Episode 9 – Chief John Perez: Securing the Rose Parade/Bowl & Authentic Leadership

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Chief John Perez. John recently retired as the chief of police for the Pasadena Police Department in California. In his nearly 37 years of service to Pasadena, John served at literally all ranks in the department. During his career, John worked patrol, narcotics, counterterrorism, as a SWAT sergeant, lieutenant, and commander.

John helped form the first generation of Pasadena's tactical team, which had the challenge of deploying as a full time gang enforcement team and as a SWAT team for many years. John was twice awarded the chief's medal of excellence and received several commendations for his service over the years.

John, thank you for joining me on The Debrief!

Chief John Perez: I appreciate being here, Jon. Hopefully I have something to contribute on leadership.

Jon Becker: I'm sure you do. Tell me, let's start with kind of your history and background. Where'd you grow up? What was the decision that led to you becoming a police officer?

Chief John Perez: Absolutely. I've been a LA kid my whole life. I was born in East La, and Belvedere Heights now refers to as East LA, a large family. First generation Americans had brothers that were born in Mexico and parents born as well. And so they migrated here. And from East LA, we generally made the migration east of over to LA Puente. And then from LA Puente after about 1213 years old, 14, we went over to hues Covina, which was a dynamic change in lifestyles. And where we were moving with a father who really worked hard all week long and a mother who raised us and worked part time. And we were also raised by a woman from Mississippi who was my mom's best friend.

So I have the best of both cultures and culturally as a Latino. And then moving into a mostly white area of town, going to South Hills High School in West Covina really produced a view of the world and life, and with one incident that occurred, really pushed me into policing and prepared me better than I thought.

Jon Becker: Will you talk about that for me?

Chief John Perez: At 14 years old, I had a. I was probably 12, 13. My cousin was 14. He was stabbed in an incident outside of a liquor store where he was just buying candy and he wasn't, in fact, a gang member and a good kid, a good natured kid in a great family. And he was stabbed and later died in the hospital. And that was just. And we grew up in this gang area where, you know, we really couldn't use the parks if the police or the gang members were in the parks.

So you learn to have a way of life where it really gets in the way, you know, as a kid, to really go out there and grow and be in a safer place. When I became of age to move around about 14 years old, and finding a group of friends in West Covina, it changed dramatically. I was able to move around, enjoy life, but I never forgot, you know, the experiences we had as a family going through the death and the reminder that there are bad people out there. And since that point, at about 12, 13 years old, all I wanted to do was be a police officer and serve. Nothing else. Not the military, not the firefighting. Just serving as a police officer was my goal.

Jon Becker: And was passed in the first agency you went to work for?

Chief John Perez: It was the very first agency I applied for, and the last and the last it was. I applied for the sheriff's department and passing at the same time as a police cadet. I was able to take the entry police officer test in those days in the 1984, just in the beginning of 85, took the test. So when I became a police officer, I didn't have to take a test again.

It was more of just updating my background and sending me to the academy at 20 and a half, being not only the youngest person in the academy, but the youngest person, the youngest police officer in the department for a while until somebody else was hired at 21. The average age back then was 24, 25. Now it's closer to 30. So you can imagine at 20 and a half, you really got to make sure you're mature and trying to move into an area of making good decisions.

Jon Becker: I have a 20 and a half year old son. I don't think I'd arm him.

Chief John Perez: My parents probably said the same thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's a fair point. So talk to me then, through the early parts of your career, I know you worked a variety of assignments. Kind of walk me through the big periods of your early career.

Chief John Perez: Well, you know, it was dynamic. In the eighties, it was about the violence, right? We saw the crack cocaine and gang epidemic kind of crash into each other. And being a young officer out in the field, I think it was only about four weeks into it, there was a shooting where we responded to a street there in Pasadena, with a lot of gang activity. As I make the turn with my training officer onto the street, you could see the smoke coming from casings. I'm 21 years old, thinking, you know, they're paying me $12 an hour for this.

So I get into the street, I get out of a car, and the person shot as we're talking to him was somebody I had stopped prior and knew him a little bit. And we're kind of connected about the same age, you know. And then to see him taking his last words as he dies, as he's talking to me, and, you know, you're going through these emotions, but you also have your field training officer, you know, yelling at you to get a statement from him who did it, you know?

So it's a really odd place to be from an emotional standpoint as a young man and having care for people that you're right in the midst of this event where somebody's dying on you that you remembered a week earlier that you had a pretty good conversation with, and you knew he was a gang member, or I knew he was a gang member. But nevertheless, life went. It was gone right there in front of me.

Jon Becker: And that was how far into the job?

Chief John Perez: That was about three, four weeks. Two to three weeks. Less than a month, for sure. And my training officer walked me through all that much. Shortly after that, we had somebody jump off our Colorado bridge. And as soon as the body almost hit, my training officer was yelling at me to look the other way, because that thumping of a body hitting the ground, these are things you experience, along with a high level of calls for service and the murder rate that we were experiencing in California, especially in Pasadena, one neighborhood was way too much.

Give you an example. Back then, we had 13,000 part one crimes, major crimes, and most of it was in one neighborhood. Today, Pasadena probably has about 3600, and it was the lowest period we've ever had during the nineties.

Jon Becker: So it's 80% reduction.

Chief John Perez: Without a doubt, in violent crime even more. And so, during the nineties was by far the best decade of policing. After the LA riots. Haven't experienced that. It was a very unusual period of the smelling sensation of buildings and the amount of people we arrested out of Pasadena. Rodney King was from Pasadena in Altadena area.

So you knew him from pet stops, and you're familiar with him. But it was a terrible period of time to go through that purpose, that time, and then move into the nineties with the best research we've ever seen in policing. Federal grants, problem oriented policing, community oriented policing. We really were becoming skilled at what we were doing during the nineties.

But then came the advent of other things. Bike patrols, SWAT teams for many other agencies. Many of these departments started to hire more officers. The crime bill was written in 94. In 96, 97, we had 100,000 more officers added across the country.

So all these things were occurring, and we're all moving to a place where we didn't know. We were finding so many opportunities for equipment, tactical training, police vehicles. It really was setting us up for failure into the future without knowing that, because at some point it was not managed as well as it could have been.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you had this period of time where it kind of started with the 84 Olympics, and the development of SWAT starts in 71. At LA, full time SWAT 84, everybody's prepping for the Olympics. We have this massive expansion in tactical teams all over the country. And then Rodney King, 911, Columbine. There's this series of events, the North Hollywood shootout, where the patrol side almost followed at that point, the tactical side, and began to professionalize and increase equipment and all that. When did your team start?

Chief John Perez: Our team started in 1997, and I arrived to the team late in 97, as a team was just taking off. And one of the concerns chief Malikian had the time as his team was developing, was to create it into a neighborhood policing team equally as much as a tactical team. Now, if you look today at our specialized units, SWAT teams and neighborhood policing teams, and even gang units all function differently. A mindset is different.
SWAT teams are trying to slow it down, control it, the tempo of the event. Neighborhood oriented policing has to do with creating relationships in neighborhoods, having people call us as often as possible to try to find long term solutions to neighborhood problems.

Then you have gang enforcement teams. Their effort is open up that car door often, make the arrest, look for something that might be a crime to stop the next violent incident from happening. And now you're taking all these three and putting them into a blender and just sit and go. It could be a train wreck.

Jon Becker: It's going to go sideways. One of the three areas. It's going to go a little sideways.

Chief John Perez: At some point it will. And we were creating. That group of officers were all hand picked, and we were careful as to who we brought into the unit under Lieutenant Darryl Qualls and our commander, which was Wayne Hills, who ended up becoming the deputy chief. The minds that they had were excellent for what we were trying to create.

We were looking for the right police officers to come into that unit, reviewing police reports, see who everybody wanted did they have the mindset to follow good directives, to be part of the community, to want to engage the community? At times, we didn't get it right, and we had personnel issues and problems. And during that time, we also had Rampart.

And so I read the entire Rampart report. I was talking to some of the personnel from Rampart that transferred out to learn the lessons, the top ten lessons, of how to run these type of units. So we ensured the most basic of approaches on leadership were there. But much of it was management. It was about making sure we read the reports, the arrest information. We went out to see what kind of arrests were being made. We looked at the quality of the arrest. We had conversations, debriefs, and discussions on everything.

So, really, it was an unusual period of time to create such a big team, but realizing there was a dynamic out there that reminded you on cautionary tales, what could go wrong.

Jon Becker: So at that point, it was neighborhood crime task force.

Chief John Perez: It was a neighborhood crime task force from 19. They were developed in August 28th, 1985. I remember that memorandum that was written, and we just went to this fantastic technology, which was called collating copies, where you could make more than one copy on a machine. And so I remember making one extra copy of that memo for myself, and I still have it today. It is something that I glean on.

And there was a lot of good information from that report, and it basically stated that the amount of violent crime and what was referred to as Northwest Pasadena was just outrageous, and something had to be done. And they broke it down by area codes and some of the violent crime and the races and the cultures, and then decided that we needed a 24 person team to go out there every day and make arrests. And they did top end. They made thousands of arrests.

And we look now, 30 years later, and the criticisms that we get, as well as the damage of that, well, okay, we probably put a lot of people who deserve to go to jail, but we also took a lot of people and put them into jail that maybe could have had diversion or just needed something more than a ten year or five year prison sentence for your fourth arrest for rock cocaine. Right?

So there was a better way to have done it back then, and we just went all hard and all heavy with the. With the war on drugs, and we're not talking about those that needed to go to prison and should never come out. The wide majority should have the opportunity to relive their lives.

And I think we destroyed a lot of lives. Not Pasadena, but the general reform across the country and very careful about that. For somebody to have a federal charge of, you know, one rock cocaine and to go to jail for ten years from that, and you see 18 year old kid tearing up like, I got no life no more.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because retrospectively, I think history has not been overwhelmingly kind to the war on drugs, and especially the federal sentencing guidelines. I remember the article that I wrote to get on to law review in law school was about federal sentencing guidelines. And it was contrasting a guy who had an ounce of cocaine that was laminated into a suitcase and an ounce of cocaine in the suitcase. One guy goes to prison for 30 years, one guy goes to prison for 10. Cause the container counts. So I think that retrospectively, there was that moment where it was like, okay, that might not have worked.

Chief John Perez: Yeah, we have enough science now and data to make better decisions. And that's what I'm hoping here in post retirement, to be able to run around and help that education. Not from a place of thinking we know it all, but provide the cautionary tales and the study of what we need from a police officer today and the prototypes we're looking for.

Jon Becker: When did NCTF move into being a SWAT team? Like, when did that – When did you stop the neighborhood crime?

Chief John Perez: Tasmania, 1985, about 92, 93, became a special enforcement team. And then by 95, the idea started to come out about a team that was really more tactically inclined and SWAT trained. And so by 96, we went to the special enforcement team, SES.

Jon Becker: And at that point you were a sergeant?

Chief John Perez: I was a sergeant moving into the unit at that point. And brand new officers, all brand new, really. The age difference between me as a sergeant and the average officer was maybe two years or three years. Same with my lieutenant, that he was the youngest lieutenant wooden, Darrell Qualls, and he was probably, you know, 34, 33, 34. So we had this perfect team being set up. Culturally, what a leader that was, african american and Latinos, two latino sergeants, and then a team that was made up of everybody, Asians, blacks, whites. It was really a team you could be proud of. And it was by far a period of time.

We learned how to be better leaders with each other, with the community, and really manage all that work that was coming through at times. We were deployed 7, 14, 21 straight days. And not only were we the gang unit for the shootings, to try to stop more shootings, we were also the SWAT team. Then we became a fugitive team. And at the time we had a janitors for justice.

So we became the dignitary protection and the protest team. So we were doing it all. And it was rough on families, it was rough on people's personal lives, where their personal lives were, in fact, a professional life. You couldn't escape it. And so that's just the way it was. You worked out together. You spent the night in the locker room, sleeping on the floor together in the offices, standing by, waiting for hours for events to happen, if the president visited or some high dignitary came to town. So it really was an extraordinary period of time. When I look back and all the work these officers did.

Jon Becker: So, and at that point, the primary focus is criminal. With 911, that changes. Right? When did you promote, you promoted a lieutenant? Around that time, right?

Chief John Perez: Right before 911. A month or two before 911, I was a patrol watch commander. Very unusual period of time when 911 struck that morning and my wife was a dispatcher at the police department called me and woke me up. And it was just a very. I mean, the feelings we all had that day, you know, it was, this depression was sitting in. The world seemed smaller, like you couldn't breathe, and you're wondering what's going to happen next and all the potentials for another attack. And started to think out the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl games and things that we host.

And the next thing I know, they created a counterterrorism unit of two people, and I was the lieutenant of that section. So literally, they walked me to a closet, called me in and says, this room with all these boxes needs to be done. And you have, you know, it was September, obviously, so we're getting into late September by the time I get up there. We need you to move all this and get ready for new plans and security plans for New Year's. So hurry up.

Jon Becker: So clean out this closet in the next two months, secure the Rose parade and the rose ball from a terrorist act to tier one events.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: In two months.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Seems reasonable.

Chief John Perez: And at that time, we didn't really have a lot of federal support. We had some support, but it wasn't a system that we created as a result of it. And I was sent off to New York to work with their counterterrorism team and work on the Macy's day parade through the neighborhoods and the bureaus that they have.

So I learned a lot from that experience going up there. Greg afshuriandhennae, who was the corporal in the room, incredible. Always owe him so much for what he did during that period. We worked seven days a week, sometimes 20 hours a day. For all those months, there was no rest, rewriting policy protocols engaging people.

And we were responsible for the potential investigations that came up. And it wasn't about proving that you had yourself a possible terrorist event. You were disproving was the approach we took, because that was a much better and healthier way to try to prove something. You could rationalize as to why not proving something puts you right automatically on the opposite side here. You become your own critic on these things. And we had some very interesting calls of, you know, Middle Easterners, for example, you know, using plastic bags to block older windows out at night.

And they only come in after one in the morning to have a cigarette outside in an apartment complex. And they'd go back in, and we're a month off or less than that from New Year's. How do you handle that? You know, getting our bicycle team. We were all set up on surveillances, each one that came out for a cigarette to smoke. What did we do? We gleaped them. Good old police tactics. Each one that came out one by one.

Finally, the last one came out, like, where's everybody at? We gleaped him as well. We get in there, we hold the place, we call the FBI. They come out, and they do an investigation. They say, we got nothing. These are just Saudi Arabian kids, students with money from their parents who are going to school at PCC, and they just need some direction. And so I remember the FBI agent leaving as we all left after 4 hours of an investigation. They said, just don't embarrass us. And it's like, wow, we have a lot of learning to do in terms of culture.

And so we went out, and really we were taught by the mosques about the culture and building our relationships around those communities in Altadena and Pasadena was hugely important. So that incident kind of drove that, like, hey, we need some training here. You know, we can't just use our instincts in policing every time we think we're right, which is the hardest part about police work, right?

Figuring out whether a crime is actually occurring, not chasing the guy with the money bag, with the mask and the money sign on the bag. That's simple. It's thinking there might be a crime. That's the most difficult part of policing forever.

Jon Becker: That's an interesting way to put that. It's interesting how, like, you think about 911 and the effect it had on the country, but the effect it had on Pasadena was pretty profound, because I'm sure that prior. Well, talk to me about prior to 911, what was securing the Rose parade and the Rose bowl like, and maybe give us some. Some give us some perspective on the Rose parade and the Rose bowl.

Chief John Perez: Well, you're talking about the parade itself. That is a month's planning just for the actual operation, but it starts months in advance, if not at the beginning of the year, as each event goes on and UCLA season begins. Our planners, which are amazing people, they're assigned a lieutenant, a sergeant, a corporal, a couple of officers, and that's it.

Nothing more than that. And they would go out and plan every event, taking every type of precaution and trying to reduce the cost. We could make everything as safe as you would want at a high cost. The freedoms are going to be restricted and it'd be unaffordable. We'll end up being like today's soccer games in Europe, right? Fully fenced off and so many, it becomes a man's game. Families don't go and it's getting better these days, but.

So we were in the same predicament as after 911 to see how we're going to approach this. But before that, a lot of planning, a lot of effort. You depend on mutual aid, you depend on relationships. Cost was always a factor that was more of a dynamic as law enforcement began to increase the cost with salaries and retirements.

And these things made it more difficult. So before that, it was tough. But we had fantastic people from Roger Kelly, who planned the World cup, to people we had that were known across the country by their name and what they did with people like Alex Uribe and Bruce George and people that just knew how to do this work. And Randy Taylor was a well known name. But these are people that traveled the country to other stadiums.

Jon Becker: What was the primary fear for the Rose parade and Rose bowl? Pre 911?

Chief John Perez: It was managing the crowds. It was an event happening of violence on the parade. The parade's a million people. They thought it was probably closer today as h***. Tech did their numbers, maybe between seven and 800,000 people.

Jon Becker: Actually, on the physical parade route,.

Chief John Perez: It’s the biggest parade that we know of anywhere globally, but definitely in the country. At five and a quarter miles from the last float to where we park them is seven and a half miles. This is a lot of space and it's easy to maneuver as you pass. TV Corner, which is like a stadium. TV corner runs about four or five blocks around Colorado and fair oaks. It fits about 40, 50,000 people and is the most secure place in the country at that time. And in fact, we have so much security there, we start 48 hours in advance.

As the stands are going up, we are making sure that we have complete security with bomb dogs and searches and turnstiles and who's coming in. We've always had that to make sure we didn't have somebody taking over afloat or some kind of attack of any type that we made sure that happened. And so that was always a concern before 911, but it was also managing the crowds into old Pasadena with 80 drinking establishments in a small area of less than a mile square. That's a lot of restaurants and bars that have even been there.

Jon Becker: 700,000 people and a bunch of alcohol.

Chief John Perez: And now you move into the next morning, you're dropping into the Rolls bowl. At the time, they almost had 100,000 people fit prior to the bowl being redeveloped, from 100,000 down to about 85,000, not to mention people working the outside events. So you're always looking at about 100,000 people there.

Jon Becker: So when 911 happens, the switch flips, and it goes from we're concerned about demonstrators, we're concerned about street crime, to we're concerned about the Rose parade of the Rose bowl being used as a stage. How does that change at that point? You're running counterterrorism, right? So how did that change your preparation and your relationship with your partner agencies?

Chief John Perez: And so you have to look at the reason why. Right? Simon Sienk, what's the why behind it? The why is that we care about the fact that this is the number one tv event in the morning on New Year's across the globe, you know, with a lot of people, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people watching this event.

So it matters that the bang for the buck right there and then would make a difference about America if you wanted to attack it. And so the why was clear as day. And so the way we went about it, Wayne Hilts, again, he was the deputy chief and loved his leadership, and he says, get that phone and start calling agencies and start getting federal resources.

So you basically have a phone and you start making phone calls and work your way up the ladder to people. And, you know, these days, all those relationships paid off over the years. But I was finding frontline people like myself that would say, hey, we'll be there, we're coming. I said, well, we don't have any overtime. We don't have money to pay you.

And they would, in fact, say, don't worry about it. We're coming from all portions of this country and this globe. We'll be there. And so we had to make sure we had hotels, hotel rooms set up. We had all the resources.

Again, Greg F. Sherman was running most of the investigations at the same time. We're trying to coordinate flights and hotel stays and this and that. So there was a lot of work, not to mention looking at every part of the parade. We walked it, we were underneath the street with public works, looking at the waterways. We were looking at newspaper stands, trash cans moving. Everything you could think of was being redone.

And I remember. I recall Wayne hilts walking in saying, hey, I need a name. We're doing a press release. This new federal team that you're going to, that's going to work with us, what's going to be that name? And we're doing it in the next couple hours. You need to hurry up.

So I'm sitting in the room and Greg's busy. I'm sitting in there. I thought, well, threat assessment response team, we finally got to. I said, how's that sound? Sounds really good. I wasn't smart enough to think it out when I gave him that name, that from. From 2001, 2002, all the way forward, it's known by our street name, Tart.

Jon Becker: Tart.

Chief John Perez: So I wish I'd been more creative. The name itself made sense to me. The threat assessment response team brought every level of tactical response from bombs, dogs and tactical teams and chemical sniffers, planes and military set up all over the region. But the name Tart really didn't reflect the effort.

Jon Becker: It might not have been your best.

Chief John Perez: Branding moment, not at all. The long name was good, so over the years it stuck. The planning was redeveloped and changed, and as we went forward, it was adjusted when needed, and so it still continues on, and these federal partners really make it work for us.

Jon Becker: So you're a lieutenant now. We go post 911. What happens – you then become a commander, if I remember correctly?

Chief John Perez: Nope. I recall there was an opening in the special enforcement section now for a lieutenant, and I thought, they're going to send me over there. I know they are. And so I started packing my boxes. I remember Wayne hilts telling me, hey, you know what? Don't worry about it. We're going to keep you here. You're not going to move. But we've set up all our plans. Everything was already moving.

Once you get to that point, you'd love to work it, but it now has its own life and we as leaders have to realize that it's set up well. It no longer needs me. New leadership can take it to another direction. And sure enough, the chief made a decision to move me to the special enforcement section.

So I spent another three years going back to that unit with a new generation of officers and different dynamics. And we had seen our violent crime rate drop with all the work that was being done with the prior team. In fact, they dropped it to maybe, ooh, one or two gang homicides from the double digits. Incredible work. But then we saw that the leadership changed a bit by 2006, 2007. I became a commander in 2006, and as the leadership started to change, the officers were as great as they ever were. But some of the direction, some of the emphasis changed.

And again, you got those three dynamics. If you mess with one and it's not balanced the right way, you're going to get something different out of it. And sure enough, we saw gang violence skyrocket back up to double digits, and we had a couple double homicides in the street and thinking, oh, my gosh, we need to really do something about this.

So the team was again reformatted, rebranded. We created a fugitive apprehension team to really go after many of the gang members that had warrants that needed to be arrested. And that was a facet we used in the late nineties to go after people with just simple warrants to incarcerate you.

And so those broken window type of approaches does make a difference, and it does incarcerate the more violent, and you throw off the planning because their leaders are now incarcerated. People don't know who's running what from a gang level. So it was helpful to bring it back down again.

Jon Becker: And when you came back to the team as a lieutenant, now having been, you know, post 911, going to New York, going to Boston, seeing the experience, having the experiences you had, did the emphasis of the team change?

Chief John Perez: It did. In the perspective that my lenses, I had multiple lens to look through. And the things that I worried about grew, and I was worried about how much work the team was able to really focus on. The team had shrunk in terms of number of officers, it was hard to get to all the training.

The SWAT component, as important as it was, was a huge restraint on the neighborhood policing and the gang enforcement, because we got to a point with the blue ribbon report and some others that it was about having at least two days of training. And now with court time and special operations, we may lose the visible, preventable part of policing to be out there. Our cars were known. They had no lights on top, no police lights. They were slick top. And whenever anyone saw the slick tops, the street just got quiet.

So we used all kinds of shock and awe over the years on somebody was, you know, their wedding or their birthday or an event or we just needed to rest. We would have patrol guys drive those cars for the shock and awe of it. We'd have people call the station and want to know if John Perez was working or John Baker so we could make sure that the SES is not out there. And so they had everything they tried to do from a criminal standpoint to know if they could run freely or not. And so these were challenges that we had.

The SWAT component was the largest of trying to control how quick it was now growing with weaponry, bearcats, and the need for more training. More training, more training. We were getting away from neighborhood policing and the gang enforcement.

Jon Becker: So at some point you promoted to captain, or was it commander?

Chief John Perez: It's commander straight from the special enforcement section, which is at the time was unheard of for usually they want you to go through administration, have some other type of staff level jobs. And the chief, Chief Malikian, again, had confidence in me to take me straight from that type of unit, from a strip mall all the way north of the city in some little building, and bring you all the way downtown to the upper levels of the department and command staff.

It was a daunting feeling of this overwhelming thing, like, oh, my gosh, the first day I opened up that key to that office, it was like, man, I am not ready for this. I don't think you're ever ready for an assignment. But it was like, holy smokes.

Jon Becker: So how did you cope with that feeling?

Chief John Perez: I was fortunate. I learned it was a learning growth and I ensured for people that I was learning. I had a reputation of running hard. The world to me was SES. So in that unit, tactically planning things, you always made room for discussion before a big decision. And the team kind of understood one another and where we were going, we all knew the why to it, and we all bought in.

As a commander, the world changed. Suddenly I had 100 and something people of civilians, professional staff working. And so I had this reputation from coming from there. I had to adjust myself that I get used to who I was. And many of the administrators that we had that were level equal to a lieutenant were far more skilled than most of our lieutenants when it came to technical work within the department. The systems that we had, from computers to excels to whatever we were doing, they were far advanced compared to the average lieutenant.

And so I learned a lot during my two years as a commander of the civilian division of dispatch records, much of our technology that was going on, our jail systems. And it really was important to learn that avenue of work for me and was a great foundation, much as was a police cadet in my first two years, where all the administrative work of working the computer systems was the foundation for me all the way through my career.

So it really was an amazing period of time for people who are in law enforcement. Pay attention to those type of assignments that you think are not what I call the meat eating assignments. That's the vegetables on the plate, and it's good for your health. Right? And we have to learn to go after the vegetables on the plate. I would never replace those years as a police cadet and knowing how the systems worked.

By the time I was a trainee with an FTO, I was teaching people how to pull information out of the computer they never thought was possible. And working with the administrators, they taught me so much, was another growth to understand that dynamic and to understand the mindset of a professional staff, civilian workforce compared to the, again, meat eating workforce of police officers. So it was the best growth I ever had as an executive was that period of time.

Jon Becker: So you were admin commander for two years?

Chief John Perez: For almost two years I was in that assignment before moving on to the field operations division, which was in fact, our patrol division. And that was a frontline position where you are really, really trying to manage lieutenants and senior lieutenants at that – With a way of doing business.

So the directives that come in from a police chief, whether they're that police chief's directives or they come from the city manager or they're given by a counsel in terms of guidance, many times it's the commander that's got to go down and sell those directives. And you can't say, the chief told me, you really got to help people understand this is, we're trying to go with this directive and trying to expand people's vision.

So I don't think my skill sets then were developed enough as an executive to walk in and help people understand some of the changes we were trying to make to gain the trust of the public for the type of police work we had to do. And it's quite the challenge.

So I spent three years in the patrol division, really trying to manage many of the obstacles. Every ten years or so, we were losing a large part of our workforce due to the amount of overtime that we have forced overtime. It was a problem that we were dealing with all the way up until I made interim chief, and it was a way, we found a way out of that, but it was a constant problem with officers leaving us and having to rebuild the system again.

Jon Becker: So it's interesting you know, you see guys that are promoting the chiefs of police. A lot of times they'll come in one of two ways. They come in through an admin route where they have a lot of admin experience, or they come in through, you know, what you described as the meat eating route, which I think, knowing you as long as I've known you, I think is a very accurate description of, you know, Sergeant John Perez.

How did you synthesize, though? Because it's knowing you as long as I've known you, you always had a reputation of being like a hard charging, go getter, meat eating cop, and all of a sudden you're thrust into a very political environment. Right? I guess it's probably when you become the patrol commander that you were introduced to the politics of the city, right?

Chief John Perez: Oh, absolutely. You're at the whim of who the police chief and the senior people of the organization are, and people jockeying for positions, people looking to show they got control over something. You have to live in that environment. And for the goodness of it all, keep focus on neighborhood policing and doing this job for the people that need it. Not everybody on the block gets to vacation in Hawaii or the cabo. For them, the best it gets. Their kids get to play out front, man. That's the best it gets. And our police officers sometimes forget that everywhere across this country, we forget that basic tenant. We're here to make your life better. If maybe the deputies in my town would have done that more, I could have used the park without them being in there as gang members.

So everything I did later on was a lot to do with how I grew up in the first half of my life, to say, that's how we should police. I was policing from a 13 year old eyes of John Perez thinking, this is all I want from you. You know, it's like a young John Perez talking to the older John Perez. Don't forget about that. Nobody's going to like it. People are going to push back at you. People are going to think you're weird about that and maybe not going to like you over that.

But I had to stay true to my approach to policing, that it was about prevention, making, developing relationships and really trying to make it safer for people by prevention first being visible and then by intervention, and then if we have to enforce, well, who knows where that's going to go, right? It usually goes very well, but when it doesn't, we see the video of that. So that's why prevention and intervention are hugely important today more than ever before.

Jon Becker: It's interesting, because it's, as you come into higher and higher leadership positions, the politics of the world begin to get you. And as a chief of police, there's a lot of political pressure for you to act a certain way or to try and appease certain groups.

And, you know, I have a lot of friends now that I'm an old man, and we're all old men, a lot of friends that have come into those jobs, and you see it change them. I didn't see that with you. I never saw you kind of undergo that transformation. You were still a meat eater, but somehow you learned to speak fluent vegan.

Chief John Perez: Well, you know, I'll tell you, that's great. To put it, furthering my education as a lieutenant, getting my master's degree, I went for my bachelor's as a sergeant. As a lieutenant, my master's. I started working on my PhD as a lieutenant, I mean, as a commander. And I think that learning how to do peer review reading was a game changer. And picking up great books over the years from the early nineties all the way through to where we're at today with the leaders and what they're using from previous history really changed the format on using science into policing, really using science. Like, okay, how can I take that and use it?

There were some ideas I held for ten years. I'd write a memo to myself and hold it on a flash drive or the computer drive, wherever it was at, and bring it back up or print it out and put it into a book. And I have a ton of memos from the 1990s I wrote myself. It's like almost I was talking to myself into the future. And so I used much of that from. We reorged the entire department. I used much of that documentation and reading the peer reviewed stuff that was out there on the science. And it really was the nerd part of us coming out and willing to try new things and being progressive. A really difficult place to take a piece of equipment.

I mean, we visited your place on occasion. Always remember the janitors for justice and saying, hey, man, we need stuff. We don't have money to buy any of the munitions we may need. You said, take what you need, but you use anything. You have to pay me for what you use.

Jon Becker: You recommend stuff, you gotta buy it.

Chief John Perez: You basically said that we're talking the 1990s, and that's before the period where I knew you selling your leather from the trunk of your car for handcuffs. So we all made this progression over the three, four decades now where we're at today.

So I think that was. And spending time with smart people around me and people I respected. You're a big part of my own growth because you are well accepted by law enforcement and you're not in law enforcement. I think most people, the younger generation would probably think you were at one time. That's a frequent question.

You are well respected and accepted because of your mindset, what you provide and, you know, you put away the ego. You put all that stuff away and you deal with us. But you're a big reader. You use science and you use everyday rational thinking. And I believe that's what connects you to many of the leaders in law enforcement today. That's why you're so well accepted.

Jon Becker: It's one of the things that I think, and I think we share this. The more people I command, the bigger the business is, the more responsibilities I find, the more terrified I am of being wrong.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: And I see that same thing with you where it's kind of driven. You know, it's like they say that, you know, talk about Kobe Bryant. You know, he liked to win, but he really hated to lose. And successful people, it strikes me, are people that they want to win. Like, I like to win. When I win, I'm over winning so fast because I'm worried about the next fight and how I might lose that.

Chief John Perez: There's not a lot of learning lessons from winning.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's true.

Chief John Perez: When you lose, unfortunately, that sets up your winning for later. And I had a lot of learning to do. And losing, you lose credibility. It's how you lose credibility in an organization. As a leader, you are going to lose it. You have to gain it back. You deliver directives. You're taking a chance. Many of the leaders of today, you have to be actuarial. You're reading tea leaves and you have to have the confidence in yourself to say, I think, first of all, we're heading this way. And this is why you may be wrong.

At the end of the day and for a while, you lose credibility from that. You could be an NFL coach and third and one, and you decide to do a set of plays for a while that aren't working. The growth in, that's amazing. But in the meantime, you are well hated. I'm a big Ted Lasso fan for the leadership lessons that are in there. Right?

And so these things are huge. When we look at where we lose in life and the credibility we lose on any given day, the next day you get to wake up and get it back. It takes a little bit longer, but there are times I tried to do things or my ideas were way off, and I had to deal with it. And you have to fall forward, right?

You have to, as I say by Maxwell, you got to fail forward. You have to be able to get yourself back up, stand back up, and keep going forward. You can't just give up and say, man, I'm no good at this. And that's part of the learning lessons for the greater growth of it all.

Jon Becker: The thing is, I think that ultimately, what is at the root of a lot of that and a lot of what I hear you say is kind of two things. The first is authenticity, right? It's being who you are and manifesting your principles.

Chief John Perez: When do you find out who you are? You know, I mean, you always are who you are. And you're confident. First argument in the morning is yourself in the mirror, right? And you move on with your day. But who you are and you believe in yourself. When you start to find out who you might be as a leader, it really does start to change. True north, authentic leadership. It was a book written 30 years ago that is still one of the lead top books about true north, about being yourself.

And in the beginning, when you're developing yourself, it is a bumpy road. It is a bumpy road to trip and fall as you find out who you are to get to a place. And you adjust along the way, because you might fall into a circle that maybe they like to, you know, criticize every directive from command staff. And you're in that circle for a while, and you're like, man, you know what? This is not my circle. That's not me.

So you learn to circle yourself in with over a lifetime of people that are good for you. And in an organization, you may lose touch with them once in a while because you're in different parts of the department. So much of the people I made command staff are with me when they were young officers. And you might call them yes men or yes people, but they're yes people to the point they support you, but they're the first people to get in your face and tell you when you're wrong, you know, really important.

Jon Becker: I've said for a long time, like, you know, somebody on your staff who agrees with you serves almost no value, right? I won an argument, and I go hunt an argument.

Chief John Perez: But you know what? You don't want people just say, don't like something either. I've seen those people on command staff. That's a bad idea. We shouldn't do that. You're ready to fall forward.

Jon Becker: Right.

Chief John Perez: Like, you give me something. I'd rather go with the yes person because they're on board to work that directive.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a good point.

Chief John Perez: And we're like, well, we don't know where this is going to go, but I'm with you. I'm, oh, hey, I'm not sure there's a good idea. I'm with you. Let's go. And we're good. We're good with that perspective. As opposed to saying, I don't like where you're going, I gotta go. You know that doesn't work.

Jon Becker: No, no, it's, it's, it's, I want you to argue with me. I want it to be creative. In the end, we're on the same team so we can debate the play. And I want to hear your thoughts on the play. And I want us to argue what the best play is at the point that we go to the huddle, the play's call.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: We're all on the same team.

Chief John Perez: My staff, we got to move. My staff knew that our discussions are more important than a decision. Discussions are more important than the decision. Now there's times you can't have that discussion, but you got to make time for it.

Big part of our early planning with the city hall occupation was a preplanning. And having these discussions. I always recall a quick story as a chief with Lieutenant Bill Grossoffe, our chief of staff. I wrote an email. I was going to fire it off the council and the city manager. And Bill happened to walk in. I said, alt, take a look at this thing. Ten what you think of it? I'm relaxing, stretching from writing it. I'm smiling. I feel good, right? I just wrote something good.

Jon Becker: Feeling pretty good about it.

Chief John Perez: He's at my desk reading the computer, and he says, h*** no. F, no. He says, you can't send this. He goes, I'm erasing it. And he deleted it. He, right there. He deleted everything I had worked on. Now, granted, you get it back from the deleted, but he went through the effort of deleting it. And those are the people you want around your.

Jon Becker: So what you're saying is Chief John Perez. Was Chief John Perez because of a deleted email?

Chief John Perez: Yeah, absolutely. Or you look to a great commander like Art Shute, who's NFL coach of command staffs, and art has this ability to, to argue with you. But in the beginning when he was a new commander, he didn't have that. I actually kicked him out of the command staff office twice, but yet by far, he was the strongest leader that we have today in policing along the San Gabriel Valley, on his event planning experience, his leadership, his willingness to tell you did wrong, we give you a hug. But in the beginning, he had to figure that out as I did.

So I tried to give him the leadership. I wish I would have had more when I was coming up to the organization.

Jon Becker: So you mentioned the Occupy Pasadena movement. I think it's an interesting topic in authenticity and in placing yourself in peril. Will you kind of walk us through that?

Chief John Perez: Well, the pandemic really put us off. Right? It changed everything we were doing. And that's part of this evolution, that we had staff meetings every single day. Our lunch was in the office in our, what we call our department operations center up on the top floor of the police department. And it was important for us to review every division we had, every protocol.

We must have adjusted at the end of the day, over 100 protocols in the organization based on the pandemic, from how we were doing investigations, how we were going to deploy people. If there was, you know, people being infected and were positive with COVID how do we respond to that? How do we put you off from work? How do we notify everybody in the department without notifying them?

Well, I did some things our human resources division or our legal department didn't like for the city. If somebody was positive for the COVID we put your name out and said, John Becker has his home waiting, testing. Now HR and the legal department is like, what are you doing? That's a HIPAA violation. We are in a world global pandemic. And you're worried about that? Thats what we were worried about how tactical, some organizational policy in a matter of war when you're being shot at, right? No, no, no. It doesn't work that way. But what we were able to do is we had very few work related contacts. Much of it was coming from outside of work.

So we were able to control it. And people understood what was happening and say, well, I think I need to get tested as well. And so more people would get tested and we'd have more negatives coming back, or you were put off early. So that type of approach up and staff worked. Then you go through what was happening with social justice, the cabin fever, right?

People were coming out of their homes, vehicle pursuits, driving fast, shooting their weapons. People were stuck with the pandemic in what I call that moment in the shining where his head comes through the door, here's Johnny the Nicholson incident. And so people lost it, and people were doing dumb things. And this was creating this environment and then you had the incidents that happened in Atlanta. You had these shootings that were going on that were driving the George Floyd incident.

From May into June, more shootings were happening, and everyone now was under the spotlight. And so we're thinking, man, we got to get ready for something like this and having the discussions. And then came August, August 15th. We had our own officer involved shooting with a young man from our community who had a gun. The rumor after the shooting was he had none. And it was very difficult. We had the gun recovered with DNA on it, and people said, well, how do you know that that was implanted by you guys?

We think you guys went to the hospital and did all that stuff. And as well, the rumors were flying. Even the council members said, you know, how do we know that gun wasn't there beforehand with his DNA on it? Isn't that possible?

Jon Becker: Could have just been laying there, parked on that street, happened to run by it.

Chief John Perez: I get the emotions. I get where everybody was at. I know the difficulty of all this. It was tough, but it led to a place after that shooting where people were upset. And I actually received emails threatening to kill me, kill my family, kidnap my kids. And the officers were going. The officer involved was going through a lot. We had a right to protect him. And so it was a very difficult period of time. I did meet with the family. I discussed it with the family, the incident. They hired an attorney, a civil rights attorney, and another one that represented George Floyd.

And so these were very difficult times. And so within a week of that incident, and this is where it matters, to work intel early and put yourself in a position to grab that information. I learned that from the science of reading. Whether the old books of the seven habits and a courageous follower and good to great, all these great books were the start of our leadership reading.

Then you forward it today to YouTube and where we're at and the great writings going on with Simon Sinek. And you got Jocko Willek, the retired Navy SEAL that was a lieutenant commander. And what I like about his video and his books and his writing is that he's a study of leadership. He'll read for hours and hours to come out with 30 seconds of stuff, and we could respect that.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, totally.

Chief John Perez: And he applies his experience to it, and I really appreciate his approach to that. And it's the fact that he wasn't the most decorated warrior out there. He led the most decorated unit in the military. Now, that's leadership. That's where you have something to say. I am listening and I am going to go back and study what you are saying.

So we are in a place where we really use that for our future thinking. We had a place in a time in the morning where we had a BLM activist who had a restraining order to stay out of the city of LA, and she had occupied their city hall. And as Michael Moore told me, it was hundreds of $1,000 in damage in overtime and blah, blah, blah. It's problematic for all of us in our community. She shows up at our city hall now. She's from Pasadena, she lives in our town.

And we dealt with her in every shooting. She was out there on Facebook Live saying, hey, you know what? We're going to occupy city hall. And I'm in my workout gear and, which is probably word and stuff from 8th grade or something. I don't know how I look, but I'm getting ready to go down the weight room and my staff is in their office. About 07:30 in the morning. Hey, chief, she's going to occupy. She's not going to occupy. We're not going to become Portland.

We're not going to become all those places. City hall has way too many important services in a much lower level. It's much like occupying the capital of a state or a country. You stop all services. It's the wrong form and the wrong view for us to make the real change we need. No way. I can't allow that to happen.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The symbolic nature of occupying the city hall is.

Chief John Perez: I went across the street. I left the station, went across the street and talked to her right there on Facebook. And she gave us everything we needed to be able to understand what was going to happen. And from that point, as I left, there were people that were driving by that saw the live Facebook, that drove to city hall and engaged me out there in a positive conversation.

So it was pretty good that we were able to talk to one another for people in our community. Based on that interaction that led our day, though, and planning our intelligence, we acted early. We had tabletops. We set everybody up, making sure we were ready in advance by 10:00 in the morning, who was going to be held over at night, who was going to be ordered overtime.

Tactical teams, all this department operations center up above all the team leaders and the debriefing and deconfliction that went on really saved us that early planning of having unique things in place and being able to gap up and allowing frontline supervisors to question our approach, say, wait a second, we're not sure that's a good idea.

Okay. Why? Back to the why. And they have that discussion. It wasn't just that you had people that were in disagreement with the idea. They also provided their experience. And that's the difference right there, is that you're not just saying, I don't like something, but you're saying, I don't like something, but let me offer you a different route, or why I don't or. We adjusted this and we were able to work all those kinks out during the day, nonstop, that we secured some of our areas early so they couldn't occupy those areas and we used mutual aid.

The equipment we needed, we brought in tow trucks was very, very unique and something we trained to after that day, to other local police chiefs and police departments, to be well prepared, well situated and placed, but unseen by the public. Hugely important to allow the public to demonstrate in protest. That's their constitutional right. We should support that. Offer them the traffic units they need for traffic control and the safety. But you don't need to see 500 tactically dressed officers 20ft from you when you're protesting. It really jacks up everybody's emotions.

So if you would have opened any closet door, 20 officers would have fallen out, you know. But we were well prepared with equipment, a lot of debriefs and brief backs. The brief backs were hugely important. The rehearsals of what we were doing, it was. This was all led after the ideas were formatted with the command staff. Commander Art Shute and Lieutenant Johnny Mercado were enormously important to this whole growth.

Now they go back years, decades before, to ses. The learning curve we had back then about neighborhood policing and gang enforcement and SWAT team and balancing all that. So their mindsets understood those different directives and wasn't just tactically planned. We opened up our eyes and ears to the leadership.

Look, people don't often say they are overlaid and under-mannered. Right? It's the other way around. That's what people say, that we're over managed or we're undermanaged. Over-management and we're under led is usually the issue that we're in. We tried to make sure it was the other way around. Everything we do, we manage. We absolutely manage most of our lives, everything about it. But there are opportunities for us to identify a point, to be a leader. You can't be a leader 24 hours a day. It's impossible.

But you look for the opportunities to make change, to lead in the right direction or change culture. That's really the learning lesson that came out of that, was to look and ensure that you are taking the opportunity to lead. When it presents itself, when it presents itself right there, you have to have the ability to say, that's the moment I need to do something right here. And that's the importance of it all.

Jon Becker: So in that occupied Pasadena, you had, obviously, the tension of a city council that's divided and has different views. A community that's divided has different views. Pasadena, although a small city, does have a relatively activist mindset in some of the critics and within the council, what made you make the decision to deny, nope, you're not taking city hall?

Chief John Perez: It was a decision I had made early on, looking at Portland and looking at what happened in Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, at third city hall. And I realized if we allowed occupation, many people wouldn't get services.

Jon Becker: I'm guessing that was not necessarily a popular decision with some of the members of the community and some of the members of the city staff.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely. Our city manager, we had a long discussion, very supportive, and he had mentioned that there wasn't support for this entirely. In fact, we had one council member said, just let them occupy. Let them have it. You shouldn't stop them. He said that the following week. And so that's problematic for me to have that type of loss of government, and what could happen and trying to clean that up later could be difficult. And so we had that discussion we talked about the following morning. Maybe I would be released as a police chief, basically terminated.

So I called my wife, let her know that that might happen. She just wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing, and I was doing the right thing, and she was fully in support. So I knew I was in a good place at home.

And so a few hours later, when Antifa started to show up and we started to see the name changing on the street signs to freedom way, pig way, this, that, this. You know, they had duct tape, and they had the spears and they had shields. They were putting on very scary stuff when you're that close. City manager, after we talked, he says, okay, well, we'll talk later. He shows up at about four or 05:00, and, you know, in police work, we have what's called a go bag.

And so he raises his bag. He's got my go bag with me. I'm here with you guys. And oftentimes thereafter, during the protest, we invited everybody to our department, operations center, council members, city people, city managers. He was almost always there with us throughout the night just to listen and to provide his guidance and what we needed to do and full support. And it was really good for him to be out there.

But our situational awareness, this is the key. The situational awareness for people, for counsel and the city manager and the legal department, for the city attorney's office, it would have been delayed because of the usual processes of policing. In this case, we worked and gave him immediate information because he was on the scene with us. He was seeing it himself firsthand.

And I'd walk up and it's like having the general right next to the battle scene and give them what we were doing. He was then able to relay that to the council quickly and give his assumptions, his assessment of what was happening.

So the situational awareness was a big factor in all of this. But having that support from the council and keeping the city attorneys up to date and everything we were doing with phone calls every less than an hour was tremendous in making sure everybody supported our direction.

Jon Becker: But it was almost a suicide pact between you and the city manager then, because him showing up knowing that there's at least one council member that thinks it's time to turn over city hall.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: And he has a chief of police that has already expressed that that's not going to happen.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: You know, I mean, I realized that you obviously had done the calculus, that you were willing to lose your job.

Chief John Perez: The risk. The risk assessment. And that's why I think he's one of the best city managers in the country. He'll put me in check in a moment if he had to. Not a problem. He'll shut me down. He's the boss. You know, it's what the structure of. I'm not an elected official as a sheriff. Right?

Jon Becker: Yes.

Chief John Perez: So there's a lot more decision making processes going on between a group of people that's got to be collective and best for our community. So it worked.

Jon Becker: But it's interesting because I think one of the things, when I teach leadership, one of the things that I talk about is the difference between leaders and managers, and one of those differences in my brain is the willingness to place yourself in peril for principle, the willingness to go, you're not taking city council well. They may fire me. Okay. Like, you had already made a decision that you were willing to lose your job and not give up city council.

Chief John Perez: We kept that quiet. We didn't want the officers to have to deal with that emotion. Whether they supported me or not was, you know, we have a new chief in the morning. During this whole episode of a officer involved shooting had just occurred, and by the end of the night, it worked out extremely well, in that nobody went to jail and only one car was impounded that wouldn't start.

And it was a careful approach that we had from having hundreds and hundreds with the potential for thousands to having less than 100, and then dealing with a group of 20 or 30 walking around marching and doing things, and our tactical officers having the discipline to handle it correctly. And at the end of the day, we learned a lesson.

One of the lessons was, as command staff members, if you're not part of the planning process, you're not allowed to make last minute adjustments. You can imagine a coach coming out of the locker room with 20 seconds left in the game, and the head coach picks a play, and all of a sudden the coach comes running out of the locker room criticizing the head coach about, that's a bad idea right now. Oh, wait a second. We've had three and a half quarters to figure out their weaknesses. We think this is the best decision. So we learned some lessons coming out of there.

But at the end of the night, the officers were really satisfied. They did something right for the community. And, you know, coming out and talking to the majority of officers that were going home at 03:00, 04:00 in the morning, had some great discussions and a lot of thank yous to us and the command staff for making the right decision.

That was, you know, good for us. As command staff, you make the decisions, you go on to the next battles on whatever that's going to be. But to have a couple hundred people coming out and going home and shaking your hand, saying thank you, I think that mattered.

Jon Becker: As somebody who knows a lot of people in your department and grew up in the city of Pasadena, that decision had more impact on your brand than you could have possibly recognized.

Chief John Perez: Well, even in the community, we had people the following week, officers go get their food, and people were paying for their food and, you know, clapping for them, and they walked in to pick up their food because there were still the pandemic rules, but they had a lot of community support from people for doing what we did. It got very little attention because it went the opposite way. The news stations were looking for occupation, not the other way around.

So it got very little traction, and that was fine by us, but it got very little traction from the public. And we had another 75 protests thereafter. And all of them were handled in the same regards, except for having to put out the line of officers, because it wasn't an occupation, it was a protest or demonstration, which they had the constitutional right to do. And we supported that. And so all those other 75 protests and demonstrations, we allowed that to occur without our presence.

Again, we planned in the same way, the same accord. Again, you opened the door and everybody would fall out. But we were not seen other than the traffic officers on the motorcycles providing the traffic stops and the brakes that they needed, or those moments we had to run out and make an arrest for a gun or a fight or something that was happening. Those were the only times you saw the majority of our officers.

Jon Becker: So you see, you have 75 additional protests. It's an interesting choice in a modern law enforcement environment to decide between having a large presence or allowing a protest constitutionally. You're there to protect their constitutional rights and give them an opportunity to protest the government, which is the whole point of it. And so you need to let them go. But the amount of presence and the type of presence seems to almost give these things the ability to create their own weather.

Chief John Perez: Yes, it is possible. You never know. Once again, going back to leadership principles, we're going to the true north. It is the foundation of what I believe that in doing my experiences over the years with janitors for justice, the occupation period during the great Recession, and then reading literature, Madison, Wisconsin, maybe the lead in the country in the 1970s, writing literature about campus protests and not being seen and how much the chances were heightened that it would conclude safely for everybody.

And so I took all that into an equation and came out with the fact that we should go on that route as often as we can. There are moments in which we can't. Occupation was one of the city hall. Correct. But I had to be able to try to identify those or have a team that could identify them. And that's only going to happen through discussions and having our staff meetings and giving people the confidence to say, this is not the one, or, we need to do something better on this other one. So that was really important. But it really goes to the true north principle.

Believing what you believe, knowing you've studied the confidence, everything that you're done, and you got to wait for the fastball to come at you. I had a great talk with Matty Moda back in 2018. He came to our station, and we donated equipment, and I asked him, what is it like to be there?

And Walter Austin or Tommy Lasorda asks you in the 9th inning to come up and get ready. He says, well, you know, you've done all your study. You prayed to God, you've done everything you're supposed to. You lived your life well. He said, this is for a pinch hit, right? The guy who led the most in the season for decades. It was the record, he says, but then you studied everything you needed to. You knew you had it. When you get to the plate, you make your decisions. The ball comes at you and you say, bring it on to the pitcher.

And basically that's, I love that because that's the same approach we basically took, was to say, look, we've studied everything. We're taking everything into consideration, but now we're at a point to make a decision.

Jon Becker: But I think implicit in what you're saying, apart from what we've already talked about, authenticity and having true north, is being a student of the game, right? Like you're not walking into the bottom of the 9th inning wondering what could happen and having no plan in place. So what are your thoughts about that? It strikes me that you've always been a student of the game.

Chief John Perez: And one of the terms I use often is a student of the profession for us, and being a student of the profession means you're always studying, you're always learning, you're always bouncing things off your mentors, listening to other people, debriefing situations and taking all that into consideration. And this was part of all that understanding. You're going way back in time and pulling things out and knowing where you want to be.

And so this was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do, not to be present in the dozens we had out in front of the police station where people wanted me to take a knee or the hundreds of people, you didn't see a police car, police cars driving by. And it was very peaceful events where people got to experience the emotions of other people and the tragedies that have happened in their lives and to share them without us being in the middle or me coming out in uniform and for a moment, taking the knee and taking all that away from everybody, that wasn't the point.

At the same time, we had to know when we had to be present and when it was about protecting the proper property of the city or people. And I believe that that was the right time to do what we did. So it took a lot of thought and support from people around me, and not everybody around me was in support of what we did. At the end of the day, it was the right thing. We did take a chance. We had an opportunity to be leaders in the organization and in the community, and we took that route and we stayed with it.

Jon Becker: I think that another interesting thing about your career was your willingness to almost follow a Lincoln principle. And I think of all the chiefs I've known over the years, hundreds, possibly thousands of chiefs of police, I've never seen anybody walk into a crowd of people that did not like him. Maybe Daryl Gates walked into a crowd of people who did not like him and said, tell me what's wrong with me the way you have. Talk about that.

Chief John Perez: For me early on, you know, learning from other chiefs like Bernard Malikian, the others that have been around, you have to engage the community and you have to do it your way. And I believe the only way to do that was to be as open as I could with our community. We had something called community conversations where we went in with frontline officers to engage the community and talk to one another about real issues in policing.

Anytime people called me on my cell phone, I answered. Anybody sent me an email, I answered it. You invited me to your forum. I did my best to be there. And those engagements were hugely important, not just with people that I connected with. And philosophically, we might have been the same arena. It was connecting with people that we weren't in agreement philosophically on a lot of issues. And some of them are very close friends. They're what could be considered activists, people in the community that wanted police reform. I wanted police reform.

And for them to understand the route I was going and reorganizing the whole department. We flattened it, we regrew it, we put new equipment, new training, new technologies. We're a better police department. And many police chiefs and departments had asked, hey, how did you do that? We created new units. We put more officers into patrol without raising a penny on the budget. All that done.

And so how did that really happen? A lot of work, a lot of meetings, and a lot of teams of people coming together. And not everybody was in agreement. I eliminated the gang unit for a new model, a contemporary model that was intelligence led model that we have today. We still put units out there when we need to on overtime to patrol these neighborhoods. But much of the work we're doing up front is intelligence led.

We're going to identify these career criminals, the gang members, the people that are doing this crime, and arrest them before they do it or immediately after the arrest. That's the goal to ultimately get.

Jon Becker: I think saying philosophically disagreed is a gross understatement of people who are calling for your resignation while you're inviting them to be on a chief's counsel.

Chief John Perez: And some people even threatening my life.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, literally, it's interesting because, you know Sen. Tzu, know yourself. Know your enemy better. Hold your enemy close. Hold your friends close. Hold your enemies closer. It was interesting to watch you start a chief's advisory council with people who strongly, philosophically disagreed with you and then open yourself up to criticism in a forum you created.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about what that. What was the advantage of that?

Chief John Perez: Well, it's where it came from. And where it came from was, you know, on July 29th, 2016, I had a v fib incident where I had died for, they said 60 something seconds on a heartbeat and came back and had a surgery and blah, blah, blah.

Jon Becker: I think you might be skipping over.

Chief John Perez: Yeah, probably.

Jon Becker: How about you dropped dead and were dead for a minute or more.

Chief John Perez: Yeah. So with that.

Jon Becker: And would have remained that way if.

Chief John Perez: Not for people in the room.

Jon Becker: Not for people in the room putting you on.

Chief John Perez: You know, Bill Sanchez and many of the officers in that room did a wonderful job in making sure I was still around. But during the time I was off a lot of reflection. I always thought I was a pretty good person. But, you know, when this happens to you, you want to be even better, you know, and you strive for ways to do that. And much was done in terms of reading and really finding yourself. And part of that was reading about Theodore Roosevelt and many of the presidents I read, including team of rivals on Lincoln and how he brought people into his cabinet that were against him.

And when the opportunity created itself for interim chief, which nobody was searching for at the time, not me, and the permanent chief, which I really wasn't searching for, and let the city know I wasn't going to apply for that job, it really was interesting that that reading, that approach, that study, helped me embrace the activists even more and create a chief's advisory that, in fact, was made of people that were looking for deep, deep rooted defunding or, you know, changing the police department in ways that was not healthy for the community. And many of them, if not all of them, I believe, really changed their perspective over the years of how they viewed the police department.

And, in fact, in the beginning, the union. Absolutely. You know, I love Roger Rodin, one of the best presidents in any police union anywhere in the state, if not the country, and the way he approaches his work, but he heavily was saying, hey, man, this is not a good idea. I don't think we should be doing this at the conclusion of all this.

If I were to get rid of it, Roger would have beat me up first, because the union appreciated this group of people, to engage them and to have meetings with them, because each one of the board members represented multiple nonprofit organizations, representing hundreds in each one. So you're touching on thousands of people. Some of the chiefs advisory members even lost some of their credibility in the community for what they were learning at the police department.

So when they see how diverse we are, when they see the changes we're making, you know, change doesn't come from the outside. Change comes from the inside, not just on the leadership to say you're going to do it, but the management work that's taken to create the systems and the budgets and the protocols and all the things in management that are hugely important. And that's a learned skill, as is leadership, which is a leadership, which is a tool. It's a skill set you have to have.

So all that put us in a place that helped me during that period of time to really function through and keep the chief's advisory updated. If that chief's advisory was made of all John Perez friends in the community, what good was it to brief them before the occupation of city hall? Really, it wasn't going to do me any good. I needed people that were going to criticize me and say, well, wait a second. But to explain to them why they helped market some of the things that needed to be done in the community from an education standpoint.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. There is currently, with law enforcement, a bit of a siege mentality, where there are a lot of vocal critics and a very quiet law enforcement lobby where every bad thing that happens gets publicized and dragged through the news. And law enforcement is not proactively defending itself. And it strikes me. Yeah, but not at an organized level.

Chief John Perez: I understand that completely.

Jon Becker: And you look at some of the legislation that's happening in California related to law enforcement, and some of it is just moronic. AB 481 and this idea that, oh, military equipment is what's causing the problems. Well, first of all, half the things on that list have nothing to do with the military.

Chief John Perez: Military use it.

Jon Becker: But it strikes me that part of the reason that that happens is this siege mentality and this kind of pushing out of criticism and not having a willingness to engage.

Chief John Perez: It's a lack of education that we really need. Even internally, on both sides. Yeah, even internally. I started a Sunday email that was based, you know, it was based on our last chief, Chief Sanchez's Sunday email about everything went on in the community. Way too much information for what I could do.

So I changed it to a format which was about educating our personnel, the new laws coming out, the promotions, the areas that needed policing focus, as well as leadership issues, providing good video on leadership and things we could all learn from collectively. And it was a starting point in the organization. No matter where I went, I could start my conversation at the Sunday email. Hey, chief, you wrote this in the last Sunday. I agree or don't agree. Well, let's talk about it. And it was a great place that when I didn't do them on Sundays, I would get half a dozen or more texts from people.

Jon Becker: Where's my email?

Chief John Perez: Where's your email? Yeah. And in the beginning, I didn't send it to everybody. I only sent it to the lieutenants. I wanted them to talk to these points. And I quickly discovered there was a portion of the lieutenants that said, I don't talk to this stuff. They could read it on their own. I said, nope, not until you guys learn how to read it to your people and have this discussion. I'm not going to get it out. So a lot of pressure started to come to send it out to over 400 people every Sunday, and not just the command staff and lieutenants and the administrators of 23 people.

So it really was a platform I stuck to as long as I could before I released it out to everybody. And it was helpful, and I tried to do it all on my own. So it came for me. You know, it wasn't ten people writing it, sending it to me, and whatever mistakes or things you didn't like, it's my stuff. This is from me to you in a love letter here. And so I think it really did help in a lot of our communication with the new laws that were coming out and things that were happening.

Jon Becker: But it's once again inviting potential criticism. Oh, without a doubt, it's once again commander's intent, open to discussion, which, I mean, that's kind of leadership 401, right? That's not – You better have your ego in a pretty comfortable box.

Chief John Perez: Let go of your ego.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, you got to leave it at the door. But I think that comes back to kind of last thing I'd like to talk about before we go into the rapid fire questions, which is this notion of servant leadership and this notion that, you know, the most important person in the organization is not the one at the top of.

Chief John Perez: 100%.

Jon Becker: Tell me your views on that.

Chief John Perez: Well, growing up, playing sports, and having a large family with seven brothers, servant leadership is the direction you go. You follow others, and you're a strong follower in supporting your family. Coming into the police department as well. Always following the new chief, following people around me, following to learn, has really always been part of my platform foundation for myself.

If I believe in you and I support you, I'm following you everywhere because I want to learn from you. I want to learn how I could be better. And I want you to believe in me. And that's just part of having a circle of friends. I have the same friends for the most part I've had since I was 13, 14 years old, you know, which is really cool, right?

Because we believe in one another. And the same friends that have been core with me over my years at the police department are still close friends of mine because we haven't lost that connection. And with other people, you come and go depending on the decision. And so servant leadership is an actual management leadership principle that was written by Dr. Peters in the early seventies. And his leadership principle at that time was about learning how to follow others in your leadership, knowing that it's important to listen to people around you and their issues so you could become a better manager. But it was also about leading.

And I believe that this foundation of servant leadership is something that is going by the wayside and we got to bring that back. The most underrated leader forever will be the most consistent leader. It's an unusual place where we define our leaders by the home run, by the moment, by the things happening.

But the most consistent leaders over a period of time are usually lost. You know, they're lost in time. For some reason. We just say, well, you know, John was really good, always treated us well over those 20 years as a leader. But it, you know. Cause it wasn't that one time the building burned. You carried everybody out, man. He was the guy.

So we tend to devalue the consistent leaders over time that do it in a servient leadership style. Yet it is the essence of everything we do in leadership.

Jon Becker: That's a fantastic place to move on to our rapid fire questions. So these are…

Chief John Perez: Do I need a lawyer?

Jon Becker: Say again?

Chief John Perez: Do I need a lawyer?

Jon Becker: Probably not.

Chief John Perez: Okay, good.

Jon Becker: I mean, you did for the last five years of your career, probably not now. So these are kind of single sentence. I want your kind of quick reaction thoughts. What's your most important habit?

Chief John Perez: Relationships. People around me making sure that if you're going to lead, that people believe in you, at least they know who you are. So it's about creating those relationships and the conversations with people around me.

Jon Becker: Leader versus manager, what's the difference?

Chief John Perez: Leader versus manager? Leader has got to know the opportunity to lead. Managing is something that we do every single day, the majority of the day, hugely important. But we have to really have the skill sets to be leaders, to understand when to identify it and how to treat it with respect and love.

Jon Becker: What's the best book you've read?

Chief John Perez: I would start probably with 7 habits of the most effective people by Dr. Covey. But that could probably be sharply debated with Jocko's extreme ownership, which took a lot of those principles and his experience. And so I'd be jockeying for those two. But you know what? Jordan Peterson, 12 rules for life is amazing book. Jordan Peterson is absolutely our Plato and Aristotle of our times.

Jon Becker: What's the most profound memory of your career?

Chief John Perez: I would have to say likely the feeling that we had as a command staff after occupying of the city hall and the fact that the department, everybody believed in what we were doing. The community believed that we did the right thing at a moment that I think many people wanted the opposite thing to happen, to feel good in terms of activists and so forth.

So I believe that moment, that feeling, that driving home at four in the morning with no sleep for over 24 hours, I really felt like we had done something collectively together. There are very – Almost no moments in our lives where we think about the best thing that ever happened. It was just you, it was always people around, and that was an example of just that.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite resource? Online resource, website or podcast?

Chief John Perez: I have to go back to Jocko, man. Well, the debrief, I'm going to say, is first, without a doubt. Debrief is it? That's the new learning place for us to find our leaders locally. You connect with them because of the profession. You know what they're saying. You could learn from the leadership lessons being thrown out there.

But for the last few years before the debrief, Jocko was really the place to be for me because he's taken the science of leadership from all the years before with management, and you could break it down with great guests that he has and also the principles of what's worked for him in wartime.

Jon Becker: What keeps you awake at night?

Chief John Perez: Has to be the safety of police officers. My heart goes out to every single one of them doing the best that they can. The absolute love they have for their communities. It's really undervalued by the media and people out in the community. There's so much great things going on that they don't get the credit they deserve for their love for what they do. They're sacrifices for what they do.

All the many different areas of policing, from homeless to having to take action, to working with people in need, the amount of work that's needed and all the training that comes with all that the love these people have for this profession and their communities is unbelievable. Yet I don't think they get the respect for that. I don't think there's enough there to remind our communities how lucky they are to have that one 2% of society serving as police officers.

Jon Becker: And that is a fantastic place for us to stop. John, thank you so much for doing this!

Chief John Perez: Thank you, brother! Thank you!

I hope there was something I offered for everybody out there. I appreciate it!