Episode 133 - Break-Ins & Builder Blunders: Straight Talk with Edina’s Police Chief Todd Milburn

#133 | Todd Milburn | Edina Chief of Police | Break-Ins & Builder Blunders

In this out-of-the-box episode of The Curious Builder Podcast, Mark sits down with Chief Todd Milburn of Edina to talk jobsite theft, neighborhood safety, and what builders and homeowners should really be thinking about when it comes to security. They dive into public safety tech (like license plate readers), the rise of crime-of-opportunity, and how the police force recruits like a modern business. Come for the garage door break-ins, stay for the chipmunk invasion and Faraday cage jokes.

Listen to the full episode:

About Todd Milburn

Todd Milburn was appointed Chief of the Edina Police Department in 2021. A former Deputy Chief of the Brooklyn Park Police Department, Milburn came to Edina after 30 years in Brooklyn Park. In 1992, he began his career there as a community service officer, and held various roles including patrol officer, SWAT officer, patrol sergeant, public information officer and police inspector. Milburn, a St. Paul native, earned his degree in Organizational Management & Leadership from Concordia University.

Resources:

Visit the Edina Police Department’s Website

• Transcript

  Chief Todd Milburn  00:00

  Ian, we got a couple programs that are going on. We work with an organization on South Minneapolis called the circle of discipline. It's a boxing gym. And the dynas School District, for example, is really diversifying, and there's a lot of great kids there. There's a lot of kids that may not trust the police fully, and so we're in there trying to really build out these relationships. Say,

  Mark D. Williams  00:29

  in the curious builder podcast, we had Todd Milburn end up Chief of Police for Ian, and it was a great interview. We cover all kinds of different topics. I we start with talking about recent events here in Minneapolis with some school shootings, really just talking about public safety, but then really, we talk a lot about business operations. And I've often said on the podcast that just no matter what kind of business you're in, you have to hire fire, market, attract talented people, and the police, police has to do the same thing, and even though that's a government entity, they still have to train and hire people. And so we get into that later in the interview. It's going to be a great interview, something a little bit different. Without further ado, here's Todd. Welcome to curious builder podcast. Today's guest is a outside the box, a normal one. We've got Todd Milburn, the police of Chief from Edina. Edina. So this is so your friend of well, actually, you're related to Katie Cath. I am. She's been on the podcast a few times, and she had recommended that you come in and just interesting story. When we first line this up, I was like, obviously thinking about building and safety, and as we design homes, and our clients ask us about public safety, how do we design homes, plus the whole job site security? We'll get into that. But obviously, two weeks ago from the day that we're recording this, there was this shooting in Minneapolis at the Annunciation Catholic school, which is a half mile from my personal house and very close to where Katy Kath lives. And I thought it made sense to kind of start here. And I don't know where to go with it, because we'll eventually get into security, but I believe you were there. Is that? Were you there? I mean, you're one of the first responders. You're close by. And so I I get a lot of texts from around the country, people saying of support and saying, hey, it's tragic. I've got three young kids that are burrows. We're having these conversations with kids. And so since this episode, is going to be a lot about, what can business owners do? What can builders do when we advise our clients? But right now, it's almost like, I'm a dad, you're not even any of those things because, and I believe you're a dad as well. And it's like, how do you I'm just trying to, I don't even know where to start other than, like, first of all, thank you. Yeah. And I thought, from what I understand, the people arriving on scene were amazing, but let's talk about public safety, sure, and then how it relates to the business owners around the country, and how we can help and how we can inform our people, yeah.

  Chief Todd Milburn  02:36

  So, yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. A little bit of background on me, just to kind of do some level setting. I worked for Brooklyn Park for about 29 years total. I held a variety of different positions there. The Edina police chief job opened up, and I applied, and one thing led to another, and I got the job, and I was about four, just over four years ago now. So I've been the chief of police for Edina for that length of time. It's been fantastic. It's been a great experience for me. Just been blessed to have a lot of different experiences in law enforcement now across Hennepin County, so I got a lot of friends now in law enforcement across the county, and that's helped me out quite a bit. When we talk about the things that we're seeing here in the community public safety, the very unfortunate events that have happened here, it has allowed me to network and really work well with different agencies and public safety to really get resources where they need to be. And so going back to the event here that happened recently, the connection I have to it is, I, along with some Ian officers, went over to the scene in Minneapolis to Officer assistance. We don't normally work in Minneapolis, but we get the question quite often is, how do we, from a mutual aid or resource standpoint, work in collaboration with our partners, and we do that in moments like that. And so in this instance, we went over there to go help right work on the perimeter, offer assistance. I know a lot of the leadership in the Minneapolis Police Department. They do fantastic work. They are stretched. They've got a lot going on, they can handle major incidents such as this, and in this case, they did a phenomenal job. My role was to go over and offer the assistance and represent the other suburban departments. And so what we do is get all resources together. We have to coordinate those resources, and then I become a liaison, or have become a liaison, in that circumstance, to offer up additional resources that come in unequivocally, though, as we've started, here's the stories coming out of that event. What I've also witnessed is just the incredible response by public safety in the first few minutes of that event, particularly the paramedics, the first officers on scene, the fire department, they did fantastic work to really save lives in that situation,

  Mark D. Williams  04:38

  well and even like the I understand, like the school teachers and the kids and like, part of it is in where we'll go here. Won't spend the whole time on this particular topic, even though it's because I'm not really trained for this type of topic. Honestly, it's more of just like, from a dad's point of view. It's like we so my wife was out of town. She's at the US Open with her sister before school started, and our kids started on Tuesday in Minnesota as Ian. And so may is nine, Simon seven, and Tate's five is a kindergartener. And so the boys, I feel like kids are so resilient, probably more so than parents. Sometimes they don't know what they don't know. And so we thought, as a family, like, we're just going to sit down and talk about this. We didn't want them to hear about it on the first day of school, because the kids would talk about it and just kind of go through them and you're answering their questions. And kids are beautiful, like, in the way, I think, as a parent now I'm speaking more like, when you when they ask questions, you try to break it down to as simple as you can. And like, it's a complex issue, but in some ways, it's very simple. Like, we are protecting the lives of people. Like that part's very simple, right? How we get there, and all the things that go into it are way beyond my understanding. But it's interesting, when you're dumbing it down for children, like, it becomes really simple for adults, or for adults or for me. So it's like, and it was really interesting to hear my kids ask certain questions, like, where it went and anyway, where to kind of transition into building businesses. Is I've had homeowners many times sitting at this table, probably not this one, because we're in the podcast studio, but the one downstairs, and where people will say, Hey, we're interested in security. I'll bring it up. It's part of our AV technology package, and we'll say, Okay, so that's pretty common now. We have the doorbell rings in the front, or we have a few cameras, things like that. And I've always had this kind of this. There's two parts of security. One is, like, during the construction, it's kind of my insurance, and it's kind of my issue. And we've had tools robbed off the job sites most builders after a while. And I'd love to talk a little bit about that specifically, but as it pertains to clients, they're paying us to build them a beautiful home regardless of where it is, whether it's in the city and whether it's Edina Orono Minnetonka, doesn't matter, really, and so and they're creating these safe homes for their children. And I've been told before that the biggest, two biggest deterrents, I'd love to know if this is true or not, is a light on at night and a dog that those were the two biggest deterrents. And I'd love to know if that's true or not, before we keep going. Is that. I mean, what?

  Chief Todd Milburn  06:47

  That's that true? That would be my recommendation as well. Lighting is number one for me, too. And so the more that you can provide lights well lit areas, people do strange things at night, and they like that cover of darkness to do things. I'm a fan of motion lights as well. I have that at my home. And so the more that you can provide that light and that coverage that will deter crime. And it does deter crime, because people that are in that business see that, and they're just going to move on to the path of least resistance, people they get into crime that do theft from autos, that break into homes and things like that. They're looking for the easy opportunity. And so the more that you can do to prevent that and kind of safeguard or build out those kinds of things, they're just going to move on and they're going to go to the Easy, easy opportunity. Well, a good example of that is open garage doors. And that's one thing that we see a lot, and we have been dealing with over the last three, four years, auto theft, unfortunately, has spiked ever since covid. It's starting to come down a little bit, but stolen cars occupied by youth driving around neighborhoods looking for those open garage doors. We've seen that in Edina. We've seen that across the metro area, and they will drive by and they will look for that open garage door, and they're looking for a new car to steal, and so they know if they walk in. And the second part to that is people will leave fobs in their cars. And that's another thing that we offer up from a prevention side, is stop doing that, please, because somebody will go into that car, open up the door handle. I'll have to do is press the Stop the Start button, and they know the fob is inside, and they are off and running in right less than 30 seconds, and they're out. And that car is now being used to promote future crimes move around the metro area. It typically doesn't last long, because somebody that steals a car, knows that the police eventually will catch up to them. They might dump that car, they might move into another neighborhood, but we're starting to then compound out the crime spree because of the catalyst of that stolen car. So that's been a big thing over the last two to three years. In particular, are these auto thefts that we continue to deal with, and we continue to offer the prevention tips to try and kind of solve or reduce that, because it is a partnership we'll probably get into that a little bit later on, between policing community and so how can you get the word out? How can you promote that relationship, or that partnership, to really get the word out and then start working in these preventive, preventative approaches like such as, just keep your garage door closed.

  Mark D. Williams  08:54

  It's a lot so much of his education. I mean, right? I mean, you're because I don't think you specifically. Todd Millburn could control whether someone closes their garage or not. But from an education standpoint, if, like, take away the easy things, and I was gonna show up later, but actually makes sense now, like, if, right now, I have a mouse problem and a chipmunk problem at my house, I don't know what it is. I had no idea that this was a thing, so I called some pest control agencies. I was out of town, and my wife said, Hey, I found a chipmunk in the house. And she's like, and she was super calm about it. She took it out. It she took it out. It was, like, somehow made its way into the garbage can. I'm like, how did it get in? Well, we figured out where it did. But like, I guess Chipmunks are, like, notoriously difficult to trap or, like, get rid of. Yeah, they must be really smart, yeah. Anyway, long story short, I've got three or four of them now. But anyway, where I'm going with this is, like, where there's food, there's opportunity, and, like, they're not going to come into the house if there's not opportunity. And I get calls from past clients all the time that'll say, we have right in our contract. We're not whether acts of God animals. Obviously, there's reason, I mean some like a woodpecker. How you gonna stop a woodpecker from going after your cedar siding? But anyway, where I'm going with this is like, if there's an easy opportunity, if you have a it's funny, I'm laying out. I have a mousetrap outside too, and the other day, I noticed no more mice. I've. Gotten done pretty good job on our local population, but the ants are coming after the peanut butter. So every morning now I've got a pile of ants. I'm like, Oh my word. I'm trying to get one. And now I got ants anyway. It's pretty funny. But going back to I so I live in Minneapolis, as I mentioned, I leave early in the morning, go running, and I must have left my garage door open the night before coming in from hockey or something, because I don't always usually watch it. Now I'm paranoid. I always watch it. Well, long story short, my garage was open. I had a beautiful bike. And it's funny because I have a very expensive road bike with clip in pedals and a racing bike, and then I have a normal commuter. They didn't steal the $7,000 bike. They stole the $2,000 bike because they probably couldn't pedal the other wire, which was just sort of funny to me. Yeah, and I actually saw the bike that they rode in on, ditched in the alleyway. And it dawned on me after I took my kids to school, I was like, Wait a minute. Why is that bike there? And then I noticed my bike was missing.

  Chief Todd Milburn  10:48

  That's right. Yeah, I see that all the time, yeah. Dump a car, dump a bike, move on to the next thing.

  Mark D. Williams  10:53

  So anyway, what about I was just thinking, we're designing a home right now, and lighting control, security, having everything tied into apps. I mean, obviously it's pretty normal your doorbell, but like, cameras, things like that, there's a lot of notifications. I mean, just go up to garage doors. You can work with your AV provider and simply, even just something simple, it'll notify you if your garage door is open or closed. That's right. I mean, even, like, as your kids get older, knowing like, Hey, did they forget to lock the door, those kinds of

  Chief Todd Milburn  11:18

  things exactly. So I'm a fan of the ring camera as an example. I use that personally because it is so functional, and it makes it easy for me just to take a look on my phone and kind of see what's going on, to get those alerts, to set up the alarms, just to check in on kind of things activity. The recording of video is key for me. I'm not particular at any particular company, per se, but alarm companies are fine too, but there's a delay sometimes too. So right? The alarm goes to alarm company. It takes them a little time to assess what's going on, and then they put the call into the dispatch and I don't want dispatch center, so there can be a little bit of a delay. I like the quick access to see what's going on my phone, and then I can make my own informed decisions about what's going on. So that's why I'm a fan of the ring camera as an example. Security cameras and systems are important. What we like in law enforcement is to capture the video, because for us to solve crimes, what we like to have is evidence. And so when we can capture things that are happening, such as the image of the person on your property, the image of the person on your front porch, a license plate of the vehicle involved is super key for us in law enforcement, if we have a license plate of a vehicle we are off and running that bridges us or carries into the next topic, which is, well, we'll get into technology, I'm sure. But one thing that's kind of key to this part of the conversation is license plate reader technology. It's been fantastic for us. We got some technology installed in the city of Edina as an example, and there's a lot of that now across the metro area. But what that does is that captures in real time, stolen license plates. License plates. They're tied to crimes. If somebody commits a crime in a particular neighborhood, and we have that license plate from the homeowner, and we know that information, we can enter it into our database, and then that can spread out to the network. And if that car goes through the city of mounds, you, for example, they have that technology. It alerts to that department, hey, this car was involved in the city of Edina, and the officers will respond to that stop that car, ideally arrest the occupants if they can tie them back to the crime where it originated. And so that kind of technology is an example one we love in law enforcement, because it gives us those leads, and it gives us that objective viewpoints, and it also really raises our success rate in solving these kinds of crimes. And so the technology across the board, really, in the last five years has really accelerated in really positive ways. But there are things that homeowners can do, builders can do to help us out in terms of that partnership, to really leverage the technology that's so valuable to all of us.

  Mark D. Williams  13:32

  How does so I mean transitioning a little bit. Oh, well, I guess let's follow up on that so you can have fixed cameras, let's say any diner that can capture license plate or the cameras that are in the police cars as you're driving that are randomly just grabbing data. It's like, almost like, I'm thinking of Google Maps, like the car that drives you on the streets and maps everything. Is it something like that? Great question.

  Chief Todd Milburn  13:52

  So that technology that existed in squad cars has been in play for a number of years. And so right, those are fixed cameras on a squad car. They're constantly scanning. The trick with those, those that the hat the system has to be on inside the squad car. So in other words, the officers can get busy, and sometimes they have to shut that thing down because they're answering nine or one calls. And so it's really predicated on what might be happening throughout a shift, and it can alert to, really the things that you want it to alert to, alert to, like stolen cars, are a good example of that. That's something we always want to pay attention to. So, but you have to have the squad car in the right spot for that to work effectively. So now let's go back to if we have a pattern of crimes in a neighborhood and where law enforcement agencies are very good and skilled at is looking at our patterns, looking at our data. We have crime analysts that are constantly running through that data. I'm spending that information out to our command staff and our officers. So if we have a pattern of burglaries in a particular neighborhood, we do all the extra patrol, but to get a squad car with a fixed camera on top of it in the right spot at the right time of the day is pretty challenging to do, along with officers responding to the 911 calls, they have to come and go right. The better solution is to have the fixed cameras in strategic locations, and then you're. Always in a fixed position. And so when that car eventually comes through the area, it trips, and it alerts. And then the difference is that alerts to the dispatch center. And so for us in Edina, we're blessed to have our own dispatch center. We have very talented people that our dispatch are really good at what they do. But as soon as that alert comes in, that alerts all of our officers in area to get into that neighborhood, because that particular vehicle, which may, again, may have been in a previous involvement, previous burglary, or maybe our detectives entered that plate into the system. In whatever case, gets alert out, gets the word out, and gets our officers to the location. A good example that is, if we go back to what we're seeing here over the last month in the city of Minneapolis, we're seeing a rash of theft from autos that's all over the news, right? Somebody's going through smashing car windows, and they're pulling whatever electronics or personal effects out of that, and that's leaving a trail of damage. We get hit. We touch that every once in a while, in the city of I know St Louis Park, kind of those border cities. Earlier this week, we had alerts on our cameras that were along the eastern border of a stolen car that was traveling through the neighborhood. We've there were two of them, actually, and so we found both of them. Our officers did. One of them fled, the other one. We were able to deploy tire deflating devices and get that person to stop, and then made that arrest. And those two vehicles are traveling through. What they were looking to do is to do more theft for models in the neighborhood. So they're traveling around at four in the morning, and they were looking for those kinds of opportunity, but for that technology that alerted us to where they were. That's how we were effective in getting in there and saw and stopping that crime wipe particular rate. So it's that technology change that's happening that makes us more efficient and gets us to the right spots where we need to be.

  Mark D. Williams  16:35

  It's interesting. I have a mom shout out to her. She's always, always been this way. See Something, Say Something. And I know there's the you probably know, the psychology behind it, that if there's an accident on the road or there's something suspicious, the common the people around it, the bystander effect, I think, is what it's called, right? And everyone thinks someone else called the police, right? But nobody calls the police because everyone else thought someone else called the police. How do you, I guess, how often do you run into that, or account for people, where then people will call and say, hey, something was stolen. I mean, everyone saw it, but in the new like, well, no one's actually called this year the first I mean, does that happen time?

  Chief Todd Milburn  17:07

  Yeah, all the time. There is a barrier for people to call nine and one and psychologically people, what I've heard and what I've seen is that they think this is not big enough an event to call nine and one and burden or bother police resources or firefighter resources. I hear that all the time, it's a hurdle for people to get past, and what we tell people is, never, ever worry about that. The 911 system is set up to handle all kinds of significant load across the system. And earlier I talked about our partnerships with our other agencies or nearby cities on all public safety fronts. We have protocols built in place that we will then send other resources to a spot if the event itself gets big enough, right? So we handle that behind the scenes, so nobody has to be concerned about calling nine one. You're not burdening in the system. You're not You're not overloading the dispatcher. There's also protocols built in place that we can transfer calls to other dispatch centers if it got to that point, but we're ready to handle that load. So I always tell people, no Absolutely. Anytime you see something suspicious, just call nine. We love it, because then we can get out and we can investigate. And that small detail might lead us to a bigger crime wave. Might lead us to a bigger case. It might be a key piece of evidence that was involved, and I've had experiences over the last 30 years, the most minor call at the time led to tips and leads to a big, complex homicide case we were working on as an example, right? So you just never know, and it's just important to get us involved early and

  Mark D. Williams  18:35

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  Chief Todd Milburn  19:49

  in public safety, we try to operate more like a private business, right? We use our analytics, we do our data dumps, we look at the trends and patterns. We try to be more nimble to adapt to those trends and patterns that are. Folding. But it's key when people call nine and one and give us the information, because then, behind the scenes, we can compile that data and look at those trends and patterns. And it helps us in law enforcement to be able to target and be most effective to deal with whatever crime issues we might be dealing with at any given time. And that feeds into a larger network too, of data sharing across the region. And so we can understand maybe repeat offenders as an example, but it's all really predicated on people interacting with us early and often, so that we can see the data real time too. The biggest miss and mistake is people see something, they don't report it. Maybe they complain about it on social media, but they never involve us. And then how are we effective in solving the problem when we have that dynamic set up? It's a

  Mark D. Williams  20:39

  problem I'm not super active on, like, I think it's at next door neighbor app, which is interesting. I suspect that's probably very helpful to a lot of people. But like, they'll be go back to that stolen bike thing, and I don't even know, I can't, I never go on it, except if I get notified, like, something happened, I'll be like, Oh, it shows up in my spam or something. But like, I know a lot of people are very into it, which is super it's another it's a sub community of their neighborhood. It's a neighborhood deals, right? It's another way to communicate. And something happens and they'll say, hey, my bike was stolen. Anyone look at it. How often do police departments like you have a neighborhood that's very tight, like, do they have people that are say that then take that, there's message boards and then say, hey, let's report to the police. Or how does, let's say homeowners work with their local police if there is an issue other than dude. I mean, you want, I mean, sure you could call 911, but like, what if you took a step like, Hey, we're concerned about this, that and another thing, how do homeowners interact with the police in a way that would be beneficial to both the police department's information but also sort of helping the neighborhood sort of feel good about

  Chief Todd Milburn  21:39

  it too? Yeah, great question. So the most departments have crime prevention specialists or they have officers that they're called, like cops, officers, community oriented policing officers. They'll have iterations or versions of those points of contact, and so for community members or block leaders will say it's important for them to connect with their local police department and have a conversation to figure out, hey, who is my neighborhood specialist? Which officer could I talk to a crime prevention specialist? And that relationship can develop out. And that can be a liaison relationship that develops for information sharing back and forth next door, or some other social media platforms. The trouble again can be, is that people kind of spin on that, and they don't have facts, and they start to rumors start to develop out, or misinformation starts to happen. And social media has really created a disconnect for us in public safety. So we used to really rely, traditionally on media or press releases to get information out. Well now people just get information in a very quick order, facts or fiction or whatever, and they start to really rates, kind of spin things up, and then we are left kind of behind that trying to correct information, get facts out. So I'll come back to that in a moment. But important to note, one of the things that a lot of cities do is have a more broad or encompassing social media platform, right? And for us, as an example, every Dyna one of the things that we designed is timely alerts through different software that we have. It's called active nine enrollments, example, and we are on the community telling people sign up for this, because if we have a big event, and a big event for so many Dyna might be there was a pursuit, a crash, there were a number of squad cars around my house, and happened two o'clock in the morning. And I want to know what that was, rightfully so, why was there a helicopter flying over my house? The alert system, which is typed up by our sergeants as an example, is sent out through that and you receive a text, and it's just like three sentences that say, Hey, there was police activity on this block. An arrest was made, no further action, we're done. And that really satisfies people, because then they can check that off, like, okay, it wasn't that big of a deal, but least I have some awareness about it that feeds into our social media platforms as well. So we tell encourage people sign up for Facebook, sign up for Twitter, because those more, more important, high level things that we're seeing, you can get that information from us, aside from maybe a side social media platform that doesn't have the full facts in place, or it doesn't rise to the level of full on press release or press conferences. So it's these in between things that are happening. So that's an example of how we're trying to leverage social media and get the facts out to people in an informed way.

  Mark D. Williams  23:59

  That's really smart. It made me think, because, like, I don't follow city of Minneapolis. I mean, I read the paper every day, so I get it through the paper. But like, your point micro events and the things in related to business, and you're right, this is kind of interesting. You hear talking about it that you operate like a small business in the sense that, like, if I, if you're my client, we use a software called builder trend, and every Friday we set we report what happened that week, what's happening next week, and there'll be, like, some pictures, like, basically good businesses, and we have plenty of places to improve here, but you know, we can either provide you information or you ask for it. But if my client is asking for information, and if you're holding yourself to a very high standard, you've already sort of failed it to a certain degree. I mean, like, obviously you can't predict what you don't know, but like, if you give them 90% of what's in there, they either don't know, they don't need to know, but you're at least giving them something to feed on, so they feel connected. I have a client right now that's not to make it business wise. It's like they're not fully signed up under contract, and so they don't get our full suite of services. But they're sort of frustrated at the lack of communication from. Specifically, but my hands are a little bit tied because they haven't hired me either. So I'm kind of once they're hired, we go into our normal protocol. I only bring that up from the standpoint that if you give people information, especially if you train them on a steady diet, it's one of our things, from a marketing standpoint, that not only curious builder podcast, but my other company, Mark Williams Custom Homes, is like we have a very set cadence. Hey, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. This is what we're pushing. This is what people can expect. You sort of train people to get, kind of get to understand it, and it seems like you sort of do the same thing for public information.

  Chief Todd Milburn  25:30

  We try to, because people are busy in life, right? We're busier than we ever have been before. So a lot of things occupy our brains and our focus and our attention, social media, whatever, and kids, and raising kids, and everything that's going on in life. And people don't like to be left in the dark. They need information. And we call it feeding the beast. In our line of business, right? You gotta feed some information out, and whether it's good or bad, but you gotta get some information out so that people are feeling somewhat informed. Otherwise, they're gonna fill the gaps themselves. And that brings us back to the maybe side, social media platforms. People just need to interact and get information, whether it's factual or not, but we in our line of business try to kind of stop that, at least get some preliminary facts out to the extent that we can, from a case integrity standpoint and statutory standpoint, we try to try to kind of communicate effectively.

  Mark D. Williams  26:12

  That's where immunity, in some ways it is, like a big company, I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong. So like in a small company like ours, if my team was to post social media on their handle, like I don't need to approve it, like they're kind of, everyone has kind of their kind of their own personal brands these days, right? So especially if you do brand deals and things like that, but like, they're informing people, and as long as it's sort of like, in the spirit it's like, it's fine, I'm also very open person, but in a public point of view, I mean, you are the police chief, I'm guessing, like we, you are the one that we people see on TV when they're doing a press release on whatever. How does a, how does a department like yours handle you have, because I think I just saw in your LinkedIn profile, you now have more officers than you've ever had, right? You just hired a couple more officers. How many total officers do you have? We're authorized up to 64 we're at 60 right now. So you have 60. And so my point is that's 60 people out there with body cams, with their own lives, with their own things are how does that work? Can they I'm guessing they don't have their own social media accounts that can report that all rolls up to a public relations department, no different than, like, if you were obviously Apple, like famously Steve Jobs, or like the owner of the companies or their press department. Is that? Is it more similar to that than, let's say, a small business like

  Chief Todd Milburn  27:14

  mine? Yeah, it's for officers. If you're a new officer, you're not too excited about getting on camera. I mean, that's my experience, too, when I was young, because you're focused on providing good service. Incidents, 911, calls, things like that, right? So if you throw a camera from a new cop, most of them are like, that's really not my thing. So I often joke with my guys and gals and say, we're going to just practice and get you on. We've really opened up a lot of things in our social media platform. Just engage our younger officers, because I'm an older guy. Now, we need to kind of think about how we brand ourselves, we're always after is rebuilding trust. And we kind of go back to we've had some major unfortunate events here in the metro area, Minneapolis area, right George Floyd, the Brooklyn center riots, the active shooters, unfortunately. But in some of those cases, we've not done a good job of building that trust. We've lost a lot of trust. And so law enforcement, we're after that. And so what we want to do through social media platforms is open up and get people to see our officers in a different light. There's a lot of things that are happening in law enforcement beyond just the typical nine to one service. We're doing community engagement stuff. We're at the schools. Our school resource officers are doing fantastic work. We're doing basketball events, a lot of community engagement work across the board to go back to rebuilding that trust and really showing people that, hey, you can trust the police here. We're here to help you guys out. It's a partnership, but let's get you to understand us in a different way. So when we do that, it also builds on our customer base too. So we have a big event that happens, and we need to reach out with information in a timely manner. We built that customer base so that following up through our social media channels here to get that right information in a timely manner out to the local residents, as an example. So it's all very strategic, and there's a process behind the scenes. We have our in Edina. We have a really good communication department, really talented staff, award winning staff, actually, that do a really good job with that, and they help us with that content development here and getting different people, different faces, on camera, to really promote the brand and get the word out. It's rather complex, too for us behind the scenes, because, again, it just kind of speaks to one of the things that we do in our that we do in our line of business, important communication, pieces of work, but it's important, and we need to keep doing it, because it's paying off. It's really showcasing the things that our officers are capable doing.

  Mark D. Williams  29:13

  We could talk about this for two hours. I want to shift it a little bit to two other topics. That was about 28 which is great, but I want to talk a little bit about specifically for builders and how we can what are some safety measures? I want to talk about job site theft, what that looks like, how it's followed up on. Maybe we'll start there, and then we'll end with like clients and like what we should be encouraging our clients to do. But so from we're building a home, every builder has had to happen, but you've got, it tends to be, and this is my guess. So correct me, if I'm wrong, you've got, let's say high value metals like copper or aluminum or whatever. It's a smash and grab. I'm guessing they're going to take it to some yard to sell it, to try to get cheap cash, pennies on the dollar. I have a whole series of questions on where, why, how that's even possible, and what that looks like for the junkyard dealers and things like that, or whoever's reclaiming this. And then the second one would be, I think I haven't had. A lot of theft in my 21 years. I think the few times that it has happened, it has been trimmers, tools, in particular, the guns are expensive and some of those things more tools. But honestly, it's like, no one's gonna come in and lift a 1500 pound refrigerator. I mean, like, good luck stealing this $10,000 refrigerator. It's too heavy. It's too unwieldy. It seems to be, and I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong, most of it is probably, quote, inside jobs. I mean, there are people that already know it's there. It's maybe someone on a crew, a bigger crew, or someone told someone, hey, this stuff is here. Because, like, I just can't believe that someone's just randomly driving by one of our homes, somehow gets into the house. Like, how did they get into? You know, some sure someone could have left the door unlocked, but they probably had a code to get in. We have lock boxes in all our homes. Walk me through some of those that are common things in terms of building, because all builders have had this happen to them.

  Chief Todd Milburn  30:46

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's a thing. It's throughout my entire career, I've dealt with it or seen it happen, right? And so when you get into new construction, construction of homes right now, I would say in well, particularly in the last three years, what I'm seeing is workers are the victims of theft from autos, and so we're seeing a lot of workers on site leaving valuables in their personal trucks, personal cars. Going back to what I talked about earlier, people driving through neighborhoods, they see a site, and then see six trucks down the road, and they'll check those door handles. And we know for workers in particular, where do they store their personal effects while they're busy working on jobs in their car. So and thieves know that. Thought about that, and that's a trend now that we've seen now, right? One of the things that we do is when we see that pattern evolve, so again, it goes back to report it to us, let us know what's going on. We can try and solve the case, get a license plate of the suspect vehicle, but then we go out and try and talk to construction managers, supervisors, whatever, to get information out to say, Hey, this is a thing inform all of your staff not to do that, or at least lock your cars or your trucks and things like that. So that's one of the big things that we're seeing again in the last couple years. When you think about actual site security, I always if it's a bigger project, and you're going to be there for a while, and you're going to have important items on sites, and you don't have maybe the best protection around it's pretty open or accessible, right? I would reach out to the local police department and let them know and ask for extra patrol. That's a free service that all law enforcement provides. We deal in Volume Two, so we don't necessarily pay all that much attention to all the things that are happening across any given city, but that's where we need information to come into our dispatch centers to say, Hey, I'm a builder, or I'm working on this project. This week, we're going to have x pieces of equipment on site. Would you mind just letting your officers know and then just providing some extra patrol in our neighborhood? Easy for us to do that. We love to do that kind of a thing, and that's no

  Mark D. Williams  32:38

  problem. We've got a we've got a house in deep Haven. That's, I mean, literally, 400 meters from the police station or from the City Hall where the shirts are, which is funny. I just wrote that note, because I'm like, Huh? Because obviously, if you say, hey, this house is gonna be built for a year, it's hard to say, like, oh man, for a year, that's a lot. But if you say, hey, next week, we're delivering $100,000 worth of appliances.

  Chief Todd Milburn  33:00

  More of a heads up. We had a good example of that a couple weeks ago. The library in Edina is going to be demolished soon because that's being redeveloped in that area. And so we were contacted to say, hey, heads up. We put a fence around it, but provide us with some extra security. They put a temporary alarm in there. That alarm alerted that night thieves were in there looking for copper. That alarm alerted to our officers. We behind the scenes that set that up. So that isn't this library right adjacent to the police station. No, it's over on the east side of town, okay, Richfield, okay, by the South Town Hall. Oh, okay, okay, not now, because of that Intel and that information and some security, we went over there and made a and arrested three people that were inside. They're actively cutting copper out of that place. So Whoa. Thieves are paying attention those kinds of things. They know one big demo, big projects are going into demolition, for example, and they're gonna go search that out, right? But then that was a really good example of our partnership and information sharing, and it worked out well, how?

  Mark D. Williams  33:53

  So I'm just, I mean, how much money is there? I'm just starting to think of, like, supply and demand here. Like, bitcoins really expensive. Like, I mean, how much money is in copper? Like, I mean, how much money are we even talking and

  Chief Todd Milburn  34:03

  not much. I mean, it toggles right. It goes with the stock market. So it ebbs and flows. And we see that on our side too, when we start to see increases in crime, trends on copper theft, okay, price, metal prices are probably high right now, because this is the thing. So we watch the stock market sometime

  Mark D. Williams  34:16

  that's amazing. That's amazing. Kind of, like, converter thefts, remember? Yeah, oh, man, that was everyone Kia was getting murdered because they had everywhere precious

  Chief Todd Milburn  34:23

  metals inside of that. Yeah, poorly regulated state law changed, so it forced them more regulation around that. We were hearing stories of thieves going out collecting that and then handing it off to second third hand people that were then shipping it off to other countries. I mean, I don't know if that happened, right, but the change in statute, and especially with our local dealers, and not accepting that in without, I think it's a driver's license now and then Sarah applied that slowed away down. I mean, we see maybe three, four or five a year, whereas prior to that, we were seeing into the hundreds, yeah, like post covid, it was all in the paper.

  Mark D. Williams  34:57

  Because I'm just thinking of, like, how ridiculous this is. Like. I know nothing. I'm just, like, from what I've seen in movies, I guess I'm like, I'm thinking, like, I don't even know what a catalytic converter looks like, but let's just say it's a big hunk of precious metal. I'm just like, thinking, like, walking into a pond store and be like, my Catalina converter fell off my car. Like, what is this? I mean, I could the interaction would be so weird and awkward. Like, how does how do you not know in this scenario? Like, that's clearly

  Chief Todd Milburn  35:18

  stolen, absolutely and there's just a black market for everything

  Mark D. Williams  35:21

  too, right? I mean, I get it like, if you now, that makes way I never thought about that makes way more sense if you roll it up and then ship it to wherever these things get sold. Now that's a lot different, because now, yeah, I could see why that would be interesting just thinking about now how much of this are crimes of opportunity as a guess. How much of this is crimes of opportunity versus, like, actually planned crime or organized crime. It's like those guys cutting the copper out of that the building, the library.

  Chief Todd Milburn  35:47

  Sure, it's both, but it's probably more about crime of opportunity. I would say like 7030

  Mark D. Williams  35:53

  20, probably

  Chief Todd Milburn  35:54

  7080 Yeah, I'd say 7030 20. More people are just kind of waking up. Like, what am I going to do today? I need some money for acts, and then hook up with their buddies, going back to the stolen car thing. We're just gonna think about it the night before, or be up all night and then start it and get into a crime wave. So I think it's a little bit more of just kind of happenstance, and it's just we're gonna think about doing something today, and then we just go after the path of least resistance and start looking for those moments in time or those opportunities. That's where we see more often than not, when you're talking about higher level crimes or white collar crime. The other thing we see a lot of is identity theft and online stuff and financial transfer. So that's where you're getting into more of the strategy and more high level

  Mark D. Williams  36:34

  thinking. So do you do the local police departments get involved with that? Yeah, so like, I mean, it's interesting. I it's getting so good, especially with AI scrubbing. I mean, it used to be you could identify these email phishing scams pretty easily now, and I feel bad for in particular, vulnerable people. Let's call them older people, or, I mean, in particular, but like, I mean, now it's like, I send it to my office manager. Like, is this a bill I should pay? Now, it's like, I don't open anything unless I know who that person is. A big problem right now? Yeah, so, so anyway, let's say I know, I know plenty of builders that have had, let's say the Instagram hacked, or I know local thing. They asked me not to say what it was. But this is a couple years ago. I mean, as a well known resort, where the whole resort went down, yeah, and it was like they were held hostage for their name for like, several million dollars. And they said, basically, pay the ransom. I wasn't planning on going here, but now I'm really interested in that question. So, like, pay the ransom or or basically reboot your entire website from scratch, because that's the only way to really con it. And the pros and cons, as it was explained to me, was if I paid this ransom to who knows who this person is, for a couple million dollars, which is just a lot of money, is I don't know if they're gonna have a back door into it, like, is it even secure, right? Have you been involved with any sort of ransom stuff like that from a cyber and like not

  Chief Todd Milburn  37:42

  directly, but city of St Paul just went through this right three, four weeks ago, where they had that cyber attack, and it took a lot of things offline. They had a lot of public awareness about it. They spoke a lot about it. I don't know all the inside details, but when you see that happen, typically it's a problem, maybe internally with staff that got into a phishing situation or whatever. But one of the things that we pay are like it. Departments are super important in this space, and so a lot of for us, what we work through or with our IT department on is really education, prevention and training. Training has been a big thing in the last four or five years for our staff. Look and understand when you're seeing those phishing attempts coming in, call it out, report it but do not click on links, those kinds of things. So we go through robust training now like never before, just to safeguard against that kind of a thing. Because if it happens, it's absolutely it will destroy an organization. And what they like to do right is get that data, hold you hostage, create the ransom, if you don't, then release that data, that personal data, out to the black web or these different spaces, and then all of your private data is exposed out there. So super risky. Some organizations will pay to protect it, but these people are operating from overseas a lot of times too. So in a really tough

  Mark D. Williams  38:50

  spot, does that? Does that roll up to then the state and the federal level? Like, how it does? Yeah, I mean,

  Chief Todd Milburn  38:54

  because, like for us in the city level, we can't we have a capacity problem. We should only go so far with our investigations, and we have to hand it off to the feds. There's so much of it going on that they're taxed too, right? And so it's hard. And so that's what I go back to, by all means, work get good IT people, get good people in place. I understand security, prevention, those kinds of things in your own business model, because you have to have that to be successful. And if you have, like, these risk management issues or these open opportunities. It can it can destroy your business. For

  Mark D. Williams  39:29

  sure, this episode is brought to you by adaptive. If you're still chasing checks and juggling spreadsheets, it's time to upgrade. Adaptive is revolutionizing how builders get paid with AI powered bill pay, automated draws, one click payments and built in Lean waivers, Faster Payments, fewer headaches and total visibility. Adaptive takes care of the back end chaos so you can focus on what you do best, building. We've used adaptive for two and a half years, and trust them to keep our projects moving and payments flowing. Learn more at Adaptive dot build and simplify the Pay Process today. Ian. For more information, you can also listen to episode 10 and episode 15 going back to the house. So you got times of opportunity stealing the copper wire. We've had tools stolen on job sites. I would suspect that most of these go

  Chief Todd Milburn  40:14

  unsolved. My share her ability to solve cases has gone up quite a bit. Our clearance rate for us in particular, is really high, because it goes back to our ability to leverage technology. And so it really depends, again, if we have, like, a good license plate or a lead, we have really good detectives. It's awesome.

  Mark D. Williams  40:29

  I mean, I bet a lot of people don't, so I'd love to know the sequence of this. So like, let's say I have my trimmer calls me. He goes in at six o'clock in the morning, says, hey, the my tools are gone. It's been broken, or my trailer, and we don't usually, most residential builders don't have cameras on some of the real high end homes, of course, and commercial of course would. But let's just say your remodelers or things like that. So I called the police and say, hey, just want to file a report letting you know that $10,000 of tools or trailer was removed. What happens after that?

  Chief Todd Milburn  40:56

  Yeah, right. So the responding officer gets out there, takes a report, he or she might do some preliminary work with it. If we have license plate information, we'll run that plate. We'll see where it goes again, going back to like our license plate reader cameras that are kind of spread out throughout our city. We'll go into that database and see if we've had any cars if that camera was located near where the site was or where the crime occurred. We'll go into there and see, hey, what kind of cars came out of this this block, for example, because

  Mark D. Williams  41:22

  you would be able to triangulate, hey, they left the job at 5pm Yeah, they came in at 6am so there's an 11 hour window that something happened. That's right,

  Chief Todd Milburn  41:29

  so we'll take a look at that, and then that might provide us a lead. That might provide us with a make and model of the car. If we were to get a license plate, then that would at least give us an address of where that plate or that car is registered to. So then our detectives might go out to that area, to that the address, and do some follow up and see where that might take us too, right? So it goes back to the strength of having some of that early information that'll take us in that path. So now, kind of carrying through that call through though. So reports made it we prefer to a detective, depending on the city, how busy they are or not. Like Minneapolis has got a lot going on. If there's a good, solid lead, you might get detective that would follow up on it. If you don't have don't have anything, any good information to follow up on, it would just kind of rest in the filed reports and then go inactive and then not get followed up. So basically,

  Mark D. Williams  42:10

  as a data would that be going back to your data analysis? So let's say it just stays there as a data point. That's right, and then let's say a year later or later in that job. I mean, it seems unlikely to me that if you had a robbery at a home that, I mean, it'd be crazy, but it seems pretty unlikely that would happen again. Yeah, right. Am I wrong in that? No, you're right. Yeah, because, I mean, it's kind of like, again, people move on to different areas of the metro area, so it's usually one and done and moving on. So that's more often we tell, I may, I just tell you what a few things that we do. I mean, we try to get, obviously, like, right now we have a home right now where the windows are going in next week. So right now there's holes everywhere. So security is an illusion. I mean, what are you gonna do? There's something you can do. It's plastic over the windows. We actually do have, I told my my project manager, go to Home Depot and get the signs that say this house is under surveillance with video camera to dispatchers. It's like, we don't have any cameras there. It's just simply, like, whatever it may be, we'll see. And it's funny because my designer lives down the street, she was actually went through this weekend with my husband, and she's like, I took one look at the signs. I'm like, yeah, he doesn't have cameras. Yeah, you're right. But I just thought that was funny. She knew she knew me. She was welcome to come to the house anytime. Was he gonna say, oh, but, you know, obviously we put callers on we have a lock box. And a lot of times we've heard like, hey, disgruntled past employee or somewhere down. If you hire a I want stereotype of company. So they hire a company, and someone in their company would say, hey, there is this opportunity come in that seems more like a likely scenario than someone just driving by and walking into the house. In my opinion,

  Chief Todd Milburn  43:37

  yeah, happens all the time, and for us, if we get that information, like, Hey, I suspect this person because, right, they had access to information or might have been tipped off, that'd be enough to prompt our detective to go and do some follow up and have a conversation. I think from a case solving standpoint, we have to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt. So if we have a suspect that we think and we sit down and do an interview, nobody has to talk to us. We have strategies behind the scenes that we'll work on. But if we get into a Q and A and start talking about stuff, a lot of people confess to things too, and that's another tactic that we use in law enforcement to try and solve a crime. So in law enforcement, we need the starting point of a police report filed. It can take us into a number of different areas and opportunities. Not every case is the same. They're always unique and a little bit different. And so that's why it's can be complex but interesting work too, because it always takes you into unique, different areas that you're not maybe anticipating.

  Mark D. Williams  44:26

  Interesting look, you know, let's shift a little bit to Sure, there's things I'm forgetting there, but those are the common ones that I've experienced. And so, I mean, we're doing a lot of them already. I like the idea of giving the local police departments sort of a heads up on, like, Hey, we're especially staging, like towards the end of a project where the house is state. Well, let me ask one question there. So like we have in Minnesota, we have the oldest tour in the country, the Parade of Homes. We have the artisan home tour. We have all these things now that at that point the house is finished, done. You're talking about several $100,000 of maybe art, furniture, all kinds of stuff. And people would know, hey, it's on tour. Nobody's in this house. House, right? They could talk about casing it. You could walk through as a prospective buyer, or whatever, and just walk through the house. That's right. How often are we seeing is that common that people would break in? And what are people stealing? It seems again, I'm not sure what they're stealing.

  Chief Todd Milburn  45:12

  I can't think of a case recently where you have that circumstance developed for us. So it's pretty rare. I think Remember we saw professional athletes now that, that was a trend, too. So last couple years, people know around the country, though, around the country and athletes are gone on the road, playing their games, so they know that their home is unoccupied, right? So that evolved, and we've seen that diminish now, but it's happened here recently. I'm glad

  Mark D. Williams  45:35

  you brought that up. I meant to ask that. So because I actually know one of the homes that you're speaking about, we won't say their name, but like, I have a friend of mine who worked on this home, and they brought this up. And like, it's funny, my mom, who's a frequent caller of the police, she lives out in Orono, but when she comes to babysit her kids, like, she locks the back door, which I've lived in Minneapolis for 25 years. Like, I'm just not that worried about when I'm in the house. Yeah, and where am I going with this? Sorry, mom. Oh, or no. Like, there was a part where people were using the trails for, I remember, we're building a house like 2021 22 somewhere in there, but people were using the loose line. And they were like, going out to these neighborhoods. And you talk about crimes of opportunity versus professional it seemed like a smart thief would do it during the day. Yeah, because we know that if someone's kind of like, what your grandma would tell you, somebody, so funny is coming to all this. It's old knowledge. Like, nothing good happens after 10 o'clock, like, those kinds of things, right? Was, like, totally true, yeah. Like, if someone's driving around at three o'clock in the morning, like, if I'm a police officer, I'm like, Okay, right? They're not going to the hospital because Fairview is right over here. You're doing circles. Something's up exactly, anyway. Tangent, so, like, I don't think city, sure, we have more people, so based on demographics, more people, you're gonna have more likelihood. But I don't think whether correct me if I'm wrong, whether it's rural or metro, I think the opportunity is still, it's still people still have to think about security, in my opinion, absolutely and like rurally. So people are taking the bike bike pass out to Orono, right? And they were robbing homes during the day when people were gone, they knock on the door and covid ruined all that, because everyone's at home, right, right? Anyway, what's your thoughts on? Kind of that?

  Chief Todd Milburn  47:07

  Well, as you see the spread of population across the metro area, I think people on the fringes are on the outside of the inner metro area, or kind of stocking a little bit in the 80s mindset, like I can just leave my house open and unlock. That's how it used to be forever. Go back to our grandparents, right? That's different. Now we go back to people like, No, you have to step in and do some preventative measures here, because we're seeing these things spread out. And you don't have to be over, overly concerned and scared of anything, but just take some reasonable steps just to protect your own assets, right? And that'll go a long way. So we You're right. I mean, we're seeing those things spread out in areas that you were never having, crime problems or crime trends or things that were part of the conversation before, because it's just new for people. So it's a thing, and people have to pay attention to that. And if you go back to those preventative things, you can just safeguard against that daytime stuff is happening too, more so than ever, right? I go back to pre covid, we saw a massive increase in crime, violent crime, unfortunately, pre covid, and people kind of forget about that. So we saw an uptick, a trend, towards unfortunate juveniles that really got into a lot, not all juveniles, but some right that got into more serious crime during the daytime. There's a behavior change that took place, mental health wrapped into that. The variety of reasons for that right and still not fully understood, covid happened, civil unrest happened, and so for the last, whatever, it's been six years, we've seen these spikes in crime. Now we're starting to see things dip down a little bit in a good, positive way. So there's reason to be optimistic. I've been in this business for 30 years. Crime ebbs and flows, and it comes and goes in waves. It feels like we're starting to get down now and kind of write it down a little bit, but it's not where it used to be, pre covid levels. And so that's the change. Now it's happened in the metro area. That I like to talk to people about is to say, we think about your baseline, but let's bring it back to pre covid levels. Now, we're ever going to get to that because of the population growth? Probably not, but that's kind of the benchmark that I like to go back to when we start looking at crime stats and understand where we're at.

  Mark D. Williams  48:59

  This is interesting. Oh, we were talking obviously school shootings in the very beginning, and I was thinking about this just now. So I a long time friend of mine, who's my actually, who's my high school teacher, my cross country coach. I built him a home, and we coached together, and he I just did this 100 mile race out in Oregon. I came, He came as one of my crew chiefs. So I've known him for 40 years, and I was just asking him, because now my kids are kind of coming kids are kind of coming of age, and as we're struggling with, what do you do with social media? What do you do with phones? We've kind of are taking a step of like nothing for as long as possible. Where I'm going with this, to make it relevant is, after educating for 40 years in Chan and Chaska, where he taught, he said that really, in the last 10 years, he hasn't seen a single fight in school. And I was, like, really interesting, and he said, Todd, you're a jerk. Mark, you're a jerk. Yeah, we duke it out. I'm not saying this is good behavior, by the way. I'm just saying, like, anger still happens, animosity still happens, regardless whether it's on a sporting event or just in the hallway or whatever it happens. But like. He said, with social media, it's gone away, sorry, the actual physical altercations, yeah, now. But he said it's still, in fact, maybe worse than ever, because now it's being pent up, and it's now moving to social media sites, bullying and other sites of things. The reason I'm asking you this question is, how do you it's a big question, but like, do the police departments get involved with, like, schools and like, I mean, bullying is it can go in such a big range, but I think it's relevant in terms of, for sure, educators, but also not only us as parents, but, you know, police officers, where, how does that work? And have you noticed that as well? Or is it, is it what I'm saying? Like, like, Oh, I haven't heard that before. Like, oh, that actually tracks with data that we're seeing as well.

  Chief Todd Milburn  50:39

  Yeah, that tracks, yeah, social media is a big topic, and bullying is a big topic, and you're seeing that kind of play out. And for example, social media is being leveraged for kids to show up at a park and parties evolve, right? So they can communicate more effectively and kind of get a mass group of kids in a spot, whereas years ago,

  Mark D. Williams  50:55

  we'd be like, Hey, we're going to a cornfield. Like, maybe get there. You know how

  Chief Todd Milburn  51:00

  to get there? Maybe they do it, right? They're running joke with our kids all the time. But now it's much more nimble, right? And kids can organize and get to a spot, and sometimes, not always, bad things can happen as a result of that. And unfortunately, that's what we've seen in the last five, six years, is sometimes that leads to gunfire or gun events and things like that. I see in the school setting. I go back to our school resource officers, and that's been a thing for us in the law enforcement community too. For the last a number of years, some schools decided not to have school resource officers in their schools because we go back to the trust issue and all the things that we saw with the civil unrest George Floyd event, and that really spurred on a lot of controversy around should officers be in the school setting. We think that's very valuable, because when we get back to these kinds of things about social media, impact bullying that's happening, like quick kind of communication with law enforcement. That's where those school resource officers are embedded in can have dialog, and do have dialog with kids, or evolving patterns and working with school officials to help with preventing things from happening, right? Building those relationships, understanding what might be happening here too. So it's a really that two for one, that relationship building that takes place in the school setting, and if it were to build into something much more serious, like our staff are on site to help resolve and handle those kinds of things before we get into 911 kind of scenarios, because we go back to that topic, we don't like to create data police reports on juveniles, on youth. We want to try and safeguard and prevent that from happening. Right? That's where those school resource officers are so valuable in that space, and then going back to building that trust as well, that's what they do, right? So it's not just like law enforcement stuff, it's actually they're doing events, they're jumping in with kids and stuff, and so all that's kind of centered and geared around, like, how do we help kids with the brain development, the distractions that they're going through, the covid, the back end of covid, we know from a mental health standpoint, a lot of these kids are really struggling, trying to kind of figure out their lives on the back end of really big events that have happened.

  Mark D. Williams  52:47

  Yeah, it's interesting. Sorry. All these questions come are piling in my head. I'm trying to sort them all through, because I have so many now that we're never going to get back to the homeowner, Security, Architecture, but we'll get there. One of the questions I was thinking about, let me see if I can grab it again. I fleeted it out. Oh, I think back, so I don't know is dare still a thing in schools now. So, I mean, I remember when it kind of came out when I think so I graduated 99 so this is as I recall, late 80s, early 90s. I remember Professor or Officer Norm coming in. I mean, still remember him. Like, where I'm going with this question is, like going back to the school trust and like seeing kids at what age do in children, because, like, and the reason I make this business relation is, like, if I get into a conflict with a homeowner, I always like to meet in person, because I want them to know, like, I'm a person first, right? I'm Mark, and I have a family. I'm a human. Like, if it's an email, it becomes a little more sterile. And like, conflict resolution essentially, is where I'm coming at. And every business owner has to deal with this. And like, if we can start by just saying, Hey Todd mark, like, I know we've had a difficult situation on this house, but let's move through it. And like, usually, if you can appeal to people's humanity and make it about real people, it just simmers the pot down. In my opinion, where I'm going with this is at what point and what age do kids sort of lose their allurement. Of, like, police are awesome fire trucks. I can't wait to sit in this fire truck because, like, my kids right now are just like, wherever we see it, like, we go to eat at Wiseacre all the time, and it's right across from the Minneapolis Fire Department. It's like, I'm not sure we can get through a breakfast while we're walking across the street looking at the ladders for the 800th time and but they love that. But like, is there an age where that kind of that innocence, or, like, that's really cool. I'm interested in, like, where do you see it shift? Is it an age thing? Is it a demographic thing? Is it

  Chief Todd Milburn  54:25

  how long is your podcast? We can go on for quite some well,

  Mark D. Williams  54:29

  let's just keep rolling. If people don't like it, they can

  Chief Todd Milburn  54:33

  tune out. So to answer your question, first, like, fifth, sixth, seventh grade feels like kind of that. Okay. Dare is really intended to be around, like the sixth grade kind of level, because it captures right the kids and the development, and it gets some kind of the preventative stuff before they might get themselves in trouble. Dare programs are scattered around. A lot of districts are coming back, like we just don't have the time and the space and the capacity to run that because our time is limited. And so dare programs have been squeezed out a little bit, which. Sense, that's fine. So a lot of what police departments are doing is kind of bringing in different kinds of initiatives, different types of programming, really, to interact between police and kids, right? So for example, for us, we got a couple programs that are going on. We work with an organization on South Minneapolis called the circle of discipline. It's a boxing gym. And the Dyna School District, for example, is really diversifying, and there's a lot of great kids there. There's a lot of kids that may not trust the police fully, and so we're in there trying to really build out these relationships, the circle discipline. We bring them in, and we have kids sign up, and we bus them over to the gym, and they go through a little bit of boxing, but it's more about training, it's more about mindset, it's more about youth development, leadership, all those kinds of things that are built into that curriculum, and our cops are tied into that, and then we have other non smart people tied into that as well, and then we bust them back and then go to school. So the school loves it, because the kids then get all that friction and all the physical kind of beat out them, a little bit beat out of them, but just get the physical activity going so that they're a little bit more rested and focused throughout the school day. It gets our cops involved. And then we've got youth that come up to our cops and other spaces like, Hey, I remember that you participated in this event. It's good to see you, and they get to know each other on a first name basis, right? So that's an example of a different types of program that we're trying to embed and just get involved with. We're not trying to overstep our boundaries, but we're always approaching school districts. And in Edina, we have a great school district, because we have our own school district, and we have a really good relationship built up with various staff across the district, and so it makes it easy for us just to intersect and have these kinds of conversations and be open minded about, what else can we do to build up things? Another example I'll give to you on that one is like, there's a lot of good, talented kids that are working or living in a very challenging environment, but they've got a lot of good ideas, particularly for us in police work. So we built, or we're in the process of building now, like a Citizens Academy for Youth, where we have officers sit down with youth and then allow them to want one understand police work and what we're doing, but also give us input and information about how they see the world and what they think policing should look like down the road. So again, that's building up kind of that, that face time that you talked about earlier, and really opening up the doors for good conversation about what does the next 10 years look like. And then we also have a side kind of approaches to like, I like to recruit kids, because in law enforcement, we're really challenged with trying to get good quality candidates into law enforcement that work still continues, but we gotta find kids younger that might have an interest but don't quite understand what law enforcement is about. So it's a recruitment opportunity for us to to really get kids to think about this career path down the road.

  Mark D. Williams  57:23

  This is we hearing you talk about it is so much more relatable than I thought it'd be. In terms of, like, owning a business. We talk all the time about hire. I mean, this is true, this whole point of the show, entrepreneurship, you're hiring, firing, marketing, those are all the things you have to do too all time. And so I actually, I have a good parallel question here. Stay tuned. Audience is a great question, if I do say so myself, is so one of the common perceptions right now. So I'm going to be 45 next week, and I'm let's call it middle age for building or whatever, but like, the reason I'm bringing up my age is like plumbers. So right now, it's very common that for every seven plumbers that retire, a master plumber, only one is taking this place, same as HVAC. It's a very common theme that we hear in construction. And so there's multiple places that we're gonna have to go for this. Ai making our jobs more efficient, modularization, pre built homes, prefab, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Honestly, I want more women in the workplace. Everyone's fighting for more women, because I think they're really organized. They're great. And guess what? As a home builder who makes all the decisions in the home or women client in particular, so I want more of them in construction. Where I'm going with this is opportunities. I feel like the people that I talk to granted bias, because I'm literally interviewing people and who have interest in the build. I feel like there's actually a great surge of young people right now. They're not ready yet. They're in their nineteens and 20s. They're listening to podcasts. They're very more they're much more open minded than I think people give them credit for, in terms of, like, interest, of owning businesses and things like that. That's right, so sure, we're probably in a 10 year low window for who we can hire, as we have a great exodus of the baby boom generation and the one, whatever generation it is below it, that is sort of leading construction. Yeah. Where I'm going with this, as it relates to the police is, after all, the social unrest that we had in the 2019, 2020, and whatever these different milestones that we've had here specifically, it seems like the narrative that what I would read in the paper is like, we don't have enough officers. There's no one to hire. There's it seemed like the message, take out the word officer and construction worker. It seemed like the message was the same. Someone was either retiring or the budget won't allow for more of them to be hired. And you're talking about now, getting younger. So where I'm going to go with this question? This is a poorly phrased question, sorry, audience. I sucked at this one is, what does it look like to hire new officers? I understand there's a budget no different than an entrepreneur. We have budgets like I can't hire a new employee unless I get more build jobs and I have the capacity to do it. So I understand there's budgets, taxes. We probably won't go there today. What does it look like to recruit Where do you recruit them from? And even, like, educating, like these young kids, like, hey, it's a viable path. And where I'm going with this is relates to building is, like, one of my big hopes with this show is to show people that, like, I'm not anti College, like I went to college, but like, honestly, it's like you could have a great career owning your own business. All these. People that are leaving, there's supply and demand is going to be massive. I mean, HVAC, electricians, plumbers, like they make really good wages, hands on, hands on. And our school system, that's all I'm gonna have to have. Well, I know the principal of the Diana, so you and I play basketball together. I'm gonna have to have him on and talk about getting some more construction into his high school curriculum. But anyway, terribly framed question, I guess. What is your response to, like growing more police officers, and where do you recruit them for, and how do you build out your force? Yeah, so

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:00:27

  it goes back to treating government more like a private business and being nimble in this space. If I reflect back on when I started, when I applied to become a cop, we would they would a city would post, or a police department would post for a job, and you would see four to 500 applicants come out. I remember going into gyms and just four to 500 500 applicants, candidates that were taking the written test. So all of a sudden, take a written test, and I thought, Man, I'm not going to make it as a cop. No one's going to hire me with all this competition, right? Eventually, I got a job. So it took me a number of runs, and I got there, hired in Brooklyn Park. But now fast forward, we post, and we're lucky if we see 1010? Yeah. I mean, the drop off has just been incredible, right? And it goes back to the things that you've just described. There's a lot of

  Mark D. Williams  1:01:06

  reasons for that. Is that across the country, or is that a micro country? It's across the

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:01:10

  country, so police departments have had to become much more adaptive. And think about it like we're gone. Are the days where we could just sit back and then just have our pick of the 100 some candidates, and we get to just slow things down and take our time, and we'll just figure out and go through process. Now, it's all about marketing, communication strategy. And so for us, some examples that might be helpful for our audience. What we do in law law enforcement, or at least what we do in our department, is we have what's called a cadet program. And so what we do is we recruit kids in high school out of high school, or young adults I've just gotten out and offer them. Hey, if you want to become a cadet with us, you go through a process. You get to do work, not as a police officer, but one step below that. So you're wearing a uniform, you're driving what looks like a squad car, you're doing animal complaints, you're doing kind of the lower level things. But the change now is that we're going to help pay for your tuition, and so you've got to invest in youth, and you have to get them in your organization. You have to get them accustomed to your culture. What kids and youth really like is training on the job, training, and so I get that feedback all the time, like I actually get hands on training while I'm going to school,

  Mark D. Williams  1:02:11

  that are they going straight? Yeah, they're going to high school. Are they going to college or college? I should say,

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:02:15

  Yeah, college, usually minimum is a two year degree and then or a four year degree. But when they get that hands on training. And Ian went through this when I was a young kid too. That ties back to school. So you can be more successful in school because you've already got the job experience, right? That's huge. It's key. And then they get into your culture and they get that hands on training, and so when they're done with school, they essentially become an officer for us, but they've already got that baseline training done, and they're just much more apt than to jump into the job and the skill sets. And so for us in police work, when you get into a squad car, it's super dynamic. You have to be a multi tasker. You got a lot of things coming in, if the 911 calls are flying in, and if you have the baseline training already established, you don't have to overthink that piece of it. You can focus on the more difficult aspects of the job, but you only get that with some of that on the job experience, right? So for us, it's paid off. In the last probably a couple years, we've hired, I think, five cadets that have become officers, and that has then positioned us not to have to worry so much about the external market out there. So it's all about investing. It's the growth of your staff. It's getting them embedded in your culture, and it's really getting key people, because then when you have them on staff, like an apprenticeship as an example, then you get to see the work product there alive. And we know that if you have a low performer that doesn't pay off, the repercussions of that, the impact on the organization or private business or government, that's massive, because it's so expensive, right? So you want to do everything you can and guard against that and be successful. But when having that embedded or that thing of that homegrown talent and developing. Now, it really does pay off, and it's paying off for us nicely in law enforcement right now, but the market's, it's super difficult. I mean, that's like, I feel like I spend half my time talking about recruitment and engaging kids or getting people on board. We'll take some laterals every once in a while. We also will, like looking at maybe the plumber or whoever, and get them into law enforcement. We're doing that work too, like the second career opportunity. Second career opportunities. There's some grant money at the state that we've utilized called the IC pro program, and so we're using that. We brought in a young adult who was from the IT world. He's been a cop for us now for a couple months. Super successful, really squared away. But I like that diversity of coming from the private market, because that's a whole nother level of critical thinking that applies nicely to law enforcement, too. So it's dynamic across I mean,

  Mark D. Williams  1:04:24

  I do love it when people come from I've always said even as business, I mean, there are plenty of people, my friend Brad Robinson down in Atlanta, who's been a friend of the show. He was in corporate America, was running huge, skilled companies, and then he got into being a business owner and like, a different mindset. I say it all the time in the podcast, like, you could be a good business owner and a bad builder, and you could make it. You could be a good builder and a bad business owner, and you won't make it. Hopefully you're good at both. And where I'm coming at that with is, like, skill sets and your social IQ, your EQ, I think it is and like how you interact with people, I would imagine, like, especially this cadet program, what a valuable training to like. I mean, even if they. Don't become a police officer. Like, I would look at them, like, okay, dude, you said squared away. Like, okay, yeah, this kid just spent two years rolling and, I mean, think of all the conversations you have and how dynamic this person has to be socially, right?

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:05:12

  That's right, yeah, the EQ, the social EQ, the practical intelligence, that really bodes well for us in law enforcement, right? Sometimes the best people in math aren't the best cops, because it just doesn't translate. But that's okay, right? Everyone has their own skill sets, and you find your

  Mark D. Williams  1:05:26

  niche in life unless they're in the stats and data, like the platy albedo, a perfect fit

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:05:30

  for a crime analyst, totally, yeah, but that, but even at that, like, I like taking into those different skill sets, because what makes us good is to have a diverse team, and so we need that and everything that we do, because then you get a better product on the back end of that. And I fully believe that. So even if it's challenging for my cops, if they're not all of the same mindset or like thinking, and so we have some diversity in the room, a cop might not see that at the moment, but like six months down the road or 12 months, the value of the diversity will start to showcase itself out over time. Yeah, so I'm always after that as well from a skill set standpoint, just

  Mark D. Williams  1:06:05

  because we'll have to land the show here at some point here, we're right about normal. I got two questions that you got to get off. One is, as it relates to homeowners, what are as a police officer and a police chief that has seen this for multiple decades, what are they? What are questions that homeowners should ask us as professionals that should be sort of included, other than what we talked about AV security, things like that, but also, what are things as professionals that we should we be proposing to our homeowners and saying like, Hey, this is probably a good upgrade that you should do, other than we talked about cameras, and just being obviously aware, is there anything else that we should be informing our our homeowners about?

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:06:44

  Yeah, I just, I think the account capital improvements are just more environmental designs on a home property, things like that, right? We talked about the lighting and so the security side of things, leveraging technology and understanding how that might map out into a broader network, or working with city, working with government, really understanding too, the neighborhood, the dynamics of the neighborhood, the quality of life, those are important things too. Really establishing relationships with your neighbors. Also, that's a big thing I'm always after too. Is really networking and getting away from the phone on social media, but actually interfacing with your neighbors and then building those relationships is key to moving forward. So I think about those things, but really above and beyond the things that we've talked about, like, those are the core things that I think about from a building standpoint, too. Is just the lighting, right? Yeah, the basic safety needs, and then the other things will take care of themselves over time. So that's how I see

  Mark D. Williams  1:07:30

  that. Yeah, no, it's helpful. I like that community aspect of having a fabric of being neighbors, right? Yeah, it's important. So interesting. You're gonna love this. So, so we're doing this home over in Cottage wood, the one right by the deep Haven City Hall, and it's called misah, who's which means cozy, and I've talked a lot about on the podcast. I won't go all into it now, but I one of the things that I love about home building is it the ability to be creative and take some parts that are important to you and apply it to this home. And so I love going to the Boundary Waters, or I like going to a cabin in the mountains where my phone doesn't work. I love that kind of calming effect of being off the grid. And so I talked to my AV company, and I said I would love it if I could create a button, not like just turning off Wi Fi on your phone, because your kids' phone could jump to the neighbor's Wi Fi, or it could go on your cellular data. Like, what could I do to create a system where my house would shut down and I would have two to three hours nobody call. It'd be quiet. Could I build a rural type of home in an urban environment? And I was like, this is genius. This doesn't exist. I can make a whole business about this. I can. And so anyway, so she said, Well, let me get back to you. So she talked to one of our security people, and the security person goes, who is this builder? He sounds very suspicious to me, and like, what he's asking for is illegal, because I you know what a Faraday cage is, like, it's a metal cage. You electrify it, it can't receive any signal, so it blocks, I'm sure, like, NSA are really protected sites probably have off grid all kinds of security stuff. Anyway, I was going at it from, like, peace with my children, like, play games, yeah, right. And he goes, No, that's police jammer technology. It's a federal offense. And he told and so because, of course, I didn't think like that. He's like, Yeah, Hannibal Lecter is going to be your clients, like terrorists, like people who want to do bad things. And it's like, Who is this builder? And she's like, No, no, he wants to do this to play games with his kids. Totally so funny to me. And I was like, I have to bring this up with tags. It's so relatable. But I guess someone was driving down the road with a police jammer in their phone or sorry in their car, and it was knocking out like police services along the way and federal fancy. He was telling the story to my AV person who then told it to me. I just think it's hilarious that my idea of having this house was gonna land me in the slammer. And so anyway, I had to share that one.

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:09:35

  It's a good idea. Though. Mindfulness is huge. It's important, and we always have to pay attention to that in a very diverse and changing world, and social media and all things that are going on. So our idea was good. It was good, but it is illegal to have jammers in your car and driving around too, so don't do

  Mark D. Williams  1:09:50

  that. No, I want here's my solution, way cheaper, way simpler, because ultimately we're trying to solve is self control, which turns out, as humans, we all kind of stink at and so. What I'm going to do is I'm going to have a metal box made in the house, like in the back hall, and it's going to have miso Hoos on it. And I could be kind of cool metal. And then when the kids come home, everyone just put their phones in the metal box, and you just put it over there. It sort of entering phones off. It's just like, I like it. It's like a symbol of you saying you deliberately want to spend time together as a family, being more intentional. And I don't bring it up because I'm passionate about I'm going to passionate about I'm gonna see if anyone now, whoever buys this home, can do whatever they want with that metal box. If they don't use it, I'll take it home. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. I do the same thing, yeah. Well, I appreciate your time and appreciate your service, and thanks for coming on. I like having things sort of outside our normal scheduled programming, just to kind of challenge how we think about our business, our lives and our home. So I appreciate your time.

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:10:40

  Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Happy to come back again. We got a lot of things we talked about today. Yeah, I got a lot more stuff we can talk about, so we can run the gamut.

  Mark D. Williams  1:10:48

  All right, what would you okay, let me ask you this. What would What do you? What would you think would be interesting to discuss on a future

  Chief Todd Milburn  1:10:53

  product? I think wellness is a good thing. We dance around that a little bit. There's a lot of that conversation happening in law enforcement. I dabble in that just a little bit too. So I got some thoughts and ideas on that, so I'd love to come back and talk about some of those things. Okay, business. I like talking about business stuff too. So yeah, I mean that leadership is another good one. Yeah, leadership's important. You've got a lot of leaders that listen in on your podcast, so I love getting into those conversations. Itself up for me too, to interface with those in the private market. Yeah, too. Any of those things we can

  Mark D. Williams  1:11:21

  talk we're gonna, I'm gonna talk to Patrick at Ian, because I've been talking. He actually said I saw him over the summer, and he said, Hey, you should come talk to school. And I was like, absolutely curious, builder, come talk to your school. What is auditorium? Whatever. But I love, I love interviewing people in front of an audience. We do a number of live events, but there we go. Maybe we'll do a live event. I'll have like, because my goal originally was to promote youth getting into construction. So it was going to be leaders in the community. Is going to be a HVAC, a plumber, and then just talk to a school auditorium. But this kind of takes a new talk. We'll have a police officer, we'll have an electrician, or, I don't know, well, maybe that's the avenue of it. That'd be super fun. Oh, thanks Todd. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to curious builder podcast. If you liked this episode, do us a favor. Share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in.

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