Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Cathy Lanier. Cathy is the chief security officer for the National Football League (NFL), supervising all operations and activities of the NFL Security Department. Prior to her work at the NFL, Cathy served as chief of police with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, becoming the first female police chief of the nation’s capital, the first commanding officer of Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism for D.C. Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force.
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Tim Ferriss: Cathy, it is so lovely to see you, and thanks for making the time. Really nice to see you again.
Cathy Lanier: Glad to finally connect. It was nice to see you, too, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: And I was going back and forth on where to start this, and I think I’m just going to follow the tried and true and begin at the beginning here. And maybe we should start with Tuxedo and just give people sort of a snapshot of where you grew up, how you grew up, all those dreams of being in law enforcement. I’m partially kidding, of course, because I know a little bit of the backstory. But can you tell people about the beginning?
Cathy Lanier: It’s important, I think, for context about the choices I made in my life. Like everybody on this planet, the way you’re raised, your family, your environment has so much influence on the way you do things as an adult. So my parents married right after high school, first boyfriend, girlfriend. So right after high school, my father was a firefighter, went in the fire department. My mother was a secretary. She went to work for the federal government. Back in the ’50s, being married at 18 was perfectly normal. So they got married, bought a home, started having children. They had three kids. I’m the youngest of the three. After I was born, I think they realized that a secretary and a firefighter salary does not exactly cover childcare for three kids. So they couldn’t afford the childcare for three kids for both of them to work, so my mother took a leave of absence from work. She did eventually go back, but she took a 10-year leave of absence after I was born.
And then when I was two, my mother took us to my grandparents for the weekend, and when we came home, my father was gone, and left my mom with three kids and no income, literally, because she was not working at the time. So life changed pretty dramatically for us then. Again, I was two. I don’t remember a lot of detail early on. But I do remember as a child growing up over that next 10 years while mom was home with us, really just a wonderful childhood. My mother was always there. She helped with homework and she would take me to soccer practice and basketball practice and majorette practice. She was always with us and she was just a wonderful, loving, caring mom. And we didn’t have a lot. We lived on $350 a month. My father eventually paid child support. We had a lot of support from the church and from friends and family. But it was a fun childhood for me. I mean, my mom was with me, and I think she provided a lot of stability for my brothers and I.
And then when I was getting ready to go from — back then, this was back before middle school, so you went elementary school, junior high school, high school. So in sixth grade, you leave elementary school and you go to junior high school. So I was 12 years old, 13 years old, becoming a teenager. We were going to a new school. I was going to seventh grade. My mother went back to work. I was the youngest at the time at 13. She felt like we were old enough to be latchkey kids and come home and let us in, be home for a couple hours every day until she got home from work. So she went back to work in her same role working for her same boss that she left 10 years earlier, which is pretty amazing.
Tim Ferriss: That is amazing.
Cathy Lanier: In fact, that whole 10-year period while my mother was off, also important is how it frames my context of things, is during that 10 years when my mom was home, I remember her sitting in front of the TV and taking shorthand to the television. She would get our favorite records and she would write down in shorthand all the words. And then she would sit at the table and type them all up and give us the words so we could sing along with our songs. And I thought it was just Mom doing fun things for us, but it was her keeping her skills. My mom, when she went back to work after a 10-year break in service, she still took shorthand at 96 words a minute and still could type over 100 words a minute. So just a wonderful example of work ethic for us. She knew she needed to go back to work and wanted to go back to work as soon as possible and she wanted to be on her game.
So I mean, great childhood. But when I was moving to junior high school, my mom went back to work, so I kind of lost that guardian, that best friend at a critical time, right? I’m becoming a teenager, we were going to a new school. They were busing back in those days, so I was being bused into a really tough neighborhood in Washington, DC. So that’s where everything started —
Tim Ferriss: From Maryland to Washington, DC.
Cathy Lanier: From Maryland.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: Right on the border of DC.
Tim Ferriss: Can I pause you for one second?
Cathy Lanier: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just trying to put myself, which is impossible for me to do, of course, in your mom’s shoes, right? You guys returned to the house, no car, dad’s gone, three kids. Have you spoken to her or do you have any best guesses as to the other things that helped her hold everything together in terms of resilience or support or anything else? I mean, I suppose that necessity is the mother of invention on some level, but have you ever spoken to her about that?
Cathy Lanier: I did. And it’s funny, my mother was very passive, sweet, just kind of a very quiet, internal person, and in my entire life, I never saw my mother cry. Never. Never. I mean, under any circumstances. I’m sure she did, but I never really saw my mother cry. And my grandmother was completely the opposite. My mom was an only child. Her mother was like a pistol, like hardcore — so my grandmother was very helpful, but my mother was a rock. I mean, she took care of us. When I tell people now, we lived on food stamps, welfare, the church brought us baskets of food for the holidays, but we didn’t have a car for many years. We finally got a car. It didn’t have heat. It used to break down every time we went out in it. The hot water spigot in our bathroom used to squirt scalding hot water over you if you weren’t careful because it needed a washer, and there was nobody to come and fix that washer.
But we had a wonderful childhood. My mother was just solid. She loved her kids, and she was a beautiful, beautiful woman. And I always ask her why she didn’t ever date, and she’s like, “My kids were my life, and I didn’t want anybody around my children that didn’t think of them as the same priority that I thought of them.” So I think her resilience was really just steady for her family. I think her family was her motivation, and nothing was going to disrupt her commitment there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the singular focus. So I interrupted you. You were saying —
Cathy Lanier: That’s okay.
Tim Ferriss: — there’s this transition point, you’re busing in to Washington, DC, and you’ve sort of lost your guardian in a sense at that point. So if you wouldn’t mind picking up there.
Cathy Lanier: So, again, we were being bused into a neighborhood. The idea at the time was to racially integrate neighborhoods. I lived in a very small industrial neighborhood, like an industrial park, right on the border of Washington, DC. Literally, there was a train that ran right behind my house in the backyard. On the other side of that train tracks was Washington, DC. We were on the Maryland side. So they were busing us to a school on the border of Northeast Washington to racially integrate the schools.
So each day when our bus would pick us up and take us to school, when our bus would pull up in front of the school — everything in most big cities, I would say, but in Washington for sure, is very neighborhood-based. So when our bus would pull up in front of the school and we would get out as the Maryland kids coming to the school, as soon as we’d get off the bus, we’d get jumped. Every day there was a fight. It was a terrible change. All the way through school, I was in the talented and gifted program, straight-A student, loved school, and now I’m being bused into a school where the kids that we were going to school with hated us. It was very racially charged. It was agonizing to go to school because you had to fight just to get from the bus to the classroom.
So my mom would go — her bus would — it’s funny now. It wasn’t funny then. But her bus would pick her up on the corner at 7:00 in the morning, and my bus would pick me up on the other corner at 7:15. So we’d both go out to the bus stop together in the morning, and she would wait for her bus, I’d wait for my bus. She’d get on her bus and she’d ride by me, and I’d wave, and then one of my older friends who had a car would come and pick me up and we would go skip school for the day. I at least would skip the first half. I would skip the first few periods so I didn’t have to go through that agonizing fight every morning.
Tim Ferriss: Entry, rough entry. Mm-hmm.
Cathy Lanier: So I went from a talented and gifted student with straight As to failing literally every subject the first quarter of seventh grade. I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging 19 days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school. My mother didn’t know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at 6:00 p.m., we were all sitting around pretending to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was so chronically truant that I was failing all of my major subjects.
So meanwhile, while I’m skipping school, I’m hanging out with the wrong people, much older crowd, friends of my older brother and just an older crowd and just getting in trouble. And I fall in love with a much older boyfriend at the time, think I’m in love, and we want to get married and run away and get married. And so by the time I was in the ninth grade, I’m 14 years old, found myself pregnant. My boyfriend at the time had given me a diamond ring. We were engaged, we’re going to get married, so we run away. He was 26 at the time. I was 14. My mother, when she finds out, was going to have him arrested. She was going to put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, “Well, we’ve got this. We’re going to get married and we’re going to have the baby and everything’s going to be great.” The mind of a 14-year-old. Obviously things didn’t work out that way.
Interestingly, I went to my father who had been out of the picture most of my life and asked for him to sign for me to get married. Because of my age, one of my parents had to legally sign over my legal guardianship to my husband. So they literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad, thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for, because once he signed over my guardianship, he —
Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.
Cathy Lanier: — paid $100 less a month in child support. So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We got married the day after my 15th birthday. I was eight months pregnant at the time.
So I guess fast-forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was back at home. My mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn’t approve of me going to school. So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED. And she would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type on the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand, and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. I got a job as a secretary when I was 16, so started working as secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening in a bar. Also lied about my age to work in a bar. That was the only option up in the area where I was working. So for the next several years, I worked two jobs as a secretary and a waitress.
And my motivation really was my son. It was kind of a significant moment for me, and I’ve had a few in my life. When my son was born, I had never babysat before, I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know anything about babies or children. And when he was born, he was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my bed in my bedroom. And I’d wake up in the morning, and he’d be awake and he’d just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Not crying, nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this —
Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: Yeah, about three weeks into this experiment, I’m looking at him one morning, and it just dawns on me for the first time that I’m a parent and that that helpless little baby was completely reliant on me. And my mother always stressed the importance of education and work to us, and here I was, my husband didn’t allow me to go to school, I would never be able to get a job, and I’m looking at this poor little innocent baby and I’m thinking his whole life depends on me, and what am I going to be able to provide with a ninth grade education? Not much. So that was a aha moment.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to resist the temptation to ask 300 questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we’ll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious for you, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes at that young age, when you — and we don’t need to get into the details unless you’d like to share, but when you separated from your then-husband, when that happened, what did you think was going to become of you? What did you envision your path would be at that point? I have to imagine that it would have just been incredibly challenging. I don’t know. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I read that when you were a young girl, you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: And then flash-forward, you go through this entire tumultuous experience and you land back at home. Where did you think your life was headed? Where did you think you were headed at that point?
Cathy Lanier: Well, I knew that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world, and that’s take care of my son. And when I first moved back home, I got my GED, but I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. It was 16, almost 17. I had to wait till I was 16 and nine months to take the test to get the GED. Interestingly, you needed 255 to pass the test. I got 256. I passed it by one point.
Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about —
Cathy Lanier: There’s another little footnote of my life.
Tim Ferriss: — these Sliding Door moments. Holy cow, right? Okay.
Cathy Lanier: So I knew that my mother had always stressed the importance of education and work, so I knew I had to go back to school, and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance, and I knew if I was going to do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn’t do that, I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, “This is not my path. This can’t be my path.”
And so when I got my job as a secretary, they offered tuition reimbursement to go to college, so I started at community college. I just started taking one class a semester, and that’s where it started, one class a semester. And they reimbursed me for it.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, for people who don’t have context, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was, God, it has to be, what, more than a year ago now, I’m sure. Time flies. But it’s been a long while. And I just remember thinking to myself, “God, I hope someday that we can have this conversation on the podcast,” so I want to thank you again for doing it.
How do you then go from there — what is the connective tissue, sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement? What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction?
Cathy Lanier: So to be fair, my family’s a public service family. My father was a firefighter. My oldest brother had become a firefighter right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer. I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class a semester working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I was still living in the same crappy neighborhood, but I wanted my son in a good school.
And I saw an ad — I was 23 years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Metropolitan Police Department; they were hiring. And what caught my attention — it’s a full page ad in the Post. Half of the page said tuition reimbursement. I’m like, “Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I’m paying for one class a semester. Going to take me 30 years to get a degree.”
So I went with a friend, and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early 1990. 500 murders a year. DC was known as the murder capital of the world at the time. So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test, and I came out — I want to say I came out like 60 out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back in the early ’90s. Washington DC was about 89% African American.
So I mean, I felt the same drive my mother felt taking care of us is that I have a son that needs me, he needs me to provide for him, and the only way I’m going to do this is get a good job, government job, not a bad option, and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metropolitan Police in 1990, started walking a footbeat. My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy, I went to work and didn’t come home for five days. It was great.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, we’re going to double-click on that and come right back to Mount Pleasant, but before we do, I want to know what the entrance exam or qualification exam was like, right? Because you mentioned the GED, and just by the skin of your teeth getting in, passing the hurdle. And then it sounds like you’ve, not a very technical term, but kind of crushed the examination that you took that ultimately placed you at 60 out of a thousand. What was that test like?
Cathy Lanier: So remember, now when I started taking classes at Prince George’s Community College, my goal was to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an attorney. I started out wanting to be a secretary like my mom. Then once I got into the workplace, I realized I wanted bigger, better things, so I wanted to be an attorney. So I was taking political science, philosophy, a lot of those kind of courses, getting all my generals out of the way at community college. So by the time I got to the Metropolitan Police Department at 23, I had three years of college courses. But the exam for entry into policing, now back in those days, they only required a high school diploma or an equivalent. You didn’t need college.
So the entry exam was a lot of things that you would expect for law enforcement. You do a lot of multiple choice questions. You have to be able to read and comprehend well, so reading comprehension was a big part of it. You have to do some basic math, so you have to understand math. But there was a lot of problem-solving type questions. So they flash a photo in front of you and then they say — there’s a photo inside of a department store, and then, okay, you’ve just walked into this department store and there’s been a robbery. What is it you noticed in that quick three seconds you had to look at that photo? What do you remember? What time was it on the clock? What color was the lady’s shoes that was standing at the register? So there was reading comprehension, math, problem-solving, and then a good bit of, are you paying attention? Do you have the detail to pay attention to do the things that you need to do as a police officer, much of which you learn as a cop.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. But it seems like you had either developed or innately possessed — and maybe I’m reaching, but I mean, maybe not. I mean, was there anything in that test that highlighted, for lack of a better descriptor, superpowers, strengths of yours, that came into full fruition later where you’re like, “Okay, if I look at the recipe, some of the ingredients of the recipe that ultimately contributed to my success,” were any of them sort of revealed in that test in any way or not really?
Cathy Lanier: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I won’t — okay.
Cathy Lanier: Actually, great question. Actually, it’s a very good question. I don’t get a lot of interviews to ask the types of question you’re asking. I think it’s an excellent question. So I would say the two things that have helped me in that exam and that have helped me most of my law enforcement career, my grandmother instilled in me — she spent a lot of time with us growing up as well — two things, problem-solving being a big part of that. You never make excuses. When bad things happen, don’t make excuses. You put yourself in that position. You found yourself here. It is nobody else’s fault but yours. I’m not an excuse person. I don’t make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation, I did something to get myself here and I’m going to get myself out. And that was the way she taught us. You get yourself in, you get yourself out. And the other thing she taught me was, she’s like, “You’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You better be damned for doing.” So you act. You always act. You don’t let your circumstances dictate for you. You act and you take action and you do. You don’t wait for somebody else to do for you.
And those things were really part of that problem-solving exercise when you’re coming on the police department, and it’s certainly your problem-solving exercise every day you’re on the police department. It certainly was for the next 27 years for me. Look, you can’t avoid consequences. There’s consequences for everything that happens. Every decision you make has consequences. You can’t avoid consequences. But you can choose what you do after those things happen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I imagine you’ve probably not met him, but I interviewed someone named Jocko Willink, who’s a former Navy SEAL commander, many years ago. It was the first time he ever did a public interview. And he wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And I feel like your grandmother and what she instilled in you is in a nutshell exactly the type of high-agency thinking that Jocko talks about. It’s the same thing. Wow.
Cathy Lanier: My grandma would say there’s two types of people in the world, excuse people and people who are accountable, and I’m going to be the accountable.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Mount Pleasant. For people who don’t have the historical context, what were the Mount Pleasant riots? And you said right before I asked about the test, you said it was great. And if that is actually not a sarcastic statement, but a real statement of how you felt, I want to know why that was the case. But let’s start with just a little bit of history for people who aren’t familiar, I certainly wasn’t, with the Mount Pleasant riots.
Cathy Lanier: Well, when I said it was great, in terms of being a rookie right out of the academy and understanding what you’ve got yourself into, it was, “Here’s what you’ve got yourself into. You went to work today and you’re not going home for five days.”
So the night before my first day out of the academy, there was a pair of police officers walking a foot patrol in our patrol district. They tried to place a gentleman under arrest for drinking in public. He was a Latino male, didn’t speak English. We had a big problem in our city back in those days. We had very few people on the department that spoke Spanish. We had a huge Latino population. There was a big gap in our community. So it’s really difficult to do any kind of effective policing if you’re not communicating with the people in the community, and we were not. So when this officer was trying to place this person under arrest, during the handcuffing the subject, after one handcuff was on, he turned around, pulled a knife on the officer, and the officer shot, so he was shot with one handcuff on. So the partner of the officer shot, rolled him over, put the other handcuff on, took the knife away, called paramedics. All’s the people saw was a handcuffed person who had been shot. So the Latino community in that neighborhood immediately began gathering on the street, large crowd. This all happened around 11:30 at night so by the time I got into the station for 5:30 roll call, I show up at 5:30 in the morning, the riot had broken out around 1:00 a.m. They had burned several police cars. There was stores that were looted and on fire. There was a big, big deal down in Mount Pleasant. So when I got to work my first day, I walked into the station, said, “Hi, I’m Cathy Lanier. I’m the new rookie from the academy.” And they threw me a gas mask and they told me to go out and get in the van. And he said, “Hop over the counter, go out the back door and get in that van.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I hopped over the counter and went and got in that van.
I was sitting with 15 other cops with gas masks on and big riot sticks. And they took us down and they dumped us off on the corner of Mount Pleasant Park Road and it was fully engulfed in fires and looting. And people were throwing bottles and bricks and stones at us. We had little helmets they had given us as we were hopping out of the van. And I didn’t have a radio because rookies weren’t allowed to have radios at the time. I had not been trained how to use the radio. So my partner had the radio. So my lifeline was on my partner, but we stood there online and literally got pelted with bricks and bottles. And I mean, over the course of five days, it was trial by fire for sure. But it was a big learning experience for me because I understood the frustration.
I understood the frustration. That whole community in Mount Pleasant were all Latino. They didn’t speak English. The cops didn’t speak to them very well. I mean, nobody could really communicate with — but the cops were pushing people around and there was no way to try and get the story straight and really no effort to get the story straight, to understand the frustration. So it was a big learning experience for me as I worked my way up the ranks to understand how important inclusion is in the community. If you’re a police officer and you are not embedding yourself in that community and understanding who the people are in that community and what their needs are and how to communicate, you’re really not going to be successful.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to, I imagine, revisit that at some point because it seems to be a consistent thread through a lot of the work that you’ve done, but I want to spend a little bit more time on Mount Pleasant. I am curious, I suppose, yet again, what that maybe showed you about yourself or just highlighted about you constitutionally or personality wise, right? Because I would imagine some people could get dropped in that environment after they just signed up, they’re like, “Hey, I’m just here for tuition reimbursement. Holy shit, I’m getting hit with bricks. This is not exactly what I thought my first day was going to be,” and they’re out. I have to imagine that there are some people who would be closer to that.
Maybe they didn’t quit, but they were probably closer to that end of the spectrum. And do you thrive in particular in intense environments? I wonder, right? Because in my case, constitutionally out of the box, little things, especially interpersonal things, bother me that are trivial, frankly. I get all wound up about very stupid things, but in crisis situations, the car accident in front of me, some guy’s got his leg blown apart or whatever. I actually do really very well in those environments. I don’t know why that is. I really have no idea, but was there anything that you noticed about yourself in that type of environment, in those types of circumstances?
Cathy Lanier: I think the thing for me that I thrive on is as we’re dropped out down there and they’re giving us the riot sticks and the helmets and the gas mask and they’re shooting canisters of gas into the crowd and knowing what started this and how this all blew up, I’m thinking to myself, we’re not going about this the right way. I was a rookie. I know nothing about policing other than what I was taught in the academy so by no means did I think I was smarter than the guy making the command decisions, right? But I’m just looking at it from my perspective and going, “This is just not the right way to do this. We’re not going to win here. This is not a win situation. This should be done differently.” And I just always felt like from the minute I hit the ground, watching [inaudible] analyze the way that we were doing things and thinking, why are we doing this this way?
There’s a better way to do these things. And so that’s the way I felt in Mount Pleasant. My first day on the job, really hard to explain, I just felt like there’s a problem to be solved here and we’re not going about it in a problem solving manner. We’re going about it with brute force. Brute force doesn’t always work. And so it intrigued me and every day after that, once the riots were over, I started walking a foot beat in the city. Every single day I went to work, I got to problem solve. For six, seven, eight times a day, calls for service, 911 calls, you respond to people who are in crisis, people who need help and you get to try and help think through that, help solve the problem. And that’s what I enjoyed doing. It’s frustrating when you’re at the bottom of the totem pole and you’re the line officer. You’re in a chain of command, you can’t make certain decisions. But I did feel like every single day I went to work, I made a difference in someone’s life, no matter how small.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And this was around, tell me if I’m getting this wrong, but around 1990 or early ’90s?
Cathy Lanier: 1990.
Tim Ferriss: 1990.
Cathy Lanier: Yep. 1990.
Tim Ferriss: And you were working your way up the ranks. When did you first, and we’ll certainly talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of that timeframe in some respects, but when did your first real mentor show up? I have different names from doing homework in front of me. I’ve got, if I’m saying it correctly, Sonya Proctor, I’ve got Charles Ramsey, who might show up a little bit later. I’m not sure exactly on the chronology, but were there any critical figures in the first few years who were helpful to you? Or was it really just executing, getting the job done, delivering and working your way up? I’m wondering when your first mentor of sorts or — I don’t want to say guardian, it might not be the right word — but influential figure showed up in policing.
Cathy Lanier: So I was an officer and I loved my job. Once I worked my way up, I was foot patrol the first several months. And then I went to motorcycle school and I got trained to ride a motor and then I was on a motorcycle. I wanted to be mobile so I could get around and I love the adrenaline, 911 calls, getting out there, being first on the scene. And then I got moved up a little bit more in seniority and I was in a patrol car. And I used to get on the radio and I’m like, “All right, Dispatcher, I’m in service. Stack me up. Give me all the calls you got pending that’s been sitting there waiting. I’ll take them off.” So I had a lieutenant who, he was like a SWAT team commander guy who got promoted to lieutenant and they sent him out to patrol, which is like a slap in the face to a SWAT guy, right?
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Cathy Lanier: They hate the call stuff. But he had come to my district and he called me in his office one day. He’s like, “I hear you on the radio out there.” He’s like, “You’re really humping.” I was like, “Yeah, I love this job. This is great. It’s fun.” And he’s like, “You’re coming up on three years, you’re going to be eligible for sergeant. You should take that sergeant’s test.” And I was like, “Why’d I want to do that? I like my job. I like what I’m doing. If I take a sergeant test I’m going to get moved somewhere,” he’s like, “No, no, you need to take the sergeant’s test.” I’m like, “Well, why would I want to do that?” And he’s like, “Well, you want to make more money, right?”
And I’m like, “That’s a good point.” And he said, “And once you start taking these promotional exams, it gives you more opportunities to influence the things. I hear you, you’re trying to change some things, why don’t you take that exam?” So he pushed me pretty hard. And when the test announcement came out, he said, “Come on, I’m going to give you a ride. Let’s go pick up your books. You have an eight-month window to study.” He’s like, “Let’s go pick up your books.” So I was like, “All right.” I was a little intimidated. I’m like, okay. So I took that sergeant’s test. I was eligible for sergeant at three years. I took the first sergeants to test. There was 890 people that were eligible that we took the test altogether.
After the written exam, you go to an assessment phase where you do a bunch of oral interviews and exercises and paper exercises. And I ended up coming out number 13 out of 890 for that. So I got promoted right away, a very young sergeant, 26 years old, three years on the job. I had a master patrol officer working for me that had more years on the job than I was old. He had 26 years on the job, I was 26 years old. So that was the first mentor. And he had remained a mentor for me for most of my career.
Tim Ferriss: What was his name?
Cathy Lanier: Donny Exum.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, man, these stories are so critical because whenever — I mean, people are self-made in many respects and at the same time, you just have to wonder sometimes, right? If you didn’t have these intervening figures, nothing like your experience, but I had a pretty miserable public school experience when I was growing up and ultimately hadn’t even thought of private school. And there was one math teacher who was basically like, “You need to get the hell out of here.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, out of here to where?” And he just kept harping on me. And then there was one other person who chimed in. Then I had two people and I was like, “Oh, okay, maybe I should take a look at this.” And it was just like, if that had not happened, who knows? It’s just a lot of question marks.
Cathy Lanier: Critical. Those mentors are critical.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What does a sergeant do? I’m embarrassed to admit that I have no idea. What does a sergeant do?
Cathy Lanier: So this is one of the things that police departments do right. Now that I’m in the private sector, I wish the private sector had a similar structure. So once you make sergeant, you start as a first line supervisor. So they’ll give you eight people, eight to 10 people that you’re responsible for. So you’re the squad sergeant. You have a squad that’s assigned to you, those eight to 10 people, they report to you. So I’m responsible for making sure when we pop at a roll call and we hit the street that my squad of eight is doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re clearing their calls, they’re taking reports like they’re supposed to. If they get in a situation where they don’t know what to do, they go over the radio call for me, I go down and help them work through that situation and I help teach them how to manage these situations.
So you’re first line supervision, you’re right there every day on the street with the 911 responders and you’re helping them manage those calls and you’re helping them manage how to solve those problems. You’re signing arrest paperwork. If you make an arrest, “Wait a minute, let me look at all of the probable cause you have here before we put this person in handcuffs.” Or if you’ve got the person in handcuffs when I get on the scene, “Let’s review what you got here before we take somebody to jail. Let’s make sure we’ve met the DC code, we know that you’ve got a legitimate arrest here.” So you start managing a small group and then the next level is manager. Then you become a lieutenant and then they give you like 40 people to manage and you start making little bigger decisions. Now you’re scheduling, you’re assigning, you’re working through warrants and things like that. So it’s a very gradual progression.
Tim Ferriss: In that timeframe, early 90s or just 90s, I suppose, writ large, what was it like being a woman in the police force?
Cathy Lanier: It was a really tough environment when I first got there. There were a few days in the very beginning when I was an officer that — the good thing about the officer, when I got there, the department was 85 probably percent African American. The city was largely 89% African American. So largely African American, certainly very few white females. It was very few females. So I would think we were about 11% women on the department of 5,000, 5,200, I think, when I came on, the size of our department. So very few women, very few white women, little bit — this was a very — it’s hard to think back to 1990. Sexual harassment was commonplace. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared about it. It wasn’t an issue. It happened every day and you work through it. I grew up with two older brothers, so I knew how to navigate it a little bit.
Listen, my brothers gave me advice on how to deal with some of this. The good thing is as an officer, you very quickly establish yourself. And I established myself as an officer early on as a worker. I came to work, I did my job. I don’t need anybody to do me any favors. You don’t need to look out for me. I don’t need a partner. I can ride by myself, I’m good. Once I made sergeant though, the harassment got worse. I mean, I had a lieutenant that was really, really sexually harassing. I mean, not just me, but several women, physical harassment. I mean, getting you on a midnight shift in a sergeant’s office and closing the door and putting hands on you and things like that. And I remember saying to my boyfriend at the time, I was like, “You know what? I got real thick skin. I can take all kinds of comments. I don’t mind any of that stuff, but I’m not going to let people put their hands on me. That’s just not going to happen.” So the harassment was pretty intense. It was a really tough environment.
Tim Ferriss: So what happened?
Cathy Lanier: So had a lieutenant, when I made sergeant, I was sent over to Southeast Washington. I was patrolling in Southeast. I had really a good squad. I worked nights, permanent nights. So I had a lieutenant that was harassing me and some other women, but me pretty intensely, calling me on the radio, forcing me to drive him around, putting me in his cruiser with them, making me drive him around, just not letting me do my job. Constant harassment, calling me on the radio, bringing me to the office, making me drive him somewhere, things like that. And so I finally, after several times of asking him to leave me alone, I finally filed a sexual harassment complaint. He had put his hands on me several times. So I filed a complaint, and I remember going down to the EEO office and filing this complaint, and they asked me to write a list of anybody who had ever — well, first of all, before I went down, my partner, one of my fellow sergeants, who was a Black male officer, said to me one day, we were out riding together.
The lieutenant had called me in and my partner said to me, the other sergeant said, “How long are you going to let this keep going on before you do something about it?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “I hope you’re writing this stuff down. I hope you’re going to say something to somebody because this can’t go on like this.” So the first, again, a man, not a woman, another male police officer basically said to me, “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, nobody else is going to stand up for you.” And so when he said that, it clicked. He’s trying to say either you’re going to allow this to keep happening or you don’t want it to happen and you do something about it. So after that conversation, I filed this complaint, I list all the people who had witnessed because my harasser made no effort to hide it.
He made horrible comments and grabbed women in front of others all the time. So I listed 17 different witnesses and they did the investigation. And literally I left the EEO office, I went to court, I had court that day and I was in court 20 minutes after I left the EEO office from filing my complaint, my harasser, the lieutenant, texted me on my beeper, we had beepers back then and said, “I know what you’re doing and you’re not going to get away with this.” So it was supposed to be confidential, but within 20 minutes of leaving the office, the person who was doing my investigation called him and told him that I had made a complaint.
Tim Ferriss: Gross.
Cathy Lanier: So I had to go back to work in that environment, one of the most violent areas of Washington DC. From that day forward, he prohibited me from partnering with anybody. He refused to allow me to ride with anybody else. He continued the harassment. He came into my office the next day, shut the door and said, “Look, I know that what you’re doing. You need to back down. You need to withdraw this complaint. You’re not going to win.” Anyway, long story short, they sustained the complaint. So the investigation, all the witnesses I listed, they were all men. I didn’t think any of them would tell the truth. Nobody wants to go against a higher ranking person, and every single one of them told the truth. They all wrote down what they saw. They all not only talked about what they saw him doing to me, but what they saw him doing to other women.
And I was just shocked. I always say to women, you don’t realize when you’re in these scenarios, decent men that observe these things going on, they don’t like it either. They don’t like it either. And those other men that I was working with, they didn’t like it either. And some of them, this guy had harassed their girlfriends or their wives, you know what I mean? So that really made an impression on me, that so many of the men that I work with stood up and did the right thing there. When it was time for him to be disciplined for this, when we got to trial board, I walk into trial board for the discipline to come down and they told me they had to drop the whole case and throw it out. And I’m like, “Why? What happened?” And they said, “Well, we missed the 90 days. In the District of Columbia, you have to bring discipline within 90 days of the day that you knew or should have known about the misconduct.” They sat on this investigation till day 91 and then turned it in.
So literally after all of that, they threw the case out and they said, “Well, we’ll just transfer you. Where do you want to be transferred to?” And I was like, “I don’t want to be transferred. I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t transfer me. Transfer him. I didn’t do anything.” He later had several other complaints come forward and eventually was terminated for a severe case with multiple other subordinates later on.
But I will tell you this, now everything above the rank of captain in the police department is appointed. You civil service exam for sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. After captain, it’s appointed by the chief of police. You’re an appointed rank and you’re also at will so you can get appointed to inspector or commander, but you also can get demoted with no cause either.
So I remember one of my mentors, another mentor, a lieutenant, there was a captain and a lieutenant that were both good mentors to me there. The captain of the two mentors I had there pulled me aside after this complaint and said, “You did the right thing. He’s been harassing women here for years and somebody needed to stand up so you did the right thing.” He said, “But just know you’ll never make it past the rank of captain.” Because that lieutenant was very well-connected at the time to the chief of police, so very friendly with the chief of police that whole administration. So I said, “That’s fine. That’s fine.” I wasn’t thinking long-term longevity and promotion.
Tim Ferriss: So that actually ties into what I was going to ask you because it strikes me as an incredibly brave thing to do. I imagine not everyone in your situation would’ve done that. I mean, in fact, they didn’t. I mean, I imagine there’s a lot of fear around, there could be a lot of fear around the political or job, professional repercussions of voicing something like that, especially during a period when that was not common.
Cathy Lanier: Well, remember, my driver in life, Tim, if you think about this, and harassers work this way, my goal in life is to take care of my son. I’m a single mom and after he knew I made a complaint, he was threatening my job. He was really making it very difficult for me to come to work. It was terrifying to come to work. And I was fighting for my job, I can’t lose my job. I have a son to take care of and I’m not going to lose my job because somebody wants to be a bully. And that’s the motivation. It was terrible. I was sick to my stomach every day. I was going in the bathroom and throwing up. I mean, when I got to work and just every time I heard his voice on the radio, it was terrible for me, but I also couldn’t afford to lose my job. I was not going to let somebody force me out of my goal. And I had a son to take care of, so I couldn’t afford that. I was going to fight until I knew that I was safe.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it’s a focusing, forcing function, right? I mean, having that singular priority. So it seems like, I mean, the predictions about you never rising above the rank of, what was it, captain?
Cathy Lanier: Captain.
Tim Ferriss: Seems like that fellow wasn’t exactly the Nostradamus of predicting the future. So could you walk us through how things progressed and why were you able to continue to excel? Did his prediction just turn out to be completely false.
Cathy Lanier: I think it would have been accurate. I tell you what, the stars aligned for me. So I took sergeant test at three years. I was eligible for lieutenant at five. I took the lieutenant’s test at five years. I came in number one on that test. I took the captain’s test, seven years, I came in number three on that test. So I got promoted bang, bang, bang, three years, five years, seven years. I was a captain in seven years. I would have never gone past the rank of captain in that current administration. And then Marion Barry gets arrested, our mayor, Marion Barry is taken out and replaced by the control board. The control board comes in 1998. I’m a captain at the time. Marion Barry is now taken out of play. The control board takes over. They bring in Chuck Ramsey, an outsider who knows nobody in the department.
He doesn’t know anybody. He’s got no clique. He’s got no boys. Everybody’s fresh. So he comes in as I’m a lieutenant just making captain, takes over the police department as a complete outsider and is doing his assessment of what officials, what command level officials he wanted to have on his team. And he appointed me from the rank of captain to be an inspector to take over major narcotics branch with less than eight years on the job. I was 29, I think.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Then Chuck makes his appearance. Right. Okay. Charles Ramsey.
Cathy Lanier: He’s the next big mentor.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Okay. So just for honestly, my personal curiosity, because I really know nothing about how police structures work. What is a captain doing? And then what does an inspector do, if you don’t mind?
Cathy Lanier: So again, this is where I think the police department gets right. You spend three years as a patrol officer, you make sergeant, you study really hard, you take the test, you make sergeant, you go through some schools. After you make sergeant, you manage a small group, then you make lieutenant two years later, you go through the exam process, you go through some schools after that, and then you manage a platoon of 40. When I was a lieutenant, I had narcotics officers, I had detectives, and I had patrol.
Tim Ferriss: How are those 40 people determined? Is it based on neighborhood or some type of geographic area?
Cathy Lanier: So at that time, it’s done differently and over the course of the years, it’s changed, but at that time it was geographically. So I had a patrol district, and of that patrol district, I had one third of that patrol district, and I managed every resource for that part of the district. So all three shifts. I had day work, midnights, evening shift, all three shifts. Those officers are split across those three shifts, and they covered all the policing. So not just the 911 responders, the guys in uniform going to 911 calls, but also your narcotics officers and your detectives that follow up and investigate crimes.
Tim Ferriss: This is lieutenant.
Cathy Lanier: That’s lieutenant.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So lieutenant, is that the first time where you’re getting the decathlete’s exposure to all of these different things?
Cathy Lanier: Yes. And you’re also getting exposure to administration. So part of that promotional exam is studying administration. You have to learn administration. So if there are municipal regulations that need to be changed, and I’m managing a large part of the portion of the District of Columbia, I see a municipal regulation needs to be changed, I need to know the process to petition to change that municipal regulation. How do I go about changing that law? Because I’m seeing firsthand the impact it’s having in our neighborhoods, so police administration starts to become more and more important there. I also now can start influencing policy. I can influence policy for my little piece of the world. I decide what my drug enforcement tactics are going to be. I decide how we’re going to work in terms of doing warrant service and things like that. So that’s where you first start to get a better understanding of influencing how policing actually is carried out.
Tim Ferriss: Not to minimize the prior steps, but it sounds like the lieutenant role is a very dense learning opportunity based on the description.
Cathy Lanier: And I think the best role, the best rank on the police department for me was lieutenant. I was able to still go out on the street, support my troops, back up my sergeants, have fun policing and do the policing that I enjoyed, but I also had the ability to change the environment for them, help them, and also influence how we were policing our community.
After captain, it gets — the captain is more — you’re strapped to your desk a lot more.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say more behind the desk.
Cathy Lanier: You’re reviewing bad arrests, that a sergeant didn’t do the right thing and review the paperwork. Now you’ve got a bad arrest that’s got to be detention journaled. So you’ve got to review and make that decision. You’ve got to set things up at the courts. You’ve got to look at all the disciplinary investigations that come in. Officers getting disciplined for things. You’ve got to make decisions about that. You sit on trial boards. Who’s going to get disciplined? Who’s going to get terminated? It’s very administrative. You’re helping the commander make decisions, community meetings, deployment decisions, and it’s not as much fun.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I know a few people in law enforcement, but mostly military, former military guys. And I mean, very similar. Some of these guys, they just love being in the field and they’re like, “I got promoted.” It’s like, “I just don’t know how I feel about it.” There’s very mixed excuses.
Cathy Lanier: Well, here’s the big key. When I went to go change my uniform, so you go to property division, when you get promoted, you walk off the stage, you get your birds or whatever you’re getting, your clusters or whatever for your new rank. You go to the property division, you get your new rank insignia. When I made captain and I went over to property division to get my new rank insignia, they said, “Turn in your handcuffs.”
And I was like, “What? Turn in my handcuffs? What are you talking about?”
“Well, you don’t need those anymore.”
I’m like, “You’re not taking my handcuffs. I’m going to keep my handcuffs. Right here. Right here.”
I kept my gun belt. I kept my gun belt, my handcuffs, my extra magazines, all those things that the administrative captains used to turn in. I’m like, “No, I’m keeping this stuff.”
Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Chuck. And because I’m so unfamiliar with the internal workings, it’s hard for me to pick the next sort of flashpoint, maybe a seminal moment for you. I mean, there’s a lot to pick from. I’m not sure how to put them in order, not that they have to be in order, but maybe tell me if there’s something that we just talked about before this. But you mentioned Chuck, pushing you to take tough assignments. Is special operations division, is that a sensible place to hop to next? Or what do you think? Are we skipping some important steps in between?
Cathy Lanier: When Chuck came in and he initially put me in charge, I’d only been a captain, I want to say four or five months, and he kind of did a clean out at the top. A lot of that old boy network that was there when he got there, they were all people that were long past retirement. So he pushed a lot of the command staff out. So that made him push people up pretty young in their career. So he pushed me up to be the commander of major narcotics branch as an inspector, like I said, just under eight years on. So I was very young and I had a major role —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. I’m trying to do the math. How old were you then at that point?
Cathy Lanier: So I want to say I was 30-ish, 30, 31. I made the narcotics branch.
Tim Ferriss: Man, that’s amazing. That is a lot of responsibility. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: And so, I went to major narcotics branch. I was there for — so I had major narcotics branch and vehicular homicide. So I managed all the vehicular homicide investigative units there for just under two years. And then he promoted me again to commander. And I took over a patrol district, the fourth district where Mount Pleasant sits. The patrol district I started in, I went back now and I was the commander of that patrol district. It was the largest residential area in the city of Washington. So I took over that district. I ran that for two years, and then Chuck got a way. He called me down to his office and he says, “I’m thinking I’m going to send you to SOD.” It was 9/11 happens. The Friday after 9/11, he says, “I think I’m going to send you to special operations division.”
I was like, “You know what? I love being the district commander. I love working in 4D. My goal was to retire as the commander of 4D. Thanks, but I really like where I am.”
And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” And then two days later, a teletype came out transferring me to SOD. So it wasn’t really asking me. He’s like, “Oh, okay.”
Tim Ferriss: He’s like, “That’s a great story. Thank you for that.”
Cathy Lanier: Yeah, funny. Right. “Glad to hear it.”
So I took over special ops. Now, special operations division had never had a woman in charge. So that in itself was a little intimidating. But the one thing that when you talk about mentors, and I know you probably have experienced this like many others, is what a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don’t have. Chuck recognized that I didn’t have the confidence. I was intimidated by this SOD thing. I was like, yeah, no. Never had a woman in charge. It’s a predominantly male. I always say the most testosterone in the police departments in SOD. It’s the bomb squad, the SWAT team, Harbor, the Marine Unit, the helicopter unit, aviation, horse-mounted unit, K-9, civil disturbance unit, the presidential protection unit. So it’s like nine or 10 different units, your high-end stuff. So anyway, he recognized that I was intimidated by that. And he’s like, “Mm-mm, you’re going to go and you’re going to do it.”
He sent me off to a bunch of schools. I went to EOD schools, bombing schools, so I learned how to manage a bomb squad. I learned how to manage a SWAT team and the people there were great. That was my best assignment in my entire career. I spent six years there after 9/11, recreating our special operations division and turning it into a Homeland Security and counterterrorism unit.
Tim Ferriss: What made it so good for you, that particular role?
Cathy Lanier: Well, it was the most complex role I’d ever held. Most of the units I managed, I had to manage three or four different type of specialties. I had to manage nine different specialties, and they were highly special. These were highly trying — sniper teams on the SWAT teams, negotiations unit, the bomb squad. We were just after 9/11 and we were trying to evolve our department from a pre 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol to a post 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol. We got caught flatfooted on 9/11 and we should not have been. We didn’t have the skills, training, equipment, and things that we should have had. I always say Timothy McVeigh was, that Oklahoma City bombing was the wake-up call. That’s when we should have started changing the way we train and prepare our police officers, but we didn’t.
And then there’s the first World Trade Center bombing. That was another wake-up call. We didn’t respond to that. It was not until 9/11 that the nation’s police departments and the largest cities really realized that we have to be prepared for this type of asymmetric threat that we’re now facing. So when Chuck put me in charge of SOD, he said, “I want you to create the homeland security capabilities that we need, not just in SOD, but across the whole department.”
So he gave me a blank check to create a brand new police philosophy in the Metropolitan Police Department. So we created the Homeland Security Counterterrorism Bureau. We created CBR&E. My first year, we got $17 million in funding to buy level A suits to send our people down to Anniston, Alabama. I went down to Anniston, Alabama. I trained in Sarin and VX, live Sarin and VX gas. We were trained to do rescues in hot zones. We went down to Nevada and trained on rad environments, radiological environments. We trained with — I was one of the few people that was fortunate enough to train with Ken Alibek and Bill Patrick, two bioweapons scientists, one from Russia and one from the US, taught my bioweapons class, how to respond to biological threats, anthrax, right? We had anthrax in Washington, DC. These are all things that I was on the front end of creating, and I got to go through all of that training and all of that experience with my whole team. And the Metropolitan Police Department, when we were finished that six years of evolution, was a completely different place.
Tim Ferriss: This is a good time to, I think, come back to something I kind of promised to listeners that we would revisit, and it goes all the way back. We’re not going to go all the way back to Mount Pleasant, but when you were first day on the job, five days, and you’re looking at it, and you’re thinking to yourself, “We’re not doing this the right way. We can’t even communicate with these community members. Furthermore, we’re not even trying to set the message straight.”
And then if we flash forward, I have notes that are a bit scattered here, but I have notes on embracing technology. So this is from governing.com. I want to give credit where credit is due. So this relates to looking for new ways to connect the community to the police, in the case of the police. So the creation of an anonymous text tip line, cleverly named 50 411. Am I saying that the right way?
Cathy Lanier: Give the 5-0, the 411, right?
Tim Ferriss: The 5-0. I’m such an idiot.
Cathy Lanier: We are the 5-0, like the cop, you know, they used to call us the 5-0 back in the old days and 411, you know 411.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So in 2008, it received 292 tips. By the end of 2011, that number jumped to 1200.
Cathy Lanier: 1200. Yeah. We got up to about 2800.
Tim Ferriss: 2800. Right. And there are many examples of how that ended up being valuable. And then there’s a whole separate topic, which is maybe related but different, which is cultivating sources, right? So like developing sources, getting to know people, and this is quoting from the same piece, but you treat people with respect, you establish relationships. And God, I’m trying to think of some of these examples that I read about separately, but this seems to all probably feed into a lot of what you were doing in that overhaul later, right?
Cathy Lanier: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m just wondering if you have any other examples of sort of cultivating a access to helpful information, right? Not just drowning in noise. I’m wondering how you even thought about that. Because I imagine one of the challenges at that time, probably even still today, but especially post 9/11 in the wake of that, that there’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. If you want more information or tips, there’s probably going to be an overwhelming amount depending on how you solicit and how you search for it. So how did you think of separating signal from noise?
Cathy Lanier: So for me, it was pretty simple and it does go back to Mount Pleasant. Again, pretty intuitive on your part not having been in policing. So when I became the chief of police, a couple of commitments I made to myself and to the community was that we had a tendency to place higher value on some neighborhoods and some crimes than others. And our job is to protect all of the community and every crime should be equally important to us. If we’re not preventing crimes, we’re not being successful, making arrests. We used to publish our arrest stats every year and go, “Oh, look, we made 50,000 arrests last year. Look how successful we are.”
Well, that’s 50,000 times. We didn’t do our job because we didn’t prevent those crimes from happening. So to me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department. Now, I don’t have a stat that can tell you what I prevented, but the goal should be to try and prevent. So for me, what was very clear is, so when I first took over as chief, I promised I was going to go on the scene of every single homicide. Why? Because I wanted people in the communities to know it didn’t matter what neighborhood you lived in or what the circumstances of that homicide was, that homicide’s just as important to us as every other homicide. So homicide in Georgetown, in the very expensive, wealthy neighborhood, if there was a homicide there, it would get news coverage for weeks and police were all over it. And almost always those crimes would be closed. But if there was a homicide in a public housing project, it got little to no news coverage. Three people shot last night in Southeast.
That was it. That’s all you hear. And nothing about those people or what happened with those crimes. And they very rarely got closed. So I put an emphasis on trying to cultivate those relationships in the community. And it was clear to me two things. People didn’t trust us, they didn’t trust the police, and we didn’t close these homicides, because witnesses wouldn’t come forward. They wouldn’t come forward, because they didn’t trust us. And so, we had to change that. So I had a great example. I was out, we did a crime initiative during the summer called All Hands on Deck. So I was out on all hands on deck. I’m walking through a public housing complex and there’s two middle-aged women sitting on a wall outside in the summer. They’re drinking. They got open containers of alcohol, which is illegal. They could have been — in the old days when I was policing, we would just walk over and handcuff them, lock them up, take them to the station.
That’s open container alcohol. So I go over and I sit down, start talking to them. There had been a series of shootings in this complex and I said, “Hey.”
She’s like, “I don’t know why you guys are here. You don’t care about us.”
Kind of giving me the lip. And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll tell you what, here’s my business card. My cell phone number’s on here.” First of all, they had no idea it was a chief. I’m just the cop. They don’t watch the local news. They don’t know that I’m the chief. “Here’s my business card. If you have any information and you want to talk to me about anything that’s going on here, and tell me who’s out here shooting in the middle of the night, hit these kids that are on the tennis court, on the basketball court, please let me know.”
And when I walk over to the two ladies, they kind of take their beer and stick it behind the wall. I was like, “You know you’re not supposed to be drinking out here, but I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”
So I give them my business card. I give them that respect. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Talk to them with a little respect. I give them my business card, my cell phone number’s on there. About two weeks later, I get a call at one o’clock in the morning, and it was a woman’s voice. Don’t know if it was those women, can’t prove it, don’t know to this day. But I get a call about one o’clock in the morning. There was a shooting in that neighborhood, and the woman’s voice said to me, “Tell your officers that the gun is behind the white Escalade.”
And I’m like, “What are you talking about?”
She says, “On Cloud Street…” She gave me the address on Cloud Street. She said, “There’s a white Escalade. The gun is there.”
So I turn on my police radio half asleep, switch to the sixth district where that address is, and sure enough, they’re working a shooting. And I went over the radio, I said, “Cruiser one, who’s the on scene official? Have him call me.” He calls me and I said, “Look, I just got a tip from somebody that there’s a gun involved in this case and this is where the gun is.”
Sure enough, that’s where the gun was. They recovered that gun. From that recovery of that gun, they were able to start working this case and actually get information. So I always tie that back to, I strongly believe that the fact that I walked over to those women, I showed them a little respect. I sat on the wall with them. I didn’t lock them up for the open container of alcohol. They weren’t hurting anybody. I sat and chatted with them. I gave them my cell number and said, “Look, I want to help, but if you don’t give me information, I can’t help.”
So that’s the philosophy that I wanted all of my cops to have. That’s the way I wanted all of us to lease our communities. I wanted people to see that you give me information, you’ll see results. You tell me who’s involved in shooting up the neighborhood. We’ll go after them. We will make arrests. So we started doing, instead of just putting posters up when a homicide occurred, when we made an arrest for the homicide, we went back and put posters up saying the case is closed. Reverse canvas. Instead of just telling you when something bad happens, we’re going to tell you when we close it. So now people know that we’ve taken that person off the street and those little things matter.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Matter a lot. I want to please confirm or deny this, but I am in the course of speaking with you and certainly in the course of doing homework for this conversation, impressed with your attention to detail, which comes back also to my signal versus noise, because I am dazzled by your ability to manage all of these details. And tell me if this is a complete dead end, but it seems like you demonstrated this really, really early on. And we’ll come back to where we were in the timeline, but this is how you had a job at 16 as a secretary at a commercial real estate firm. Am I getting that right? And you handled —
Cathy Lanier: That’s Eisinger Kilbane.
Tim Ferriss: You handled tenant billing, right?
Cathy Lanier: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it seems like you’ve practiced this or just had this ability that you’ve honed over time. Thousands of pieces of correspondence come through the police department every day, but you’re also talking about learning, I think at that job to never let anything that’s got your name on it be imperfect. And it’s just like, how come —
Cathy Lanier: Sound familiar, Tim?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, yes, there’s that also. My incredibly helpful slash —
Cathy Lanier: OCD?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brain damage too, saying OCD. But as you have a job that increases in scope upon scope, upon scope, upon scope, and how do you build systems that help you to keep track of these things, right? Because not everyone is going to have necessarily your eye for detail or capacity to remember the details in that photograph that flash for a fraction of time that you then need to recall. So it seems like ultimately, and I am cheating a little bit, because when you sent and we asked for some notes in advance of this conversation, I’ll just read one thing here, because —
Cathy Lanier: I don’t remember now, so you’re going to get me on this.
Tim Ferriss: Great. Yeah, no, it’s good. It just says, “No hacks for me. I try to focus on systems or strategies that will hold up over time.”
And I’m wondering, for instance, whether it’s in your current role or where we left off in terms of your timeline, as you’re soliciting information from the community and they’re offering more, because you’re showing not just the announcement of the bad thing, but that you actually took action related to their help that closed cases, et cetera, et cetera. How do you ensure that the department or the organization that you’re a part of is equipped to digest that? And I’m not sure that’s an easy question to answer, but I’ll just leave it there.
Cathy Lanier: No, it’s not an easy question to answer, but I would say this — I pushed technology very, very hard once I became the chief. When I took over as a chief, we had Teletubby pagers. We didn’t even have cell phones, and I wanted everybody to have smartphones. The early smartphones, the first one we got was a Trio. We had Palm Pilots and Trios, right? If you remember that far back.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, I do.
Cathy Lanier: And then we pushed putting computers in the cars and we pushed the technology, gunshot detection technology, cameras, integrating those gunshot detection technology cameras, all those things together. I really wanted technology to be those systems, right? Taking all this great technology that’s coming out, make us more effective and more efficient as police officers. Instead of spending three hours handwriting an accident report, we could pull up on the scene of an accident report, have a iPad or a laptop in the cruiser that GPS drops the intersection on a police report and all’s I got to do is plink a little car down there and my police report now takes 10 minutes instead of two hours.
So I brought all this technology, the systems that made us better, it made us more effective. And I relied a lot on people. I mean, everything I did, I learned from the people that work for me and the people in the community. I made it a point to go out and talk to people and listen. Everything I learned about fighting crime that was effective, I got it from walking around the community and giving my cell phone number out, listening to what people had to say. Because if you listen to people, they will tell you what to do.
And my officers, my detectives, my sergeants, my lieutenants, those guys, when I did my strategic planning sessions, I would bring in from all of those groups and brainstorm with them. What are the things we need? How can we do better? What do you need that you don’t have? What are the crime trends that you’re seeing? But when I witnessed this evolution of technology and crime, and we had to get our police department to adjust to meet that evolution. We hire cops for a 25-year career. And when this technological crime evolution was happening, we had detectives that didn’t know how to manage a crime scene with seven different cameras they had to download to get video of the crime scene. They didn’t know how to mobily, forensically dump a phone. You arrest a guy who just did some armed robberies. And the biggest case, and I’m sure in your research, you saw this Thomas Maslin case.
There was a case that really kind of set this in stone for me. There’s this poor gentleman who was robbed for his cell phone one night, he’s beaten with a baseball bat. They crush his skull, they take his phone. Those same suspects, we find Mr. Maslin the next day with his skull crushed, barely alive, no cell phone. We don’t know where his cell phone is. He’s in the hospital. Well, what we don’t know is that same night right after they robbed him, that same group of kids went to Adams Morgan, another neighborhood, and they robbed three more people and they were arrested. And when they were arrested, they had multiple cell phones on them. They were robbing people for their cell phones, because they were going to go and turn those phones in and make money. And all those cell phones were recovered as evidence and put on the books, but nobody knew that Thomas Maslin’s phone was in that books, because we didn’t have anybody that had the digital forensic skill to dump those phones and figure out whose phones they were.
And when we finally did figure that out months later, I said, “This is never going to happen again. We need to have people that are trained to have that skill. And if we can’t train our detectives to do it or they don’t have the bandwidth to do it, then we’re going to hire civilians to do it, but we’re going to have that skill and we’re going to have it out on the street daily.”
And so we did. We hired criminal research specialists, we hired some other civilians for digital forensics. And so, we went through this evolution and it is building systems that will endure over time and policing was not designed that way. So we had to really change the way we do policing. And now police departments are doing much better at keeping pace with technology.
Tim Ferriss: Before we get to maybe the differences between your experience in law enforcement and everything that preceded the NFL and the NFL, could you just give people an idea of the scope of your responsibilities at the NFL? What are you responsible for?
Cathy Lanier: Everything related to security. So executive protection, I set the standards for physical security and cybersecurity at the stadiums. So all of the stadiums, the 30 stadiums across the US and our international stadiums, a little bit of variation on the international, but across all the US stadiums, we set the requirements for security that they have to meet. So once we set that standard, we update it annually. We do the audits and red teaming and we make sure that they are meeting those standards. So physical security, cybersecurity, both. We also have investigative responsibilities. So violations of the personal conduct policy. Those are all investigations that are done by my team. We have game integrity, so management of the game integrity program. So making sure that we are maintaining the integrity of this game. There’s a lot involved in that.
If it’s got anything to do with security, it falls on us. Individually, the league office has full responsibility for Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, Combine, Draft, and all the international series games. So when I say we have nine international games this year, the reason scheduling this is so hard, each one of those international games, I will take a team out and advance at least two trips, if not three. And we’ve got nine international games this year. And I’m also working on, we plan Super Bowl about 18 months out in advance ’cause that’s 10 days of events over 20 some venues and then Draft. So Draft, I’m leaving for Pittsburgh on Sunday to go manage the Draft for the next seven or eight days. So special events, tentpole events, that’s a big, big part of it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So tons of free time.
Cathy Lanier: Tons of free time. 170 days on the road last year.
Tim Ferriss: Oh my Lordy. So red teaming is a really critical concept that I want people to understand. Some folks may recognize it within the context of say tech, given the types of people that I’ve interviewed before in terms of paying people to try to break into your systems, let’s just say, or to take down your service or to fill in the blank, but they’re on your side. And I wonder where red teaming, I should know this, comes from. It’s probably from hiring people —
Cathy Lanier: Military.
Tim Ferriss: Military —
Cathy Lanier: Military.
Tim Ferriss: — pretending to be the Soviets, right. Probably.
Cathy Lanier: It’s the military. I mean, it was a military concept initially. And think about it this way. You’ve got to look at it a little differently. I think on the tech side, it is a little different, but I think of red teaming as we set a standard, like, we think use of magnetometers to screen for weapons. We think use of a perimeter to make sure everybody goes through screening. All these standards we put in place of security. I can go and audit you and you have all those standards in place, but what a red team operation does is it’s quality assurance. Are those standards working? Did I tell you to do something that didn’t necessarily work? So it tells you if the standards that you were using are effective or not. It may be that you put them in place, but you didn’t execute them properly, so they’re not effective.
So if you’re not properly doing secondary screening, it’s not that the magnetometers didn’t work, it’s that your guard didn’t respond properly to an alert. So it’s a quality assurance. It’s a quality assurance test to see if the standards that you are employing or you’re requiring are being used properly and are they effective? That’s the key. It’s not a gotcha. It’s like, is what we’re doing effective? And if it’s not effective, how can we make it effective?
Tim Ferriss: How are your responsibilities or your job with the NFL most different from what you did beforehand? I’m just imagining there might be new constraints on what you can or can’t do, even though you’re coordinating with federal, state and local law entities. I mean, just imagining what that entails with 32 clubs makes my head spin. But how is it most different from what you did before?
Cathy Lanier: I’d say it’s most different in terms of its diversity. So I thought coming from 27 years in the nation’s capital, managing SOD, I managed every large event protest, demonstration. We had about 2,300 a year that I was responsible for when I was there. So I thought, and then presidential inaugurations, I was like, “This is easy. I can come to the NFL, this Super Bowl thing’s going to be nothing. This is going to be a walk in the park.” And the diversity here is, the complexity here is so much more. It’s so much more complex and the diversity. So I’m not only setting up the equivalent of a presidential inauguration that I did every four years before, every year it’s Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is more complex. It’s spread over 10 days, over 26 venues, and it moves every year. So it’s in a different place.
So I’ve got to build all those relationships. I’ve got to learn all those new venues. I’ve got to figure out security in a completely different climate. And in Minneapolis, it was 25 below zero. Guess what? Some technology doesn’t work in that 25 below zero. Some of the things that we do in Arizona’s not going to work in Minneapolis. And then now with international, we try and go and implement our full suite of security standards in Madrid and Sao Paulo and Australia and Munich. But when we get there, 20% of what we do is going to have to be adapted to the local environment. There’s laws and regulations and things that are different in different countries. Things that we do here, you can’t do there. Things they do there, we can’t do here. So the complexity of what I do now is far more complicated and it’s far more diverse than what I used to do.
Tim Ferriss: And by diverse, you just mean constantly shifting, like you mentioned, these different locations with —
Cathy Lanier: There’s no template. I can’t say, “Hey, it’s inauguration. This is what we do for the inauguration.” The ball sites are all the same. We do the same things. We know what to do with the inauguration. This is, every time it’s like you just take the old plan and throw it away, start all over. Pretty much, not completely, but pretty much.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no shortage of learning —
Cathy Lanier: You don’t want to start with any assumptions. No assumptions, that’s for sure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to shift gears just a little bit. I’m wondering if, are there any books that you recommend or resources? This doesn’t have to be within the context of the NFL, but when I imagine you get approached by people who are hoping to learn from you in one way or another, or you are just mentoring people, whether that was in policing or within the NFL or in other contexts, are there any books that you recommend frequently to other people? It doesn’t need to be nonfiction, could be anything.
Cathy Lanier: So I’d say my favorite book of all times, and I made it mandatory reading for my command staff when I took over as the chief, which was a hoot because nobody ever made our command staff read anything before. And I also did a book club. I also used this book and did a book club with the community, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell. One of my all time favorite reads, because it forces you to understand that no matter what your challenge and no matter what your problem is, it goes back to problem solving. Whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve, there is a tipping point. You just have to know what that tipping point is. And I love that book. I’ve read it three times, I think. It’s a great book, so that’s one of my favorites. It just makes you think differently.
Tim Ferriss: What did you hope people reading it would take away to apply? How might that change how they act on the job or think and then therefore act on the job?
Cathy Lanier: Well, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, what your profession is. If you read The Tipping Point, the key point is that you can turn around any situation, you can solve any problem if you’re paying close enough attention to the details that you can hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point to turn around high levels of violence in a community? What is the tipping point to turn around whatever your problem is?
I would also say Blink. Blink is another one that I only read because I liked Malcolm Gladwell, but Blink, for people in high-paced professions, Blink is one that helps you really evaluate how you make decisions, how you rely on your instinct and your experience and how much that matters. So those are two of my favorites. And then the only thing I read, Tim, is stuff about my job. I read work stuff, so nothing really fun.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me come back to the — I suppose this all relates, everything relates to making decisions, but especially performing under extreme and sustained pressure. And I would imagine that, of course, part of the hiring process for a lot of the people who report to you, let’s just say, or within your organization, you’re already vetting for people who can operate at a high level with sustained pressure, where they also have to be very good at improvising when conditions change and so on. But if you were teaching a class to, could be high school students, college students on sort of resilience and handling pressure, right, some people buckle and sometimes you learn by buckling and then you figure out how to approach it next time. What would you tell them about making decisions under pressure and acting under pressure as opposed to becoming paralyzed? How would you even begin to talk to them about that?
Cathy Lanier: I would say it’s — I don’t care who you are. It’s not 100% instinct, right. It is, your body’s going to react in a crisis to what it knows. So if it’s a situation where you have trained for it or you’ve thought about it or you’ve prepared for it, in your mind, you’ve walked through it, you’re going to be in a lot better position than if it’s something that’s never crossed your mind. This is where kind of preparedness crosses that line. And this is why we try and encourage people to be prepared. Know when you walk into a building, what are the two different ways you can get out, not just the way you came in. Is there other ways you can get out of this building? Right. So everybody’s going to freeze initially. I think to a certain extent, if you have no experience, nothing in your brain that your brain can go back to have you act.
But in terms of being in a workplace or a professional environment and making decisions as a leader, if you have the knowledge that you need, you’ve done your homework, you’ve read everything that there is to read, you’ve got your education, you’ve got experience, decision making becomes easy. Each time you go up at a different level of rank, as a sergeant, when I first made sergeant, making decisions was a little tough at first because I was still pretty inexperienced myself. So my job was to be more well-read, understand the DC code a little better than the patrol officer, know what case law says. So if I didn’t read that stuff and I didn’t study, I would be uncomfortable making decisions and I would hesitate to make decisions. We had a lot of people that don’t like to make decisions. But the more you read, the more you learn, the more you invest in your knowledge, the easier it is to make decisions.
To me, decisions now with all of the years I’m in 36 years in this business, and now again, I have two master’s degrees, I’ve studied, I’ve got all this experience, decisions for me like boom, boom, boom, boom. So it comes with experience. It comes with investment of time. It comes with preparing yourself to be able to make a decision. And of course people will throw things at me that I’ve never experienced before, but because I have all those other things to rely on, I can make a decision and I feel good about it.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I have to imagine also, this is true in a lot of contexts outside of security or law enforcement. Certainly applies to military, but it kind of applies everywhere, which is making decisions in the face of incomplete information. And so I’m wondering what you have learned about that, making decisions, biasing towards action when you have incomplete information. How do you think about that?
Cathy Lanier: It happens. It happens a lot, especially in first responder communities and military. Like you said, it happens a lot. You’re not always going to have a complete picture. Again, I think your comfort level with being able to make those decisions is going to fall back on, are you qualified to make that decision? If you feel qualified to make the decision, sometimes I got to make decisions without all the information. There’s two things that go along with that. One is, do the best you can based on what you know at the time, but know a decision has to be made. And then if you make the wrong decision, undo it, change it, fix it. Don’t just stick with it because you’ve got to be the boss. And this is what I said. Admit you’re wrong. Change course, go another direction. That’s where people get tripped up, right.
When I’m making a decision and I don’t have full information, I’m thinking to myself as I’m making this decision, “I can either go this way or I can go that way. If I go this way, what can go wrong? If I go this way, what can go wrong?” Okay, now I’m going to go this way. If one of those things goes wrong, consequence thinking, right. “If one of those things goes wrong, what’s my course of action then?” So if I’m making a decision with incomplete information, as I’m making that decision and giving that command, I’m thinking about how I’m going to deal with the collateral damage if that was the wrong decision ’cause that’s next. You make a bad decision, you can’t just go, “Oh shoot. Wow, darn.”
Tim Ferriss: Tough look. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: You’ve got to — right, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. What are you going to do about it now? How are you going to fix it?
Tim Ferriss: So just a few more questions and then let you get back to your very busy day. If you could put, this is metaphorically speaking, like a message on a billboard or have a reminder on your desk that everybody sees when they come in. It could be a quote, could be a mantra, could be anything. If you could put it on a billboard for millions of people to see, what might that be? I mean, is there anything that comes to mind? Could be someone else’s quote, could be something that you try to live your life by, could be something you want everybody who’s within your organization to be reminded of, or it could be something else entirely. Does anything come to mind?
Cathy Lanier: I mean, I tell people all the time, bad things happen to everybody. Bad things happen to everybody. And a lot of times it’s we do it to ourself. We make bad decisions, bad things happen to us because of ourselves. Bad things happen to everybody. It’s not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you; it’s what you do after that. So it’s easy to have some tragedy or some terrible thing happen to you and sit around and feel sorry for yourself or become a victim or let it define you. It’s your attitude and your effort that you put into how you recover. So it’s not what happens to you. It’s not the bad thing.
It’s how you handle those things that really matter in life because you can have one of two attitudes every time something bad happens, which attitude are you going to pick? For me, it’s going to be, I wish that never had happened. I wish I’d never made that decision. I wish that had never happened, but you know what, I’m going to fix it. I’m going to not let it define me. I’m not going to let it take me down.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Cathy, I mean, I think that’s a pretty strong way to land this plane. I’m so —
Cathy Lanier: You have the coolest job, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so fun.
Cathy Lanier: I can’t imagine how much you get to learn talking to so many people and you must have an encyclopedia in your brain.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the best job. And it didn’t come from some big long-term plan. It was kind of zigging and zagging with, frankly, I mean, tying into what you said, some really — in retrospect, with the information I had at the time, there were good decisions about various things, starting books, but made some terrible decisions on deadlines where there were kind of suicide missions and ultimately just adapted and tried to make the best of a sequence of, I would say, in retrospect, kind of poor decisions led to one of the best decisions, which I never thought would become this. And here we are. And thanks for —
Cathy Lanier: Good for you.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for being willing to do the dance and play some improv jazz in this conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to say or add, suggest to people, request of people, anything at all before we wind to a close?
Cathy Lanier: No, just was a fascinating couple of hours with you. I’m an avid follower and really enjoyed my time here, so thank you for including me.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, definitely. Cathy, thank you so much. I hope we get to see each other at some point. Who knows? Might get to your neck of the world. Probably will, actually.
Cathy Lanier: Please let me know if you do. New York or DC, look me up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m in both. So I’ll keep you posted. Thank you again for the time.
Cathy Lanier: Okay. All right.Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening, we’ll have show notes, links to everything that we talked about at tim.blog/podcast as per usual. Just search for Cathy and you will find this episode. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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