Friday was Peace Officers Memorial Day, a day of remembrance established by President Kennedy in 1962. I returned from Washington, D.C., Friday evening after spending the week serving as a citizen lobbyist with the Police Officers Defense Coalition during National Police Week. Even that day, we were able to hold an impromptu meeting with a staff member from Senator John Kennedy’s office in Louisiana.

National Police Week

Over those four days, we walked the halls of the congressional office buildings. We sat down with legislators and their staffs and advocated for legislation that matters. The work was deliberate and focused, and I believe it made a difference. We have reason to believe that it did.

The meetings were only part of the story. What I brought home with me most were the moments spent with the families of fallen officers. Hearing their stories and looking into their eyes gave this mission a weight that no briefing ever could. I met some of them on airport trams, on flights, at the memorial wall, and at evening receptions.

Lobbying for public safety is not a political exercise. Done for the right reasons, it is an act of accountability. It is the proper response to tragedy and a way to honor sacrifice with something more than silence.

The day before I arrived, the Medal of Sacrifice passed the Senate and now awaits the President’s signature. On Friday, the staff member I met with in Senator John Kennedy’s office told me that as many as five pro-police and pro-public safety bills have moved out of Senate committees and are ready for a floor vote. Anyone who understands how slowly Washington moves knows that this is major good news.

A Failed State

I stayed in Columbia Heights and had looked forward to the “vibrant” community my Airbnb host described. The Metro station was half a mile away, and the weather was crisp and perfect for a long walk in dress shoes and a suit. Despite the neighborhood’s reputation for walkability, it did not feel safe for a visitor on foot.

Even the convenience store reflected broader decline. It did not have refrigerated beer, chilled malt beverages, or wine. This was not because it was a classy store. It was completely sketchy.

Two Metropolitan Police Department cruisers sat in the Tiger Mart parking lot with their marker lights on. Meanwhile, groups of unsupervised children dominated the streets, many on app-based scooters and e-bikes moving unpredictably along the sidewalks. Pedestrians were equally chaotic, often blocking the way and intentionally bumping into people. The scene was disorderly beyond anything I expected. The smell of cannabis hung openly in the air.

Driving through MPD-patrolled neighborhoods, despite seeing a noticeable police presence, we did not witness active intervention even as we observed repeated public-order and quality-of-life offenses over the course of a five-mile drive. At other times, we saw armed National Guard units patrolling in teams of three. That response may be effective in the short term, but only temporarily. On my first beat, an area with generational poverty and a transient population dealing with behavioral health and substance abuse, people did not smoke cannabis openly in the streets even in the early morning hours. They still made the effort to conceal their crimes. That norm was gone here.

It is election season in the District of Columbia, and the political machines running Washington, D.C., are promising more of the same. The candidates continue to promote a philosophy centered on government assistance and tax-funded cradle-to-grave security.

The District of Columbia has been part of my life for longer than I can remember. I have lived in both Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, so returning has always felt like a homecoming. I missed the 1990s and the 2000s but lately, this region keeps calling me back, now year after year. Now, my investment in this city and what it represents is very different.

Some of What We Accomplished This Week

The Medal of Sacrifice has passed Congress and now awaits the President’s signature.

Five pro-law-enforcement bills moved out of Senate committee and are now ready for a floor vote.

Advocated pending bills with dozens of members of Congress and their staff.

On Friday, flags flew at half-staff across this nation in their honor. President Kennedy, as mentioned in the beginning of this article, established this day of remembrance in 1962, and more than six decades later, the debt we owe these men and women has only grown.

Earlier last week I stood at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, a wall bearing the names of more than 22,000 officers killed in the line of duty. We add an average of 163 names every year.

Those of us who have built our lives around public safety carry a responsibility that does not end when we leave the job. Showing up in the halls of Congress, on behalf of those who can no longer speak for themselves, is not extraordinary.

For this profession, it is simply what we owe.

Rest easy, heroes. We will always remember you.

Please keep all families who lost a peace officer in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

I want to publicly express tremendous gratitude to , author of For the Blue Substack and Legislative Director of the National Police Association, and Bert Eyler, President of the Police Officers’ Defense Coalition. Last year we locked arms with Hollywood Morris of Support Our Shields and police mental fitness advocate Cori Huston and accomplished something that had not been done before. This year we added a day and our impact was even more effective and profound.

References:

National Police Association

https://nationalpolice.org/

Police Officers’ Defense Coalition

https://policeofficersdefensecoalition.com/

Support Our Shields

https://www.supportourshields.com/

I’m honored to be invited back to Washington D.C. during National Police Week. I look forward to days of meeting with legislators and their staff to help move bills toward sponsorships and ultimately to floor votes.

Thank you to and Bert Eyler who joined forces between the National Police Association and the Police Officers’ Defense Coalition for making this whole thing possible. It wouldn’t have happened without them and I credit this effort to them. Discussing some issues with other national police organizations last year, they said that some of our key priorities weren’t really on their radar.

If my flights are on time and the D.C. Metro is clear, I’ll be in the Rayburn House Office Building tomorrow morning.

While preparing to travel, I saw a LinkedIn post from the Dallas Police Department noting that this year they are remembering 95 total fallen officers. I remember ten years ago where five Dallas Police Officers were murdered providing security for an anti-police march. My curiosity caused me me do a little more research finding that NYPD has lost 932 officers since 1849 and Chicago 571.

According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 111 law enforcement officers died in the line of duty in 2025. That number represents a 25 percent decrease from the 148 deaths recorded in 2024 and the lowest annual total since 1943. It is not a reason to celebrate but to share silent thankfulness.

As more than 100 names are carved into stone, they are preceded by 24,000 peace officers who gave their lives in the line of duty. Six already on that wall are friends and co-workers, of those four were murdered by criminals for doing their jobs well.

National Police Week is a time to stand still to honor the men and women of law enforcement who paid the ultimate price and to acknowledge what every officer carries the moment they pin on a badge and walk out the door. It is a week of folded flags, long silences, and names read aloud. Names that deserve to echo long after the ceremony ends.

While I look forward to doing my part by advocating for federal public safety legislation, please keep an eye out for me going live on Substack. I plan to do so at least twice a day and the first one should be sometime after 10 a.m. tomorrow just to document the beginning of the week. I’ll probably update via Substack Live on what we can expect to see in the coming days.

If you want to help, I ask that you do what my friends from Mission First Alliance are doing. While I was writing this note, I received a message from my friend Marcus saying that our mutual friend Jeremy “…let me know you are in DC this week for LEO Advocacy. Praying your time is very productive and our Almighty God will use you.” Thank you Marcus and Jeremy!

Perhaps the most profound moment last year was at a social gathering and the people I was standing with were the family who had lost a loved one in the line of duty. They don’t need lofty words and sentiments; they need and deserve our love and compassion.

Please keep all of our peace officers in your prayers, and this week especially, please keep the surviving families in your prayers also.

Not exactly master criminals

In most of these cases, the dollar amounts are tiny compared to the long-term financial penalty. Another striking revelation, none of these law enforcement officers are going to be joining Professor Moriarty, Lex Luthor or even Danny Ocean in the master criminal hall of fame. Are there stories where someone made a poor choice out of punishing hardship and the temptation was just too great? Not that we have seen so far.

The most profound observation is that these crimes are being committed for peanuts by cops who are prosperous by all standards. A New Orleans police sergeant has a base salary of $83,000 with an unmarked take home out-of-parish vehicle? An Orlando master police officer earning six figures? Of the cops that get themselves in trouble, none of the rewards are where you could set yourself up for life in a new country and live like royalty.

Also, the ignorance of everyone getting caught while committing this fraud annoys me. This type of crime has been going on in all careers forever but if you are a law enforcement officer, your arrest, trial and firing are going to be in the news.

In 2022, NBC reported on 54 California Highway Patrol officers being charged in an overtime fraud that took place between 2016 and March of 2018 with a grand total of $225,000 loss, which sounds like a lot until you find out the average would be about $4,200 and then knowing that in reality, many got more and many got less, those who got less than $4,200 were double cheated. However, the point being that officers are regularly getting caught ought to have some deterrence effect.

It’s not easy to lose a police pension, but in many states, committing financial fraud against your police employer is a great way to get rid of it. First responders and their families likely know the generosity of some extra duty details. I know construction contractors and movie production companies do. Many have a minimum time if you show up, so if you are working traffic for a 5K run and there is a tornado warning, the officer still gets paid the three or four hours minimum in the agreement.

Some agencies have venues that necessitate a coordinator who schedules regular coverage for a private employer. Depending on the assignments, these can be prone to abuse. Perhaps a shopping district, that requests additional extra-duty patrol, in an area that already has a visible police presence, may not notice that the officer and vehicle, that they are paying for, is not there at all. The officer, her or his vehicle, and GPS enabled radio and body camera, are sitting at home, while the money rolls in. This was a real case in Orlando where the officer remained at his residence outside the county. The list of charges was limited by data retention so while nobody knows how long this abuse existed, it was for longer than what he was arrested and charged with.

Most media reports follow a pattern. Most law enforcement agencies do it right. Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Florida detected fraud and arrested three cops including a former officer, and two were fired. Nassau County Florida fired and arrested a deputy for fraudulently claiming hours she didn’t work over two years amounting to $4,478.63. Again and again, these sums just don’t add up.

The Big Easy’s big problem

Reporters in New Orleans have been following overtime abuses with the New Orleans Police Department for several years and what makes this story unique is that it seems it is the same cast of characters year after year. Sergeant Henry Burke’s payroll records reflect that he worked 4529 hours, more than 12 hours per day on every single one of the 365 days of the year, bumping his base salary of $87,254 to $282,200. Burke was arrested on February 4, 2026 and charged with ten felony counts. Here’s the other dimension to the story: the ADP Payroll company account for Sergeant Alfred Russell added multiple in or out punches days after the shifts occurred. Investigation has revealed chronic password sharing of payroll authorization accounts.

Senior Police Officer Brandon Coleman, documented as being on the clock and on the job assignment while being photographed at home, had over 1700 payroll reviews and edits, with every edit linked to the user ID of Sgt. Kevin Thompson, and Thompson had 1385 payroll edits done by Coleman’s user ID. This illustrates that Coleman has administrative rights over Thompson’s payroll timecard and vice versa.

The abuse continues with Sergeant Bianca Boone whose base $83,024 salary swelled to $239,045 while reportedly working 4200 hours of scheduled shifts, overtime and details.

She is being investigated, as is Sergeant Rene Benjamin for working 602 shifts over 363 days. NOPD payroll records show Benjamin working 444 days and 14 months without a day off in the recent past. There was an FBI investigation with an unknown resolution. In 2020, Benjamin is documented as having worked 360 days.

In April 2026, the investigative reporter, who has been working on this for years, spoke with NOPD Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick. He asks her about Benjamin who has worked 363 calendar days, and she treats it like an ambush.

“That is something I would say, I don’t know how healthy you are going to be trying to do that – I don’t know anything about that, I appreciate that you are trying to get to the truth of the matter and ‘you’re also doing the gotcha’ so I don’t know anything about this situation.”

In that, Chief Kirkpatrick fails to address what a police chief ought to know in a department of less than 1,000 officers where 50 are earning more than $200,000 as overtime has doubled since 2022 from $13.1M to $26.8M in 2025.

The chief who covered it up

Mount Dora is situated in Florida between Orlando to the southeast and The Villages to the northwest. It is an ideal place to raise children with high performing schools and a reputation as a center of culture. Why, in the beautiful area of chains of lakes and rolling hills would one of the most egregious abuses of authority take place? For years, the law enforcement profession has faced both fair and unfair accusations of abuse of power and corruption. The Mount Dora Police Department is an agency of less than 80 employees and less than 50 sworn staff.

In August of 2025, I wrote

“…in October 2023 where Mount Dora Lieutenant Barry Strykowski was accused of stealing time by falsifying records and misuse of his city issued vehicle. This included claiming to be in service on extra duty jobs, and invoicing for that time worked, while they planted a GPS on his vehicle which revealed not only that he wasn’t at work but at times beyond geographic range the agency vehicle uses policy permits. Sometimes he was working but double dipping, claiming to fulfill two obligations. But these accusations were not just policy violations, some of the actions, where they developed probable cause, were serious felonies.”

The accusations against Strykowski are settled facts. He claimed to be working, and was getting paid for working, while he and his vehicle were in Orange or Duval counties. In at least one case, he was getting paid twice for the same time worked. He cheated the city and contractors that hired cops for extra duty.

Following an investigation that produced a 22-page report outlining only the known theft by fraud committed by Strykowski, he had applied to another police agency and was in the final stages of the hiring process.

Officers who change jobs prior to discipline are a stain on the profession called gypsy cops. Their illegal behavior is recognized by one agency, only for them to lily pad to another agency. While it is a well-documented problem in law enforcement, there are safeguards that work if police executives follow the rules. That failed to happen in this case.

Mount Dora Police Chief Michael Gibson explained to the ABC affiliate WFTV in Orlando that upon the conclusion of the internal investigation, he used his discretion to negotiate a voluntary resignation from Strykowski with a whitewashed record. Initially the Florida Department of Law Enforcement separation form reflected that, truthfully, Strykowski ‘resigned while under investigation and pending discipline.’ Then that form was changed stating it was a ‘voluntary separation not involving misconduct.’ That record manipulation is the mechanism that creates gypsy cops.

A Mount Dora captain received a call from the agency doing the background on Strykowski to hire him, which being out of the loop on the lieutenant’s investigation, stated under oath that he checked with Chief Gibson:

“I saw the Chief. I said Chief Oakland is calling. They want to find out if there’s any discipline on Barry Strykowski. He said, no discipline, just like that. No discipline and no pending inquiries. That’s what he said. I said, can I write that down? He said, yeah. And then he made those other comments. What’s the connection? Or what? You know, what there? That’s it. Can I send him that? He said yes.”

Captain Victor Uvalle replied via e-mail to the phone query with the response from Chief Gibson. A nine-word e-mail. “No open cases and no discipline on Lt. Barry Strykowski.”

Life went on for months until a whistleblower let the news know that Strykowski was getting promoted to sergeant, while still under new-hire probation at his new agency. Gibson, confronted by facts, stated that his resignation was his discipline. He argues to the news that since the City of Mount Dora was the victim, that he had the discretion to forward or not-forward the crime to rightful prosecution. Gibson suspends Uvalle with pay for months, and then fires him for four sustained counts of truthfulness related to the nine-word e-mail that Gibson had Uvalle send to the hiring agency.

Leadership is the answer

My father told me, locks keep honest people honest. A co-worker in my earliest work experience told another co-worker as he put his wallet in his pocket, it’s not that I don’t trust you, I just want to keep on trusting you.

We can’t blame leadership for all the criminal mistakes of sworn officers. No one can do any public safety profession, dispatch, corrections, rescue, fire, and law enforcement without an above average risk tolerance. Bill Bratton had it right when, to paraphrase, that we must hire from the human race. But leadership must respond and decisively when we see the obvious gaps.

Superintendent Kirkpatrick doesn’t understand that intangibles like public trust will never be achieved without acknowledging that detecting obvious abuses like nearly 50 cops making over $200,000 via overtime is a primary function of her role.

Chief Gibson is unlikely to ‘use his discretion’ to let a shoplifter go who stole $5,000 from a local art storefront, so why would the theft to the city, where often the instrumentality was a city unmarked police vehicle, be any different? Without a whistleblower, Gibson’s backdoor agreement and FDLE separation form manipulation would have gone unnoticed. Records show Gibson has done it again as recently as March of this year where another FDLE separation form needed to be changed from ‘failure to perform tasks satisfactorily’ to ‘administrative separation not involving misconduct.’

This is the call for the true leaders to stand up. They will be easy to spot. They’ll listen, they’ll show caring, and they’ll show all the fake losers the road. The true leaders will do the right thing regardless of the cost. They have the clarity and vision that will call people to follow them.

I’d like to know from you what you think is worse: the massive fraud in New Orleans or the leadership decisions in Mount Dora. Let me know in the comments.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/54-california-highway-patrol-officers-charged-overtime-fraud-scheme-rcna16821

https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2020/09/02/boston-police-arrested-overtime-fraud/

https://www.police1.com/arrests-sentencing/3-fla-officers-arrested-in-33-000-overtime-fraud-investigation

https://www.fox8live.com/2026/04/29/nopd-overtime-investigation-finds-more-sergeants-home-while-clock/

https://www.fox8live.com/2026/02/19/nopd-overtime-investigation-reveals-thousands-timesheet-edits/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/central-florida-police-officer-suspended-hours-after-9-investigates-questions-why-he-was-hired/SFGQJUELZFCRZI2NGL3M3ABT4U/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/ch-9-obtains-records-raising-questions-about-whether-local-officer-lied-during-hiring-process/XNVVJBE62VBBZM6D2XDWXPZFKU/

https://www.wftv.com/news/local/orlando-officer-arrested-clocking-couch/GGBBHEVWSRHG3EZ6NB6QW22III/

I spent nearly three decades in law enforcement encountering marijuana and working with officers who recognized what they were dealing with when they smelled weed. In one case, a traffic crash, I moved a damaged car out of a travel lane only to find a two-gallon Ziplock bag of weed under my foot on the ground that had been flung into the grassy area. The moving van traveling north clearly had more than household goods on its bill of lading. I put the bag of weed on the hood of my patrol car so they would know not to come back looking for it.

Working weed was fun. Think of Sean Penn playing Jeff Spicoli as a stoner. Bloodshot eyes, the giggles, munchies, maybe a cooperative walk back to the patrol car. It was predictable. It was manageable. Little or no psychosis.

That drug is completely gone. It does not exist today. The young cannabis user of today has never been exposed to the mellow drug of yesteryear.

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Modern Cannabis

The substance has been bio-engineered to a degree that it bears uncharacteristically high chemical levels in THC [tetrahydrocannabinol] and little resemblance to the low risk weed that made alcohol look dangerous in the late 1980s. The cannabis available today may bear the same name as the drug that myself and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers encountered on the street 30 years ago, but it is a substance of the same name with an incredibly different potency and effect.

Many, including me, were the ripple effect hires of the 1994 crime bill and remember being on the frontlines during the last chapter of our nation’s crack epidemic. We witnessed the survival of the bodies but the terrible cost for families. The drug users punished themselves by their own abuses far beyond what any justice system could impose. Families disintegrated under the pressure and children were scattered to families, foster care, and adoption. Today’s generation euphemize crack cocaine in terms that equate to an overpriced coffee drink.

Today’s drug stories are very different. A friend recently lost his son to a cocaine overdose. Another police veteran friend lost his troubled son to drugs tainted by Fentanyl. They are two loving parents who I worked with closely. Thirty years ago, there was trouble and complication, today there is the sudden and stark absence.

In 2013, I read the significant event sheets that I printed out every morning for chief’s staff. Officers stopped a car and search incident to arrest, they found several grams of heroin in the vehicle. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I haven’t heard about heroin in a few years. Funny how they stopped them a couple of blocks away from the closed down methadone clinic.’

The tide has turned recently

In 2014, the New York Times published a series by the editorial board early in the legalization push of cannabis with the main headline being ‘Repeal Prohibition Again’ creating a legitimacy of debate on a topic that has been bounced about for decades.

Today the new members of the NYT editorial board have a different take. With the perspective of a dozen years of recent history, they traverse their own minefield of issues precious to them, including any economic, racial, or ethnic group being criminally charged for offenses in deviation to the mean of the majority.

To their credit, they completely rethink the attitudes, policies, and laws that have gone into past endeavors. They have not switched sides but have recognized the realities of cannabis liberalization in different states. Cannabis remains illegal under federal code.

David Leonhardt, an editorial director in New York Times Opinion, with Emily Bazelon and German Lopez weighed in online, in print and via podcast. Here are a few excerpts of their published discussion.

Bazelon: Also the strains of weed have become so much stronger. As someone who rarely actually uses or smokes it, I feel like with edibles I have to be really careful and start with a really small amount and just assume that it’s going to be way too strong. Or else I’ll wake up in the morning and still be in some kind of fog.

Influential Ohio based NYT editorial voice German Lopez had a lot to offer:

‘But then over time, we saw more and more problems pop up with marijuana legalization. We’ve seen a sharp increase in daily users. More people now use pot daily in the U.S. than use alcohol daily. And that is a dramatic shift. We’ve seen increases in addiction. We’ve seen increases in people going to E.R.s and reporting what’s called “cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome,” which we’ll just say C.H.S., but it’s like really violent nausea. It’s not at all pleasant.’

His personal experience with cannabis was also less than pleasant:

‘I remember making fun of Maureen Dowd’s experience with an edible, then going to Colorado and having basically the exact same experience where I’m sitting in a bed just in a state of panic and completely shocked that this was so much stronger than anything I had been used to. I just was not expecting it at all.’

I’ve previously cited the Breakfast Club appearance of SNL alumnus Pete Davidson where he mentioned his desistance to anything with THC. The co-hosts agreed, that today you need to ‘break off’ a cannabis product to avoid a negative outcome on a single use product. In the same conversation, Davidson spoke about how all of the people he was in rehab with were youth and they were there because of weed.

Some perspective

In 1977, the average THC concentration in seized cannabis was roughly 1 percent. By 1997 it had climbed to 5 percent. By 2022 the DEA was measuring an average of 16 percent in confiscated flower, a sixteen-fold increase in 45 years. Concentrates, oils, and vaping products routinely test between 60 and 90 percent THC. Dabs, a vaping product is regularly tested at 90% THC.

Now the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment has added something new. Chinese transnational criminal organizations are producing cannabis averaging 25 to 30 percent THC. According to the DEA, this is the strongest marijuana ever seen in drug trafficking history.

Chinese transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) dominate the domestic cultivation and distribution of marijuana, with most grow sites located in states where the cannabis industry is “legal.” These Chinese TCOs are producing the most potent form of marijuana in the history of drug trafficking, with a THC content averaging 25-30%.

Earlier research from The Lancet Psychiatry had already established that daily users of high-potency cannabis were significantly more likely to develop psychotic disorders. A meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that the heaviest users were nearly four times more likely to experience psychotic outcomes compared with non-users.

This year, in 2026, JAMA published a retrospective cohort study following 463,396 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17. Past-year cannabis use was associated with significantly increased risk of clinician-diagnosed psychotic and bipolar disorders through age 25. The association was strongest for psychotic disorders.

When Psychosis Meets a Patrol Officer

Psychosis is not a medical abstraction. It is paranoia that feels like certain knowledge. It is hallucinations that cannot be distinguished from reality. It is a person who is genuinely terrified of something that does not exist, standing in front of an officer who has no idea why. A review published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that cannabis use was a risk factor for violent behavior in patients with psychosis.

A separate meta-analysis of youth populations found that cannabis users were more than twice as likely to engage in physical violence compared to non-users. In California, Bryn Spejcher stabbed her boyfriend more than 100 times after consuming high-potency marijuana. Her defense successfully argued that cannabis-induced psychosis caused her to lose touch with reality entirely. Again, this was a ruling in California, a state with a legalization of recreational cannabis.

More courts are now wrestling with cannabis-induced psychosis as a criminal defense, and some jurisdictions are accepting it. In Connecticut, prosecutors argued that cannabis-induced psychosis contributed to a double homicide in Bridgeport.

California emergency rooms reported a 53 percent increase in cannabis-related visits in the three years following legalization. In 2014, people with cannabis use disorder accounted for 11 percent of all psychosis cases arriving at emergency rooms, totaling 90,000 cases and 250 per day, triple the number from 2006. That was before today’s concentrates became widely available.

The drug being legalized in state after state is not the drug those policy debates were built around. When Colorado voters approved Amendment 64 in 2012, average THC was about 12 percent. Today’s legal dispensary shelves carry flower testing at 25 to 30 percent and concentrate products (dabs) that reach 90 percent.

How can law enforcement succeed?

Law enforcement has been slow to make the connection, in large part because the opioid crisis consumed so much attention and resources. But cannabis-induced psychosis is showing up in use-of-force incidents, in emergency rooms, and in courtrooms. Officers who are not trained on what high-potency intoxication looks like are going to make decisions without the information they need.

Standard police training needs to reflect the current threat. A recruit who learned about marijuana intoxication from a 2010 curriculum learned about a different drug.

Departments must update their training on drug recognition, mental health crisis response, and de-escalation to account for what high-potency cannabis intoxication actually looks like. We need to recognize that the product changed faster than the policy conversation did. This drug has changed. The risks have changed. The encounters are changing. Pretending otherwise helps no one except the people profiting from the sale of increasingly dangerous products.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting, and leadership conferences, and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

References

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/opinion/legalized-marijuana-laws-regulation.html

DEA 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment

Euronews Health: Highly potent cannabis products tied to risk of psychosis, schizophrenia, and addiction (August 2025)

ScienceDaily: The hidden mental health danger in today’s high-THC cannabis (2025)

Axios: Cannabis THC levels keep getting higher, DEA data shows (April 2025)

The Lancet Psychiatry: Cannabis and psychotic disorder (EU-GEI study)

PMC/NIH: Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence

NIDA: Cannabis Potency Data

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083929/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_fast%20t

The Flat Tire

Three years ago, I saw a social media post by a law enforcement agency showing an officer changing a tire for a stranded motorist. The officer in the photo is a friend of mine for more than two decades, and knowing him well, I was not the least surprised by his kindness or initiative. But there were details in the post that made me think. The officer was on his lunch break at a training class in another county when he encountered the motorist with the flat tire in a parking lot. The parking lot was the police department he was visiting. Yet somehow the moment was photographed, sent to the public affairs office, packaged for social media, and distributed across multiple platforms.

After giving this perhaps too much thought, I was left with the same question: What does this have to do with law enforcement, and what does it do to enhance the image of the agency or the profession? My friend in the picture would have changed that tire whether anyone was watching or not. He would have done it in uniform, off duty, or wearing a fishing shirt on a Saturday morning. That is who he is. The act itself was genuine. The presentation of it felt less so.

Supporters of policing will praise these moments because they tend to celebrate almost everything officers do. Critics will dismiss them as public relations theater. Unfortunately, when a good deed is carefully staged for public consumption, it risks confirming the cynics more than persuading them. That is where the problem begins.

When Policing Becomes Performance

Around 2017 and 2018 many agencies began emphasizing a directive often described as “humanizing the badge.” The goal was understandable: show the public that police officers are not distant authority figures but fellow citizens who care about their communities.

Soon social media filled with photos of officers cooking breakfast during wellness checks, mowing lawns for elderly residents, washing dishes in family kitchens, and participating in various acts of goodwill. None of these actions are inherently wrong. In fact, nearly all officers have always done these things quietly for decades.

What changed was the need to document them.

The moment an officer pushes a lawn mower while another officer photographs the scene for social media, something subtle but important shifts. What was once a private act of kindness becomes public messaging. It becomes insincere and even exploitative.

At one point in my career, I was assigned to follow command staff to a homeless shelter to take photos of them reading to children. The activity itself was commendable. But the experience left me wondering whether the moment was about service, or about optics. Policing has never been a profession short on genuine compassion. I consider it a real danger comes when compassion begins to look scripted.

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Coffee With a Cop

One of my last assignments involved organized community engagement in 2019 while working in the media relations office. One morning we held a “Coffee with a Cop” event at a small coffee shop. Before leaving headquarters, more than a dozen officers gathered for a briefing that ended with the commander’s enthusiastic directive: “Let’s go engage the community.” The irony was difficult to ignore.

Each of us arrived in our own unmarked city car, filling most of the nationally known coffee shop’s notoriously tiny parking lot. Inside, the limited seating was quickly occupied by uniformed officers. Citizens who had simply stopped in for coffee suddenly found themselves surrounded by police officers conducting an outreach event they had not planned to attend. We tried to make the best of it, talking with customers and posting photos to social media. The interaction often felt forced, and the smiles we captured for the camera did not always reflect genuine connection.

Programs like Coffee with a Cop were created with good intentions, and in some places they work well. But the lesson I took from that morning was simple: trust cannot be manufactured through scheduled engagement alone. When I dug into the roots of its origins, all the way back to Hawthorne, California, I found that most of the national sponsors were not pro-police, but painted the police as the problem.

That does not mean community engagement is meaningless. It grows through daily encounters that are neither staged nor scripted.

The Professional Presence

Decades earlier I witnessed a moment that demonstrated this principle far better than any outreach program. I had located a hit-and-run driver and called for backup. The officer who responded was one of the most respected in our department. His uniform was immaculate, his tactics were flawless, and his demeanor reflected quiet confidence. When the driver began giving me attitude, the officer calmly walked over and said, “I don’t know what you think is funny here, but this isn’t a joke.” He never raised his voice. He never mentioned arrest or jail. The driver’s entire posture changed.

Professionalism alone commanded respect. Citizens recognize authenticity quickly. So do criminals. Moments like that build trust in ways that no social media campaign ever could.

The “Piggy Bank” Theory of Trust

Several years ago I discussed these issues with chiefs, academy directors, and senior law enforcement leaders. They described community trust as an investment—coins deposited into a piggy bank over time. One day, they explained, an officer might face a tragic encounter involving deadly force. When that moment comes, the accumulated trust will allow the department to make a withdrawal from the bank of public goodwill. It is an appealing theory.

But the events of recent years, and even in 2026, tested that theory in ways few expected. Across the country, officers found themselves facing hostile crowds, violent protests, and an intense national debate about policing. In some cities, officers were struck with rocks, frozen water bottles, and broken pavement. Leaders struggled to balance political pressure with the morale of the officers standing the line. The lesson is sobering.

Public trust can never be stored away like savings in an account. It is not a deposit that grows in value like accumulated interest.

We need to answer calls again

The same public that you are engaging in community events, bringing out your field kitchen, or following you on your social channels are getting the message that law enforcement has the time for cookouts or ice cream trucks, but then they are directed to a clunky failing online reporting system when something vitally important to them is disregarded by cops as inconsequential. What do you think that taxpayer thinks of your officer or deputy’s Tahoe or F150?

A question for the ‘old school’ officers who responded to stolen toaster or lawn mower calls: did you get a ton of field intelligence about the neighborhood from nosy neighbors?

The best thing that the police can do for community engagement is policing professionally.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

The Law Enforcement “Family”

A desirable feature of joining law enforcement, corrections, or a fire-rescue agency is the idea that you are now grafted into a great big loving and competitive family. It is one of the attractions that used to draw people to law enforcement, to be able to say that we are all family and that we are all connected to one another in this pond of sacrifice, sweat, and blood.

To those, excluding military service members, who have not been through actual academy training, and to family members who think that you have vicariously experienced it, you may have experienced a good taste, but nothing compares to the actual complete experience. There are significant goals in academy training that are exclusively based on trust between first responders, trust within the unit, and trust in the organization you work for.

The Moment an Officer Gets Injured

In patrol, I had many sworn officers as light-duty ride-alongs. It was important that they reached pensionable hours per pay period as they navigated the workman’s comp regime. When I was transferred to investigations, I received a larger cubicle with room for a second officer and an intern. During that season, I spent significant time with many sworn officers who had experienced both physical and moral injury. Many of my readers know the pain firsthand of deadly force exerted on you and responding with deadly force to end the threat. You were there and you understand the complicated nature of dealing with both sides of it.

“My squad members don’t reach out to me anymore,” shared one injured officer who was spending 40 hours in the headquarters building absent doctors or PT appointments. I spent decades with them. Too many of their careers ended prematurely.

The Athlete Recovery Model

That’s why I am honored to share the innovative program Ready Rebound. What if we took the best practices and attitudes of high-performance sports medicine and rehabilitation to first responder injuries? The real newsmaker is that we haven’t had an innovation like this sooner.

While civil servants in fiscal management or neighborhood relations face physical risks, their daily hazards differ fundamentally from those of rescuers, corrections officers, and law enforcement. We currently operate within a system that treats carpal tunnel syndrome as administratively equivalent to the ‘on-the-job’ traumas of the front line: a gunshot wound in policing, musculoskeletal damage from a firefighter pulling down a burning ceiling, or facial trauma from an assault in a correctional facility.

The sports model is radically different: When a professional athlete is injured, the world stops. Trainers rush onto the field, a team physician conducts an immediate assessment, and within hours the athlete may have imaging, treatment plans, and rehabilitation specialists assigned. Every step is designed to restore strength, mobility, and confidence so the athlete can return to peak performance.

A fireman’s surgery may be weeks away. The decision to send a corrections officer to physical therapy may take more than a month. The law enforcement officer may be waiting for treatment while the cloud of an internal affairs investigation hovers over her or his family.

One of the hardest duties of any police chief is to tell an officer that because they haven’t been able to return to full duty within a policy time limit, they will be terminated. No one has offered a fix to that until recently, when I heard my friend Todd’s presentation to the police chiefs association meeting.

Todd Herb and I worked together for 23 years. He came from a smaller agency and hit the streets running in the most target rich environments in patrol, to the jump-out uniformed drug unit, to apprehension K-9, and finally solving the most intellectually challenging complex cases in our financial crimes unit. Even in our highly charged and competitive environment, I can’t recall a single negative comment shared about him and all his peers gave him a five-star rating. Today, after several years of representing valuable tools of the trade, he brings Ready Rebound to the forefront.

Getting Officers Back on the Street Safely

It is a 180-degree course correction for everyone with a high-risk pension, like police, corrections and fire. This solves the problem of every city, state, or county that doesn’t want to terminate the law enforcement or fire service professional based on arbitrary time limits on injury, repair and healing.

Recent data confirms what everyone in uniform already knows. According to the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted report, assaults on officers have reached a ten-year high, with more than 85,000 officers attacked in a single year. The rate of assaults has climbed for three consecutive years, even while other categories of violent crime have declined nationally.

In practical terms, that means the risk to the officer answering the radio call is increasing, not decreasing. In early 2024 reporting, unprovoked attacks on officers rose dramatically, underscoring a troubling shift toward targeted violence against those who wear the badge.

Those numbers are not just statistics. Every assault on an officer carries the potential for a life-altering injury, both physical and psychological. A broken wrist during a struggle, a rolled ankle during a foot pursuit, or the long rehabilitation after being beaten in the line of duty is not an abstract policy matter. I’ve been in the hospital rooms with officers who nearly lost their life, and but for backup showing up in time, they would be engraved on the memorial wall. If you’ve ever been there, you know how off-putting, impactful and necessary that can be. We hope we never have to do it again. To be blunt, officers like that don’t need six weeks or six months to endlessly ruminate on what nearly happened. Sometimes we lose those officers to other careers and other times we lose them tragically.

Too often the systems responsible for protecting these professionals treat recovery as a bureaucratic timeline rather than a mission.

The Leadership Decision Agencies Must Make

I’ll admit that chiefs and sheriffs are easy targets. It is tempting to feel sympathy for them, caught between political pressure from above and expectations from the rank and file below. But on this issue, that excuse does not hold. Not here. This is precisely where leadership is teste and where too many fail.

Every chief and sheriff who rose through the ranks remembers what it felt like to stand in that space between pressure from the top and pressure from the street. Some of them reminded us at every rank stratum, that wherever they were, sergeant, lieutenant, captain, that they were the one bearing the tension for the whole organization.

Today, on an issue as fundamental as how we care for injured first responders, we are hearing too many supposed leaders retreat behind the language of scarcity, blaming and lamenting budget uncertainty and citing possible tax reductions that have not even been proposed, let alone enacted.

When the people who run toward danger for their communities are the ones left navigating a bureaucratic maze after being injured in the line of duty, silence from leadership is not neutrality, it is failure.

When assaults are increasing and the risks of the profession are rising, leadership must ask a fundamental question: are we building systems designed to return our people to service, or systems that quietly push them out when the healing takes longer than a policy manual allows? Generation Z, and the now rising Gen Alpha, as their social norm will not tolerate any sense of disloyalty to them, even as their loyalty is blatantly conditional. Broadly, their perception is that every agency, business, or organization, exists for them, to give them a means of earning an income, to keep their promise of care, and if there is a generous wellness, healthcare, and disability program, the rising generation treats any failure as a systemic betrayal. This must be a consideration in retaining the generation that we will be handing the keys over to shortly. This hastens the need to fix this now.

I have no financial relationship with Ready Rebound today. I’m not opposed to it in the future, but it must be noted that this is not paid or sponsored by Ready Rebound. I saw my friend Todd Herb doing the right thing for the right reasons. If you’ve read previous articles, you likely know that the only promise I shared with victim’s families was ‘to figure out the right thing to do is, and whatever it is, do it.’ I encourage you to do the same!

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Please keep all first responders in your prayers!

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

Reach out to Todd Herb via email at therb@readyrebound.com

Federal law enforcement officers serving the United States of America for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are being vilified for carrying out their charter. They are taking fire in an ideological battle over policy settled for more than two centuries. Federal overreach may be rampant in many government ventures, but border and immigration enforcement remain legitimate federal responsibilities, even among many libertarians.

It is time for us to show our support!

Young students are violating school rules, leaving their classrooms in organized ‘Abolish ICE’ walkouts. Their civics education was obviously not effective, or they would know that all of America’s adversaries, who are funding so much of this revolutionary anti-American activity, are famous for being deadly serious about their own borders.

A time for choosing

In October of 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered the famous speech “A Time for Choosing” in support of presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater. At the time, Reagan had not yet been elected governor of California. He hadn’t even been a candidate. That’s one of the factors that is so striking about the speech, that this former actor and guild leader would share words that are so relevant that they stir hearts today. Goldwater lost and Lyndon Johnson won, but few, if any, remember any of their addresses. These words from Reagan still echo from beyond with truth and relevance today.

Communism was the issue of the day in 1964. Sadly, it still is today nearly 62 years later. Billions were enslaved behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and too much of Asia. This includes the continually enslaved nations of North Korea and the People’s Republic of China. We had no awareness in real time of the atrocities and mass murder of millions under Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution from 1966-1976. The Red Guards who eliminated the Four Olds and the people who held tradition were killed or re-educated, a fate that the Red Guards also faced when they became uncomfortably powerful by threating Mao’s dominance over China.

In his speech, Reagan recounted a story of American businessmen speaking to a Cuban refugee.

The goal of today’s protesters is undermining the United States and its legitimacy. Many are duped and don’t know it, but it is the truth. It is cloaked in counterfeit acts of love and compassion. The words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ have been weaponized creating the illusion of a binary that doesn’t exist in the secular. In the sacred, love and hate are absolute polar extremes but, in the secular, they are degrees in an ungrounded and adrift continuum.

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Indoctrinating citizens of a foreign power to de-legitimize the authority of their own government and their borders, by the extremely privileged manipulated into believing they are the disenfranchised, is always the Marxist master plan. It is not a new idea. Rhetoric in a 2026 Grammy award acceptance speech ‘No one is illegal on stolen land’ repeated so frequently, despite the logic flaws of that statement, has fabricated civil unrest in many areas and especially in Minnesota against CBP agents and ICE agents.

No one on the right or left in 1964 would believe that sixty years later, three out of five items most Americans touch every day would bear the imprint ‘Made in China.’

Rebellion funded by dark left money

Generations of American youth with tax-funded educations have been deprived of instruction on the competition between free-market and collectivist societies. They are easily captured by an atheist utopian vision. Today, our uneducated graduates are on the streets marching with the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). The PSL produces printed signs so quickly it sometimes seems like they have a Kinkos inside a U-Haul.

Defend the 612, funded by left-leaning organizations such as Arabella Advisors via the Hopewell Fund, trains Minneapolis residents to create perilous situations with ICE agents. Reagan’s words remind us that this is nothing new.

Christina Buttons reports in City Journal:

Members repeatedly referenced the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” an activist handbook that members used to generate ways to impede ICE. Members discussed throwing urine at agents, praising one such incident as “mvp” behavior. A daily update account called “The Report Card” encouraged participants to “annoy” agents with constant noise. They view “noise making and interrupting their meals and bathroom breaks” as essential, noting these tactics “serve a critical role in draining their morale.”

Make the pledge and share broadly

Our CBP and ICE officers deserve our support as they enforce the laws enacted by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President of the United States.

I chose to publicly affirm my support for both ICE and CBP, and all legitimate law enforcement, federal, state, county, tribal, local, via the pledge for ICE on Support our Shields. Your information will remain secure. This is to deliver a number, not a list. We are going to deliver a message to everyone in the Department of Homeland Security that there is a great body of support for the individual officers and their families.

This is why today is a time for choosing as Ronald Reagan voice echoes as it has for 62 years, calling us back to the fundamental charge of the founders in the United States Constitution.

Policing influencer Hollywood Morris has sacrificed to ensure that dedicated law enforcement officers who are killed in service have an enduring emblem of recognition for future generations. His organization, Support our Shields, quite appropriately, is the host of this effort to create a dialogue about the truth of the role of ICE in the service of our nation. Morris states:

“This petition isn’t about politics—it’s about moral clarity. When the men and women enforcing our laws are demonized, ignored, or left unprotected, the rule of law collapses. Standing with ICE is standing with order, truth, and the safety of every community in this country.

This stand with ICE is personal—it’s about refusing to stay silent while those sworn to protect the public are turned into political targets.”

Join the movement to support CBP and ICE as they hunt the worst of the worst criminals who only endanger our citizens within our borders. The request is simple:

1. Affirm that they are legitimate federal law enforcement officers chartered to enforce the laws enacted by the United States Congress.

2. Agree that every United States citizen with the courage to bear the badge should not be targeted, harassed and annoyed by organized mobs throwing human waste while they practice constitutional activity. Also, that you support legislation penalizing Bounties on Badges (HR 7114).

Click this image to make the pledge.

Please keep all first responders and their families in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.city-journal.org/article/minneapolis-ice-watch-protests-defend-612?utm

https://www.supportourshields.com

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-behalf-senator-barry-goldwater-time-for-choosing?utm

https://www.supportourshields.com/ice-solidarity-pledge/?utm

https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/hopewell-fund/

https://timmoore.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-tim-moore-introduces-no-bounties-badges-act-crack-down-threats

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In the opening scene of True Lies, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Harry Tasker, is wearing a tuxedo and appears ready to tango, then, as part of his choreographed escape, performs the famous Argentinian/Uruguayan dance, the Tango, it’s no surprise. Everyone in public safety, especially every first responder, dispatch ECS, or corrections officer can share a story about how their appearance, their presence, their stance, their discipline in grooming, played a role in slowing or stopping a depreciating situation. You dress for it, you prepare for it, and without surprise, it happens.

We are seeing escalating violence against all first responders nationwide but especially today on Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents and Border Patrol Officers in Minnesota. Chief Brian O’Hara of the Minneapolis Police Department has been the victim of the animosity that he has fostered, as have his officers.

In 2019, HBO reimagined the comic book/graphic novel world of Watchmen set decades in the future with Tulsa Police Officers forced to wear masks to serve in safety. This fictional scenario was set amid a powerful modern white supremacist movement while weaving in only one-sided themes of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in 1921. It was an agenda piece, pre-George Floyd, that distorted existing storylines to project counterfactual social commentary as both today’s and tomorrow’s truths.

But here we are in 2026, with ICE agents trying to protect their families by masking while doing the fundamental duty of any functioning government; removing the convicted criminals in your country who are without legal status to be in your country.

We need to respect our own rules

The enemies of law enforcement have a solid basis opposing law enforcement without visible name badges and faces. It has been a best practice, even with a number, where a citizen with a complaint would be able to provide some identifying factor of the officer with whom they interacted. Every charging document required my name and identification number. Every affidavit, every subpoena request, even every parking, traffic ticket or abandoned vehicle notice needed to carry all my unique identifiers, both personal and agency.

The concept clearly understood was that every local, county, tribal, or state law enforcement justify using masks during search warrants when suspects and the media are present for highly specific mitigations. Wearing masks always had to be tied to serving the public interest, protecting the identities of officers and ensuring operational security during ongoing high-profile or sensitive cases. Should identities be associated with law enforcement, other collateral contacts would recognize them and either modify their operations, destroy evidence, or in the most extreme cases plot to murder those officers and their families. Masking was only for exceptional circumstances. In that, you would not see the masked officers ever handling people or taking suspects into custody.

The required presence of these masked officers on scene has always been to illuminate activities and hiding spots that couldn’t exist in the four corners of a document subject to public records laws. Equally important for the safety of the searching officers is to make sure nothing had substantively changed dangerously, like explosive traps, since the affidavit for the warrant was filed.

The big lie

The big lie exposed day after day is that protestors are not the stakeholders they pretend to be. They are not protecting their ‘neighbors.’ They don’t and have never cared about the illegal alien community, and their value to them is only present in exploitative terms, like who will do all these demeaning jobs. It’s like the script of Legally Blond where the function of ‘other people’ is only to support those in power.

The protestors are the pathetic tourists of outrage parachuting into situations they have never spent any time or effort trying to understand. They present themselves as altruistic while acting like the privileged Howells on Gillian’s Island. They are not objecting to a policy or practice they have ever studied.

Instead, they are reacting to symbols stripped of context, projecting motives onto people they do not know, in operations they cannot understand, on behalf of communities they have never cared about.

It doesn’t matter the degree of crime, the shortest line of people in the World is the line to be victimized by someone who should have been kept out of our country. Whether you are a protestor in support of illegal alien amnesty or a fervent supporter of legal immigration policy, no one can support any parent’s child being hurt, harmed, exploited, sexually assaulted or murdered by a person who was not legally allowed to be in this country. That is one of the most profound levels of failure of a federal government in its duties to protect its citizens.

Danger is lower than projected

Today ICE agents and Border Patrol officers believe that the need to mask is to protect their families from unnecessary doxxing and harassment. As a reminder, this is the reason fictional comic book superheroes give for wearing a convincing disguise or mask. ‘We’re doing it to protect our families and loved ones.’ Popular fiction follows this form.

With the surge in Minnesota, and with so many agents and officers being away from their families, I completely understand that it is a devastating and frightful scenario where some left-wing network sycophant seeks to harass, annoy, or even harm their family. I’m no risk manager, but we must evaluate this based on past harm of federal law enforcement families and project from that possible future harm. It’s been a popular movie plot and story device driving action movies, but the reality is that the bad guys have a well-founded fear of harm attacking any law enforcement family. I can’t think of any workplace friend where any ideological attacker would even have a 1% chance of survival. Perhaps popular Sheriff Grady Judd has it right when he warns criminals of a lawfully armed populace:

Masking has been ineffective

I was in the least optimal environment for getting news updates when I wrote the article on the day of Renee Good’s death. Yet, in seemingly no time, I learned the identity of the masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross long before any of the details of Renee’s non-marital partner Becca Good.

Law enforcement legitimacy collapses the moment authority hides behind masks. It survives only through visibility, accountability, and the exercise of lawful power.

Masks do not protect agents or their families. Harassment is not solved by concealment, intimidation is never curbed by retreat, and violence is not deterred by pretending anonymity equals safety. Just like Agent Ross, the lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on.

Activists may want to cosplay rebellion and manufacture oppression narratives and that is their right. But when they cross into interference, targeting, or doxxing, the answer is arrest, exposure, prosecution, and consequences without apology.

Plaid Antifa will not be defeated by hiding. It will be defeated when the law is enforced decisively and in full view of the public.

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Please keep all first responders in your prayers.

References:

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/air-marshals-ice-agents-chased-out-of-los-angeles-restaurant/

https://theconversation.com/im-a-former-fbi-agent-who-studies-policing-and-heres-how-federal-agents-in-minneapolis-are-undermining-basic-law-enforcement-principles-274573

https://dailycaller.com/2026/01/15/anti-ice-protesters-random-man-chevy-video/?utm

https://www.wtxl.com/news/florida-news/florida-sheriff-warns-looters-encourages-gun-owning-residents-to-shoot-criminals-if-necessary?utm

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, a disappearance case I worked on had the solemn anniversary of 20 years unsolved. The cold case has been adopted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE.) I reserve all details of the case for and to FDLE. It is a case that has been debated on true-crime podcasts as well as national programs like 60 Minutes and Dateline over the years. There were three other cases I worked with similar scale and scope, two were also disappearances and other was a terrorist massacre, but none of those taught the lessons that served me during the final years of my career and even while dealing with personal loss.

Pandemic and Stimulus Checks

About 15 months prior to retirement, I was assigned to investigate missing persons. Departing chief’s staff, the chief really took good care of me. The most uncomfortable part of the job was speaking regularly to the families. To succeed, I determined to turn that into my favorite and most effective part of my job. During the advent of the 2020 coronavirus panic, circumstances aligned to provide me with more than plenty of opportunities to regularly speak to families.

Policy required a DNA submittal within 30 days and a written supplement every 90 days. I found that many of the reporters or complainants also suffered from behavioral health issues yet were very responsive to firm compassion. Even families who had loved ones that had been lost in my city for years, just needed the assurance that someone still cared.

This only worked with certain rules. I had seen in past cases where impossible promises only harmed the relationship between the police and the family. It’s a fool’s errand to try to keep them on board while they are still dealing with immense uncertainty and loss. Truth trumps false promises, even well meaning false promises.

Instead provide milestone commitments that you can keep:

1. Never promise or guarantee any outcome

2. Don’t answer every question (this is very hard but worth it)

3. Promise that we’re going to determine the right thing, and whatever it is, we are then going to do it

(One of my friends on Substack regularly runs financial survival appeals and I can relate. The early promise was for every five free subscribers, you would likely have one paid subscriber. Like him, I will rarely paywall a post or restrict the flow of information.

I ask you today to financially support American Peace Officer. Join me in this adventure as we meet with legislators on both sides of the aisle, we focus on the best help for first responders and their families.

I’m as retired as I’m going to be for the rest of my life - 50 hours to 60 - and I will, whether you make a modest payment or not, going to continue to fight for the health, prosperity -physical and especially spiritual- of our nation’s first responders until my last day. I pray you join me in that. )

New Centurions

Today, a next generation of cold case detectives has borne the mantle, and I am inspired by where they are going. Post retirement, I was honored to be welcomed as a board member of my local crime stoppers program, Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida,

Decades ago, Crime Stopper programs were just tiplines but today have evolved into legitimate crimefighting investigative tools. Today, the most progressive crime stopper programs are being invited to regional task forces, including cold case events. The new guard is also doing an outstanding job approaching cases that were unsolvable two decades ago and now Millennial and Gen Z detectives are bringing today’s technology in policing and solving a lot of yesterday’s crimes.

“He’s Wearing his Daddy’s Genes”

One of the technologies that today’s cold case detectives are using is genetic genealogy. Two detectives, who I admire greatly, Michael Moreshi and Michael Fields, adopted the 2001 Christine Franke murder. This case had all of the solvability factors and convicting that all our solved 2001 cases did not. It only lacked a suspect and these forensic DNA pioneers, through a grueling process convincing administrators of the value of expensive testing and extensive travel, 17 years later brought justice to the family.

The two Michaels and I worked directly in the past with the detectives and the prosecutors who brought the first successful DNA conviction in the United States: the Malibu rapist. “He’s wearing his daddy’s genes” was the British article about DNA read by prosecutor Jeff Ashton taking this technology to criminal prosecution.

On Feb. 21, 1987, a man terrorizing women in Orange County, Florida, brutally attacked Karen Munroe in her Orlando home while her two young daughters slept in a nearby bedroom, WESH reported.

It is amazing to contemplate that DNA evidence has been around less than 40 years. In this 2001 case, the DNA tools used for prosecution had existed for only 14 years at the time of the crime—a shorter span than the many years the case sat cold before its successful resolution.

The cops who care

All cold case detectives out there deserve an unofficial holiday! I don’t know when we should do it but there needs to be a real holiday in a forest of fake holidays. Let January 26, 2026 be a day where everyone in law enforcement reaches out to the amazing relentless, caring, and compassionate detectives who have the most challenging cases on their desks and keep going because there is, somewhere out there, a family at a loss needing closure.

If you are there today, mourning a loss of an unsolved murder or disappearance, my heart goes out to you. One of my friends was murdered and the case is still unsolved. Reach out to the leaders and commanders and let them know how much their commitment supporting cold case detectives means to you and your family. We are continually seeing those unsolvable cases being solved through innovation and technology and exclusively by the cops who care.

Please keep all peace officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References:

https://www.wesh.com/article/florida-dna-science-andrews-case/41877068

https://www.northeastflorida.crimestoppersweb.com/sitemenu.aspx?ID=231&P=about&utm_source

https://www.wesh.com/article/florida-dna-science-andrews-case/41877068

Murders are down. For the record, I am happy about that. My wise friend of points out that the only crime stats you can trust are car thefts and deaths. Some reports on 2024 crime statistics are saying the murder rate is at the lowest point since 1900. There is a whole lot of data out there to analyze and interpret. However, we need to take a moment to appreciate that young people today are in a safer world than I have ever lived.

Drug overdose deaths are also, thankfully, down and continuing to decline. Henry Grabar reports in The Atlantic that a protester’s sign in Seattle read:

‘HEY SPD, ... CRIME IS DOWN 20 PERCENT, AND YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.’

The taunt was glib, but it hinted at a profound question about the nature of public safety in American cities. After a pandemic-era rise in murders commonly attributed to a lack of policing, Seattle recorded fewer homicides in 2025 than in 2019, despite a much-smaller police force.

It’s true. Unfortunately, we are not looking at a solution where reducing the police is the causation for a reduction in crime. Just like shark bites are forever pegged to ice cream sales, correlation does not always prove causation.

Attrition as an Explanation No One Wants to Say Out Loud

In a recent conversation with Chief Patrick Flannelly (ret.) on the Podcast we discussed the solemn consequences of the fatal drug overdose crisis over the past years and how, due to Fentanyl and many other deadly drugs, property crime and other categories will be decreased.

This is what I said last year on this topic:

Check out the post here:

Revisiting community college statistics class, winning the lottery does not change the odds that you might win next week. You are not bumped to the bottom of statistical probability but instead your probability remains exactly the same for the next drawing (to the chagrin of other players).

That isn’t the same in the world of addiction and substance abuse. There is a finite segment of the population that wakes up planning to intentionally deprive others of their money and property for their own benefit. This population has been the most significantly devastated by the fatal drug overdose crisis. It is a consequence of attrition.

It is similar with murderers. One thing that Lifetime movies get right, you likely won’t be murdered randomly. Sadly, murder investigations that I have assisted with include intimate partners, brothers, and my last major case was framed as a beef between rappers, but they were also first cousins.

But the tie between victim and offender relationship in murder cases is substantially tighter than property cases. This again provides the most plausible explanation for the decrease in murders, that due to years of neglect since a low in 2014, failures in law enforcement’s ability to intervene created an escalation that has peaked and has now fallen. Unlike the lottery maintaining and expanding the number of players, there are no replacement murderers when one gets killed or long term imprisonment.

Demographics, risk aversion, and a safer, but stranger, generation

Another critical component to be considered is that the 2025 graduating class was the numerical peak of my lifetime and not projected to reoccur during my lifespan. Projections are that class size will decline for several decades to come. One of the top five school districts in the country is considering consolidating eight primary schools due to below threshold enrollment. Two other major school districts in Florida are consolidating schools, and while school choice options are a driver, many of these schools would still be in play if they hit fifty percent occupancy.

Author on Substack as is writing her third book, this time on why Generation Z are not engaging in pre-marital reproductive behavior, where young people are not engaging in risk of any sort, even sexy risk. Don’t worry, she will include all the factors including digital devices, social substitution, and ingrained safety-ism as contributors, but it is profound to consider the degree that these forces are shaping our future.

But the question remains, what is the status and future of law enforcement considering reports like this. In 2002, I was on the Homicide Squad when we had a five-month period where every single one of our attempted murder victims survived. Muscles were sprained ‘while we were patting ourselves on the back’, but as soon as murders picked up again, the line was ‘murders are not preventable.’ I’ll debunk that in a future article where courage, risk, and boldness saved a lot of lives and families.

During the last 13 years we have seen the exodus of not just law enforcement officers from the profession, but law enforcement officers and their families. When I was selected to go to police academy 32 years ago, I wasn’t one of the ‘naturals’ but they weren’t hard to spot. Their family had prepared them over the years and immersed them in the best traditions of police culture. They didn’t drop out of school to join, instead, these young ladies and young men graduated university and served our country in the military on their path to their law enforcement careers. These friends have had rich careers, and some are still leading. But family leaders recognized the leadership crisis more than a decade ago and so many legacy candidates have been directed into other careers where they are less likely to be betrayed by weak ‘accidental’ leaders.

How do we adopt the proper mindset for the future?

We need far more law enforcement officers than we have currently budgeted. If smaller agencies, who are by far the majority of law enforcement organizations in this country, don’t figure this out it will be a costly unending cycle.

First, dispel the notion that more officers means more money. We have seen six-figure sign-on bonuses. San Diego spent $55,200,000 on overtime beyond a budgeted $46,400,000 OT in fiscal year 2025. Fifty-five million dollars! That is happening in large and small departments around the country. Like an addict needing an expensive hit, agencies have not convinced their fiscal provider that over-hiring is economically beneficial in the long term. Until we change our mind about the value of retention, law enforcement command staff will remain in a hamster wheel of their own making.

Second, if attrition, due to disastrous national drug policy and seditious border policy, are responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans, well over 500,000, who have died from drug overdose deaths between 2015 and 2024 with a very large subset involving Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, we need a path forward that never lets this ever happen in America again.

The time has come for the best traditions of law enforcement to emerge again. Poor cowardly leaders will be claiming credit while standing on the graves of those they took an oath to protect. Pause and reflect on that for a moment.

Community Violence Initiatives (CVI) are eager to climb the podium, but they have proven to increase violent crime and drug dealing, even in their own offices. Their employees have a high mortality rate due to ongoing criminal activity. Make no mistake, the convicted felons acting as ambassadors and violence interrupters are the most corrupt waste of money where a city or county can dump taxpayer cash.

If you, like most rational people are observing that crime seems worse rather than better, you are correct. The news is still reporting local crime like it is off the charts. While we have an unnatural respite, the factors that will fuel the next wave are staring us in the face in the form of drug liberalization during an unprecedented national mental health crisis, partially caused by the psychosis inducing drugs themselves.

The crime decline narrative is seductive because it absolves people of responsibility. If crime is falling on its own, no one must answer for the catastrophic policy failures that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Reality is less comforting. We are witnessing a temporary statistical lull shaped by attrition, demographic shifts, risk avoidance, and the long shadow of a drug crisis that devastated entire communities.

If anything, this moment demands more courage, more staffing, and more leadership—not less. The danger is not that crime numbers are down. The danger is that we deceive ourselves that this silence is safety and realize later that we dismantled the very institutions capable of stopping it.

Please keep all first responders and their families in your prayers!

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-reported-crimes-in-the-nation-statistics

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/homicide-rate-declines-sharply-dozens-us-cities-new-129445976

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/22/murder-rate-century-low

theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/great-crime-decline/685695/

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20250514.html

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/drug-overdoses.htm

https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates

https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html

There is no rational reason why this officer-involved fatal shooting in Minneapolis on January 7, 2026, was destined from the echo of the first shot to be instant international news. In most American media markets, this case would remain a tragic and avoidable event. The cause would be assumed to be attributed to critically unwise choices by the deceased. Unless there was some local interest, it would be unlikely to bleed to another market.

Choosing to threaten armed law enforcement officers, weaponizing your vehicle and attempting to harm or kill, significantly ratchets up the statistical probability of being shot and killed in an officer involved shooting. It’s not rocket science. As one of my friends quotes John Wayne: “If you’re going to be dumb, you’ve gotta be tough.”

How Political Timing Turned a Local Shooting into National News

This, like so many other cases that rise to international attention, has little or nothing to do with the facts of the case. There is nothing exceptional about this case on its own merits. It is just a normal and logical cause and effect narrative. There may be a behavioral health component on the part of the driver.

A day prior, January 6, 2026, PBS reported “The Trump administration has launched what officials describe as the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, preparing to deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents and officers to the Minneapolis area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.”

This provoked outrage from Governor Tim Walz (a day after announcing that due to being immersed and implicated in a massive fraud scandal on his watch that he would not run for re-election) called this initiative to expel illegal aliens “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.”

On January 7, 2026, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent opened fire on the driver of a sport utility vehicle that was deliberately accelerating toward him. The female driver, Renee Good, had been using her vehicle to intentionally block and disrupt ICE vehicles.

These are the facts: As her vehicle is approached by agents and is told to get out of the vehicle, she reverses the vehicle. An agent is in front of the protester Good’s vehicle as it is traveling backwards, when suddenly she engages forward drive. Her vehicle struck the agent, but there is video evidence that when the driver shifted into forward drive (the backup lights turned off) the agent who is now suddenly in harm’s way, was still holstered. The three shots were fired 0.5 to 0.75 seconds later striking the driver in the face according to on-site witness testimony and several angles of video.

Yet, despite widely shared video, media outlets are publishing amazing non-sensical statements like: “A third officer with his gun drawn crosses in front of the car as it moves away from the agents. That officer, who appears to be knocked backward but not hit, opens fire on the vehicle.” That, objectively, didn’t happen.

How Media Language Rewrites Reality in Officer-Involved Shootings

The land of 10,000 lakes has earned a reputation of a topsy-turvy Alice in Wonderland style of leadership and justice. The media bias is unsustainable. CNN shares this message in their coverage of the ICE officer involved shooting by interjecting this:

“Remember: The day after Christmas, a 23-year-old conservative content creator claimed in a video posted to YouTube, with little evidence, that Somali-run child care centers in Minnesota were fraudulently taking funding meant to provide child care for low-income families. The video, boosted by Vice President JD Vance and tech billionaire Elon Musk, quickly racked up millions of views.”

They were describing the citizen journalism of Nick Shirley who did not break the story of the daycare fraud in Minneapolis but travelled to Minnesota to see for himself. The fraud had been taking place prolifically, but Shirley’s work only demonstrated the fearless conduct of the criminals and indicated the corruption of state daycare licensing.

Wikipedia has euphemized Good as the ‘driver waving people around her car’ and the Associated Press describes her as ‘motorist’ while CNN repeatedly uses phrasing of ‘woman’ or ’37-year-old woman.’ Many sources are intentionally sowing deception evoking the idea that she is just there having car trouble. During her vigil, on January 7, 2026, other voices in the Star-Tribune reveal her true purpose on Portland Avenue between 33^rd and 34^th streets:

Speakers at an evening vigil disclosed few details of Good’s life, but were resolute in honoring her as a good neighbor who was protecting others. “She was peaceful, she did the right thing,” said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of CAIR-MN.

“She died because she loved her neighbors.”

A speaker who only identified himself as Noah, rejected Kristi Noem’s portrayal of Good as a domestic terrorist and said instead that Good was present on Portland Avenue on Wednesday “to watch the terrorists.”

CNN also reported: A woman with blood covering her face sat in the yard of Minneapolis resident Tyrice Jones’ home following the fatal ICE shooting of a woman this morning, Jones said, and was heard shouting, “You guys just killed my wife!”

Jones said he walked outside his home after hearing gunshots followed by a loud bang when he saw the woman, who he told to call “her people.” She replied, “We have nobody out here. We’re from out of town.”

Good is survived by a six-year-old orphan.

Leadership Failure at Every Level: City, State, and Media

This is the result of failed and even seditious leadership in both the City of Minneapolis and the State of Minnesota.

Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a master of performative politics, weighed in with a profane press conference blaming Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the escalation that he and others created. Chief Brian O’Hara discusses live on CNN the hazards of ICE enforcement (of criminal illegal aliens) in his city and the danger to his officers being injected into these situations.

State Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is well within the vortex of the state welfare, healthcare, and childcare corruption scandal was quick to blame the actions of Good on the ICE agent she tried to kill.

Governor Walz, another recurring character in all of the scandals that have shaped the past five years, held a press conference at the state EOC claiming Federal DHS agents were coming into his state without coordination with state and local officials. Secretary Noem, who formerly was a neighboring governor concurrent with his terms called him out sharing that state and locals, like sanctuary city Chief O’Hara are the ones who won’t coordinate with federal assistance unless it is something they want.

Media bias has hit a new low of shamelessness during this day of unnecessary loss. The press used to support the objective truth. We were promised that if there was video of incidents, we could come to agreement but that hasn’t come true. We didn’t even have body worn camera (BWC) but still have four or five video angles so far, with likely more to come.

It is sad that a protester made the unwise choices to interfere with federal agents doing their job. The ICE Agents, themselves United States citizens, are sworn officers charged with the mission of criminally processing illegal aliens within our sovereign borders.

If this is the pattern continuing that we have seen since the George Floyd riots five years ago, or nine years ago with Philando Castile, we will see the safety of the people of Minnesota continue to deteriorate to third world standards.

Please keep all law enforcement officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

His work is frequently featured on LawOfficer.com, the only law enforcement owned major media presence in the public safety realm.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-sent-to-minneapolis-area-to-carry-out-largest-immigration-operation-ever-ice-says

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/livestory/ice-shooting-minneapolis-live-updates-9.7036845

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-we-know-so-far-about-the-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/minnesota-fraud-state-reps-testify-01-07-26

https://www.startribune.com/she-was-an-amazing-human-being-mother-identifies-woman-shot-killed-by-ice-agent/601559922

Megan Kocher posted on social media that “I met Renee and her wife just a few weeks ago. She fed me tea and cookies at her house while we talked about school stuff.”

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/minnesota-fraud-state-reps-testify-01-07-26?post-id=cmk4oeumz000s3b6p69fe59ti

https://apnews.com/live/minneapolis-ice-shooting-updates

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a Minneapolis motorist on Wednesday — a shooting that federal officials claimed was an act of self-defense but that the city’s mayor described as “reckless” and unnecessary.

In social media accounts, Macklin Good described herself as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom” who was from Colorado and currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” and displayed a pride flag emoji.

https://apnews.com/live/minneapolis-ice-shooting-updates#0000019b-9ae6-dc77-a1bb-deeebf9b0000

In a video from the scene of the shooting posted to social media, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle crying, describing Macklin Good as her spouse and that they had a 6-year-old child.

“That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!” wailed the woman, who wasn’t identified.

This past year was filled with unforgettable stories. It began January 1, 2025, with the New Orleans terrorist attack that was followed hours later with the Tesla car bomb in Las Vegas.

Protesters continued to fill the streets of New York City, crippling traffic in opposition to the Israeli military response to the Hamas massacre and kidnappings of October 7, 2023.

In June, Vance Boelter murdered former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Horton and her husband Mark. Immediately prior to this, Boelter shot and gravely wounded another lawmaker and his wife. Following the largest manhunt in Minnesota history, the assassin was captured. A search of his vehicle revealed a letter where he implicated the governor. This was completely dismissed by the mainstream media prior to examination of the actual note based on anonymous sources close to the investigation.

This article is about the law enforcement and public safety stories that didn’t get the attention they deserved.

The Walking Tall Sheriff

Former Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser was investigated by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation following a cold case investigation into his wife’s murder in 1967. This incident was a key component of the legend of Sheriff Pusser that painted him as an anti-crime crusader whose wife was murdered as they were ambushed by criminals. Following that, in the 1970s, there were several Walking Tall films made portraying him as a virtuous hero. In the 2000s, both Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Sorbo played Walking Tall characters, though their character went by different names. Pusser died in a single vehicle accident in his new Corvette in 1974, reinforcing the perception of heroism and unjust tragedy.

In August 2025, the brave investigators fundamentally upended the legend of the lawman immortalized in the Walking Tall films, concluding that evidence now contradicts his account of the 1967 killing of his wife, Pauline. Their thoroughness, including a 2024 exhumation, determined that Pauline was likely shot outside the vehicle and that Pusser’s own gunshot wound was inconsistent with an ambush. Prosecutors stated publicly that, if Pusser were alive today, there would be probable cause to charge him in her murder.

Gen Z uprisings

Major Gen Z uprisings this year resulted in the overthrow of the government of Nepal and Madagascar. There were two major uprisings in South America and two others in continental Africa that have had impact but not regime change.

Beginning in 2023 and intensifying through 2024–2025, Gen Z–led Nepalis have mobilized in response to chronic unemployment, entrenched corruption, and a political system dominated by the same elite actors who have recycled power since the end of the civil war. These protests have been largely decentralized, digitally organized, and ‘leaderless,’ relying on social media rather than political parties or revolutionary movements. Demonstrations included mass student walkouts, road blockades, and protests targeting parliament and key ministries, with demands focused on accountability, resignations, and systemic reform rather than ideological revolution.

Then they set all three branches of government on fire.

Following that, the military demanded the protesters choose a new Prime Minister which they did on Discord. Sushila Karki, a former Supreme Court justice was elected on a preference poll on Discord, ironically, one of the platforms that was banned by the previous government sparking the protests.

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In October 2025, Madagascar underwent a military takeover following weeks of large anti-government protests sparked by water and electricity shortages and discontent with President Andry Rajoelina. Youth-led protests, in a country with a median age of 19 and with 60% of the population under 25, mobilized under a movement often referred to as Gen Z Madagascar.

Demonstrations erupted on September 25 over the chronic cutoffs of utilities and quickly expanded into broader political grievances. Government forces responded with force, and at least 22 protesters were reportedly killed in clashes galvanizing the movement.

A key military unit, CAPSAT, refused orders to suppress demonstrators, refusing to fire on civilians and instead sided with them, marking the turning point that led to the removal of Rajoelina from power. That development turned a youth driven protest into a military coup. The leader of the CAPSAT unit, Col. Michael Randrianirina, was later sworn in as interim president, with the military establishing a transitional governing council.

Why are an island nation off the east coast of Africa and a landlocked nation between India and China relevant? It should be concerning that these movements were a part of a larger uprising that is not highlighted in American mainstream media. We must recognize that it is occurring here in the United States. Do you really think that the mass protests for Gaza, ultimately in support of Hamas and opposed to the State of Israel, have any knowledge-based loyalty to either side? We haven’t seen any evidence of that, and YouTube citizen journalist Nick Shirley was interviewing Gen-Z protesters in New York City nearly two years ago and couldn’t find a protester who knew what they were protesting. These demonstrations were a public safety nightmare that crippled traffic to the bridges and tunnels in Manhattan.

From 1966 to 1976, Mao’s Red Guard in the People’s Republic of China were a youth movement operationalized to move the cultural revolution forward. They completely destabilized China causing them to be disbanded, with millions of members either re-educated or otherwise eliminated. We deserve better information on these trends reshaping the world.

Conversations about cannabis: The danger of weed has gone mainstream

On August 13, SNL comic Pete Davidson appeared on the Power 105.1 Breakfast Club. Formerly famous for embracing and promoting cannabis consumption, the sober Davidson is far more engaging. Around 40 minutes into the show, he discusses both his weed use and his experience in rehab. He says that “most of the young people (in drug rehab with him) were in there for weed.” The conversation with the hosts of the show revealed their intimate knowledge of contemporary cannabis consumption culture, including how to portion down. Davidson quotes stand-up comedian Dusty Slay who describes today’s high THC weed as stronger than ‘weaker acid.’ Slay talks about walking around in the front yard praying and reaffirming that marijuana has never killed anyone. Davidson then discusses how low THC weed was fun for music and movies, but today’s concentration causes him psychosis and feeling like he is ‘outside himself.’

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What has come about in 2025, with the narrow defeat of recreational cannabis initiatives in several states, is a true reckoning of the true human and family cost of all forms of substance abuse. Families who fought against lethal drugs in honor of their lost loved one are now locking arms with former users who pull back the veil on the elevated risks associated with drugs and derivatives. Well known celebrity doctors including Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Drew Pinsky have brought opposing views to recreational marijuana, not from ideology, but from their experience.

A culture that spent a decade normalizing drug use is now recognizing its quiet casualties in rehab rooms and ERs instead of headlines. It is being revealed to compassionate voters that legalization efforts only exist to enhance corporate bottom lines and escalate black markets.

Law enforcement professionals, policymakers, and the public deserve honest coverage of forces reshaping authority, legitimacy, and social order in real time. Ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear. The law enforcement community must recognize in 2026 the importance of sharing these events, especially our victories. It guarantees that we will be leading when the consequences of these movements arrive.

Please keep all our first responders and their families in your prayers. Happy New Year.

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/30/gen-z-protests-corruption-five-activists-nepal-madagascar-togo-kenya-morocco-protesters?utm

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/young-activists-who-toppled-nepals-government-now-picking-new-leaders-2025-09-14/?utm

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/madagascar-president-rajoelina-address-nation-monday-evening-2025-10-13/?utm

Human Performance vs. Armchair Expectations

Is tailgating dangerous? We find consensus on this. Driving by a traffic accident, some are quite obviously cause and effect, even for those who have had no training other than the material to pass a driver license exam.

Every driver has experienced the stress and anxiety of a tailgater on their rear bumper. I’m guilty of judging the tailgater through the reflection of my rear-view mirror and spin through speculations of how she or he is likely not insured.

However, the driver license handbook suggests impossibly high following distances with suggestions on estimating distance a professional surveyor or real estate agent couldn’t achieve. The most practical advice which works at all speeds is the two second rule. If that’s new to you, here is how it works: as the vehicle in front of you passes a marker, your vehicle stays two seconds behind. It takes .75 seconds to realize the car in front of you has slowed or applied their brakes. This gives you 1.25 seconds to get your foot on the brake.

But here is the real question: Why does a 19-year-old driver, during the peak reflexes of their life, have dramatically more rear end collisions than a 79-year-old who has lost most of their reflex speed. The answer is human performance tempered by training and experience. That is the answer to a great many things.

When Courts and Media Confuse Opinion for Science

Two recent events have brought these factors into the forefront. The police training company Force Science Institute was criticized by an Eastern Kansas media outlet trying to portray them as discredited. This was based on other reports, where another media outlet - who also had not seen the training or the lesson plans - had quoted some critique, by a judge and a former prosecutor. The closest anyone got to a real claim was that while testifying, Dr. Bill Lewinski, founder of the Force Science Institute, replied to the prosecutor’s question during cross examination:

“You have never testified on behalf of a citizen who was shot, killed, or injured by the police since 2003, have you?” McGinn asked. “We’ve never been asked, so the answer is no,” Lewinski said.

I have been connected on social channels for some time with Force Science leaders Von Kleim and Brian Baxter and found their commentary nothing but insightful and thoughtful. Based on everything that I have read from each of them, including Chief Baxter during the years prior to joining Force Science, there have been nothing but reasonable and sound well-founded perspectives. My review of videos available online reveal nothing but reasonable science at the most practical level.

The recent Kansas news article quotes a judge from more than a decade ago stating: In a 2013 ruling on a case in which an officer used force, California U.S. District Court Judge Jesus Bernal called Force Science research “nonscientific gobbledygook” and wrote that it enjoys “little or no acceptance within the relevant scientific community.”

Judges have the right to their own opinion, but when broadcasting from the bench, they should be accountable to every voter in their district. Steve McAllister, former US Attorney who has presented possibly a record nine cases before the United States Supreme Court referred to Force Science Institute as ‘snake oil salesmen.’

While the world, the defense attorneys, and media convince the general public that they have the capacity to evaluate ‘officer performance’ the sane and reasonable limit the expectations to measurable ‘human performance.’ Long story short, even the best work within their limits. Force Science Institute has a distinguished track record, even five years ago being featured in the IACP media and touting 30 peer-reviewed published studies.

Two years ago, I saw something similar out of New Jersey. Kevin D. Walsh, who was serving as acting comptroller, is a civil rights attorney known more for his work at conference podiums than in courtrooms—where selective facts are used strategically, assumptions about motives are made, and the public is encouraged to take sides before any real understanding of the case can develop.

The police training company doing business as Street Cop Training had secured conservative commentator Tomi Lahren as their Atlantic City keynote speaker. Was that the trigger for Walsh? We’ll never know. When the acting comptroller found this out many months later, he delivered the most left-centric report to the New York Times prior to its official release. Walsh went to great lengths to portray Street Cop Training as endorsing unconstitutional policing, while every authentic exposure of their work displays the highest regard for the United States Constitution.

Walsh and his team practiced deceptive video editing presenting to any audience that icebreakers were the curriculum and that holding captive the attention of the officers attending the conference was only to be in humorless puritan fashion. In an irony beyond irony, the leaders of Street Cop Training were producing the next level advanced training that New Jersey cops hadn’t been offered by New Jersey Police Training Commission since its formation in 1961.

The Myth of De-Escalation

Police academic research, usually NIJ funded, is rarely consequential except in the forensic sciences. You could subscribe, as I did for years, to the National Institutes of Justice library additions weekly emails. The more technical and scientific the article, the more benefit it appeared to present to the forensic community. The most concerning aspect was how many taxpayer-funded studies wound up behind very expensive paywalls. Studies that helped midnight shift officers were non-existent for years.

Then, on the extremely rare occasion where you have the George Mason University meta-study on police body worn cameras that shatter the myths of the vendors claims of behavior change of suspects and officers. Commonly know as the Hawthorne Effect, that observation creates a modification in behavior. It works for a while, as in jail calls, but it proves that one of the chief claims of BWC, behavior modification are revealed to have no benefit, and ultimately absolutely nothing changes.

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The most important research revelation of 2025 came from my friend Dr. . De-escalation has been a household word in the public sphere for some time. But to quote Tucker Carlson’s most overused phrase: ‘What is that?’ There was a huge assumption that this was ‘common knowledge’ and there would be training to – well, to put this bluntly, to have the police de-escalate themselves. Dr. Yates yanked the curtain back on the whole charade.

Dr. Yates offers a human performance course, Seconds for Survival, that uses human models both inside and outside of law enforcement. He bases this on broadly accepted research on all sides of the political spectrum. The data, the same data gathered by DOJ conducted studies, as well as National Institutes of Justice funded stories studies that were not taxpayer funded, provides the clear parameters on what performance is to be expected from suspect and officer. His “course blends behavior pattern analysis with practical survival strategies so officers can anticipate and prevent violence rather than merely react to it.”

It is too easy to forget that these trainings did not begin spontaneously. They arose out of a need and a gap that exists in most states’ curricula. These courses provide exactly what the most ardent police critics demand: more lifesaving training. It is time that we embraced the groundbreaking studies and quit burying the best of authentic research. Ignoring that truth doesn’t make policing better. It only makes tragedy more likely.

Please keep all first responders and their families in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References:

https://www.kcur.org/news/2025-12-12/force-science-law-enforcement-training-research-lenexa-police-discredited

https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/chesterfield-police-force-science-charles-byers-july-2024?utm

https://www.travisyates.org/seconds-for-survival/?utm

Please don’t think less of me. I briefly wondered what was the big deal over the Hillsborough County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office cheating scandal. I felt that those involved losing their careers was enough, but being added to a veracity disclosure list for a non-criminal violation was punitive.

When Cheating Becomes a Credibility Crisis

The first domino to fall was Chief Deputy Anthony Collins, the second in command. He and Mrs. Collins reached a degree of marital disharmony where she, in a retaliatory move, revealed via email to the elected sheriff that the chief deputy had paid a tutor to complete his coursework for the FBI National Academy (FBI-NA). The FBI-NA is a ten-week program for senior law enforcement leaders. In the 90 years of the program, more than 55,000 law enforcement managers and executives have graduated the program. It is currently held at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The academy has certainly earned its prestige as I have seen many friends attend and return filled with drive and purpose, then progress to even higher offices. If it earns criticism, it should be regarding its exceptionally low rate of failure. In other words, cheaters would cheat out of laziness, not a lack of academic capability.

I have been a guest of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and toured many of their facilities and was briefed of their intelligence and analytical capacity. They showed their main offices, the jail, their substations and more subtle installations. Today, based on my impressions years ago, I stand by the assessment that the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is a top tier modern law enforcement agency ready to embrace every technological advancement that furthers the mission of ensuring safe communities.

The scandal grew as the investigation probed deeper. Data analysis of emails found other agency commanders using the same ‘tutor’ as Chief Deputy Collins. Five additional ranking members either resigned or were terminated between July and October of this year under the cloud of cheating at their leadership schools by having papers ghostwritten. They lost their jobs, or as Sheriff Chronister put it, “They paid with their careers” but then they were Brady listed. Given the fact that they had such a public fall from grace, as well as it was unlikely that they were going to be conducting investigations or making arrests, seemed like overkill. Today, after consideration, I do support that action, and recent Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department case makes the Hillsborough actions make even more sense.

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The Hidden Cost of Secrecy and the Brady–Giglio Divide

On November 3, 2025, Wired magazine published the secrets scandal of the Kansas City (KS) police hack. In 2024, a malicious group of hackers who are known by the name Blacksuit literally held the information systems of KCKPD hostage and demanded a ransom to return control of the data. The city refused to pay.

“Published by the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, more than 1 terabyte of hacked documents paint a disturbing picture: Officers with egregious credibility issues—those the department itself investigated and found untrustworthy—were not only allowed to stay on the force but often rose through the ranks or moved on to other departments, without the public knowing. In Kansas City, Kansas, the police department asserts that Giglio Lists are not subject to disclosure, as they considered confidential personnel records.”

Brady and Giglio, are based on U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1963 and 1972 respectively. They form the foundation of prosecutors’ obligations in discovery to supply known exculpatory evidence (Brady) and any witness credibility issues (Giglio.) In Florida and several other states, the term “Brady list” is often used as a catch-all, but most officers placed on it are there for Giglio issues, for credibility or integrity concerns that could affect their testimony. Failure to disclose is a violation of the defendant’s right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.

This hack has caused reputational harm for every great cop with the KCKPD. The data revealed cops who would steal from crooks on raids, egregious examples of domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment, proven excessive force and false arrests. Officers who should have been fired or criminally charged, faced neither with some promoted to the highest ranks. This further undermines criminal cases and complicates the work of the prosecutors who have no idea that officers they are putting on the stand shouldn’t even have a badge anymore.

Integrity Is the Real Reform

These cases tell us that there is more cheating and dishonesty waiting to be discovered. I’m certain prior to July, all these Hillsborough deputies were anticipating their next promotion. It is nearly certain that there are other worse secrets hidden behind weak firewalls just waiting to be hacked. This presents a real leadership opportunity for the entire first responder community to have the conversation with staff, based on these examples, that nothing hidden can be assured to remain hidden. This applies to personnel records, discipline files and training certificates. It is likely time for an audit, especially by a qualified third party to find any blind spots.

Researching this article, the same memory kept recurring. In 2003, my fitness instructor, then Officer Steve Kelley, held large workout classes during lunch hour. Many participants would shave a few reps from our exercises, and I reached out to see if he recalled the quote he shared with me back then.

“My dad always said — anything worth having is worth working for. Those who avoid the work only cheat themselves and set themselves up for failure (or injury)!”

(In his third career, he serves as Director of Law Enforcement and Safety Team Training, at Decision Tactical in Central Florida, the most immersive tactical training center, open to the public, on the planet. Check out their video in the references.) It was so impactful to remember his perspective about the cruel joke when cheaters cheat themselves.

The entire public safety realm, including law enforcement, corrections, and fire-rescue, demand respect from the public based on our integrity. Cases like these undermine trust and claims of transparency, and worse, the stain impacts the hardest working and most virtuous among us. We can’t miss this opportunity for self-correction and real reform.

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Please keep all first responders in your prayers.

Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://www.fox13news.com/news/hcso-chief-deputy-resigns-amid-allegations-cheating-fbi-national-academy-coursework

https://www.wired.com/story/hack-exposes-kansas-city-kansas-polices-secret-misconduct-list/

https://decisiontactical.com?v=0b3b97fa6688

When We Should Be Winning

Law enforcement is losing when we should be winning. The off-duty online misconduct is wrecking cases and staining reputations. I was just about to weigh in on a million-dollar settlement for an officer involved shooting from five years ago, but my research revealed that officer was arrested for possession of child pornography a year ago. While I was primed to defend the cop, I suddenly understood that this seven-figure payment was the sound economic decision for the agency.

The consequences impact every member of that agency too. When the white flag is waved, especially in a racially charged shooting that took place 75 days after the in-custody death of George Floyd, it paints the whole profession as being as shady as the activists claim, especially to those predisposed to questioning any police action. Despite the agency getting off financially cheap, local and national media will forever regard this shooting as a questionable or inappropriate shooting. No one will remember that the suspect was in possession of a loaded stolen firearm while on pre-trial release for a recent arrest for possession of a loaded stolen firearm. They won’t remember that the gun slid forward of the suspect’s right hand at a 45-degree angle where he landed.

Digital Footprints and Public Perception

Most cases of online misconduct are not related to criminal child pornography, but this illustrates how even four years after the officer involved shooting, it can and will affect cases. The early days of the Internet are over. In the early 80s there were just a few CompuServe users back then, and the architects of the World Wide Web were still hard at work making something that didn’t exist beyond list servers and bulletin boards. Today, we are recruiting officers who have never lived in a world where they couldn’t order a pizza easily on their phone.

Former Trooper Michael Proctor lost all his credibility in the Karen Read case and was fired based on his thousands of text messages that contained offensive and inappropriate language going back a dozen years. He just abandoned his appeal to get his job back with the Massachusetts State Police. CBS National News reports:

‘Stephen Carley, representing Massachusetts State Police, used Proctor’s own words to make the case that the veteran trooper deserved to be fired.

“Distasteful. Unprofessional. Inappropriate. In poor taste. Juvenile. Sexist. Disgusting. Dehumanizing. This selection of words does not come from a public comment section on a website, an op-ed columnist, or a protester outside the Norfolk County courthouse. These words are Michael Proctor’s accounting of his own conduct in this case,” Carley said during the hearing.’

When Context Becomes the Scandal

Around 2021, the Oakland (California) Police Department was ‘embroiled’ in a social media scandal regarding an account on the Meta platform Instagram. While the department was under federal monitoring, the discovery of the ‘crime reduction team’ Insta account resulted in a six-month investigation by a law firm that clearly had their conclusions established from day one. It reeks of a consent decree scheme to overbill. The article that appears in the Bay Area Fox affiliate KTVU notes the frustration of the firm in their report where there were memes alluding to some coworkers using sex in hopes of promotion or depictions of ‘Latinos as gang members’ that few found anything offensive about the posted content. The news report states:

“In fact, some officers continued to insist that there was nothing troubling about offensive memes from the page, the firm noted. Other officers “improbably” claimed they did not understand the memes well enough to say whether they were offensive or not. And still others, the firm noted, “doubled down” that the memes were not offensive.”

From the detailed descriptions of the memes, I speculate that it would take a pretty big payment promise from federal consent decree monitor before any reasonable person could even feign distress with a straight face. However, this example serves as a lesson that you need to consider the climate where you are before engaging publicly. One of the key elements in the Oakland case was that 140 city phones were confiscated and examined. But before you fall in the trap of thinking that you are safe on your personal phone, when you contribute to accounts or online groups that may be examined, your device may get pulled into the gravity field. Once it’s in the Faraday room, it is gone.

Leading Yourself Before Leading Others

If you know you are at risk for being charged for possession of child pornography or worse, take off the badge and get some help. I don’t know what is worse, you getting caught with it or making it through your career without being busted. Either way it is bad news for you and your co-workers and you are always going to be on the edge of jeopardy.

Those who don’t have an illegal porn problem need to determine how you must lead yourself. The wise option exists - to look at every email, text, and social media post and question whether you will be proud to see or explain it in the future. Choose wisely regardless of whether it is public or private content. Nearly every day in the media, we see leaked emails and texts; communications that were intended to remain private.

Integrity in the digital age isn’t about staying silent; it’s about staying clean.

Please keep all law enforcement officers in your prayers.

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Roland Clee served a major Florida police department as a Community Service Officer for more than 26 years. His career included uniformed patrol, training, media relations, intelligence, criminal investigations, and chief’s staff. He writes the American Peace Officer newsletter, speaks at public safety, recruiting and leadership conferences and helps local governments and public safety agencies through his business, CommandStaffConsulting.com.

For media interviews and podcast appearances, click here: http://bit.ly/40pT3NS

References

https://wflanews.iheart.com/featured/florida-news/content/2024-08-12-former-deputy-accused-of-stalking-investigating-detective/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/michael-proctor-karen-read-massachusetts-state-police-appeal/

https://www.ktvu.com/news/instagram-scandal-oakland-police-probe-into-sexist-racists-posts-was-anemic