Ep53: DeliverFund Org on Human Trafficking ~ Nic McKinley
Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker 1
So my name is Nick McKinley. I'm the founder and and CEO of actually multiple companies, but one of them is deliver fund. We're a a private nonprofit intelligence organization that equips trains and advises law enforcement for the fight against human trafficking and not just law enforcement. Actually, we.
00:00:21 Speaker 1
We work with industry partners we work with.
00:00:23 Speaker 1
With kind of anybody who is adjacent to the human trafficking problem to provide them with data and technology and training so that they can be effective in that fight.
00:00:34 Speaker 2
Can you share any relevant experience you had in combating human trafficking or working with law enforcement agencies? And I think even mentioned with just people who are interested in taking up that fight against human trafficking.
00:00:48 Speaker 1
What kind of all started just by way of background, I spent a number of years in military special OPS, and then I was recruited at the Central Intelligence Agency and and was working in a unit there in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. And we had this human trafficking Intel kind of like what I like to call smoking gun Intel on a human trafficker. But that's kind of all that they were doing was just trafficking.
00:01:10 Speaker 1
Children across the Afghanistan Pakistan border and when we tried to find somebody to do something about this because our job was counter narcotics and counterterrorism down there, human trafficking was not something we were supposed to be focus.
00:01:23 Speaker 1
On.
00:01:24 Speaker 1
So when we looked around for somebody who was doing something about this, couldn't find anybody. And that was a light bulb moment for me where I thought to myself, wait a minute, we can kill people with flying robots from 6000 miles away, but we don't have anybody focused on this human trafficking issue.
00:01:43 Speaker 1
That can't be true, and I just started looking throughout the federal government to see who was doing what, and I found there were federal agencies like Department, Homeland Security, and elements within the FBI who were doing a good job. But there was just not very many.
00:01:59 Speaker 1
And that really, when you looked at the human trafficking problem?
00:02:06 Speaker 1
Dollar for dollar, the largest human trafficking market was the United States of America and we have over 18,000 law enforcement entities across the United States, none of which are really connected in the same platforms, and none of which focus on the human trafficking issue. And So what I tried to do, what I decided to do was basically take the.
00:02:28 Speaker 1
Counterterrorism methods.
00:02:29 Speaker 1
Analogies and and a lot of the technologies that we knew worked really well in the counterterrorism fight and started to apply those to the counter human trafficking fight. And that started with one law enforcement officer and that one law enforcement officer has now turned into over 450 law enforcement agencies across the United States.
00:02:51 Speaker 2
Wow, that is amazing. So deliver fund has been established for how many years? How?
00:02:58 Speaker 1
We're in our 9th year. Yeah. So this is in two years. This would be the thing that I've done the longest. I would have done this long longer than I was in the military.
Wow.
Wow.
00:03:12 Speaker 1
I was in the Air Force in the pair rescue teams.
00:03:15 Speaker 2
That's interesting. It's good to talk with another person who's who's got that military background. At least that concept and understanding how things work in the world, especially when you talk about the the kind of the terrorists and the kind of terrorism that you identified, like you, how real, you know, personal experience in regards to knowing what needed to be tackled versus what has.
00:03:37 Speaker 2
What could be?
00:03:39 Speaker 2
Something that could be addressed even more and become part of your objective for your organization. So that's awesome. That's awesome. Thank.
00:03:47 Speaker 2
You for sharing.
00:03:48 Speaker 2
But how do you think your skills and expertise can contribute to the mission to deliver fund in combating human trafficking? I think you kind of touched on that subject, but I don't know if you wanted to allow.
Right.
00:03:59 Speaker 1
Yeah. When it comes to the the fight against human trafficking, it's important for people to understand what we're talking about. I originally thought that human trafficking was an over their issue. It happened in Cambodia and Thailand and Guatemala. This is surely something that is not happening in the United States of America and.
00:04:19 Speaker 1
When you realize that again.
00:04:21 Speaker 1
And dollar for dollar, the United States of America is the largest human trafficking market on the planet. Well, the way that you fight things over there is different than the way that you fight things over here because we have the Constitution and people have rights. And so it it's a different it's a different mechanism, but it doesn't mean that a lot of the same methodologies.
00:04:42 Speaker 1
On a.
00:04:42 Speaker 1
Right.
00:04:43 Speaker 1
So from a skill set perspective that was that was really easy for me to translate those skills over because I essentially had an Ivy League education in hunting down bad guys and doing that in the worst places in the world. And one of the things that I realized with law enforcement in the US is that law enforcement has a very, very tough job.
00:05:04 Speaker 1
But the rules are very regimented and the threat is not as high as you see in, say, you know Kabul, cause think about it. When was the last time a, you know, there was a car bomb in the United States of America? Well, it hasn't happened and.
00:05:18 Speaker 1
I mean, I don't even know how long, right? I mean we it just hasn't really happened. There was a, there was a a weekly sometimes multiple week occurrence that we would have to deal with. You know when was the last time you know somebody got in a gun fight in the United States of America and the other side had belt fed weapons. They had RPG's they had weaponized.
00:05:38 Speaker 1
Drones, right? That's not really something that we see here. So what we found was that in, in working in those environment.
00:05:47 Speaker 1
It's.
00:05:48 Speaker 1
Human trafficking and things like that really started to take. They didn't even have a seat on the bus. It wasn't that they had a seat in the back of the bus. They even have a seat on the bus because you were worried about all of these things are.
00:05:59 Speaker 1
Gonna blow up.
00:06:00 Speaker 1
That things that are going to kill people really fast, and it seems like in in America and as Americans we.
00:06:06 Speaker 1
Tend to focus on the things that kill people quick.
00:06:08 Speaker 1
Really, suddenly, suddenly, people care a lot about, you know, fentanyl addiction. But human trafficking is something that kills people. Slowly, the the data that I have read says that the average life expectancy of a human trafficking victim is about 7 years before they are murdered or die of an overdose.
00:06:29 Speaker 1
Or if something happens and a lot of those overdoses are actually.
00:06:35 Speaker 1
Them being murdered by the trafficker because they, the trafficker, knows that if they give a girl what they call a hotshot of heroin.
00:06:43 Speaker 1
An AO dear, let me just leave the the needle in her arm and leave her on a you know the the motel bed. And when the cops show up, they go. Ohh well, just another, you know? Just another dead ******. Case closed, right? They don't investigate it as if it were potentially a a murder. And. And so when you when you take.
00:07:04 Speaker 1
Kind of the what we've learned overseas and things that kill people quickly.
00:07:07 Speaker 1
And then we said, OK, well, why are we not focused on applying the same level of effort to the things that kill people slowly, like human trafficking that we do, the things that kill people quickly, like drugs and terrorism. And to me, that was a again, kind of a light bulb.
00:07:27 Speaker 1
Comment that says we can act. We don't have to choose. We actually can do.
00:07:31 Speaker 1
Both we can fight narcotics and human trafficking with equal levels of efficacy, should we choose to. The question became why don't we? And I think it's actually really simple trafficking victims are not a voting constituency.
00:07:48 Speaker 1
So our politicians don't properly fund the fight against human trafficking because the public is not demanding that they do so.
00:07:59 Speaker 1
And I think that's because you have these.
00:08:03 Speaker 1
When you look.
00:08:03 Speaker 1
At who? Human trafficking affects it predominantly affects. While this is changing, it currently predominantly affects.
00:08:13 Speaker 1
Socioeconomically depressed areas, predominantly in the inner cities, and it's starting to spread to rural America actually quite rapidly, but for the most part, it's predominantly in the in the inner cities. And so if we talk inner cities, we talk socioeconomic depression.
00:08:29 Speaker 1
What people groups are we talking about primarily?
00:08:32 Speaker 1
We're primarily talking about people of color, and because you have a under representation.
00:08:39 Speaker 1
Then politicians are not willing to put the right amount of resources behind it in order to combat the problem.
00:08:48 Speaker 2
That's exactly true. Absolutely. I mean, that's you are spot on in regards to that because that's why I put so much effort into expressing my concern about something like I think it has a lot to do when you when you mentioned.
00:09:04 Speaker 2
Note the Americans are are different in regards to how they respond. They we have such a short attention span we don't seem to kind of like have the in. You know you have to keep our interest and if the if there is a 2 minute thing it's just like on to the next thing.
00:09:21 Speaker 2
It's like we will.
Right.
00:09:23 Speaker 2
Program to be that way. And that's just a technology.
00:09:26 Speaker 2
That we have.
00:09:28 Speaker 2
That's pretty much have put this in a situation where we can't keep our attention long enough to understand and to and to bring the a more of awareness on something like that. That's.
00:09:39 Speaker 2
Human trafficking.
00:09:41 Speaker 2
So.
00:09:41 Speaker 1
Well, and I.
00:09:41 Speaker 1
Think you also have an issue of of power differentials, which is something I could talk about for a long time, but when you see like if you see somebody who has means and they have a good network and their child say goes missing, right, maybe daughters making some bad decisions son is making bad decisions whatever the the world will move.
00:10:02 Speaker 1
In order to help them.
00:10:03 Speaker 1
Well, that same thing happens to people who have no network and have no means every single day in our inner cities. And yet the world doesn't even know about it, much less the world move. And so I think it really comes down to a.
00:10:20 Speaker 1
What are our priorities as a society and what are? What are? What do we care about and what do we not care about and the things that we care about? We will put funding behind so you see.
00:10:32 Speaker 1
A great example is where I live. I had a a conversation with the city manager and I love doing this to politicians and people who who make these kinds of decisions because quite frankly it it's a chess game that they can't see coming. And so we start talking about, you know, different crime issues and. And so my next question was like well.
00:10:53 Speaker 1
You know what? What are we doing in this county about human trafficking? What is the city doing about human trafficking? And it was the same response I always get. Ohh, it's it's the most important thing. And you know, we care about it a lot. And there's lots of wringing of hands and mashing of teeth.
00:11:08 Speaker 1
And then the question that I ask that makes them all very uncomfortable is that's amazing that you're taking human trafficking so importantly and and that you're you're you're you're so dedicated to.
It.
00:11:22 Speaker 1
Please show me the budget line item that is funding your counter human trafficking team.
00:11:27 Speaker 1
And your law enforcement. And I knew that their law enforcement didn't have.
00:11:30 Speaker 1
And then as well.
00:11:31 Speaker 1
You don't understand because we get this and we get that and you don't understand. Like I'm a guy who worked for the 7th, who worked for the the federal government for 17 half years. Like I understand government and government finance and how it works as well as anybody. So again, why are you not funding a human trafficking task force? Why don't you have a dedicated?
00:11:51 Speaker 1
Trafficking task force and then he's started to make all these excuses and well, but your gangs task force is probably fully funded.
00:11:59 Speaker 1
Your property Crimes task force your auto theft unit, so you telling me that cars are more important than people? Are you telling me that protecting property is more important than protecting people?
00:12:11 Speaker 1
And and you can back them into.
00:12:12 Speaker 1
A corner pretty quick.
00:12:14 Speaker 1
And and so this is, I think the national conversation we need to be having with our politicians is show me where you are funding the thing that you are saying you care about. And if you aren't funding it and you're choosing to fund other things instead, then you don't really care about it.
00:12:33 Speaker 1
I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, if we have to take money away from fixing potholes and roads and instead use that money to root human traffickers out of our communities, that's the right decision, and that's what we.
00:12:46 Speaker 1
Should be doing.
00:12:47 Speaker 2
I was just thinking about like what you do, you know?
00:12:50 Speaker 2
What's their route in regards to how we can nip this in the bud? Like what would be right on the top of your mind in regards to knowing that you have so much background and expertise in understanding how the business of human trafficking entails? I mean, cause I can think right off the bat like.
00:13:10 Speaker 2
With human trafficking, do you believe that Keene and drugs are kind of like hand in hand? If you eliminate 11, would the other one would be lessened or least to a smaller percentage of minimum of people who are involved in being human?
00:13:30 Speaker 2
Do you think that would ever happen in this world? Yeah.
00:13:31 Speaker 1
Yes, 100%. I I think it could if people cared. I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we have gangs, task forces and then we have a.
00:13:42 Speaker 1
Property Crime Task force and then we have a narcotics task force and then we have maybe a human trafficking task force only usually not. And so we we we fight these issues in silos and what works a lot better is to essentially just have a team of very capable people who will go after.
00:14:02 Speaker 1
All of them, because the world is so interconnected, right when when we had the 1980s and 90s and Pablo Escobar and these kind of top down hierarchies of of criminal networks.
00:14:16 Speaker 1
Where pretty much everything was controlled by a family or or some type of gang.
00:14:22 Speaker 1
Yes, that that made sense. But the way that things work now is we have what I like to call a loose affiliation of like minds, which is that you have these bad guys doing bad things.
00:14:32 Speaker 1
And they work with other bad guys doing bad things, right? So the guy who creates the fake documents no longer just does it for one gang. He does it for.
00:14:40 Speaker 1
All the gangs no longer just does it for one, traffic rates for all the traffickers, the guy who sells illegal guns, sells them to everybody. The guy who transports things, the transports them for everybody. And so this, you have a lot more kind of independent. You can almost call it the criminal gig economy, right? You have this, this independent network.
00:15:00 Speaker 1
Of of lone actors that are out there performing one piece of what used to be part of a larger criminal network.
00:15:12 Speaker 1
So we need to get rid of these silos and these little task forces and instead do it like we do, like we do the things overseas, the, the things that we work on overseas, you don't have, say, the special forces ODA, who is only focusing on terrorism and then another special forces ODA.
00:15:32 Speaker 1
Who only focuses on narcotics. No. You have a team of hitters and intelligence people who all go after everything simultaneously. And that's the way we need to start thinking about law enforcement because.
00:15:48 Speaker 1
The reality is, is that almost every narcotics case probably has a human trafficking case connected to it. Almost every human trafficking case probably has a illegal gun and, you know, illegal property crime and money laundering and narcotics.
00:16:08 Speaker 1
Case attached to it and so we need to start attacking those those systems, not people talk about attacking the network. There isn't really a network anymore and that's kind.
00:16:19 Speaker 1
Of my point.
00:16:20 Speaker 1
We need to attack the system that allows those loose loose networks.
00:16:27 Speaker 1
To operate and I think that if we were to take that approach and like a great example is what I talked about earlier, right, you have the what appears to be a dead prostitute with a needle in her arm in a hotel. Then the detective says Ohh the case shut. If they treated that as a homicide and they were legally mandated to treat that as a homicide.
00:16:49 Speaker 1
From day one, well, then we're going to find that. No, that actually is a human trafficking victim. And that's pretty easy to figure out through the online advertisements. It's a human trafficking victim who was killed. Let's find probably by our trafficker. Let's find out.
00:17:03 Speaker 1
Who that is. OK. Now let's find out where he gets the drugs. Now, let's find out where he gets the the muscle, the guns, the cars, the whatever. Let's put together that entire package. And now let's take everybody down at once. And that's not really what we're seeing. Instead, we see prosecutors, and it's not really the law enforcement officers.
00:17:23 Speaker 1
It's more of the prosecutors and the administration of the law enforcement departments really just saying, OK, well, let let's let's go after this bad person. Let's get the win and then let's get the statistics so that we can generate budget to then do it again.
00:17:41 Speaker 2
Well, you, you know your stuff. Thank you so much for that, because this is something that a lot of people don't know.
00:17:47 Speaker 2
Like.
00:17:49 Speaker 2
I mean just comment, Joe like like what's your for? So I thank you very much.
Yeah.
00:17:56 Speaker 1
Everybody thinks that law enforcement is an episode of, you know, CSI, Miami and the.
00:18:00 Speaker 1
Reality is it.
00:18:01 Speaker 1
Could not be farther farther from the case, but at the same time, if this is what we want to see, well then we need to support our laws.
00:18:09 Speaker 1
Properly, we need to pay them properly. We need to increase the standards for what it takes to become a law enforcement officer. But we also need to increase the pay and decrease the liability so that we can attract better talent. And that's not to say that law enforcement officers aren't talented. I mean, some of them, especially some of those.
00:18:29 Speaker 1
Some of those detectives, I mean, they'd be curing cancer if they weren't solving crimes. I mean, they're incredibly brilliant people.
00:18:36 Speaker 1
But is, I mean, are we seeing an increase in standards and what it takes to become a law enforcement officer in this country where we seeing a decrease in standards? Well, very clearly we're seeing a decrease in standards and the reason why we're seeing a decrease in standards is because we're not properly supporting those law enforcement officers. And so you know, you had this, you know the.
00:18:56 Speaker 1
He funded the police movement absolutely.
00:18:59 Speaker 1
Stupid and and all of the data, all of the data and I will debate this with anybody who wants to debate it all. The data shows that defunding the police is the absolute best way to a further degradated society. Now at the same time, it is true that we were using.
00:19:19 Speaker 1
Police for things that police shouldn't be used for, right. Police end up becoming social workers basically sometimes, and they end up, they end up doing all these things that they should.
00:19:27 Speaker 1
Do we need our police officers to be essentially the most highly trained and most well equipped public safety officers that we can possibly make them and their craft, their trade and going after criminals is violence?
00:19:47 Speaker 1
Because ultimately, at the end of the day, it's always going if somebody chooses not to cooperate, they have to be forced to do that, and there's no way to force somebody to cooperate without using violence. So then we need to limit the liability.
00:20:00 Speaker 1
Three of those law enforcement officers then, when they do their job, so there are problems within law enforcement. Yes. But we know why those problems happened, because we haven't seen those problems before. We started seeing a degrading of standards, which came from a degrading of pay and an increase in liability. And then that leads to law enforcement officers making bad decisions.
00:20:21 Speaker 1
Which then, which is very, very few and far between actually, but because it gets caught on camera cause everyone's got a camera today, then it makes it seem like that's all of law enforcement and we just as a society we we can do better.
MHMM.
00:20:37 Speaker 2
Thank you for that.
00:20:38 Speaker 2
Because, I mean I'm. I'm for to.
00:20:41 Speaker 2
A limit in regards to defunding. I think it just needs to be rearranged in the funding and how.
00:20:49 Speaker 2
The funding and the budget should be for the law enforcement because I think.
00:20:53 Speaker 2
And you're completely right in regards to the camera. You know, everybody's got a camera, if not the cop, it's it's.
00:21:00 Speaker 2
It's a it's someone who is in the public area that is happening and catches it. And then of course it it goes into a another rabbit hole because they they weren't there at the time of it began. They were probably at the point where it escalated to the point there was violence in some form.
00:21:20 Speaker 2
Not to to completely fund it, but to rearrange the budget.
00:21:24 Speaker 2
That you don't need an AK47, you don't need to have like, you know, like all these things, I mean, I guess unless you are dealing with other people who have that, that type of artillery. Yeah, I mean in Texas, I mean, you can, but I think that when it comes to the.
00:21:37 Speaker 1
Other me, yeah.
00:21:44 Speaker 2
Training. That's a big plus for me when it comes to dealing with mental health issues there. That's where I kind of draw the line in regards to having a law enforcement try to.
00:22:01 Speaker 2
OK, deescalate or whichever and not have someone there as a social worker or someone who is a who who deals with mental health issues.
00:22:09 Speaker 1
Completely agree. Have a have a trained mental health professional there. Have a law enforcement officer there for security.
00:22:16 Speaker 2
Yes.
00:22:17 Speaker 1
And and to to make sure that that person right? Because if you have 105 LB. Woman who's a mental health professional, who then is going to go talk to a £250 mentally ill man.
00:22:31 Speaker 1
If that man decides to get violent, that's not gonna work out well for that woman. So. So, yes, you do need that law enforcement officer there, but only in a only for the security of the social worker. Right. A mental health professional should be the mental health professional that's doing the actual work.
00:22:49 Speaker 2
I'm loving this in.
00:22:50 Speaker 2
Depth conversation. I'm so glad that we're able to have this. This is.
00:22:56 Speaker 1
It's it's it, it there are.
00:22:57 Speaker 1
Important conversations, and I think part of the reason why is because.
00:23:00 Speaker 1
We tend the.
00:23:02 Speaker 1
The the world has just become so polarized that we just demonize everybody and you know, on one side you have right as an example of movements that were kind of opposite each other. You have the Black Lives Matter and the Blue Lives Matter, right?
00:23:16 Speaker 1
And I have friends in both.
00:23:19 Speaker 1
They know the guy who owns Blue Lives Matter as an example, and they're like when you put people in A room.
00:23:26 Speaker 1
And I and I know plenty of folks on the the the Black Lives Matter side.
00:23:31 Speaker 1
Like you guys have like 80% in common.
00:23:34 Speaker 1
Because no anybody.
00:23:35 Speaker 1
Who says they want to defund the police? Doesn't really want to defund the police because the next question I say is OK, well then when your child?
00:23:42 Speaker 1
Gets molested by the soccer coach or whatever, and there's no police.
00:23:48 Speaker 1
What are you going to do about that?
00:23:50 Speaker 1
We definitely don't want to go to a world where you know, we're all vigilantes and we just take the law into our own hands, because then we end up very quickly in a situation where might makes right and so we don't want to go there. I think we can all agree that we don't want to go there. So we do need police.
00:24:10 Speaker 1
However, do we need so many police because neighborhood policing is dead? All the research is very clear that neighborhood policing doesn't work anymore because nobody knows their neighbors anymore. Everyone's got 100,000 friends on Facebook, but they don't even know who lives next.
00:24:16 Speaker 2
We.
00:24:25 Speaker 1
Sure. And so we don't need patrol cars, just cruising around looking for something suspicious anymore, because all of the Intel essentially that we need is all online.
00:24:37 Speaker 1
You know, **** ******* and drug dealers and and human traffickers and you know, gun proliferators they're all talking about the crime that they're doing on online. We can collect everything we need by just passively collecting what they're telling us they're doing.
00:24:58 Speaker 1
And then going out and holding them accountable for those crimes.
00:25:02 Speaker 1
So you actually could reduce the size of your police force. I think by 30% and I agree with not saving that money, you reallocate that money into salaries and benefits and mitigation risk mitigation for the law enforcement officers so that you can attract.
00:25:21 Speaker 1
Better talent. And when you get better talent, you're going to have better training. You're going to have smarter people who are then going to make better decisions.
00:25:34 Speaker 1
Under stress.
00:25:36 Speaker 1
And so you can see how when you fix a part of the system, you actually end up, you end up fixing the whole system, right? So think of it this way, like, look, let's look at our medical infrastructure in the United States.
00:25:49 Speaker 1
It's got problems.
00:25:51 Speaker 1
It's also the best medical infrastructure in the entire world. Having lived in 14 different countries, I can tell you it is absolutely the best. If your child has cancer.
00:26:00 Speaker 1
Sir. And you're an oligarch, and you live in Serbia.
00:26:04 Speaker 1
You're trying to get your child into a Children's Hospital in the United States of America, not a Children's Hospital in England or in Australia or anywhere else, right? If you are a person of means in any place in the world and you have a medical issue, you're trying to get to the Mayo Clinic, you're trying to get to MD Anderson. You're trying to get to American.
00:26:25 Speaker 1
Facilities so we know we have the best medical system in the world. That doesn't mean there aren't problems.
00:26:33 Speaker 1
Right. So we can we can keep the good and not destroy the entire system in order to try to root out the bad. Like let's keep what's good. I think we can all agree that pediatric heart surgeons are probably some of the biggest heroes in the world and are like some very, very good people. But if your child is the one getting heart surgery.
00:26:53 Speaker 1
Do you want your pediatric heart surgeon who works for a nonprofit hospital or probably a government funded hospital? Do you want that pediatric heart surgeon coming off their second job that they have to work to make?
00:27:04 Speaker 1
Meat and now they're tired and they're going to do surgery on your child.
00:27:10 Speaker 1
Or do you want them waking up in their beautiful home, having a great cup of coffee, getting in their Porsche and enjoying the drive to work and showing up and being like, alright, let's do some surgery.
00:27:22 Speaker 1
You probably want the latter.
00:27:25 Speaker 1
Do you want the most talented person operating on your child, or do you want the person who got the job because they had to fill the slot with somebody?
00:27:37 Speaker 1
It's a good analogy for where we are with our current law enforcement, right? We expect and I can tell you as a former professional shooter where my job was largely to put little pieces of lead where they needed to go to damage the thing that needed to get damaged without damaging anything around it. And I was expected to do that.
00:27:59 Speaker 1
Under levels of pressure that most people will never experience, even a single time in their entire life, and I was expected to do it perfectly every time. So.
00:28:10 Speaker 1
With if that is, if that is what we expect, and that's what we expect for law enforcement officers. We talk about how law enforcement officers, I think it was a case in New York, right where unfortunately a guy pulled out his wallet and ended up getting shot.
00:28:27 Speaker 1
And the reason why that happened is because those law enforcement.
00:28:29 Speaker 1
Officers were scared.
00:28:32 Speaker 1
And the reason they were scared is because they were under trained.
00:28:36 Speaker 1
And then you look at that case, they ended up firing something like 40, some rounds of which.
00:28:42 Speaker 1
Only a few hit.
00:28:45 Speaker 1
The innocent guy who just pulled out his wallet.
00:28:49 Speaker 2
Yeah, it's.
00:28:49 Speaker 1
Now in my old unit, if you missed, you were fired.
00:28:56 Speaker 1
Right. So like it?
00:28:57 Speaker 1
Wasn't it wasn't an option. If you missed, you were fired. And so there there were. When you look at kind of what my old unit was doing and the the level of.
00:29:07 Speaker 1
Training we had.
00:29:08 Speaker 1
There were so many circumstances where we could have very justifiably got into a shooting.
00:29:15 Speaker 1
But we didn't.
00:29:17 Speaker 1
Because we knew that even though that guy had that AK pointed at us, we could see that the safety was on and we were confident that we could actually draw and shoot him before he could take the.
00:29:27 Speaker 1
Safety off so.
00:29:28 Speaker 1
We're able to just deescalate and we, because we weren't afraid and, you know, fear in large part comes from lack of having a.
00:29:37 Speaker 1
Man and when you are in those types of high pressure scenarios, you end up with a lot of fear. If you are not properly trained and all training is is helping you to develop plans to deal with situations we we we don't need to defund the police at all.
00:29:58 Speaker 1
We actually need to refund the police and it's controversial for me to say, but I actually think we should do.
00:30:02 Speaker 1
Mobile police budgets on what they spend on actual police officers. There's a lot of administrative blow in bureaucracy and stuff. All that needs to go away.
00:30:13 Speaker 1
If you are, if you never carried a badge in a gun and you never did that work and you never did it successfully, you should not be allowed to be in a in a leadership position in law enforcement, period. There there's there's absolutely no room for people to be telling other people to do something they themselves never have the courage to do that. That said, we redistribute that.
00:30:33 Speaker 1
Money towards better training and better equipment.
00:30:35 Speaker 2
Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I I agree.
00:30:40 Speaker 2
A lot of what you just said identified because and that's the right word to say, refund, you know reallocating the the amount that should be appropriately applied to the appropriate. You know, even I was even going to mention like maybe having one of the number one things to be trained on is diversity.
00:31:00 Speaker 2
Diversity training.
00:31:02 Speaker 2
Something that a lot of a lot of people are not very understanding how to approach because like for me I have a dual bachelors in accounting and business administration and one of the things we actually had as a class was diversity.
So I.
00:31:16 Speaker 2
How to approach somebody based on their ethnicity? How to talk to them? How to I have many people of color in my circle?
00:31:27 Speaker 2
The way you approach a child from among community could be completely different and approaching a a child from a black community you never you never pat them on the head. That's considered, you know, evil spirits or whatever based on their religions. You know, that's something that we we need to address. I mean, if that's something that they can do that.
00:31:34 Speaker 1
Right, right.
00:31:46 Speaker 2
Is a dire need.
00:31:48 Speaker 2
In understanding diversity on how to approach a scenario like that. So.
00:31:53 Speaker 1
I I I agree with that.
00:31:55 Speaker 1
Because I do think that there's a lot of, you know, like as an example, when I were in the Middle East, right, I'll, I'll white kid who grew up in Montana and know anything about Muslim culture and know anything about the Middle East. And so, you know, I was given classes to to help understand the culture I was going to be interacting in. And. And I think that that is important because we do have micro cultures all over the.
00:32:13 Speaker 1
United States but and and and actually, you know, as we were talking about earlier before the podcast, you know, some of those microcultures are actually what lead to an increase in human trafficking, which is an issue that needs.
00:32:24 Speaker 1
To be addressed.
00:32:25 Speaker 1
However, I also think that we need to do a better job of recruiting from communities that don't traditionally.
00:32:34 Speaker 1
Be themselves as as an example of police officer, in this case right? So.
00:32:38 Speaker 1
You know, rural America, you know, farm kid in Iowa is kind of raised in a way where they see themselves as being in the military or they see themselves as maybe being a police officer, where in the inner cities they're not. They're not getting that feedback.
00:32:58 Speaker 1
And let's face it, some of the best police officers in our country are uh men and women of color who understand the communities that they're policing.
00:33:11 Speaker 1
So there there's something to be said about educating people, but no amount of education that was given to me by the military or the CIA can ever help me to understand the Muslim community overseas in the way that somebody who grew up in that community understands it, that I think.
00:33:32 Speaker 1
I think the education piece is important, but I think it's a small piece. I think we need to do a better job of recruiting from those communities now recruiting from those communities doesn't start with like, oh, we're doing a job fair at the local high school. That's dumb, right? It goes. The recruiting piece should go into.
00:33:50 Speaker 1
Long term, right. So.
00:33:54 Speaker 1
It should be where kids in those communities see law enforcement officers in their schools regularly. They see them in their communities, having positive interactions regularly. They have law enforcement officers coming in and and talking to them about, hey, like you can do law enforcement officers who look like them.
00:34:14 Speaker 1
Who are from their neighborhoods?
00:34:16 Speaker 1
Maybe they don't live in their neighborhoods now, but they're from those neighborhoods coming in and saying, hey, you know, I had a tough childhood. I had whatever I I get you, I feel you. I know where you came from because I used to be you. In fact, I sat in that desk right over there because I went to this high school.
00:34:32 Speaker 1
And.
00:34:33 Speaker 1
This is what I did and now I'm this police officer. And let me tell you how great of a job this is and this is something you can do too. It's a generational process and I think that if we as a society decided that we were serious about, say, bringing more people of color into policing.
00:34:53 Speaker 1
Because I think that's the solution.
00:34:56 Speaker 1
I think it's you. You know who? Who do you want policing a county in rural Iowa? Probably somebody who grew up in that county in rural Iowa or or or something similar to it, and who do you want policing inner city Chicago. Probably somebody who grew up in that community because you.
00:35:15 Speaker 1
End up right, we we have this prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion, which is really important. And so the kid who grew up as an Eagle Scout in rural Iowa who is now policing inner city Chicago sees a kid do something stupid.
00:35:32 Speaker 1
You know, put graffiti on the side of a building.
00:35:34 Speaker 1
Or something like that.
00:35:36 Speaker 1
And doesn't understand because that's not the culture he came from. And so he disproportionately responds, well, a law enforcement officer who grew up in that community probably says, OK.
00:35:46 Speaker 1
Uh, we're going to go to local, you know, store and get some soap and some Scotch brites, and you're going to clean this off. And I better not see you doing it again.
00:35:59 Speaker 1
And so there's kind of a punishment, but it's nothing that affects that child's life.
00:36:04 Speaker 1
Term and and so I think we we have to start thinking about this generationally and not thinking about it through the lens of the current adult population. Think we have to actually go all the way down to grade school and start thinking about it generationally through the lens of the current child.
00:36:24 Speaker 1
Population and then that's how we actually solve these problems in a way that they will stay solved.
00:36:33 Speaker 2
I completely agree about that. Thank you for sharing. Excellent. That's a good piece to talk about as well. Maybe we can talk about any testimonies that you'd like to share, if there is any.
00:36:45 Speaker 2
I guess for example, like any stories that you like to bring to the spotlight, we can talk about it. Active missing persons that you're working on or that that kind of came across your desk. If you work with them directly or or how does that, how does that come to? Yeah.
00:36:57 Speaker 1
Sure. How does that work? So we have a centralized technology stack, so a bunch of different technologies that are involved in that.
00:37:08 Speaker 1
And.
00:37:09 Speaker 1
What we do is we give law enforcement free access to that. That's why donors are so important to us, because law enforcement again, we just talked about all the problems law enforcement don't have any money and it's not the law enforcement officers fault, it's the politicians fault for not properly funding these types of problems. And it's why.
00:37:28 Speaker 1
Politicians, let's just say they don't invite me to speak very often because they basically just point out how they're doing a bad job.
00:37:35 Speaker 1
So so we have created this platform that's for free, for law enforcement, and we not only give them training, what is human trafficking and what is not human trafficking, but also how to to use online tools. And then our tech stack in order to be able to coordinate cases across the country I mentioned.
00:37:55 Speaker 1
That law enforcement is not an episode of of CSI Miami earlier.
00:38:00 Speaker 1
And what I mean by that is law enforcement doesn't have the technical capability that people think they do, and they're not very well connected. So if you have, say, a a young girl who goes missing in Tampa, FL and she is now being, let's say, she's being trafficked in Oklahoma City.
00:38:19 Speaker 1
This is a real case.
00:38:20 Speaker 1
The Tampa Law Enforcement officer is not connected with the Oklahoma City Law enforcement officer.
00:38:26 Speaker 1
Unless they're feds and you're looking at, it's something like a 200 to one state and local to federal officer ratio. There's just not very many federal officers and they tend to be dealing with like the much bigger things and not that one missing child is not a is not a big issue, but they're trying to take down, say, a terrorist.
00:38:46 Speaker 1
Work or something, right? So they don't have time to focus on that one.
00:38:49 Speaker 1
Kid.
00:38:50 Speaker 1
So that's what we do is we tie all of these law enforcement departments and NGO select NGO's who who need the capability, we tie them all together within one centralized platform and the artificial intelligence and the platform will tell them if they have commonality in their cases, this phone number in your case is the same as this.
00:39:11 Speaker 1
Phone number in my case, let's talk so. So we basically create a permission list de facto federal task force out of state and local law enforcement officers and prosecutors. So that and prosecutors love us for the the work that we do. So it's.
00:39:28 Speaker 1
So that that's kind of how we do it. But one of the things I think it's important for your listeners to understand is how trafficking happens.
00:39:36 Speaker 1
So let's like let's.
00:39:38 Speaker 1
Let's nerd out on numbers and as a business administrator and and accountants I I know that you love numbers as much as I do so.
00:39:48 Speaker 1
In a five year period, you mentioned the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is a phenomenal, phenomenal organization. Our country quite frankly, owes them a debt of gratitude and owes John Walsh a debt of gratitude for for setting it up.
00:40:02 Speaker 1
The National Center for Missing Exploited Children in a five year period found that they had an 846% increase in suspected child trafficking cases.
00:40:13 Speaker 1
So think about that 846% increase in only five years.
00:40:18 Speaker 1
Why did that happen?
00:40:20 Speaker 1
Smartphones.
00:40:22 Speaker 1
Which are broadband connected micro computers that are in everybody's pocket that make it so that somebody can order a girl to a hotel room.
00:40:31 Speaker 1
For that's the same way that they can order a pizza and for about.
00:40:34 Speaker 1
The same price.
00:40:36 Speaker 1
So we've commoditized primarily women and girls.
00:40:39 Speaker 1
Yes, this happens to boys. And yes, this happens to men, but this is predominantly women and girls issue and so and and it's predominantly men who are driving the demand for those women and girls, right. It's not a woman who is ordering that girl to her hotel room. It's a man who's doing that right. And and who are those men?
00:41:00 Speaker 1
Predominantly upper middle class to wealthy.
00:41:03 Speaker 1
White.
00:41:05 Speaker 1
White collar jobs.
00:41:07 Speaker 1
That's that's who it is, right? That's. That's who the oppressor in this case is. And I I use the word oppressor very specifically because that's what they are doing to those young girls who get ordered up to their hotel room and so.
00:41:21 Speaker 1
How does that girl get there? Well, we go back to that 846% increase in suspected child trafficking that because of smartphones. So it used to be like us. I'm 46 years old. So when I grew up, it was the the wrong side of the tracks. There were the girls walking the streets, right? It was.
00:41:41 Speaker 1
And then everybody knew there was a creepy guy on the other side of town who would exploit people. And so parents would just keep their kids away from that guy. Well, now what we have done with smartphones and social media apps and the algorithms that kind of connect us.
00:41:57 Speaker 1
Well, it's math that's connecting us all.
00:42:01 Speaker 1
These algorithms are helping that creepy guy on the other side of town access every single child in the United States who has a smartphone.
00:42:11 Speaker 1
So what we did was we gave.
00:42:14 Speaker 1
Predators.
00:42:16 Speaker 1
Instead of only access to the prey that they could physically get in contact with, we now gave those predators access to all of the prey.
00:42:25 Speaker 1
And the algorithms within social media are their targeting platforms.
00:42:29 Speaker 1
So the reality of human trafficking in America today, and this is very important for your listeners to understand, is that it's not the white van with free candy going through the neighborhood that's going to abduct the child.
00:42:43 Speaker 1
It's.
00:42:44 Speaker 1
Your daughter being upset with you because you won't let her wear the miniskirt because she's trying to wear some age inappropriate clothing which I think and I grew up with three sisters at some point. This is all young girls, right?
00:42:55 Speaker 1
And and she. And in my day, she would go into her room and she would write angsty things in her journal and listen to some, you know, angsty music. And that was the end.
00:43:06 Speaker 1
Of.
00:43:06 Speaker 1
It today she gets on TikTok and makes a video saying she's mad at her dad or mad at her.
00:43:10 Speaker 1
Mom, for not letting her wear the miniskirt.
00:43:13 Speaker 1
And that trafficker slides right into her DMS and starts telling her all the things that she wants to hear, like, oh, that's just cause you're so pretty and your parents are trying to keep you from growing up. And hey, let me send you an Amazon gift card and.
00:43:28 Speaker 1
And manipulates her and befriends her, and grooms her over a period to weeks, months, sometimes years.
00:43:36 Speaker 1
And then convinces her to run away.
00:43:41 Speaker 1
Into the arms of somebody that she thinks cares for her but is really somebody who's going to exploit her, and then she becomes a missing person.
00:43:49 Speaker 1
So it doesn't work like it used to. It's not abductions anymore now. Does that still happen? Sure. But when you look also at the National Center for Missing, Exploited Children data, you find that.
00:44:00 Speaker 1
Of their missing children, cases in 2022.0001% of those cases were stranger abductions.
00:44:11 Speaker 1
92% of those cases are what they call endangered runaways.
00:44:16 Speaker 1
And most of those endangered runaways were groomed online and convinced to run away by somebody that they thought was going to take care of them. Right. Who's going to going to answer all of their questions and fill that essentially God sized.
00:44:33 Speaker 1
From their heart. So when you start looking at at at how that young girl is trafficked, how she shows up to the hotel room in the 1st place, it's incredibly important to understand that it's the Internet that makes all of that happen to include the initial recruiting. Now, I've heard some parents go in the absolute.
00:44:53 Speaker 1
Stream and that's why I don't get my children access to the Internet and like, well, that's like saying that you're not going to teach your children to.
00:45:00 Speaker 1
Read and the modern.
00:45:01 Speaker 1
Environment your children have to have access to the Internet. They have to be able to make good choices around the Internet. It it's it's akin to parents saying that, well, I'm going to keep my children under my roof and not let them talk to anybody because I'm afraid they might be exposed to drugs. Well, eventually, they're going to leave.
00:45:21 Speaker 1
And they will be exposed to drugs, 100% chance that happens. So how do we educate them so that when that does happen, they can make the best decision? And if they do make a mistake, they can come to us and we can help them fix that mistake?
00:45:37 Speaker 1
The Internet is exactly the same thing. It's the new drugs, if you will, and every single child has access to it or will have access to it. Every young girl will at some point be solicited online or will have some creepy guy coming in and and.
00:45:57 Speaker 1
Into their DMS and trying to solve all their problems. So we need to make sure to educate them how to properly deal with those situations.
00:46:05 Speaker 1
And how to, if they do make a mistake, they do send a photo that they wish they wouldn't have sent. How to actually work with us as parents or work with authority figures?
00:46:16 Speaker 1
To solve that problem.
00:46:19 Speaker 2
Absolutely. I always pronounce them Nick Mack as a nick. Yeah. So Nick, nick. Uh, a lot of things that are coming out with the.
00:46:31 Speaker 2
The programs and the the awareness it like from 16 dealing with the OR.
Yeah.
00:46:38 Speaker 1
Sextortion, they call that.
00:46:39 Speaker 2
Extortion.
Yeah.
00:46:41 Speaker 2
And they did that for children. I mean, you know, let me see that. Oh, come on. You know, or whichever coursing them to do it. And they think, oh, well, you know, they're not going to share.
00:46:51 Speaker 2
It or it's just.
00:46:53 Speaker 2
It's just one pig. What? What's what is it going to do? And it it does more damage. And that's where that can lead to. And and in their lives because of the embarrassment or the shame that comes out of that. So we're getting shoveling.
00:47:06 Speaker 1
Or getting trafficked, you know that.
00:47:08 Speaker 1
That.
00:47:09 Speaker 1
That's pretty common. And so I think it's also important for us as parents to not be so judgmental.
00:47:16 Speaker 1
I mean, thank God, smartphones and the Internet did not exist when I was growing up because there's no evidence of a lot of.
00:47:23 Speaker 1
The stuff that I did.
00:47:24 Speaker 2
Yes, exactly.
00:47:25 Speaker 1
And so children have it so much harder today. They they have so so many more problems that they have to be.
M.
00:47:35 Speaker 1
Able that that.
00:47:36 Speaker 1
They that they have to deal with that we never had to deal with. So as parents, it's important for us to educate ourselves but also not be so judgmental and understand that that.
00:47:46 Speaker 1
There are. There are problems that children today have had to deal with that no children in history have ever had to deal with, and those problems are created by the Internet.
00:47:58 Speaker 1
And so, you know, if you or I, when we were growing up, if there was a photo that we didn't want to get out, there was probably just one photo.
00:48:05 Speaker 1
Go and we could burn that photo. We could throw it away. We could destroy it now. Right. And it was very difficult to replicate that photo. I remember back in the day when you had to order like you. You know, you had to order copies from Walgreens. You had to tell them how many copies of a photo you wanted, right, like, oh, there's five of my friends. So I guess I'll take 5 copies, right? I mean, that that was, that was a hard process. And it took a week.
00:48:27 Speaker 1
To then get them back. Now it's instantaneous. It can, and it can be replicated for no cost across the entire globe.
00:48:37 Speaker 1
In seconds.
00:48:39 Speaker 1
No child population has ever had to grow up in those circumstances, and so it's important for us, I think as parents, to not be so judgmental when kids do make a mistake and instead say, OK, I made mistakes too. When I was young, however, the consequences of the current environment.
00:49:00 Speaker 1
Are significantly higher than they ever were when we were growing up, and so we need to help them solve those problems as fast as possible. And because I know people are gonna ask, well, if my child does something, what do I do? Let's Tim get all the way back to our original part of our conversation. You call law enforce.
Right.
00:49:15 Speaker 1
You call your County Sheriff, you call your your Police Department, you call the FBI, you call Department of Homeland Security, you call everybody and you don't stop calling them until somebody answers you and starts taking your case seriously. And. And luckily, law enforcement officers in this day and age, for the most part, there's always exceptions. But for the most part, they take this issue.
00:49:35 Speaker 1
Very seriously. They know what to do and they will immediately take action. And not only do you want to contact law enforcement, but if your child does send a photo to somebody that they probably shouldn't have sent the other organization that you want to immediately contact as the National Center for Missing and Exploited.
00:49:54 Speaker 1
And you want to tell them what's going on, they will do what's called a hat. They will create a hash of the photo, which is essentially the mathematical algorithm of the photo. So not the actual photo. And then they will then enter that into a series of software that a lot of companies have that will make sure that if somebody tries to say.
00:50:13 Speaker 1
Share that photo on Facebook or Instagram or something. It will automatically catch it and strip it out.
00:50:19 Speaker 2
Wow, that's good. Detailing this information that I did not know about. But thank you for sharing.
00:50:25 Speaker 2
That because that's something.
00:50:27 Speaker 2
Again, like someone would not know until it does happen, we we're we're trying to prevent from getting to the point of this happening, but to know.
00:50:36 Speaker 2
That there are.
00:50:38 Speaker 2
Things already set in place, so that's.
00:50:42 Speaker 2
That's very.
00:50:42 Speaker 1
Kids are going to make mistakes. We need to create. We need to create solutions for those mistakes and not just say, well, these are the consequences. I'm sorry. They're life altering.
00:50:44 Speaker 2
Oh, of course.
Exactly.
00:50:52 Speaker 2
Exactly, exactly. You have an app called deliver funds, human trafficking safeguard. And how can how can people access this?
00:51:03 Speaker 2
If they are interested.
So.
00:51:05 Speaker 1
Yeah, you just go to the Apple Store or Google Play store if you have an Android and search deliver fund that's DELIVER fund or you can search HT safeguard. It stands for human trafficking. Safeguard. Just download the app. It costs $1.99 month in order to access the data. But what it does is we collect.
00:51:27 Speaker 1
Commercial sex advertisements off the Internet and we clean it up and and and make it so that it's queryable. So if you have a phone number of somebody that you think is a little bit sketchy or an e-mail address, you can actually search it in that app and you can see whether or not that phone number or e-mail address is tied to a commercial.
00:51:46 Speaker 1
X advertisement and if it is, then you know that you can do some further investigating to find out whether or not that's somebody you want to continue.
00:51:54 Speaker 1
To interact with.
00:51:56 Speaker 2
Wow, that's great.
00:51:57 Speaker 1
Or you want to have your child continue to interact with.
00:51:59 Speaker 2
Right, exactly. Exactly. But yeah, that's that's amazing. Wow. Wow. Now if.
00:52:07 Speaker 2
People wanted to contribute to your cause or share information about your organization. Are you able to provide like, links, resources, your contact number, or person in general who they can just anything that you could share would be great to the listeners and how they can reach out and contribute their to your cause.
00:52:25 Speaker 1
So the best way to get a hold of us is going to be through our website, whichisdeliverfund.org. There's a donate button on there, so if you have some extra capital that you want to invest in the fight against human trafficking where we're darn good use of that of that money, and then we also have resources for training and.
00:52:45 Speaker 1
And different things in order to help people learn more about human trafficking and then follow us on social media. So we're at deliver fund on all the social media platforms and I'm at the.nickandic.net.
00:52:59 Speaker 1
Mainly on all the social media platforms and we put up a lot of information there. So you know if you follow us, you'll get a you'll get a daily little snippet of human trafficking education in your feed.
00:53:12 Speaker 2
That's awesome. Thank you. I'm deeply following you. If I haven't already. Thank you so much again, Nick. It's been an honor to speaking with you.
00:53:16 Speaker 1
Well, thank you.
00:53:22 Speaker 1
I thank thank you.
00:53:23 Speaker 1
For having me, I appreciate you.
You.
Creators and Guests
