Policing The Bay Area of California

this is things police see first and accounts with your host Steve Gold welcome to the podcast interviews active and retired police officers about their most intense bizarre and sometimes humorous moments on the job i am Steve Gold i am old gingerface thank you for being here everybody appreciate you appreciate you finding the podcast appreciate you uh binge listening to the podcast that’s always good so uh so thank you excuse my voice it’s a little bit um it’s a little rough i’ve had a cold for about a week typically how it goes in my house is um kids will get sick then my wife will get sick then at the very end if at all I will get sick so that’s kind of where where I’m at i worked I went to work i I worked through it but um didn’t get a lot of sleep so it’s kind of it’s kind of lingering so sorry for the kind of stuffy voice but I’m happy to be with you i’m excited for this guest um he’s got quite the police career and he’s also an author he did 35 years in law enforcement between uh Berkeley PD Baldwin Park Farmington New Mexico and then back up into the Bay Area where he retired as a chief 35 years in law enforcement four departments as I said in two states worked every rank in assignment from patrol officer to chief of police worked 10 years as a vice president of corporate security for NBC Universal in Los Angeles also was director of security for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art currently consults with Cook and Associates a security investigations firm in the Bay Area and he’s authored three books um centered in the San Francisco Bay area which we will talk about without further ado let me bring on the great Brian Brady brian good morning Steve how are you i’m good sir good to have you um thank you i saw you uh when we were communic when we I first initially got your email I saw your name and I thought it was an old childhood friend screwing with me because I grew up with a with a Brian Brady same spelling really where what what where uh Cape Cod he was some East Ham no no not no our ours were uh when they immigrated my my dad’s from Ireland so when they immigrated they straight to the Bay Area okay are you related to Tom Brady no uh although you know I I certainly know of him and he he was at Sarah High School which is right down the road from us actually uh when I was in school uh I went to St ignatius in San Francisco and we would have been in the same league today but back then we were separate leagues so uh and he’s a little bit younger so you’re basically related is what you’re saying to the Gre Tom Brady yeah well man it’s great to have you on um quite the police career started up in Berkeley that place is um pretty politically charged place to be a cop i imagine it was uh our theory was if you could be a police officer in Berkeley you could be a police officer anywhere and uh fortunately you know Berkeley was unique uh a lot of the things that have happened in law enforcement over the last century either started in Berkeley or invented in Berkeley uh perfected in Berkeley i’m going back to you know Berkeley was first department to ever use a lie detector the first department that actually had an MO modus operendi even before the FBI uh first department to use radios in in patrol cars for department oh yeah believe it or not Berkeley was the first department to have a police dog uh they had uh a woman police officer and African-American officer in the 20s way ahead of so uh a lot of the trends that happened uh later started in Berkeley and uh we were the college c you have college to get on so uh we were yeah we were pretty proud of ourselves we you know we were uh saw ourselves as kind of the best of the best and that that carried over i think the quality of the work was good and you learned a lot you you learned how to investigate you learned So making the transition then to other departments was much easier gotcha yeah wow talk about progressive um of course that progressivism now in in the city of Berkeley is a a what they say that the the joke in Berkeley was a today a conservative in Berkeley is just a liberalism and a crime victim uh so you know the politics in Berkeley was wasn’t it was probably much more conservative really in the 50s uh into the early 60s and then with the change politically nationally and with the Vietnam War and all the things that transpired you know Berkeley became kind of the cutting edge of uh the demonstrations and the anti-government and I think that’s you know carried over once you you garner the reputation Then you feed it yeah absolutely well it’s not it’s not that much different than the rest of California but the that state in general the West Coast in general it seems like has always been because I’ve always been an East Coast cop they have always been um like cutting edge with technology they got even they even got semi-automatic pistols first like they got everything first computers in the cars i think I think that’s true and I think we’re fortunate that you know we have POST which is peace officer standard and training which sets the rules to be a peace officer in California and you have to play by those rules you have to hit certain standards uh to be hired you have to go through a background investigation they set the standard for the investigation they set the areas that have to be checked uh and if you don’t check all the boxes you can’t get certified uh if you promote you have to go to a post-approved mandatory 80 hours of supervisory training within the first year you have to go through 80 hours of mid-management training if you promote again you have to go to command training and it’s all you know part of the process they also have a system of decommissioning officers where if you have an officer that commits a crime or does something uh uh to get terminated you go in a decommission file in California so you can’t get hired again and that’s one of the problems they’ve had nationally where you’ll see an officer get fired in a department and get rehired somewhere else here with that file system the state maintains that can’t happen yeah believe it or not Massachusetts just got post about two years ago yeah we we set the standard for and and a lot of states have it now and it’s great and and I think it’s uh it’s going to dramatically improve the quality of policing and you know people have a standard that they aspire to and it it professionalizes the whole career yeah you’re right it was easy for bad cops to hide too like they’re in Mass like the coast basically has like where I am now i started on the coast now I’m in Western Mass and Western Mass is always treated as kind of the the place the capital forgot like it gets money last it’s you know it’s just the way it is it’s the rural part of the state but that’s what would happen you’d get a cop that fell on his face on the coast and then would just come out west it might even get like rank you know or whatever because you know lower pay desperate for cops no tracking system to to know this guy’s discipline and if if the if the agency didn’t care at all they would during a background there’s really no law that says they had to tell you anything they could just say “Yeah he’s fine.” Or “No no comment.” Yeah in the law in California it’s worked out where uh the company that I consult with now we do background investigations for police and fire personnel and uh California you can’t as an employer when our investigators show up or the investigator from the agency shows up you just can’t say “Well so and so worked here from day one to day 12 and that’s all we’re going to say.” All right you’re obligated to divulge you have no choice yeah so uh that has been a the legislature saved us on that that’s a huge thing to be able to compel employers to give you the information you need on that person yeah yeah I used to I did backgrounds for um city of LA for a couple years for the PD and I used to carry a photocopy in each each of my cases folder of that law and I would give it if they were hesitant at all I would say here’s the law and just so you know if you had information that would have kept them from becoming a peace officer and something happens you could be liable immediately personnel folders would open and they would talk to you how long ago did you do backgrounds for LA um 2017 2019 okay because a old Berkeley compadre of mine was doing backgrounds for LA probably a little before you but uh he very much enjoyed it yeah it was great they get a lot of freedom um you you basically had of course they wanted a certain amount of cases but they would you know you did your field work at the office with personnel building was kind of your home base and you had field work to do and it was kind of the first job I ever had out outside of police work that was like had a long leash just produce just produce and we’re not really going to ask too many questions about what you’re doing and that was that was really cool yeah the backgrounds are are fascinating they and you you’ve experienced it you look at some of these and you go why are you applying for a police job there’s no way in hell you’re ever going to get this job you’re wasting all our time but you see them and I worked with guys that had done it for 20 years and and to them too the the changes they saw like I would have candidates come in that like on paper looked like a good candidate and then they would come in like cargo shorts and a t-shirt for their to meet me and the background guys would say 20 years ago he’d be gone right there he’d be like reapply after three years but when I was there they would take them yeah we we send the notice for the interview it says “This is a job interview dress appropriately.” And like you said some of them will show up in flip-flops and cargo shorts and you go I don’t know if that’s that if you think that’s appropriate for a job interview uh you know maybe you’re in the long line of work yeah know what I like to bet my best my favorite candidate was a kid from um you know a poor part of the city he would come in and you could tell he was wearing like his dad or his older brother’s jacket and the pants weren’t right that to me was like I like that kid because he know he he didn’t couldn’t afford it doesn’t have the right stuff but he put a a hodgepodge of a suit together and he’s trying to look his best he tried he you know that’s you’re right that’s that’s a lot of a lot of points right there for trying absolutely well that other guy you know just didn’t care yeah yeah yeah I would get guys that were like you know had rank in the military and all this stuff and they would come in and just like they had the job already not they had heard like we were having trouble hiring so they were going to come in and be Joe Cool guy and you’re like get the hell out of here yeah it’s and you know and some of the ones we’re getting right now it’s fascinating is that they’re you know 25 26 years old and they still live at home their uh their in their you know their their job history is they were a barista at Starbucks or Uber driver uh that I mean which I mean I’m not knocking Starbucks it’s a great place to start but I don’t know that it’s necessarily a career u and I don’t know that it’s necessarily the career background to go into law enforcement but uh it’s it’s interesting though I’ve always been interested in law enforcement why did you ever consider working at a job less than a police officer in in the career field to get a feel for it oh no no I never did that uh yeah those guys used to worry me too and I’d always be like did you did you play contact sports or get any schoolyard fights like because you get worried that they have had a very soft life and you’re like you we don’t want to spend all this time vetting you then have you freak out or not be able to or be scared or whatever and I remember one of the questions we asked was “Have you ever had to make a critical decision?” And I remember this one candidate he sat there and he thought about it for a while he said “You know I got off of my work and I was coming back to my apartment and it was winter time and the area we lived in was prone to flooding and the road was flooded and the signs were up that we couldn’t go any further and the police were turning us around so I had to decide whether I should turn around or go on would that be a critical decision no you idiot if the road was flooded yet the decision was made for you you turn around that’s also him that was a critical decision that’s brutal brian can you take us way back to when you were a young patrolman hitting the streets can you tell us about the first call you had that you would consider a hot call you know I I was the question you you sent it out and I thought about it for a while and I think initially there was a house in Berkeley that uh was occupied by some folks that were less than stellar one of whom had already been in a shooting with a Berkeley officer and shot the officer uh and so he was uh out uh and they ran kind of a dope house and they ran young girls out of there and so if we ever get a call at that place it was always you know you super cautious there were guns in the house there so I can remember just starting out knowing about the house and knowing about the players that were at the house and we were looking for a runaway from and you got to remember Berkeley in ‘ 69 was a haven for runaways from all over the country and uh so we were looking for some young girl from somewhere and had to go to that house and ultimately had to go in so we knew there were people in there with guns etc so I could I can remember being you know very apprehensive going on that call and you know from that probably the next that would jump out at you anytime this was you know 69 was pre-WAT basically LAPD was adding SWAT at that point um LA sheriff’s but for our size department 200 plus officer department that was hadn’t happened yet so if you had an armed person in a structure you know you you went and got them you had to do the search i can remember you know really very vividly remember going into a building and having to look for somebody and you’re in a hallway and there’s doors on both sides of the hall and you’re clearing it you know one door at a time and then you’re down to the last door so you know you the bad guys run out of space you’ve run out of space so there’ll be a confrontation those are the ones that I mean that resonate that that I I look back on as a kid your heart’s in your throat on those calls yeah absolutely it’s police work is so funny like that there’s so many things that you could um you know little tasks you get given by supervisors or just your you know running radar because there’s been a lot of citizens complaints in an area or it can feel very routine and then when you get calls like that it kind of you’re like “Oh yeah I’m the we’re the ones that deal with this stuff too.” Well and even in the midst of that uh there’s always that gallows humor that you know permeates law enforcement where somebody finds something it does break the tension shall we say but in this particular case I remember the officer I was working with we’re very good friends we started the academy together and stayed friends till he passed away and in those days Berkeley like most departments they issued you a handgun or you could buy your own and in my case in his case we had each purchased our own well I don’t remember why but the when we bought the guns I had more money in my pocket than he did so I bought a Colt Python which was a beautiful handgun he bought a Colt Diamondback which was the little cheaper version of the Python it was made of alloy as opposed to steel anyway he was envious of the gun and I remember we were doing this very thing in a building we had narrowed it down to a hallway so we kind of did you know rock paper scissors who’s going to go first so I lost i was first up so on three I’m going to go to the first door and he’s going to cover me so you know one two and I get this tug on my gun belt and I stop i turn around i said “What’s what’s wrong?” He said “Well if he gets you can I have the python?” So that So that’s awesome kind of the gallows humor of looking for an armed suspect that’s I can’t blame him that’s a beautiful gun yeah it is i It’s still sitting in a safe uh and appreciating i mean it’s like a piece of art yeah i um I actually just held one last week i was at uh burning some time i was getting uh my car worked on and there’s a gun shop nearby so I walked in and they had a cult python and I’m like cuz my dad gave me um when he was younger when I was a little kid he bought a 357 Magnum that was a Ruger Red Hawk which is a very cool much chunkier it’s it’s a big it’s almost you know it’s it’s kind of a chunky gun and but he told me like when I first shot it when I got old enough he said “This is a nice gun but he said I I always wanted that Python.” That’s what he said well with what I loved about the Python we carried 38 bullets and you could shoot 38 or 337 in that in that weapon so you could carry that weapon on duty but you had to carry the issued ammunition but it made you frankly a much better shooter because the frame on that weapon is so heavy that with the lighter ammunition the 38 caliber bullets the gun barely jumped i mean you could hold on target and shoot accurately even if you weren’t a great shot yeah absolutely i love shooting 380 357 just for that exact reason it’s a real hole puncher well we we had that in New Mexico too when our department I worked on in New Mexico standards are much different than California and the standard there was you could carry any weapon that you could qualify with basically so we had guys literally that carried six shot Colt 45s not semi-automatics I’m revolvers 6-in barrel looked like something out of Gunsmoke and uh we had other guys carried because of Dirty Harry they wanted a 44 Magnum well you go to the range and what they were doing they were carrying the weapon and they had it loaded with 44 mag loads at the range they shot 44 caliber loads which is like shooting the 38 so the gun with that huge frame on it never moved you could shoot e but when you put the 44 mags in it was like firing a cannon so when I got there I changed it i said you have to be able you can carry anything you want but you have to qualify with the rounds you’re carrying well the 44s were gone because nobody could qualify with that thing uh and if you tried to shoot at night you were blind after the first shot a big fire yeah i mean you couldn’t see anything and if you were standing next to the person you knew you were answering phones that weren’t ringing for three weeks uh so uh yeah those went they were gone yeah that that’s a hell of a round my another dad’s story my dad had a um 44 Magnum rifle and he loved it he thought that was great but he always felt like the 44 Magnum was more of a rifle round it was so big you know it was it San Francisco PD at one point went to 41 magnums and believe it or not you know in San Francisco I was a cannon too but they carried 41 caliber rounds they didn’t carry the mag rounds so it was a big gun but they carried a big slowmoving round which in a city that’s congested that big slowmoving round is actually not a bad idea because it doesn’t over penetrate um the scary thing is when somebody’s out there with a 223 you know AR-15 or something nobody thinks about the fact that bullet’s going 3,000 ft per second and it’s not going to stop when it hits one thing it’s going to keep on moving and if you miss the target it’s going to hit somebody half a mile down the road yeah that’s why I never understood um US Air Marshals carry 357 Sigs i never got You’re in an airplane you figured you want something with a little less penetration i wonder i don’t know they used to make a hijacker around that was a subsonic that really wouldn’t over penetrate they may be carrying a nose on a plane although I talked to a pilot about that cuz when I had to transport a prisoner or something you were armed when you were transporting and you on the plane and you’d have to tell the pilot where you’re seated and all those sort of things and I I told the pilot I said I had bought specifically for that transport to hijack around so it wouldn’t penetrate the plane and the pilot said “I don’t care you can shoot all the holes you want in my plane just don’t hit a hydraulic line he said “I can fly a plane with holes in it.” So I don’t know how how serious a problem that is oh there you go that’s funny um Ryan can you describe uh the strangest or most bizarre thing you dealt with you know I I you you gave that actually uh three things came to mind one of them is and I’ll mention it first it’s strange and it’s sad and it’s it’s weird uh going back to Berkeley uh I’m working in the South Campus area south of Cal and we get a call uh a couple at their residence says that there’s a young woman there who claims she may have been a victim of sexual assault so I’m dispatched i get there and I talked to this couple and they said you know she’s she came to our front door she knocked on the door she was very distraught uh and she said she was she’d been raped and I said “Okay.” They said “She’s we have her sitting in the living room.” I said “Okay.” Goes “Before you go in there we need to tell you.” She came in we took her in we put her in the room and then she proceeded to take all her clothes off and she’s sitting there naked i said “Okay.” So I go to the room and sure enough there’s this young woman she’s a Cal student she’s nude very pleasant um very matter of fact explains to me that she had been a victim of sexual assault maybe six months prior and the case was being investigated by the University of California police they had arrested a suspect she was going through some counseling and she just hit a spot in the road that derailed her and uh so we talked for a moment or two and I asked her I said would how would you feel if we took you up to the crisis center and you could sit down and talk to a doctor and she says I I would really like that i said great let’s I got a backup so we could you know take her i said why don’t you get dressed and um we’ll go she said okay so I waited and few minutes go by and she looks at me this well I’m not going to get dressed with you watching she’s sitting there having discover so you know and it’s just part of her mentality was you don’t get dressed with somebody watching but it there had been this disconnect and and that was sad i mean that this this incident had so derailed her uh that she got to this point fortunately in her case she knocked on somebody’s door who was kind and caring and took her in and we were able to get her help but you know that was uh that one kind of resonated and then the other strange that jumped out at me and and it has a certain humorous aspect uh graveyard shift comes on duty i was working the 4 to 12 so we’re getting off and the graveyard sergeant asked for two of us who were working the PM ship to hold over so we get to this house and and it was in Berkeley as well and it was an old housing project and the supervisor said “We have a guy in here who’s having a mental health crisis and um I’m we’re going to have to take him into custody but he’s big and strong and really acting out he’s broken windows out in the place and thrown furniture out in the front lawn so my partner and I said “You know what do you want us to do we’re going home.” Uh he said “Well most of these officers on graveyard are brand new they’ve never really dealt with something like this like would you guys stay in?” I said “Sure.” So the bad guy comes to the front door and sure enough he’s I’m 6’3 and weighed 235 pounds this guy’s bigger than I am and so I right off the bat it’s like this is not going to be fun if unless we can really talk to this guy so I talked to him and I said you know we can help you and we go back and forth and I mentioned going to see the psychiatrist well that does it he doesn’t want to see the psychiatrist he backs away runs back in we follow him and the house had well you were east coast guy had a radiator that was attached to the wall and the floor which he went over and ripped out and threw it through the window now right off the again right off the bat this is not going to be fun uh and this guy is immensely strong but in doing so he slices his arm uh on the on the glass on the window so you know I think well there’s there here’s an opportunity i tell the guy you’re you’re hurt let me help you have somebody bring me a first aid kit we put a compression bandage on his arm which was badly cut and then I wrapped him up like a mummy i mean I put gauze around his arms arms arms his torso i mean this guy was I couldn’t have handcuffed him any tighter i used all the gauze on the first aid kit and then convinced him he needed to go to the hospital because he was bleeding we get to the hospital i tell the doctor “Uh this is what we need to do but he’s having a mental health issue.” So they bring the psychiatrist over and I asked this guy I said “Are you MD psychiatrist or are you PhD psychologist?” He said “No I have no doctor.” I said “Great so you can look at his wound and tell him he needs sutures at the same time you can evaluate him psychologically because he doesn’t like psychiatrist don’t say psychiatrist because I can tell you what happens when he does trust me.” And this guy says “No no no i could never do that i must be honest with him.” I said “This is not a good time to be honest this is a good time to tell him just you’re a doctor well sure enough this doctor takes the bandage off looks at the wound and says “Now I’m a psychiatrist.” At which time our hero rears back and punches him right in the face and just lays him out he bolts out of the ER i chase him down in front of the hospital and at this point I want his literally on his back and I’ve got my arm around him in a karateed and I’m trying to stop him it carried me for about a quarter of a block before he finally you know succumbed we got him back in the hospital and he got sutured up and taken up to the psychord and at the same time in the other side of the ER they were fixing the psychiatrist’s broken nose and we warned him i you know that was I thought there was a certain humor in that uh little a little comeuppance for his arrogance he didn’t want to listen we try to tell him because he was saying “Well you don’t you’re not a doctor you’re not qualified to make that decision.” No I’m not but I wrestled with him down at the house i can tell you I said the magic word psychiatrist and I saw what happened so you don’t do that yeah i’ I’ve never gotten a warm or fuzzy feeling from any ER doctor I’ve dealt with in a police capacity you know I I think it’s funny how ER has changed when we started I started uh ER wasn’t a specialty uh the doctors that work ER were paid overtime and they could be uh any doctor basically could work a ER shift uh and on a weekend let’s say well we had doctors who were at the uh Letterman Hospital in the Prescidio in San Francisco the Army base who were army doctors who you know they made a decent salary as an army doctor but they could come over and work a 24-hour shift at the ER in a in a city hospital and make as much money as they would probably in two weeks at at the regular salary right so we had a lot of army doctors that worked on the weekends and then finally ER became a specialty and that changed everything we had the ER doctors who specialized they were good i mean they were really good and they were unflapable i mean you could bring in people in pieces practically and these guys didn’t bat an eye they they were ready to deal with it and then we had a nurse I remember uh male nurse great guy Vietnam vet and he had been through the Army’s medic program it’s like a 52-E course and these guys are in the field they can do everything but neurosurgery they’re amazing and between he and the really well-certified ER doctors we were so lucky these people they were the the creme de creme they nothing bothered them and uh if you got taken in there and you said no they were there you were you were the chances of you making it were really great yeah I’ve had those good experience i mean it sounds like an army doctor would be great or the people you’re talking about but I had I had an officer in the ER with um OUI that drove into somebody’s house and the officer calls me and says “Hey um there I’m trying to get the guy will give blood.” He agreed consented but the doctor said she thinks he’s too intoxicated to make that decision and I go “Well you better put the doctor on the phone with me because that’s the whole point there’s implied consent it doesn’t it doesn’t matter what condition they’re in from alcohol you you agreed not to be drunk when you’re driving if you hold a Massachusetts license and and and in California when you sign for your driver’s license it says right there when you sign up that you agree to you’re giving your consent at that point you’re sober when you do that so no yeah and and the guy wanted to do it like and so in mass if you do it and you fail you lose your license for 30 days and you go in front of the judge all that if if the hospital forced him to be a refusal it’s 180 days right off the bat so I I’m finally she she relented but then gave me all the well our lab doesn’t know what kind of um what kind of uh u you know tube to put it in because they said it could contain i said “Listen you just can’t use alcohol wipes and it’s got to be you.” Now we have the tubes we have little kits we carry but then we didn’t i was like you know there’s I think it was like a purple stopper on it that that one won’t contaminate the sample but she knew all that she was just busting my balls well yeah she’s she’s she wasn’t she was torn between being a doctor and a lawyer uh so Proforce Law Enforcement the best damn cop shop in the nation whether you’re purchasing for an entire agency or you’re an individual officer looking to buy firearms or duty gear these guys are the best in the biz pro Force Law Enforcement has law enforcement exclusive pricing and is a place you want to be buying your guns damn it this a place you Come on mom it’s recording proforce law enforcement the best damn cop shop in the nation whether you’re purchasing for an Pro Force Law Enforcement the best damn cop shop in the nation whether you’re purchasing for an entire agency or you’re an individual officer looking to buy firearms or duty gear these guys are the best in the biz proforce has law enforcement exclusive pricing and is the place to be buying your guns and duty gear they carry all the top industry brands and the guys and gals that work there understand exactly what law enforcement officers need special discount link tps.proforceonline.com um it’s u deeply discounted items just for listeners of this show or you can go to proforceline.com and shop the whole place place is unbelievable you can also visit Prescott Arizona in person or Brea California in person to get hands-on with the gear all the context up is in the show notes thank you Pro force uh but yeah the the Army ones were great they and again for us they had seen you know they were Vietnam vets they were they had seen horrible things and they they just they were able to you never want to say matterof fact when someone’s you know seriously injured but that’s really what they were they they didn’t get rattled where I’ve seen doctors who are not ER types on gunshots that that look as rattled as uh some of the other people in the ER that’s not a good sign you don’t you don’t want the the guy just plug in a hole full of grattled yeah that that there’s a huge difference like I I have known personally people who are nurse practitioners or doctors but don’t work in emergency medicine and they’re not good in emergency situations because they’re in a controlled environment they they didn’t they probably knew that about themselves and they didn’t sign up to be an ER doctor because they want a controlled environment where they can have patients and see them in the office you know and the ER specialists are adrenaline freaks you know bring me the worst bring me you know car accidents bring me shooting i mean they just seem to thrive on that kind of pressure and thank God they do because they they if it were not for that you know people would be dying in the ER and as a consequence they don’t and paramedics I’m a I’m a huge fan of paramedics uh after watching them work and uh working with them I’m pretty much convinced if they can get to you in the first few minutes uh you got a really good chance of making it uh I mean you know barring a bullet to the head or something like that that they can do it but if there’s some the bleeding they can stop or if they can do the initial first aid uh or far better than first aid yeah you got a pretty good chance of surviving yeah absolutely paramedics are amazing all the places in most of the cities and towns in Mass want you to be they’ll hire you as EMT but they want you to be a paramedic but I noticed a lot of the city and towns around where I am is there there’s either no stipen like no raise or it’s a thousand bucks for the year i’m like this person has to go through a thousand hours of class in training donating a lot of their time and you were going to give them a thousand bucks extra it’s like you got to pay these guys yeah and and when I was in Nevada the we had a fire district as opposed to a fire department so uh in California the the the districts are funded via property tax uh as as most county type agencies and districts are special so they get an allocation uh voters have to vote it in so many cents on the dollar it goes to the fire district and Neato had uh a great fire department we And the nice part was we as PD didn’t have to compete with them on the city budget for tax dollars uh they were being funded by a totally separate source and uh they were among the the better paid fire uh fighters in the county probably the best but they also had a requirement they wouldn’t hire you as a firefighter unless you had a paramedic license so every firefighter they hired was a paramedic as well so not only did you get the ambulance showing up with two paramedics on it the engine company that showed up had three paramedics on it so uh we had absolute Cadillac fire protection and medical service that’s awesome absolutely brian can you tell us about the most intense or terrifying call you dealt with as a police officer i think probably officer involved shootings where where you have an officer shot um uh I was involved in in Berkeley we didn’t have it’s really interesting oakland is next door to us and we literally uh have streets that run east west and on the uh south side of that east west street is Oakland on the north side of the street is Berkeley so the center line is in the middle of the street so if you have a traffic accident it’s always exciting it’s whoever gets there first you know makes the jurisdiction somebody else’s but that’s started in Oakland uh and so Oakland’s bigger you know we’re 40,000 oakland’s 480,000 oakland has they’ve lost I think 55 officers in the line of duty they’re a little older department than us but not much uh we’ve lost two in Berkeley and they both happened while I was there uh I was involved in one and the other I was my shift but I was at home that night and then on another officer he was shot i was working the night he got shot and uh those are probably the most frightening uh and it’s a combination of things your your your friend your co- comrade your beat buddy whatever you want to call it is down and being worked on and being carded off and you’re hunting for the and and the stakes have gone up uh a lot of times you’re looking for somebody who maybe aren’t but they’ve not taken on the police you know they may have shot at their significant other they may have shot at a drugstore owner or something but they haven’t quite crossed that that uh line uh to take on the police this this person already has so they may have nothing to lose at that point so uh that’s kind of hearttoppping when you’re when you’re searching for them knowing that the chances are you better see them first if they see you first they they’re probably going to pull a trigger so uh those two and in in one like I said the officer was killed and we lost a hostage and uh it went on for hours and it was it was uh a bad situation that that’s the one you were on the shift for and you didn’t a little bit sure um we had a situation uh on the graveyard shift they had a sergeant that was recently promoted and he was a senior officer he he was uh god he’d been a patrol officer detective a juvenile officer and he was probably drawing toward the end of his career i think he was pretty close to 50 I believe and uh he promoted and I think the main reason was for pension purposes that it was much better to pension out as a sergeant your salary is higher and that’s what your pension’s going to be based on and he was old school he’d he’d you know come up through the ranks and and good great guy uh but when he was working the street the last time we weren’t carrying portable radios uh you know you you used a call box believe it or not to to call the station well he had his portable radio but he had it sitting on the front seat of the car it wasn’t on his gunbell prowler call pretty typical in the middle of the night neighbors see somebody we get there police get there and the suspect is gone well this old sergeant he’s a pretty sharp guy he backs his car down a carport between an apartment building turns the lights out and all the police cars drive away and he waits so sure enough the bad guy pops back out where he’s been hiding under a house he confronts him and there’s a fight and the suspect gets a hold of his gun uh a neighbor comes out the suspect is over the officer the neighbor hits the suspect with a actually an axe that he brought with him but he had it turned so it was the blunt end not the blade that hit the guy the guy shot the neighbor uh nonfatal and then he executed the officer and went into a house and took a couple and a four-year-old hostage and we got there uh obviously at that point and I didn’t get there till uh shift change at 8:00 i came at 8:00 and was part of the team that was on the perimeter uh dealing with the maintaining the control of the situation and uh we negotiated uh the suspect didn’t want to give up he uh they took a mattress and put it in a closet in the bedroom where he was holding the couple and the four-year-old and the four-year-old was basically sleeping on the mattress of the closet he wanted his uh wife to bring a handcuff key to the house because the sergeant who had been shot managed to get one cuff on the guy and he couldn’t get the cuff off uh so the wife came and we weren’t going to do it initially cuz hostage negotiation at that time the theory was you never give that person the chance to take another hostage at that stage though the the theory was that he’d already taken two and the wife wanted to do it so she brought the the key up he took the key and then he told her he was going to shoot her uh so she ran away uh at which point he unccuffed the key he took the key he unccuffed the handcuffs went back into the bedroom and for reasons we will never know walked over to the closet and executed the four-year-old oh my gosh so at that point the husband and wife ran out of the house and he was pursuing them and came out onto the front porch of the house and uh raised the weapon to shoot them and we shot him uh so it was kind of a nightmare we lost the hostage we lost an officer we had a witness shot uh it was locked i mean well you talk any officer involved shooting a hostage situation you know blocks locked down um mutual aid because you have to highway patrol had all the the intersections blocked for us oakland police were there with us uh side by side to deal with this and uh you know you just don’t have enough people uh those things just uh you have to evacuate i mean think I mean you’re you’re on a block you’ve been there you got a house that’s the problem house you got to evacuate everything across the street because of a possible gunshot you got to evacuate everybody the side of it you got to evacuate the block behind the house so you don’t have a bullet going so geez the number of people you need just to do that then you got to have a place to put everybody you can you can you know you’ve been there it’s it just it is a nightmare that is un there was no I obviously you guys killed the guy so you couldn’t find out but no shut the sleeping fouryear-old yeah there’s there’s no rhyme or reason nobody nobody knows i mean the people in the room the the the couple they come they were just you know obviously and like I said it wasn’t like the you know not making excuses but you have a situation where it’s it’s a you know a kid that’s crying or screaming or acting out doesn’t justify shooting or anything but at the same time maybe that tripped something in this person mentally but the kid was asleep hadn’t done anything just laying on the floor in the closet uh so uh I have no idea uh what what happened in his head that that made him do that or why for any reason he saw a four-year-old as a potential threat just beyond the pale yeah that is that is crazy Brian wow um well after that story I I hesitate to ask you do you have any uh positive or heartwarming stories from your career anything Anything just happened in those days uh you know I like this one uh and there’s I mean there’s lots of good stories there are lots of people doing good things that’s one nice thing about being a cop i mean you see people at their absolute worst uh they’re most embarrassed you know those kinds of things and you also see them do really good things you see them do you know uh and sometimes it’s the cops that do a good thing uh we had a situation where a kid probably I want to say 12 13 years old he finds a a mini bike in a creek so he takes the thing gets it out of the creek takes it home tells his dad that he found it dad says “Well you need to call the police it’s it probably belongs to somebody.” Kid does that we take the bike put it in the property room get the numbers and try and find an owner and the kid calls and says “Hey if nobody claims the bike what happens?” Nobody claims the bike you found it we go to you if you wanted it oh I want it okay now how long does it take it takes 90 days we have to wait and we have to put an ad in the paper we have to do all these things he said “Okay.” So he would check with us every every week well it’s like the 89th day and somebody claims the bike uh uh they’d been out of town and you know and this kid is just devastated he he he had been so uh good about checking on it so at the time I was a ranking officer and I I went to our police association i said “Hey look this kid is squared away he’s really done the right thing you know we have a chance here to do something you know really nice.” So we went to the local Kawasaki dealer and said “Hey have you got a really nice minibike that’s not overly expensive?” And he says “Hey I got one I took in on trade that is pristine.” And he says “You guys can have it before.” And he gave us a price which was great so we bought it and we took it up and gave it to the kid i mean it was I mean he was so thrilled and uh you know hopefully we you know made a friend here but he it was the right thing to do this kid had been uh honest he followed all the rules you know he and I got the carpet pulled out from under at the 11th hour and uh so he got he got a much nicer bike believe me than than the one he found and the father was you know was elated and it was a good it was a good life lesson all the way around it was it was good for our guys too because they did the right thing and they got to see immediate gratification for doing the right thing just look at that kid’s face that was Yeah that was all you needed so I think that was to me that was a really good story and uh oftentimes those stories never make page one you know they’re uh and sometimes it’s our fault and when I was the police chief I made that comment to a reporter and you know we had a conversation and I said “You know you guys do a really good job of of covering us when we screw up but there’s some good stuff out there that goes by the wayside.” And she was terrific she said “Yeah it’s easy for us even in like a a riot a demonstration whatever we film you guys because you’re predictable we know what you’re going to do we know that if the crowd throws rocks and bottles you’re going to probably throw tear gas we know that if the crowd pushes forward you’re going to push back so it’s We don’t know when the crowd’s going to move we don’t know what they’re going to do but we know exactly what you’re going to do we’ve done this before.” I thought about that so okay that’s a good point that makes sense uh so she said ‘ Here’s the problem you never tell us when you do something good like this story you just told me of the motorcycle we’d cover that in a minute that’s a great story but unless someone picks up the phone and drops a dime on us we don’t know what’s happening so she said “Call us we’ll come cover the story.” She goes “It may not make the 6:00 news but trust me turn on the news on Sunday night it’ll be on Sunday’s slow news day we need news stories and that’s a great story and we get people family type people on Sunday evening watching the news we’ll run that story at 6:00 on Sunday night so I made it a point at that point if we had something good we called the press and we got some good press out of it and it was usually on Sunday night on a slow news night so uh sometimes we’re our own worst enemy we don’t we don’t tell the press we do something right yeah I do see a lot of PDs being better about that having like a lieutenant or somebody assigned to like getting their attention when something positive is going on you know yeah it’s our own fault if we don’t you know don’t toot our own horn when we do something well right yeah i love that story man because man who can’t remember being a teenager or a kid and just absolutely obsessing over something you want you’re drawing pictures of it you’re looking at pictures of it you’re thinking about all the stuff you’ll do with it and then boom you’re not getting it he was that close you know he he one day away i mean it was I I felt so sorry for him when the thing got claimed and we had to tell him it got claimed yeah he was just crushed i love that story man that’s a great one um really popular question with the audience there’s a lot of people who listen to the show that are um thinking about being cops or doing ride alongs they’re in backgrounds um and they really love to hear the the men and women that come on this show give them some advice uh for becoming a police officer you know I think uh in part of we’re doing backgrounds now and and I’m intimately involved in doing this um some of it comes down to use your head i mean make think about the consequences of decisions that uh it’s not just the here and now that there there’s it’s kind of like and I don’t know what I’m I’m going to date myself here i’m kind of a dinosaur on some of this but you know social media you know sexing yeah somebody says you know we have a number of applicants that will come in and say yes I’ve exchanged nude pictures of myself with my girlfriend or whatever my significant other and I asked the obvious question “Are you still with that person?” “Well no we broke up.” And I said “And where do you think those photos are?” “Oh they would never post those.” “Oh yes they would um if you have a falling out with that person and there’s some anger I said you know internet comments emails photos they have the shelf life of plutonium they don’t die they’re out there forever in a day so before you send that photo before you write that stupid email before you make that social media comment think about who’s going to read that and could you defend that comment on the front page of the paper tomorrow morning probably not don’t make it don’t put something out there that can haunt you and then my pet peeve if you get hired and if you’re fortunate enough to be a police officer and you’re driving around in your patrol car roll down the damn window i am so tired of looking at cops driving around with their window rolled up in their little black and white cocoon with the air conditioning on and they wouldn’t hear somebody screaming for help if they’re just 5 feet outside the car uh when I started supervisor saw you driving around with your window up you’d got days off uh I don’t care if it was raining i remember my old sergeant said “That’s why I gave you a raincoat.” Uh so you know you had to be able to listen to what’s going on outside uh and if somebody wanted to get your attention I mean they could be standing on the sidewalk screaming at the top of their lawn you’re not going to hear them if you got the air conditioning on so uh that’s that I just I see that all the time now with and that just irks me now that’s my pet peeve that but the background part to to think about you know just in finance you know don’t default on your bills don’t have don’t have your car repossessed don’t have you know you have 23 accounts on your uh FICA score and 18 of them have delinquents you know that get your bills paid don’t send stupid emails uh you know and and if you’re going to leave a job tell your employer you’re going to leave don’t just quit jobs with no notice and we got a bunch of them like that so you know you’ll do a background yeah the person worked for us for so long but they just didn’t show up one day and you ask the candidates it’s I didn’t like the job they didn’t like so I just quit well it’s a protocol to quit uh and you know you you have to hit the protocol but so those are they’re little things but you know they they’re things that disqualify people quickly yeah absolutely that that’s that’s good stuff that funny you say that about the radio my dad uh used to tell me back and he he’s been retired 15 years now but um he said he remembers back when he started there was a local chief that wouldn’t order the patrol cars with radios because you could still have them not have um radios cuz he wanted them to have the windows down and be listening and they wouldn’t if they had the radio uh that’s I’ I’ve been there we we had the same problem our our department used to pay the fee to have the radios taken out of the cars before they were delivered so it cost us more to get the car without the because the car came with a radio so you had to pay somebody to pull it out and you know we finally said “Uh no just leave them alone.” And if if someone’s driving around with the radio on and misses a radio call that’s a sergeant’s issue let the sergeant deal with it and we also found out over the years that sometimes there was more information on a news channel during a critical incident than there was on the police channel uh so sometimes being tuned into what was going on uh was beneficial yeah absolutely good point um Brian Golden Gate Tales tell us about it brother um this is my my new endeavor uh I started writing about five or six years ago and what I did I took my my time in police work my time with Universal Studios and with the museum and uh collected some stories with people I worked with people I’ve met and decided to write a crime fiction series and uh where better than San Francisco to write it i grew up there it’s it’s my home uh I know the city and I know SFPD pretty well even though I didn’t work there I had um lots of great connections there and when I worked homicide uh over in the East Bay uh I called San Francisco and talked to some friends in homicide and asked them if I could come over to the city on my days off and just be a fly on the wall with them because they were handling probably 100 homicides a year at that time and uh so they let me and so I would spend my days off with them i got to go to crime scene sitting on interviews uh do it all and so they they become the protagonists in the book the the homicide inspectors from San Francisco so the stories are crimes that uh are real but they’re composits of of real crimes to make one crime and the characters are real people but they’re composits of real people some not so much a composite some are pretty thinly veiled you can kind of tell who it is if you know me and you know some of the players uh and then of course the other advantage when you’re an author you have this disclaimer at the start of the book that says you know any semblance to real people is purely coincidental etc which allows you car blanch to take a swipe at somebody you don’t like and make them a bad person in the book so uh you can have some some literary license with that it’s the transition is from police writing which is cryptic and uh concise and you got to get all the information in a relatively short um it I use the term the jack web draget just the facts ma’am and right where you go to a novel and you want to expand on that you want to make it interesting for people to read it it’s boring if you’re reading with the way we write as police officers so you have to make that that transition to writing more descriptively which keeps hopefully keeps a reader’s attention so Greed is the new book it just came out it’s the third one in the series same characters basically throughout although each book can stand alone uh if you read them in sequence the the character development is better that that’s also sells more books which makes me happy uh but u that’s that’s kind of how I got involved in that and I’ve had I’ve had a lot of fun doing it and it it it does it is discipline it does get you up in the morning to write and to do those kind of things and uh it it allows you to you know you think back like we just talked about things that happened in the career it gives you an opportunity to put that in writing which is sometimes kind of fun yeah absolutely sounds awesome the goldengatetales.com is a place to they can pre- they can order the book there and also on connected to yeah Amazon Barnes & Noble and hopefully some uh some local bookstores I’ve been working with that are going to carry the material copper fields which is a small it’s not small anymore they must have about eight or nine bookstores but they’re they’re local in Marin and Sonoma counties and uh kind of a throwback to the old independent bookstores where you walk in they got the hardwood floors the wood old wooden floors And yeah there’s something about a bookstore i I just uh really enjoy a bookstores oh yeah well Brian uh the link to to get your books will be in the show notes it was an honor to have you on the show man thank you so much thank you for your time i appreciate you having me it’s always fun to uh to talk about you know what was going on when yeah absolutely and I got and like I we said before we uh came on I got some other podcasts you need to go on um even better Sid Thompson writers with um Patrick O’Donnell great guy and uh it’s all about cops that write uh novels and books so I’d love to do that that’d be fun it’s it’s always nice to talk hell yeah go talk about yourselves even better that’s right all right brother i’m going to put you in the um I got to do the outro to the show can you hang on just for like two minutes we can chat after sure absolutely the great Brian Brady everybody not my childhood friend Brian Brady but the uh author and retired police officer um great stories honored to have him on thank you to him for for making the appearance this is a time in the show where I thank the Patreon sponsors Sergeant and Above get a shout out i’m going to do my best here with my um waning voice to uh get this done first the lieutenants who I’m talking about is Andy Biggs the great and powerful Andy Biggs Kyle Roberts Mike Roach Roach Machines AI Solutions check him out the great and powerful Thomas Connell everybody sergeant Level Adam Alexander thank you Adam McMahon Adam Mihal my man the great Ben Peters Brad Thompson Brett Lee everybody dan Carlson from Burley Boards check out Check him out on Instagram amazing woodworker sherry Finch thank you madame Clark Lockoff you are wonderful david Elman Dennis Kerisio my man doug and Kelly Newman love you guys and I’ll see you soon visiting from Wyoming dylan Mosher thank you dylan Elliot Sykes ladies and gentlemen Gabriel Decknob thank you the great Gary Steiner George Ker none other than the George the great George Kerotus thank you George Greg Gadboy thank you Jackson Dalton from Blackbox Safety check them out james Rose everybody jason Lurri oh thank you jason Laauo Jessica King John Jordan John Shoemaker John and Aaron Kate love you guys see you at church lauren Stimson the handsome Lane Campbell Lisa Gnome Marcus Johansson ladies and gentlemen can’t believe it iceman from Motorcop Chronicles check out his podcast thank you Iceman nancy Pam and Paul Maloney Raymond Arsenalt everybody richard BS keep on trucking brother stay safe out there sasha McNab the great Sasha McNab Sam Conway ladies and gentlemen Scott Young Sean Clifford Seth Wright everybody thank you Seth sheriff Ronald Long thank you tammy Walsh holding it down at dispatch thank you Tammy tony Behe my man Zachary Pleet everybody and the great George Tessier love you buddy see you at church guys those are the Patreon members sergeant and Above I love I love saying your name i love the support i appreciate the link is in the show notes if you truly love the show and you want to show me monetarily you can do it there but rest assured the show will remain free so everybody can hear this these stories from the great men and women of law enforcement i love you guys and I’ll see you next time