Defunding Police, Rap Murder, and Cop Stories | The Greg Kading Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to retired police detective Greg Kading. They talk about cool cop stories, defunding the police, and working on high profile cases. Greg is best known for working on a task force that investigated the murders of rap stars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in the mid-2000s. In September 2011, he made a documentary and self-published the book Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations Go to wethepeopleholsters.com/bee and enter the code BEE10 to save $10 Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans Topics Discussed Best law enforcement shows Worse Crime shows Trying to figure out Rappers names Tupac and Biggie murders Watching someone portray you on TV Tupac murder How Greg became wrapped up in the large profile rap cases Homicides in Los Angeles Current status of gang violence Weird cop story Being a rookie cop Crashing in a police car Starting a podcast Reacting to police hatred Police violence Rodney King riots Derek Chuavin and George Floyd Waiting for all the facts Theology and police work Moral relativism Valuing all life as an officer Seperating yourself from your job Keeping your identity separate from being an officer Defunding police Being a private investigator Stench of autopsies Colors of the bodies Interrogating Subscriber Portion Orlando Bloom being robbed Smoking jackets Pro tips against burglaries Drug problems Always have a safe Flashlights as a weapon South Central beat cop Plainclothes detective Lethal Weapon Bureaucracy Flashlight over taser Pepper spray story PCP story 10 questions
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Good cop.
Great cop.
No, no, it was supposed to be a bad cop.
It's subverting your expectations because we do comedy.
Is that what comedy is?
Yeah.
Subverting expectations.
Just purely subverting expectations.
Okay.
Well, stop right there.
Oh, that's a different intro.
We talked to a cop today.
We did.
And his name is Greg Kating.
Yeah, if you watch crime documentaries, you've probably seen him.
He's in a lot of them.
And if you haven't, he just has that look that you wouldn't have seen him in a true crime documentary.
He has those eyes like, I've seen a lot, kid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he wrote a book called Murder Rap.
Murder Rap.
I was going to say Murder Cop.
That's not right.
That sounds like a movie.
Yeah.
It's like X Cops.
Yeah, Murder Cop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So he wrote a book called Murder Rap about the rivalry between Big E and Tupac and both of their deaths.
Yeah, and I guess he investigated it all.
And he says he knows who did it, even though nobody's been convicted.
Well, he didn't even make the claim like, I know who did it.
He's like, it's known.
This is the objective fact that these are the guys who did it.
Right.
And there's just never been a conviction or anything like that.
So it's interesting.
We talked about that.
A little bit, not the whole, yeah.
But we just fascinated talking about to a cop.
So we talked about everything from the Chauvin trial to just the whole culture right now.
And we kept trying to dig great stories out of them because that's like the best thing you talk to a cop because they have crazy lives.
And they don't realize how crazy their lives are because they'll just be matter of factly like, well, I guess there's this one time that this meth head like bursts through a wall like the Kool-Aid man and started attacking me with a wrench or whatever.
But like, and to them, that's day-to-day.
Like for them, that's like writing an article for you.
Yeah.
So, one thing to know about this episode: if you like a good cop story, the best by far is in the subscriber portion.
We heard about a story.
That's all I'm going to say.
It involves a naked woman running on a power line.
That's all I'm going to say.
Now, you gave it away.
Well, no, no, that's only part of the story.
That's the only part.
The story kept getting better.
It felt like we were in a writer's meeting for Looney Tunes, and they're like, And then, an Anvil falls, and you're like, And every moment you think, oh, yeah, that's going to end her, but she just keeps going.
She keeps going.
PCP kids.
Don't try it.
Don't do PCP.
All right, let's welcome to the studio, everybody, at the same time.
Welcome.
Greg Caden.
Are you enjoying our Photoshops on the wall, Greg?
Is this Zach Galifanakis?
Is it?
GK Chesterton.
GK Chesterton.
Oh, okay.
I thought maybe it was one of his.
But now I need to see the biopic of G.K. Chesterton played by.
He's an old author we're big fans of.
Okay.
Zach Gavilophagus.
Gaffalafana.
Yeah, Snaphalopagus.
Well, hi, Greg.
Thanks for coming on.
All right.
Well, here we are.
Are we started?
We're started.
All right.
We got Greg Kating here.
Now, I don't know if you watch crime documentaries, Greg, you're like on a number of them, correct?
Like, I know when I looked you up, I was like, oh, wait, I've seen this guy.
I realized I had just seen you in, there's a Netflix documentary.
I don't know what it's called, about this hotel.
Cecil.
This Hotel Cecil.
You're in that one, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Me and my old partner, my homicide partner before I retired, were both kind of featured in it.
He actually worked on the case.
I was more of a talking head.
Nice.
So how many of those have you done?
You know, I retired in 2010 and I did an early like VHS or V, is it not VHS?
VH1.
Oh, VH1.
Yeah.
That's how I'm dating myself.
I used to watch V. It was Betamax.
And it just spiraled into once I did that, I just started kind of getting more and more, you know, introduced and immersed into doing crime docs.
So yeah.
You got that grizzled cop screen presence.
Really?
Yeah, like, is that offensive?
I'd take, I'd be super complimented by that.
Yeah, that's a compliment.
Yeah.
I like when people say you don't act like a cop.
I'm cool with them saying you look like a cop, but I like it when they say you don't act like a cop.
Yeah.
Yeah, you look like a cop, like you were a cop, and now you're like, here's how the streets are.
Yeah.
I can do it freely now.
Yeah, in the buddy cop movie when the young guy comes up and he's like, you know, you're your last day on the job and you're retiring.
Yeah.
And we come.
Yeah.
And you're the old grizzled guy who doesn't play by the role.
That old, not that old, not that old, but in the context of the buddy comedy.
Yeah.
You know that one of the great shows that had to do that, that kind of juxtaposition between the young cop who's raring to go and then the old cop who's on his way out was, do you guys remember Crash with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall?
No.
Just before you guys.
Great movie back in the day.
Sean Penn was the young cop and Robert Duvall was the guy on his way out.
That's one question I had.
I was going to say her for later, but what are like cop shows that you like?
Two, particularly, because I think these two shows really nail on the head what law enforcement is like.
You watch CSI and all these other crime dramas and it's just like, okay, so unrealistic.
There's nothing about this that is coming close to how it actually is.
So out of Baltimore years ago came a series called The Wire.
Oh yeah.
See The Wire.
The Wire.
It was on HBO.
It nails it.
That's the true gritty bureaucracy hacksaw.
Pardon my language.
That goes on in law enforcement.
And then kind of merse that with Reno 911.
And those are the two best cop shows.
If you can somehow, you know, integrate those two shows, you know exactly what it's like in law enforcement.
I want to see that show.
I've seen Reno 911.
I haven't seen The Wire.
So I've only got half the picture.
Yeah, The Wire is a very slow-moving.
If it does feel like they're trying to make it exactly like you're following real.
I actually watched like the first eight minutes the other night of the first episode of The Wire.
Oh, really?
And then my wife got home.
Yeah.
It's a slow developing, but once you're in it, the characters are so well, so well developed.
It's fantastic.
Really good show.
So what are the worst cop shows?
Play movies.
It's those, you know, those prime time ones that are on all the time.
And I don't want to talk trash on, you know, popular television programs, but it's the ones where they solve it in 30 minutes, you know, where they get their DNA results back, you know, with a phone call from the crime scene.
And so it's, you know, the ones that are really unrealistic.
Yeah.
Yeah, CSI, NCIS, those kinds of things.
You said those numbers.
For the record, Greg loves those shows.
So you I assume so this definitely a big milestone, to say the least.
You were involved in the investigation of the murder of Notorious BIG, also known as Biggie Smalls.
That's the same guy, right?
Yeah, it is the same guy.
And Tupac Shakur.
Not the same guy.
Different.
Not the same guy.
Tupac and Shakur, his partner.
No, no, no, no, yeah.
Tupac Shakur is one guy.
Oh, okay.
Yep.
And then Big E, Biggie Smalls, Notorious BIG is one guy.
That's all one guy.
Not Heavy E, that's a different guy.
That's a different guy.
Okay.
That's a different guy.
Yeah.
All right.
So you wrote a book.
Just kind of give us that story of like how you came to this point, like from that whole thing.
Introduction.
I ended up, we were doing a reinvestigation of Biggie's case in Los Angeles because there's a big lawsuit against the city.
There was a claim that there was police corruption involved, cover-up, and that, you know, even to the extent that they were saying that some officers were involved in the murder.
So that led to a lawsuit against the city.
And then that lawsuit wind its way through the court.
At one point in time, our department, this is almost 10 years after the fact, this is in 2006.
Biggie got killed in 97.
10 years after the fact, they were like, hey, let's reinvestigate it.
Let's see what this lawsuits, if there's any, you know, anything to it that's true.
And so that's how I got recruited to work Biggie's case.
Biggie's case has always been believed to be connected to Tupac's because he's only murdered six months earlier in Vegas.
And there's all this rivalry going on between them.
So we ultimately get to the point where we get people to confess their roles in both of the murders.
And the lawsuits dropped.
And so at that point in time, the LAPD is like, okay, we're done with this investigation.
We're not going to be able to prosecute anybody.
The lawsuit's dropped.
And I thought, well, there's so much that we learned in the investigation.
The public's never going to know unless somebody kind of steps away and tells them.
I couldn't tell the story while still being on the job because it's conflict of interest.
So I retired.
I was prepared to retire.
Law enforcement had run its course for me.
So I retired, wrote a book.
And the book then was turned into a documentary.
And the documentary then turned into a limited series on Netflix.
Book in the documentary called Murder Rap.
And then the Netflix series was called Unsolved.
I watched a few episodes in preparation for this interview.
So what's it like watching a guy play you on a show?
Because you're the guy with the backwards hats you, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you wear a backwards hat everywhere?
I used to.
And so that actor, Josh DeMell, he was really, really cool, really down-to-earth guy.
Nothing pretentious about him at all.
So I was really happy that they had selected him to, you know, kind of be my, you know, to represent me.
And so he would be like, well, what did you used to do?
And I said, I always had my hat on backwards.
So he would then try to emulate that.
And it was a lot of fun doing that series.
And of course, there's creative license taken, but I think they nailed it as far as the accuracy of what happened, not only in the case, but in the investigation.
So because are the I'm so new to this, but basically it seems that there hasn't been anybody convicted in the murder of either of these guys.
No, there's never even been a prosecution in them.
So charges have never been filed.
By the time we got the confessions by a couple of co-conspirators, one in each murder, most of the people had already died.
Most of them had gang violence.
Gang violence.
Yeah, different street type of activities that led to their deaths.
The only people really standing now are, you know, and I don't know if you'd qualify this as standing, but Suge Knight, who's basically doing life in prison.
On an unrelated thing.
On an unrelated thing.
Okay.
Yep.
Another murder, though.
And then the co-conspirators that both confessed they escaped any prosecution.
So would you say that you know or are pretty confident you know who killed, but you can't, it's just what's that situation?
Well, it kind of sucks because it's bittersweet.
Like we do know.
Like there's no doubt whatsoever in my mind.
I know exactly that Orlando Anderson is a Southside Crip.
He shot and killed Tupac Shakur.
He had gotten into a fight with Tupac earlier that night at the MGM in Vegas.
So the same guy that Tupac got in a fight with came back and shot him and killed him.
And then there was a retaliation of that because when Tupac was shot, sitting next to him in the car was Suge Knight.
And they were very close.
It was his number one artist on his label.
So Suge Knight then retaliated and had Biggie killed.
And he used a gang member by the name of Wardell Faust.
They called him Poochie.
And Wardell came, went to the auditorium where Biggie was at and waited outside and killed him.
Shot and killed him.
Poochie's not the same guy as Puffy?
No, Puffy, so he's the CEO of Bad Boy, record label back on the East Coast.
He was the CEO of the label that Biggie belonged to.
Bad Boy Records.
And Death Row was the West Coast one?
Correct.
Yeah, see, I'm getting it.
These are all rappers, by the way, for the non-strollers at home.
These are rapper, gangster rap.
Don't listen to it, homeschoolers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, what was it like?
Suddenly, I mean, I don't know how involved you were in gang-related violence or any, what you consider this, but like you got thrust into a world.
It seems like, you know, this whole East Coast, West Coast rap battle stuff, like, what was it like being thrust into that?
Yeah, were you like a young recruit?
Like, I want to go into gang violence.
Well, at the time this happened, 2006, I'd already been a cop for almost 20 years.
Okay.
So, and I had been working gangs and narcotics and stuff.
You're an LAPD, bro.
Yeah.
See a lot of that.
So the only thing that was really new about it for me was just the genre of music and, you know, kind of the music culture of it all.
And that's why I brought a partner of mine on who really, really understood that world, a guy named Darren Dupree, African-American guy that really enjoys that, or at least paid attention to that type of music, worked in the clubs in Los Angeles.
So he was the perfect guy to partner up with because he could give a lot of insights into the music culture.
He could be like, skrilla means money.
That is exactly.
That is exactly the type of thing he would do.
He's like, hey, Greg, you sound really white.
So I hope you understand.
That's funny.
What's unexpected?
I mean, going into that, you know, I assume you had to interview a lot of these people.
And just, is there anything kind of unexpected about that world or some of the people you had to interact with?
No, for the most part, everybody was uncooperative.
Everybody was kind of stricken to that street code and not really being as forthright as they could have been, which would have helped to make progress in the investigation.
But we're used to that.
We're kind of just accustomed to that type of reaction when we're doing these investigations.
So there was nothing really surprising about it other than, and this is in hindsight, what surprises me about it is how simple it actually all was.
But yet here we are 25 years later and it's still considered an officially unsolved case.
And that's frustrating because it's like those things don't really seem to, you know, make sense.
How could it be so simple, but yet unsolved?
But it is.
Now in TV shows, when they say a case is unsolved, like we're closing the book on this, then the cop goes rogue and then like solves it all in the streets where everything's blowing vigilante.
Do you ever do that?
That you can tell us about?
Well, some of the times there's no statute of limitations on this stuff.
So you need to be a little bit cautious.
No, I mean, when I retired, I still continued to stay engaged in trying to get more information about both of those cases and started developing relationships with people that either hadn't been identified or hadn't been willing to come forward.
So it continued to kind of evolve.
And, you know, at least with that case.
But yeah, law enforcement's, people don't realize that a large number of homicides in Los Angeles at least go unsolved.
Like the majority.
It's over 50% that don't get solved.
And it's just an unfortunate that this one had a lot of attention because there's celebrity components.
But down in South Central and other areas of Los Angeles, there's just stacks and stacks and stacks of unsolved cases on the shelves of the LAPD.
Wow.
And now is gang violence as bad today as it was back then, or has it gotten better?
It's different.
You know, it's a little bit more, it's less apparent.
Like back in this, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, the gangsters were hanging out on street corners with their rags in their pockets wearing their colors, and it was very apparent who they were.
That all kind of took a turn when I, you know, as they began to realize this is not in our best interest to just stand out here like sore thumbs drawing attention.
So things kind of went a little bit more, you know, less apparent, less present.
But there's still, you know, obviously a lot of gang activity in Los Angeles.
And of course, you have now the big transnational gangs like MS-13 that, you know, they're all over the world, but they've completely integrated themselves into all different areas of society.
It's such a big thing.
I don't even know where to start with asking questions.
Like there's so much like I just want to like, I want, I have to be honest, like whenever I meet a cop, I just want to sit back and be like, just tell me some of your stories.
Light up a cigar.
Yeah, light up a cigar.
Tell me all your crazy stories because I assume I used to, when I used to live in Coos Bay, a small town in Oregon, and I became good friends with the guy who became the chief of police, old Boston guy.
And just sitting and listening to him tell his stories from being a cop.
It's my favorite things.
So you got a few of your top stories from being a cop?
I do.
What happens, at least for me, is the you know, these stories, you've got a thousand of them, yeah, but you just aren't readily available until what happens is two cops will start sitting down, yeah.
So that's a trigger, right?
It's a trigger, and then you go into this whole thing where you're trying to one-up each other, like, yeah, that's a good one.
But let me tell you about what happened to me, yeah.
And so, there's this weird kind of dynamic that happens so often.
You need us to make up some stories, yeah.
No, I one came to mind, this one was really weird, and I'll try to make it really brief.
Yeah, so there's this guy that uh um, I'll just his name's Robert, I won't give his last name, who was um in a long-term relationship with another man, and uh, that man died of emphysema.
And then Robert found himself after a really long-term relationship becoming very promiscuous and going out and going to the clubs.
And he's he's an older guy, he's in his late 50s, and um, and picking up on people.
And so, he ends up picking up on a guy, and they go back to his house, and that individual both robs him and kills him.
So, three days, Robert hasn't shown up for work, he's dead in his house.
Three days later, his employer, who is LA County, or I'm sorry, LA City College, calls and says, Hey, Robert hasn't been showing up for work.
They get a hold of a family member.
The family member goes over, sees that the car's not there, and the lights are dark.
And he's like, Well, it doesn't appear that Robert's here.
Maybe he took off somewhere, but we're still concerned.
This is way out of character for him.
And so, they call the police.
So, the police go and they knock on the door, they get permission to force entry.
And as they go in, this is the first thing these two cops see.
And of course, they've got their guns out, but it's very, very dark.
There's just some real, you know, a small amount of light coming from a couple lamps.
And they look in and they see Robert on his knees with his shoulders and head and his face buried in the cushions of the sofa.
And then there's a huge, you know, 14, 15-inch butcher knife stuck in his back.
And standing over him is this white guy, this big, bald white guy who's got nothing on but a pair of like tight shorts.
And the cop is just about to pull the trigger, like he's freeze almond, you know, type of thing.
And then he realizes it that it's a life-size cutout of Stone Cold Steve Austin, who's standing over the decedent with a butcher knife in his back.
And as we tried to make sense of this whole thing, and you know, you know, some of these people get into some really deviant activity, deviant sexual activity.
So there's this now turns into our crime scene.
Robert's obviously.
Did you guys arrest Stone Cold Steve Austin?
He wouldn't cooperate.
He just stood there like telling him he just would not come.
He listened to verbal commands.
Yeah.
Austin 316.
But just really bizarre things.
And I remember thinking how this would look because like the cop, I interviewed him.
He says, I had like two and a half pounds of pressure on that trigger.
I was just about ready to let it go.
And I thought how that would have looked and you shoot this cut out and say, We've killed Stone Cold Steve Austin, who's first on scene at this point.
That sounds like something in training when they're doing the different targets or popping.
Don't shoot Stone Cold Steve Austin when he pops up.
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Just, you know, weird little stories like that.
I come and go in line.
Well, that's nothing.
I got a better one for you.
Yeah, we'll just make up cops and then get one up and then that'll trigger something for him.
What about rookie stories?
I mean, I can't imagine it being new to, especially like cases with murder and stuff like that.
And you first walk.
I mean, most of us are so separate from that kind of thing.
We never have to see it or experience it.
What's it like for that to become like your day-to-day?
Well, so when I was a rookie, I was in my really early 20s.
And so, you know, I didn't even have the personal maturity to be out.
I shouldn't be, you know, I think 21 is a really young age to put somebody out on the streets.
Yeah, that is.
You're just trying to figure yourself out before you're trying to deal with worldly problems.
So anyways, you go through a process.
You know, you start off.
You got a training officer.
You slowly start to develop into, you know, learning how to do police work.
And you, depending on what way you want to go in your career, you want to be an investigator, you want to be a supervisor, you want to go to SWAT, you want to fly helicopters, you want to do dogs.
There's just so many different areas that you can kind of go into.
For me, I always was fascinated with gangs.
So I started to get into, you know, understanding and developing my expertise on gangs.
But yeah, as a young cop, you make mistakes.
You know, you're overzealous.
I crashed a lot of cars overdriving.
Tell us each story.
One time I hit this lady out just real quick.
I'm driving and the highway patrol is chasing some robbery suspects.
It's really late at night.
It's like one o'clock in the morning and we're on the streets of South Central and they're flying by.
We see the suspects go by in a sedan and then one lone CHP officer chasing him and we're like, damn, jump in.
So we're trying to catch up to this whole thing.
And we're flying.
I think we're northbound on Broadway coming up to Slossen.
And I see that they get through the intersection.
And I see that cross, and they had, you know, the other police vehicle had its lights and sirens on.
So I'm assuming that cross traffic, anybody on the road is going to be looking out, like, what's going on here?
Police just flew through the intersection.
So I'm gunning it.
I've got my lights and siren on.
And this van pulls right out into the intersection in front of me.
I didn't have time to react.
And I center punched that thing right on the side.
And I hit it, I think I was like 70 miles an hour.
Oh my gosh.
And I hit it so hard that this kid that was in the back seat, he wasn't strapped in.
He was sitting in the rear seat of this van.
He came out the side window and went right over the top of my car.
He came right out the side window, went right out of my car.
My car is spinning out.
The van is tumbling.
And it goes, you know, 30, 40, 50 yards down the road and it comes to rest on its side.
So we, once we get our senses about us and I realize what had just happened, it was like that.
And I hit it with so much inertia that that kid like just went right out the window.
And as the car came to a rest, I get up and all I hear is the boom of the beat of the bass speakers.
Like the music was so loud in that van, she never heard the sirens and wasn't paying attention.
And so the lady that is now who is the driver and the mother of this kid, she's standing with her feet on the ground, but like through the driver's window, because the van's on its side.
So her feet are on the ground through the driver's window, and her head is this kind of poking out of the passenger window.
So she's standing in the car, but you know, kind of sideways.
And she has this milkshake that had blown up on her and like french fries from McDonald all stuck.
That's my nightmare when I'm like, you know, binging some kind of like Taco Bell.
I'm like, man, if I get in a car wreck right now and die with this all over me, my wife, it's going to be terrible.
But it was this surreal thing because I'm trying to make sense of this.
And this kid, and you're not going to believe this is true, but I swear to you, this is the kid came out with so much force that he didn't get hurt at all.
He came right out with so much force.
He landed right in the center of the intersection.
He's just sitting there.
And of course, he's got bruises and scratches and stuff, but no serious injuries at all.
He came out so fast that he wasn't injured.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
So that little piece of judgment cost the city about $25,000.
That's insane.
That's never in cop shows.
Like they get in lots of car wrecks, but kids never fly out of windows.
That's wild.
I got lucky.
I would have been really lucky.
Well, that's nothing.
I hit a school bus into the Grand Canyon.
40 kids came flying out the window.
It's like Jimmy Pop.
That happened to me in Grand Theft Auto.
Yeah, we'll tell our Grand Theft Auto stories.
Where do we go from there, man?
Well, I'm kind of letting you take the lead here because this is like your dream.
You're hosting your own true crime podcast here, Ethan.
Yeah, we got to.
I would rather just do a case-by-case do a whole new podcast.
You already have your own podcast, right?
Well, I'm hoping to start one.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, so I really want to do one.
So we'll start right now.
Okay, great.
My debut episode.
Yeah, I really, I built one, a little studio at the house, and I really want to do a podcast.
And so I'm just trying to figure out, first of all, how to get a platform to do it on.
And then I came up with this subject matter.
I don't know if you guys recall, but back in 2013, there was a rogue LAPD officer that went on a shooting rampage all over South Southern California.
So I think that is the, I'm going to do a series on that because I hooked up with one of the primary investigators on it.
He has all the material.
That was a guy who shooting cops and then he went to the cabin.
Exactly.
Right.
I remember that.
I watched it all live.
I was like, remember when Dave Chappelle talked about that?
It was weird.
He almost sounded like he was sympathetic to the guy.
Yeah, that's the topic I've seen you talk a bit about.
I mean, there's that whole rivalry between the cops and I don't know if the black community is the right way to put it, but there's this.
I mean, even right now, my own daughter is 14.
She's never met a cop in her life.
She's caught up into this ACAB all-cop donkey.
It's such a straw man blanket thing to say.
It's obviously on his face a dumb thing to say, but it's almost so dumb you can't argue with it.
And I don't know what to, I don't know.
So what's your reaction to that?
Just that whole culture?
I mean, what do you, I don't even know what you do with that.
It's discouraging.
I don't think people actually realize what they're thinking and saying oftentimes, especially this younger generation.
They're very emotional.
And they don't really, I think, either haven't really had the life experiences to understand what a society would look like without having gatekeepers.
And the whole idea that you know all these cops are bad in general, like all cops donkey listen, everybody out there that I worked with and you know I spent, you know, 25 years on the job and um, you know, the last 10 years doing private investigations but still interacting with law enforcement all the time.
Everybody's out there trying to do the right thing.
Yeah, we have our bad seeds, just like any profession does.
You have people that didn't belong there and shouldn't be there, and you do your best to try to weed them out.
And then problem is is that when they screw up, it reflects on everybody, you know everybody.
It's guilt by association, right and uh, but the reality is that I would say 98 of the guys, a strong 98 of the people out there want to do good work, want to do it right and want to make sure that that the, the communities are safe and that they're well served.
That's, that's 98 and uh.
It may even go up as high as 99, but we're going to have our rotten apples and unfortunately, they screw up and we all have to suffer the consequences.
Yeah, I remember uh, I saw I can't remember who this was, but talking about, you know, if you were to just percentage wise, with the amount of people that live in the in America uh, to try to make it so that there never was another white cop shooting a black guy situation, just just on sheer percentage wise, you just have to turn it into a police state because there's so many people in their country, just for it to happen.
You know, a few times a year because of our media, it becomes this massive story.
But, like these situations, it's almost like there's no way to.
That's the hopeless feeling, like how do we ever get out of it?
Like, you know, because there's always going to be these situations, situations are going to come up like I don't know how you make it just never, ever happen again.
You can't.
They're going to come up, they're absolutely unavoidable.
You know, as long as there's lawlessness, there's going to be conflict in in our society.
If there's lawlessness, there's going to be law enforcement and those are going to collide.
Sometimes they collide rather peacefully or they can, you know, coexist peacefully, in the sense that you can go and apprehend somebody without having to tase them or, you know, struggle with them.
But there's going to be those people that just aren't willing to go along with the program and that's going to create conflict and it's going to, you know um, you know it's going to exacerbate into somebody getting shot at some point in time.
It's unavoidable, you know.
We just can't do anything about that as long as there's crime.
I mean, you would have been with LABD during the whole Rodney King thing.
Yes, how was that?
Yeah, so the riots were wild.
Yeah, you know so the riots were wild.
And but law enforcement's cyclical.
You know, we're heroes, one day villains.
The next heroes, one day villain.
You know, after 9-11, of course everybody was praising first responders and then of course the George Floyd thing happens, and now we're just a bunch of evil people out there taking advantage of, you know um, you know less fortunate people, and but it'll come back, we'll.
You know it'll just keep ebbing and flowing, because that's the way it's always been.
You know we had the riots back in the 60s, you know, in south central.
You know, think about what we thought of the military back when Kent, KENT State happened, you know, and so then we become heroes and then we become zeros, heroes and zeros.
So we're just up and down.
Yeah.
So what's your, I mean, if you don't mind me asking, I find it really interesting to ask an actual cop this question.
Like, what do you make of Chauvin, the Chauvin trial, and the whole situation with George Floyd?
Well, I knew right away what the problem was.
You know, excited delirium.
It's a medical condition.
And when you have all of those contributing factors that Floyd had, it's not completely unusual for his heart to stop, for him to suffer cardiac arrest or, you know, to, you know, to struggle so much with his breathing that that leads to cardiac arrest.
So, you know, we knew immediately, anybody in law enforcement that's dealt with a lot of uses of forces understood exactly what that was.
Probably under the influence, maybe having some other physiological issues, medical issues, which he ended up having.
And those all just contribute to this perfect storm of a situation where somebody is, their body just can't hold up.
You know, kneeling on somebody's back and even the upper back in between the shoulder blades, we've always done that.
Maybe it was a, you know, it was a long time.
So I'm not going to argue with the amount of time because it seems to me that was extensive.
But I think the overreaction, the public overreaction, because they always do this, it's a knee-jerk reaction before all the facts come in.
If we just hold off a little bit and allow the facts to determine what happened, we're not going to have as much conflict and animosity.
It happens all the time, you know, where we, socially, we just react to some clip on television or we react to some YouTube clip or TikTok, whatever it is.
And then it leads to all types of different issues.
And then we find out later, it's like, wait a minute, there was a lot more to this story that had you waited, you wouldn't have felt like you felt.
Well, it seems like people are building up a brick wall to that.
The immediate feeling, if you see a YouTube video, if you don't immediately judge, jury, executioner right there and put out your opinion online, you're already assumed to be, it feels like you're already assumed to be racist or biased just by not by not waiting for like all the facts to come out.
And it feels like even now, it felt like to me through that trial, it was just decided from the beginning by culture.
And it feels more and more like just by saying, what are the facts, that's become too controversial to say that.
It is.
If you make sense anymore, then you're a bigot or a race.
You can't even have to even engage in conversation these days is oftentimes untolerated.
It's just unbelievable.
Yeah, I mean, I want to believe the average person doesn't think that way, but it seems like the people with the loudest voices do think that way.
And I don't know what they're trying to gain by it.
We seem like we're on a really slippery slope, don't we?
Like we're just on a really slippery slope downward.
And, you know, I was having a conversation the other day with somebody, and I just, I almost feel like it's hopeless.
Yeah.
You know, save the coming of a perfect, you know, somebody to put things right.
Robocop.
Yeah.
Oh, I was thinking more in the term of a messiah.
I was trying to make a theological thing.
I was.
I was going there with that.
Theology and cop work.
How do you do you have a theology?
Do you have a philosophy behind justice or good and evil and stuff like that?
Well, I do, just in the sense that, you know, when you really have the conversation, if you're just working through the conversation, you're ultimately going to get to this point.
You know, is there an objective rulemaker?
You know, or is it just, you know, relative morality?
And if it's relative morality, we all just kind of become our own gods.
We decide what's good and bad and blah, blah, blah, and judge everybody by our own, you know, set of principles.
But if you want, you know, if you have, if you walk the conversation all the way to the point where there has to be a transcendent rulemaker, right?
There has to be somebody that puts the rules and then we need to recognize and be obedient to those rules.
Otherwise, we end up with just, like I said, moral relativism.
And that is just an absolute disaster when you walk it through.
I like this idea now.
It's giving me a satirical article idea of the morally relativistic cops.
Like, freeze, that is not preferable societal behavior at this point in history.
Because look, all of our laws ultimately lead back there.
They have to have some type of independent, transcendent rulemaker.
All laws are based on that.
I mean, you just traditionally just go back in time.
And you have to have that conviction that a human being has a certain level of value that isn't scientifically provable.
We just all agree to believe it.
And that is like a breakdown of like you see a culture that doesn't hold that and then just sees people as like fodder.
But I find that fascinating just on watching some crime shows like First 48 or whatever, where you see a guy who was like clearly living just a terrible life and was going to get shot at some point, was just like dealing drugs and shooting people.
And then he got shot.
And the lengths that the cops would go to to like bring his killers to justice.
You know, and he really was playing stupid games and got stupid prizes kind of thing.
But they don't judge it on a scale.
They don't.
Well, he was kind of an idiot.
They go, he's a human being.
He's got dignity and he deserves to be brought to justice.
And like, I find that, I'm very proud of that, being part of a culture that's like that.
But it seems like a lot of people see the opposite.
And that's why I see that and I go, I guess there are bad cops, but there's something really beautiful there.
You know, you're coming into that community and trying to solve that murder.
I think it's really honorable.
Yeah.
Good job.
Thanks.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, because we do.
We hold life, you know, every life has value.
And our actions need to be judged, obviously, and held accountable for the things we do.
But at the end of the day, there's still value to every single person.
So a victim of a gang member who gets shot committing gang crimes, we still look at it as a person with value.
Yeah.
Summer's here, and all you people that live in states that have winter, it's time for you to get out your t-shirts.
Look at this.
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These are amazing.
Yeah, I want this one.
I don't even have one of these.
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That's the blue one.
That's the blue origin.
It's got blue origin.
Nice.
And look on the back, it says Babylon B. That's so cool.
This one says support fake journalism, and it's got kind of a grungy feel for the Seattle people.
Yeah.
Designed by Ethan, our Gen X grunge.
Yeah, I like the Gen X grunge.
That grunge look.
Yeah.
And Andrew's holding one up, even though he's disavowing the Babylon B. Yep.
He's holding it up.
I'm taking this shirt.
Do something terrible to it.
Yes.
To burn it.
Certainly not wear it.
Yeah.
Buy shirts and then burn them if you hate it.
Oh, here's one that's unexpected.
It's just the Babylon B on a shirt.
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Boom.
In your email.
You get one of those cases where it's like stuck with you.
Like one of the ones that's like, oh, man.
Or is that a lot of them?
And you get all the files open on your desk.
If I could just solve this one.
I guess that was Big Hand Tupac, but you did that.
Well, that brings up a great point because you do have to separate yourself to stay, you know, psychologically healthy.
And if you just become so absorbed in what your job and your responsibility and your identity of as a cop, you can kind of really lose yourself.
And then, you know, it can lead to all kinds of problems.
So, you know, I think there's a lot to be said about being able to go to work, do a really good job, but at the same time, keep everything in perspective so that you're not losing your own identity outside of your professional identity.
Because there are cops, man, and they just, once they retire, they don't even know what to do with themselves because everything about them has been this thing and they don't know how to do anything else.
Defund the police.
Yes or no?
Try it.
See what happens.
It seems like they're trying it.
I was planning about these cycles and all these cities that have defunded the police.
They're like, refund things.
Refund it.
Very quick.
More police.
Every time I hear people talking about it from law enforcement, when we joke about obviously because it's so ridiculous, we're like, hey, man, go ahead.
Because we're all going to get huge raises once they realize what's, you know.
So you're a private investigator now.
Yeah.
So without cracking my voice, you're a private investigator now.
And we all have our image of that being like MacGyver or something.
But what's that?
What is private investigation like?
What do you mainly do?
I'm a general investigator.
There's a lot of private investigators that are niche.
They have a guy that just will do polygraphs or somebody that just does computer forensics and that type of thing.
So I'm general.
So I do just anything that comes in the door.
But it's a variety.
Sometimes we're dealing with law enforcement cases where a person is not completely satisfied with the outcome of their investigation and they want to have another set of eyes look at it.
Occasionally we deal with infidelity cases, child custody cases.
I did a really cool case on stolen artwork that took us all over like four countries trying to track down some artwork of a celebrity who had his prized possessions taken.
So it's a variety of things.
It's a lot of fun.
And there's no bureaucracy or supervision.
That's the liberating thing about it.
You're on the job.
You've got to get permission from supervisors and go through all these protocols.
And in private investigations, you're kind of just your own boss.
So when you walk up on a crime scene, they're like, this isn't your jurisdiction, Kating.
You walk up in your trench coat.
Catch you, Kating.
I don't play by your rules.
Go write another book, you fool.
Did you have to throw anybody under the bus in your book?
Just the people that needed to be thrown under the bus.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, and do you ever have any, do you ever say any cool puns when you come upon a dead body like you're smoking and you don't drive the button of the guy or just right before you punch a guy?
You find the guy in the refrigerator and he's frozen and you're like, looks like he's out cold.
Something like that.
That's funny.
You take me back to when I was in the academy.
Yes, he does have a story where they're training you quips.
They did the quip training course.
We had to go and do a tour of the coroner's office.
So we do a tour of the coroner's office.
We're in the academy.
I've never been exposed to a bunch of bodies laying around on gurneys.
And we're walking along, and I recognize there's the corpse of this.
This is horrible.
There's a corpse of an Asian female and she was unidentified.
And on her toe tag, it said long gone.
Long gone.
Oh, God.
That's horrible, right?
Is that like Jane Doe?
Exactly.
That's how they call them?
It was the version.
It was the Asian version of Jane Doe.
Wow.
Long gone.
We came up with that.
We at the Babylon Bee condemn this hatred and bigotry.
This illustrates kind of the morbid humorous.
And long gallows' humor of law enforcement.
So obviously somebody at the medical examiner's office is making light of it, knowing that us recruits are going to walk through there and see that.
That's dark.
Do you have to go to autopsies?
Did you have to go to autopsies as a detective?
Yeah.
Gross.
Like super gross.
Because I couldn't imagine.
When you were a rookie or the guy that barked in the trash?
Typically, you're only attending an autopsy if you're a homicide investigator.
So you're there to kind of learn what you can from the examination of the corpse or the decedent.
And it was the worst.
I hated attending autopsies.
There's a stench that you can't get out of your clothes.
It's like cigars.
Oh, it's, it's so much worse.
I'd have rather been just smoking a cigar during the autopsies just to get to drown out the, it's probably frowned upon.
They probably used to be able to do that.
Not anymore.
Yeah, it's just putrid.
So I didn't like autopsies.
But one of the things that I thought was so fascinating is how colorful the body is.
You know, how yellow fat is and how there's these really, you know, interesting bold colors.
You know, it's not just all like, you know, brandy looking.
It's kind of beautiful.
It's like a big tie-dye.
We're like, we're all wearing tie-dye shirts inside.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, should we go to our subscriber portal?
We're going to go to the deep, dark, dirty stories that can't be told on the can't.
I can't say public because this is the ungoogleable portion of the show.
He can't get canceled.
It's only with our paid subscribers.
So we'll go there, get the super dark, grizzled stories, and we'll go deep.
And we'll ask Greg what his favorite tools are.
We'll talk about Greg is.
So Greg will interrogate Kyle.
Oh, perfect.
Great.
Just reenact an interrogation.
We got lights.
We got some pipes.
You need him with a pipe?
I don't know what you use.
Like hit me with a pipe?
Like a lead pipe?
Or threaten him with it?
I don't know.
What do you do?
Well, you need the kind of single bulb.
Do you smoke a cigar or a cigarette while you interrogate?
I wouldn't, but I would have a pack there in order to offer over to somebody so they'd be nice and relaxed.
So you can use tequila.
You can use just a technology.
You don't like hold the cigarette up to their eye and be like.
It depends on how cooperative he is.
More on that in the subscriber portion.
All right, let's go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I remember one time.
No, it's a long story.
Discretion.
No, long story.
Please, please.
Wildest thing I've ever saw.
And I just like very liberally application of pepper spray.
And of course, he just turns and keeps running.
So I open the gate and run right into my own bank of pepper spray.
Yeah.
No one's going to believe this, but I'm telling you exactly how this happened.
Group of kids that were dealing with burglaries, right?
And Orlando Bloom's house was one of the ones that they kept.
Oh, really?
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