The CopDoc Podcast Ep 72 Dr. Brandon Kooi, Aurora University

Brandon Kooi is a professor and researcher, working at Aurora University in Ilinois.  Brandon Kooi is a professor and director of the criminal justice program at Aurora University in Aurora, Illinois. Kooi has been a private security consultant/executive, criminal investigator, law clerk, and youth crisis interventionist. He has helped to train police chiefs and executives across Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Problem-Oriented Leadership Institute for Chief Executives.

His most recent research is a book focused on police leaders, entitled Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders from Routledge Publishers. He included Teddy Roosevelt, August Volmer, O.W.Wilson, Penny Harrington, Chris Magnus, Bill Bratton and Chuck Ramsey.  He also delves into the work of Herman Goldstein and George Kelling.

Kooi evaluated a community anti-drug initiative called Neighbors Against Drugs, which won the Wisconsin Association for Community Policing Robert Peel Award and was a finalist for the Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing. Kooi's book, Policing Public Transportation, appears with LFB Scholarly Publishing.

His research papers have been published in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education, Journal of Security Education, Journal of Applied Security Research, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies and Management, Police Science and Management, and Criminal Justice Studies. Kooi's research interests include community justice, victimology, environmental criminology, crime mapping, problem-solving, interviewing/interrogation, and private security. 

He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Illinois State University and his doctorate in criminal justice from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. A graduate of Michigan State University, he has been active in Problem-oriented Policing and is affiliated with the Arizona State University Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.  

We talked about policing, reform, leadership and the work of illustrating the work of the seven selected police chiefs.  

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com 

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Transcript

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[00:00:02.710] - Intro

Welcome to The CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia, and other government agencies. And now please join Dr. Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on The CopDoc Podcast.

[00:00:32.330] - Steve Morreale

Well, hello, everybody. This is Steve Morreale. Welcome back to The CopDoc Podcast. And today we have the opportunity to talk to someone from Illinois, and we have Brandon Kooi, who is with Aurora University. Brandon, welcome.

[00:00:43.540] - Brandon Kooi

Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. And thank you to your audience for taking a listen to this one.

[00:00:47.200] - Steve Morreale

I appreciate it. So this is Brandon. Brandon is Dr. Kooi. He is a professor at Aurora University, and he wrote a book, and that's what attracted my attention. You know that this podcast is all about leadership and innovation and progressive thinking and moving organizations forward and rethinking the way we do things. And one of the things you did, Brandon, was wrote a book, you crazy fool. 400 plus pages called Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders from 1895 to the Modern Times. And you selected seven. So tell us about that.

[00:01:14.840] - Brandon Kooi

Okay. Yeah. So this was just something I've been thinking about for years, took about five, six years to sort of write off and on. I'll just quickly kind of name the seven leaders everybody's always interested in. How do you put together the seven greatest? And I don't know if it's necessarily the greatest. It was just essentially seven leaders that I took. So started with Teddy Roosevelt and his time of leading the New York City Police Department about four years before he became President of the United States, then moved into August Volmar and his work as what is known as the father of the police professionalization movement in Berkeley. O. W. Wilson, who was a really well known chief with Wichita and then as a Dean and professor of the first criminology program in the nation at Berkeley and then became Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department from 1960 to 67. I have an appendix to the O. W. Wilson chapter on Herman Goldstein and truth be told, I really wanted to write a book about Herman Goldstein. Goldstein became a mentor of mine, and I just adored everything about him. Was able to attend a number of problem orientated policing conferences, presented with some police agencies and some training kind of stuff with the center for Problem Orientated Policing as well.

[00:02:18.190] - Brandon Kooi

So that was kind of the original intent, kind of going to the modern leaders. Then Penny Harrington was our nation's first female police chief 1985 in Portland. And I got to know Penny very well while writing this book, was just a phenomenal experience. Bill Branton, who is in the media a lot, I believe he did one of your podcasts as well, so we could check that one out. Bill was great as well in terms of reviewing the chapter. And then Chuck Ramsey, who is actually from Chicago, near where I'm from, and then he went on to reform the Washington, DC Police Department. And then it's a Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. And then the last one is Chris Magnus. The Irony. And again, how I chose the seven. There was no sort of real set weight in doing this. In fact, I was thinking about writing a book on infamous police Chiefs.

[00:03:01.430] - Steve Morreale

I like that. Maybe that's your next book. Yeah.

[00:03:04.650] - Brandon Kooi

So I think it kind of went down to a top ten and it was just taking forever and then eventually whittled down to the seven. So I probably gravitated to the Covey stuff in terms of seven highly effective police leaders, Seven Highly Effective Police Chiefs. So by no means is this saying these are the seven best. It's just seven that were seen as highly effective. Getting to talk about the history that surrounded the cities that they were serving was also very interesting. So, for example, the Penny Harington chapter talked a lot about the first females in policing as a whole, let alone the first female police Chiefs. A lot with race and race in America along the Chuck Ramsey chapter. And then, of course, with the two academics I didn't make mention, but George Kelling, I talked about him as the appendix to the chapter on Bill Branton. So bringing in all of the material on the broken windows policing perspective with Herman with the problem orientated policing perspective as well.

[00:03:55.280] - Steve Morreale

Well, you've got a couple of very good people. I mean, Herman, Unfortunately, George and Herman died recently and he did also. And I'm sure in many ways you've got to be happy that you were able to grab them before they passed in their wisdom. I was sad to see George leave. He was up in Dartmouth and talked to him a couple of times and given an award for ACJS. But let me back up, Brandon. We're talking to Brandon Coy. He is a professor at Aurora University. And tell us about your trajectory. How did you get into this? How did you end up at Michigan State, a great school? How did you end up in criminal justice?

[00:04:25.880] - Brandon Kooi

So thank you for asking that. So I was born in south suburban village of Chicago on Indiana border, Lansing, Illinois. So the irony is I would go from Lansing, Illinois. Yeah. So I lived in Lansing, Illinois for the four years and I went to get my PhD. But prior to that, I grew up in Lansing, Illinois. So a town of just under 30,000. And I think what's interesting is that I attended school known as TF South Thornton Fractional South High School that opened up in 1958. And in the planner's infinite wisdom, they had people from Lansing no longer traveling to Calumette City to attend TF North High School. So in 1958, they decided to name TF south the Rebels. And we had the Confederate flag as the main symbol within the high school. And eventually that would create a lot of racial contradiction as the city began to get more diversified. So in 1993, a couple of years after I graduated, they kind of officially dropped the Confederate flag. But I still recall kind of the tension around the symbolism that was there. And we certainly heard a lot more about the symbolism throughout 2020.

[00:05:27.250] - Brandon Kooi

And I think that the things I remember hearing even from the time that I was growing up and then into high school was this is Chicago media that is bringing this sort of publicity to the problem. It's not really a problem to have the Confederate flag and these sort of things. And these were the kind of stories that you would hear people telling in the south, not necessarily a suburb of Chicago in the 1990s. That kind of stuff stuck with me. And I think it stuck with me also when I was writing the book in that we can't help but to kind of escape the problem with racial tension and policing in America. And it's very much a part of the struggles that we have today and what we saw in the aftermath of the 2020 social justice protest. So I think that was a push for me. I attended Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. For my undergrad. I traveled with 22 other students from my high school there simply because, well, where else were you going to go? I hate followed them along to that school just because I didn't know where else to go.

[00:06:25.060] - Brandon Kooi

And I at least knew I knew 22 people when I arrived there. This was the year of Rodney King officers being acquitted. And what I tell my students is what I remember my first semester of College was that our downtown Normal ride it and stores got looted. And remember people in my dorm running around with new jackets on, Letterman jackets without the letters on and snickering about it. And there was definitely racial tension there as well. And part of that was just when you asked your students today about 911 or Rodney King. First off, our undergraduate students weren't even born on 911, 2001. Nobody knows who Rodney King is from that generation. And I know that the stories of Michael Brown and the Ferguson riots and one day George Floyd will be remiss if we don't begin to tell that history. So that was a big part of telling what these police leaders had gone through historically, but then also reliving our own American history to be able to teach why this is so importantly connected to policing and police leadership to be able to figure out as well. And I think all of the police leaders that I was able to interview and certainly the ones that I read about, they all seem to be kind of history buffs, too.

[00:07:33.150] - Steve Morreale

They understand the history. They want their young officers to understand that history as well, in order to really understand the need for reform and pushes for change in government and in policing.

[00:07:43.810] - Steve Morreale

Well, as you know, and listened to Bill Bratton, when I talked to Bill and we've got history, I had known him from the 70s when I was in the Army. And one of the things that really struck me and I don't think you just said it and you reiterated that we don't teach police departments in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston about the history. And like yourself, we spend time in the classroom an awful lot. And one of the things that I say to students is you have to understand history. So we try, at least we make an attempt not to repeat our mistakes. I think you what you were bringing up with Rodney King saw it happened with George Floyd. And I understand and it's this tension that seems to continue. What troubles me as a kid, yourself, as an academic, is the issue that so many people will jump and cast a toxic broad brush to say that all police are that way as a result of a few there's a bunch of them. I do want to get into the book and the interviews and how that idea of history and training and relationship.

[00:08:40.080] - Steve Morreale

And my guess is that many of the people that you identified focus the Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders, how they treated others.

[00:08:48.420] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah, absolutely. So I think what's unique and what the readers will find is interesting, I guess from the perspective of trying to get to know personally the individual leaders is that they all went through something in their life, sometimes not the greatest things that made them who they are. So, for example, I could just start with kind of Teddy Roosevelt again. Four years before he was President. Many people might not know that he was leading him the nomination President for the New York City Police Board in 1895. They used to have multiple people in charge of the police board. And during that time period, he's coming at this from kind of a troubled life city Police Department. He ended up losing his wife and his mother on the exact same day, Valentine's Day of 1884, his wife Alice was giving birth to their first daughter, who he named the daughter after his wife. And then his beloved mom, Mitty died of typhoid fever. His wife died of childbirth and Tr kind of disappears and becomes a rancher in the Dakota, Badlands for a number of years. He joins a Sheriff's Department there, kind of gets his background in policing.

[00:09:53.170] - Brandon Kooi

And Interestingly, this is where the storyline for the Batman comic book actually comes from is from Teddy Roosevelt's life. So he gets this need to really do good for other people, ends up coming into the New York City Police Department and he comes from an affluent lifestyle. His family is very well to do. He's a well connected politician, Oyster Bay, New York. And he comes into the inner city of New York and he sees the amount of poverty that is there and what new immigrants go through. He becomes really good friends with a number of journalists, one of them being Jacob Reese. And they go out onto the streets in what he referred to as the midnight rambles to truly understand what it's like to be immigrant or not having the social nets that we tend to see today in terms of taking care of our immigrant poor. And he would also see just how corrupt his police officers were during these midnight rambles. There's no doubt that Teddy Roosevelt was the success as the President that he was because of those kind of boots on the ground experiences that he had running the police board in New York City.

[00:10:58.120] - Brandon Kooi

And every time that I told these kind of historical stories, I always try to reiterate that these stories don't die. They live on. So, for example, in the 2020 protests, a statue of Teddy Roosevelt toppled in Portland. And just a few months ago, his statue was taken away from the Museum in New York City, the Natural History Museum in front of Central Park. That statue has now been transferred, I understand, to North Dakota, where he had done all of this work in the aftermath of losing his wife and mother. So we see this kind of thing being seen over and over again in terms of the history.

[00:11:32.470] - Steve Morreale

Well, I see the history. Do you know why that statue was taken down?

[00:11:36.030] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah. So Interestingly, his grandchildren were actually in favor of it being removed as well, given the times of the racial tension. The statue actually showed Roosevelt I think it was 1940 when his wife was there to unveil it. He had already since passed. But the statue showed Roosevelt on top of a horse, an African American next to him and an American Indian next to him. So it sort of showed him in this position of an authoritarian figure. But the point of it was that he did a lot to help African Americans and Native Americans in terms of his presidency and in fact, what you can see and even when he was President of the police board in New York City. And in fact, one of the things that I like to point to is that one of his first acts when he became President was to have a sit down dinner with Booker T. Washington inside the White House. So African Americans have been invited to the White House before, but usually it was a quick rehearsed meetings as opposed to breaking bread with sitting down for dinner. And the Southern newspapers just went wild in the aftermath of this that not only was the President sitting down with this civil rights leader from the south bucket of Washington, but he was having dinner with his teenage daughter.

[00:12:43.150] - Brandon Kooi

And that was kind of a big deal at that time. And there was a lot of heat that both he endured and Booker T. Washington endured as a consequence. But I think it speaks volumes to where Roosevelt's heart really was when it dealt with race and even gender issues, it turns out, in terms of his leadership. So although that statue is removed, I think it's important to really know where these leaders were coming from.

[00:13:06.250] - Steve Morreale

So we're talking to Brandon Kooi, Dr. Brian Kooi at Aurora University, talking about his book Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders from 85 to Modern Times, and it's published by Robert. The question I have is there's a few who are past. So you had to be part historian and then part interviewer. So talk about that kind of digging did you have to do for the one versus the opportunity to be able to sit and chat with the other? I think there were four who were alive at the time, correct?

[00:13:31.980] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah. So this is kind of a strange thing for me because I'm not a historian by any means. When I had attended Illinois State University, I had become a teaching assistant for Frank Moore, who was a kind of a famous criminal Justice Professor, wrote a book on the Pinkertons and a lot of other history stuff. And I think my time with Frank sort of embedded in my mind this idea, just being so fascinated by history. I was kind of raised by my grandfather, who was infamous for having the stacks of newspapers that I remember as children of the we remember when newspapers used to be everywhere throughout the house, and you could always cut out copies of the newspapers and give them to me. So I found myself diving into newspaper archives to really understand what was going on during the time period that these people were leading. And then you get from historical societies a lot of letters that they had written during that time and kind of diving into that as well. So in a way, you almost felt like you were in a time war because you couldn't necessarily interview him, but you could see so much about what it was like to actually live during those times.

[00:14:31.750] - Brandon Kooi

So August Volmar had collected a lot of stuff from his time at the University of California, Berkeley, and then becoming basically the first Berkeley police chief in town, Marshall prior to that. So Volmar's work dealt with looking at people that had written about him in the past. There's a guy by the name of Alfred Parker who wrote the first kind of book on August Volmar, who was like a middle school gym teacher at the time and just kind of a friend of Volmar's and decided that he's doing so many good things, we should write a book on them. Then there was a married couple by the name of Jean and Elaine Carte, who wrote a dissertation on Walmart. And it's fascinating even getting to know the people that wrote books on the people that I want to write about. So give you one example here. Jean Carte became the chair of the criminal justice program at the University of Cincinnati. And in November of 1977, he was actually killed on the campus or near the campus University of Cincinnati trying to stop an armed robbery in progress. So to this day, the American Society for Criminology ASC has both the Carte Award for a student paper award and of course, the August Volmar Award as well.

[00:15:36.840] - Brandon Kooi

The ASC was actually created in the living room of August Volmar in 1941 with some of his former police officers and students and then even the ACGS. You mentioned that earlier. ACJS and Alpha Five Sigma was created by Vivian Leonard. He goes by VA Leonard. And that was one of Omar's former students as well, who's also a Berkeley police officer and kind of pushed the ACJs organization. So you can see all of these links, which I think is just sort of fascinating. August Walmart, give you kind of an insight here. Six foot four and £190. When police officers used to have squabbles or arguments, Volmar had a boxing ring where he would allow them to put on gloves and Duke it out in order for them to settle their differences. So not saying we need that kind of stuff, but Omar was one that would listen to his police officer gripes. In fact, he had one day a week where he called it the crab sessions, where he wanted everything to be aired out so he could work on workplace morale. He did a lot of fantastic things, probably too short of time to mention them all, but many might not know that he was actually a police chief in La for about a year and a half trying to reform an extremely corrupt city and corrupt Department.

[00:16:45.310] - Brandon Kooi

He then went on to Chicago, so near my hometown, and he created a police science program at the University of Chicago and served as one of the authors of the Wickersham Commission. He actually helped a couple of graduate students write up some of that. And then he came back to Berkeley and started the first Criminology program. So this is the first police chief to begin to recruit College students to become police officers. He pushes the idea that undergraduate degrees for police officers was the best way out of some of our problems with use of force and corruption. And by the way, he was doing all of this with a 7th grade education. So this is a bleak science professor. Somebody that reads about academic research all the time, tries to become very studious by sitting in on classes and telling his police officers to go to. And he's doing all that with a 7th grade education vomar's life would end in 1955 with his own firearm in his own hand, committed suicide, suffering from numerous heart attacks and Parkinson's. And just as a testament to who he was, he would donate his body to the University of California, Berkeley.

[00:17:48.740] - Brandon Kooi

There's no gravesite for August Volmar. He never had any children either. So even in desk, he was a man of service. I think it might be interesting to note that similar to Roosevelt statue being removed just a few months ago, Volmar also wasn't immune to the kind of 2020 social justice protests. They have made a push to take the name away from Volmar Peak, which is in Berkeley, because some people had written that he was part of the beginning of the paramilitarism in policing. He was a Spanish American War vet and he created this militaristic lease force in order to professionalize policing. The truth is that Volmar was very much a proponent of crime prevention. Way ahead of his time in terms of talking about the need for social workers to be involved with leasing hires one of the first black police officers, the first black police officer in Berkeley and one of the first female officers with a College degree. That female officer would be in charge of what he called the crime prevention unit. So very much geared towards the need for crime prevention. Saw things like drug addiction as being not something that we could cure through criminal justice, but instead something that should be treated as a disease.

[00:18:58.550] - Steve Morreale

So again, way ahead of me.

[00:19:00.530] - Steve Morreale

I was just thinking what you say way ahead of his time. I don't want to skip anybody, but I want to move into your interviews because I'm curious to know how you crafted those, how they modified while you were beginning the process. I've been through this a number of times and you ask a series of questions and then something comes up in another interview and the next thing you know, you're adding that to the next one because it opens your eyes to it. I see your smile. I have the benefit of looking at you. So tell me about that experience, about planning for them, contacting them, finding some time for them.

[00:19:31.030] - Brandon Kooi

It varied from leader to leader. So I mentioned that Penny Harrington, I got to know really well, reading, if they have books or anything published, obviously read everything that you can that they published or any kind of videos or audios. Many of them. I do podcasts, so I'd listen to everything and read everything that I possibly could about them prior to doing the interviews. And then somebody like Harrington and even Chuck Ramsey, multiple emails being exchanged, asking questions, great at responding those sort of things. But then setting up the interview. This was done on phone with Bill Branton through Zoom with Chuck Ramsey. And then I mentioned with Penny Harrington just multiple times, if you can get a leader or somebody that can spend considerable amount of time and multiple times getting back to all your follow up questions that are inevitable, that makes you feel more comfortable. I guess as a researcher and writing this kind of stuff up, but I would say all of them were just great. I should mention Chris Magnus also exchanged a number of emails with me. I also had the luxury of Mike Scott, who is the director of the center for Problem Orientated Policing.

[00:20:25.570] - Brandon Kooi

He's down at Arizona State University at UW Madison Law School for a number of years, Herman Goldstein sort of main mentor. Mike, had worked with Chris Magnus as well. So just reading about Mike's work with the Tucson Police Department, all of that becomes really helpful and gives you kind of that well rounded view of what's going on with these leaders and again, the historic baggage that they oftentimes inherit when they're trying to lead and reform certain police departments.

[00:20:51.180] - Brandon Kooi

So what was the high point of this research? Well, I'll even ask you to consider the low point of the research because there's always highs and lows. But what was the high point? When did you realize as you were setting down this road, it's a long period of time to be involved in research? When did you realize you were seeing light the end of the tunnel?

[00:21:09.570] - Brandon Kooi

I think what I found myself when I really knew that I loved just the process is that there were many nights where I would just wake up before in the morning with my mind just racing. Sometimes that's the best time to write. Nobody else.

[00:21:20.620] - Steve Morreale

I do exactly the same thing.

[00:21:22.510] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah. And then you're on the right track when it's not sort of something that you dread, but something that you really do want to see concluded and you just love the process and the work. So that was kind of a high point. The other part of it was just the sort of strange coincidences that I kept finding. So, for example, Penny Harrington and Chris Magnus were both graduates from the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State. I swear to you that I didn't choose them for that reason. I had absolutely no idea that there was that history. So it in turn caused me to get in touch with people at Michigan State

[00:21:56.440] - Steve Morreale

who would have known them.

[00:21:57.640] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah, would have known them. And being an alum, saying, hey, this is stuff that we need to maybe talk about more put out on websites and that sort of thing. And certainly after Penny Harrington passed, I know Michigan State put out some announcements about that, recognizing that she's part of our School of Criminal Justice Hall of Fame. So there was this weird coincidences. O. W. Wilson was kind of the chief mentee that came from August Volmar. And as I mentioned, I got to know Herman Goldstein over the years, served on a committee because I actually taught in Boygan, Wisconsin, for a while at Lakeland College before I came to Aurora University. And Mike Scott was nice enough to invite me in to be on a committee in Madison, Wisconsin. So I would travel back and forth and I was just kidding because any time you get to sit down next to Herman and get to know him personally, and of course, I would start asking him questions. And this was years before I thought about writing the book, but I was fascinated about him working with Ow Wilson. So 1960, O. W. Wilson becomes the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, one of the few external hires, and he gets brought in by Richard J. Daly. So the original Mayor, Richard J. Daly, who is only on about year four of being Mayor of Chicago, year three, and he's fighting for his political survival because Chicago had just gone through this horrendous, what they called the Summer Days scandal. In Chicago, police officers were actually involved with burglarizing people's homes and stealing stuff out of their home, Loading them into police cruisers. It was just kind of a horrendous scandal. And long and short of that is Owlson comes in and he brings a number of civilians to help lead his reform movements. And one of them is this intern that he met in Portland, Maine, by the name of Herman Goldstein, 35 years old at the time, going to pay him $11,000 a year to become his main executive assistant in Chicago. Herman told him no more than once he didn't think that he had any chance of reforming the CPD. And I say this because the history would tell us again, in one of these weird coincidences, O. W. Wilson had told August Volmar no more than once when Volmar wanted him to take over departments like Fullerton, where he would become one of the youngest police Chiefs in the nation at the age of 25, Wichita, Kansas, which was seen as very much archaic and had a lot of problems.

[00:24:16.530] - Brandon Kooi

And Wilson told Volmar, no, thank you. And Volmar was persistent and continued to push. So you talk about the grit of many of these police leaders, not just for their own grit, but their mentors grit as well, to continue to push them. So Wilson eventually convinces Herman Goldstein to come to Chicago as his executive assistant. And there's a number of brass, as you could imagine, in the CPD who aren't too keen to these academics coming in to reform the police Department. They didn't have the police experience. And even O. W. Wilson at the time had been in academia for 25 plus years before he came back to lead the Chicago Police Department. So your true pracademic there in terms of Ow Wilson? So Goldstein had a lot of interesting stories. One was JFK's trip to Chicago three weeks before his assassination in Dallas. This was supposed to be an Air Force and army game at Soldier Field. That trip would be canceled at the last minute. And Herman told stories about the CPD just being really ill equipped to handle the President making that kind of trip to Soldier Field and in fact, we now know that there was all kinds of assassination plants of JFK in Chicago on that day that Herman and Ow was there.

[00:25:32.230] - Brandon Kooi

Abraham Bolden is a name that your listeners might need to look up if they're not familiar with this. Bolden was the first African American Secret Service agent to serve on presidential. And Bolden would actually discuss how ill equipped the Secret Service was and the problems that he faced being the first black Secret Service agent and how Chicago. The reason I'm mentioning this is he was from Chicago, still lives in Chicago. He's still alive. Living on the south side of Chicago. Abraham Bolton ended up being locked up for three years. On what for all intents and purposes, it looks like trumped up charges as a Secret Service agent. The two people that testified against him on an alleged counterfeiting scheme where he had taken a bribe. They later recanted. Abraham Bolton did three years in federal prison and then later discussed all the problems that Herman also shared with me in terms of just being equipped to handle the president's trip. O. W. Wilson met with Martin Luther King, Jr. First police leader to do this. Prior to civil rights protests in Chicago. Goldstein was in charge of helping to integrate beaches in Chicago. So again, we see more of that push for reform when it deals with race relations with OW Wilson.

[00:26:41.360] - Brandon Kooi

And then this is where the notions of problem-orientated policing really stem from that work important work to reform the CPD, but also kind of what would be the next step in reform, which came out of Goldstein's work as well. So I had the luxury of doing a lot of that sort of thinking back and notes that I took on those conversations with Herman. Penny Harrington made mention of her being the first police leader. I got to know her. I actually got to know her granddaughter very well as well in terms of just researching the book so the family members become important. I interviewed Catherine Cole, who is the wife of George Kelly. So after George Kelly passed away, I also had the opportunity to meet him a couple of times at conferences over the years. Never had an extended conversation with them. So it's nice to bring oftentimes family members into reviewing your work because they could tell you any mistakes that you made. And of course, I made mistakes. So you could imagine Bill Brandon wasn't shy about telling me this isn't right and correct that.

[00:27:39.170] - Steve Morreale

Let's stop you there for a minute, Brandon. So I find that pretty interesting, very interesting, actually, that you are trying to be as accurate as possible and you're bringing people in to say, did I get this right? What am I missing? How do I paint the picture in a more true fashion? So that's pretty special that you were able to DEA with Harrington's family and certainly George Kelly's wife up there in Dartmouth. So that was helpful. But all of this takes time, right? You chip away at it. It pushes the deadline way far away.

[00:28:07.300] - Brandon Kooi

Right. Thankfully, I had a publisher that didn't give me too much grief over it. The deadline was like years. Was it, Ellen, when it was? Yes, it was, absolutely. And there was enormous benefit, of course, that came with this because the deadline probably should have been a couple of years prior and I wouldn't have captured 2020. Right. I wouldn't have captured George Lloyd. I wouldn't have been able to read through Bill Bratton's, the book, The Profession. The luxury of this is that I was able to share these chapters with people that I was most interested in seeing. So Penny Harrington read the chapter several times. That part would have been disheartened if I wasn't able to share that with her and others that were close to her before her passing. But we did. We were able to get that. And obviously, she was enormously elbow in the review. I'll also make mention that as a testament to who Penny was. We all remember what it was like to teach through the pandemic, and we all got accustomed to Zoom and students being in these little boxes. Penny actually Zoomed with my classes on three different occasions.

[00:29:08.130] - Steve Morreale

So nice.

[00:29:08.750] - Brandon Kooi

So the interview process occurred with watching her teach my students at Aurora University and the ability to be able to record those and share with people and share with people for the next several years, as long as they're willing to learn and listen to it.

[00:29:23.500] - Steve Morreale

So it's a video history, which is terrific. So let's talk about as we aim towards the end of our time here. I want to talk with you about conversations with Bratton, Chuck Ramsey and Chris Magnus. And when you wrote this book, as we speak about Chris Magnus, he had been at several places, and I had the honor of interviewing him on decision making a while back. And he was the chief in Fargo, in Richmond, California, Tucson. And now he's got Customs and Border Patrol. You were saying that he was at one point in time he was being considered. Well, he is on the front lines and in the hot water. I suppose it's not an easy thing to do. So how about those three who are alive and well now, what's your experience with them? Were they receptive to you? Do they still have an edge? And I don't mean a negative edge, but an edge about policing and where it can be and how we make some modifications? Because I think that's pretty important.

[00:30:15.100] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah, absolutely. So if we consider both all three, Brattoon, Ramsey and Magnus, without a doubt, they're still very involved. The media is constantly still turning to Bill Bratton and Ramsey when anything happens with the police, whether it's the capital insurrection, social justice protests. So they're a testament to just great leadership. Again, the irony of Chris Magnus is that he grew up in Lansing, Michigan. We looked back to his time with Richmond, California, and again, short on time. Not going into a lot of detail here, but this was another irony that a guy by the name of Devon Bogen, who runs now Advanced Peace, this was an individual that had created an initiative in Richmond and in other cities to try to essentially entice behavioral changes amongst the youth that were most prevalent in terms of gun violence. And he did so in sort of a really creative way. He had actually tried to get some grants through Ceasefire and wasn't able to kind of put that together and kind of came up with his own. I think it referred to it as Ghetto Ceasefire. And they put his office next to the city manager's office by named Bill Lindsey, and they seem to have some really good success that kind of these behavioral modifications.

[00:31:19.740] - Brandon Kooi

The coincidence is that Devon Bogen also grew up in Lansing, Michigan, and I remember asking Chris about it, and they didn't really know about this connection until they were in Lansing, Michigan. And the Ons initiative through Devon Bogen really ran parallel to the community policing push that Chris Magnus had. In other words, they weren't really working necessarily together, but they weren't opponents as well. So I found this kind of fascinating in that we can have really good community initiatives that are trying to change communities without necessarily direct law enforcement involvement and police leaders that allow for that, and at times begin to address officers that might be naysayers to strategies, initiatives that might not be entirely inclusive of the Department. It's kind of fascinating to see that sort of work taking place. So Chris was able to talk about some of that, and maybe I was more curious about it than what he was. But they had phenomenal success in Richmond, had great success in dealing with immigrant populations in Fargo. Talk about some of that. And then, of course, changing the whole community policing aspect in Tucson as well. Ramsay and Just, his history in terms of Washington, DC is fascinating beyond belief.

[00:32:29.570] - Brandon Kooi

He shared with me a lot of personal photos that were great to get around some of these potential Copyright issues. I guess when they share personal photos with you. Penny Harrington had mailed a huge envelope full of photos and different notes to me to share, was thankful that I got that back to her in time. And Bill Brandon, he went line by line by line through the book on a phone call, which was just great. He spent a considerable amount of time on the phone. And by all means I'll mention this, that he consistently said things like, you're the researcher, this is your work, that's fine kind of thing. And he wasn't ever really saying anything that shouldn't be in there wanting to change anything dramatically. So they were all just wonderful to work with, and it was a thrill.

[00:33:07.980] - Steve Morreale

Well, it's a major accomplishment, to say the least, and I think it's a piece that will be used for an awfully long time. I think as I'm picking through the pages, I see an awful lot of reference to three or four organizations that have been at the forefront of trying to have an impact on police reform, improving service delivery and such. And I think of the Police Foundation, the Police Executive Research Forum, and certainly the IACP, all of them playing a role. I'd like to know as a professor who looks at criminal justice and is in the classroom a lot and a researcher on top of that, what your view, what your feelings were on the day of January 6?

[00:33:45.240] - Brandon Kooi

It's a tough day. I think that what we saw was the obvious breach, but really a struggle for our own democracy, understanding what our Democratic principles are. I mean, there's the natural security side of things as well. And just looking at what Ramsay went through in terms of reforming the Metropolitan Police, you had a new Metropolitan Police leader. Of course, the capital has their own security military that should have been involved. So there's always kind of just nuts and bolts of the risk management, contingency planning and security side of things. The other part of it, again, is, I think, just more national in scope terms of how do we understand the friction in the divide in America has been created over the past several years, and how do we merge that policing plays a role in that? I always say that your municipal police is the face of that democracy. Most people don't even meet their Mayor, let alone the governor or President or other folks that are involved as state attorneys or judges, but everybody usually meets a police officer and has that kind of conversation. So noting that that base of democracy can have such an enormous impact on people's life, on their frustrations, on their grief, and how do we do a good job listening to that divide so that we can begin to have less of it, I think is really critical.

[00:35:02.330] - Brandon Kooi

And again, I'd look towards the lessons of kind of an Ow Wilson, what I call an iconic photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seated next to Ow Wilson inside of the Chicago police headquarters after he had just given the civil rights leader a full tour of the CPD, met with a number of police officers, and guaranteed that he would do everything that he could to protect the protesters that were converging into Chicago at that time. That's a lot different than what we saw occurring on a nightly basis with the BLM movement or even with the capital insurrection. So police being able to do the job within the Constitution becomes really important. Chuck Ramsey talks a lot about constitutional policing, how we properly trained police officers to understand the history. And he even made mention that they would read out the Constitution during roll call meetings. You can imagine hearing your roll call Sergeant read the Constitution to new police officers. I think that should register with many of them in terms of kind of that awesome responsibility of being the face of democracy.

[00:36:05.210] - Steve Morreale

That's quite a statement. That's a great idea. If you had a magic wand as a policing scholar to make some changes in the next few years, what would they be?

[00:36:14.290] - Brandon Kooi

I find myself more fascinated with what the new officer believes is the role that they take. And we always talk about the need for bottom up, and we talked about this for problem orientated policing. And truth be told, we've seen some of the best problem orientated policing type of initiatives coming kind of bottom up new or unique officer given the freedom to go and solve problems. But top down leadership is also about providing the right culture and the environment for officers to be more analytical about the causes of crime, be less about pointing to the who, trying to understand the why, especially with repeat problems, and coming up with kind of creative responses that we may or may not have tried in the past and then, of course, being able to assess and evaluate the impact of that. I like to think about the idea of newer officers really spending that probationary time, possibly maybe without even a firearm, and working the areas where there is a lot of problems. I imagine officers out on foot, working with communities of distress, areas where the most concentrated crime is occurring, and just seeing through that different lens what could be as they accumulate more data, meet with community leaders to really have that understanding before there's that reliance on those officers engaging in law enforcement and answering the calls for service, perhaps that would begin to create a different vision for them to understand the role that they could potentially play.

[00:37:36.680] - Brandon Kooi

Ultimately, how do we get lease officers of the future to truly become problem solvers? We have to be able to have good analyzers within the Department that are helping to direct how they do the job. I think the old philosophies of 24, 25 year old officers engaged in community policing were probably too far fetched. But the research literature on problem orientated leasing has a lot more backing in terms of apartments being able to and individual officers oftentimes being able to impact crime in very systemic ways if they're providing the right culture and leadership.

[00:38:09.770] - Steve Morreale

I hear you say problem solvers and problem oriented policing and Pop Herman's invention, if you will. It seems to me also that lease departments have to be willing to allow people to go out there and find the problems, identify the problems and bring them back and then work on them in the same way. In other words, what's out there? What are we saying and not get slapped for bringing a potential problem back to consider that happens in a lot of police departments. Don't bring me a problem as you have a solution. Most police departments don't bring me a problem. I got enough problems.

[00:38:36.930] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah. Looking back on that history, one of the things that Herman pushed for in the Chicago Police Department as early as the was to have some kind of analytic unit within the CPD and far ahead of his time. That's really what we're talking about, is that every Department needs to have somebody analyzing the problems so that we can direct resources accordingly. In another week, we're going to be having the 30th annual problem orientated Policing Conference in Ann Arbor. This is going to be the first one without Herman Goldstein, about 30 years in, at an international problem orientated policing conference. Why I fell in love with this conference is that it's not your typical academic conference, mainly attended by police. And really the only time that I've ever been to a conference where you can meet officers from all over the world who are coming for one purpose, and that's to understand problem solved Sarah process, which came out of John X work and Bill Spellman. So there is a model for how we go about doing problem solving. The center for Problem Oriented Policing has a fantastic website with a lot of evidence based guidebooks on how we go about solving problems.

[00:39:40.620] - Brandon Kooi

So it is a very well developed body of literature for how we go about doing this work. But to understand that there's a lot to it. It's not your simple kind of Dare project or coffee with a cop kind of thing, that there is something much deeper and there's some intensity to it. And I have found that the officers that get sort of instructed, trained, if you will, on this, they absolutely love it. And several officers that have attended the conference over the years have said, why haven't we gotten this sooner? Why wasn't this at the Academy? Why did it take 20 years for me to hear this kind of stuff? So it hasn't created the paradigm shift that many hope that it would. But I would say for the younger officer and police leaders, if you really don't know much about problem orientated police, you can dive into it because there's so much to offer for that.

[00:40:27.900] - Steve Morreale

And thank you for saying that. And we've got to wind down as I move on, as you're saying, you just talked about evidence based data and literature. So evidence based policing. What I hear a lot is evidence based policing, data driven policing, intelligence led policing. It seems to me all of them have the root of looking at the problem, evaluating the data and showing in some way either quantitative or qualitative that it, and then spreading the word. Is that a fair statement, Brand?

[00:40:53.070] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah, I would say so. And one of the things I'll just sort of put as a caveat to that is that good crime analyzers that are trained as a criminologist is oftentimes what's missing. It's hard enough to get crime analyzers, let alone ones that have a background in criminology, but when you have both and they have a seat at the table and by that I mean command staff and the police Chiefs here, crime analysts that do right along with police officers to really play a role. They can be very impactful. So you have to move beyond just the crime statistics Because there's so much more to look at when we're dealing with problems.

[00:41:25.090] - Steve Morreale

Well, thank you. We've been talking to Brandon Kooi at Aurora University and he has written the book, as we've said throughout our interview, Seven Highly Effective Police Leaders from 1885 to modern times. Brandon, you have the last word. If you are in the classroom and people are questioning whether to be a police officer or not And I know that's not all of our criminal justice students, what do you say to them?

[00:41:46.020] - Brandon Kooi

Yeah, I say absolutely. This is just an interesting time for all of them. Change is something that will always occur within policing. Like any organization, it's going to be resisted by different people, but there's enormous opportunity for them to create change for the good. Most police officers that I've met over the years just absolutely love their job. That job is always going to be evolving. So I very much encourage all of my students to get into it and if you're thinking even if you have an inkling of going into policing, go and test do your interviews and you can decide later on if you want to change careers. But it's something that they'll never be able to take away from you. Same with a College degree, right? Something they'll never be able to take away from you. So I very much encourage them to great.

[00:42:23.360] - Steve Morreale

Well, thank you. Thanks to Brandon Kooi Who is out there in Illinois today for parting his wisdom and the experience. Congratulations on a long road to making this a reality.

[00:42:34.850] - Brandon Kooi

Thank you, Steve, very much. Appreciate it. Thanks to the listeners to appreciate it.

[00:42:38.240] - Steve Morreale

So another episode of The CopDoc Podcast in the books. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode.

[00:42:45.930] - Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to The CopDoc Podcast with Dr. Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune into the cocktails podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.