Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1517 - Nancy Panza
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T19:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1517 - Nancy Panza' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1517 - Nancy Panza' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1517 - Nancy Panza

Hello Nancy. Hi Joe. How are you? I am doing well. Thanks for being here. Thank
you for having me.
Thanks for letting me come and talk. My pleasure. So tell everybody what you do.
So I am well my day
job I'm a professor in the psychology department at Cal State Fullerton and in
my side gig I am a
forensic and police psychologist. That is a very appropriate subject for the
strange times we find
ourselves in right now. Indeed. So as you are watching all this play out from
the George Floyd murder to
where we're at right now what what has this been like for you since this is
your field of study?
It's a weird place to be in. You're kind of for me caught in between two worlds
it seems. I mean my
job is to take care of police officers so keep them healthy keep them well to
make sure that they
can do a good job doing their jobs. And so the first thing I see is we got a
mess on our hands.
For me when I see a lot of the videos that end up you know on on TV my initial
reaction is well
let's have a look is there something really to be upset about here and well
obviously in seeing the
the video of George Floyd's murder there's a whole lot to be upset about here
and so you know heartache
comes from that. And then my you know my next response is to kick in is okay we've
we've got
problems on both sides. We need to not only figure out why such things are
happening and prevent them
because that's not good. Nobody wants bad policing. Even the police don't want
bad policing.
On the other hand how do we also take care of our officers who are out there
who now have to go out
and continue doing their jobs in a really difficult and overwhelming
environment?
Yeah it's such a strange time because on one hand you you got all these people
that are calling out
for defunding the police. And you know this is here's a point of view that Ben
Shapiro had when he
talked about the protests he said um he said saying they're mostly peaceful
protests is like saying
OJ Simpson had a mostly peaceful day when he killed Nicole Simpson because he
was only violent for a
couple minutes. The rest of the day he was it was mostly peaceful and he's like
that's a good way to
describe the protests. I think you could also say the same thing about the
police department. The police
department and police officers are mostly good people doing a good job but the
problem is when
one out of all these millions of interactions when one goes bad or there's a
bad officer people see
that they highlight that and then they say this is the cops these are the cops.
I don't think that's
true. I've met a lot of great police officers. I know a lot and it's an
insanely difficult job. I don't
think they get paid enough. I don't think they get respected enough. I don't
think they get trained
well enough. I had Jocko Willink on here who's a former Navy SEAL commander and
his perspective is
very clear. He's like they do not train enough. He goes if I was in control
they would be trained 20%
of their time. 20% of their week would be spent in training. De-escalation
drills, safety drills,
how to handle things if one of your partners is losing his cool. All sorts of
drills that they should be
doing that they do do in the Navy SEALs that they should be doing in the police
department as well.
Yep. I listened to your podcast with Jocko on it and I was I was blown actually
I listened to it twice.
I listened to it the first time I was like yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I loved
everything that he had to
say. He's a real leader. He's so good. He's so good and his idea about training
was I mean I'm in full
agreement and full the 20% training thing would be would be super hard
especially now where we are
because money's going away not coming in because that would mean 20% of the
force would be off
training and we'd need that many more officers and that many people on duty you
know to fill in the
active role. So you know while that would be a dream and I think he's right all
those skills that
you need if you're not actively you know if you're not actively training and
keeping them up to par
they're going to they're going to go away. They're going to decay. But on top
of what he said the
piece where I was like yeah but let me come in and talk with you too is is that
you know he thinks like
the warrior that he is you know Navy SEAL super tough guy talking about
firearms and he's right the
firearms training is probably not enough. But what's even more so especially in
today's world and society is that
when you look at the um the makeup of a police academy training you know first
of all it's it's
so short and and they do they get field training after that for a long period
of time and so that
that's good it balances it out. But the content of the academy you know by far
most of that time
and training is spent learning laws learning that kind of textbook of of what
it is to be a cop and
how to function and then the other parts there's the physical training and the
firearms training.
But if you look at what happens once a police officer gets out there on the job
and what they're
doing a huge percentage of it is in communicating and there is almost none
almost none.
You know the example I think of it comes to mind most when I prior to being at
Cal State Fullerton
I was a faculty member at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and
so in the city we worked
we did some trainings with the NYPD and we had a contract to do de-escalation
training.
So when the recruits are coming through the academy they would come over to
John Jay and we would have
police trainers and and us the psychologists would come in and we had these
wonderful actors who
are trained to portray individuals with mental illness and we did this
interactive de-escalation
training. Teach them how to talk to somebody how to what do you say that's
going to help bring
someone down as opposed to and it was this you know okay ready here goes this
training scenario we pull
these rookies up who are scared to death give them like a block gun say okay go
like wood block not a real
weapon you know go to it and engage this individual and our actors are were
brilliant and portray these
individuals with mental illness wonderfully and you know inevitably they'd come
in hot and things you
know screaming erupts and the the rookies going for their gun and we're like
okay okay okay hold up stop
let's talk about what just happened from the psychology side we kind of
explained here's what's going on
here's why that didn't work with this type of individual the police tack you
know would come in
on the tactics side and we'd say okay rewind do over and then we would run them
through the scenario and
we would keep stopping and starting in this interactive like hands-on training
by the end of the day
they were like i learned more today than i learned in the last two months yeah
but we got them for
one day right six hours and then that's it you know so that whole constant
training and giving the
skills not just the firearms and the tactics and the you know how to use force
properly but also
the communication and dealing with these stressful situations and and distressed
individuals because
that is what they do non-stop day in and day out yeah i i know what you're
saying when you were
talking about how difficult it would be to actually have them train 20 of the
time right but i don't
think it's difficult enough that we should ignore it i think that i think if
obviously i'm never going to
be in control but if i was in control i would say that's how it's got to be we
have to hire more people
we need i think they need way more people way better training and i think there
also has to be
evaluations in terms of like how are they dealing with stress because it's not
just how to deescalate
how to deal with a situation with with a possible criminal but also how are you
dealing with the
fact that every time you go to work you might get shot you might not ever come
home to your family how
many times do you see suicides how many times you see murders how many times
you see car accidents and
other all that stuff weighs on a person absolutely and all those police
officers that see that stuff
every day depending entirely upon and that's one of the things jocko talked
about their psychological
makeup he talked about it with uh soldiers that some soldiers can see some
crazy and be like
it's okay i'm good to go and then other soldiers like i'm up i don't know what
to do here i
i have anxiety i can't sleep i'm a nervous wreck same thing is true for for
cops some folks are they
can go through you know have the worst call that you could imagine death gore
you know loss of a
child's life i mean these things are are horrific and they see it and you know
they they react and
it's awful but they recover and and and they're okay the next day and then you
know on the opposite
hand you've got somebody who has maybe a less intense or you know a less
horrific call and it just
puts them over the edge and you know from the psychology side you know we've
studied this we've looked at
this what how can we tell is there a way we can predict you know what type of
event what type of
person who who is likely to to to fall apart to end up with you know post-traumatic
stress disorder
can we tell who's likely to develop but you know a clinical syndrome later and
and the the shorter
answer is we can't there are some things that that we know and obviously you
know some of them are
really logical if you're in a higher state of stress if you've already got
vulnerabilities going in
you're you know going through a divorce at home and unhappy on the job and
drinking too much outside
and you've got all these other things that are already you know festering
underneath and then
you also are put in front of that you know it's not surprising that that maybe
that would push
somebody over the edge into a really troubling place but other times you know
it's really hard
thing to predict and so instead we need to be there and be on it and there i
mean there's so many things
that can add in about you know how we do that in in ways that we're really
falling short which is kind
of my my passion and where i am these days in trying to do a much better job of
being on you know what
we would call officer wellness because we've historically done a really shitty
job is there
a standard procedure like when someone comes back from say witnessing a murder
is there a standard
way that they interact with them across all police departments or is it
depending upon the department
and what set up the sheriff or the the police chief has put in place yeah very
much depending on the
department and what they put in place so when it comes to like the mental
health and psychology that
the things that we do with departments are it's it's very standard these days
like i would i think
the numbers show about 80 90 sorry 98 percent of departments do a pre-employment
uh psychological
evaluation before they're hired that's what i spend the majority of my time
doing is is screening
people who are starting the job so that part is very normal to do and i can
tell you all about
that process beyond that what happens from there on out is very much up in the
air depends on the
department some departments require a what we would call a you know a critical
incident debriefing
so some of the agencies that i work with will if if somebody is involved or
there's a major incident
every officer who is on scene there will come in and do a debriefing with me or
with another
psychologist to check in afterwards and a lot of that is just where are they
how are they in this in
this moment are they okay to go home are they safe how do you determine
education is it just a judgment
call it is it's a judgment call um and the ones that i've done i would say most
of the time it feels
pretty clear-cut most of the time folks are either they're doing all right they're
a little shaken up
which is normal i mean anybody who experiences something