Has the FBI Always Been Corrupt? | 1 Ex-Mafia Boss vs 20 Cops Surrounded Follow-Up

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Surrounded 46 min 4 speakers 5 chapters transcribed
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What influences public perception of the FBI?

Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 0:00
In this day and age, all of us, no matter who you are, we're influenced by the information we take in. Take into account that very often the people alleging the so-called political motivation of the FBI are themselves hyper-partisan.
Heather (Veteran Police Officer) 0:15
Now, if we want to talk what happened with ICE in Minnesota, what I can say is that in New Jersey, we're not supposed to shoot at moving vehicles unless we have no other avenue of escape, right? Underneath the Constitution, underneath the Fourth Amendment, when we place somebody under arrest or we're holding onto them and they're in our custody, it's our job to make sure that they're okay, regardless of whether or not they're a good person or a bad person or they've made bad decisions. It's our responsibility.
Host 0:44
All right, let's get into this. I'm here with Tom from Surrounded. Tom, welcome back into a less combative environment, but welcome back in the Jubilee universe. How are you doing?
Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 0:59
I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Host 1:00
What is your memory like from your exchange with Michael in Surrounded? That was probably one of the more contested exchanges of the session.
Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 1:15
Yeah, it didn't start off that way. It started off friendly enough, but as it went on, I mean, he has strong viewpoints and And there were some things I felt inclined to push back on and it went from there.
Host 1:33
Yeah. And for anyone listening to this, do you mind kind of elaborating on your experience in law enforcement? Because that was something that came across that I thought was really interesting is you have, you know, you worked with the FBI, but you've had relationships with police officers. So you really have like a broad amount of just touch points with law enforcement in America. Do you mind covering that or breaking that down?
Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 2:05
Sure. Yeah, I was an FBI agent for 23 years. I retired in 2020, at the beginning of that year. And I worked a variety of assignments in my bureau career, all in the LA office. And I never worked organized crime, so his experiences being the subject of an organized crime investigation by the FBI in the 80s in New York, I obviously have no knowledge of that and didn't work that violation. But I was married for a dozen years to an LAPD officer, a detective. She was a patrol officer when we first met. But in the course of my FBI career, I worked in several task force environments. And getting a sense of... The sort of varying cultures, every law enforcement agency has its own culture. And even within an agency, to use LAPD as an example, you know, there are a number of geographic divisions in the LAPD, what in New York we call precincts.
Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 3:20
a perception people have of law enforcement as one monolithic block, but it isn't so. There are differences between the East Coast and the West Coast, how certain things are done, attitudes, training varies. And above all, the operational experience of agencies vary. And Police agencies are shaped by those experiences, shaped by the things that go right, by the things especially that go wrong, by controversy, and are ever-changing. I think it's important for people to remember that law enforcement is not a static organization. monolithic beast, but one that is responding, responding to society, responding to the expectations of society. When I started in the FBI, for example, the FBI didn't record interviews.
Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 4:24
And it stemmed from an era where it was just understood that if an agent testified, the jury would accept their testimony, that that wouldn't be Questioned in any way. It was just a sort of a given.

How does hyper-partisanship affect trust in law enforcement?

Tom (Retired FBI Agent) 4:42
And meanwhile, at the same time, local agencies had long ago begun recording interviews. And it's only in recent years, towards the end of my career, that we started recording interviews. And that's now gone. I'm not sure where it is exactly now, but it's moving to be sort of the standard because juries are evolving too. They respond to what they see in the news. They respond to what they see in media. The show CSI was very popular for a number of years, and it led to something called the CSI effect, where jurors came in with an expectation that police forensic science had all the capabilities that they saw on TV.

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