Policing, Teaching, and Mental Health: Dr. Charles Baker on Building Better Criminal Justice

Jennifer [00:00:00]:
Hi, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jennifer.

Ashlee [00:00:03]:
And I'm Ashlee.

Jennifer [00:00:04]:
And I get to introduce our guest today. And as always, we have a special guest. And I was reflecting. I'm like, I actually think I've known this guest since I've been born and I'm not related to them. So it's the first time for that. But we have Dr. Charles Baker with us today and I'm just going to give it to you, Dr. Baker, to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:00:23]:
First of all, thanks for having me and hope I can add something to your podcast here from my background and experiences. Well, I'm originally from Louisville, Kentucky. Grew up here, went to high school here and began college here. I went to Western Kentucky University for a year right out of high school. And that's a little bit relevant to My first real job was on the Louisville Police Department. Today it's the Louisville Metro Police Department. Back in the day, it was the city of Louisville. It's I began my work there in January 8th of 1973.

Jennifer [00:00:57]:
Okay.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:00:58]:
After having one year of college at Western Kentucky, I went to Western out of high school with the goal of being a high school teacher and a coach. But a good friend of my father's was a Louisville police officer and they were in a hiring spree at that time and he encouraged me. So I went down, took the test, and before I knew it, I was in recruit school in January at 70. And that was not my plan. But once I got there, I really super enjoyed it and began my career there. We can get into that later and a lot of it's relevant to what I do today, but I had a lot of assignments during my time there, enjoyed every bit of it. So anyway, I got sidetracked for several years with the Louisville Police Department. And like I said, I had one year of college there while I was on the department.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:01:47]:
The training officers that I had at that time encouraged me to continue to go to college. And we had a federal grant, the leap money that came out of the late 60s, federal grant to pay for college. So I enrolled at the University of Louisville part time while I was working. And it was those original trainers that I had that encouraged me to do that. And I'm always grateful for the department for allowing me to do that and actually paying for it. It was a challenge to go full time to work full time and go to get your degree. But I ended up with my master's degree because of the police. But I did 20 years there, worked in a variety of assignments But I retired when I had my 20 years in and it was, I didn't leave because I disliked the job.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:02:32]:
I really enjoyed it. But I was young enough to do something else in life and allowed me to go back and do what I originally wanted to do, be a high school. During that career time, I also went back to school to get my high school teaching certification. So when I retired from the police department, I could teach social studies in high school, Kentucky certification. And I got a job teaching at, actually the high school that I attended, Iroquois High School. I taught for a couple of two years there, and then I went to a law enforcement magnet at another school and I was in my third year teaching and my wife worked for an airline and she got transferred to Phoenix, Arizona. So, so at that time I was very emotional about this, but I had to quit my job and go out there. And so I only did three years of what I really wanted to do originally right out of high school.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:03:24]:
But I had a good time doing that, went to Arizona, and my first job out there was director of security for the Mesa, Arizona Public. So I became chief of security for them. That was my job when I, when we left to move out there and did that for seven years, my boss, an assistant superintendent, and he hooked me up with a professor at Arizona State University who talked me into earning my doctorate at Arizona State. So moved to Arizona. Instead of watching TV at night, I'd go to college and finished my doctorate and my dissertation tied in law enforcement as well as education. And back then, this was Columbine High school day. So my dissertation was about the attitudes of school principal in reporting crime from school.

Ashlee [00:04:13]:
Oh, wow.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:04:13]:
Is that relevant at that time? 20 some years later, it might be worthy of a follow up with that to see if it's changed. But anyway, finished my doctorate, I had the opportunity to become a professor at Scottsdale Community College. And so I finished my time. I did about seven years at Mesa Schools and 12 years teaching college, got to retire and we moved back home. And since then I've been here teaching as an adjunct at the university. So that's the Cliff Notes version.

Ashlee [00:04:45]:
That is incredible. And now I want to go read your dissertation.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:04:50]:
Well, it might be boring, so.

Ashlee [00:04:52]:
No, no, not at all. I feel all of that. So I'm excited to have you on here to talk about that. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

Jennifer [00:05:01]:
Well, and I don't know that I knew that your story was so full circle in terms of going to a teacher's college at Western University. And that always being a bit of your calling. And so it makes sense that you kind of merge these two worlds together. And do you find that your experience on the police department influences how you profess or your teaching of the criminal justice?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:05:28]:
You know, when I started teaching criminal justice at the community college level, a lot of entry level courses, survey courses of the criminal justice system, not just policing and those, but looking at policing, the courts and corrections, you know, the three stool, three legs on the stool generally of policing. So I try to incorporate all those in, but basically with the police being the catalyst for all of those without police investigating crimes, making arrests, we don't go to the court system, we don't go to the correctional system. And so I try to incorporate all of those in there. And. But it's been helpful, especially again, these survey courses that introduce you to constitutional law and those kind of things, I try to gear it toward how that impacts the people that work in the freedom of speech to protest and those kind of things. And what police officers need to know about balancing a community's right to express their views publicly, but yet not cross the line and interrupt with civil order, civil disobedience, how to balance those kind of things out. You know, the search and seizure, the right to remain silent, all those things, how the police officer on the street has to understand those and know the limits of their authority and those kind of things. So I've been trying to incorporate the, the practicality of that with sort of the words, textbook words, the academic words.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:06:55]:
And I think students have generally appreciated that.

Ashlee [00:06:59]:
So, yeah, and that was kind of our next question or one that I had was how, how your students kind of respond. Do you give your own real world examples of what it was like for you when you were an officer? And how do they respond to that?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:07:13]:
Well, upfront, I tell them a lot of times and this gets a little bit, I don't know how to say it, maybe touchy right now because I've always tried to play devil's advent and come up with scenarios during the classroom of practical situations that may occur on the street. And I would tell them up front, these are not always my views. I'm just playing devil's advocate to encourage discussion, to encourage you to come forward and share your thoughts. And so I might say something that's not what I truly believe, but just to foster some discussion in the classroom. And I would bring up scenarios and I would tell them they're not all mine. They might be some of my colleagues that have been involved again in this day and time, I think we have to be cautious about that because I could come up with a devil's advocate sort of scenario and someone think that's the way I truly feel, especially when it comes to race relations. When we talk about George Floyd, we talk about Breonna Taylor and all those kind of cases, it can become emotional and you just have to be cautious about how you phrase things so that they don't think that that's the way you truly mean. But we have to, I really believe this in academia, we gotta.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:08:25]:
We gotta discuss the truthful things that go on in our society, even if they're unpleasant or maybe hurtful.

Jennifer [00:08:32]:
Yeah, I think that that's a really good point in trying to walk that line of giving real life experiences and not having it. How to be viewed as your own perspective, from your perspective, what do you feel like are some, maybe misconceptions or things that get brought up in, you know, in the classroom that are misconceptions around criminal justice?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:08:57]:
Well, I think one of that strikes me and it's, it's interesting. Having done this for a long time, I do things. I do some online classes too, so I have a lot of what I call critical thinking questions. There's no right or wrong answers, but their responses are, you know, if we were in the classroom, it would be class participation. Raise your hand and speak up. Online. It's writing, writing your responses. I found out that they will post online more, I don't know, truthfulness or their feelings more than they will verbally in a classroom with other people where someone could look at them.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:09:35]:
I'm finding that out. I can see how attitudes have changed among students in a lot of areas over the course of the years. One example of that is I would ask them that if someone died of a drug overdose and the person that sold them those drugs illegally that killed them, do they have some level of responsibility? The person that sold them years ago, it would be, no, no, no, no, no. The person that bought the drugs and took the drugs, it's their responsibility. I've seen that evolve over the years where now they're willing to hold the person that sold them the illegal drugs more culpable. And I'm not saying them all. I'm just saying statistically, I'm seeing more that agree with that than did several years ago. But I think misconceptions, obviously one it's been for a long time, is police drive fast and they shoot guns and they do this, you know, the TV type stuff.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:10:30]:
And I would tell Many, many of your hours a day are boring, driving around, patrolling and writing reports. And I, this is one thing that I have emphasized particularly when I worked at community college out in Arizona because we worked closely with the local police departments around there and they would tell us that the shortcomings they're seeing their recruits are the ability to write, the ability to document what they did. What they did may have been correct, what they did investigation, but it becomes lacking because they don't know how to articulate it in writing. So when you emphasize writing, that's not the fun stuff. Okay. But I tell them how, how critical and important that is. So that's, you know, the fallacies of that and the perception because of media, I believe with high profile cases of George Floyd and horrible, horrible cases of things, they see bad things that police do sometimes and then they, they sort of lump it all into one pile. They, they stereotype a lot for that.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:11:35]:
And I have to emphasize to them that the vast majority of police officers just want to go out and do a good job and want to go home to their families at the end of the day and they're not out to racially profile or are there exceptions to that like any other? So those, some of them that I've Misconception.

Ashlee [00:11:52]:
Yeah. And I love to hear this. I also think like, we actually have a lot of listeners who aren't even in the first responder world, which is really cool. And I think for those listeners too, this is such a great opportunity to learn that, that these things are being talked about because I think it's easy for a lot of people who are not in the first responder world to feel like it isn't considered. These things aren't talked about. We turn our heads to it. Right. Like that's what I hear a lot.

Ashlee [00:12:18]:
And I know that that's not true from working in it so much, but to hear it from you and to hear how well first off you articulate it, amazing. And, and so to hear that and to learn from you, I think is going to be really helpful to our listeners because you're right, we have to talk about.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:12:32]:
You can't just bury your head in the sand and they won't go and they'll all go away. So I think that's important for at the college level or other levels too, even at the high school level sometimes. I did a couple of law enforcement or, excuse me, criminal justice type classes in high school and I thought they were valuable, particularly young people at that time to be aware of what the Reality of policing was that they face, you know, when they see a police officer on the street, they see it hopefully totally different. Disgusted.

Ashlee [00:13:02]:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and how do you, I know you kind of hit on this a little bit, but maybe you can dive in a little bit more of like, how do you balance your own knowledge with the academic part? Like, especially if it kind of goes against what you have thought, you know, within your career and how things have evolved so much like, I guess, your, your personal self. How do you manage that when we're.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:13:24]:
That'S a good, that's a really good question. A couple of years ago here at the university, they have the Southern Police Institute, Jennifer, probably, and they had a, an opportunity for me to go teach that class. And I went through that program in 1982. So that shows you how old and so I welcome the opportunity to go teach. And that had law enforcement commanders from all over the country in this class and this here, probably more than the undergraduate or graduate classes I teach. They would bring up their real world experiences and contrast it with the academic peer reviewed research, so to speak. And so the one to try to summarize that feeling a little bit and the way I've tried to do it is certainly you have to, you have to welcome the research, especially good peer reviewed research, statistical data. Today I'm, you know, I'm hearing questions about Washington, D.C.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:14:21]:
whether they had accurate criminals or crime statistics, you know, have they been fudged and all that. And so but one of the things when you look at the academic world of beast, of theories and strategies, the thing that I kept emphasizing to them from my standpoint is yeah, you can have all that academic information, but in the real world you have to consider people's feelings out on the street, the community's feelings, how they feel about things may contrast significantly from what the data said. And so that's one thing that I've always loved about when I worked on the police department, you know, I had a lot of good jobs and I moved up the ranks to some extent, but the most rewarding job I ever had was riding a beat. Jennifer knows in south Louisville, where I grew up and went to school and where you get to know people on the street. And if you got a second, I've got one example of that that I think indicates it. My best friend growing up lived down the street from me and his mom turned 90 years old, I went to visit her. She still lived in the same house. She could live at home.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:15:22]:
She thought someone was breaking in her house. One Night she called the police and they told her that you don't need to worry, this is a relatively safe neighborhood. Well, I know the neighborhood has changed a lot since when I grew up and I saw her and she told me that they didn't, she didn't have to worry. That didn't make her feel good because she was still scared. And I said, we, we have to incorporate balance people's feelings and their perception with statistical data or peer reviewed research. I think you have to mesh the two together. So that's what I've tried to do and to say, okay, yeah, this is valuable, but also you have to consider this. You know, what does the public really feel? And so I think police officers on the street need to.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:16:05]:
I wish they would still have those connections on the beat. I don't know that they do, but hopefully, yeah.

Jennifer [00:16:11]:
As a therapist, I love you using the word feelings. Obviously those are really important. And I think that that's such a great example. And I have a great belief that human beings are herd animals and we are here to connect with other human beings. And to your point, how, how first responders serve a community is important, that it's connected with that. I think that that is a great, a great example of that. Since we're on the kind of lines of feelings, I want to talk a little bit more about officers and their feelings and just what conversations you've seen around mental health. The evolution of that from your career starting in 1973 to, you know, being a criminal justice professor.

Jennifer [00:16:59]:
Have you seen that shift over time or anything like that?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:17:02]:
You know, I have. I haven't actually been on a police department for several years, but I do, I'm aware of some of the changes and evolving, I think of that particular area, you know, go back to my early days and maybe even through most of the career, you know, to identify an officer as having some sort of emotional feelings or troubled feelings. Ever since I went on, you know, a couple of things, alcoholism, suicides, and that, relatively speaking, in this profession are higher than many other professions, you know, and they've always said, well, it's the availability of your weapons and all those kinds. The one thing that I hope is getting better, and I believe it is just to recognize that officers all perceive things differently. They. Something might impact someone very emotionally in one thing, and someone else did not really bother them or they're. They handle it different. I think anyone that has a pulse or a human.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:18:03]:
When you see tragedies happen, or if you're involved in a tragedy or you See a family that's torn apart by some violent crime. You're always said you're not a human if you don't feel some level of emotion. But the question is, how do you separate that from doing your job? You know, I've worked with officers, and including me, where I think where we kind of identified the truly innocent victim is one that hurts. And I think many times we differentiate that from someone that put themselves in a bad position, you know. But I do feel like, at least publicly, departments say that we recognize this. I can't answer whether they do it practically. I mean, we hear about it. Is it lip service? I don't know the answer.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:18:46]:
Whether it is or not. I hope it isn't. But I think it's always been difficult for co workers, first line supervisors, because at least when I was on the part of, it was close knit. You know, if you became a supervisor, you're supervising people that were your friends for a long time.

Jennifer [00:19:01]:
Right.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:19:02]:
And I, I really think it's difficult for any of us to see a colleague or friend that may be going through some troubled times to report that because you don't want to fall, you don't want to make a wrong judgment and you also don't want to jeopardize their career. Oh, right. By saying something that you're not, maybe not qualified to say, but it's just based on what you see. So there's gotta be a mechanism to do that, that you maintain confidentiality and not, quote, unquote, ruin someone's career because you made a comment about it. So I do feel that there are some mechanisms and we hopefully departments are looking at that and it's, if you come forward yourself, if you self report that your career is not over because you, you can't handle the, you can't handle this or something. You know, police officers are, I don't know, probably. I never thought I was this way that much. But the tough facade that you're, that you can handle any kind of situation.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:20:01]:
There's a human side to all of this. And people need to remember that cops are humans before they were cops.

Jennifer [00:20:07]:
That is super powerful to hear you say. And I think human beings are complicated and to your point, individualized. And what might bother somebody is water off the ducks back to somebody else. And something else could bother that for another person, you know, water off the ducks back to them. So I think that's an incredible point to say that there are individuals that are human beings that do this job and the impact of that.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:20:34]:
And I hope it always remains human beings do. It doesn't become artificial intelligence.

Jennifer [00:20:41]:
Oh, gosh. Well, I do want to ask you as a professor about AI and your students, but that's a different episode. And another question.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:20:52]:
One thing, when I graduated from recruit school, the person that gave our speech at that, he was a state police commander back in 73. We had a computer room that had less data on it than our cell phone. It's huge. And computers were beginning to take. Have an impact. And he said this, he said, we will always have police officers. Your job will always be safe no matter what happens with computers because we always have to have the human element dealing with human tragedy or human conflict. I hope he was right, you know, get a little bit concerned about that today.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:21:28]:
But I hope he was correct.

Ashlee [00:21:29]:
So, so true. I have to go back to this whole. I always say that in my trainings at my, at the police departments, I always say you are human before you're an officer. So again, to hear you say that was incredible. And for our listeners to continue to hear that, I think it's just so important. I have a question a little bit in regards to. And I'm going a little off the beaten path, but just in terms of like mental health, is that talked about for first responders in the academic setting?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:21:57]:
I can't say that directly. There are, at least in the classes that I've taught, you know, the survey classes I've done, the police in Arizona, I had a class called the Police Function, Correctional Function. And then those classes you talk about, there's sections of that that deal with those particular issues for people that work in those professions. The stress of those. If I go back to my undergraduate days I wrote, there was a book that came out then called Society's Victim, the Police. It's a real thin book, but it was one that we read. And I wrote my graduate paper on stress. It goes back a long time ago about the, you know, we have stressors for that.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:22:40]:
Everyone has financial emotional stressors. But it went into the specifics of stressors in law enforcement and there's a whole laundry list. But I think, at least from my experience, and I can't speak to all the criminal justice programs around, but it would be incorporated in parts of those classes that talked specifically about law enforcement or specifically about correctional off those kind of things. So we would go into it. I wouldn't say it would be in depth, but we did touch on it.

Ashlee [00:23:09]:
And I'm totally calling us social workers out and I'm letting it out here that's you know, I used to teach at the college level as well, and something that I feel super passionate about is in the social work world, we have all these specialties. So geriatric social work. Right. Medical social work, school social work and so forth. But there was not one thing that I ever learned about social work in terms of helping our first responders. So I'm super passionate about that because I think that is something we need to start pushing in colleges as well. Right. Like, you guys are also a special population that needs to be acknowledged too.

Ashlee [00:23:45]:
And so that's why I kind of brought that up to see on that end, I don't know as much about the criminal justice, you know, part of it. And so I just know on our end, I think that can be something that's enhanced upon a little bit more.

Jennifer [00:23:56]:
Well, and I again, I appreciate, you know, criminal justice is a broader shift, not just. And yeah, you know, I think that I've worked with people in the criminal justice realm, like attorneys, things like that, judges that have seen horrific cases, they're not the first responder to that, but those experiences can be really impactful. And actually, you know, I've been approached by attorney's office here to talk a little bit about mental health and wellness for, you know, lawyers, you know, in terms of those heavier cases. And so I think it's good that there's conversations because you're exactly right, Dr. Baker. You know, criminal justice is not just law enforcement, it's a whole system. And so I guess I'll try to, you know, ask this question in that broad system of criminal justice. But is there ever the topic of discussion, you know, mental health and the impact of working in a system that you see, unfortunately, society's kind of worse things, obviously mental health, but also like the impact of a family or there any conversation.

Jennifer [00:25:04]:
And I know that's maybe a very detailed question, but just really have a lot of curiosity.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:25:10]:
Relative your family, is that what you're saying?

Ashlee [00:25:12]:
Yes.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:25:13]:
Yeah. You know, I think again, going back to, you know, I don't, when I've been teaching the classes, I don't say, okay, let's today let's talk about how this impacts a family. But I have incorporated it, like streaming it through the class. One of the things that just from a basic standpoint, people say, oh, I'd like to be a police officer. Okay, fine, just remember, you're going to work weekends, you're going to work nights for a long time. They will say something like, I really don't want to be A patrol officer, but I'd like to be a narcotics detective. Or I said, you just don't start out there. You have to pay your dues.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:25:48]:
And sometimes you pay your dues for the entire career because you don't get the opportunity to work in csi that they think every case is going to be solved by DNA. And so I go back and I said part of the uniqueness of the job that could lead to stressful family situations is the fact that you're working weekends when all of your friends are going to the movies or going to a concert and you have to say, I got to go to work. You have to work at nights especially. And I can say this, I had two daughters and I worked out of my 20 year career. I would bet 2/3 of it was working at night, 3:11 shift from midnight to 8. And when you had the two daughters growing up with gymnastics, with T ball, all these kind of. My oldest daughter was in dance. She was always at these dance recitals that would last for six hours.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:26:43]:
I'd get out of it because I had to work. But you miss some things you miss and you think, well, that's no big deal. But then when I look back on it and say, man, I wish I could have gone, it's a trade off now, I have to say, and I can't speak to that today, but when I was with my police department, you couldn't do it all the time. But if you had something special that you wanted to go to, you could trade off days around or somebody would cover for you and you'd trade. But I do think that has an impact on families because inevitably when something goes wrong in the house, it's 2 o' clock in the morning and you're at work, that puts a strain on the marriage, you know, that you just, you have to have a, it's kind of a teamwork thing, you know, have to work together. And those are things that are again, you go back to the unique stressors of this job. And I think for me one thing was, and it's a good thing that you love your job so much that you want to go to work. I worry sometimes that that becomes.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:27:40]:
I like to go to work as opposed to my family. I like it so much. I love this, you know. You know, you say, yeah, you love it, but you need to get your priorities kind of straight too. So I think that's a challenge for that. So I think those are unique stressors, you know. Now there's other occupations that work. Nurses, doctors, work at Night, you know, so you have to have a spouse, a husband or wife.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:28:04]:
Because a lot of women in law enforcement that work nights, it's probably more difficult for them, especially if they have children. You know, at least what our society says they should be. That's evolving. I think that's evolving sometimes, you know, and this was me having two daughters, so I'm empathetic. So you know that I understand their unique place in society with their job and trying to raise children. So I do think that, you know, I do incorporate some of. I build it in across the class. I don't have.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:28:33]:
We have these two days on stress and family. I just kind of say I kind of weave it in there.

Ashlee [00:28:37]:
That's so. And I love that it's even been talked about and, and I think that you hit on it. We talk about this a lot on the podcast. Actually is some of our first responders in the clinical work that we, you know, they use work as the escape from home. You know, like things maybe aren't going great at home and so I can go to work and work overtime and do all these things. But then you are missing out on the family aspect of it.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:29:00]:
You know, you mentioned overtime. And I go back a long time ago and, and I'm, I am eternally grateful. The opportunities that I had and I made a, I think made a good living. Didn't get rich. But there was a time when you, when you needed, when you're young and you got a young family and you want to buy something new and the opportunity to work off duty jobs everywhere or to work overtime, you start doing that because, okay, you rationalize it. I'm making money so I can get my family these better things. But what are you sacrificing to get it? And I think that's reflecting back on that sometimes for, even for myself, I think was it really worth it? But you don't think about that at that for that immediate gratification right there.

Jennifer [00:29:41]:
So, you know, I think to know it's a through line and like a thread that you weave throughout is really impressive and I just am glad that it's there. I think Ashlee and I kind of created this podcast because we had concerns that there are families that are. And not intentionally, you know, I don't think it's an intentional thing. Like we just don't want to be with our family. Sometimes people don't want to be with their families. But is there something within, like academia where there could be opportunities for more research about families of people that enter the Criminal.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:30:22]:
Well, I'm sure there are, you know, and I, you know, again, I don't know everything that's out there when it comes to that, but certainly I think it'd be worthy of research about just what we, we just spoke about was the office. Do officers love their job so much that it replaces their family? Sometimes it's a close knit, you know, at least in my experience as law enforcement. Close knit. Those, those people you worked with were who you hung with when you were off duty too. You went off with, you went. Jennifer knows. You go jogging, you go, you know, when.

Jennifer [00:30:54]:
Softball. Yeah.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:30:57]:
And all those kind of things. You did it with those same people. And you know, the other thing too, going back years ago, when it looks at, I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it, I don't know if it'd be a stressor, but something that becomes part of your fabric is that if you go somewhere socially with a group that are, that's not police officers, right off the bat you get identified as the, the cop in the room. And now I always, and I'm sincere about this, even when I was young, I didn't want to be identified as a person because of my profession, but I think we all are. And he's a doctor, he's a lawyer, he's a, he's a cop. And then, then if you're in a room with people that may not appreciate cops, you get the evil eye sometimes. So you gotta, you know, you, you try to tell, well, I'm not like what you think we are, you know, those kind of things. You know, those kind of, that's a, that's an issue.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:31:50]:
So that, think that's where it becomes. Cops tend to hang out with cops and makes their families hang out with cops too, instead of socializing to the broader area. I'm not saying that's all the, all the time, but that's, I think that's kind of common.

Jennifer [00:32:03]:
Yeah, I agree. And some of that is your point. Just that natural thing that happens around shifts and schedules and, and things like that, which makes sense. But to your point, like it's sometimes that work of broadening.

Ashlee [00:32:18]:
Right.

Jennifer [00:32:18]:
That you are more than just this one thing. There's different aspects of you and it's.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:32:24]:
Good to, it's good to not just see the world from a cop's point of view. Yeah. We need to see it from the way others perceive it. Also. We may not agree with it. Yeah, it's important, I think, you know, police officers riding a beat in a socioeconomic area that they didn't live in. I think it's incumbent upon them to try to understand the socioeconomic status and way of life of the people they're serving. Serving.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:32:50]:
Not patrolling, but serving. I've always been against the term police force. I never. I call police department or whatever the force implies. That's all we do. So that's just me, though.

Ashlee [00:33:01]:
So I know our listeners cannot see us right now, but Jennifer and I are smiling from ear to ear because that was so powerful.

Jennifer [00:33:09]:
Yeah.

Ashlee [00:33:09]:
And so true. And everybody does need.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:33:11]:
I never thought of it as powerful, but it's just kind of my personal.

Ashlee [00:33:16]:
It really is. And. And for the sake, Jennifer, I hope you're okay with this. Moving to the next few questions here, just because the sake of time, and we're kind of talking about these things already. One thing we know is, like, training and policies and all these. Everything that's kind of coming into play today. Right. In your view, what is the most critical change needed maybe in, like, law enforcement training today?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:33:38]:
That's needed today?

Ashlee [00:33:39]:
Yeah.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:33:40]:
Human interaction.

Ashlee [00:33:42]:
Yes.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:33:42]:
Communication. Communication with your audience, with your. The people you're serving. And again, I think sometimes people attracted to police work are not always familiar with or understand the community they're assigned to serve. You know, they. They come from a social. Social economic background that they have their views of the world, their worldview, and then they're patrolling an area that doesn't have that same worldview. And again, you don't have to agree with it, but I.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:34:12]:
I probably can't emphasize this enough that I worry to. This is. My kids call it, okay, Boomer, baby boomer, you know, back in my day kind of thing. But. And I try to. Technology is a. It's a wonderful. I mean, officers are taking.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:34:28]:
Writing reports on a laptop, and they're. And I had to. I had to write it on a piece of paper and go to a telephone and call it in, you know, and that's time consuming. And so technology is great, but we communicate. Like I said, my students communicate more online than they will in person, face to face. And you know as well as I do, you can say something, you can text something to someone, and they perceive it totally different than what you. Because they're not watching your body language, they're not looking at your inflection. And so you got to be careful, you know, that's, you know, husband and wife talking.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:35:04]:
That's not what I meant when I texted you that. And so I. I. Written communication, when written, I mean, even if you do it on a Laptop or type it to be able to articulate an investigation in a chronological way that when you turn that report in and it goes to a prosecutor who don't. Who wasn't there, they. You can. There's a picture of what you did and you did it correctly. But also dealing with people on the street, human interaction, I don't think that's ever going to go away.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:35:36]:
Cops have to respond to domestic violence or people arguing and fighting over something, and you have to intervene and you've got to be able to quell situations and diffuse situations, not throw gasoline on the fire. I think that's, you know, I guess they say they do that, but that ought to be ongoing and not just, okay, let's have a week of how we do communication. Let's do it all the time.

Ashlee [00:36:02]:
Yeah, I love that. I'm, like, so excited that you're talking about this because when I wrote my dissertation, I wasn't expecting that to be a huge part of it, to be honest. But almost every police officer that I interviewed brought that up. Brought up in terms of recruitment and the new generation coming on board to these departments, just the lack of the communication skills and how they are concerned.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:36:25]:
About it and understand body language and inflections and all that. You can, you can say something that appeases someone or infuriates them. It just depends on how you. Not just what you say, but how you say.

Jennifer [00:36:39]:
Well, and I so appreciate just the humanitarian aspect of this in terms of, like, again, you are connected to other humans and in service to them and their community and the compassion of that. And I think that's something kind of what you started with in terms of, like, misconceptions and things like that. You know, I won't speak for Ashlee, but I know the people that I serve are incredibly compassionate, are here to help. You know, sometimes that is because of an experience that they weren't helped when they were younger and they want to make sure that, you know, that doesn't happen to somebody. So I think it's powerful to say, like, these are actually things that are happening behind a uniform and also that those are things that are important when you are in your uniform. You know, human interaction and how that can either de. Escalate something or escalate something.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:37:34]:
I was so fortunate when I first came on the department and I think I mentioned to Jennifer about an article I read the other day about lowering the educational standards. But, you know, when I went on in 73, my training officers were all mostly high school graduates from the 50s and 60s. But at that time, that was a pretty good education in those days. Today, there's a lot of high school graduates that are not very academically sound. And I don't mean that meanly, but that's just, just the case. These guys, the people I rode with, were so street smart. They were smart, they knew how to deal with people. And I.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:38:13]:
The ones that I. I'm not saying they were all that way. I was just very, very lucky to get training officer that showed me that and instilled that, said, listen, let's don't make this situation worse. Let's calm it down. And I mean, we've seen examples on the news. A lot of officers that take a bad situation and throw gasoline on it, make it worse. And I was, I was lucky to have people school me in that. I guess.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:38:37]:
Back in the.

Jennifer [00:38:37]:
Well, was there anything in terms of after leaving policing and receiving your doctorate that made sense, sense in the rearview mirror about policing, that maybe you didn't fight, you know, when you're in it, that when you step back in that academic role, had a different perspective for you?

Dr. Charles Baker [00:38:57]:
You know, I look back on, on my time there, and this goes back. I'm. I'm driving down a street yesterday, and I remember the very first call I ever got on the police department, and it was 53 years ago. That's half a century. That's over half a century. And so. But I do remember things vividly of my very first call and then some others, you know, and when I reflect back on that today, the police department was really good for me personally, because I'd probably get antsy and I would have the ability to go and work in different areas. Different.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:39:33]:
I worked in different patrol areas in our community. I worked in the Crimes Against Children unit. I worked in the intelligence unit. I worked several years in homicide. I was a commander in the homicide. And I love that because it was like getting a new job. But I didn't have to start all over. I'm still getting the paycheck.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:39:50]:
You know, sometimes you quit a job because you want to try something new. I could do it right there and the paycheck would be the same. And that was good for my personality. If anything, I don't regret it. But I do think about it sometimes that I didn't go into an area to become more competent, to be more specialized. Like some people never wanted to move up the ranks. They wanted to stay in homicide for all those years, and they became an expert. And, you know, I became a sergeant, went to Homicide and had never worked there.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:40:20]:
But I had good people that knew what they were doing. I learned from them. And so you kind of. You know, it was always my goal to move up in the ranks. I did to some extent. Not as far as I wanted to, but hindsight's 20 20. I'm good. Okay.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:40:37]:
So, you know, I was kind of a generalist. I'd call it a generalist type path.

Jennifer [00:40:42]:
Yeah.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:40:42]:
As opposed to coming, quote, unquote, an expert in a certain area. I don't know that I would change, but I do think about that.

Jennifer [00:40:50]:
I just say, I think that's how Darwin says we survive. Right. You got to be flexible and moving, so you just made sure you had survived.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:40:57]:
I like change. I like different. Just me personally. And, you know, when I reflect back, there's. There's things that. That we did then we could do better. Police departments, we evolved. You know, I tell you how I relate it.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:41:10]:
I started in 1973, and I was really young. Just it wasn't five years earlier. We were having racial turmoil in the streets in my neighborhood where I grew up. You know, I remember being in junior high school and 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated. And outside my school window, someone hung Martin Luther King in epitome. And I looked out the window and that I'm like, even my. My parents thought this was horrible. And so we had turmoil in the streets of Louisville, Kentucky.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:41:40]:
And I'm patrolling those beach five years later, and I'm thinking, you know, we can do it better. But we learned lessons, learned lessons from that. It's troubling today when I see bad things happen around the country that, well, not everyone learned the lesson.

Jennifer [00:41:55]:
You know, I agree with that. And, you know, you say, oh, back in the day, and really in reflection.

Ashlee [00:42:01]:
Okay, well, I think. Thank you so much, Dr. Baker. Just, I want to obviously respect your time. I know we had, like, a million and one question, have a lot of questions. We didn't overwhelm you with that. We knew we wouldn't hit them all. But there's so many good ones, and I feel like we really could keep going.

Ashlee [00:42:17]:
But I appreciate your time, and I honestly, like, loved learning from you. So I hope that we continue to do that.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:42:23]:
I appreciate the opportunity and, you know, at this point in my career, in life, I like to share my. My thoughts, and they're not always correct, but I always like to posture, promote the discussion. I appreciate your time.

Jennifer [00:42:36]:
Well, we really appreciate your time. And as much as, you know, I appreciate you saying, well, that's maybe outside of my expertise. I do think that you provide a lot and have a lot more to use. We really, again, appreciate it.

Dr. Charles Baker [00:42:49]:
Thank you. Thank you very much.

Jennifer [00:42:50]:
Ashlee, what do you got for us?

Ashlee [00:42:51]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm just so excited for our listeners to hear this and always to remember that when the call hits home, Jennifer and I are here for you. So thank you, guys.

Jennifer [00:42:59]:
Thank you.