Envisioning Excellence: A Deep Dive into the Evolution and Rigor of Police Training in California with Dr. Matt O'Deane

Season 6 - Episode 127

Imagine a world where the officers patrolling our neighborhoods not only serve and protect but are also the pinnacle of professional development and adaptability. That's the vision Dr. Matt O'Deane, a prominent figure at California POST, shares as he joins me, Steve Morialli, to unwrap his journey from a safety patrol youngster to a linchpin in the oversight of police training. We traverse Matt's storied career, from his start at the National City Police Department to his impactful days within the San Diego District Attorney's Office, and now his influential work ensuring law enforcement officers across California are well-equipped to face the rapidly changing demands of their duty.

Have you ever wondered what goes into the making of a law enforcement officer in California? Well, prepare to be enlightened as Dr. O'Deane and I examine the intricate pathways from academy to continuous advancement within the force. We strip back the layers of their rigorous training, highlighting the essential training in critical areas such as crisis management and strategic communication. It's not all work, though—Matt shares the personal investment and perseverance needed to climb the ladder from corporal to command, the pivotal probationary periods, and the creative solutions resilient police chiefs employ to maintain high training standards amid resource scarcity.

Finally, we pull back the curtain on the meticulous planning and collaboration required to keep California's police training in step with legislative changes. Hear from Dr. O'Deane about the approval process for new courses, the importance of feedback in shaping responsive training programs, and the stringent selection criteria for consultants at California POST. As we discuss the future of law enforcement education and accountability, you'll get a front-row seat to the ongoing efforts to ensure our peace officers are not only educated but exemplify the utmost in professional conduct and competence.

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

Intro-Outro: 0:02

Welcome to The Cop Doc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopD oc 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 CopD oc Podcast.

Steve Morreale: 0:32

Hey everybody. Steve Morreale, you're listening to the cop doc podcast. We're back again with another episode. This time we're here in Boston and talking to somebody in California, Matt O'Deane, Dr. Matt O'Deane. Hello there, Matt. Good morning sir. Thanks for coming in. How are you? I am fine. I'll speak a little bit about how we connected. Matt and I connected while he was at Walden University and, full disclosure, I was the chair of a dissertation that he completed. We've done some presentations before. We've kept in contact. Matt was a commander at the District Attorney's Diego O ffice of Investigations and he now works for California POST I want to talk about.

Steve Morreale: 1:09

I know you were in a police department, but how did you get involved in policing, what turns did you take, what work did you do and what brings you to California Post?

Matt O'Deane: 1:17

Well, I know I wanted to be a police officer. Quite honestly, all the way back to when I was in sixth grade I remember vividly I wanted to work in law enforcement. I was a member of the school's safety patrol and there was a local officer from the city of La Mesa that came to our school and I was just always very impressed with law enforcement. I had some uncles back in Massachusetts that were police officers in my hometown and then just went to junior, high and high school and then decided to start community college. I started taking a bunch of criminal justice courses, which really reinforced my interest in the profession, and then I went through the San Diego County Sheriff's Academy and graduated. I was a security officer at the same time for the San Diego Transit System, the San Diego trolley. So I was doing that right around downtown and then got picked up by the National City Police Department Little city here in San Diego County 90 officer department did that for 10 and a half years and then I left there as a sergeant and then went over to the DA's office bureau investigation and I worked there for 17 and a half and the last four I was a commander there. So I was in charge of the gang prosecution unit, the narcotics unit, the cold case homicide unit and training. So I did that and in California police officers are fortunate enough to be able to retire at 50 years old. So I turned 50, I pulled the plug from a law enforcement position and then I went to work for California POST Peace Officer Standards and Training, which is obviously it's a regulatory agency. It's that we are not sworn peace officers but we work with police officers every day.

Matt O'Deane: 2:42

I Region Seven the manager, so I'm the liaison to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and then every police department in Riverside, San Berna rdino, Inyo, and Mono County. So I have 48 police departments and then 22 private presenters, basically private companies that we have certified POST-training provide, and I work with them. I meet with them on a regular basis. I attend all the monthly chief meetings. I update them on all kinds of things that are changing as far as laws and regulations and policies. There's quite a bit going on actually in California the last couple of years as far as legislation and licensing and decertification, training requirements, education requirements. So there's a lot of things that the chiefs need to be aware of and I also meet with all the training managers.

Matt O'Deane: 3:27

Each of the departments has a training cadre, whether it's for the perishable skills, the shooting, the driving, the arrest, control or other leadership topics, or mandatory topics, legislative mandated issues. And then, of course, go up to Sacramento five, six times a year, stay connected to the office. That's where the headquarters is. That's, the headquarters is actually in West Sacramento. So post has about 170 employees that run, regulate the entire state and we're broken up into a series of bureaus.

Matt O'Deane: 3:54

I'm assigned to the training, delivery and compliance bureau so we make sure every police officer that's hired meets the government code, penal code, post regulation to qualify. They have to do a long laundry list of things to qualify to be a police officer or a dispatcher or a reserve. And also we run the police academies and supervisory leadership. We have our command college. There's a lot of various program management, consulting. So we do kind of what you do, steve, where you go into a department and you look at it, you evaluate it, you give them suggestions on what can be done more efficiently, what maybe needs to be changed, with a very academic, scientific methodology to it, and then, of course, the whole new licensing division. So I believe yesterday was the first hearing of the new advisory board that Governor Newsom put into place over the course of this year, and two officers were there and went before this new board to start the process to decertify and based on serious misconduct that they allegedly engaged in.

Steve Morreale: 4:48

That was a really big day yesterday, and then moving forward, the first of a few anyway. You went back to school. You earned your doctorate. I know you do some teaching.

Steve Morreale: 4:55

What I'm curious about, and I hope that we can explore that, is when we talk about police training and how to improve that. I'm curious to know, now that you're a practitioner that is now in this oversight responsibility and counseling or coaching responsibility for police agencies and you get to talk with police chiefs and training coordinators, both from the training side from the state and the training side from each individual police agency. There's a lot of moving parts, as you will know, and I'm curious to know how post is getting feedback and deciding what they might change or what they need to pay attention to. I know at one point in time not that you didn't do it, but we talk about de-escalation techniques and, obviously, cultural competency, and it just goes on on dealing with mental health problems. It seems to be an ever-changing landscape of things that police officers have to be aware of and trained with. So talk about that.

Matt O'Deane: 5:54

Yeah, that's very much correct. So a lot of what we do is dealing with the results of what the legislator passes. So, as an example, like after the George Floyd incident, the governor and the legislator in California decided to not allow police officers to use, say, the carotid restraint. So that technique, they said it cannot be used in a post-certified course. If the departments are going to use it, going to train it, that's on them, but it's not going to certify it. So as a result of just that one incident, I went through all the courses in my area, which there are many, many hundreds, and noticed that several of the courses contain that content in their outline. I had to reach out to the training managers and advise them hey, this needs to be removed. Another recent piece of legislation was AB48. So after a lot of the protests and riots in a lot of areas, the legislator in the state didn't like how the police were using less lethal beanbags, chemical agents to disperse crowds, as an example. So they kind of changed the rules on that. Police need to give various warnings, they need to give escape routes, things like that. So that we had to change then all the training that exists or has been created since to address the new changes of the legislator I said to put in those things. So when they're teaching the classes, we know that they are teaching what the current law is. So one of the things we do is we go through all the courses and there's about 5,000 courses approved in California that we have post approved state. So it's a very large catalog and anybody can go to postcagov and click on the catalog and you can look at our entire curriculum of courses. Also, if any of your listeners are interested, they can go to a new website that was created. It's called open data all one word O, p, e, n, d, a, t, a, dot, post, dot, c, a, dot, gov, and it'll open up a little search engine and they can put in the title or the police department or the presenter or the course number, if they know it from the catalog, and every single outline of every post approved class is public record.

Matt O'Deane: 7:43

So Senate bill 978 was another law passed back in I think it was passed in 18, but it was implemented in 2020 where the state said the public has a right to know what the police are being taught, what they're being trained right. Their taxpayers fund the police department. So now community members don't even need to call us and say, hey, I want a copy of the LAPD's bicycle course outline or a rifle course. They can just get it. So that's kind of nice. It kind of actually alleviated some workload from guys like me, the consultants, people calling and asking us hey, just log in and you can get it and review yourself. So there's just tons of new laws.

Matt O'Deane: 8:17

Obviously, senate bill two is the huge one with the licensing, the decertification. We created four new actually six new bureaus, changed, reconstructed our organizational chart, moved things around, hired a bunch of retired law enforcement officers to run that bureau and to triage the cases. So the law basically requires you to have incident of serious misconduct occur, an allegation of serious misconduct not even that it's true, just the allegation has to be reported to us within 10 days so that the departments will up by the department. So the department is required to upload. Somebody walked into the lobby. They said, hey, this police officer punched me for no reason. It's excessive, it's unnecessary, it's a crime, it's unprofessional. Whatever they make their allegation, the police department documents it like they do. Now get assigned to an internal affairs division, as you know, to investigate. They'll come up with their finding. Is it sustained, is it not? Is it your discipline? Or it could be from a verbal warning or reprimand all the way up to being terminated and criminally prosecuted, depending on what they do. So all of that whole process was set.

Matt O'Deane: 9:21

But as far as the training goes, police officers in California have what we call continual professional training, cpt. The lowest possible minimum is 24 hours every two years. So every police officer, from the chief of police all the way down to a reserve, including dispatchers, need 24 hours of training every two years. So basically 12 hours a year. They would technically qualify for the minimums. Now in my area there's no police department that does the minimum. I believe that I just checked a couple months ago. The average police officer gets about 40 hours of training a year. So of various things. But if you're a sergeant or lower, you're somebody that's in a black and white, you're driving around the community, you have regular contact with the community, you have to do what's also called perishable skills.

Steve Morreale: 10:04

I want to stop you for a minute because you use that term. It's not a term that we usually use, especially on the East Coast, but I understand what that would mean. You can't come out of the academy, shoot your gun a couple of days and go back out on the road and never shoot your weapon again. That you have to continue so that you understand muscle memory and you understand through rootinization that you can fire that gun and you can handle it safely. So perishable skills. I understand there. What are the other areas?

Matt O'Deane: 10:32

There's a lot of things that are post mandated. Obviously the shooting but driving, if you operate a motor vehicle, arrest and control. A relatively new requirement is use of force, strategic communications. Then you have things that are required by the legislator, like officers need eight hours of first aid every two years and they cover a lot of basic first aid. It's not making them a paramedic, but it's giving them at least the foundation to kind of get that patient secured and stabilized to some degree.

Matt O'Deane: 11:00

You know, while you're waiting for the fire department to arrive, there's a lot of like for field training officers. So you just take a new officer in your car and say, hey, you know, this is your trainee. I teach him how to be a cop. They have to go to a 40 hour field training officer course and then every three years they would need a 24 hour field training officer update course. They would also need an eight hour crisis intervention training course. So that would be just to be an FTO in good standing, right, and then, as you promote through your career, if I make sergeant, then I have to go through our 80 hour post supervisor school. Teach them all the foundational things that a sergeant would need to know. Then you maybe make lieutenant. You'd go to our 104 hour management school. You make chief of police. We have an 80 hour executive school and then we have these are all required.

Matt O'Deane: 11:41

They are required if they want, if the officers want to obtain post certification. So once you get hired as typically how it works in California you get hired as a police officer. Then the department sends you through the police. The police academies are typically about six months. They vary a little bit. There's between the 41 academies. Once you're done with that, you get out on the street. You go through a field training officer program. So it's you and an FTO. You go through multiple phases. That's typically it has to be 10 weeks, but typically it's 14 to 18 weeks. You're with a training officer, then you're on probation. It has to be a year. Most departments are 18 months.

Steve Morreale: 12:14

Well, that's during that time. Let me stop you because that doesn't always happen in departments. I like what you're saying. Most of the time it's a one year probation and if interceding is your academy, then you're in for the academy for six months. That means you're on probation for six months and off you go. What you're saying is the clock starts ticking for probation after you're out of the academy. We have one year to keep an eye on you, right?

Matt O'Deane: 12:37

One year is the minimum. There are a handful of departments that it's one, but most departments actually opt to make it 18 months. They want to extend it, they want a longer period of time to properly evaluate this person, which is fine. We encourage departments to exceed our qualifications. They just can't go less. So if a department said we only want to have, we want to in exactly in your scenario. We want to include the six months of the academy in their probationary time, no, not going to happen. I would deny that. So it has to be 12 months on the street because they're not a police officer.

Matt O'Deane: 13:04

In the academy we consider them a trainee, or cadet in different terminology. Once they graduate the academy, they raise the right hand, the chief sheriff swears them in. Now they have law enforcement authority. They work on the street and then, once they're done with the FTO and the probation, now they're typically have been on the department for 24 months or two years. At that point they get their basic post certificate that will stay with them forever, assuming they don't now engage in serious misconduct. That's what can be pulled away from them. So during the first two years of their career they are given which is relatively new. It started one year ago. In January 1st they get a proof of eligibility certificate. So we equate it to kind of like a learner's permit. Right, you get your, your learner's permit and then you got to go out, you got to do the driving school, you got to go out with your dad or your mom or a friend or a family member and they got to teach you how to drive. And then, when you're competent, you get behind the wheel and you got to convince the DMV that you're safe, right. So if the officers engage in misconduct say when they're on the job for two weeks if you had something like that crazy in their FTO program and they do something inappropriate they don't have a basic post certificate to take from them yet because they haven't been on long enough to earn it we would take their proof of eligibility certificate. I see that's kind of the licensing scheme is set up so the vast majority of officers will never engage in serious misconduct.

Matt O'Deane: 14:17

Officers are very good people and you know 99% of the cases, especially, you know, when you have solid supervision and good leadership, holds them accountable and holds them to task and keeps them on the right mission and on the right path, that goes a long way as well and then they just advance. So if then, once they make sergeant they want to get a supervisory or management or executive because in California most departments it's tied to compensation. So in my old office if I got my advanced post certificates I got 12% pay raise. There was a lot of incentive.

Matt O'Deane: 14:45

And then it's an interesting formula how you get the certificates. So if you're just a cop with no formal education, it'll take you in nine years. If you have a bachelor's degree and you're a police officer, you can get that same certificate in four years. Right, there's all different ranges of years training points. So it's really meant to encourage officers to continue their training, continue their formal education and get these advanced certifications quicker. They can get compensated and you know it typically helps you promote and advance and it increases your professionalism.

Steve Morreale: 15:13

So the industry, the profession. One of the things that is a pet peeve of mine is that we have a tendency to call all this stuff continuing education and yet in other professions it is called professional development, and I wish that we could move towards changing that nomenclature so that people from the outside understand what's continuing education, what's in service? It's professional development, and so what begins to make me wonder. I'm quite impressed with California and what they do with post. I think they're one of the leaders in the country, and what troubles me again about policing is the way we advance people, that we promote you, but we don't prepare you for that job until after you get the job. So there's no preparation.

Steve Morreale: 15:57

You know the military will do that. If you want to be a sergeant, then you're going to have to do some training, you have to go to the train. It doesn't mean you're going to get promoted at that point in time, but it gives you an idea of what the expectation is. Is it similar in California that? Is it a requirement? I think you said that it is not necessarily a requirement to go to a sergeant, or to explain that to me.

Matt O'Deane: 16:17

You're correct. So in most cases, Most people are a corporal or a detective. They get promoted to sergeant, let's say, and then once they've been promoted within the first year, typically, depending on availability of courses and staffing issues and things like that they'll go to the 80 hour supervisors.

Steve Morreale: 16:33

Now, they do have a requirement. Is it a requirement?

Matt O'Deane: 16:35

Yes, okay, if they don't go. When I go there and I do my compliance audit, I'll say, hey, steve was promoted to sergeant 14 months ago and I noticed that he hasn't been to supervisor school. Please get him in. And if you haven't gone, there's usually a reason. They'll say hey, listen, Steve's the only sergeant we have. We're down two sergeants. There's no way Steve's going to supervisor school right now. We don't. So they'll have some explanation. Or they'll say, okay, it wasn't available.

Matt O'Deane: 16:58

Obviously, like when COVID happened, everything was shut down. It created a backlog. We've since recovered from that. It is required because those sergeants want and need that certification to move on. Now they can go as a corporal. There's nothing that would prohibit, to your point, the motivated corporal that wants to know what they're getting into or make themselves more marketable, like when they go to the interview panel. They can say hey, and I put myself through the supervisor school or the department sent me. They can go to the sergeant school in advance. We don't prohibit that. But I can tell you it's more of the exception, not the rule, I see.

Steve Morreale: 17:28

Well, let's ask about this. So here you are, a cop, a sergeant, an investigator, a supervisory investigator, and then a commander, and I know that you did some leadership training. How did you make that transition?

Matt O'Deane: 17:40

Well, for me it's. I'm not assigned to the licensing division so, just like any other government agency, we're different bureaus and different responsibilities. I'm the liaison to the actual police departments and private presenters in my region, which is very large. It's very much a partnership. Almost 28-year police officer, I'm very passionate about law enforcement. I love law enforcement. I respect police and what they do more than most people. I go in there with a really loving heart and corrective mindset. It's like I'm not here to discipline you or slam you or make you look bad. I want to work with you to make your officers the best that they can be, the safest that they can be. Obviously, we want them to be in compliance.

Matt O'Deane: 18:20

As you know, there's a lot of liability If you have an officer that's out of compliance. Let's say they graduated the academy and they've been working for five years now and they've never gone to the range to requalify or demonstrate that they can shoot properly and now they get into an officer-involved shooting. Let's say, god forbid somebody, the suspect passes away. Now there's all these lawsuits and court cases and being reviewed by the district attorney's office. It's helpful if that officer's out of compliance and didn't shoot the attorneys are going to. It's going to create a lot of liability. I'm guessing you know highly probable you're going to pay a lot out for failure to train. Or, worse is, your officer could get injured or killed because they don't have the skill set they need to do the job. So that would be horrible. You know you're putting somebody out there that's not qualified would be incredibly unethical and immoral in my opinion.

Steve Morreale: 19:04

So we're talking to Matt O'Dean and he is a consultant, basically a field manager, for Post and their training and compliance with the peace officer standards and training. It's interesting, matt, and I know you've been around it is very, very rare that officers are called peace officers. It's more in the West and in the East, although there is a move to try to change that. What's your perspective on that term? Peace versus police officer?

Matt O'Deane: 19:30

Well, technically they're all peace officers. I would say you know you are keeping the peace. I mean that's your objective. How well they do it in certain communities is debatable, but we oftentimes sub. A lot of times they won't use police officer because sheriff deputy, which is a law enforcement or a peace officer, is not a police officer. They're a sheriff deputy or agent. For the Department of Justice in California is a special agent or supervisory agent, right? So they don't all use the term peace officer but they're really synonymous terms peace officer, police officer, sheriff deputy, special agent. Honestly, they're all law enforcement. They're all under that big umbrella. They might operate under different penal codes and have different levels of authority, but generally they're all the same. And I'm dealing with state, local, municipal, school districts, colleges have their own police departments, all the way down to park rangers and special districts, transit police things like that Authorities, yeah, yeah.

Matt O'Deane: 20:23

Railroad police officers, airport police officers. So there's a lot of like really specific roles and functions, as you know, in the profession. Which is one of the things that I really liked about it is, you know, if you, if you're working in patrol and you don't like that or you're getting kind of sick of driving around and working graveyard ship, take the test, educate yourself, learn how to be a detective, put yourself through some schools and then start putting in for these detective assignments. You know getting good at doing interviews, because most of the detectives the court detectives, you know work during the days when businesses are open and victims are able to go talk to, you know. And then there's all the different task forces. Right, you know the specializing narcotics and guns and auto theft and sex crimes, and you know. So just even in San Diego there's over 30 different task forces where state, local, federal all come together to focus on very specific crimes. They have more resources available to them. So there's a lot of opportunities, especially for the officers that work hard, educate themselves, build their resumes. You know they don't use the term CV. You know, in police work, like in academia, you know, you're putting all your publications and all your presentations and all the courses you've taught. Law enforcement is a little more scaled down probably than that.

Matt O'Deane: 21:26

So you have to post one of the things we keep a profile. So from the day you start the police academy you have a California post profile. So every time you attend post training, no matter where it is or who puts it on, if you're added to a post roster, that course is on your profile along with all your education, assuming you send us your transcripts, all your certificates, so that profile and it follows you. If you switch from San Diego police to Los Angeles police, to Fresno police, it's the same profile. It'll just show from this date to this date you worked here. This date to this date you worked here and so on.

Matt O'Deane: 21:54

So they can pull up that profile and then it also says their status. So now on the top it'll say you're active, you're inactive, it's suspended, it's decertified. So any police department that's going to hire Matt Odean or Steve Morielli, they're going to have to go to post because we're a lateral. They're going to have to check with us to make sure there's no misconduct that was reported. They're going to have to check with us to make sure that your training is good. You went through a police academy up to date, that you are hireable, and then they're going to put that in the background file and then when we consultants go there and look at it, if I don't see it there, this guy's not eligible to be a police officer. Thank you for watching.

Steve Morreale: 22:25

Well, I want to go back to a question I posed a few minutes back and we're talking to Matt Odean. He is a consultant for the California Post and a former police commander. Matt, when you're talking to police chiefs and to the training officers, what troubles them? What are they looking for? What kind of guidance are they asking for? What's missing in training that they feel that they convey to you? And if they do, how does that travel back to Sacramento? So?

Matt O'Deane: 22:53

it's a kind of a reoccurring theme with again. I work with 48 departments on a regular basis and then probably another 70 on a semi-annual basis from regions around me. So I've met with hundreds of chiefs of police and training managers in the last couple of years alone. They all have issues with staffing and retention. I don't think I have a single department that's at full staff, at full capacity. They're all fighting for the same people, the same pool. So, quite honestly, the departments that have more resources, more money, obviously don't have the same issues as the smaller departments. So in my area I've got obviously very large, the largest department in the state, the LA Sheriff's Department, and Riverside and San Bernardino are huge. But then there's also other really big departments, like the city of Chino and Ontario that have good size departments, several hundred officers, a lot of money, nice, beautiful facilities, nice patrol cars.

Matt O'Deane: 23:42

If I'm a police officer, I'm a young guy looking to go to a police department. Why would I not want to go to Ontario Police? That's large and beautiful facilities and they have a big airport, international airport, or an Anaheim where they've got all these sports teams and Disneyland right. I know I can work all these special events, a lot of overtime opportunities, right. Or I could go to a department out where I was just at this week great departments. But I was out in Imperial County where the entire county has 200 police officers right, there's eight police departments out there. Some of the departments have three, four officers right. The entire police department is three or four officers right. So completely different dynamic. They do a great job.

Matt O'Deane: 24:19

Obviously they're hurting for people as well. So they're trying to get people in the local community to work there, because if you go out there and you work and you're not from there, I mean, quite honestly, you'd probably go crazy. It's a bunch of fields and cows and things like that. One of the issues they have is people will go out there, they'll get hired, they'll go to the academy, they'll get trained. After a year they leave and they go inland right. So these departments are like a training ground, spending all their time and money training these people only to have them leave, yes, right. So that happens a lot, keeping the people you have, having money to do the training like. Sometimes I'll have chiefs say to me you know having a real hard time getting in compliance this cycle. We just our training budget's been slashed. We're understaffed. I'm already burning my guys out. They're working a lot of overtime which.

Matt O'Deane: 24:58

Of course, is not a legal excuse, as we know. It's like well, do the best you can, and then you will just have to justify and document the reasons why they're out of compliance, and hopefully it doesn't bite you.

Steve Morreale: 25:08

Well, I was just going to say that eventually, that could bite you in the behind and you can make all kinds of excuses.

Steve Morreale: 25:13

It's interesting that in California these are requirements and yet a requirement sometimes can be written off because the political side the equivalent of the legislature for a town or a city says we're cutting your budget for training, which is crazy. It should be something that we should put more money into. It's really kind of crazy. Now you're, you spend a lot of time in classrooms now and you have a teacher mindset and that's troubling to me, as I presume it would be to you that the general public would take training so in such a laissez-faire point of view that it's not important. We certainly want our doctors to know how to conduct surgery, we want our pilots to figure out how to fly the newest plane and have proper training, and I think that expectation is of policing. But if budgets can be easily cut for training, don't you see that as problematic? It's hugely problematic.

Matt O'Deane: 26:04

There are some remedies, as you know. That can be done. You can do good training in-house. You could have a new officer in their FTO and maybe you have a little lull in calls for service and you could get a couple of officers together and you can practice proper search entries or proper ways to approach a vehicle.

Steve Morreale: 26:19

But that's not certified Right.

Matt O'Deane: 26:21

That doesn't mean it's not. That's correct. It's not post-certified. But all training doesn't need to be post-certified, no matter what state you work in. Okay, it can be documented in their internal training file. Yes, they're not going to get CPT credit for it, but they can train.

Matt O'Deane: 26:35

I had that my first week on the job. I've been here four and a half years almost at post. Almost my second day on the job my boss came to me and showed me a newspaper article One of my departments that it says 90% of this particular department are audit compliance. So somebody got the information, went to their local reporter, made the department look horrible. So we got on a plan. I met with the department the first week. The chief's like yeah, I'm the new chief, I've been here for two months and I got a city council meeting next week and we're going to talk about this article. You know, hopefully I'm still the chief next week when you come back and talk to me. He was able to go there and get $260,000 released from the city to get the entire department in compliance.

Matt O'Deane: 27:13

And then I worked with them to create a couple of courses that they did not have the ability to teach in-house. One of the things they were relying on the sheriff's department to provide this training, which is great, like in Riverside County for example is super advanced, fantastic law enforcement. I'm a great sheriff's department, beautiful training facility. So if they have a huge staff they will train the smaller ages, like out in Palm Desert you got Palm Springs in Cathedral City and Indio and Desert Hot Springs and Blythra. So those departments they can do the training in-house, which sometimes they do, but a lot of times they'll go over to the sheriff's department because the sheriff's does a great job and they can meet with all the other departments. There's a lot of networking going on and you can see how other departments do things. There's a lot of side benefits to that.

Matt O'Deane: 27:50

But at the end of a training cycle, so every two years the cycle begins again. So we are halfway through the current cycle in California. So every department when I meet with them I'm like hey, how are we doing on training? How are you looking? Some departments are hey, we're 72% done. Hey, fantastic, you only need to get the other 28% done in the next year. You're doing great. Some have not even started yet, zero. So I'm like okay, you know they're still in compliance, but waiting till the end is not necessarily the best approach, but it's what they got to do for what they're dealt and what they're given and that's why it posts.

Matt O'Deane: 28:19

You know, a lot of the training that we certify is free. I mean, we reimburse. We have, I believe, over $110 million budget. A huge part of our budget at post is reimbursing the agency. So if you're going to go to a 40 hour supervisory school or internal affairs investigation school up in Los Angeles and you live in San Diego and you go there, the department can put in a training reimbursement request to me and we will reimburse things such as their hotel, their rental car, their private expenses. Right, yes, some of it. Obviously not all of it, but there are meals to make it more reasonable for the department to send the person.

Matt O'Deane: 28:54

So, we do a lot of that or things like the supervisory leadership institutes eight month program. They go three days a month for eight months, or command college or the executive. There's no cost, so we pay everything. We say, hey, send this sergeant for three days a month for the next eight months. It's going to cost you nothing other than, obviously, the person's salary and the fact that they're gone from your department. You're going to have to absorb that. But back, backfill, and even in some courses not a lot, but some of them we will pay for the backfill as well.

Matt O'Deane: 29:20

So if you're going to go to that school and it's a backfill approved class post, we will pay my overtime to cover your 40 hours you're gone, so that you can go to that course and that's in things that are, like, really really important. We call it a plan one, like interview and interrogation. That's a plan one so we put such a high priority on the fact that they can interview and interrogate someone properly and legally and so that any information they obtain is actually admissible in a court of law. They're not violating the person's rights, et cetera. We make that course a plan one so that that department really has less excuses to go.

Steve Morreale: 29:51

Let me continue. We're talking about Odin. He is with California Post and asking questions about training and compliance and the issues that are going on in policing. As someone who has created courses college courses both of us, who's doing that for posts have you been able to watch an idea, a concept, a requirement take shape in terms of training? How has the training regimen developed?

Matt O'Deane: 30:18

That's a great question. So I do this quite a bit. So what'll typically happen is actually, this week several. So I had a call from one of my departments that says hey, we want to teach a two-day patrol rifle course at our department that we don't currently offer. So the first thing is that's OK, we need to go into the catalog and we need to see what's available in the region now. So let's say, as an example, they want to create a course but two police departments literally down the street have the same course and it's got low enrollment every time.

Matt O'Deane: 30:46

So, rather than them creating a third one which is only going to contribute to the low enrollment problem of the existing couple ones down the street. I would probably encourage them. Hey, send your officers to that. We encourage a lot of regionalization, helping each other out, publishing the courses. If you've got a space, help your brother and sister out and let them go. So that would be the first step. Or then we'd say, ok, you want that course? The very first thing I make them do is give me a training needs assessment form.

Matt O'Deane: 31:09

So I say I need to make sure, before I approve this course, that there's an unmet or ongoing need in this area for this class. So I'm not going to spend the time and energy to create this course, build the course outline, make the budget, make the safety plan, certify all the instructors, only to have nobody go. So it's similar in colleges, right? If I'm teaching at the community college and I don't get 25 students to sign up, my class is probably going to get canceled, right? So it's not worth it to the college to run the course based on what they're bringing in and what they're paying me and the cost of the facilities. It's just. They would just rather cancel the class. So it's very similar in a police department. But typically there is a need because they're asking for it and they want it and obviously they know what they need.

Matt O'Deane: 31:48

So, assuming there's an unmet need and I'll typically survey all the training managers. So when I meet with the training managers, you know I'll be in a room with 35, 40 training managers, you know a representative from every police department in Riverside County. And then I meet with the same group up in San Bernardino County and then at Los Angeles has two similar groups. I will say, hey, listen, this person wants to create this course. Are you going to send your people? If it's crickets in there and people are like no, we don't need it, we already have one, then I'm going to tell them hey, unfortunately there's not a need for this course. If they say, yes, we've been looking for that class, we are looking forward to this getting done. As soon as it's done I hope I can get five spots.

Matt O'Deane: 32:21

Obviously, within that class moves forward, they have to create an expanded course outline for the course, every outline of every class. Again, you can see them on open data dot, post, dot, cagov. They're basically your standard outline. You know, to the third degree of detail. It's not a full lesson plan, it's not every instruction, for if I, you know, I break my leg on the way to class and I give it to you, you can see. Hey, you know, have them do this activity. It's just the kind of the bullet points of what you're going to cover.

Steve Morreale: 32:44

An overview.

Matt O'Deane: 32:44

Yep, an overview, right, and then how long it's going to take? Right, you got to say it's a two hour class, a four hour, eight hour, a 40. How you're going to break that content down, how much time are you going to spend? Now, if it's a class that has specific requirements, like the legislator says, this course will talk about these five things or these 10 things, then that's got to be right up its front and center on page one. I need to make sure you know if they're teaching a baton course, it have to say it have to have proper baton strikes, areas where you can strike in. Areas where you can't strike, you know rendering aid once you've maintained control of the suspect. So if I see it's a baton course and it doesn't have those topics, I mean it's immediately denied. I kick it back to him and say, hey, this needs to be corrected, you're missing this and this and this. I might even give him an example, a one that's a good example to use as a kind of a go by. So we'll go back and forth on these outlines, in some cases many times, before it's in a good shape to approve. Then they enter everything in our system, our EDI system, electronic data interchange, certain courses.

Matt O'Deane: 33:39

Again, there's regulations that require all this stuff. So regulation 1070, for example, requires that an instructor of various topics be a certified instructor. I've never been to firearms instructor school. I've been shooting for 30 years, pretty good shot, but you couldn't put me in your firearms course. I'm not a post certified firearms instructor. So if I didn't see that on the resume and the person's in a perishable skills firearms class, then obviously they're done. I said this person's not qualified. So we make sure all those requirements are there. Obviously you can't go to the FTO, you know you can't go to an FTO update class if you're not an FTO. So there's like prerequisites common in academia. You know you have to do part one of the class before you do part two or part three. So we have kind of that stuff.

Matt O'Deane: 34:17

And then if the course requires a safety plan, which if it's anything where an officer can really get injured or killed basically all the perishable skills or anything where there's a manipulative skills they got to do a safety plan and we have a sample publication on what that is.

Matt O'Deane: 34:30

So obviously if you're going into a classroom, if you're going into a less lethal course and you're going to go into a munitions house where the officers are going to be shooting each other with paint bullets that are Filled with paint instead of a bullet. Right, there's no way that's gonna happen without those officers being searched, all their magazines Removed, their gun checked right, we're gonna check their pockets and then they're gonna be given magazines with the paint rounds in it. Right, we don't want to have an accident where an officer leaves alive. We're, as you know, so that all has to be articulated in a safety plan, and there's a hundred different things that they would have to do in that class For me to be satisfied that it's gonna be done safely, because I don't want an officer injured and that's your role.

Steve Morreale: 35:05

Your role that's to guide and kind of manipulate and push whoever is the submitter to improve it until it meets the criterion. That post has that A fair statement.

Matt O'Deane: 35:16

It's a back and it's like I play. We consider we're playing ping pong. You know, they send it to me. It's in my queue. I look at it. I could type comments. You know, please fix this, fix this, address this a safety plan, I go. Okay, where are you gonna teach the class? Well, we're gonna teach it at LAPD and LA sheriffs and Riverside sheriffs, okay. Well, the safety plan needs to have.

Matt O'Deane: 35:33

Who's the person in charge of those three facilities? Where's the nearest hospital, each of those facilities, if I get shot at that facility? Where's the trauma kit? If we're gonna be rolling around on a mat doing arrest and control? What's the procedure to clean these mats Right? Are they cleaned with bleach?

Matt O'Deane: 35:46

You know, I don't want to get some kind of Mercer or some kind of disease from the dirty mat and every single topic. I mean there's quite a bit in a canine course the dog muzzle when they're in the classroom. We don't want to have the dog get scared and bite somebody or things. There's just many, many Variables. Yeah, obviously they have to have a proper ratio, you know. So if you said, hey, I'm gonna teach a firearms class, I'm the only instructor and I'm gonna have 20 students on the line. No way I'm approved. It would be impossible for you to properly watch 20 different shooters. Make sure they're proper technique. You know they're locking their slide back, they're reloading correctly. It's just not gonna happen. That's in that class. I would require a five to one ratio for every five students. I want one instructor stand. So those are just some of the thousands of examples we look for.

Matt O'Deane: 36:28

But once they Get it all done and it meets our qualifications, then it's post approved or post certified and then they have to run it one time before we'll even reimburse them for any kind of Tuitions. And then we'll usually have our QAP. People come in there, our quality assistance program, so it's retired guys like you or me here and they'll go and they'll sit in the back and then they'll sit there for the for the three-day class and they evaluate it. They write very detailed evaluations on the instructors, the facilities. They have the outline in front of them. They make sure that you're following the script, that you're covering what you're saying, that the activities were engaging right, and then they're all master instructors. They all went through a long series of Instruction that post requires for to be an evaluator and then they'll write all these comments hey, it was a good class.

Matt O'Deane: 37:12

You know, we recommend maybe you do this to kind of drive this key point home, or you fix this kind of. You know, I like academia when your dean sits in the back of the class and evaluates one of your courses. Right, are you doing what you're saying you're doing? Or maybe they do it come. You know, promotion time or evaluation time same thing, yes, so we do that. And then, of course, if there's any complaints about a course which is very rare, but if a complaint comes in, hey, I didn't think this was safe, I didn't think this was appropriate. Whatever, they're not teaching what they're supposed to be teaching, I might suspend the course until I can conduct an investigation into that complaint, because we want to make sure all the courses that we put our name on and me in particular, if I'm putting Matt Odine on the bottom of it I want to make sure that it's legit, it's proper.

Steve Morreale: 37:51

So we're talking to Matt Odine and we're talking about training in detail and how it is done in California and how it's certified and Some of the issues that are cropping up that he's hearing from both police chiefs and training officers. Let's just go one more stab at that. When you're talking to police chiefs, besides recruiting and retention, what are their concerns?

Matt O'Deane: 38:12

They have general concerns. I think across the board that just the quality of the people coming into the profession are not like they used to be. This is not just a generalization. I'm there's lots of good people, certainly, but they're not as driven. They just as happy to be a police officer. If it doesn't work out, they'll go to the fire department or they'll go be a paramedic. It seems like 10, 20 years ago there was much more Enthusiasm, if you will, for the job or insert uncertainty that this is what I want to do.

Matt O'Deane: 38:37

Yes, this is what I want to do. Right? They're not finding themselves right because you spend a lot of time and money and energy to get a police officer, from the day they apply to the day they graduate the police academy. You know that could be a year later. You've gone through the entire hiring process right Psychological, medical, paying your investigators, getting all this stuff, paying them to go to the police academy, you know, not so reduced rate. Obviously they're not getting full peace officer pay in most cases, but they're getting compensated, they're getting benefits and things like that, and only to find out that they don't like it. So they're trying to encourage things like explore programs and cadet programs and reserves and kind of develop people younger, developing a pipeline of people, getting them involved at an earlier age.

Matt O'Deane: 39:19

But quite honestly, there's you get a lot of feedback from the defund the police movement in a lot of the large cities in our country. I have a son that's 20 years old and I've honestly thought he would follow in my footsteps and be a police officer and talk to him about it, and he told me just a couple months ago. He says, dad, you know, just listening to all the crap you talk about, no offense, but I don't want to be a police officer. He wants to be a multimillionaire. He says good luck with that. I want you to be a multimillionaire to maybe you can pay off my mortgage and buy me my 69 GTO that I want.

Matt O'Deane: 39:47

How are you gonna become a multimillionaire? He has no actual no plan yet. Yeah, hopefully he comes up with a plan, right, he's just it's gonna occur by osmosis or something. He's not interested in being a cop because he sees all this crap on the news and he sees what the police are going through. And he didn't have the same commitment I did. I mean, I knew in sixth grade that was my only. I only had plan a. I didn't even envision doing anything else. I didn't think of any other thing. That was my only plan. So I don't know what I would have done if I didn't achieve my goal.

Steve Morreale: 40:12

Quite honestly Are you pleased with your role? In this oversight position with policing seems like it's a great transitional position for you.

Matt O'Deane: 40:20

It really is. I tell you, post is a really fantastic organization and I'm not just saying that because I worked there. I mean they really pick and choose the best people from the state. I mean there's over 90,000 police officers in California. It's huge, and there's a very limited. There's only, you know, 30 consultants in a post. So to even be a post consultant, you have to be a lieutenant or hire. When my spot opened, I remember I believe it was me and eight other people going for it, and these are not eight. They were good. I feel very fortunate to obviously to have gotten the job.

Matt O'Deane: 40:47

I think I got it because I was in a training role and I had already used the post databases on a regular basis. I already created a very comprehensive or co-created, you know a very comprehensive three week leadership institute in San Diego County. That's still going to this day San Diego County Regional Leadership Institute. So proud of that. And they turned it over to really good people when I left and it's only gotten better and improved and grown since. So all of that helped me. And then, of course, having my PhD in formal education and of course they liked the teaching experience because at post I teach courses for post as well.

Matt O'Deane: 41:19

I teach a two day course called the training coordinator course where we teach new training coordinators. My partner and I teach it four or five times a year throughout the state to teach them how to do exactly the last question. You asked me how to build a course, exact step by step instructions. How much can you charge? What do you need to do? What qualifications do the instructors need? What facilities do you need? Because some departments want to do training but they're never going to get approved because they don't have a proper facility or safe facility to do it.

Matt O'Deane: 41:47

Post has awesome people and it's very mentally stimulating, especially now, I think, because there's been so many changes. For the first time ever, posts can decertify folks and you hit on something earlier where you have a regulation where cops need to be trained. And at the end of a cycle, when I look at the compliance report, I say hey, you have 100 officers. These six are not in compliance. What gives what happened? Well, they have an excuse. Sometimes it's a good excuse. Hey, you know, matt was gone for the last 18 months. He was deployed in the military serving our country or out of danger, or out of danger or something.

Matt O'Deane: 42:16

Or Matt got shot and he's been out for the last year and a half recovering from his gunshot wounds. So clearly there are good excuses, right. But that has to be documented in their files so that five years later, when we're all gone and they just see that Matt was out of compliance and nobody's going to know. But one of the things that is being discussed now in fact was just discussed at the post commission meeting the other day is now officers can only be decertified for engaging in serious misconduct. There's nine areas that if they do one of those nine things, it could end up getting them decertified after we, after after all their due process right, the investigation, the IA at the department level, then it goes to the advisory board, then it goes to the commission, then if the commission rules against them, they can actually go to an administrative law judge and have an evidentiary hearing. So yeah, there's a lot of steps, obviously, and nobody's gone through that whole process yet. The first two guys went through the first step yesterday. So we'll see how it all plays out. But but the training side of it is not incorporated.

Matt O'Deane: 43:12

I know there are states where at the end of a cycle, if you're out of compliance with your training. They'll say hey, Steve, I know you were busy or busy guy, you didn't shoot. So your peace officer powers are suspended until you get to the range and you shoot and you provide evidence. Does that you shot? Many states are like that. California is not. I think we will be there in a few years. We are going that direction because right now we have no teeth. So what happens if I don't train? I've had chiefs ask me that. What happens if my guys are out of compliance? Matt, what are you going to do? To me I said Well, I'm not going to decertify them, I'm not going to take them off the street. That would be worse potentially. But be advised when this guy does something and you get sued, don't be surprised when you're paying out an extra 5 million or whatever because they made an issue out of it.

Steve Morreale: 43:51

I think you hit on something there too, and that is that so many times even think about accreditation and certification, those kinds of things I'm talking about from clear, from a state accreditation. It is not required, it's voluntary, and I think I hate to impose requirements, but I think if we're going to be seen as a true professional organization, just like hospitals, then you have to go through an accreditation or you can't be a certified police department. You understand what I'm saying and I think you, as the post, you need some meat behind holding people accountable, right setting expectations of holding people accountable and being able to suspend maybe not decertify, but to suspend. So we need to wind down. Matt, I wanted to thank you for being here. We've been talking with Matt O'Deane. He is an adjunct professor, he is a consultant in training for California POST, and we go back a good long way before we leave. In your mind if you had a magic wand and could be the king or the queen for the day, what would you want to add for police departments to be competent?

Matt O'Deane: 44:56

Well, I think the state's going in the right direction. I think that the education requirements are probably one of the biggest things that's changing Right now. To be a police officer in California you only need to go to high school and the profession takes a lot of flack for that because it's a very low bar. So you could maybe not even graduate high school. With the rest of your class you can go back and get the GED. You would be fine that AB89, recent legislated just changed. So the California Community Colleges are working to have where you're going to have to have a degree in modern policing, basically a two-year AA degree or a bachelor's degree in any subject, but a bachelor's level to be a police officer. So that's probably going to be an effect.

Matt O'Deane: 45:31

Obviously, things could change in two years time. I'm guessing all the people that are current police officers would be grandfathered in, but anybody new coming to the profession would have to have two-year degrees. So I would say it'd be a lot easier to get that done when you're 18 years old and you graduate high school and then go to college. When you're 19 and 20, get that AA done, because you can't go to the police academy until you're 20 and a half can't be a police officer in California unless you're 21 years of age when you get sworn in. There's no more 18, 19-year-old police officers. You got to be 21.

Matt O'Deane: 46:00

I'm a huge supporter of that because I'm a big fan of education. But I also know I have worked with people that have multiple master's degrees, and the other partner I work with was a former and eight-year Marine Corps veteran. I would rather work with that Marine Corps veteran every single day of the week than the guy with two master's degrees in some cases. So just having a formal education by itself is no guarantee. No guarantee, but I do see it's been my personal experience that the officers I work with that have some education just seem to be.

Steve Morreale: 46:29

I haven't done scientific studies yet they just seem to be a little bit better in how they talk to people.

Matt O'Deane: 46:35

They quite honestly just seem to get less complaints because they're just a little more socially aware. They know when they need to control their emotions. You want to be intelligent. You want to have emotional intelligence. Somebody yells at me and calls me names. I could care less.

Steve Morreale: 46:47

It's almost impossible to hurt my feelings to be honest with you Whether I'm decent or not, and you know that because when you were my chair you used to yell at me a lot, but I appreciate it.

Matt O'Deane: 46:58

I appreciate you kept me on task. So I would say in a perfect world, if I were king I would say anybody that wants to be a police officer has to maybe register their intent or something when they're 18 years old and they start their education and training when they're 18, that when they're 21, 22. A lot of other countries, like you know in Ireland you're very familiar how detailed it is and advanced it is to be a police officer they almost kind of combine the academia and the practical application from the academy into one large three, four year venture, not just a six month thing. So I think that would go a long way into. Obviously you have a lot of limitations on what you can teach someone in six months. We know this. If they have all other courses, more advanced courses, I think it's all a good thing. I'm just a little concerned that if the officer has no education when they get hired which the way that the proposal is written now they can do it. So now they get hired, now they go to the academy, which is more than a full time job. It's like having a full time job and probably another part time job or full time job on top of that just to keep up with the academics and everything else.

Matt O'Deane: 47:57

Then you're in the field training program. That's incredibly stressful. Your field training officer is probably volunteering you for every crime that occurs to get your skill set up. So you're on your weekends. It's not uncommon they might go into the police department and sit there all day on Saturday just catching up on the reports because they're slower than their counterparts that know what they're doing. So you're going to be hard to go to school at that point. Now you're on probation as a police officer. You're trying to learn everything and not screw up and get fired. Then you got to go to school and get this degree, because if you don't have your degree by the time you reach the end of that 24 months, we won't give you your basic post certificate. Therefore you're fired. Well, you're not. Maybe you're not fired, but you can't be a cop. So unless your department has a position as a dispatcher or something else that you can do, you're not going to be certified as a police officer. So if I were in control I would have all that front loaded, not after they get hired.

Steve Morreale: 48:45

No, I understand and that makes perfect sense, and that seems like a waste of time, energy and money for a state, for a city, for a town and certainly for the person who thought they were launching a career and all of a sudden, the career goes away. Well, Matt, thank you so much for your time and for your energy. Thanks very much for being with us.

Matt O'Deane: 49:02

Well thank you, steve. I love your podcast, love you. Appreciate everything you've done for me in my life. I really do. You're my number one academic mentor. You really know your stuff. So hopefully I'll see you at some more academic conferences down the line, you know, down the road.

Steve Morreale: 49:14

So thank you Down the road. So thank you. We've been talking to Matt O'Deane In California. You've been listening to The CopDoc Podcast. Another episode is now on the books. Thanks very much for listening. Keep listening. We keep growing and appreciate it. We'll have other episodes coming up. Have a good day, Thank you.

Intro-Outro: 49:32

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 CopDoc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.