Lou Reiter

The podcast "Open Forum in the Villages Florida" is seeking support from its listeners through monthly donations or purchasing Amazon products. The host, Mike Roth, interviews Lou Ritter, a former law enforcement officer, about his background in the field. Ritter explains the importance of police departments investigating themselves and addresses common complaints against officers. He also discusses the small percentage of serious misconduct cases and highlights the prevalence of smaller police agencies. Ritter mentions the most serious acts of police misconduct, such as sexual abuse and unnecessary use of force. The episode concludes with a brief Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis and a discussion on the rules of evidence and interviewing officers in internal affairs investigations. Welcome to the Open Forum in the Villages Florida podcast. In this show we talk to leaders in the community, leaders of clubs and interesting folks who live here in the villages to get perspectives of what is happening here in the Villages Florida. We are a listener supported podcast. How can you support our podcast? This is Mike Roth and listeners I'm thrilled to share with you this podcast which is my passion project for you. This podcast brings me joy, brings you knowledge, inspiration and a lot of things that people need to know about the villages and the people living here and what's actually going on. Creating this podcast is a labor of love even though it demands more time than I can easily spare but hey time isn't something we can buy back right? Now here's where you come in, the unsung heroes and heroines. You can help us keep the podcast alive and thriving. How? By becoming a supporter. There are two simple ways that you can support us. The first is a small monthly donation. Visit our podcast website openforum.com and click on the black supporter box. Even a small three to ten dollar a month donation makes a difference and guess what you can cancel any time no strings attached. The second way that you can contribute to the podcast is by making a purchase of an Amazon product at Amazon standard prices that way there's no extra money out of your pocket but you are supporting the podcast. Check every week because we're going to be adding new Amazon products that you can buy and support the podcast with and you support means the world to us. Stay curious, stay inspired and keep those headphones on. This is Mike Roth on Open Forum in the Villages Florida. I'm here today with Lou Ritter. Thanks for joining me Lou. Thanks Mike. Lou why don't you give our audience a little bit of your background in law enforcement. I've been involved in it for 63 years now. The first 20 I was with the Los Angeles Police Department and I had 22 different assignments but I retired as one of the deputy chiefs of police. The last 43 years I've been a private consultant and I principally do training for law enforcement audiences in internal affairs. How to conduct administrative investigations on shootings and in custody deaths and misconduct allegations. I also work with insurance companies to audit their agencies that they represent and maybe they're experiencing a higher kind of loss factor and they want to find out why that is. And then in addition I act as an expert witness in civil trials where citizens or law enforcement officers are suing the police agency. And which police chiefs did you work for in Los Angeles? I worked for three. One was there only a year. Bill Parker was the one that kind of came up the same period of time that I was created and Bill Parker was the creation of professional policing in Los Angeles. Then I worked for a guy for eight years named Ed Davis. The last chief I worked for was Daryl Gates. You retired in what year? 1981. So there is life after retirement. So you did 20 years in the Los Angeles Police Department and how many years were you in internal investigations there? Actually being an investigator and being someone who put on the administrative tribunals it was only two years. But once I made lieutenant, captain, commander and then deputy chief, 80% of my time really was spent with personnel issues which dealt with internal affairs. Why do you feel that police departments should investigate themselves? Police work is different than what's on television or in the movies. It would be like trying to have a citizen investigate why a pilot made an error in a plane. There are things that only active practitioners realize and know what should be done and you don't look at what's on television or in the movies. And so police have that background and more importantly they know how their officers were trained and what they should do and they know the written policies and rules that the officers have to follow. They have the capability of doing that. Now do they all do it? Not that necessarily true. And what is the most common complaint that you hear about? I remember I was given a presentation up at the Suffolk Law School in Boston and one of the persons I asked that question to and she says I imagine that 80% of what you investigate are use of force or improper use of force. That's not true. Every time we have done an audit somewhere about 80% of citizen complaints are attitude, verbal abuse and neglect of duty. They just didn't get the service they expected they would get or they didn't get the treatment they thought that officer should provide to them. And really the serious misconduct narrows down into less than 10% of most police departments and when you get into criminal misconduct it's one or two percent at the most. Only one or two percent. So all of these TV shows we see about corruption in police departments they're really probably just made up. That's good for TV but police work is just like any other work. 10% of the employees are stars. You've got 80% who do the job that they've been paid to do. You get 10% that are slackers. You only got about 1% who have taken that badge and the authority they have and use it to steal, to rape, to abuse people. So it's a small percentage and you have to remember when it comes to policing we have 18,000 police agencies. Other country in the world has that kind of structure and in fact 50% of our police departments have 10 or fewer officers and 8% of them have 25 or fewer. So most of them are very small almost like families when you look at it that way. It's not unusual to run into a department that has one police officer. He's the chief and the principal police officer cop on the beat. We run into big cities that's certainly not true. Yeah but the big cities you're only talking about 200 of them. We got 18,000 police agencies. Look locally here. Wildwood has about 60 officers. I think Lady Lake has 35 or 36 officers. Sumter County might have 200 maybe 250 including correctional officers. We are more small here in the villages than if you get over into Orlando and some of the metro areas like Metro Miami and Dade County and Palm Beach County. What are the most serious acts of police misconduct? How frequently do they really occur? Like I said before less than 1% of the time the cases that Internal Affairs investigates are serious and of course the serious ones the one that I find the most despicable really is sexual abuse and on duty sexual abuse where they're abusing crime victims or they're stopping young women usually young women on traffic violations and to get out of a ticket they encourage the person to engage in sexual act. They're using their authority. In addition we have some officers that either like to use force unnecessarily or they get wrapped up in the incident and they get goaded into using unnecessary use of force and then of course we get theft. We have the incident in Baltimore with the Gun Trace Task Force. All of them went to federal prison but they started off trying to bring guns and narcotics off the street. To do that they cut corners on probable cause affidavits. They dropped contraband narcotics on these suspects. They stole money so they might get $600,000 worth of cash and they would book maybe $500,000 and split the other $100,000 between them. Those are cases but they're rare. And now we'll hear a short Alzheimer's tip from Dr. Craig Curtis. Dr. Curtis what can someone do if they know that they have Alzheimer's that runs in their family? There's a lot that they can do. Published actually in the Journal of the American Medical Association in February of 2024 so this month this was a study done primarily at Rush University in Chicago looking at those with brain amyloid so those people that already have amyloid. Can a healthy lifestyle protect them from developing dementia? And the answer was yes by following these five healthy habits that were tracked. They did not smoke. They did moderate exercise for at least 150 minutes a week. They kept their alcohol consumption. They used approximately 530 autopsies to prove that those that followed those healthy lifestyle habits actually had less amyloid in their brain. With over 20 years of experience studying brain health Dr. Curtis's goal is to educate the villages community on how to live a longer healthier life. To learn more visit his website CraigCurtisMD.com or call 352-500-5252 to attend a free seminar. Thank you Dr. Curtis. And when Internal Affairs is in investigating a case what are the rules of evidence and interviewing officers? A lot of people get stumped here because they expect Internal Affairs when they're dealing let's say with a serious violation on the part of a police officer to follow the same rules they see on law and order and in all these trials. And there's a difference because when we're conducting an administrative investigation which means that maybe a policy or a rule has been violated we've been given a lot of latitude. In fact back 1963 the Supreme Court said in a case called Garrity versus New Jersey which was essentially a ticket-fixing New Jersey. The prosecutor in that case told Garrity who was a police chief okay if you don't answer these questions in this criminal probe we're dealing with you're going to get fired as the police chief. That went up to the Supreme Court 1963 and the Supreme Court said whoa wait a minute now the chief still criminally has the same rights as any citizen so if you're investigating the chief criminally that person doesn't have to give testimony against his self-interest. That's called the Fifth Amendment violation. No citizen is required to testify against himself but administratively they said public employees that's the distinction public employees have to cooperate with the administrative investigation if it's dealing with a policy or a rule violation. They cannot lie they must be truthful and they must cooperate with the investigation. They must be open and a lot of citizens don't understand that because they say wait a minute an officer has been involved in a shooting and there's somebody been killed by that shooting and you're gonna wait five days or in some cases ten days to the officer if it were a citizen they'd be interviewed right then. Actually they wouldn't because they would lawyer up and lawyers say don't say anything. But in the police situation on television it always seems that they say don't say anything until you have your union rep there. That's true and I agree with that I'm an advocate even though I was never a part of the Union in Los Angeles I agree with that because today there's more chance of an officer being criminally charged with something he or she did on the job. Let's say a shooting or in a jail cell a use of force and somebody gets killed during that where they're trying to control the person. We have they call them progressive prosecutors have been elected ever since George Floyd in 2020. We've got a lot of progressive prosecutors and they are bringing criminal charges against officers for things that 20 years ago they never would have. As an example in Washington DC a couple officers are drag racing with their patrol cars and they totaled them both out. In the past they would have said police department you handle that yourself. These guys were criminally charged. The Union now if they have a union remember we're down in Florida and while the PBA and FOP active still a lot of departments here that have no union representation. I think all officers should be allowed to have some form of representation when they're being compelled to answer these questions. And why is that? The representative can make objections so later if the state decides to try to use what they've said while they're being ordered to answer that attorney can say judge we objected to that and that should be excluded from the trial here because they were compelled to answer those questions. So it's become more of an issue today than it ever has been. Now and evidence we talked about evidence we can require an officer to pee in the bottle or take a blood test or disrobe. We have to be conscious of his dignity but if we're dealing only with a rule violation we don't need a warrant for that. Today the most common tool where we find police misconduct is in their use of cell phones. Many officers carry three cell phones. They carry a department issued, they carry one where they call their family and they got another one that they use to call their girlfriends or to do their dirty business on. So you want to have access to that if you're conducting this administrative investigation. Now if you're looking for criminal charge you've got to get a warrant to get into that phone but you don't need a warrant if you're only conducting an administrative investigation. So the department issued cell phone that's the property of the police department could always be examined for evidence. Yes there's less of what they call an expectation of privacy because the department and now the department should have a policy that says your department issued cell phone or your locker or your car that we give you there is no expectation of privacy at any time without any reason we can come and examine it. Some departments don't have that written policy but you're still allowed to do that again if you're looking for a policy or a rule violation. If you're looking for some criminal even with a department phone you need a warrant. What about that second phone the personal phone the officer might be carrying? That's always the issue the officer will say it's in my wife's name. The courts have said we don't care if you carry it on duty and they're investigating something and it could possibly give evidence toward this rule or policy violation you've got to cooperate now if you don't cooperate you're then guilty of insubordination and you can just be fired because you've been insubordinate. Okay. We don't even care if we can prove the original charge. From what you said it would seem that it an officer is carrying a third cell phone they're automatically a dirty officer. No that's not true that's for a lot of reasons. The first phone department issue understand why you have that. Second phone for family business fully understand that. Third phone gets a little bit out of line in my mind. Yeah it's a red flag just like if somebody gives a crime victim a business card and puts their personal cell phone on it that right away is a red flag. Why would you not use the department issued? Now if they wanted to they could have a rule that said you can only carry the department issued cell phone and you could use that to call home for personal needs. I probably would object to that and say I have my own second cell phone. And that's exactly so I mean we could create that it's like the Bruel Hall we went through years ago where every time you got out of the car you had to put your hat on and we went overboard while looking at hats rather than looking at what they did good and bad. So it's the same thing they're going to kill at least one other cell phone get over it we have the authority to get in it to make it them turn over to us we have the authority to have them we won't give me the password but you put your password in there and open it up let me see I can do a screenshot if necessary I can take the phone and to protect everybody's interest you have a third party do a whole dump on the phone and then that person segments out the things that are specific to the allegation of misconduct you're investigating. We have to treat these people with respect. Cell phone today has more personal information than most of our houses have. Yeah I'm carrying more stuff in my cell phone that I think is absolutely minimally necessary because it's convenient because of the programs that I'm running on the cell phone other times who are the traps the passwords or two-factor authentication have caused in using the device. The other thing they can tell where you've been. Oh yeah. Yeah I can track your movements to determine are you in fact patrolling? Are you sitting behind a warehouse sleeping? Are you going visiting your lady friend? Cell phones have a great deal of data today. Now is that similar to what we see in the Hollywood portrayal where police officer was carrying three guns? There are some many of them will carry a second gun and that is really for their protection. Say if their first gun is taken away from them or if they lose it in a fight they have a backup weapon. Yes every now and then we do. In fact there was a friend of mine was an expert witness on a case in Washington where these guys were carrying these long stiletto daggers. No ungodly reason to carry anything like that. And what were they using? They were using it as a throwdown weapon if they shot someone and they shouldn't have. In this case they all piled on this guy and it was one of what we call this in custody death. And as a consequence the city settled that case for 5.8 million dollars because they had this throwdown stiletto dagger that they claimed the subject got and was trying to stab them with it. There was no reason for any of these officers to carry that kind of tool. Now let's spend a couple of minutes talking about the movement that came up a couple of years ago defunding the police. Can that really work or is that just a stupid idea? The word was wrong. What they should have used is let's reimagine the role of the police. We're a very conservative group. Most police officers would be conservative if not ultra-conservative. We're very resilient too. I've been around a long time so every time we go back to the riots of the late 60s I was out in the streets and the Watts riots and we had all sorts of commissions and then we had the Rodney King incident. We had all sorts of commissions and then we had the incident in Ferguson and then we had the George Floyd in 2020. More commissions. Yeah they have all said the same thing. They have all identified areas that policing needs to improve in. One of the big areas all of these have said is citizens should have an easy way to seek redress for grievances they may have on the police and yet still in a lot of police departments they've made it cumbersome to do that. So I think the term defunding was wrong because we need police officers and we should have said let's reimagine them and what is it that you want your local police officer to do? Take the villages here. What do we really want the police officer to do? I think nobody wants to get a ticket but we know that traffic is a big issue here so we want police officers to educate and enforce traffic violations. The other thing we need police officers. That's an interesting word that you use it's split under my fingernail. Most of these officers are out there with very little direct supervision. The only way we can supervise what an officer does is by citizens voicing a complaint if they have one. Now the other big thing we've got. A citizen would offer a complaint on the citizens word against police officers. Not so much nowadays because most of them have what we call a body-worn camera and that should be on during any traffic stop. Now if it isn't that's something the supervisors need to be alerted to. We found that these officers were regularly dropping evidence on people and they only found that out because they reviewed the body-worn cameras. We've got programs now where you can feed keywords in and the computer identifies those segments of the body-worn cameras that are in the cloud wherever that is. That's a form of oversight. In addition a lot of citizens when they're stopped turn on their cell phone so they're recording it as well. It's the idea. Not every citizen is smart enough to turn off or be not every citizen is smart enough to have the recordings permanently captured in a place where they can be played back at the appropriate moment. If you're out there on I-75 we expect to have a certain number of tickets written. These are the violations that are causing accidents. We want you to look for people who are committing these kinds of violations. Now the officer has a discretion. They can look the other way. They can issue a warning. They can write a ticket and drop it down 10 miles an hour so you don't go into that excessive speed ticket which costs you a ton of money or they can write a big ticket item and unfortunately some cops will look at it and say what's the attitude of the person I stopped and if they're amenable to the enforcement they walk away fine. If the person gives them a hard time the pencil is pretty mighty when it comes to writing tickets. So the officer hasn't done anything wrong. He's just enforcing the letter of the law and it's going to cost you a bunch more money. Here in the villages I think that the enforcement around the traffic circles really needs to be increased. Just driving up Boss Boulevard from 44 to Spanish Springs on an average day in the weight of time I will see at least one violation of traffic circle law and be it many times one out of three times I'll see someone violating a traffic circle that almost caused an accident. One of the problems I've got being an outsider now I still it boggles my mind we you have two lanes of traffic on the traffic circles. Some of them. Most of them have two lanes and you've got the outer lane and then you've got the inner lane. What really boggles my mind is because they allow the inner lane to cross right across right lane they want to exit the circle. Anywhere else in the world you can't do that you have to be in the furthest most outside lane to make that curve but some traffic circles have a no-go zone one of the four corners so that your force from the center lane to the outside lane whether or not you're continuing around the circle or you're going to exit and that makes sense there are a lot of traffic circles and intersections where people are allowed to cross the right lane from the left lane to make an exit. Oh it's painted on the roadway there are hash marks that are painted on the roadway that boggled my mind when and I've been here just about a year now and but I'm very cautious and if someone's in the traffic circle I don't try to enter it because I don't know what they're pointed to but it is then of course you get the people that think they're in a LeMans trying to go through the traffic circle and they don't even slow down a little bit yeah yeah on two wheels coming around the corner but there is a need for traffic enforcement here and I'd almost say that most of the traffic circles need a traffic camera not actually one probably at least four so that the traffic enforcement could issue warnings automatically to people who new to the villages or accidentally making a mistake physical damage or people getting hurt yeah the other thing local law enforcement have to contend with here is drinking driving we have enough terrible collisions and drinking starts real early here in the villages the other thing that surprised me since I moved here is the number of domestic calls and principally Sumter County Sheriff seems to handle most of those and that's a real nerve-wracking call for any police officer because you're invading the personal space of the people in that home and yet we have a lot of it and some of it is understandable some of it is not understandable we've got young people living with their parents and they're abusing their senior parents but Sumter County seems to be doing a good job yeah there's some of that and there are other things but I want to thank you Lou for being on the show with us today Mike it's been enjoyable for me and if you have a question that comes in the law enforcement or if one of your viewers or listeners has a question too they can reach out to you and I'd be happy to answer any questions and I'm part of the village now and I'm full-time even though I'm still working I know you've written a couple of books Lou I have yes I'm look holding one of them now it says broken badges cases for police internal affairs this is a novel or is this really a true story they're fiction but they've been cases that I've all been involved in I've changed the names and I've changed the locations and now you don't want to read my books if you're offended by language or sex because unfortunately I'm dealing in that 1% we talked about the 1% that abuse their badge and take advantage of other people how many books do you actually have I have two fiction books so I have 60 copies of each one but I have another 500 page manual about how you do internal affairs okay so that's in the fourth edition now so if someone wanted to read this fictionalized account called broken badges how would they do that they could email me easy email Lou writer at gmail.com that's a r-e-i-t isn't Tom er Louis l-o-u all one word thanks for joining us Lou my pleasure Mike remember our next episode will be released next Friday at 9 a.m. should you want to become a major supporter of the show or have questions please contact us at Mike at rothvoice.com this is a shout out for supporters tweet Coleman Ed Williams Paul Sorgin and major supporter dr. Craig Curtis at k2 in the villages if you know someone who should be on the show contact us at Mike at rothvoice.com we thank everyone for listening to the show the content of the show is copyrighted by rothvoice 2024 our rights reserved