be routed to the patrol officers that are in the field listening for regular radio calls. They also are able to hear some of the Live911 calls as they’re coming in. That gives them a little bit of a head start in hearing the location and getting to where they need to be. At the same time that the call is being triaged by the call taker, the officer is also listening to this call and conversation and being able to begin to use his experience as a cop and make determinations about what’s occurring, what the mode is, and what we’re going to do once we get there.
Often, even though they do their best right to get the information from the person making the call, and we transfer that onto a format that goes to the dispatcher, and it gets dispatch, we hear that, and we get to it as police officers. It does nowhere near resembles what the actual incident is. I don’t want to put a number on it, but often. With this Live911, we’re going to not eliminate the key player in the middle, but we’re going to have like an ear into that conversation and to help us also be able to better understand what’s in front of us.
It’s going to be good for us in that from a public safety perspective. We are going to be able to read between the lines in some incidents that sound, if unfiltered, could come across in a way that dispatches us in a danger-oriented mentality going into something. If the officer is listening to a lot of key things that are occurring in that conversation, they’re able to separate that and go, “It sounds bad, but some of those things are not making sense. Maybe it’s not quite what I’m hearing.”
Sometimes people say, “I don’t know, I think he’s got a gun.” They are trying to make sure that they get the officer there sooner. As they’re asking him more questions and the officers are listening to this, some of those questions are not being quite answered in a way that makes sense. From there, it throttles or adjusts his response to that call. He is not going headlong thinking, the man with a gun. He is thinking something about the way this lady is reporting. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Do we have a man with a gun? Maybe we don’t.
That happens when people claim non-existent urgency.
In order to get us there faster.
Is that common?
It can happen. That’s a component of why the call taker asks many questions.
How is the detective shift to patrol duty going?
It’s not just detectives. It’s traffic officers and some neighborhood resource officers that are going to have to spend some time doing call-taking. There is not one aspect of our operations where I feel like, “It’s okay. We will do less of that. We will do less of this,” especially with detectives. Detectives are pivotal and important because every case that they’re assigned has a victim to it.
We’re going to be careful about not sending detectives that are investigating an active robbery, sexual assault, or homicide. We’re not going to send those guys to go do patrol duty when they receive a high-priority case or an investigation of that nature. We have property detectives that are also working cases. Our detectives are going to be doing 1 or 2 tours of patrol per month or week. I forget what the ratio is going to be, but in order for us to be able to meet what is our basic staffing and ability to deliver that front line of public safety to our community.
The reason is simple. Over the last several years, whether it was because of the social unrest or the pandemic, we lost over 105 total members of the police department. Thirty-five of those were police officers. In any given year, the police department loses about 6 or 7 police officers a year for different reasons, retirement, termination, or whatever.
We nearly doubled that statistic in the last several years. That has led to us being at this place where we are shortening our staffing and ability to go out there and provide the front-facing public safety that we need to have in order for us to be agile, responsive, and to meet the moment when some of these crimes are unfolding and happening in our city. We had a late-night burglary where a guy used a hammer to break through the glass casings and started to steal stuff on the north side of town.
It was 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning when the call came out. We responded as an emergency call. I don’t know where the officers were coming from, but they have been able to stay in their respective areas of operations. We have four different areas within the city. That’s your assigned beat, but because we don’t have enough officers to keep them in those beats, they end up being all over the city.
At 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, they respond across the city to this burglary in progress. They don’t get there on time. They get there only with enough time to see a speeding car in a dark part of the city. That has to be the car because it’s the only one that is driving away at a high rate of speed. They pursue it. They try to make a stop to it, but they’re not successful. They call off the pursuit. We don’t pursue those types of situations. The guy gets away.
There is a situation where I think to myself, “What if that was a home invasion and the seconds and the minutes count, and we have to be there in order to save somebody’s life?” I need for us to have the right number of folks in our staffing in order to go out there and stay in their areas of they were assigned, whether it’s beat 1 or beat 4, whatever beat that they’re assigned to. Work those areas, get to know that community, and not be in this mode because we’re short-staffed that they have to crisscross the entire city all throughout their day in order to cover all the calls for service.
That is where we find ourselves now because we’re deploying this minimal number of officers out into the community. Not only did I feel that was not safe for the community, but it was also not safe for the officers responding because they had to be there for one another. Many calls for service that we don’t know how those things are going to go. You want to have your partner that comes with you and be part of that call.
Our officers do phenomenal work. They’re amazing on many levels. They are good people. I want to make sure that we give them all the tools and all the opportunities to be successful because the environment that they go out and do this work in is completely unpredictable. Our job is, and as much as we can do is to provide them the ability to be successful.
One of those is by making sure that there are enough of them to do this work and enough of them to be there for one another in those critical incidents and moments. I would not want to send a single officer to a prowler call in the middle of the night because he is by himself looking for somebody who is up to no good. Even though I might have a UAS overhead, that UAS can’t land and do anything. My thought process was, “I want to make sure that we have enough officers to be able to get to these calls on time and safely.”
Thank you for that. I got one more thing I want to uncover here. It seems like you’re using the word values in this book and clearly, you have many strong values that have led to your success, how you think about people, and how you want to manage law enforcement cities. It’s warming to see that. I look at a lot of what you have written as virtues in a lot of ways, and sometimes you don’t know the difference. They are pretty close to these words. When I think of who the type of person I want to be, the type of person I want my child to be in the way I would hope communities and civilizations would treat each other who would be virtuous. Perhaps virtue is the subset of values that are all positive.
From what I gather from you, the impetus for why you wanted to have this show because you wanted to find the good things that are out there. You’re trying to bring folks into a conversation with you and a wider audience in the community about the good things that are going on out there and how we can leverage and move those things forward. You’re right.
Our organization is anchored in solid values. I see that day in and day out. I came from the outside. I get to walk around the police department and look at the signs and the symbols near their workspaces or the things that they believe in and the time that I have spent with them in one-on-one conversations, riding around with them in a police car or having lunch and understand what drives them.
Many of them are from Santa Monica. They have this connection and responsibility to their role in the city. They know it inside and out. They feel responsible for it. That’s unlike in some cities where the police travel from a long distance. Don’t get me wrong, some of them travel from a long distance to come here too, but they have ownership of the community. They believe in what they’re doing. They’re inherently good people.
Don’t get me wrong. We’re going to make mistakes. When we do, the things that we are going to espouse is that we will be transparent and accountable for those mistakes, whether internally or externally. Externally, I will be the first one to step outside and say, “We erred. I need you to have faith that we understand and that we made a mistake. We will get better and continue to work through being accountable, transparent, and getting better.” If we look back on my interview with you, one of the things that come up is that he’s continuously talking about getting better and continuing to improve. It’s possible. I don’t think that we should rest. We should always be in movement, forward progress.
[bctt tweet=”We’re going to make mistakes, and when we do the things that we are going to espouse, we will be transparent and accountable for those mistakes, whether internally or externally.” username=””]
I suppose the harsh way of putting that is to grow or die. I enjoyed the book. It’s called Do No Harm. I hope enough people read this where it changes the lives of many in communities and go through the strategies you’re talking about. Employ those and create better communities. After reading this, I see you as a man of virtue, and I thank you. I know you’re just getting started here, but I can already see that we’re on a good path. It feels that way.
It is a great city. I pinch myself every day that I walk out of my office, smell the ocean air, and be around our officers in our community. It is inherently a good place, a good department, and a good city. I had great experiences. I look forward to making a difference in our community and our police department. I hope that if there is a legacy to be had, it is that we were able to build the leadership in our department that makes it.
One day down the road, when I finally retire, there will be an amazing slew of candidates, men, and women, that are ready to take the reins. Our city leaders will look at that and choose somebody from the inside. My job is to foster that competency, character, courage, and relationships internally now that the table will be set for the next generation.
It was a pleasure. I appreciate it.
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About Ramon Batista
Experienced law enforcement professional with a demonstrated history of working in the government administration industry. Skilled in Government, Emergency Management, Public Safety and Community Engagement. Strong business and people development professional with a Master’s degree focused in Leadership from Grand Canyon University.