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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger to FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say and I say it again.
You've been had.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Michael Bell, he is a retired lieutenant colonel from the US Air Force, and pretty famously has been pushing for police reform in his home state of Wisconsin, ever since the killing of his son, Michael Bell Jr. by police officers in an incident in the family's front yard a few years back.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Michael?
Good morning.
I'm doing fine.
Glad to have glad to be back on the show.
Scott.
Good deal.
You know, I'm really happy to have you here.
And I think, you know, out of all the, you know, police reform type activism in America right now, I really think that you've got your eye on the ball.
And you're really focusing on exactly the right question, which is the checks and balances, the separation of powers, when it comes to police shootings, and who's in charge, who else might be in charge of investigating these things other than the cops, best friends that he works with daily, or possibly the internal affairs division of a police agency, if they even have one somewhere.
And so and not only that, but you've made real progress and you made it the hard way you want to tell them first, I guess about the billboard campaign here.
Well, our first billboard campaign started in 2010.
Right after we received a record civil rights settlement, regretting my son's death by a police officer.
And we've continued that.
And recently, a judge issued a report against the Kenosha Police Department.
And that report, essentially called them out for an officer that had planted a driver's license and a bullet at a crime scene.
And the police department allowed this evidence technician who did this inappropriate act to continue to process evidence for months later, and until it was in the middle of a trial that was disclosed.
So a judge came out issued this report that not only did the district attorney have an issue, but so did the police department and it wasn't just at the line officer level, it went all the way up to the chief.
And so with that, I said, I have somebody that is finally saying the exact same thing I have been saying for 13 years.
And so we are in the process of trying to reopen the investigation to my son's death.
And yeah, and so what we did is a massive publicity campaign to include billboards, Google advertising, Facebook advertising, YouTube advertising, print advertising, radio advertising, and we saturated the southeast Wisconsin area trying to do that.
I found that that's the only thing that really politicians respond to is is is social awareness of what's going on with the problem.
And now, so I guess, I guess so many questions here.
Let's go back to when you first started the, the billboard campaign here.
You know, I think we talked about this before, the fact that you are an Air Force, a retired Air Force officer, the fact that you're white and educated, and you know, as an officer, that's like a professional in military terms.
It means that when you're dealing with the rest of police and state representatives and whoever, there's a certain amount of respect that you're due that maybe other people wouldn't get.
At the same time, though, you put up these billboards, saying what and they must have really made the cops mad around there.
They're an open ended question.
And the first billboards that I put up were, there was a large smoking gun, and it said, when police kill, should they judge themselves?
And it was an open ended question.
And recently, we've been calling for reinvestigation into the cover up in my son's death.
And so there's been a gamut of different messages that have been given on the billboards.
But you're right, I am a white military officer.
I served my country for 23.8 years.
I was a pilot, I flew in support of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Desert Storm, even after 9-11, I was refueling fighters over to President's Ranch down in Texas.
And so when my son got killed, there were five eyewitnesses.
And all of a sudden, the police came up with a report that didn't even come close to what the eyewitnesses saw.
And then I asked the governor, I asked the Attorney General, I asked the local DA for assistance, and they ignored me.
And I'm thinking to myself, if I am a servant of our country, if I work with law enforcement every day, and if I tell them there's a problem, and they're ignoring me, what is happening to the Asian family, the Hispanic family, the African American family, the low income white family that doesn't have the intellectual resources, that doesn't have the financial resources, that doesn't have the courage to take this on.
And so I knew there was a problem.
In our settlement, I refused to accept a non-disclosure confidentiality agreement.
And that's a big deal, because I always wanted to take my son's story and tell the world about it.
And on November 9th of last year, it was the anniversary of my son's death, we released a video called Forensically Impossible Anatomy of a Police Cover Up.
And it's been sensational.
Once you see it, you will understand that it's irrefutable.
In fact, Frank Serpico said that it equals that of the Walter Scott shooting in South Carolina.
And so just last week, I took out a full page ad in the Washington Post.
It occurred on the day that the President had a State of the Union address.
And I knew that every politician and every media correspondent in Washington, DC was seeing what we were doing.
And we sent everybody to the video.
And you can find that video on at Michael bell.info.
Michael bell.info.
And it's also a free thought project right now is this story, Air Force Colonel buys 24 billboards to expose cops who executed his son.
And I guess I'll give you the opportunity, but I don't want to put you on the spot about do you want to talk about what actually happened that night?
My son was coming home from a night out with friends.
He had a designated driver, designated driver became intoxicated.
My son was the least intoxicated of the group.
He was driving home, he pulled up in front of his own home, he turned off the car as he was getting out of the car, a police officer arrived.
The police officer manhandled my son and accused him of speeding and running a stop sign, which later in court we proved that did not exist.
There was some tasing, my son ran to the back of his home, mother and sister came out, saw a Rodney King style beating of my son.
And then an officer screamed, he has my gun, another officer ran up, put his gun directly to my son's temple and took a deadly shot right there.
I brought in my own investigators after the civil rights lawsuit.
And if you go to our Facebook page, plea for a change, you'll actually see that a mirror on the side door of the car, where the officer was at, is the culprit.
But and so and I and so I recognize I believe that the law enforcement made an honest mistake and being a combat veteran.
I'm sorry, what does that mean?
The mirror was the culprit?
Yeah, a mirror.
Yeah, there was a there was a mirror that was a jacket gap in the officer's holster.
And a jacket gap is nothing more than kind of a, an opening so that way your jacket if you're wearing it in cold weather can fit between your sidearm and your holster belt.
And this off and this officer accidentally got his mirror, his gun caught on this mirror, and misinterpreted as my son taking his weapon.
And so another officer shot him.
But instead of telling the truth to the public, the police department took it back and said, we're going to play it this way and created a false narrative.
And that's what got them in trouble.
So you're saying it does seem to you and it says in this article is the quote from you to saying that you thought it was a mistake.
And then in fact, the officer who had called out he's got my gun has since killed himself.
Is that correct?
He took his life in 2010.
Yes.
So pretty honest admission that it was his screw up there.
In the very worst way it looks like.
Scott, you have to understand that I'm not anti cop, but I am pro truth.
And, and so are the bill that we got passed in the state of Wisconsin requires outside investigation.
In May of last year, I was able to organize a summit in Racine, Wisconsin, just up the road.
It was sponsored by UW Madison Law School and the SC Johnson Foundation at Wingspread.
And I was able to get the director of the National Transportation Safety Board, one of the directors of NASA, NASA's aviation safety reporting systems.
I had a doctor from Harvard Medical School, all sit down with law enforcement and talk to them about an external learning system that those professions have that law enforcement doesn't.
And if you take a look at a comparison, law enforcement and aviation are very dangerous.
In fact, aviation is rated number three on OSHA.
Many times law enforcement doesn't even make the top 10.
But if you look at the data, aviation hasn't had a major mishap in the United States for the last several years, law enforcement, they continue to have the numbers increasing in the police involved shooting.
And why is that?
Because they don't look at and say, what can we learn from this situation?
How can we disseminate that information to all the different law enforcement agencies in the state?
And how can we reduce the number of police shootings in the state of Wisconsin?
In fact, 2017 was a record year for police shootings in the state of Wisconsin.
And I know it's early.
But if you just take the numbers from January and the first week in February, we're looking to meet or exceed that our sister state of Minnesota hasn't even had one third of what we've had here in Wisconsin.
So there's a problem and how are we going to correct it?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so well, let's break that down then.
So first of all, what's the root cause?
Or what do you think are the most important root causes of the increase in police violence against American citizens?
Well, a number of things.
In my own son's death, the officers were awarded a meritorious service awards for killing him.
And I recognize what that was.
It was a way to confuse the public about whether the shooting was justified or not.
If you had a bad shoot, and you award the officers for killing somebody on a bad shoot, the public's thinking, well, the union honored these guys for meritorious service for their heroism.
So therefore, I'm confused.
How could it be a bad shoot if that professional organization reviewed it?
But the problem with that is, if you give officers awards for taking human life, in front of a room full of people that can continue to take human life, you encourage them to do the same.
That is one of the problems that happens.
And so we're calling that out nationally.
And another problem is, is we don't know whether the officer was in a clear frame of mind when they decided to use deadly force.
As a pilot, if I was involved in any type of mishap, I would immediately go to the flight surgeon, they would pull my blood and they determine if I was on painkillers, under the influence of alcohol, or even something like as simple as steroids for muscle building, and see if that affected my decision in that aircraft.
Law enforcement doesn't have that happen.
They can use deadly force at any time.
And we don't know whether they were drunk.
We don't know whether they were under the influence of a painkiller for a medical incident.
We don't know anything like that.
So that's another thing that we have to determine in the factor.
But NTSB issues non-binding safety recommendations when they determine the root cause of an accident.
And those non-binding recommendations can either be accepted or rejected by the airlines and the FAA and other other companies that might use that type of flying.
But that doesn't happen in law enforcement.
And here's a classic example.
I'm sure you're quite aware of the John Crawford shooting that happened in Walmart in Beaverton, Ohio, a couple years ago.
Yeah.
John was in there, he picked up a plastic machine gun.
He was in a toy section.
And somebody called 911 said there's a, I believe they said there was a black African American man in the store with a gun.
And so law enforcement shows up and you can actually see in the video, this law enforcement agent shot the guy in less than one half a second.
That's how fast it was.
Now, we didn't look at all the different factors that determined a Crawford shooting.
Did the 911 call, was it inappropriate?
Did we hype up the officers?
Did the officer that did the shooting, did he have additional problems?
Now, I wrote an article called the insanity of finding fault versus fixing cause.
And I had a comparison of that, that same shooting with an airline accident.
I took an aircraft that was down in St. Louis, and the pilot's name was Ralph Peterson.
And he was sitting in his taxi spot, called ground clearance, and was taxiing to a runway for departure.
And he actually taxied across an active runway as a TWA jetliner was taking off and the wing of that aircraft went through his cockpit, killed him and his passenger.
Well, the NTSB came in and he looked at all the different circumstances.
How did this guy misinterpret these taxi instructions that took him to a wrong one runway and killed people?
And he issued, I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 different recommendations on how to improve the situation.
Now, there's a classic example of human factors and communication issues that killed people in both scenarios.
One changed aviation forever, but the other didn't do anything about it.
And you know, it's just going to happen again.
So that's an example of how the problem sounds like you're saying that the root cause here is that there is no accountability and the cops know that there is no accountability.
So go ahead and do your worst.
And there is no accountability.
In fact, that's the problem here with my own son's case is that even though there was a problem, the entire department got together to support the officer and they created a false narrative.
And, you know, it's really kind of funny, Scott, is that my attorney waited two and a half years, because he knew that the story that the officers told at the beginning, was in direct opposition to the forensics.
Because my son was shot in the right side of the head, all the eyewitnesses said he was shot on the right side of the head.
But law enforcement said they shot him on the left side of the head because they couldn't see whether Michael had a gun or not.
And they never even read the forensic report.
So my my attorney allowed all four officers to tell inaccuracies under under oath in video deposition, and you can actually see this on Forensically Impossible.
And after the last officer lied, he gives them a copy of the medical examiner's report.
And he says, read this paragraph for me, please.
And at that moment, they were busted.
And so then they went back and they tried to recreate a video to show how it could have happened.
But that made things worse.
Because you know, once so once you start lying, then it just gets worse and worse and worse.
And I have an affidavit where the officers under oath have changed their testimony six different times in the shooting of my son.
And eventually it led to a record civil rights settlement in 2010.
In my family, I use my entire portion of that to change the law enforcement system here in the state of Wisconsin.
Well, it's interesting, right?
How it just goes without saying, only I would be such a pain in the neck to bring this up that there's not even a hint of a possibility of a whiff of a thought that these men would be charged with the crime of perjury, and would be prosecuted and sent to prison.
When you have an ironclad case that they're lying under oath, which if it was any of us, they'd bury us under the jail.
You can't even lie to an FBI agent, nevermind a judge, right?
You can't even lie to have, at least on the federal level, you can't even lie to a cop without going to prison.
These cops can tell any lie in the world, they can change their story six times.
And I'm the only one who would ever even bring up the idea just to show just, you know, to illustrate how ridiculous it is how we all know that that's not even really worth bringing up that that's not even the question at all.
The only question is whether we're going to get to the truth at all, not whether any of these men would ever be punished for what they did.
And once again, I said, I'm not anti cop, because I do know that many officers are very good officers, they put their lives in a line, I can tell you story after story where officers have pulled people from burning cars, save them from suicide, risk their own lives and save others.
But I am pro truth.
And if you have a system that you can't believe in, it has to be fixed.
Well, let me ask you this, when you talk, I mean, and I know that you have all this experience, especially now with all this activism, you've been dealing with these cops a lot.
You have any hint from these guys from the good ones, that they're worried that the general public hates and fears their tyranny, that we don't consider them to be our security force, that we consider them to be basically wild animal predators out and we just hope that we're not the the dough that they go chasing after.
We're not the gazelle that they go running after to, to devour.
Because I mean, and I know, again, I don't necessarily represent everybody.
But I think, you know, especially with the advent of Twitter and Facebook, every one of these local police abuse stories become or not everyone, but many of them become national stories.
And you have people who aren't even political people who are saying, geez, who gave the cops in this country rabies?
They're absolutely crazy.
And don't they worry that we have no confidence in them, that we don't think of them as people who save us from burning cars.
We think of them as the kind of people who would run us off the road and kill us.
I have a couple comments for you there.
And the first comment is, is that regarding the perjury, I immediately called for, called for an investigation by the US Attorney, by the governor, by the Attorney General in the state of Wisconsin.
And they all denied me.
And now recently, the Attorney General came out and he said, and I and it's in my quote in the Washington Post ad.
But essentially, he said, at worst, the officers lied.
And, and Michael, and the officer was probably mistaken, and that Michael had taken his gun.
But he will not open up any charges because in the he says the statute of limitations on perjury have expired.
And I'm like, okay, this is the this is the circle that you put me in.
First, you tell everybody tells me I have a stack of papers like six inches high of you will not get an investigation.
And now you're saying I'm entitled to an investigation, but the statute of limitations has expired.
So that's the first thing I want to address.
The second thing is, is I do know that after the police officers were shot in Dallas, there were five officers killed, that they had a retention issue that they'd lost 100 officers in about 90 days.
And it was either retirement, people quitting, people going to other agencies or whatever, because wives and family members were concerned about their, their, their, their, their family member, there was an officer of being killed.
And so there is a retention issue.
Now, how are you going to draw quality people that can be good under pressure that can think and so forth, if you can't, if you can't recruit them.
And so there are major issues facing law enforcement today.
And if they don't address this, this problem about killing innocent citizens, then they're going to have even more issues.
I did want to say one thing, when I testified in front of the Task Force on Policing for President Obama, I brought out a fact that approximately 25% of all police shootings are called mistake of fact shootings, where an officer didn't know the truth, and misinterpreted it and they killed somebody.
So if you're losing about 1200 or 1300 people a year to law enforcement type shootings, you can actually save about 400 lives if you can reduce the amount of mistake of fact shootings.
Mistake of fact shooting could be anything from Amadou Diallo's case where he was reaching for his wallet, and people misinterpreted it.
My son's case where an officer hooked his gun on a car mirror and thought it was my son reaching for it.
Or even Douglas Zerbe in California, who was holding sitting on his porch, drinking a beer and holding a spray nozzle to his garden hose.
And those are all mistake of fact, you can reduce the number of shootings if you have an external learning model that makes this better.
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Well, okay, so this I think is just the most important thing in the world.
I don't know if I knew this the last time we spoke or if we talked about this at all, Michael, but there's this lawyer named Scott Greenfield.
You may be familiar with him.
He's on Twitter a lot simple justice is the name of his blog, simple justice, a criminal defense blog.
And there's this most important blog entry, there's a few of them, and they kind of link to each other.
But this one is called Tamir Rice's basically reasonable murder.
And when he breaks down in here, Tamir Rice, of course, was the 12 year old boy with the BB gun, who was shot and killed also in an instant, before even given a being given a chance to surrender or anything in the park there.
And they cleared the cop that did it, of course.
And so what Scott Greenfield explains is that there's really no law that says that the government can't kill you.
The only law that says that they can't is the word reasonable.
In the Fourth Amendment, they can't seize your life, unless it's reasonable.
But if it's reasonable, then they can.
And then it all comes down as, as Scott Greenfield explains to this court case from 1989, called Graham versus Connor.
And Graham versus Connor, the court ruled that guess what, reasonable is not to be determined by the jury.
Reasonable is to be determined by the police perpetrator's paid expert witness who says that, no, from the point of view of a cop, it was a good shoot.
And only a cop with a cop's training can know whether it was a good shoot or not.
So as long as one cop can get another cop to tell the jury that, oh, yeah, no, from our point of view, it's cool, then the judge's instructions to the jury are, it's not for you to decide whether it was reasonable.
It's whether it's for you to decide, as a matter of fact, whether this other cop thinks it was reasonable, and that will be the standard.
And so this is the bottom line of why there's no accountability.
It's because the courts have made up this rule that you, if you become a deputy sheriff or a city police officer anywhere in America, you have a license to kill.
And it's virtually impossible to convict you of murder over this standard.
That's, that's why the NTSB training model is so important here, Scott, because I don't think we're going to overturn Graham versus Connor for a long time.
And I'll tell you the reasons why is because in most instances, though, where there are very egregious types of shootings, there will be a settlement, there will be a confidentiality agreement, and we'll never get back into the Supreme Court again.
And that's why I am pushing so hard on my case, I am the rare exception that has the video depositions, a multimillion dollar settlement, no non-disclosure confidentiality, and the courage and intellect to get this done.
So that's why I'm out here doing that.
But on the other side is I'm not so sure that Graham versus Connor is a bad thing, because I, being a combat veteran, do not want to have some librarian, a dentist or attorney telling me what I should do in a combat role.
And sometimes people die by friendly fire, and you do the best that you can.
And so I think you have to give an officer the ability to use deadly force if he needs to.
But then that exception, that one out of 100 that uses deadly force so quickly, like in the, in the Philando Castile case in Minnesota, then you have to figure out what did the system do wrong?
And how do we prevent this type of simple tragedy from happening again?
And so why are you so anti-librarian?
Why in the world would you think that regular citizens can't judge whether a cop has the right to shoot somebody in self-defense or not?
If I shoot you, Michael Bell, and I say to the jury, yeah, but I thought he was an aggressive threat against my life, then the librarians get to choose whether I was being reasonable or not.
And my counterargument...
And by the way, if I said Michael Bell was reaching toward his waistband, they would send me to the penitentiary for the rest of my life.
If I said Michael Bell was pointing a gun at me, then they might buy that.
But under the Graham versus Connor standard, eh, he looked at me funny is a good enough reason to blow somebody's head off.
I, I agree.
And I'll give you some counter...
Scott, if I sent you into an operating room, and I asked you to conduct brain surgery on somebody, could you do it?
Yes.
And librarians, librarians sit on juries and decide malpractice cases all the time.
Without being expert in brain surgery, they can decide whether this guy was goofing off and screwed up or whether sometimes there are just bad outcomes.
And regular citizens decide that all the time.
And in fact, what are we talking about here?
The cops are not experts in whether other cops are, should be allowed to kill somebody or not.
That's the that's the whole point of this conversation, is that there's no accountability, because only the cops get to judge.
Well, one of the things that you're misinterpreting is that there is what's called internal organizational review, and external professional review.
Now, I as an Air Force pilot, if I had to do some type of maneuver, and I damaged my aircraft, or I killed somebody, I would not want to be reviewed by somebody that's never been in a combat situation.
And so...
Well, that's a separate question.
And honestly, look at where we're talking about.
We're talking about the jury.
We're talking about a case where it's so damn bad, even the district attorney decided we better prosecute this one, which means that we already got through all your review boards by the other professionals who said, Yeah, I don't know, I think go ahead and indict him, right?
In an aviation mishap, there's more than one investigation.
I mean, usually the company itself looks at it, maybe the airfield that it occurred at looks at it, the NTSB looks at it, the FAA looks at it, and everybody does their own investigation.
But the only motivation of the NTSB has said, is this is what went wrong in the chain of events.
Okay, but if it was if a pilot's negligence was so bad, that it was a criminal matter, and they indicted him for murder, then would that not go to a regular jury of human beings?
Or only government agents get to decide?
And I am in agreement with you on that point.
But you have to understand that an officer probably is doing the best that they can when they make a decision.
Okay, but as soon as that standard is applied to all regular people, hey, when I shot the guy, I was doing the best I can, and everybody gets off on self defense, even when it's not self defense, then I guess that's fine.
But otherwise, you're talking about two completely different standards.
And we're talking about different standards for the people who are supposedly our servants, who are supposedly our security force.
And yet, they're in a position where they can kill us and get away with it every time.
And I guess I'm just kind of confused where you're coming from on this.
It seems like the bottom line is, government accountability for government employees ain't enough.
You need, or at least when that's obviously all you have in a state, then you need some other agency, an entirely separate agency with a separate budget, with separate appointees appointed by separate people or elected by separate people, right?
A DA from a different county, or some state investigator who has no dog in the fight.
You need as many checks and balances and separations of power as possible.
And I agree, the separations of power and the checks and balances are important.
And I want to give you, I have to give you an example here.
I live in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and just up the road is Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
And about five years ago, we have a, there's a Sikh religious temple up there.
And it was the middle of the day.
And a deranged gunman walked in there and just started killing all these people that were in prayer.
And there was a lieutenant on the Oak Creek police force, his name was Brian Murphy, he showed up, and I think he was shot 14 times.
And he lived.
And this man killed the person that was shooting all these people.
And you can see that this is an act of heroism, or he actually took bullets in defense of other people.
So Scott, you just can't draw the line down the middle and say, Oh, wait, you think that a jury wouldn't agree with that?
I mean, first of all, there's no there's no grand jury in the world who would indict an officer like that.
There's no prosecutor in the world who would bring a case like that.
And there's no pettit jury in the world who would convict an officer for something like that.
I mean, seriously, Michael, if you were saying to Look, Scott, after the last 10 times that these juries just went crazy and convicted innocent cops who didn't deserve it, and we can't have that anymore, then I guess I'd listen to you.
But that's not what's going on here at all.
And in fact, if you get a jury for a cop on trial, anyway, guess what the entire jury is made up of government employees.
Anyway, librarians are government employees, and they're going to have cops, wives, and all kinds of people who really should be compromised by conflict of interest from even being on that jury in the first place.
And you're, and you're bringing up the complexity of the problem, Scott, I brought in my own researcher, he was very qualified.
And in since 1885, when police and fire commissions were established in the state of Wisconsin, we tried to look at all the different there are four ruling bodies that can rule whether a shooting is justified or not.
And that is the police department itself, a coroner's inquest, the district attorney, and, and a police and fire commission.
And my researcher looked and we could not find from three of those ruling bodies in a century, an unjust, an unjustified ruling by a coroner's inquest, a police department, or a police and fire commission.
And we only found three, that's three in 100 years, where an officer was actually found guilty or charged by the DA.
And in two of those cases, citizens came forward.
And they actually brought in the additional data that changed the case.
And so you're telling me that this problem, I already know that the problem exists, but how do we find it?
And like I said, I've already showed you some of the problems that that happened, that you can't overcome these major obstacles.
But we can come up with a creative learning model that makes it better for everybody.
And it happened in medicine.
And it can happen in law enforcement.
So now what is exactly the law?
Because you actually got a law passed and signed a bill pass and a law signed in Wisconsin.
And what does it change?
Really?
April 23 2014.
Governor Scott Walker signed the first bill in the nation that said a police department cannot investigate itself.
And that applied to all 700 police forces in the state of Wisconsin.
And what it requires is outside investigators, whether they be from the Department of Justice, whether they be civilian investigators, whether they be from another department that's to be determined, must come in and conduct the investigation and be the lead investigation or an officer involved shooting.
And you know what, if I got to tell you, man, I think if we go back two or three years, that was that's even a little further than you were originally shooting for right that they would that a separate jurisdiction would have to take the lead.
You were willing to settle for less than that before I thought, right?
I actually wanted more than that.
But this is after after immense public pressure.
This is what we're able to come up with.
That's really good, man.
You know, honestly, I thought it was going to be like, well, another jurisdiction gets to tag along, but may or may not be able to do anything.
You know, that was what I was expecting out of the final conference committee or whatever, you know, something like that.
But now it sounds like you really got something done there.
Well, and they must issue a public report on the shooting too.
And so and that's an important part.
And also another part that came out of it is that most families don't understand anything about the law enforcement system.
And if they shoot and if somebody shoots one of their family members, they don't have any idea what to do.
And so the agency that that shoots or the district attorney's office within that county must provide that family with an outline of what they can do if they disagree with what happened.
And so these are major things.
And you know how important this is, is I testified in Missouri twice after Ferguson, Missouri, I went down there and I testified twice that this is what we did in Wisconsin.
They had a Republican controlled legislator, they have a Republican controlled governor's office.
And even though they admire Scott Walker here in the state of Wisconsin, they could not even give an external investigation outside of committee twice in the state of Missouri.
So that's how hard it is, because there's nobody putting up billboards.
You know what, I mean, I think that's right.
I think it's the billboards.
And it's the leadership that you've brought to this where you have a focus.
I mean, you know, I hate to say it, because I don't mean to be mean to powerless people basically, but what a disaster and a mistake it was for Black Lives Matter to name their movement, Black Lives Matter when, you know, hey, I understand.
And it's fair, absolutely, for them to insist that their lives and their rights are respected.
But if it had only been named accountability for cops who break the law, or just something simple, accountability for the police, and that was the focus, then that raises one immediate question.
Okay, well, what's the model language for the legislation?
And right is one, one good new law we need to pass here.
And, you know, I actually know a guy who knows a guy in the state legislature here in Texas, and I was trying to pitch this to them, that you have kind of a random lottery, where you have a police force or detective, or a DA's office, or however exactly it works, from a separate county that comes in to do the review whenever there's a police shooting.
And we already have this in Texas, where, for example, the DA in Travis County is responsible for prosecuting government officials from all over the state, if they're breaking the law up in Lubbock, or whatever, the Texas DA has jurisdiction, or the Travis County DA has jurisdiction over that, because the state legislature decided so.
It's perfectly within their constitutional jurisdiction to make it that way, and to have this kind of review.
And it seems like, hey, if we all agree that the problem is no accountability, and that so then the answer is, let's try to get some accountability.
And on the Michael Bell model, you've are you're already paving the way here, we could get that done.
But instead, the answer is like, yeah, once we shame everyone into not being racist anymore, then in 100 years, police shootings will dry up somehow or something.
And of course, now I wonder too, and this is kind of a narrow focus, but then it does raise the question, the number two thing for the police reform type movements in America of all descriptions, is ending the war on drugs.
And that includes opiates and cocaine, and the rest of it, too, because this is the pretext upon which so many criminal, you know, investigations or violent activities by police are begun.
Oh, I thought I smelled pot.
So I pulled them over and shot them.
You know, this kind of thing, where it would seem like the the predicate for so many of these, you know, investigations or actions would be taken away if we would just end the prohibition.
What do you think about that?
I, I'm in 100% agreement with you.
I wrote a breakthrough article with another Air Force pilot, and it's called the insanity of finding fault versus fixing cause.
And the thing that you just brought up, Scott, was that right now, the thinking within law enforcement, it's a foot race, and whoever can discredit the other one is going to be the winner.
And in my own son's case, they try to discredit him and assassinate his character.
My son had no drugs in his bloodstream.
He had an alcohol of point 133.
And you can see that he drove perfectly.
But the problem is, is that when law enforcement gets drunk, I have chiefs of police here in the state of Wisconsin have been taken for DUI, the our own Attorney General, a past Attorney General got a DUI.
When they did that, it was a lapse in judgment.
And and they should be forgiven for where you got a 21 year old college student who is a criminal, which is, you know, they call him vermin or whatever, because he was under the influence.
And so that has to change.
And you're right in the opioid.
And we do know that the opioid problem is is is nationwide.
Yeah, and it's been illegal for 80 years.
So apparently, that's not quite doing the trick.
You know, just hunting people down for trading in this kind of thing.
It's not and people are dying.
And, you know, Vietnam War type numbers over this stuff.
And it's crazy.
And yet, you know, in fact, speaking of the of the Austin, the Travis County District Attorney, Marianne Lemberg, she was pulled over for driving drunk, and she was black out drunk on, you know, hard liquor, screaming and fussing.
They had to tire in the Palestinian chair and put the spit mask over her face as she's screaming.
And the video is on YouTube, as she's screaming, Do you know who I am?
And call Bob the sheriff and tell him I said, Let me go and going crazy.
And she didn't even have to resign.
She didn't have to resign.
She's currently the Travis County DA.
So most ridiculous thing in the world.
And exactly like you said, Well, you know, she had a bad night.
Yeah, except she is in charge of never cutting that amount of slack to anybody else.
So how does that work?
I'm in total agreement.
And that's why the really the only reasonable way forward right now, Scott, is an NTSB style learning model.
And I want to tell you a simple story.
There was a there was a woman, she was a health reporter for the Boston Globe.
Her name was Betsy Lehman.
And she was their their premier health reporter.
And she was diagnosed with a very mild form of breast cancer.
So she took her your treatment very seriously.
And she went to she went to I think it was one of the Harvard Medical School, and she was administered a chemotherapy treatment.
And she kept telling doctors she didn't feel right.
And she had a massive heart attack at about age 34 and died.
And during the review of her medical procedures, about two months later, they had recognized that they had given her four times the normal dosage for chemotherapy.
And so you can imagine this was on the front page of the Boston Globe.
And the state of Massachusetts essentially created a Betsy Lehman Learning Center for medical incidents.
And what it does is it tries to improve medical procedures, so that way other people can benefit from this.
And law enforcement could take that boilerplate model of what Massachusetts did, which then went on to Pennsylvania and went on to Oregon.
And they could do it right here.
And I know our legislators in our state are discussing it because they got a record number of police shootings.
And how do we fix the problem?
So we had the summit, we introduced these learning models.
And we're actually talking about a legislative council committee to bring in a bunch of experts and say, how do we make this model happen?
So this is the most reasonable solution out there right now.
And I've never, I've never once marched down the middle of a street.
And I can assure you that even though I've asked famous people of color to assist me in this, nobody's ever assisted me at all.
And that's why the message that I'm bringing forward is the most important one in the nation right now.
Well, you know, when you describe about the the chemotherapy incident there, in just a normal country in a normal time in America, the idea, that's exactly what would happen, right?
Somebody makes a mistake, we go, Oh, no.
And we get some money together, we get some organization together, hire the right people and make sure to try to do something to make sure that we don't continue to make that mistake.
Of course, that's what we do.
Right?
Doesn't that make perfect sense?
Why wouldn't we do that when it comes to the cops?
And you know, especially when crime rates, as everybody knows, are way, way down.
Maybe Kevin Drum is even right about something that it was all about the lead in the gasoline.
And that really, you know, with ever since unleaded gas, the crime rate has been dropping.
I'm not exactly sure the correlation and the causation, even when the economy is bad, the crime rate is dropping in the United States of America.
Well, at the same time, the cops are acting as though the whole society is criminal, right?
Like, like, at any time, we're all on the verge of doing something horrible.
And that, you know, they're the they're the thin blue line that, you know, is holding us all together, preventing society from tearing itself apart.
And they're at war, get out there, you're at war against these gangsters, you're at war against these criminals, you're at war against people who sell cocaine to each other, and all this stuff.
And these cops believe it.
I mean, I remember when the when patrolling deputies first started dressing up like SWAT all the time, that my first impression of it was just how silly it was.
Like, especially in Austin, Texas.
I don't know if you live in Baltimore, there's some pretty tough neighborhoods, I guess.
But in Austin, Texas, these guys are driving around in full SWAT gear all the time.
Like what do they think is gonna happen?
And don't they feel silly?
Like when we were kids playing, you know, dressing up like GI Joe or whatever, when they're not in a war, they're not in Iraq, they're in Austin.
And then it actually it took a while to really dawn on me that they don't see the irony.
They don't think it's funny.
They really take this seriously, that they're at war against the population of their own town.
I'm in full agreement with you.
I'm very offended when I see those images of a man in uniform, and it's split half because between an army uniform and a police officer uniform, I'm very offended by that.
And I every time I see that I call them off because that's a whole different thing.
Going to going to war for one's nation is a whole lot different than than being a warrior to take down your own citizens.
So very good, Scott.
Hey, there were special operations guys who were mocking the cops in Ferguson, they're saying, man, I go full scale to war in a lot less get up than that.
You know what I mean?
What are you guys doing?
Anyway, I'm sorry, I'm just ranting at you now, Michael.
But listen, I really appreciate the work that you're doing.
I think the first of all, the training and the the the looking at ways to, to fix training and this kind of thing like you're doing is a really important thing.
But most of all, especially this law that you've passed, I guess I should ask you, I'm sorry, if you got time for one more.
Have there been any police shootings led by independent or, you know, outside investigators since this law got passed?
Oh, almost everything has been done by outside investigation.
In fact, we how many have there?
How many shootings have there been since then?
Since the law?
I know that there were 24 in 2017.
And I would probably venture to say there was maybe 15 or so in 2014, maybe 20 in 2015, something like that.
So has it made any difference to have these outside investigators come in then so far?
It hasn't made a difference in the number of shooting.
Well, for the first time ever, a police officer was fired after after an outside investigation, not for you his use of lethal force, but because he conducted an illegal pat down, which caused the citizen to to be enraged.
And so he was fired.
So it's the first step.
It has to you have to make sure that it's kind of like a three legged stool.
But at the foundation of it all is external investigation.
And then you have to have independent review.
And then you have to have a learning mechanisms that can store the database, and also release that information so future generations can learn from it.
And these are all the important factors.
So I want to invite your guests to go to michaelbell.info and see our video, Forensically Impossible, the Anatomy of a Police Coverup.
And if they have an opportunity to sign the petition, which calls our local DA to reopen the investigation, Michael Bell's case, I'd love to have that happen.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you very much again for your time, Michael.
I really appreciate it.
I appreciate you too, Scott.
Thank you very much for the work that you're doing.
All right, you guys, that is Michael Bell, and former lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force.
Again, michaelbell.info is his website.
And also you can see the video Forensically Impossible, Anatomy of a Police Shooting Coverup.
You can see it there.
And you can also see it in this article at the freethoughtproject.com.
It's a very well done article here by Jack Burns, Air Force colonel buys 24 billboards to expose cops who executed his son.
And very important work being done here again, michaelbell.info.
And you guys know me sign up for the RSS feeds and everything at scotthorton.org.
Check out the full archive is now on YouTube, youtube.com slash Scott Horton show 4600 interviews going back to 2003 for you there.
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That's a fool's Aaron.us.
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Thanks, guys.
