Las Vegas is Becoming America's Safest City

If we can't contain crime, we're never getting to recidivism, we're never getting to mental health, we're never getting to addiction. We got to get ahead of the curve on the most urgent thing, which is people getting robbed and murdered. We got to handle on that, then we can really, really move forward and help people.

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All right, hello, and welcome to the Mark and Ben Show. Today we have two very, very special guests, Chief Mike Genaro from the Las Vegas Police Department and Sheriff Kevin McMahill, also from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.

And the reason we have these guests is there's been a little controversy lately about donations that I've made to the police department. And it's really a collaboration. You know, we've been working together to kind of make Las Vegas both kind of the safest city in America and the best police, the highest tech.

using technology to make everybody from citizens, the suspects, the police more safe. And it turns out that the people at TechCrunch think that's a horrible idea.

So we thought it would be a great chance to explain what policing is because it's kind of been turned into this cartoon in America where there's these weird reversals of good guys and bad guys and this and that and the other. But it turns out to be maybe the single most important public service that the nation provides

And it's a really hard, complicated, difficult problem. And it's amazing when people do it as well as we do it here in Las Vegas. So with that, I will give a full introductions of our guests. Immediately to my left is Chief Mike Gennaro. Mike is the Chief of Staff to the Sheriff, and then he's been in the Las Vegas Metro PD for 25 years.

which is amazing. He's responsible for internal affairs, for intergovernmental services and for labor relations. So he has like a great feel for the entire force. He's basically been instrumental in everything that we've been doing here in terms of upgrading things.

And before that, he was in the New York Police Department, and interestingly, he was there with Bill Bratton, who kind of famously took New York City from being the murder capital to the safest city in America. And so Mike's got great insight on, you know, what makes policing work and, you know, and what's problematic.

Secondly, to the left of Mike, we have Sheriff Kevin McMahill. He is the eighth sheriff of Las Vegas. He's been in Las Vegas for over 30 years in LVMPD. He served as under sheriff for six years, providing leadership during significant events like the 2020 shooting and the civil unrest that followed.

He served three years in the United States Army before law enforcement. And one thing that I think is important to point out is many of our officers, many of our police came from military service. So when you think about the backgrounds of police, often they're the people who have the biggest feeling of an obligation, who want to serve, who want to protect.

the citizens of the country and the citizens of the city. And that's the bulk of the force. And so when you're thinking about, okay, what are their motivations? Where are they coming from? Like Kevin, that's where it comes from.

So let's get into it. So before we start, so Kevin, if you could just give us kind of a view of like, what is the scope of the Las Vegas Police Department? Like, how many people in the department? How many citizens are you protecting? You know, what are kind of like, how many murders do we have? Like, what's the scope of the challenge?

Yeah, so thanks for having us Las Vegas is a really, really unique city in the sense that when you look at how the police department was built in 1973, we took the city of Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff's Department and merged them together to become the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

They had the wisdom back then to put an elected sheriff over the head of the police department. So the sheriff reports to the people, not the mayor. Exactly right. So the city council, the mayor, the county commission, they don't get to tell me how to operationally run the police department. I'm accountable to the people.

which is very unique in American policing typically. Well, and very interesting because most of the big cities in America, the mayors decided to defund, reduce the budgets of the police department after the whole kind of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter movement. But in Las Vegas, the people didn't want that.

Exactly right. Yeah, it's a really good point because, you know, I know all those chiefs across the country and all the largest sheriffs across the country. And it's really important to know that those police chiefs are really trying really hard. But the truth is, is that mayors and councils and city managers really run the police departments in most of those places. And so that's one of the biggest problems in American policing, if you ask me, but

So I'm also in charge of Clark County and the city of Las Vegas. Clark County is about two, two and a half million people now, the city of Las Vegas, about 1.3, 1.4 million jurisdiction across that. I also run the Clark County Detention Center, which is the largest jail in our state, also the largest mental health facility, the largest addiction treatment center and the largest homeless shelter in the state. Well, another kind of great point that you're not, you know, when it comes to public safety,

It's not just, you know, people robbing each other and that kind of thing. You're dealing with mental health, you're dealing with homeless drug addiction, all these kinds of things. So it's a really broad scope of issues.

Yeah, and you and I have spoke about this long, like many a times, while we're the largest provider of all of those in the detention center, we also know that incarceration doesn't fix mental health addiction or homelessness, right? And so we're in this sort of quandary as police that 911 is the response to everything, but we're not really equipped to deal with all of those things. And so our crime rate, I will tell you, I'm really proud to say our organization is 6,200 people strong.

My budget is about one and a half billion dollars as we sit here today. 90 plus percent of that is salary and benefits of employees. So not a lot of money left over. Well, that's so that's such an important point because, you know, one of the things that I'm getting criticized in this article is well, Ben, you as a private citizen shouldn't give money to the police. Well,

We can't invest in any, you know, there are all these amazing new technological public safety solutions. You can invest in them if 90% is salary and benefits. I mean, like there's no, even if it's a huge savings over time, you can't make the initial investment.

Yeah, 100% right. Today we're sitting at 96 homicides. Last year we ended at 148, which was a 20% reduction in homicide from the year prior. Which is amazing because the FBI statistics just came out and crime was way up. Yeah, we're trying to get below 100. I don't know if that's going to make that goal this year, but I can tell you and we'll talk about a number of things as we progress through here. But the one thing I think that I hope your listeners and your viewers take away from this is

Those are not just numbers, that there's a human life behind every one of those numbers. Every single homicide number that we talk about, sexual assault, we talk about robbery, we talk, whatever it is, there's a family that has been impacted. A mother, a father, a sister, a brother, an aunt, uncle, you name it. Children whose lives will never be the same because some suspect decided to commit a violent crime against the people in our community. And that's why we're partnered up and working so hard together, is to reduce victimization, save people's lives.

Yeah. And that's so important. As you know, I mean, you guys know, I have a lot of friends who came out of prison. And one of the things they all say is, look, hurt people, hurt people. And so, you know, when you stop a murder, when you stop a crime, most of these victims, these are people who are likely to enter a path of crime, these families. And so it creates a whole horrible cycle where people end up, you know, they're a victim and then they're a perpetrator.

I mean, that's a big part of the program that Mike and I work with on Hope for Prisoners, also on the reentry programs that we have for prisoners coming back into our community has given them an opportunity. And that's one of the reasons why our organization is so successful, because you partner with an agency like Hope for Prisoners, right? So you have cops building relationships with people getting out of prison. Right, right.

You know, a lot of people don't expect that, right? But now you're changing people's mindsets and you're helping course correct their future by having that relationship. Yeah. And it's important. And hope for prisoners is an anti-recidivism organization that is kind of closely partnered with LVMPD. Their recidivism rate is much, much lower like I think the national rates in the 70s and their sub 10 percent or something. Less than 10 percent. Yeah.

Sometimes it's the first time any of those people as human beings had anybody invest into them at all. Right. That's part of why it's so successful. Yeah, isn't that mean? It's sad and it's amazing. Look, we, you know, partner with, you know, the folks as they're getting out of prison, that's when they're being introduced to the police, right? So they have this mindset of the police are bad, the police put me here, but then fast forward 30, 60, 90, six months.

They're actually friends and, you know, the mentors in some ways, the cops are, you know, helping a mentor them and they have a great relationship. Um, and then that's a force multiplier for us. Right. So it's just, it's just another component to lowering crime. Yeah. I think it's such a misunderstanding of the general public of, you know, what happens with, uh, kind of police, police and, uh, kind of people who commit crimes and have been to prison.

Well, as you know, I mean, like, and my friends have been like, well, I'm not talking about guys who are in prison for six months, like five, 10, 20 years. And, you know, they love talking to you. You're one of their favorite people. They want to talk to you about everything. Because you're the person who understands, you know, that life, how they got there, what they're trying to do now.

And I see how successful and driven they are to change all the, you know, and to help people, right? I mean, it's amazing. I do. I love having conversations with them here in their stories. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's such a, it's such an important kind of set of work.

So one of the things, so when you look at victims, how do they break down economically? Are they rich? Are they middle class? Are they poor? Who are the victims of these homicides and robberies and these kinds of things?

You know, that's a difficult question to answer to give you specific numbers because it changes generally weekly, monthly, yearly. But what I will tell you is, and one of the things that we very first talked about, if you remember this, was that in Las Vegas, we have 10 areas of our town that we identify as chronic persistent hotspots.

Areas where crime has been occurring since the and I'm going into my 35th year of policing They've been the same chronic criminal persistent hotspots for all of those years And so what we've we talked about initially was you know If you were to go in and and have the ability to change the crime picture in those neighborhoods and most of the time they are minority communities and they are lower economic income type communities and The the misnomer and the mistake that we made for so long

was that we didn't realize that there are far more good people in those communities that want police to come to their community, to protect them, to give them the opportunity to thrive in those communities, then there are bad folks. And so we had to change our mindset many years ago about looking at the entirety of the community as the problem and realizing there are individuals within a community that are causing a problem and laser focus and targeting on those folks. But I will tell you, in Las Vegas specifically,

Roughly 75 to 80% of all of our crime occurs in those 10 areas. And if when the initial conversation that we had was if we could envelop those communities in a technology bubble and make it virtually impossible to commit crime, think about all the lives that we would be saving and reducing of the victimization. And that's where you've been absolutely critical in helping us change the narrative.

Yeah, it's so amazing. You know, my wife grew up in an area like that. And the thing that I learned is your career path if there are no police is crime. There is no other there. There is no go to school. You can't even get to school. Well, the only lawn or there is the gangs. Yeah. No police. Right. Right. So you're complying with

the wallessness in some way. Yeah, survival after that, really. Yeah, no, so amazing. And, you know, it's funny. I was looking at this reporter's background. You know, she went to very fancy school. She studied abroad. Did you guys study abroad? Right.

This is a so ironic thing about kind of people criticizing the police. It's these rich people who have their own security or they live in a neighborhood with no crime or what have you kind of imposing on poor people trying to make it like a life that's impossible.

You know, it's very, very frustrating, but it's exciting what we're doing. So I want to get into kind of how I kind of got started with it. So, you know, I met Mike and I was learning about Vegas PD and Vegas is an interesting crime.

kind of situation because people visit Vegas to commit crimes. Like, you don't just deal with the people of Las Vegas, you deal with the crime tourists. And one of the interesting stories you told me was when during COVID, the hotels lowered their rates. Correct. And then why? Dramatically. Yeah. Dramatically said, tell us that story because that's a crazy story. They dropped their rates to

$100 right a night where some would be eight nine hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, and then it just created this Wallisness inside these properties and there was fighting and they literally

come to Vegas and just basically commit crimes. And then they would just go out. Because it was so cheap. It was right. It was cheap. And they were getting sweets. And they're saying this beautiful property. And then next thing you know, there's like metal detectors going up. And it just really, well, during COVID, it wasn't a lot of crime on the strip, right? Because it was closed. So there was a shift to different types of crimes, right? Now you had more child abuse cases. We had more residential burglaries, things along that line. So there was a shift.

But the crowds that were coming were very challenging for our cops to have to deal with as well as security personnel up and down the street. Yeah. And so amazing that with you've got kind of the crime in Vegas, you've got people coming to Vegas to commit crimes because whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, not true for our listeners. Like that doesn't mean you come to Vegas, commit a crime and not go to jail. You go to jail.

But you have the highest murder solve right in the country. And so, how are you able to, you know, why is Vegas like, you know, so much better policed in terms of actually being able to solve crimes than other places? You know, you've got such a variety of complicated crimes. I think one thing that people kind of overlook with Vegas is,

I look at Vegas as a city within a community, right? And people kind of dismiss how strong our community is here and how hard this police department has worked to develop a relationship with that community. You know, you look at the old stick and whistle cop, right? That this cop walking down the street and that cop

his feet are hitting that pavement every day, and he knew that neighborhood, and he knew the cars, he knew the people. It was an intimate relationship between the cop and the community. And our organization, going back many, many years, and the sheriff, he has helped develop a lot of programs that we still have today that are even stronger.

When a crime happens, someone in the community knows who did it. And if the community doesn't want to talk to the cops, well, you're going to have a low salary right there. And you're going to have more crime. And the fact that we have such a great relationship with the community that really helps drive that solve rate up, because people are willing to come forward, willing to talk to us, they want to be a lot more compliant.

Whereas in other cities, right off the bat, they don't have that advantage. And I'm sure you have some other reasons as well. But I think that's a really huge driving factor for why we're so successful.

Actually, that brings me to Kevin. You told me a story, which was one of the reasons I really wanted to kind of get involved, you know, with the Las Vegas Metro PD was, you know, after the riots, you know, the kind of riots started all over America and people were protesting. And the approach here was community policing. You went into the community and you gave a talk and you could you relay like, you know, what you did, how that talk went, how the community reacted.

Yeah. And I think that Mike's right on that, you know, we've, we've for well over 20 years been working on trying to find a way to build trust in communities where none existed. And, and lots of different programs, one of which is we call the safe village program that had just dramatic results in, in West Las Vegas and our so-called black part of town. You know, those investments really paid off, but that's the hard part of police work because, you know, putting handcuffs on somebody and taking them to jail, that's simple.

We're all exceptional with that as well, which is part of why homicide solverates are good is because we have an entirety of a department approach to it. But the part that's hard is how do you go into communities and develop a relationship where none exists? And then how do you continue to foster that relationship so that you can actually get to a place where trust is built? And we've worked on that for so long. And then when George Floyd happened, the first thing that I did was stood up and you don't need

an investigation to tell you anything different. You don't kneel on an African American man's neck or any man's neck, by the way, for nine minutes. You just don't do it, right? And you don't treat a human being in the manner that that officer treated George Floyd. You just don't do it. And so it's not hard for me as the sheriff, the chief of the law enforcement organization here to stand up and call out

bad behavior when you see it. And so A, I think the community believed that from us, but also I asked a whole lot of people in the community to make sure that as we continue and we dealt, look, we had lots of things happen in our community the same way, but not, we didn't get our community burned down like Minneapolis or downtown taken over like Seattle or Portland or any of these other places because

It wasn't just me, but it was people throughout this community that said, that's not our police department. They stood up and they believed in us. They stood with us and they went out and they made sure that that everybody in this community understood that Las Vegas is not any one of those other cities. And we don't tolerate that type of behavior by our police.

Right. Right. You know, it's just remarkable, you know, how different it was here. And it's such a blueprint, I think. And that's, you know, like one of the things we're trying to do together is build the ultimate kind of policing blueprint for the country, not just for Las Vegas. And that's why, and that's kind of where kind of technology started to come in. So kind of when I heard all those stories, you know, I, I went to, who's the, who's the, the CTO at LVMPD? Oh, who's James Kilberg?

I said, look, let's make you the technologically most advanced police department in the country.

Part of it is technology, but one of the first things we ran into was culture. And you came to me, we had an issue with 911 operator attrition. And maybe you could tell us about that. Yeah, we had at our 911 center, we had 50% vacancy rate. So 911 employees were showing up to work and we couldn't even have them leave because we didn't have anybody to cover the next shift.

And it was just reading this, you know, this culture of they didn't want to come to work. We couldn't hire anybody. And it was, you know, it was very dim and, you know, fortunately. And you had personnel budget.

Right. But the work environment, it's stressful. I mean, you're getting calls. People are dying and these kinds of things, a very, very stressful job. So what was the kind of cultural implication that caused so much attrition? You know, it was, I think, a lack of recognition.

by leadership. They had broken equipment in there. And really, nobody walked around and said, hey, what do you need? So that was one of the first things we did when the sheriff took over. We went in there and said, hey, what do you guys need? And look, the chairs were fucked up and the keyboards were fucked up. So there were things visibly that we knew we could change.

Uh, and in talking to them, you know, they were like, we don't even have an ice machine. I was like, you don't have an ice machine. Yeah. Ice when I tell people that they're like ice, like did they have like, you know, did they, were they so organized like now? Like, just ice, you know, like for like, for your coke. Yeah. And, uh, and like.

you know, they said they had their own coolers with ice and they were like scoop cut, right? So that was just another component of the atmosphere, right? The atmosphere and that just breaded this negative type of culture. And then they were like, yeah, you know, the coffee machines always broken. And it's funny, because you and I talked when I was, we were talking about the coffee, you were like, let's get a new machine, change the coffee, change the culture. Right? Like that was, I was like, I need that on a t-shirt. Simple. Yeah.

Yeah, let's kind of pull a espresso cappuccino. Forget Mr. Coffee, we're going full out. But it was changing the leadership down there was instrumental. And hearing out some of the concerns that they had and look, there were some low hanging fruit that we were able to change to make their life a little bit better, remove some policies that were archaic.

and just create a different atmosphere and making sure that leadership was in alignment with their supporting the new direction that we were going.

coming through with what we said. If we said you were gonna get this, well, then we had to deliver on that, right? Because there was a lot of trust in our new pathway forward. But if we didn't deliver, well, then we were gonna be like, okay, you don't care and you just come down here giving us lip service. But really coming through on everything that we delivered, hearing them out, sent out a lot of surveys, listening to what they had to say. And now look, we're 100% staffed.

And that was like within a year, we got the staffing up, 9-1-1 calls are answered in less than 10 seconds. And what was it, you know, at the bottom? It was like, was it four minutes? What was it? Yeah, worse than that. I mean, we had some times 9-1-1 calls were six, seven minutes. 3-1-1 non-emergent calls would be four or five hours at times.

Yeah, so I mean, you know, it speaks so much to, you know, we got to care about the people who are trying to save lives or everybody's lives in jeopardy. I mean, like this is the thing that's so I think core to what we're trying to do in Vegas is, you know, just coffee, ice.

six minutes to 10 seconds. Imagine you're on the other end of that 911 call, you know, and you're bleeding out or like whatever is happening. Right. Kid drowned, right? You need some sort of. You're on hold six minutes. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, it was that. So we got them fully staffed. And as you recall, there is, you know, a lot of vacant area inside that, that

communication center, and the plan was to eventually add more 911 terminals for call takers. And then we eventually got staffing up to where, okay, this is a reality now.

But we couldn't get the funding to get these, these computer terminals. And, you know, we were looking out to a lot of political figures to help us fund this. And that was in a reality and that's something that, you know, you and Felicia did, you came in and you bought all those 911 call terminals for us.

I think people don't understand you know you have an operation up and going and the way public budgets work you know you've got you can handle today but investing in anything in the future even something as simple as coffee is just much more difficult like that that process is going to be a long time so if

You know, a citizen like myself can step in. We can just like once we make the investment, then we'll see the return and then like everything gets better. But like it's that initial investment that's so hard through the normal process. Yeah, he can attest more to that. But yeah, it's almost it is impossible sometimes or if you can allocate money, but you're taking from somewhere else. Right. Right. So you're not really making a difference.

Right. Right. And it's, you know, like very, very small investment, you know, so many, so many lives saved from our coffee machine. We talked about the coffee machine. You got the coffee machine, but we couldn't find the $2,000 for to get the water to the ice machine, right? That took us like two months to find, and we didn't want to ask, right? But we have to try to find two grand to get the water to the ice machine, right?

But now we're building a groundwork of it. Yeah, right. Like, you know, 9-1-1 should be a highly respected, great job. And look, the men and women that work down there are the first responders, right? When someone calls for help, they're the first ones there and they do a remarkable job. And it's great to be able to give them that recognition and to let them know that, hey, there are people out in the community that you don't even know that

really appreciate what you're doing, and that's why you got these great things. You can't really oversell, though, that just, I mean, we joke about coffee machines and ice machines and all of these things, additional. But you helped us change the culture there.

And changing the culture there allowed for us to have happy employees again, people that they love to come to work, but they're working in a challenging environment and the building had gone to hell. And you just helped us get us back to a place and deliver on the word that we said we were going to do in a far more rapid fashion than we ever would have been a. In fact, if we would have relied on normal budgetary process, we wouldn't be where we're at today.

Today, now I can deliver a service to the citizens of Las Vegas that I would have never been able to deliver to them because we change the environment. People want to work there again. And when you go down there now, they're happy. Yeah. That says a lot. So important, you know, when you think about technology, it really starts with the people, right? Like, so if the people aren't in the right place, you could add whatever technology you want. It's still not going to, it's still not going to do anything. And so, so key.

But let's get into the technology. So the first program we started was the drone program. And I think to the normal person they might not know, why did drones matter in policing? How does that affect safety? How does that change? Like drones help us become more efficient and effective.

And we can respond faster, save lives, and deescalate situations much quicker. You have a drone that could be overhead in 30 seconds to a minute. And what is critical in policing is real-time, accurate information intelligence, right? That real-time intelligence. If someone calls 911 and says that there's a guy walking through the cul-de-sac, and he's armed with a rifle, right?

and we could send a drone up in that cul-de-sac, and we see that the guy is actually dragging a broomstick, okay? Right now, there, we could have just saved a citizen's life, okay? Because we have a drone overhead now, we're still gonna handle it very tactically, but now we know, okay, it's not a rifle, we could zoom in, it's clearly, it's a broomstick, okay? Completely different situation where before guys are gonna roll down their cul-de-sac,

guns drawn, and it could easily result in an officer-involved shooting. So the de-escalation part of that, and the safety for everybody in that community, just off that one type of call, is profound. Yeah. It's profound. Yeah, and you have. I mean, you know, look, people get scared. They report things that aren't true. And unknowingly, right? Yeah. I mean, we joke about even, you know,

We, people are out on the, you know, our own folks are out at a crime scene. Yeah. Typically the first two phone calls we get, the information's not accurate. We're getting it from our own people. It's not that they're lying, but things evolve. Situations evolve. The facts change, right? And then, okay, now you got the whole story. Right. So when someone from, you know, calling 911, they're scared. It's their perception. It's whatever it is. It's not right.

And from an officer perspective, like, what is it like to, you know, if you don't have the intelligence and you walk into a situation, your information is that the person's arm. Do you have a gun in your pocket? Like, like, what does that feel like? You know, what are you thinking about, you know, in terms of, you know, your life, your family, like solving? Because, you know, there's all these things. Oh, you know, he should have deescalated it. He should have shot him in the leg and so forth. But like, what is it?

You know, what does that feel like from the kind of other person? If you, you know, you look at it from an officer standpoint, going down the cul-de-sac with that same scenario, right? He's going down with the information that he was given, what he knows at that time.

And you're going down there, and you try and pre-plan, and you're going to de-escalate as much as possible. And that guy turns to you with that brim stick, and now it results in an officer-involved shooting. And now you have a dead citizen that did not have a firearm.

And that cop is going to have to live with the fact that he shot someone that was not armed, right? And even though that would be a legal shooting, because based on his perception and what he knew, but what people don't understand, and I did the officer-involved shootings in the interviews for well over 100 officer-involved shootings, people don't realize how it affects that cop.

and how it affects his family and his kids. So it's so profound. The last thing a cop wants to do is have to shoot someone, and then you shoot someone that's not even armed. So now that drone is overhead and it alleviates so much of that stress on incident commanders, on cops, on a community. And then if he does have a gun, now we can slow things down. It's confirmed. We have eyes on him. You don't got to put anybody in danger. You don't even have to send a canine dog.

And we could just evaluate and we have time on our side now to really determine how to handle this. And that is such a, you know, you can't put a price tag on that.

Yeah, amazing. And then, so then we have another program with technology from a company called Flock Safety, which is, you know, we've got, there are a lot of cameras in Vegas, but this really enhances how you use them. Maybe you can describe, you know, how that technology works. Yes. So the Flock cameras are hooked up to major intersections.

and their license plate readers, as well as they could, you know, look for a red vehicle with a smashed out red taillight, for example, right, if it was utilized in a crime. And we get a large number of flocksets that help us find murder suspects, stolen vehicles, robbery suspects, where, you know, there's not a cop with that intersection and the vehicle goes through and it's like, okay, flock got the vehicle and

Now you can have a drone go out overhead. And this is one thing that's great because it, police response, a lot of issues with policing and what the critics were saying is, okay, if Metro was looking for a red car that was using a robbery, right? Now you have cops stopping all these red cars. Right? So now you have the mindset we were talking before, right? So, but now I think your arm was in a robbery.

You're like, Hey, why are you coming up to my car with your gun drawn? Bad things happen. And now all of a sudden you have what's the type that typically say a shooting from really what could have been an unnecessary stop. But with the drone, not even the right car, not even the right car, but it fits a description. But now with when you utilize both technologies, a flock found the vehicle. And now you have a drone overhead that's like, Hey, this is the car right here.

You bypass all those unnecessary police interactions, and now you have a very calculated response on a suspect vehicle, where we would never have that without those two technologies.

Yeah. It's so, you know, people overlook that because, you know, you get these, the press will interview a, you know, a citizen who was pulled over for the wrong reason. And they're like, wow, as profiled as this, I was that. But like in a zero information environment, all you know is a car, a light out.

the race of the suspect may or may not be the correct race this and that the other you know that's such a different situation than if you have an intelligence program with technology then all the sun like these things go away and you know people are.

You know, the solution isn't the worst solution is less police. The right solution is better intelligence, you know, which gets you better policing. So it's just so interesting and amazing how it's worked here in Vegas. Actually, Mark, why don't I let you have been doing all the talking?

So I think there's been a great discussion so far. So a couple of clarifying questions I think people might find really interesting. So one is when most people I think think of drones, they think of like the predator drones flying overhead in the Middle East or something like that. Like is that what you guys are talking about or you guys talk about something different?

Yeah, no, we're not talking about that at all. Although, you know, I am keenly interested at some point in getting those more capable type of drones and expanding that into our search and rescue and our surrounding mountainous areas where I have to commit, you know, officers and helicopters to go do that kind of stuff. I think there's absolutely use for drone as we move into that arena as well. But we're talking about we use drone operations in a lot of different areas. Right now we have deployed

Drone as a first responder where we have we basically treat it like a canine unit. So the drone operator will work with a uniformed police officer. They'll go out to a hot call. They'll stop short of the actual scene, launch the drone overhead. The operator will continue to operate and then the uniform police officer will start to provide real time intelligence to the rest of the responding officers as they're out there. That's been up and running now for about

Well, three or four months and some of the results have just been absolutely fantastic. The officers in the field love what it is they're doing. We also use drones in SWAT operations where we have a glass break capability on some of those drones as well. We'll drive them up, break the window out so you don't have to put a police or a SWAT officer up into a place where they could potentially be shot.

They'll they'll do entries into a home before I have to commit a human body into the home. These drone operators have gotten so good they'll fly up into addicts now and they have the capabilities that we just never had before. And so the whole intent there is making sure that we save the lives of our SWAT officers before they have to go in there. But also

You'd be surprised at how often we're able to communicate to a suspect through a drone or we make entry, we take a door, make entry with the drone and the suspect just gives up because the drone is in the house. We have a drone dog that we use for explosive and chemical detective, I'm sorry, chemical and explosive residue detection.

We have drone operations and a lot of different aspects of our organization that has just been utilized to really minimize the risk to not only our officers, but the suspects involved in that.

You know, they're used all the time now for public safety at large scale events, right? F1, these drones are up buzzing around all day, all night covering such a vast area, checking rooftops, looking for, you know, potential snipers or people that don't belong in certain areas. So large scale events, we're using these drones now at every single one of them.

Yeah, and you guys highlighted this, but I think it's really important for people listening to really understand this and tell me if I have this right, which is if you guys have to field a human being with a badge and a gun to get eyes on a situation, you have an inherent risk every time, you know, an officer has to enter a convenience store in the middle of the night, right, or has to enter a home or this potential home invasion or even just gets a call on domestic disturbance. If you're saying an officer with it with eyes and a firearm, you have inherent danger in every such interaction.

that something is going to go horribly wrong. And if the purpose of that interaction is just to understand what's happening and you can send in a drone instead, you not only are potentially saving your officer's life, you're potentially saving the lives of innocent people in that context. And in fact, ironically, also quite possibly the criminals themselves. Is that right?

100%. Yeah, that's exactly, you know, I mean, there are still going to be certain times where we have a say a hostage rescue where we have to go in immediately with officers regardless of what happens, trying to save that hostage's life. You know, we have a number of those every year. But even in those cases, there is often times an opportunity to deploy a drone before we get there to try to give that immediate intelligence to those SWAT officers as they have to enter. And so we try to use that technology to limit the exposure of both

the officers and the suspects alike, and it's been wildly successful in our organization.

You know, the latest thing that we're getting ready to deploy is kind of new 911 technology. And Mike, maybe you can talk about, okay, you know, what is that technology? And then when we add it to, you know, flax safety, to the drone program and to your shot spot or technology, like, and you put that all together, you know, what are we looking forward to in the future?

Yeah, so the new dispatch technology, the 911, prepared 911. So essentially right now when someone calls 911, it goes to a 911 call taker. They're receiving that call, getting that information from the PR or the person that's calling. And then that information then gets put out to a dispatcher, and then that dispatcher puts it out to the police officer.

with this new technology, soon as someone calls 911, the officer in the field is going to be able to hear that 911 call come in as it's actually coming in. Oh, wow. So again, act like fast, right? Because the faster the officer can respond, the faster we could start saving lives. So if you think of this as a, let's say an active shooter or a robbery in progress, right?

Because what happens is if the cops driving down the street and there is a shooting at a gas station and it's a white car, that cop could drive right past that white car and not know that was the suspect. But with this technology, as the call is coming in, the cops hearing there was just a shooting at ABC gas station and the suspects are leaving in a white four door car.

he's actually hearing it real time as it's coming in before the dispatcher even puts it out. So now that cop can immediately get eyes on that suspect vehicle or go immediately render aid, whatever has to happen, but it's immediate. Right. If you also think about it from this perspective,

So with these X10s that we're going to be deploying. So imagine the scenario Mike just just painted a gunshot goes off shot, spotter detects it or an LPR from flock goes off. And we have a pre positioned drone that launches because of the other technology tells him, hey, go here.

Now, back in our real-time crime center, we're going to have a police officer capable of piloting that drone, giving real-time intelligence within 30 seconds to a minute of an incident that's occurring. Every police officer that's responding here through prepared 911 will be able to listen to the real-time 911 call as they're responding to this, hearing what the PR is telling our dispatch, so that lag time of

A minute, three minutes is removed on the most critical calls that we have when our officers are responding. That is an absolute game changer in our world. Amazing. Absolutely. And one thing the listeners may not understand is when that drone is up,

Every police officer who's responding has that feed on their phone. So they all have this intelligence company. So everyone's getting this real-time intelligence. So it's like, it's multi-layered, right? As you're describing the technology, just like policing, right? There's so many different moving parts to it. So when you have all this technology coming together in one city, I mean,

would love to have zero crime, right? So now you have all of this technology yet with the core foundation of community policing, which we've always had. So when you put it all together, I mean, we're, we're hoping to have literally the most dynamic city yet the safest city. Yeah. It's just amazing. I mean, if Vegas becomes the safest city, that'll be the most incredible thing.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but it's not crime. You know, and Ben, the truth is, is I have a lot of employees, the vast majority of them that really believe we can get there. I think that's a, I mean, the belief in what you have brought to our police department, the both of you have brought to our police department.

There's this buzz and excitement, I guess, because I'm not really a technologist by any stretch of the imagination. But I can tell you, the excitement that I hear from these folks about these technologies is really palpable out there within the workforce.

Amazing, and we kind of had a better place to deploy it because it starts with the community policing, the trust, and then you add the technology to that and we could do something really special. So Mark, do you have some other questions?

Yeah, so you know, you guys alluded to, you know, many other cities in the country are dealing with a lot of these same challenges. And you know, I can't help but note, you know, obviously there's been a just vigorous debate disputes over the last five years on, you know, sort of the nature of policing in a lot of cities. And you know, you have cities maybe like Chicago that may be going in the other direction, which is they've deliberately like turned off shot spotter.

as an example. So maybe you guys could help us understand the stuff that you guys are doing in Vegas and the implementation of these technologies and the change to the methods and all the benefits that we've been talking about. If you look at the list of the other 50 big cities in the US, would your expectation be that as you prove it, all those other cities can do all the same things you're doing? Or do you think that that, for whatever set of reasons, is just not practical or possible?

That's a great question. And so as a sheriff, but also as a chief of a major city, I happen to be fortunate enough to be member of both major city chiefs association, which is the 58 largest cities in the US and Canada, as well as major county sheriff's association, which is the equivalent for all of the largest sheriff's department.

I can tell you that, you know, we meet three or four times a year. We share notes. We all try to duplicate the things that work in a variety of different communities. Some are more successful than the others, but what I will tell you is, is that I think the answer to your question is unfortunately not because

We don't have all across this great United States of ours, people like the two of you that are willing to go in and help out from a budgetary perspective. But also, we've had the opportunity to learn so much from both of you in talking about how you approach business. I have 6,200 employees. I run a very large organization and getting the opportunity to bounce things off of Ben here has been

invaluable to me, number one. But I think the challenge is, is that every single one of these organizations would love to be able to say they have the technologies that we do. But in a reality, the budgetary processes that most large cities have, as we know, you know, for a long time they were cutting. They lost the faith of their police, which is a horrible thing because if, you know, cops can come choose to come to work and do nothing.

And if you do nothing, nothing happens, right? They call that the blue flu. Yeah, exactly. And so we don't suffer from that here, but I believe that as this technology catches on, much like we've seen with flock, the LPR, I know the city of Las Vegas is moving to the buy some for their marshal services right now.

Um, there's no doubt about it. There'll be a slower implementation of these types of programs across the United States. They're just not going to be able to get to them as rapidly as we are. But we're going to prove it's going to work. And I think, uh, more and more municipalities will, we'll find the people that, that are like you, uh, both that really want to help make their community safe because literally lives depend on it. Yep.

Good. And then second question, if you guys haven't answered this, is what's on your wish list? And of course, it's not your job that hopefully our companies will be able to come up with the ideas for technology. But what's on your wish list for pressing issues where you're like, wow, I wish we could do X and we haven't figured out how to do it yet.

So I'll give you one. I really believe that some of this AI here in the new future can have a tremendous impact on what has caused significant challenge for me as the sheriff. And one of those is in the body redaction. Our body camera redaction

technology. So as it stands now, I had to create an entire unit of 12 people to deal with our public records requests that come in and I'm bound to bias. Every state has different laws on what you can release. So if I have to scrub out an individual's face, I have to have a detective watch that entire body worn camera video to make sure we redact that throughout the entire process.

That technology can't be all that difficult to develop to get us to a place where I don't have to have real cops doing tedious work to remove faces, addresses, names, things that were said inside of that. And then the other one, quite frankly, is there's a technology that we utilize to solve a lot of crimes and that's cell tower dumps.

So we'll take an individual cell tower. Their cell phone is in the in it hits when let's say we have a crime series that's occurring. We may have a cell tower that hits in Henderson, another one in North Las Vegas, another one. Three or four here in in Las Vegas. Criminals don't know geographic boundaries, but you can imagine the amount of cell phone data that we get when we get that through subpoena. And then we have to manually go through all of this to try to find the same telephone number.

But if we could get to the place where that technology is able to take that sometimes literally millions of cell phone numbers that were there, to sort of go through it and give us a report that says, hey, these seven telephone numbers, at the date and time that you're looking for, we're in all of these specific locations, it helps us develop leads. Now, it doesn't develop probable cause, let me be clear on that. But what it does do is it points us into a place where

Those individuals were in those locations when these major crimes occurred. And so we can rule them in or continue our investigative efforts to help resolve those series in a much more rapid fashion. And we do that already. We solve most of our robbery series very rapidly because of some of that type of effort, as well as just, look, I'd be remiss to say,

We have exceptional people that work here at Metro. Our detectives are fantastic. The relentless effort in follow up and follow through is exceptional. The leadership is exceptional. And all those support things are great, but technology can be utilized to more rapidly get through some of the challenges of data that we have in the very near future. And I think that's going to be a game changer as well. Yeah. The second one sounds like a very easy solve for us. The first one said will be

easy soon. There's probably, we got to go back and look at that. I think that would now be a straightforward application now to just say, yeah, these faces need to be scrubbed out of this entire video sequence and just have it happen automatically. It should be very easy, you know, those kinds of things. Or even identify, you know, identify the unique faces in the thing and just let you point and click which ones you want to enter out. That should be easy.

So a couple of broader picture things questions. So I see these graphs, you can tell me this is right, but homicide solverates have been dropping nationwide over for a very long time. Like the percentage of homicides where there's ultimately a solution and hopefully a convicted criminal has been dropping. It's like falling in half over the last 30 years or something like that. Is that like, yeah, what's happening?

This is not a Vegas-specific question. Not true in Vegas. Vegas is 94%. Right. Okay. Well, there's a question. Why is it so high in Vegas and why is it falling in so many other places?

I think Mike alluded to some of it earlier. You know, there's a lot of things I would tell you that go into that secret sauce of solving these. And I think it's important for you to understand is that means that you don't get away with homicide here. And that has a sort of downstream effect on criminals to understand that if you're going to come to Las Vegas and commit these types of crimes, you're going to get caught.

That's a big part of it. Whereas you look at other cities where they have maybe a 30% solve rate, the individuals that are out there on the street, they're not afraid of getting caught because the cops are never getting them. That is attributed to what Mike talked about on our literally decades, couple of decades long investment in developing trust in places that it doesn't exist.

But you can't take away the fact that we also had really sort of changed the mindset that our approach to homicides is not just that a homicide detective owns that case now. When we have a homicide in our jurisdiction, or in the case of our new shooting team, you will see that we have a whole of agency approach. That means that patrol cop that's out there on the street, that works that neighborhood, knows that community better than any detective ever will.

The only people that know the community better than the cop that works in that community are the people that live in that community. So that relationship between those beat cops and the community. So let me just give you a simple example of a homicide that we solved a number of years ago based on this effort was when I was working in 2010 as the captain of West Las Vegas, predominantly black part of town, we had about 13 homicides. The solve rate was exactly a guess.

zero, not a single homicide had been solved. And there were a number of detectives that said, well, and, and for I just have to admit, this was what was said was, no, it's self-cleaning oven. Today's suspect, tomorrow's victim. And I just didn't, I just, that didn't sit, sit well with me.

And so we actually introduced a patrol officer who had been working over there for years to go down and look at those homicide cases that were unsolved in our community. And he knew the vehicle that was used because it was a distinctive white van with a teardrop window in the back. He knew who drove that and where that van was that night, they were able to go and solve that first case.

We have an entirety of, of organization approach that we all own that homicide. And that's part of why, but I'll still tell you, those detectives are relentless. They're led well. They give a damn and they really, truly believe it's their job to bring the worst of the worst, uh, to the justice and they'd never, never, never let those cases go.

I mean, you have to put in perspective here what the sheriff just said. Some of these agencies have a 30% closure rate, right? Or success rate. That means criminals committing homicides have a 70% chance of getting away with it. Like, just to put that in perspective, that's an incredible number.

Right. So to your point, if you let a community get into that state, many more bad things are going to happen. Of course. You can't let it get to that point. So this is a related question. So Mike, I'm really curious your NYPD experience. So one of the arguments that a lot of the reform people made in the 2010s that led to a lot of changes in a lot of places in the US

One of the arguments was actually the New York example is not a good example. So the famous storywright is New York City had this massive explosion of crime, wrap up in crime in the 70s through the 90s, and then Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Bretton, or Chief Bretton, and later Bloomberg. And then all of you guys implemented a set of changes to how policing operated in New York City, and then that led to this incredible reduction in crime to the point where

I mean, I walked through Central Park in 2015 in the dead of night, completely by myself, and it was just wonderful. It felt completely safe. I got to the point where New York City at least felt like it was just incredibly safe, and then there's been this explosion of crime and violence ever since.

But the argument went, it's like, okay, was that due to changes in policing? Or was that just kind of like the tides, which is like, okay, you had the crack epidemic and it sort of came and went. And so crime, of course, is going to ramp up and back down anyway. And then also the economy was doing bad in the 70s and then was doing much better than 90s and 2000s. And so of course, crime is going to be worse for the bad economy and it's going to go away with the good economy and so forth.

Like basically the critique or the argument was all these policing changes didn't actually drive that massive decline in crime. And so therefore, if you stop doing those things, you could actually keep to a low rate of crime. When you see somebody make that argument, what's your response to that? I can tell you, before Bratton was the police commissioner, if a homicide happened in a certain part of town, that captain

really didn't have to answer many questions about that homicide, right? But what he started doing, one of the things he started doing was holding area command captains accountable for crime.

You know, why did that homicide occur? Was it a problem house? Should you have known about it? Were there problem people there? And they really started drilling down, holding these captains accountable, which really was a completely different business model for that profession, right? It was almost like a corporate structure now where it was like, hey, you're going to come in and you're going to have to answer for these numbers, which was kind of unheard of before.

And then out on the street, there was the expectation that it started when he was over the transit authority. You know, when I was a kid and then going on the train, countless people just hopped those terminals, right? They weren't paying for it. And then all the sudden, there was the expectation that you're going to start arresting people for hopping those turnstiles.

And lo and behold, the guys that were up in the turnstiles were guys that had firearms. Those guys were potentially going to do murders. Those guys were the ones doing the robberies. So this stop and frisk, they expected us to go out and stop people, put your hands on people. If you saw people loitering on a corner, whether it was blasting music or smoking dope, whatever it was, they wanted it addressed.

you know, Bill Bratton even came into, you know, the academy when I was there and he referenced the broken windows theory and he said, look, these environments breed more, right? You have to have an environment that is going to breed success for this community. You can't have people hanging out on the street corner. You can't have people hop in turn styles. We can't have graffiti on the walls.

It's got to be uncomfortable for criminals, but comfortable for the community and then the community will thrive. And we had such a huge impact and, yeah, you were responsible for how many people you stopped, cars you stopped, but it had a profound impact on

I would say the overall crime, but also getting to know the people in the neighborhoods because we were a lot. We were out. We were walking these neighborhoods. We were, you know, through the projects and you knew, you know, your allies and foes and it was a completely different mindset.

Then when I hear about it now, I'm shocked because I'm like, wow, it was so different when I was there. And nobody in a million years would think about hopping a turnstile or causing issues on a subway platform. And it just didn't happen before. They'd be arrested. And it just kind of goes back to that broken windows theory.

And so, and then basically what's happened, I think you tell me this is right. It's like those changes are reversed. Is that all those? Yeah, you know, the stop and frisk policy and, you know, all these, these policies and expectations that were put forward were eventually stopped. Yeah, which has led to in retrospect, predictable consequences.

I mean, police matter, right? Yeah, actually, Mark, one thing that's interesting about what you brought up and about Mike's background is Mike was deep cover for 10 years, you know, with the Italian mafia, with MS-13, with like real, you know, the most sophisticated criminals. And I think people's perceptions of, you know, these people who comment on it, whatever, you know, economists sitting in their nice offices,

have not interacted with criminals, and so their assumption is, you know, a criminal's motivation is they can't afford a loaf of bread, and so they're going to go rob a store. That's generally not true, and Mike, maybe you talk about like, you know, one, there's a variety of criminals, but, you know, it also is a career.

Yeah, I mean, you have career criminals, right? And we have a unit, the career criminal section, they follow career criminals. You know, some of these guys, 80% of their adult life, they've spent incarcerated. And that's what they know. And to circle back kind of to the hope for prisoners,

You kind of hope they would head into this whole preferred in this program because it's just what they know and it's what they do. And it's, you know, it's unfortunate, but it's how do you break that cycle, right? How do you break that mindset? And that's where it's such a multi-layered approach to try and get through to change some of these folks.

You know, sometimes it's also, if you look at it, it's really generational. I mean, we see this all the time, you know, it's where oftentimes where you were born, what opportunities were provided to you, and a lot of people that has been suggested, you know, sitting there.

their offices and think they know what they're talking about is they're just lucky to be born to who they were born to where they were born. Exactly. And never had to really work to get out of that gang life. A lot of that is simply survival. And every major American city has those kinds of communities, including Las Vegas. And so our hope is, is that all of our effort is driven towards sort of breaking a lot of that cycle.

You know, you've mentioned something at the beginning of your question to Mike in regards to the crack epidemic. There's still a crack epidemic, by the way. And if you look over the years, the epidemic just has a different drug name now. I mean, we went from having almost a thousand methamphetamine labs that were here in Southern Nevada. At one time, we had an entire meth

team that had to go in and eradicate these things. And now I don't think we've had them. We had one meth lab, I believe last year. We don't. It's all shifted south of the border. You had the oxy, the heroin. Today it's a fentanyl crisis. Fentanyl is in.

every street drug that is bought and sold and people are dying at extremely high rates of it. And so we can always say that, you know, this particular drug or that drug is partially what leads to significant violence. And we know that low level drug deals out on the street absolutely lead to violence. In fact, I just make this point to you is there are all those folks that are behind the legalization of marijuana, which it's legal in most places now.

There's no argument there. There's not even much for me to talk about about that. But what I will tell you is the legalization of marijuana has done nothing to eradicate the black market of marijuana. In fact, you know, I tell people all the time that I've been to a hundred bar fights over alcohol and never one bar fight over marijuana.

But I've been to, I've been to a lot of homicide scenes over the low level sales of marijuana. It's just a fact, right? And so we have to look at behaviors of individuals associated with that and how that contributes to the crime. But a lot of that programming that we have is really developed around what we started off on talking about with addiction and mental health and homelessness because they all seem to be intertwined. And, you know, we're really working on trying to figure out how to connect

services for all of those, not only why they're in our custody, but also as they move out of custody because we find that while we have great services in our jails for these individuals, the minute we release them out on the street, they don't have a place to go get those anti, you know, the patch that keeps them off a heroin for a particular period of time or they don't have health insurance to continue to do that. So

I bring that point up because I think it's really important for people to understand. We've become involved in all kinds of things that are really not the police's responsibility because our heart lies in making sure that people are not losing their lives or the only thing they'll ever know is a life of crime. We keep talking about all of the stuff we do here. One of the big things you have to do is connect people with a meaningful wage-paying job.

because if they get out of prison, they can't get an ID, they can't get a real job to take care of their families, you're going to perpetuate that cycle and they're going to go right back to prison. And so all of this stuff, technology continues to help us so that I can also continue to have people work on the things that are really about saving the soul as well. Yeah, that, that, you know, the, the ID and all those things, you know, one of the

You know, talking to people, I've come out of prison, one of the probably most hamfisted, at least technologically enabled things that we do is we just go, okay, you have a felony. And therefore, you know, you can't rent an apartment, you can't buy a house, you can't vote, you can't, you know, you can't do the things. And then employers all know that. And you're just in this very broad category.

And it's funny because, you know, one of my friends, the Shaka Senghor who, you know, has a felony and came out of prison was like super upset when like the Democrats were saying, Trump's a felon. It's like, stop stigmatizing felons. You know, like, what are you doing? Because that is what makes you continue as a criminal, is that you can't reenter life. And I think that, you know, that's one place where

We need technological solutions so you can get, look, I understand protecting citizens, somebody's coming out of jail and so forth, but we need more data. We need full information. What kind of prison are they? What are they trying to do? What's the real likelihood of this person with this profile coming out and doing something?

I got a friend who's been out 10 years. He's been out 10 years. He hasn't committed a crime. He's probably less likely to commit a crime than a random person you'd hire. We just don't have any of that information. We don't have enough support for these guys to get back on track. That's such an important point.

And if you think about it, you know, if you look at what they did to individuals that were leaving prison, they would prepare them for auto body, for auto mechanics or culinary. And I don't know about you, but if they said, Hey, Kevin, you're getting out of prison. You got to go learn how to be an auto mechanic.

I don't have that aptitude. I don't have that skill, right? Maybe I could learn it. But it's also not something I'm passionate about. So it's developing programming and technology can really help in this is what do we find that that person is interested in? What are they intrinsically motivated with? Because if you find something and you connect that individual with it and they can build a life through it, and we can actually provide a bit of hope to them,

That's one of the game changers that really takes these people that never contributed a single thing in our society that now become longtime contributing members of our society and save their lives. I know it sounds corny to a lot of different people, but that's what technology is going to allow us to do as we continue to move forward.

Yeah, yeah, such a such a big important component of the program. And I think that I mean, you know, like one of the how integrated you are, not just, you know, with hope for prisoners and the DA and so forth. You know, one of the things we do here in Vegas is, you know, if you're a first time offender,

You know, so many criminals are not alphas, they're betas. They went along with their idiot friends, committed a crime, and then they end up in jail, and then they can't get back into society, and then we've just like manufactured a criminal. And what they're doing here in Vegas is, hey, if you look like that on a first offense, we'll just send you straight to hope for prisoners. We won't send you to jail.

And those kids end up doing very, very well. And so it's really important to look at this holistically. A lot of people love it isn't the answer. Yeah, no, no, no. For a lot of you, right? It doesn't work, right? So how do you change the mindset? How do you, you know, break that cycle and give them something impactful, right? Right. To look forward to.

on if, you know, if your listeners and viewers here have never had the misfortune of having a person that they love become an addict or being impacted by mental health, they should count themselves lucky because that's not the story for the vast majority of us. And when you have somebody addicted in your family or you have somebody with mental health in your family,

That is a tremendous challenge to get them right. The system is just not set up for it. And sometimes, you know, no matter how much you love on them, those addictions are powerful. That mental health is powerful. And, you know, we've got to continue to give hope to people.

Yeah, and then this is, and this is what's so important. You know, we talked about investment early and, you know, people like, well, Ben, like, why can't just, you know, the voters decide what the police department gets and why are you giving them money and this and that and the other? And this is one of the things that came out of TechCrunch.

you know, why aren't they going through the normal process? Why are you intervening? And it's like, well, look, these investments, if we can't contain crime, we're never getting to recidivism. We're never getting to mental health. We're never getting to addiction. We're never getting to any of these other problems. We got to, you know, get ahead of the curve on the most urgent thing, which is, you know, people are getting robbed and murdered and, you know, beaten up and domestic abuse and all these things.

we get a handle on that, then we can really, really move forward and help people. And so it's so critical that people understand that because somebody's got to step up. You know, on behalf of Mark and myself, we just want to thank you for your service, for keeping the community safe, for building, you know, what I think is maybe the greatest police department in the whole country. And thank you to all of your officers for doing the same. So it's been amazing.

Now, Kevin and I, on behalf of all of our cops and really the community, thank you for what you guys have done for us. It's remarkable and it's, you know, going to evolve and really change policing as a whole. So really you guys are unbelievable. So thank you.

Yeah, listen, thanks isn't enough to the two of you, but that's what I have. Kind of like the budget process, but, you know, there's always that story about the man in the ring, right? And the reality is, is that you are putting money behind this opportunity. And I want you both to know that what you are doing is saving lives. And while we're going to always have critics about things that it is that we do, we try to do them responsibly, but at the end of the day,

I know for a fact, it's saving lives. And for that, for me, that's exactly why I'm in this business. So thank you for allowing us to do that. No, amazing, amazing. And to Mark, go at TechCrunch, you can write what you want about me. You can say what you will about us, but we're not going to stop. So sorry. And with that, we thank you for joining the Mark and Vencho. And we'll see you next time. Thank you, Will. Yeah, thank you.