Leadership Under Fire: The Minneapolis Police Crisis

Transcript

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Welcome to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates, where leaders find the insights, advice and encouragement they need to lead courageously.

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Welcome back to the show.

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I'm so honored you're going to spend a few minutes with me here today, and a few minutes is just about all I'm going to take up from your time.

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And last week I gave an interview to Alpha News it's a pretty large news organization based out of Minneapolis and of course we had Minneapolis police.

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Officer Mitchell was ambushed and gunned down, I believe earlier last week.

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They actually buried him today.

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And this interview kind of came on the heels of that, because I have a little bit of a background with not necessarily the police department, but some of the politicians in Minneapolis.

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Several years ago Mayor Fry, who's still the mayor, made this outlandish statement that he was banning all warrior training because he did not approve of any training that taught officers that everybody's a threat and of course it was ridiculous that training doesn't exist.

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This whole idea of warrior and guardian is ridiculous.

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It's a word game that's being played, and so that's sort of how the interview started, with a little background on that, because obviously today Minneapolis is much more dangerous.

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Obviously, today officers that work there are in a much more dangerous environment.

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There's mandatory overtime because their staffing is so low.

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And when I say staffing is low, minneapolis is really the poster child for what really will occur when leaders completely abandon their responsibilities as leaders.

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They are funded for, I believe, a little over 800.

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They are below 500 as I speak and they will be probably plummeting to around 400 in no time.

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That department I've been watching it closely is on the brink of absolute total destruction and bankruptcy.

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It's quite possible, if they don't change their ways there, that department will one day cease to exist or will consist of so few officers.

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They're not really functional as a law enforcement agency.

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And I'm going to sort of let that interview come out and let me answer a lot of those questions that I talked about.

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But there was one particular question that was an interesting question and I wanted to sort of talk to you about that question because it's something I hadn't really thought of and I thought it was a very good question and and so I answered it to Liz Collin, who did the interview.

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But I want to, I want to sort of talk to you about it because I think it could apply to some of you, and what she asked me was specifically was is it even possible for Minneapolis to return to a sense of normalcy when it comes to safety for the community and police officers, she says is that even really a realistic conversation to have?

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And man, oh man, what an interesting question.

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Like, is it even possible that they could return to the Minneapolis that we once knew, which was a really great city, right, I grew up watching the Twins and Kirby Puckett and nobody would think twice about going to Minneapolis.

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And no one's going to Minneapolis today.

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And of course, that interview is going to go into a lot of details on that, including the two consent decrees they have not one but two and a myriad of other issues that they have going on.

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But that kind of came towards the end of the interview and I want to sort of line that answer out for you and discuss it with you.

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I'd love to hear your comments, I'd love to get your feedback on that, but I'm actually not sure it's realistic.

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But in a sense I'm an optimist and here's why Everything bad that's occurred in Minneapolis has occurred because of leadership.

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It's that simple, it doesn't get any more complicated than that.

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It's been a series of really bad decisions made by leaders in that community, not only within the police department but within city government, and so if that's how they got there and that's how they got in the mess they're in Now.

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By the way, everyone outside Minneapolis knows they're in a mess.

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Now, if you listen to the Minneapolis local news and you listen to the political leaders in Minneapolis, they act like this place is Disneyland.

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It clearly is not.

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There's a couple of Twitter pages you can follow that just gives you line by line of the crimes going on in real time.

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It's pretty horrendous and really really sad and unfortunate for that community that their leaders have let them down, and so it does seem a little outlandish to say that they could come back from this.

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But see, because leadership is responsible for everything bad, leadership is also responsible for everything good, and that's why I can be an optimist about whether it's Minneapolis or any other place, and so I sort of gave a list to Liz on what they needed to immediately do.

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Now, I'm not advocating that they would actually listen to me or do this, but if you're trying to answer the question, could they ever return to normalcy?

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Could they ever return to safety in a community that's thriving?

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I think they have to listen to this.

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So number one is they have to tell the truth, and not only tell the truth going forward, but confessing the lies from the past.

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There is A number of items that that leadership in Minneapolis has lied to, not only their citizens but to America, and says vocal and I'll let that full interview for me to go into what those lies are.

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If you've watched the fall of Minneapolis and you've listened to other things going on, you know those lies.

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There have been horrendous lies that have impacted not only Minneapolis but also impacted the rest of the country, impacted not only Minneapolis but also impacted the rest of the country.

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As vocal as those leaders told those lies, they have to be just as vocal in repentance.

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They have to apologize that they lied.

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Now, obviously that's going to be a hard stop for many of these horrible leaders.

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But it's not leadership if you don't tell the truth.

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It's not leadership if you don't own up to mistakes.

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It only gets worse and that's sort of the downward spiral that Minneapolis is in.

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Why is that important?

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Because it sends a message to the men and women behind the badge.

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It sends a message to the community that wants to be safe.

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Accountability matters.

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Number two.

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That begins showing support for the men and women behind the badge.

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Once you tell them the truth starts that.

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But they must vocally show support to the men and women of the Minneapolis Police Department Folks.

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They've been doing business surveys for decades on why people stay at their job, why people are happy at their job, why people work hard at their job, and it always comes down to support from their leaders.

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We all think in law enforcement we need to have the highest pay, you need to have the best benefits, we need to give you a signing bonus.

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None of that stuff.

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That stuff may be important to a few.

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By and large, all the research tells us you will work and you will be happy and you will do what you can at your job when you feel like you are being supported.

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And everyone knows that Minneapolis does not support law enforcement.

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They know the leaders don't.

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That's why their recruiting is in a crisis and people will say, oh, that's because of George Floyd.

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No, it's not.

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It's not at all.

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You can turn.

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Of course they didn't support the men and women behind the badge during George Floyd because they blamed an entire profession based on that.

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But that's not why they're having problems today.

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That may have been part of the problem.

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Today, as it continues forward, they're still losing people in Minneapolis.

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They're still dwindling as a police department, you must show support for the men and women behind the badge.

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So I want to kind of give us to.

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This may not just apply to Minneapolis.

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Some of you may work in communities that may not be as high profile as Minneapolis, but it may be just as important to listen to some of these things we're discussing here.

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Number one tell the truth.

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Number two show support.

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Doesn't seem crazy, does it?

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Kind of seems like leadership 101.

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Unfortunately, we have to talk about leadership 101.

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Number three, then you must empower law enforcement to do what they do best go after criminals Folks.

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No one knows this better than law enforcement.

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I love it when I hear all of the new programs and the new theories and the new technology and we're going to do this now, we're going to do that now.

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Well, the last I checked, we reduced part one crimes to record lows in the 90s.

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How did we do that?

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Didn't have technology, didn't have programs, didn't have all these feel-good pledges that we love to sign.

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Nope, we just went after the criminal element.

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And if you don't get back to that, the criminal element will not disappear.

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There will remain a very unsafe element in your community.

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And then, fourthly, when controversy arrives and controversy will arrive.

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Folks, we work in a business of controversy.

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That's why lawyers circle the drain around law enforcement.

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They know at any given minute something's going to happen.

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We could be completely in the right, but it's going to be deemed controversial.

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It's going to bring outrage right.

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And so when that controversy arrives and it will in Minneapolis as it will in your city leaders need to simply tell the truth.

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It's that simple.

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If the officers were right and people are outraged, they're going to be in the right.

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If the officers were right and people are outraged, discuss why officers are right.

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If officers are wrong and people are outraged, then discuss that they're wrong and hold them accountable.

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It really is that simple Just tell the truth.

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And this seems to be very uneasy to many officers on the streets.

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I speak to a lot of them.

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I speak to you weekly.

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You're more scared of doing your job right and being destroyed than doing your job wrong, because, by and large, you control whether you do it wrong.

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What you don't control is when you do it right and you are destroyed for doing it right.

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And we all can think of specific examples of people we know and people in the news where this has happened.

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It just happened to a state trooper in Minneapolis where not only do the experts say the use of force was justified, but chain of command said it was justified and the district attorney went after him and while they ended up dropping charges, his life was forever altered.

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We all know that, and so we are.

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When your officers are more scared of that, doing their job right and being destroyed.

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I don't think any profession more or less than Minneapolis Police Department recovers from that.

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And so that is.

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You have to make that decision before the controversy.

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If you wait for controversy and knee jerk, you're going to probably make a wrong move, and, man, we've seen that a lot.

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Fifthly, minneapolis and I keep coming back to this they need truth tellers.

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If they can get there, if they can get there, if they can just start telling the truth, that would be the beginning of a change.

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Isn't it odd that all of this kind of just comes down to leaders telling the truth?

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You know that's the foundation of leadership, is integrity, ethics, truth-telling.

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I mean, everyone would expect that right.

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But we live in this weird day and age where the truth seems to be missing or something else is proposed to be the truth or it's just pure deception.

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Just today I watched President Biden's remarks.

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He was at a gun control convention.

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I don't know what it was called, but he was given a speech on gun control, which is odd, considering it's the same day his son was convicted of a felony and a gun charge.

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And this isn't a political statement, it's just a lie.

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He got up there and he said that under his administration, violent crime was reduced to record lows in the last 50 years.

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Now, folks, that's a flat-out lie.

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I've written about this on Substack.

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You can find that at CourageousPoliceLeadershipcom.

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Actually, go to TravisYatesorg and it will branch you over there on articles.

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That's a complete lie.

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He's using FBI crime data.

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That's about 42%.

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43% agencies didn't report the crime.

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So he's citing data and you know I go into details in the article.

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They converted, they went over to NIBRS and a lot of departments couldn't participate.

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The FBI, you know, very seldom gets a lot of things right, but the fact is we don't actually know how much crime is going on in America because the main reporting mechanism is completely fractured and no one seems to care, because it's a political year and they like to say that we're at record lows and anyone with a brain knows that isn't true.

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But when the leader of the free world says that to the world, that should be insulting to everybody.

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Right, and that's what's going on in Minneapolis.

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Some lies are more deceiving than others, but that was a complete lie and everyone knows that, and I actually pulled the data out in the article because in 2020, we had full data Ninety-eight percent of the departments participated, and now it's in the low 60 percentile of agencies that are participating.

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I don't know.

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Agencies like Los Angeles and New York City don't even put their crime data in.

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So I mean, yeah, that affects violent crime.

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Don't even put their crime data in.

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So I mean, yeah, that affects violent crime.

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But when leaders lie, the whole foundation of what they try to do fails.

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There's nothing after that you're going to be able to do to recover.

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And so Minneapolis, just like your agency and your city and my community and everywhere else, the truth matters, and we've lost our way in this.

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It's very odd to me, because that used to be just a given.

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You knew that real leadership was about integrity and telling the truth, and now it seems to be that the truth is the last thing being said.

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I don't know whether that's cancel culture, where, when you say the truth and people don't like it, you're going to get attacked.

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So you try to say things that people like to hear.

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That's obviously what's gone on in Minneapolis.

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I mean, they changed their tune with the wind over there.

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But if we don't get back to that regardless if you're in Minneapolis or any other community if we don't get back to the truth and honesty, nothing will ever get better.

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And that was really my summary of Minneapolis.

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That sounds awful simple.

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Really, if they would just tell the truth and support cops and let cops do their job, it would recover 100%, 100%.

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But I'm not sure that's in the cards, man, I got a lot of good friends that work in and around the Minneapolis area and everything you hear about them is true and more.

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All the chaos you see on television is true and more.

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There's so much that's not being said to you.

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My heart breaks for them.

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My prayers go out to their fallen that they just buried today.

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There's nothing pleasing about talking about these things, but woe is us if we let leaders get away with what they've gotten away with, because it does real, real damage.

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Thank you for listening and just remember lead on and stay courageous.

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Thank you for listening to Courageous Leadership with Travis Yates.

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We invite you to join other courageous leaders at www.

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travisyates.

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org.