Welcome back to Looking Outside.Okay, this is really cool.Joining me on the show today is former LAPD detective, Greg Kading.
We're going to dive into the world of a detective, what it's like to be a detective, the process of digging towards the truth, how a more in-depth understanding of and perhaps influence over human behavior helps an investigation, and of course, the future of police work.
So a huge welcome to the show, Greg.Hey, Greg.
Been there.Thanks for having me.
Thank you so much for coming on.If you don't mind, a little intro into who you are.
I'm a retired detective from the Los Angeles Police Department.I retired back in 2010.It's been 14 years.After I did a 25-year career, I started out with the Sheriff's Department down in Orange County.
Then after a few years, I decided to go and work up in Los Angeles.And that was my kind of professional journey.And then personally, I have a wife I've been married to for And I think 40 years forever.
And then I have a 33 year old son and a couple of dogs.
Are you still living in LA?
I live about 50 miles east of Los Angeles in a town called Rancho Cucamonga.So it's a suburb of Los Angeles, but it's still a considerable distance away from downtown.
Awesome.Great.And you're joining us from Kansas, so thank you for making the time to do that.Absolutely.
I'm visiting a close friend of mine out in Kansas City, and we've been staying here for a few days just catching up and eating barbecue.
Yeah, sounds perfect.So one thing I wanted to ask you right off the bat was, you said you retired 14 years ago and you were in the police force for 25 years.So 14 years is a really long time.
Do you feel like you still have your detective or police hat on?How easy is it to remove that from your day-to-day life?
That's a really individual question because some people can retire and just completely walk away and move on to their next chapter in life.
But there's also a lot of guys in my profession that so much of their identity, personal identity is built on their professional identity.They still wear the cop hat a lot.
I had no problem walking away, but I did stay within the same professional pursuit because I became a private investigator.
So I was still conducting investigations to a certain degree, but just in different settings than I would have been as a professional detective with the police department.
Are you still doing the private investigations? So, I mean, PI, LAPD detective, these are two professions that are very glamorous, I think, at least in how they're portrayed in movies.
There's definitely like an allure in the portrait of these two professions.What's the reality behind that?Like, is it more gritty than how it's usually portrayed?
Definitely within law enforcement, there's a whole lot more bureaucracy and red tape and the type of things that you don't see necessarily portrayed on television or in movies.So it does appear to be more glamorous when Hollywood gets involved.
It's a lot of monotony, requires a lot of patience.You watch programs and you get people get returns on their DNA tests overnight, instantaneous. All of that is not exactly the way it actually is.
In the private investigative field, there's a lot more liberty.It's a lot more freedom to go out and do things without having to answer to supervisors or get involved in any type of bureaucratic red tape.
There's benefits and there's some pros and cons to both worlds.
a lot more freedom when you're a PI.I can imagine that a lot of the things that you did when you were in the LAPD were regimented by the protocols and the policies of that particular department or division.
Is that also quite unique versus the different types of state-based police structures, like a New York department would operate slightly differently to an LA department?
Yeah, there are some differences between different major law enforcement agencies.New York, because of their both logistical settings and geographic settings, might be different than Los Angeles.
New York has almost three times the number of police officers than Los Angeles does because it's a much more denser setting.Los Angeles is much bigger and spread out.So there are some of these little nuances that us to police differently.
So it all depends and the size of the departments make a huge difference because smaller departments don't have the type of resources that the larger departments do.
So those are all the things that you have to accept and deal with depending on where and who you work for.
The LAPD and doing police work in LA, because of the proximity to Hollywood and filmmaking and everything, I know now you're a lot more involved in that world with some of the documentaries that you've been a part of.
And that's actually, for those interested, that's how I spotted Greg.I was watching the documentary about the Hotel Cecile.So my husband and I were watching it and every time you came on, we're like, Oh, I love that guy.
He's just like cutting straight through the bullshit and. Like everything that you were saying was so insightful.
If I can imagine that you get those sorts of opportunities a lot more, obviously now that's a bigger part of your life, particularly with the book that you've written and the appearances that you make.
But was it also a part of your life when you were on the force or are those things quite separate?
Quite separate.I never had aspirations of being a writer or getting involved in documentary filmmaking.
Any of those things never really crossed my mind until the very end of my career when I felt compelled to tell the story of what we had discovered in the murders of the investigations of Tupac and Biggie.
But then that led me to this whole new world of storytelling. And began to immerse myself in those, with those people in those settings that kind of opened up these new opportunities.And I really enjoy it.
I enjoy all of the components of storytelling and documentary filmmaking.
And it's very public, private investigations and detective work.It feels like that is behind the curtain, behind closed doors type of work, where you're very careful about what you say and what you reveal, particularly to the media.
Whereas now it feels like you're in a state of your life where it's almost the opposite, where it's much more public and you're very openly telling the stories of some of these things that have taken place.So what's, how has that shift been for you?
I always felt truth ought to be shared at all times, whenever reasonably possible.I understand within investigations, there's times where you just don't disclose information.It can have negative effects on your investigations.
And then also there's expectations when you're on the job.If they're unsolved cases, you just don't really speak about it, unless you need the public's help.
But more often than not, the police department expect you to keep things professional and keep things confidential, that when you no longer have those. requirements, then you can speak freely.
But you also need to maintain some element of respect for protecting people's privacy and not trying to attack people without good cause.
All of the interviews that I've listened to where you've relayed the Tupac and the Biggie Smalls case, you've been very fact-led.It's actually got nothing to do with you, Greg, as a person.
It's very much factual to the case and to the investigation and what's been uncovered and bringing the facts to life. And that's a really interesting case.
Obviously, that's the book that you wrote about is being a part of that task force that helped to bring the truth of what happened in those murders.
And I didn't want to dig into that too much in the podcast, because I feel like there are people who have done it much better than I could.And I'll definitely link that.
My favorite one was with Brian Callan on the Off Limits podcast, where you were going through all of the evidence and talking about the case quite methodically.So that was really interesting.I'll definitely link that. into the show notes.
But the bits that I found really interesting when you were talking about that case was the human aspect of the investigation, like how you were able to bring the truth out of people and how do you maybe use your instinct as a detective to say, oh, maybe that maybe we didn't dig into this area enough.
Maybe we need to go back to that or how things are connected to one another.Is that a very much a kind of a learned skill and an instinct that you build over time to be able to do that?
Yeah, I think so.I believe so, yeah.
You evolve as you are learning how to conduct investigations and using your experiences with interviewing people and collecting information and all of those things, you hopefully continue to get better at them and more
effective at them, but you have to allow yourself the opportunity to learn and grow.You don't just get a detective badge and all of a sudden you know how to be an effective investigator.It's a learned skill.
The most important thing is maintaining objectivity in any investigation, not having preconceived notions about what the truth might be because that can lead you to different confirmation biases and
We've seen that happen over and over again in investigations where an investigator develops a theory and then they get themselves entranced by their own theory and then only start to interpret information to support their preconceived ideas and then they dismiss all the information that actually works against their theory and it can be very dangerous.
It's why oftentimes innocent people get convicted or guilty people you know, never face justice.So that's the most important thing, is just maintaining an absolute demand for objectivity.
What you said just then is also just so relevant inside of the business world as well, because we are often on this mission of let's just prove that this is the right direction that we're going in, but we've already made up our minds.
Obviously bigger consequences inside of a crime investigation, but remaining objective, really letting the facts guide you, being curious throughout that process, calling your own bias.
Like how many cases do you feel like it took you to really feel like you had this down pat?
There's always room for improvement as an investigator, especially with technology changing and the ability to kind of see things differently than perhaps our predecessors.
So you have to incorporate all of the resources, technologically speaking, that are available to us today that weren't always available to us in the past. And then a lot of it has to do with the way that you're trained.
Your training officer has to instill in you these important values of objectivity.
And so a lot of it has to do with who were your mentors as investigators, who were the guys that kind of took you by the hand and taught you how to inspect a crime scene, taught you how to conduct interviews and interrogations, taught you how to see
different things through different points of view.So it's all a culmination of these different approaches.
I think it's also how you're rewarded, right?Because if you're rewarded on let's save time and money on an investigation and get a really quick result, then maybe that's also perpetuating that kind of bad behavior that's not as objective.
So did you find that was the case in detective work and in the LAPD that the reward was really around a great investigation process versus the end outcome?
No, I think it's both.You need a great investigative process.I don't remember ever feeling like there was a overriding pressure to solve something quickly.
And then therefore you do sloppy work because you're just so intent on solving it as quickly as possible.Because that is not the way to conduct an investigation.
And you're going to make mistakes if you're allowing time to dictate how you're going to conduct an investigation. I never felt that was a common problem within the LAPD.
We always had the, for lack of a better term, luxury of taking these things one step at a time at our own pace, trying to do a really good, comprehensive, thorough job without having this pressure that you need to get this solved quickly.
And more so when you moved into cold cases, or was it a very similar process despite the fact that the case was cold?
Well, yeah, with cold cases, people have already forgotten about them.So there certainly is no pressure to solve them in any kind of accelerated way.
Question might be asked, like when I got on this Biggie Smalls case, there was a looming civil case against the city of Los Angeles.So there was this external pressure to try to get this thing solved.
that we weren't given like a deadline, but it took us three years from the time we began the cold case investigation.It took us three years to get to the truth of the matter behind the murders of both Biggie and Tupac.
But because of this external pressure of this lawsuit, maybe that was unique, but it's unique because most of these cases are enduring some type of external scrutiny.
throughout the process of an investigation, then I know that in another podcast, what you said was it's around forming a hypothesis and either proving or disproving that hypothesis.
So that's a really very scientific way of approaching an investigation, which feels like it would naturally remove. bias that might come into the process.
But what are some other triggers that you would look out for throughout an investigation where you're like, oh, maybe I'm getting a little bit or I'm seeing in other people bias or that lack of objectivity come in?
Within reason, all things are possible.If there's competing theories, it's like the scientific method.You approach it trying to disprove your theory.Then if you can't disprove your theory, then it's most likely true.
Or at least you can go through a process of elimination, getting the theory that has the most credibility.But it's the same approach as the scientific method.You have a hypothesis, you try to disprove it.
And if you can disprove it, then you no longer spend any time promoting that as a possibility.So that was our approach.There was several competing theories about who killed Biggie Smalls.
One being my predecessor, Russell Poole, had developed a theory, but he was making that critical mistake of losing objectivity.And he just had a theory that he wanted to be true, and therefore he put
all of his interpretative effort into seeing everything in a certain way, a subjective approach as opposed to an object approach.
That can obviously lead to either a manipulation of the data or maybe just a misrepresentation of them.Obviously it runs a lot of risks, but in approaching a cold case, you start with reopening where the case ended.
Have you had any cold cases where you open that file and it's like, well, shit, there's nothing in here, nothing to work with.
Yeah.And oftentimes in cold cases, everything has been exhausted.
And so you have to start thinking in unconventional means where if the cops before you, whoever had conducted the investigation, if they've checked all the boxes of your typical investigative process, then you try to reinvent something new in order to open up some new doors or to turn over some new information.
But you should never start where they stopped.As a cold case investigator, you don't start where they stopped.You start where they started.And that way you can see whether or not they did follow all of the reasonable investigative steps.
Because if you just start where they stopped, you don't know if they've made mistakes.
Or missed something, missed an avenue of investigation.
Right, that's really interesting.And I can imagine a lot of that then goes back to the conversations or interrogations that took place and whether some people were spoken to or not spoken to or how thoroughly that interrogation took place.
So that's the other thing that I wanted to ask you about.And probably the most common question that people would have is, How do you know if someone's hiding something or lying?
There are certain cues, maybe physical cues or facts up your sleeve that you can tell that, oh, they're not telling me that.So something's off.
So there's different red flags.Obviously, body language is a big factor in trying to determine if somebody's being deceptive.
And then you use information that you already have that you can use to cross-examine people when they're providing you information to see if what they are saying matches up to other known facts.And so it's a culmination of things.
There's a lot of psychology that goes into it. And you try to find out where people are vulnerable.And you have them tell you the story over and then see whether or not there's variances in their story.
And then you have to find out why those variances exist.There's a lot of different components to interrogating or interviewing somebody.But one of the most important things is you just let people talk.
Try not to control the conversation within reason.Just allow people to talk because detectives have a horrible tendency to want to prove to that person how much they know and be in a position of intellectual superiority.
And it's not good when you're conducting an interview.There's this famous old detective, television detective named Columbo.And he always portrayed himself as a bumbling idiot.
Which causes other people to be disarmed.Because if you allow people to think that they're the smartest person in the room, they're more likely going to be inclined to talk.And that's all you want.You want people to keep talking.
I'm so happy that you brought up Columbo.He is my favorite detective of all time.I have seen every single episode of Columbo.And Columbo's, you know, stick of like, just one more thing.Oh, just on the fly.
I've just thought of one other thing that I want to ask.You're irritating people a little bit.It probably disarms them as well.Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, we call it the Colombo method.
So then, how about those people that are coming into an interrogation and maybe they're a little bit more clued in on the detective process and they're playing games with you, mind games or other, how do you cut through that bullshit?
You just allow them to.If they feel like they need to be the smartest guy in the room, by all means, be the smartest guy in the room.
You got to eliminate your ego from it and just be patient and try to the best of your ability not to get into a conflict or an argument.Because again, you just want people to expose themselves.
And oftentimes, if you let people talk, they will without even knowing. or be giving you information.So it's really about trying to just be humble and honest.I think honesty, for the most part, is also really important.
But we also will use investigative techniques that are not entirely honest, such as we conduct investigative releases.
We'll tell somebody, for instance, this individual identified you as being at the scene of a crime, when in fact nobody's ever said that to us.But it's just one of the techniques that we might use is to provide
misleading information in order to get honest information.
And I know, again, in the Biggie Smalls case, you did that with the letter that was written up.
Which seems like such a great tactic, right?Because if you are innocent and you, for example, you weren't there at the time, it's something that you would irrefutably deny.I definitely was not there.So that seems like a really great tactic.
And it's within the rule book, right?Like you're allowed to do that.
Yeah, it's absolutely allowed.It's practiced quite often.It's just part of the investigative process that sometimes you utilize those type of tactics.
And in this instance, when you're speaking of it paid off because we suspected that she knew something.And then when she thought that we knew more than she did, that's when she began to open up and divulge her involvement.
And again, in that case of just listening and allowing the truth to come out with just like a little nudge and a little prod.
So I can imagine then sometimes you've been in interrogations or even just throughout an investigation when you're speaking with people who are truly evil and have done really, really terrible things.
How do you control your emotions in that kind of time?
Yeah, you have to remove your own personal judgments to the best of your ability.Because when people feel judged, they'll get defensive. You'll know if you're talking to a sociopath because they're showing no human emotion, good, bad, or indifferent.
So you do get the sense when you're talking with somebody quite quickly whether or not you're just dealing with somebody who just is a sociopath and doesn't recognize the harm that they've done.
You do have the sociopath, and then you do have people who are born and raised in a situation where things are almost out of their control, particularly with some of the gangs that you were investigating and obviously just living in L.A.
The Hotel Cecile documentary shown a lot of light on this as well as like pockets inside of L.A.that are a little bit more destitute and people are born into these environments and grow up in these environments and feel, at least feel,
Maybe they actually don't have a choice but feel like they don't have a choice.
How did you distinguish between somebody who was trying to make the right decisions and was just caught up in a bad situation versus someone who actually had ill intention?
You're somewhat empathetic to people that have been subjected to an environment where they're surrounded by these bad influences, whether it's gangs or drugs or broken homes, broken families, all of those things, you try to have some empathy.
When people make bad decisions, oftentimes it's because they just didn't have the right, the right values were never instilled into them.And so you take that into consideration, but then there's the people who,
They're just bad, you know, they're just bad people.They just have no remorse for the things that they've done or the harm that they've done.And there's an intellect issue here.People are just really simple because they're uneducated.
They've got very little life experience and they don't understand the consequences of their actions until it's too late.
The empathy piece is, I think, a really important one because I can imagine that you dealt with a lot of young people who were kind of caught up in all of this.I think you said in one of the articles, today's victim is tomorrow's suspect.
So they're kind of caught in these crime cycles that they almost have no choice in.
Absolutely.Yeah, absolutely.I've interviewed kids 12 years old who have taken a gun and shot somebody over a basketball.It's often difficult for people like me and most likely like you to comprehend our value system has been better developed.
And how you were raised and who you were raised by, right?Because I think probably most people listening would be like, where are those kids' parents?And what did they teach them was appropriate and not appropriate?
Oftentimes in these inner city environments, the streets are the parents.The older brother is the dad. The auntie is the mom and there's just a lot of fractured relationships and fatherless homes and kids that aren't required to go to school.
And so the streets become a much bigger influence than the influence that they ought to be getting at home.
Is there any kind of training with the LAPD where you go and visit other police departments in other states to understand how unique the situation in L.A.is?
Yeah, we have, there's annual conferences throughout the country and it's regional and also just like stateside where gang investigators will all go and meet and compare information and share information with other gang investigators.
Same with robbery investigators or sexual assault investigators or homicide investigators.There's a lot of networking going on.
There's a lot of interaction that takes place to inform each other what's happening in their areas and how sometimes what's happening in LA such as
when the gangs began to migrate from South Central Los Angeles and Compton into these other inner cities and establish footholds there.
Those type of things are discussed and shared and collaborated on with law enforcement throughout the whole country.
I can imagine that you get a lot of learnings from each other, maybe like different approaches to specific situations and ways to adapt.
Yeah.And we learned from each other.And sometimes when somebody else is doing something more effectively than you are, maybe it's time to reevaluate how you do things.
And so for instance, to your point, the Los Angeles police department was the first one to have a special weapons and tactics unit in which guys specifically trained for these high risk type of interactions with people.
And then other agencies began to realize, wow, this is how we ought to be doing that too.We ought to have people that are trained specifically for this purpose, as opposed to just going, Hey guys, we've got something to go do.
Let's all, you know, and they, they haven't trained together or understood how to tactically approach things.So that's how we learn from one another.
That's great.I love that.And, uh, you learn also to adapt with the latest technologies, which is what you touched on before.So detective work started, I did a tiny bit of research in LA in 1853.So it's been around for a long time.
And obviously we'd like. In the 80s, if I'm not mistaken, you know, fingerprints really coming into their own.And then now we have the CSI type granularity of scientific evidence that you can gather from a crime scene.
And you would have seen a lot of evolution and how police work is influenced by technology over your 25 years, I imagine.
Absolutely.Currently the availability to profile somebody with DNA is amazing because it gives you such specific information.So DNA has been an absolute godsend for law enforcement and for investigators.
You're right, before it was fingerprints, but fingerprints were limited when you compare the information they provide versus DNA.
Yeah, and to be able to gather evidence from more than just one kind of body part.
The forensics fields are just amazing these days.The way in which they collect evidence and the way that we can find evidence through like microscopic examinations.
So there's the scientific evidence that you gather, for example, DNA, and then there's other types of evidence with data.
So I'm thinking specifically of things like surveillance and profiling people based on their past behavior, past crimes, where they've been, what people they've been associated with, that surveillance culture that's starting this conversation or maybe restarting around predictive policing.
So I'd love your perspective on that because that's obviously a very dangerous territory to go down with what you were saying before around staying objective.
So a good investigator is going to use all the resources that are available to him.
When you examine surveillance video and information and body-worn cameras that the cops are wearing these days and having a good working understanding of all of these different resources, they all should be complementing one another.
That's the way you come to a comprehensive truth, is that these things have to be harmonious.Because if they're not harmonious, then there's something wrong.The truth is still evasive.You must use all these things collectively.But yeah, profiling.
I know that word is a bit of a delicate word these days.In the technical sense, it's what we do.You do look at people's behavioral histories and get to know them as well as you can.
And people expose themselves all the time, behaviorally, through the way they communicate on social media, which is another thing an investigator is going to do.We're going to say, how does this person act behind the safety of their screen?
And what do they say?And what are their proclivities?How are they inclined to respond to different types of stimuli?
What do they follow?What sources do they follow?
What do they engage with? Yeah, do you think people still think social media is a bit of a safe haven?
Yeah, a lot of people are really naive about it, that you get convicted felons who will appear in a social media post with a gun, you know, not knowing that you've just given your parole officer everything they need in order to violate your parole or things like that.
Yeah, I think people feel overconfident that somehow any of this maintains confidentiality.
Yeah, absolutely.Thinking about the future of investigations in general, private or police driven, what's something that you're really excited about that you see coming down the line?
It's hard to imagine anything being more important than DNA these days.I don't know where the technology can go beyond that as far as forensics.
But I think the information sharing abilities of departments is still got some area to improve where we can communicate more effectively through networking and commonly used data resources, database resources.
If a gun gets recovered in Los Angeles, being able to put information about that gun into a system that somebody in Texas can access so that we can start sharing information because the world's getting smaller due to technology.
And we ought to be on the forefront of making sure that we have access to the information we need in order to solve crimes.
It feels like it's a very manual process that you have to go and look at, were there any similar crimes in other states?And they've tried to piece that together.
But I guess that database currently exists for the federal police, where they are able to piece a lot more things together nationally.I don't know if that's accurate.
That is accurate.The FBI has databases that not all law enforcement agencies can access.And perhaps for some good reason, some of that information could be very dangerous if it's out in the public domain.
For instance, back in the 1970s and 80s, there were several serial killers in Southern California.They were all operating at the same time. Law enforcement had no idea.They thought it was one person.
And then they would catch that person and say, finally, this is all going to come to a stop.But the killing could continue because they weren't in a position to be networking and communicating the way that we do now.
Comparing notes, comparing crime scenes, comparing information that would allow you to recognize that no, there's some subtle differences here that would indicate there's probably more than one killer.Back then, it didn't work as effectively.
Or you see a lot of these cases where a serial killer would dump the body in another state as well.So obviously it's like the investigative team is going to be different and they're not going to connect me as a citizen of this state.
That's really interesting.Even as you're talking, you know, there's a lot of detective experience and instinct that's coming through, right?It's like connecting pieces together, thinking about what's missing.
What do you think is the most important skill for a detective or an investigator to have?
The ability to listen, it's critical that you main absolute objectivity, maintain absolute objectivity.That's so important that the ability to just listen and hear what people are saying.
You'll hear for lack of a better term, what your crime scene is saying, being able to remove ego. and removes any personal biases that you might have that could inhibit your ability to see the truth.
Because we all have these presumptive biases and it's just being honest about that and then safeguarding yourself against them, whatever they are, because those will oftentimes interfere with your ability to see objectively and clearly.
So you have to be definitely self-reflective, self-aware of your own biases.And I love the tip about listening.I think like all of your advice was so relevant for anyone that's in the business world that's listening as well.
You have been an absolute pleasure to listen to.One last question for you before I let you go, which is what your go-to is when you're trying to look outside.
So how do you get yourself out of this kind of methodical headspace that you're in of an investigator mindset?
I love to be outdoors somewhere in nature.If I'm going to do something recreationally, I either I play disc golf or regular golf.So I love to golf.Um, Betty, like if I'm with my kid, my son, we go disc golfing.
But if I'm with one of my old buddies, we go regular golfing and that's where I clear my head.That's where there's no phone.And that's where I'm not thinking about anything, but just being in the moment and trying to appreciate that.
disc golfing, is that like mini golf?What is that?
People get it confused with, they used to call it like frisbee golf.
But it's, you have these small little discs, they're plastic discs and you try to, it's like golf, you try to get down to a specific location and score points.
Yeah.It's a pretty popular thing, but it's a more popular thing with the, like a younger generation.
That's why I don't know.All right, we'll definitely have to check that out.Yeah, great.Really great advice.Be in the moment, get out in nature, do what you love with the people that you love.
Greg, it's been amazing having you on the show.Thank you so, so much for sharing everything that you did and for coming on.
Certainly.My pleasure.Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening.If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review, or share the show, and I will see you next time.Until then, keep looking outside.
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