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Joey: I'm here with Brian Berg, Officer Brian Berg from the Redding Police Department. Thanks for coming today.
Brian: Thank you.
Joey: I'd shake your hands, but my hands suddenly got clammy. I wonder if that's like a law enforcement thing.
Brian: Yeah, don't get nervous.
Joey: I'm suddenly nervous. Do I have any paraphernalia on me? I don't think so. I don't normally carry any, you know, anyway. You get that a lot, though, right?
Brian: I get that a lot. "These aren't my pants."
Joey: Yeah. "I borrowed this car from a friend." "What friend?" "I don't even know him that well." Yeah. I used to watch Cops and loved the Bad Boys Bad Boys and the explanations.
Brian: Oh yeah.
Joey: Yeah. You've got a few of those, huh?
Brian: Got a few of those. Got a few stories.
Joey: Yeah. You've been with RPD. Is this like year 26?
Brian: 26 years, yes. Yeah, long time.
Joey: Getting up there, man.
Brian: Most of my adult life. My entire adult life. Yeah.
Joey: And you're not originally from Redding. You came here for the job. Yeah?
Brian: I did. Yeah. I was born and raised in the Bay Area, East Bay, Fremont. My dad was a cop down in the city of Milpitas, which is north of San Jose.
Joey: Sure.
Brian: Retired as a Commander down there. And so I grew up in a law enforcement family, going to the police department and being around that atmosphere my whole life. And so, out of high school, I went to junior college and ended up in Chico at Butte College, and I knew I wanted to chase a law enforcement career. That's really all I knew and really wanted to do. I just put myself through the police academy and hired. 1997 was in the police academy, and getting hired was extremely hard back then. So I threw applications out up and down the state for the most part. There were a few places I didn't want to work in, but there were a lot of places I didn't mind working in. During that time, I met my current wife. She was at Chico State.
Brian: We actually grew up in junior high and high school all together. She's two years younger than I am. We knew each other in high school, but we met in college and started dating in August. And I got offered the job in Redding in January of '98 and said, well, if I can get this job, I can keep this relationship going for a couple of years and maybe bounce back to the Bay Area where we're both from, and work down there. And so yeah, she ended up graduating college and coming up here and going into Simpson for her teacher credential and her master's, and she got a job at Shasta High School early in her career. And next thing you know, it's 26 years later, and here we are.
Joey: You guys are both from Milpitas.
Brian: Fremont.
Joey: But you didn't really know each other.
Brian: Correct.
Joey: And you both, you ended up meeting in Chico. 0:02:46.4
Brian: Yeah. Yeah. 0:02:47.2
Joey: That's.
Brian: Knew of each other. I probably rode my bicycle by her house every single day going to elementary school and junior high, and walking by her house to high school, and yeah, I knew of her; we just knew who each other was, but never knew each other.
Joey: And that might actually have been a connection then, you might be like, "Hey, we were from. "
Brian: Yeah, no, it was.
Joey: Okay. That makes a lot more sense.
Brian: Yep. We ended up back in Fremont, and she was there, and I go, "Hey, you're up in Chico too, right?" Long story short, I gave her my number, thinking she was way out of my league; there was no way she would ever call me. And she did.
Joey: And because this is pre police mustache.
Brian: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I didn't grow the mustache until I was about 45 years old. I waited until I was mature enough to grow a mustache.
Joey: I'm still not mature enough.
Brian: I'm not either, but I pull it off.
Joey: What's funny is my wife and I are from here, and her dad was my mailman. And we both went to Chico State and we met in Chico.
Brian: Okay.
Joey: So it's, but that's not quite the Fremont. Fremont to Chico's a little bit, that's a little bit further.
Brian: Yeah, close.
Joey: Yeah. But similar type of thing.
Brian: Similar thing. Yeah. It's funny how life works.
Joey: And so you were looking at. I would've thought that not only was it hard to get on law enforcement straight out of the academy and everything, but also a small department. I mean, Redding is a, when you're talking about California.
Brian: Yeah. It's a mid-sized department for California.
Joey: Mid-sized?
Brian: Yeah. Mid-sized. Yeah.
Joey: Because I think a lot of the law enforcement goes through the bigger cities, right? People start off in LA or San Francisco, and they transfer out. Right?
Brian: Yeah. Everybody takes their path of where they want to go. And sometimes agencies sponsor officers, too. So you get hired before you even go to the academy and that agency will send you to the academy and then bring you back—just different viewpoints in how you do that. Sometimes, we'll hire people who put themself through the academy. It's cheaper for them, for the city, obviously. I have paid myself through the academy and paid my way through for the city to pick me up.
Joey: Good ROI, though; I'm sure you got your money back, right?
Brian: Oh, they did. Yeah. Yeah.
Joey: It's a good investment, right?
Brian: Yeah, yeah. It's a good investment for the city because they don't have anything for you, right? And so if you don't do training, it's a whole training process that takes place once you get hired as a police officer because the academy teaches you this much on how to really be a police officer because of that.
Joey: That's kind of college. Right?
Brian: It's absolutely, it's that field training program that really gets you past the mustard, and you have to pass that. If you don't pass that, they say thank you, no thank you. It doesn't mean you can't be a cop somewhere else, you're not a good fit for our city. And so for a city to hire somebody like that, it's really no interest in them paying somebody to go through the police academy and bring back and them not make it. We're into that person a lot of money. And so it's a little harder to separate from that person. So it's kind of a give-and-take.
Joey: In the 26 years you've been here, you've probably seen Redding change quite a bit.
Brian: Dramatically. Yes.
Joey: If you think about some of the, I want to get into. You're a police officer, so it's, and that's such a right word, maybe enigmatic. I'm one of those people that I wish I had a better vocabulary.
Brian: Save word, exactly.
Joey: I know. I mean, I'm trying. I need to do the Word of the Day app. But it's one of those professions that's more than just a profession.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: You know what I'm saying?
Brian: Yep.
Joey: It's, there's a lot around being in law enforcement.
Brian: Yeah.
Joey: Okay. And so when you meet people in law enforcement, it dominates the conversation, versus when you meet accountants, you might have a couple of quick tax questions there or so. Still, I want to talk about other things because you're heavily involved in our community in a lot of ways, both through law enforcement and outside of law enforcement. But since we're talking about law enforcement, I would like to talk about what you've seen change-wise because I have some ideas on things that have changed over the years with crime.
Joey: I've never thought Redding had a crime problem. Maybe I, it's because I watched so many Forensic Files, and I'm like, and they're almost never based in Redding. But what can you say about Redding's crime right now and the change that we've seen maybe over the span of your career, which is almost three decades?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. And viewpoints change, too, right? People as individuals change, and my viewpoint of things is what they look like. 22-year-old me, brand new police officer, hot and ready to go out into the job, you viewed things differently than I do now as a 26-year veteran and been through some stuff also. So, I give these answers with that grain of salt of like my viewpoint back then, even looking back on them changes from what I might've thought at that time. You know?
Joey: I hope so. That's called growth.
Brian: That's growth, absolutely. It's called. Yeah, exactly. So, I think a lot of things have changed in Redding. We've obviously grown as a community, which is always what I've wanted to see as this community. It's a wonderful place to live. It still is a wonderful place.
Joey: Absolutely.
Brian: Do we have crime? Absolutely, we have crime.
Joey: What city doesn't?
Brian: Yeah. Every city does. Do we have a homeless problem? Yes, we do. But every city has a homeless problem.
Joey: In America, unfortunately. Yeah.
Brian: Yeah. And it is a lot of the California issues. We've talked about California's laws and the political atmosphere and how that's changed crimes in California's cities across the board.
Joey: That changed kind of the definition of crime.
Brian: Yes.
Joey: Right?
Brian: Absolutely did.
Joey: I mean, there are some things now that aren't crimes that were, 10 years ago, that was a crime. Right?
Brian: Yeah. 10 years ago, if I, 10, 15 years ago, if I found somebody had a little bit of methamphetamine on them, we would send that person to prison. Right? That's how it is a felony, and they didn't always go to prison, but after a certain amount of contact, having the same old.
Joey: I don't know why I was so shocked when you said, if I found methamphetamine, you go to prison. I think the word methamphetamine and prison connotate. My body had a visceral reaction. Keep going.
Brian: That's okay. Yeah. But the laws viewed that as a felony, as a felonious crime. And since Prop 47 and AB 109 have passed, it's decriminalized really narcotics use. And so that's been, that's a topic from 5, 6, 8, 10 years ago, obviously, but it's still very relevant today as far as how we handle those types of things. And as a police officer and as a citizen, I look at it as accountability, right? Are drugs victimless crimes? People argue it is because there's doom to themselves, but who's a victim as a result of drug use? If you have, you are high, your mom, the people who have.
Joey: If people that use drugs contain it to themselves.
Brian: Correct.
Joey: Then you might, I think you argue, but that rarely.
Brian: It doesn't happen.
Joey: It rarely stays contained to themselves.
Brian: Absolutely. Yep. We used to have the DARE program back in the day, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education; there's another acumen that says drugs are really expensive there. It does. People can't contain a drug habit and maintain a 9:00 to 5:00 job, right? This is very hard.
Joey: Not outside of Wall Street.
Brian: Yeah. Right.
Joey: It's almost impossible outside of Wall Street.
Brian: Yeah. Especially.
Joey: Or DC.
Brian: Especially street drugs. Right?
Joey: Yeah.
Brian: That's super hard to do. So what do you do as a result of that? You steal. You break into locked cars, break into cars, and steal things to sell them. They steal your $2000 stereo out of your car. I'm sure you have one of those. I don't, but some people do.
Joey: No, I have more.
Brian: And they sell it on the street for a $50 bag of meth or whatever like that. And so you become a victim because of property crimes that are a direct result of drug abuse. And the problem we have with that is that there is no accountability. We created drug programs and educational programs and rehab, but there's no way to force those people into those programs. Does that make sense?
Joey: Yeah.
Brian: Accountability. We attribute it to your kid's little misbehaving. And as a parent, you go, oh, it's just Johnny being Johnny, he's acting up. And he smacks mom maybe. Right? No, Johnny, knock it off. It's just Johnny being Johnny. You never do anything about it. And Johnny grows up, becomes more and more, the name's not Johnny, is it?
Joey: No.
Brian: A kid named Johnny can grow up and get more and more emboldened as they get older. Now, Johnny's 18 years old, and he's misbehaved his whole life without any consequences. If you provide consequences in the home and have timeouts, you're restricted, or whatever that means.
Joey: Some type of discipline.
Brian: Some type of discipline, right? Yeah, Johnny's behaviors will probably curve. And now you have grown people, grown adults who you're still not disciplining when they do things bad, right? And they're allowed to get away with things over and over and over again, whether that's breaking into your car or property crimes, it's non-violent or drug use, and we're saying, "Hey, no big deal. We're just going to write you a ticket for it." And you don't even have to go to court for it because you have no consequences for going to court. What is their motivation to change their life because there are no adverse consequences to their actions, right? That's what these laws have primarily done in California. And we've seen that directly happen here at home with us.
Joey: So does that mean we're seeing a rise in the ancillary crime? Since the drug itself isn't a crime, are we seeing rises in theft, burglary, and even assault battery?
Brian: Absolutely. And we have steadily since those laws passed. And it goes directly to, like I said, there's no consequences for people's actions, right? If I can say, listen, we have a rehab program available to you, and as a consequence of your drug abuse or your stealing things because of your drug abuse, we have to send you to rehab and get you better, right? And you have to go to that. If you don't go to that, then what? Nothing or you have to go to jail, right? People are more apt to go. I would rather go to rehab than jail. It might be a forced thing, but at least we're doing something to fix the problem. Right?
Brian: We're giving them the resources they need and the tools they need to be maybe more successful once they've completed that program. But now I have a drug problem, and I go to court, and they say, "Hey, why don't you go to drug rehab?" And they go, "What if I don't want to?" They're like, "Well, we're full-on jail space, and we really can't do anything else with you." So, what's their motivation? Unless you were personally motivated to go out and change your life, which one in a thousand might be, which is great. That's fantastic. We want to see that.
Joey: That's really low odds, man.
Brian: Very low odds. I'm making up numbers. Those aren't factual numbers, but in general.
Joey: That's really bad.
Brian: People I see aren't willing to go.
Joey: No.
Brian: And get the help. And the same thing with the homeless population that we have in town. Jonathan Anderson, the Good News Rescue Mission, runs an amazing program.
Joey: I heard nothing but good things about him and the program.
Brian: And up until, I'll be honest with you, up until five, six years ago maybe, maybe a little longer, I was one of those people that were like, "Oh, the mission's the problem," right? People are coming to Redding because of the mission. San Francisco's putting out flyers that say, come to Redding for the mission. Those are things they were bringing busloads of people to Redding and dropping them off because of the mission. You've heard all those rumors and stuff. Until I went and actually educated myself, a novel concept, about what the mission does, it's an amazing program and most of those rumors are false. Do we have people that show up for the mission? Sure. But they're not busloads of people coming in and doing that.
Joey: And my understanding is they're never at capacity.
Brian: They're never at capacity. From my point of view, we offer to go out and do these, call them sweeps or whatever you can call them, and clean up the river with all the homeless people down there.
Joey: I've seen that.
Brian: It's awful.
Joey: Truckloads of trash.
Brian: Truckloads of trash and trash.
Joey: Yeah.
Brian: And we always offer them, every time we offer them resources. "Hey, the mission has beds available. We have these others, and a thousand different non-profit organizations in town are willing to help you." And very rarely do people accept that freely. Because there are no other consequences. There are no other consequences to going back there and being back tomorrow with as much trash on the river again. And this is a repetitive cycle. So, how do we get out of that? Because if we're asking people to get off the street and fix their problems voluntarily, they won't. And a lot of that is because it's generational. They don't know how to, and they don't have the basic skills that you and I might have for cleaning my room or doing dishes, right? Those are common skills that most of us have.
Joey: Whether we exercise it or not.
Brian: Husbands don't do it as well, yes. And we realize our wives would like us to.
Joey: But we could.
Brian: But we could, we understand the concept of that. And a lot of these people, I'm generalizing, a lot of these people don't have those basic skills that we grew up with. Because that's not the house they grew up in. Does that make sense?
Joey: No, of course.
Brian: They don't even understand the concept.
Joey: It's sad, but yes, it does make sense. I'm sad to say yes, I know what you mean.
Brian: Yeah. They don't have the concept that I can go to the mission and get true help and get off this street and not be in this position anymore. I don't think they have the concept of that. Some of that's mental health, too. We can get a whole different; we can go 12 different ways with this conversation.
Joey: When I was growing up, it was pitched that basically homelessness was tied to poverty. And I think that was a huge fallacy. It's tied to mental illness, drugs, and alcohol.
Brian: Absolutely. Yeah.
Joey: And we have such a net for poverty. Are there people in that situation who are in poverty? But those are the super outliers. I was listening. The other day, I saw a lad talking to me; I'm trying to remember who she was. She's a really intelligent lady, and she is on my social media every now and then. And she was talking about how when you have conversations with people, and they continually go to the outliers, that it's either they're, you're talking with somebody that has such a low IQ that they can't think abstractly or they're disingenuous either way, stop the conversation. So that idea of as soon as you say, "Hey, homelessness is primarily mental illness, schizophrenia, all that, drugs and alcohol." And they go, "Yeah, but what about. " It's like the conversation stopped because that is not even one in 100, right?
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: So it's like trying to, so sticking to what it really is. And I think how does. There's a part of me that's like that shouldn't be law enforcement. That burden should not fall upon law enforcement. That's not. Is law enforcement, are you a policeman? And what I think of a police officer, someone to enforce laws, especially in the physical realm, meaning, keep people from killing each other, that kind of stuff, right? And now we're talking about social workers, psychologists, medical doctors. It feels like the wrong; this burden is being put on the wrong group of people.
Brian: We've become all of that. Every bit of that that you just said. I'm a social worker and police officer.
Joey: And the jack of all trades is the master of none.
Brian: Absolutely. Yep. And I have to change my hat at a moment's notice, right? I might be there in a social worker mindset of trying to get this guy, this person's services, and it changes to a violent encounter immediately. And I have to change that hat and change my mentality of how I'm working. You know what I mean? So it becomes very important; you have to master a million different traits, which keeps the job interesting, but it's not the role of law enforcement. Law enforcement shouldn't be out doing social work. Is that part of what we do on a daily basis? Absolutely. Because part of social work is solving problems, right? And that's part of what you do. But truly, this is a societal issue. Nobody else wants to deal with it.
Brian: I say that there are a lot of people who want to deal with it but don't have the tools to deal with it. So it gets put on law enforcement. And that's generally how law enforcement goes. If somebody doesn't know how to solve a problem, fix their problem, or have an issue, they call the police. And often daily, we field calls like, this isn't a police problem. I'm sorry, I don't know. I know you're struggling and having a problem, whether this is my handle or not, but this is not a police issue. And we have to deny service to somebody because it's not fit in our realm of what we do.
Joey: In your career in law enforcement, and I'm sure you've probably gone to a lot of conferences, you're probably in. Do you see anybody who's been able to solve this in America? Do you see how City X, Cheyenne, Wyoming, tried to force that population to nail it? Like, do you see anybody?
Brian: I think if we had seen that, I think that model would've been replicated many times.
Joey: That's what. I was hoping you wouldn't have to say that. I was afraid that was the case. That no, it's not solved.
Brian: And many of the different communities have tried different things. Salt Lake City, Boise, and Idaho have tried different events and things to do. And a lot of times, what happens is that a city tries to get innovative, right? And they try to force the. I'll use the homeless population as an example, to try to force that population to doing something so it'll solve the bigger problem. And we have a lot of these civil rights activists and organizations to come in and say, "Well, that's not legal to do that. These people have the right to be free and do what they want. If they want to live on the street, that's their right as an American citizen." Which, yeah, they're kind of right. But they. Something gets lost in the bigger picture of things.
Joey: That's a huge gray area.
Brian: But it happens. And cities get sued and lose millions of dollars. And so cities go like, "Well, we do not have to do that anymore." Even though it might be the right approach.
Joey: You mentioned the city of.
Brian: We're too afraid of getting sued for things.
Joey: Last fall, I went to Boise, Idaho; I'd never been there, and one of the things that struck me was how insanely clean it was.
Brian: Yes.
Joey: We did not see a stick of gum or gum wrapper on the ground because my wife and I were there for a sporting event because our son couldn't live there, but for other reasons. But I was like, this. Where are the homeless people? We drove around and went to grocery stores. We didn't stay in a gated community; we were in. And we never saw it, we didn't see. And so, you are saying you dropped Boise, Idaho, in there.
Brian: I did.
Joey: You triggered my mind, so they must have tried something, right?
Brian: I've been to Boise and I saw the same thing.
Joey: What are they doing there?
Brian: Well, they're strictly enforcing camping and unlawful. So, just camping in general. But as a result of that, they've. The City of Boise has been sued, and there's now a case law federally that says there are certain things you can't do with the homeless population as far as moving them in their campsites off the city sidewalk because that's a public place; they can be there. And so it's, that's where the exact example I gave is: the city's now faced with lawsuits from civil rights organizations, and I'm not bashing civil rights organizations.
Joey: No, no.
Brian: They certainly have their place in what we do in society. They get lost in this, the new trend right now. We need to pick on this because we have to win and win some money, as opposed to really looking at the societal issues and the impact this has on society and maybe going like, "Hey, let's work with law enforcement." I get what they're trying to do; let's try to guide them. Instead, we just get slapped with a lawsuit, and they have to pay millions of dollars. And cities are now going, "Well, we do not have to do that anymore because we can't afford it; it's something that can bankrupt the city." So it's unfortunate, you know what I mean? People have good intentions of protecting people's rights; that certainly is a valuable and respectable job, but we get lost in that sometimes; what's the bigger picture? instead of
Joey: So, shiny squirrel moment.
Brian: Yeah. Go for it.
Joey: I have to try something here and see if this works. What's the best TV show that depicted law enforcement that you think of?
Brian: Right now, well.
Joey: Of all time.
Brian: Actually, depicted law enforcement well, I thought that the show Southland was probably my personal favorite.
Joey: Okay, that's a fail. By the way, guys, that was a failure on my part.
Brian: It's okay.
Joey: I thought you were have to say The Wire.
Brian: The Wire is decent.
Joey: And so then I had to go to Hamsterdam. I thought, like, that's like. I thought, man, maybe if I'm lucky, he'll say The Wire, and I'll have to look like a genius.
Brian: Yeah, I didn't watch The Wire all the way through, so I don't know, I heard it's fabulous.
Joey: Yeah, it's the Baltimore Police Department.
Brian: Yes.
Joey: It definitely touches, it's like multiple seasons, touches upon the drug and they.
Brian: Sure.
Joey: At one point, I'm going to give it away. Hey, the show's been out for 20 years. If you haven't watched it, I'm sorry.
Brian: Exactly.
Joey: Okay. But they basically corral and they say, okay, they go to all the drug gangs and all of a sudden they say, listen, from this block to this block, this block to this block, we're not have to do anything, you keep it in there. No violence, no violence whatsoever. Like, and even at one point, I think two of the drug dealers shoot each other, and the cops go to the things that we're going to shut you down. You bring him to us, and he had to turn himself in like the gangs are like dude, this is, and when all their numbers went down, and of course, they broke it up, but I felt like it was trying to, and maybe even in them it's this weird mixture where it's like you throw your hands up, you go, you're not going to get rid of this problem. So, what are you trying to do? You're trying to contain it. Like drugs won the war on drugs, drugs won, like clearly.
Brian: Everytime.
Joey: Yeah. And so we're like, how are you? Without a, okay, you can't stop it, then contain it, control it, try to bring some semblance of humanity to it. So they were like, they brought in people, say, okay, we're going to make sure you have clean needles, and here's the clean needle disposal, and I've heard people like, ah, that's crazy, I guess because they feel like you've morally given up. Still, I don't know; there are two types of societies that I see outside of America; one is kind of like the Portugal approach, which I think legalized everything, and they have, oh, you can shoot here, Amsterdam type thing where you can go, you can do these things. And when you go to those places where if you're watching the videos, it's sad, it's absolutely tragic.
Brian: Sure.
Joey: People are killing themselves, they're killing themselves. But you can say that for all of San Francisco. And then the other side is somewhere like Russia, where they're like, they don't.
Brian: They chop your fingers off if you're caught with marijuana. Yeah.
Joey: Yeah, they're have to. And those are the only two that you don't. Everything else is in between where you have this. What's with this trash? And why is this guy? And this person overdosed on a stairstep in front of these kids. And it's like, I don't know how to get away from that, and so out of all those, I'm like, okay, well, I guess the Portugal one out of the three, I don't know. And so well, you've morally given up, right?
Brian: Yeah, but where's the answer?
Joey: I don't know.
Brian: If I had the answer to, I'd be mayor.
Joey: I have to say, you know you came on today to have the answer, right? Like I said, you were.
Brian: Absolutely, for sure.
Joey: So then there's no master plan that everybody has; this has to get implemented soon.
Brian: Exactly. So my family and I went to Vancouver, Canada, just on vacation a couple of years ago. We tripped up there, and we went to downtown Vancouver. And the same thing you're talking about, we're walking around kind of like Boise, walking around, and we're like, wow, like there's no homeless person holding a sign, not a cigarette on the ground, like speaking, like I'd sit on the curb and eat. It was super clean. We're like, this is a major metropolitan city, right? And we're like, "Where are they all? They got it. There has to be homeless people somewhere." And my wife wanted to see the Olympic Torch, so we put into Google, we go torch, and we take a little drive, we ended up through Chinatown, and we're like, okay, yeah, it's a little hairier here in Chinatown.
Brian: And we turned left, and there they were, and it was like a third world country, it was, they call it. And so we researched it, and it is wild. It was like a third-world country, like tents out into the streets and like their free markets going on, people selling t-shirts out of shopping carts and fist fight on the corner, and then we cross one street, and there's a family of four walking down the street with their shopping bags. And they didn't cross the street. And it's like, so downtown Eastside is what it's called, like 18 square blocks. I don't know what the rules are, but they have the dispensary, not dispensaries, but the safe injection sites; they have the booths that nurses monitor, and they give needles out there.
Brian: But the point is it was, the rest of the city was immaculate. And it was just that , 18 square blocks, whatever it was, it was like a third-world country. So you kind of, again, you're talking about, like, is that a give up or is that a win for everybody? That's definitely a loss for the people on those 18 square blocks. But for the rest of the city, they're not worried about any of that on their doorstep. You know what I mean? And so I'm not saying there's an answer in there. I'm just saying that it's. It was. It baffled me. I'd never seen that before with my own eyes, and I drove through it.
Brian: I'm like, wow, like this is, there's something to be said for like having an area that those are people who choose to live that way, and we discussed mental health. Is it really a choice? Those are a million different discussions we could have, which is why there's probably no answer to these questions. You can dial off in so many different directions. But is there an area you can put them and contain them more or less and contain that lifestyle as if this is a life you choose, and this is where you're going to do it, and you can't branch out from there? But then you get into the.
Joey: You know what's funny?
Brian: Russia. Are we making people do things they can't do? So we're having a friendly discussion here about possibilities and options.
Joey: Well, okay, that said, you were saying, in my mind was the wheel. I don't know if you could tell, but the wheels were like squirrels, the squirrels running.
Brian: I can tell. Yeah.
Joey: And the wheels were turning, and there's a part of me that's like, wow, you morally gave up, but there's another part that said that's funny if I went to go get a business license right now, a friend of mine was down here in the corner, he ran out the corner place, went down and got the city permit to sell wood sheds. He's since left California, but he sold down in the corner.
Brian: The corner, yep.
Joey: And then they came like day three and said, "You can't do this." He's like, "But I have the permits and everything." "Oh, well, we accidentally gave you the permits." So they shut him down. So I'm like that idea that, hey, we have freedoms. It's like, well when you go to make money when you go to do a business, there are constraints. If I wanted to get a driver's license, there are constraints. If I wanted to get a burn permit, there are constraints.
Brian: Absolutely, yeah. That is a very good point. I never thought of it that way.
Joey: I didn't either until just now, but I thought, but we do that.
Brian: That's why we do conversations like this.
Joey: There you go. Like there's, so you look around through the city, zoning. There's a reason why it doesn't go house, motel, funeral parlor, house, like.
Brian: And smoke shop.
Joey: Yeah, it's like this is commercial, that's an office, this is a warehouse. And then here's residential over here. So that idea that you'd say, "Hey, look, we're going to allow if you do not have to get rid of it." We also need to act locally, but we are controlled by the state, and we are controlled nationally. And I want to move on to other things.
Brian: Sure.
Joey: I feel like we could sit and talk for hours about this.
Brian: We could, absolutely. 100%.
Joey: And I didn't bring you to. As I told you, one of my big things is that I definitely want solutions. I have no problem talking about problems. Talking about our problems is good and healthy, but I like to fixate more on the solution. Say, okay, hey, this is a problem. And as we may segue, one of the things we can do is I super appreciate anybody that went down and helped clean up. I've seen those posts where they show up with one of those dump trailers. You guys have a dedicated dump truck, and they fill it to the brim.
Brian: Oh, yeah. Thousands of pounds every day.
Joey: And so anybody that, I'm sure volunteer. People volunteer and help, right? It's not just law enforcement, right?
Brian: They have clean-up days, but for the most part, it's our cleanup crew that goes out, and then a couple of civilians, obviously civilian community service officers, non-sworn, with a sworn officer that go out and they give warnings, and they tag camps to say, "Hey, you need to move, take what you need." Based on the laws that we have in the city of Redding on this, we have, and if they fail to move and leave, they go out and do the cleanup for them. So there's a process, a legal process we go through. I can't just show up and start taking your stuff, unless you abandon it and leave it. But there are ways we do that, but yes, it's just our crews that do that. There are organized days that volunteer groups get together and do those cleanups. And we sometimes assist them depending on their actions, providing more safety than anything else.
Joey: I was about to say, yeah, safety.
Brian: It's quite unsafe in some of those places.
Joey: Oh, I imagine. I've had some interactions, and I'm a big guy; my wife's got some stories of where she goes to the store without me and just had some interactions, and I was like, yeah, I don't have those interactions, but I'm also 6"2, 240 pounds. People don't tend to get upset with me if I'm unwilling to give them something. Okay. Well, shifting.
Brian: Yeah.
Joey: So you worked, you held a number of different hats inside the Redding Police Department. A couple of them intrigued me; everybody's intrigued by a K-9. I mean, dogs are cool. Who doesn't like dogs, right?
Brian: Everyone does.
Joey: Especially. And then. Was it just. Watch John Wick 3 if you want to see some super law enforcement dogs in action. But you did K-9, and I also want to talk about you; what's the name of the program where you go into the schools and interact with the kids?
Brian: School Resource Officer.
Joey: Yeah. Let's talk about the school resource. Kind of what? Dogs can. Kids first, dogs second. That's fair.
Brian: Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely, it's fair. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. You're sending that and some things you guys, the law enforcement, do with the kids.
Brian: Yeah. So, the School Resource Officer program is something very near and dear to my heart. I was involved pretty early in my career as maybe a three or four-year cop when I got involved with that. I was in my mid-20s at the time, so I was fairly young, but I could relate to many of those kids, too. I wasn't that far removed from that mentality in the high school. But honestly, outside of a K-9, it was probably one of the more rewarding jobs I've had in my entire career. I had the ability to go to a school as a police officer, and I worked for high schools. We have two high school officers and two elementary school officers who split the city and the different schools. However, as a high school School Resource Officer, I have the ability to build relationships with not only the youth but also staff, parents, and administrators, things that I still have to this day.
Brian: Many of those kids who were seniors, we had, myself, my wife had kids later in life, they had kids younger as well. Some of our kids grew up and went to school together. You were my student at Shasta High School back in the day. And so I have many of those relationships to this day; they really guided me throughout my career. As a young officer, it gave me insight into the power of relationships in this profession. As a police officer, you obviously stand out; you walk into the room, and everybody looks at you. You're the focal point. That's just part of the uniform. Yeah.
Joey: You've got a gun. And a lot of people can't just walk around.
Brian: People automatically change, they react, and there's a perception of law enforcement by a lot of people. And different people, different perceptions based on their interactions, maybe with law enforcement as well, but the ability to go in there and really develop relationships and change people's opinion of who we are. Like I'm just a person. There's a reason I didn't come here in uniform today, right? I came here in my civilian clothes because I'm just a person, and to have kids see that through the uniform, like, if you pull my hair on my arm, it hurts like yours does. I bleed, I cry, and all the same things. You guys have a job, right? And I'm trained to do some things differently. But at the end of the day, I'm just a person.
Brian: I'm no different than you or your parents, and I have a different job and different outlook on things based on the experiences that I've had. And to help kids do that. And like I said, parents, teachers, and administrators alike, you have a real swath of influence that expands exponentially when you build those relationships, and you have the opportunity to really change perceptions generationally. These kids who I had as they're my students as the School Resource Officer, they now have kids, and they're telling their kids, "Hey, remember Officer Berg, he was a cool guy, and cops are good people." I've now influenced two generations of the Redding community by my interactions in schools. And that's just a small segment of that and the reward I got from doing that job. But it was a lot of fun.
Joey: What is the. For the Resource Officer, what is your, I don't want to say agenda, but what is it, like your manifest, you're going into the schools to what, make sure there's a good relationship or, you know what I mean? What are you like? "Hey, this is why we came here? This is why we have this relationship." What. Can you tell me about that?
Brian: First and foremost, obviously safety of the students. The School Resource Officer program really took off after the Columbine shootings. I came in right after the Santee shootings in Southern California, San Diego, Santee High School. So similar to the Columbine. Besides some recent things, Columbine is a big name everybody knows. So, really, it came off the heels of that, of we need armed people on campus to protect our kids. And I know that's still controversial to this day, as some people think. However, the program's true purpose is to provide safety to the schools and the student body. My goal in becoming a school resource officer was to ensure that the schools didn't have any real safety. They had fire alarms. We all did fire alarms growing up in the Bay Area with earthquake drills. We don't have that as much up here.
Brian: But we didn't really have, like if somebody comes onto campus as a threat, what do we do? Nobody really knew what to do. And that was the whole mind shift we had to have in the entire education. My wife's in education, so this is near, and I see it from both sides as well. But to educate the schools, develop programs to provide better safety to students on campus, and develop active shooter drills. And we say active shooter drills, but really any menace on campus. Somebody wanders onto campus; they're not supposed to be there, and we don't know their intentions. What does any threat that might happen to students outside of a fire, bomb, or earthquake drill look like? And so, I am really developing those plans on how we accomplish that.
Brian: And so my goal getting to Shasta High School, which is where I landed to work initially, was to develop those plans with administrators, with students, with teachers. We had a committee put together on how t best do this. And that's still in place today through all the schools. It's evolved, obviously, as we all do as things change, and we didn't have social media back then or cell phones. Everybody had cell phones. We had Nextel phones, but that's not it. But really, that's the primary purpose of having an officer on campus. Obviously, that can't consume your day, so you find other things to do, whereas we talk about the relationship building and different, just daily things that happen on campus. At the time, a student brought marijuana onto the campus, which was a criminal offense at the time. It still is.
Joey: I was have to say.
Brian: Yeah, but it was more severe back then, obviously. It's just dealing with those criminal acts that happen on campus, fighting, any other threats that might occur on campus, just curbing that behavior. And the goal of it, obviously, as a police officer who's come out is to build good people. It behooves me to make good citizens going forward in our community. If I can influence some kids and they go out and do great things in this community, then that's good for all of us. And that's really the end goal: to keep them safe in the process.
Joey: Did you ever run into anything, like any dangers in school? Because I don't know what is happening in Redding.
Brian: There's been a few, nothing super major. Most of them are threats or a report of. We had an incident; it's U Prep now; it used to be the Shasta Learning Center, but it used to be a whole different thing.
Joey: I'm so old that I went there and Nova High School.
Brian: I've heard of Nova.
Joey: Yeah, ninth grade only high school. What an experiment.
Brian: Exactly.
Joey: Please, go ahead.
Brian: No, that's fine. We had a report on, this was 25, 20-ish years ago, of somebody walking into the front of the campus holding a gun. And I was nearby, and it just brought the entire. Every law enforcement entity you can think of showed up on that campus within five minutes. It was pretty amazing. However, we also learned lessons from that as a law enforcement community. It's great we had 88 cops show up, but what are we all doing? You know, do we have roles? Do we have responsibilities? Everybody's flooding the campus. That's not good either. And so we had to re-advise what that looks like, that massive response. I can control what Redding officers do, show up, have some sheriff's deputies show up, and have CHP officers, game wardens, and probation officers; everybody wants to help.
Brian: It ended up being nothing, ended up being totally unfounded, but that was the report we had, and we had to treat it accordingly. So as a law enforcement profession, how do we change and evolve and do things better as well? And out of every incident, that's why we always debrief after any critical incident happens. We have an officer-involved shooting; we have a pursuit, we have anything that happens, we come together and talk about that afterward of like, "Hey, one went good, one went bad. Let's try not to replicate the bad things," right? You know, somebody went too fast, crashed, whatever that looks like, and tried to improve as a professional and individual.
Joey: So you did that, the Resource Officer for several years. Did you stay at the high school level or go down to elementary as well?
Brian: I did. I helped at the elementary schools in the absence of those guys, but I stayed out there in the high schools.
Joey: And that's saying their mandate is safety as well, or do they get it?
Brian: Yep, absolutely.
Joey: Okay.
Brian: And they know the different ages of kids, obviously. So they're dealing with preschoolers through fifth graders and sixth graders sometimes, so it's different. As a high school officer, I can arrest all those kids if I have to and take them to Juvenile Hall, like, let's go. As an elementary school officer, you don't have that option as much unless it's really bad. So how do you handle kids on enforcement type of actions changes as well? But you have the surrounding areas too, traffic enforcement around the school, especially high schoolers leaving for lunch and driving like maniacs, curbing that behavior, all those things come together as one.
Joey: And so then you went from that, and then you got into K-9?
Brian: Yeah, came back into patrol for a couple of years and then went into a K-9 position. So, we hadn't had dogs with the Redding Police Department for over a decade. We had a couple of dope dogs we had, drug dogs, they were labs and were great but didn't do the, you know, a person searching stuff that we were looking for in law enforcement. I was fortunate to start our K-9 program back in 2003, and it's still going strong today.
Joey: And you're involved in helping relocate these dogs too afterward, right? You were part of a program that, after they retire, puts them in homes or something like that?
Brian: No.
Joey: No?
Brian: So we have Communities for Police K-9s. We have a nonprofit organization, and I started that with Kaleigh Jo Keller, a community member at the time. And I always thought of some community non-profit to help support the dogs. Dogs are expensive.
Joey: Oh, I bet.
Brian: They're expensive to purchase, costly to keep up, all the things that go along with that. And the city obviously has limited funds. And then you talk about dogs when they retire, what happens to them? They stay with the handler almost exclusively, and very rarely, they get adopted out; we've never had a dog adopted out. But we have medical bills as the dog gets older. All the things that happen to us happen to dogs. And we have this dog now that's served our community for 10 or 12 years. Now the handler has to foot the bill, thousands of dollars when this dog is now 10 or 12 years old, and so our nonprofit helps supplement those vet bills as the dog gets older, allowing the officer not to have to come out of his pocket and pay for those things. Because the city, once he retires, is done with the dog. They don't pay for it anymore. While they're working, the town obviously covers all those medical bills they rarely.
Joey: Those dogs are like, what's that, like shits in training, I think they call it, right? Like, dogs are high. When you get them, a lot of money is invested in them.
Brian: There is.
Joey: A lot.
Brian: There is. We get our dogs through a vendor. So we get calls, like, "Hey, we have this dog; it's just not working out at the house; we'd love to donate it to the system." Which is great, we get it. It's like, that's awesome. But there's a lot that goes into training dogs and money that goes into them, so we buy our dogs from vendors. And the vendor we trust our vendors to go out wherever they need to purchase a dog. Many of our dogs come from the Czech Republic, where our vendor gets most of his dogs and brings them over here. And they come over with some basic training, know how to do some bite work, and have been tested for law enforcement, some courage testing; you can't just take a regular dog and expect it to perform like a police dog.
Brian: There's certain skills and prey drive versus defense drive that they have, that dogs have, we want a balance of. You don't want a dog that's a land shark that will bite everything and just be crazy, right? And that's a prey drive, like chasing things, and there's a defense drive where a dog gets scared and bites you because he's scared, right? That's what most domestic dogs do when you get bit by a domestic dog; that's why they're biting, they're scared, and they bite, and they run away, right? You've seen that all the time. So you get a dog that's biting you, holding on, and not letting go; that's a high prey drive and dangerous as well.
Brian: So you really want in a police dog, you want that balance of enough prey that when I say go out and do something, he's going to go out and do it, enough defense that he's going to protect himself and I don't want too much of the other, a good balance there. So we trust our vendor to find those dogs for us, and then we bring them in and do a month-long training. And then it's every month we're doing 16 hours a month of training with our dogs. I'm sorry, yeah, 16 hours a month. So every week, we're going four to eight hours a week training the dogs; it's constant that we do.
Joey: And you said something about, like, so these dogs are, I can't remember the term you just used, but you said we had the drug dogs, which are labs, right?
Brian: Narcotics dogs.
Joey: Narcotics dogs. These are not narcotics dogs.
Brian: We call them patrol dogs.
Joey: Patrol dogs, okay.
Brian: So the human, a person focused. We can cross-train. So even though I'll say a person-focused dog can be cross-trainedPolice, to work as a drug dog, they can do both. But I say the person dog because the primary focus is to find people. And police dogs are, first and foremost, locating tools. We use them to find people and things because their noses are 10,000 times better than ours, and if dogs really didn't find people or find things, we probably wouldn't have police dogs in American society. That's because that locating tool that we have is why we have police dogs, the bites, and all that stuff is obviously high profile. It's fun to watch during demonstrations, but what we actually do when we actually bite somebody is a tiny percentage versus actually deploying a dog to find them. We only bite people in the most extreme circumstances. If somebody is truly fighting us or a very dangerous person running away that's going to be a danger to you and your family if he gets away or a guy that's hiding from us that isn't coming out and use that dog to go in and distract him until we can go and make that person safe.
Joey: So you did K-9 for a while?
Brian: 13 years I did it.
Joey: 13 years, no más, right? You're not doing.
Brian: No more, yeah, no more.
Joey: That's Spanish.
Brian: I was like, yeah. I was recently appointed back to the K-9, and I just made corporal, which is a supervisor role.
Joey: Congratulations.
Brian: So I just got newly appointed back as the K-9 supervisor now. So I'm supervising the guys that have dogs now.
Joey: How many dogs do we have?
Brian: We have six currently.
Joey: Oh, wow. And these are all out in the field helping with law enforcement?
Brian: Yep.
Joey: When we talk about crime, I'm going to shift around a little bit.
Brian: Sure, no problem.
Joey: I wasn't going to try to make this all police, but it feels like that's all we're talking about.
Brian: That's right. Yeah, we can do some community stuff, too, as that's near.
Joey: I would love to.
Brian: Near and dear to my heart as well, so hard work. I'll go wherever you want to go with this thing I got.
Joey: We were joking.
Brian: I got eight hours.
Joey: I was joking before the camera started; I said we were talking about what we're going to talk about. I said, well, you came to give us your crypto advice. You were like, uh-oh.
Brian: Don't get it from me. I'm terrible.
Joey: Buy low, sell high, that's.
Brian: Doge, buy Doge.
Joey: The Elon fair. Okay. So, in regards to the K-9 and crime, I don't pay attention; I don't. And I do this because the news is, so it's dominated by negativity; that's what sells. Unfortunately, we slow down when driving for a car wreck; that's just, we're wired for, oh, what's going on? And so I've tried to control what I take in, just like what I put in my mouth. I've noticed a correlation between what I put in my brain and how I feel; if I'm reading all of the bombastic negative headlines, then I'm like, "I got to sell everything, I got to dig a hole," you know what I mean? "I got to start canning my peaches," like dude, bring it down a notch, bring it down a notch, it's not Armageddon, just you've got.
Brian: Not yet.
Joey: Yeah, not just yet. So what happens is I am not really abreast of some of the information, but Redding crime, how many murders a year? We don't really. This is not a murder place.
Brian: Correct.
Joey: I would say that the vast majority of crime is probably burglary, petty theft, or something along those lines. But please, edify me.
Brian: Yeah, we call those qualities of life or property property crimes or quality of life crimes. We distinctly separate those from violent crimes, which are homicides, armed robberies, those types of things, and then more or less property crimes and non-violent crimes. So very disproportionate in this town. We don't have a lot of violent crimes, we do have violent crimes.
Joey: Which is a good thing.
Brian: They happen. This week's been extraordinarily rare for us; we've had several armed incidents and shootings this past week for whatever reason; it's just coming up, and it's through.
Joey: Connected or separate?
Brian: No, pretty much separate. Very odd that we have that many in one week. But there were a lot of people with guns when we were around town, not legal guns, bad guys with guns. And we quite often look at our Facebook page and scroll through the last six months and probably every tenth post there would be a picture of a bunch of guns, and we're not talking about legal gun owners carrying without a concealed weapon, we're talking about really bad people, drug dealers, and other bad people that are having these guns. So it's not uncommon for us to find those. They don't always make the news, they don't make the headlines, they don't make Channel 7, but we do get those quite a bit.
Brian: And there's a lot of stuff that happens that doesn't get reported to the public in general. Pretty good about reporting stuff on our social media. The news picks up what they want out of that, but we are pretty good about posting things on our social media with that of what's actually happening in town. We talk about you not paying attention to it that much. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my wife's grandma several years ago, and she was. I was a, maybe 10-year cop, and she goes, "Brian, do you feel yourself getting jaded in this job?" Which I understood the question, right? Because we do things differently and I had to think kind of.
Joey: And they're dealing with some negative issues all day long.
Brian: All day long, yeah. This is why I hang out with normal people on my days off; it rejuvenates me.
Joey: Nice.
Brian: But it's another discussion. But thinking about it, I might look at it like a bubble. You grandma live in a bubble, you kind of, that's not a. You, Joe, live in a bubble, right?
Joey: Everybody does.
Brian: I know, I don't mean that offensively.
Joey: No, I get it.
Brian: But in a sense, you are, and that's good, right? We all sure live in our bubbles. What I mean by that is you go from home to work, back home, go to the grocery store, back home to school, back home, back on vacation, then you come back home, and that's what I mean by a bubble, and that's your life. 90% of your life is going from work to home, grocery store, home, taking your kids to school and home and that's great, and you're not driving down the street going like, "Oh man, there's people everywhere," at least unless there's something overtly obvious on the street corner, a big tent or somebody on the corner acting crazy, your attention is drawn to that, you're like, "This isn't right, I don't feel safe," that's when your bubble kinda gets popped.
Brian: Or your car gets broken into, and you're a driver, which is your safe space, right? Your bubble gets popped. And my job, as a police officer, is to keep your bubble intact so it doesn't get popped, right? That's what I'm out there doing. I'm trying to prevent crime. If I'm solely responding to your victimization, that's not good; police shouldn't be; that's part of what we do, but we shouldn't be having to do that. I should stop that guy before he breaks into your stuff. Does that make sense?
Joey: Yeah, proactive.
Brian: So, yeah. I remember an old cop, so I was 21 years old; he was probably 50 at the time, and he'd been through a lot. He said that every. This is in the generalization that not every burglar is a drug user, but every drug user is a burglar: a drug user, a thief, a thief.
Joey: I know what you mean.
Brian: Because there's a correlation to that.
Joey: You touched upon that at the very beginning of this conversation that drugs naturally.
Brian: They do.
Joey: You have to pay for them.
Brian: Yeah. He was an old burglary detective, and he said if I went out the night before and arrested all the people that were doing drugs, I wouldn't have any property crimes that night. And this is back in the late '90s when he told me this. So he is talking about how he grew up being a cop through the '80s and '90s; there's a direct correlation. That's where we talked about that accountability factor.
Joey: Would that fall under that idea of community policing?
Brian: Mm-hmm.
Joey: Is where you, it's getting heavily involved in your community. You see, TV shows, we grew up on the West Coast, and the West Coast doesn't have the history and the tradition that the East Coast does, just like the East Coast doesn't have what Europe has.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: But that idea of, you saw that police officers on the. The old New York, Chicago, they walked a beat. Everybody in that community knew Officer Berg, and the second something went down, Officer Berg knew exactly who it was.
Brian: Absolutely, absolutely.
Joey: It was Johnny. And somehow, that's because that sounds like that's what he did. He went out, hey, I see you, you see me.
Brian: Yep. You know what happened?
Joey: What happened?
Brian: Police officers started driving police cars. And naturally, you drive down the street, driving 25, 30 miles an hour, driving, maybe, I live by, and you don't stop, and you're not walking by the business. And the person says, "Hey, officer, how are you doing?" You stop and talk to that business owner. Do you know what I mean? So hence, we put officers on bicycles downtown recently; it's been a long time coming. And because it forces them to interact more with the public, getting to know people and so as a police officer.
Joey: Human to human interaction.
Brian: Yeah. As a police officer, before I went to detectives recently, last year and a half or so, prior to that, I worked the downtown beat as a patrol officer for 10, 12, 15 years maybe, love that down.
Joey: And now you're off. Now that it got completely remodeled, did they pull you out?
Brian: I know. So that was one of my goals, to see the downtown remodeled, but.
Joey: Looks great.
Brian: Going back.
Joey: Did a great job.
Brian: Yeah, thank you, not my doing, but I like to think I have a little part of that on.
Joey: We'll give you some credit, give you some street cred.
Brian: But I really took that, I really took to heart and going back to my School Resource Officer days, talking about relationships, really policing through relationships. A lot of these problems, like we said, aren't a police issue, we can't arrest ourselves or give tickets to people enough to make homeless people fix what they're doing or go away; there's always a push for that and force and force and force and force, and it's like, what does that do? And so I really found, and it takes time, it didn't happen overnight, but over the course of about 18 months or so, I changed my perception on things, perspective on things of like, how do I better solve a problem? If I can develop relationships with people that I deal with downtown because I'm part of the downtown area, that's what I can control at the time, is the downtown area. And develop relationships with the people on the street, with the business owners, and with the residents, and collectively come together and fix something. How do we best do that? And I found out by going to the, use Yuba Street by the post office. Do you remember when that was really bad?
Joey: Yes.
Brian: You've been here a long time.
Joey: Yes.
Brian: That was historically our, and before the park came in.
Joey: I was have to say before, yeah.
Brian: Library Park, that had to be the end of me. I remember one day Library Park was just where the food truck park is now for those who don't know.
Joey: Behind the Lady Lorenz Hotel.
Brian: Correct.
Joey: Between that and the old post office.
Brian: Yep, used to be Library Park.
Joey: The old VFW, right?
Brian: Yes, all that area right north, it would just be nonstop.
Joey: Homeless, yeah.
Brian: Nonstop. And I would go there first thing in the morning, get everybody, because the Lorenz is a low-income senior housing, so all those old folks are up there. Now they're overlooking, and there are people outwardly having sex in the middle of the night and using drugs and fighting, and these poor folks are sitting up there having to watch and listen to this all night long. So I'd go through and make it a point every morning; I remember one day before lunch, I said, "Hey guys, we gotta go, let's go." I'm like, get everybody out. They got the park clean. I'm like, all right, cool. I went to lunch, I came back an hour and a half later, and there were twice as many people there, and I broke, I'll be honest with you, I broke.
Brian: I went home that night, and I was like, and I almost was in tears of like, I don't know what to do, I'm telling my wife because I care so much, I care so much about those people in that area and what they're doing, and I don't hate the homeless people that are there, they're not bad people per se, but it's like, but they were not doing good things either. And I remember going home just absolutely like, what do I do? I'm just, I'm absolutely distraught over this. I try so hard daily to go out and fix these problems for my community, and I can't. And they keep coming back and almost becoming stronger the next time, and it really kind of made me refocus on how I solve this. So, I started just taking the time to develop relationships with them and get to know them. There's a guy named Jessica, a guy named Joe, and another guy named Nick. I'm just using a couple of names as an example.
Joey: Sure.
Brian: People that are my biggest problem people and just getting to know them and taking the time to get out of the car and speak to them, treat them like a human being, try to fix what they're doing, right? Let's do this to get them more on track, combined with some accountability, right? If they didn't, weren't doing what they should have been doing, I'd have to hold them accountable. If that means they had outstanding warrants and were doing something criminal, I'd take enforcement action on them. But do it, not just, "Here's your ticket, and I'm leaving," right? "Here's your ticket. This is why. Because you didn't do A, B, C, D like I'd asked you to do." Through that, I developed a self-proclaimed rule in the downtown area, and we jokingly call it Redding Code 141, which is my ID number, 141. And it's not a law, I'm going to preface this with it's not a law, it's simply a rule that I had that I asked people to comply with, and that rule was to wear your t-shirt downtown. I'm not a tyrant if you're in the downtown area.
Brian: If you're running as a workout, not from the cops, but as a workout, you can have your shirt off. You can have your shirt off if you're at a public beach or a pool. If you're doing yard work in your yard, you can have your shirt off. And I don't like it, but you can have your shirt off driving your car. I don't like it, but you can do it. But if you're bebopping through downtown, put your shirt on, wear your shirt. And so it became a joke, but it became a thing too, and I would have conversations with people on the street walking downtown with their shirts off. And I'd be, "Hey man, can you put your shirt on for me, please?" blah, blah, blah. And they'd argue with me, I'd stop and get out of the car, and I'd go, "Listen, you're right. I can't make you put your shirt on. It's not a law; it is a rule that I would like you to do for me; it's a favor I'd like you to do for me. And here's the reasons why." I explained this to them, and this goes to the bigger picture at the end of my story.
Joey: Please.
Brian: I said, "What's the first thing you do when you get in a fight?"
Joey: Take off your shirt.
Brian: Take my shirt off, right? "But I don't care what people think about me." You're right, you don't, and that's the first problem. If you don't care what people think, then you're more likely to commit a crime because you don't care, right? My wife and my kids right down the street don't want to see you on the street corner looking all the way you do with your shirt off, standing there sweating or whatever you're doing, or just trying to be cool. Nobody wants to see that. Nobody in this community wants to see that. But you don't care, so you're more likely to commit a crime, right? And so, by simply putting your shirt on, you care. And that's the first step to doing something better in your life.
Brian: And I've had this conversation, and I spend some time talking to them, and if they didn't comply, they didn't comply, it is what it is. But at the end of the conversation, almost exclusively, everybody went, "You're right, Berg, I appreciate that, thanks." And they put their shirt on, and they'd walk off. And it got to the point where they would start enforcing each other because if one guy went to the. There's a group of people standing around; one guy had his shirt off; they'd all be shirt off because they know I'd show up and be like, "Come on guys, what's the rule?" But it wasn't about wearing your shirt. It was about caring, caring about yourself.
Joey: I understand.
Brian: And if you care a little bit more about yourself and maybe what other people think about you, then you're more likely to do good things. And unfortunately, like, homeless people are often not respected by people driving by, by people yelling at them, cops sometimes show up and treat them not very well as far as how we spoke to them historically, and I don't blame anybody for doing those things because it's frustrating, it's frustrating to drive down the street to the grocery store and seeing the things that we see every day. So people roll down their windows and yell at them. So they go, "Well, F you, these people hate me, so why am I going to do anything that makes their life easier?" And by changing their perspective on things, like you just presented yourself better, if you walked down the street with your shirt on and acted like a normal person, nobody will yell at you. Nobody has to be upset with you because you're just a guy walking down the street. Nobody cares.
Brian: It's all this other craziness that you do that people care about. And that's why people are mad at you. So, you need to change your behaviors to change other people's behaviors. And so the t-shirt rule came out of that. And I didn't enforce it outside of the downtown area. Like this is just kind of a concept I've had of, like if you're in my downtown area, I call it my downtown area, which is kind of the area that I patrolled; by no means is it mine; it's everybody's. But I developed that relationship with people, and they understood because I took the time to explain to them why it was important and the bigger picture of things; I found people started acting better, right? It's silly. It's a silly little thing.
Joey: I know what you mean though.
Brian: But then I can go up and go like, "Hey, Nick, get your stuff and get going." And you'll be like, "Okay, Berg," right? You get your stuff, and you leave. And guess what? I solved the problem. I didn't write them a ticket, I didn't yell at them, you start getting out of just writing tickets and walking away, and now it's like, "Hey, get your stuff and go." "No, just write me my ticket." It becomes this head-butting thing between the cops and the. And it doesn't solve anything. And so it's not overnight, which is why most people don't do it because it takes work and it takes dedication, it takes really caring to do that on a long-term basis because it took a long time to get those relationships, but if it got to the point where I could show up and go like, "Hey, you know what time it is? You got to go." Like, "Okay. Sorry." And they'd apologize and get their stuff and leave.
Brian: And eventually, they just realized that they didn't want to put me through that anymore. And it's more about, and I relate it to, your mentor in life, right? You have a mentor who is your dad, a good friend, or something like that. I have my dad and some service I've worked for. I said I didn't want to disappoint that guy. I do not care if I get in trouble. I get in trouble, I get in trouble, I get my pee-pee slapped. But I didn't want to disappoint you. And it became more of that. My wife calls it that father figure role; they didn't want to disappoint me. They don't want to get to the spot where Berg had to show up, and they'd be embarrassed because they were doing something silly.
Joey: And you're probably the only person of authority in their life that they had a level of respect for.
Brian: Yeah. And some accountability for and.
Joey: Which is important.
Brian: Yeah.
Joey: That's an important part of being a human.
Brian: I remember one guy, I don't know his name, he was fresh out of prison, he'd been in prison for, I don't know, 10 years, he was like 32, so most of his adult life. He was new to the downtown area, so I got to introduce myself to the new guy and tell him my expectations of them because they would be in our area. And about two weeks into it, I drove by and said, "Hey man, how are you doing?" He goes, "Berg, I just wanted to thank you." And I go, "What?" He's like, "I've been in prison my entire adult life. I wake up, and somebody tells me where to go eat, where to go to the bathroom, where to do this," like being in the military.
Brian: They tell you where to go, where to go, "And now they throw me out on the street because I'm done with my term, and I don't have a place to live, I don't know when to go eat when to go do this, and so I started doing stupid stuff because I don't know what else to do. But you come by every day and take the time to hold me accountable, make sure I'm doing what I'm supposed to be, and ask me if I'm doing okay." And that's all it takes. And he said, "I appreciate that. I need some sort of structure in my life, and you're helping provide that structure." Obviously I can't do that 24/7, that's not, you know, it's not plausible but I provided enough that he acknowledged me through that and that was like, kind of like, I drove away going like, "Wow." My mind was blown; that, I can't do that 24/7, that's not, you know, it's not plausible, but I provided enough that he acknowledged me through that, was wild. Here's some guy who has been in prison his whole adult life. He just thanked me for giving him a little structure, but it was because I respected him and was respectful towards him.
Joey: I think that's key.
Brian: I was respectful towards him. And I don't think they're crap either. There might be times, there's times a police officer, when somebody's going like, you can be a nice guy and do all this fluffy stuff I'm kind of talking about but there's people that don't go with that. So many people who hate you and want to hurt you or do bad things regardless, and there's time for police to do what they have to do to get things done and hold people accountable, and there are times when people have to force used against them because they're going to jail and they don't know the program. So there are two sides to this, right?
Joey: Absolutely.
Brian: And it's not all that. Police get emphasized because of the use of force stuff. That's what most people see. How you're talking about the dog biting people, it's a very small fraction of what they actually do. It was, mostly 98.9% of the time, they're finding people. 0.9% of the time they're biting people. Same with police use of force. We have thousands of contacts just in the city of Redding every single day. Every single day, we have thousands of contacts. And the amount of force we use on people is very, very small. It happens, but that's what that's glamorous. That's what the media wants to see. That's what gets all the attention. How often have you heard about me connecting, with people on the street and solving problems that way?
Joey: Until you and I spoke today, never.
Brian: Never.
Joey: I knew it existed though.
Brian: Yeah. It does. It does.
Joey: I've known there's community officers, that. You're right. That's what I meant by when I was slugging into media because it's, they don't want to, it must be, if it bleeds, it leads.
Brian: Yeah. Absolutely.
Joey: And that's unfortunate.
Brian: And that's where I made my connection with Jonathan Anderson on the mission. I was. The downtown parking structure has been a big issue for a long time, ever since I was.
Joey: I remember that. Oh yeah.
Brian: And I remember one of the news reporters in town wanted to do a news thing on homelessness in the downtown parking structure. And I was out there that morning doing my thing, getting them out of there, and the news reporter interviewed me. I said, "Sorry, can I interview the news?" "I don't care." He's like, "Yeah, go for it." And I talked about just what we discussed in a very brief 30-second interview about building relationships, and we can't arrest ourselves out of the situation, yada, yada. And Mimi Moseley is a dear friend of mine. She reached out to Jonathan. Jonathan said, "I want to know who this guy is." Like, that's what he said, it was fantastic. Jonathan reaches out to me, and we go on a ride-along. We've been great friends ever since.
Joey: Awesome.
Brian: And that's awesome. It's awesome. But he goes, "Dude, what you're doing is called outreach." And I go, "That's not outreach, that's. For cops, that's like, I'm not a social worker. I don't do outreach." He's like, "No, but you do." And so I drove on with Anderson, and we talked to everyone on the street. And I went, "Jonathan, just hearing their experiences from them ." Because I always ask them, "Go to the mission." "I'm not going there. There are bedbugs," or, "The pastor there is a such-and-such, I don't like him." He's not around anymore, but they always have an excuse for it, and we talked to all the people about why they can't go. So I went there and didn't tell him who Jonathan was.
Brian: I said, "Why don't you go to the mission." Blah, blah, blah, blah. Listen to this. I go, "Really? Well, here's the big boss." I introduce Jonathan, who runs the mission; he dispels all the myths of the mission that were not. I've heard that same rumor about so-and-so, that's not true, blah, blah. We have metal bed frames, and we don't have bedbugs. It's impossible to curb it, so get some of those guys to go. Anyway, that's how my relationship with Jonathan started. He saw that short news interview about what we're discussing today and how we solve this problem. How do we work with law enforcement to solve this problem?
Joey: I think that's a good segue to talk about, like, what are some of the things that we can do that people can get involved in their community, because I'm a big believer, and I want to give a disclaimer that I struggle with, I can sit here right now on camera and say like, "Hey man, we've got to help each other, and we all have each other."
Brian: Sure.
Joey: And I'll drive down the road and the negative voice like you said, and I don't honk or anything, but you know, you go somewhere, and you see trash, and you see these things, and there's a part of me that, you get upset. You're like, man, and there's another part that's like there by the grace of God, go I, that's a human being, it's a brother and a sister. And it's somebody's child. And man, I see young people. It breaks my heart to see. I don't know why I can see an older person, someone my age, and I don't like it, but when I see, I've seen some of the people they want, they look like they're 19 years old, 18 years old. How is that person on the street? You know what I mean?
Brian: Right.
Joey: And so I don't want it to come off like, oh, yeah, I'm like Jesus. I go around loving everybody. No, it's a battle inside to half wanting to help that person and half going, well, if you help that person, that's just, they're going to take whatever you give them. They're going to go buy drugs and try to find that balance of, like, allow how do people, what is something people can do to try to help our community? What are some things?
Brian: Yes. And that's a common question I have and one I see. Faith-wise, I understand that argument. I'm a believer. I'm a Christian. I understand that argument. As a realist and a law enforcement professional who sees this daily, I also see that argument. I find something in the middle of it. As a community, one of the worst things we can do is help support those habits by saying, "Hey, here's five bucks," to the guy standing on the corner with their thing that says, "I need food." Because I will tell you, I educated myself, that the Mission offers three meals daily to anybody who wants to go in there. You might have been kicked out of the mission because of behavior because they do that sometimes; if he was, shows up there, they get 86 for 30 days, or a lot better than the 30 days out, 30 days in. You can still go there and get food. There's no reason for anybody in the city of Redding or the county of Shasta to ask for food. They're trying to get money to buy the drugs.
Joey: But what about if you gave them food?
Brian: Correct. So.
Joey: Would you say that it's okay if you see somebody on the other side of town? You know they're several miles from?
Brian: Sure. Sure. So I want you to do this experiment and get a cheeseburger and give a cheeseburger to somebody who's asking for food. And then drive around the corner and watch them. So I used to feel that way too and I distinctly remember the day I was off duty, and I was at the Eureka Way by the YMCA and the car pulled up, a guy standing on the corner, I wanted food, standing there and a minivan pulls up, this little 7-year-old girl, she looks about 7 years old, gets out of the car, runs up to him with this bag of Burger King from Carl's Jr. I'm sorry, Carl's Jr, and gives it to him and he goes, "Oh, thank you, thank you." And she runs back, all smiling, gets in the car, and they drive off, and he takes the Burger King, puts it in his bag, and stands back up with this signup: I want food. And I went, you son of a gun. I was so angry.
Joey: Well, he also wants drugs.
Brian: He does. And yes, they'll eat it, sure, but had he truly just wanted food, he would have taken the sign down and gone. And I'm using one person as an example, but I've seen that over and over and over and over again. And so I think that the.
Joey: So, in other words, don't give directly if you want; give to an organization like The Rescue Mission that says we will make sure that there is food.
Brian: Yes.
Joey: Because I know they feed people, and I know a lot of people that volunteer and for the various seasonal things all year, and they go in and so, okay.
Brian: Yeah. I highly recommend it, and I give to the Mission every year, and I'm proud of it. I post it on social media for the exposure of like, "Hey, this is a good organization. Let's do that, let's do this." There are several organizations in town; I'm just using the Mission as one example, but if you look online, dozens of organizations, whether or not they're helping the problem, do that. Some organizations go out into the parks and feed people. I'm conflicted on that, whether or not they're helping the problem or not. These people that we will see common people show up, or some of these organizations show up with big trash bags full of clothes. Then, they'll walk up to a group of homeless folks and give them the bag of clothes.
Brian: And what they do with that is they throw all the stuff they don't want aside, and they leave it all laying there and, or they end up on the river, all sorts of stuff. So it's, the Mission has clothes, Good Will has clothes, and all these places have clothes you can get free of, and it's not hard to do. So again, I go back to that showing up and giving people stuff isn't the right way to do things. You should give the organizations that the facts are organized and understand the problems to go out and fix those problems. If we donate to those organizations, they can do that in the proper way. That's me.
Joey: Message.
Brian: My feeling.
Joey: I got the message clear and I'm sure everybody does. So let the people who have committed themselves to doing that versus direct, it's just, yeah. And I know what you mean by the. Because you see them with two shopping carts full of stuff, and you're like, I don't think they need stuff.
Brian: Right. They don't. Like, most of them.
Joey: It's like, I feel like they need mental help. I feel like we need to bring it back. You know, it's just.
Brian: Well, I think it's counterproductive at some point too, right? Part of going to the Mission to get food is so they can build a connection with you. You're here to get food, but hey, let me tell you about our other services. And maybe on the 30th time, they go, "Well, okay, I haven't been harassed yet. Maybe I'll look for these services." And maybe they get help. But people are going out into the community and giving them food or giving them clothes; there'sunderstanding no purpose, no reason to go to the Mission or another organization to get that help. So it becomes. They're all trying to do good things. Like, I'm not bashing those people at all.
Joey: No.
Brian: They're wonderful people with good hearts.
Joey: But good intentions need to be combined with good actions and strategy.
Brian: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. These organizations spend lots of time building strategies and understand the problems better than most people.
Joey: Well, okay, so that would be the big thing is, I mean, we talked about the Good News Rescue Mission is obviously one. I had Chris Cable here, and he was part of the Anderson Cottonwood Christian Alliance. They were helping. I used to work for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and I'm trying to remember what they call it: Stand Down. And they twice. Is this sound familiar? I know.
Brian: I know veterans have a lot of resources also.
Joey: Not as many as they should.
Brian: Yeah, obviously not as many as they should.
Joey: But I can't remember if it was once a year or twice a year, what they would do is they would go somewhere, like oftentimes it was the Anderson Fairgrounds, and they would set up to where the doctors, the nurses, vets, homeless vets would come in and a dentist would look at all of them, and then a podiatrist would look at their feet, and they would hand out, you know, here's a toothbrush, toothpaste, here's wool socks, it was mental, whatever they could. And I thought, why is this just like, thank you so much, Department of Veterans Affairs, but why can't we do this? This seemed like a good thing to do, and it seemed like we should do it, as they are. We should do something where we have a place. We get them.
Joey: If nothing else. I'm already thinking of the voices of people that are going to go against this one, but if nothing else, we can catalog them and get an idea of who's who, who's here, what are they. We know who because many people complain about it, like, this homeless guy's got an iPhone. You do understand that they're trying to make sure they know where these people are because it also helps in law enforcement. Why? Because they know where people are. You have the ability, hey, that's John, as you said, you knew their names, you knew that he'd gotten out of prison.
Brian: And there's no tracking stuff that we do. We can't.
Joey: I didn't mean it that way. I didn't mean it like. What I mean is.
Brian: To just clarify, like we're not searching people through their phones or anything like that. Just me knowing, me doing my job and.
Joey: That mentor law enforcement officer.
Brian: Yes.
Joey: When he went on and said, "Hey, I see you. You see me." That night, there was no crime. There is a connection between. You're not completely falling through the cracks. We know who you are; we know that you were here at 6:00 PM on Friday because we saw you and we had an interaction, and something happened; it reduces, just like you put the shirt on, these little things add up to reduce crime.
Brian: They do. They do. Absolutely.
Joey: They do.
Brian: Accountability. Accountability. It's just being accountable to me or being accountable to yourself, and a little bit of both, probably. That's what it boils down to. There's no accountability in life, which is what, after our first conversation, I'm asking. Where does that accountability start and end? Is it possible for every cop to do that to every person in town? It's not. So where do we find a better solution for that? We can make small differences in smaller pockets of places, but it's a difficult conversation.
Joey: It is. These are very intricate, multi-tiered, difficult problems. And maybe I am Pollyanna, but I feel like if.
Brian: You said you wouldn't be.
Joey: I said I didn't want to be, I didn't say I wasn't. No, I'm incredibly paranoid and negative. I am. Yeah, make no mistake, man. There's, I am the double-minded man of James where there's a constant battle between the person who wants to help everybody and the person who's sure that everybody's got a gun and packing and is out to get me and everybody's a predator. And those two people take turns driving the rental car, right?
Brian: Yeah. As they should.
Joey: Yeah. I try to keep the paranoid guy in the back seat, try to keep him out of them, but every now and then, he takes the wheel.
Brian: Yeah, a little bit of paranoia keeps you safe—just a little bit.
Joey: Just a little bit. A little bit.
Brian: Yeah, everything in moderation.
Joey: Yeah. I'm looking forward to having Jonathan Anderson on. His name comes up all the time.
Brian: Yeah. He is amazing.
Joey: I wanted to have him on when I did this several years ago; things just happened; COVID hit and that kind of derailed this entire thing. And then just life, you wake up with, I don't know, but I'm about to turn 53.
Brian: Nice.
Joey: And I was like 19 yesterday. This ride, this roller coaster, is so fast. Enjoy it. Enjoy life, guys but.
Brian: Bring some ghost peppers, and he'll be here in a heartbeat for it.
Joey: Ghost peppers.
Brian: He's a pepper guy.
Joey: Okay. I can't handle a Jalapeño.
Brian: No.
Joey: That clearly goes off. Oh, my goodness.
Brian: He's got something wrong with him.
Joey: Well, I definitely want to have him on here, but I want to because I don't know how much time we have left. I know you said eight hours, but I assume you're joking. The cameras also overheat before they, but I want to discuss something in your personal life. And if you feel comfortable talking about this, but you were involved in this resource, and you actually adopted children, right? Is that? Do you feel comfortable talking about it?
Brian: Yeah.
Joey: You got a serious-looking face; I' just like.
Brian: Yeah. No, no. That's.
Joey: I mean, like that, just crossed the line and just be like, oh, no, maybe that is paraphernalia in my pocket. Darn it. No, but because that's really important.
Brian: Sure.
Joey: Helping out. But you did. Was that sparked by your Resource Officer days? What prompted that?
Brian: So my wife's in education, too. So, she started as a teacher. She's now an administrator. She's been an administrator for a long time. And through mostly her interactions through the schools, we've had the honor and pleasure of being involved in so many young people's lives.
Joey: That's awesome.
Brian: Some more than others, some just as mentors professionally or whatever, but a few have come and not officially adopted or on paper, anything like that, but in our hearts, absolutely. Two young ladies are near and dear to our hearts, our daughters. They are our daughters for all intents and purposes. They have their own families and lives, obviously, outside of us, but yeah, it's just something that, it's just, they were just special people to us and are part of our family. I don't know how else to put it besides they're just my kids. I don't consider them adopted. That's.
Joey: How does somebody get involved in that? Is it the organization that reaches out? Because that's a huge thing. I think.
Brian: For us, it just happened; it was just organic; it wasn't anything forced or thrown at us. We weren't out seeking it; it's just how it started through relationships, mentorship, and guidance. And then they just clicked with our family. None of them lived with us necessarily. It wasn't that type of relationship, it was more of a mentorship. They started calling us mom and dad, and that's it. They're both grown and have their own lives, doing their things. They are very successful in life but are just amazing people. We have a heart for amazing people. No matter where you are in your life, as far as struggles go, if you're an amazing, good person, you deserve somebody who will help guide you through that. By no means are we perfect. We are imperfect people as a family ourselves, as is everybody.
Joey: So is everybody. Yeah, of course.
Brian: We might just be a little less crazy than some other people, so—just a little bit.
Joey: Yeah. Well, I think the sooner we can interject in people's lives, you see the spectrum, and like that guy that you said spent his adult life in prison, I mean, he's not lost. But if you can go back and have injected in that person's life at the age of five or 10.
Brian: Who knows, yeah.
Joey: You probably have a bigger impact on the trajectory. So that's why I'm always big on anybody who's helping children.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: I feel like if you invest time and energy into them, then you're going to have to invest more later. You know what I mean?
Brian: Yeah. Mentorship is extremely important. As I said, we're not part of any official mentorship program. We know there are lots of those out there who do a fantastic job. But both of my girls said that just being present was enough. Showing up at a basketball game, showing up at a volleyball game.
Joey: Chris Cable said the same thing.
Brian: Just being there is like wildly important to kids. Because there are so many kids that, especially involved in sports, don't have parents. Parents don't show up. They're not there. I don't understand that because my parents never missed a single event, nor have I ever missed any of my kids' events ever, I don't comprehend that. I do comprehend being present as an adult, but I didn't comprehend the importance of it to them because I never experienced that myself because they were always there. But their importance for us is just being present and being there. We flew to New Orleans for another girl with whom we were close for a while. It's. For a while, we still are, but she was going to a junior college in Sacramento. I won't say American River, but she was a jazz vocalist. And she made the national championships in New Orleans. And so my family and I flew to New Orleans to go on vacation and go out and support her and just little things like that. Like, some things are just worth it to be present for.
Joey: And so when you look at prison rates, in America, there's a lot put around race. But when you look at the data, it's overwhelmingly fatherless homes, it's prison regardless of race or gender. The numbers are consistent with the fact that there's nobody there. There's nobody present.
Brian: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Joey: And unfortunately, and that's not really for this conversation and get like, that's part of that social experiment that started in the '60s of financially incentivizing fatherless homes.
Brian: Oh yes. Right.
Joey: And it did attack a particular demographic first.
Brian: And it's still attacking us as a society today.
Joey: Oh absolutely.
Brian: Generations later. Yeah.
Joey: Because it's still in effect. It's still there. But that. So, just saying like just being present, Chris talked about just. He's involved in catalyst mentoring, which combines with another; a good host would know the other organization's name. It's Pathways, maybe.
Brian: Pathways. Yeah. You're right.
Joey: And then he's also involved in Girls Inc, which is a national or maybe even international level, we're helping young women and stuff like that. And he just had a couple of great stories about just little tiny things he did, being there, playing cards with one of the kids, thinking, well, this is no big deal. And then the kids, my life was changed because you spent some time with me.
Brian: And cared.
Joey: And cared. Yeah. And it was like, really? That was all it took? It's like when you have nothing, something little is a lot.
Brian: Yeah. And kids and young adults see through BS. If you're there just to put a feather in my cap and say I'm like being a mentor because you're trying to promote yourself or your business or something like that, kids see through that.
Joey: Oh yeah. Just ingenuine.
Brian: If you're there genuinely, it's not going to take long for a kid to be like, "Hey, this person cares." You know what I mean? They might not invite me to their house, that they care. And that's all, for most kids in those situations, it's all they really need. You could do more, but at the very least, if you're genuine about it, you'll reach a kid.
Joey: I think that's everybody.
Brian: Yeah. For sure.
Joey: I think your stories of learning their names, the guy, the 32-year-old guy out of prison, that's what that was. You guys didn't hug it out, and you didn't go. We were shocked by just that little bit of respectful interaction and how much you got out of it because they come from a world that has so little of that. So little of that.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: And we take it for granted in our world. I hope you've had a good time today.
Brian: It was fantastic.
Joey: I've had a good time.
Brian: We talked forever. Yeah.
Joey: If there was, in parting, if there was something to the community, say, hey, we've obviously promoted Jonathan Anderson and Good News Rescue Mission. I always want to bring up Catalyst and Pathway, Girls Inc. If there's any more, please reach out. Anything to do with mentoring children that's our future. I want to help everybody, but I think the best investment, the younger you can invest in them, the better the investment and the ROI is, so to speak.
Brian: Absolutely.
Joey: Because this is a capitalist society, and everything has to come back to money. Every metaphor has to be that our stocks will rise high. So anyway, but other than that, are there any others we didn't touch? You said, hey, you should reach out to this or contact that person, any community? Put you on the spot, man.
Brian: Yeah. Put me on the spot. Yeah, there's so many organizations after that. Again, I would go back to make sure it's some place someplace that's organized, legitimate, local organization that is the best for our community. We can donate to the larger organizations, too, but all that money doesn't stay local, and a lot doesn't go towards what it should.
Joey: Keep it local.
Brian: A lot of big organizations keep fees for themselves, their administrative stuff. You want to make sure it's going 100% local. I already know local organizations have administrative fees, that's natural within the organization you're going to run. But keep it local and make sure you vet who you're donating to which is.
Joey: Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time. My hands got even clammier. I feel like I was interrogated. It might be these lights, or it might be that you're Officer Berg.
