Description
Britt Elmore spent 27 years with the San Francisco Police Department, 25 of them in narcotics, almost all of it undercover. He dropped out of school at 15, worked as a garbage man and a glazier, got a GED at 24, and started at the San Mateo County jail before SFPD hired him in 1998. Six months in, he was loaned to narcotics for six weeks of buying dope in the Tenderloin. He never left. His last 15 years were on a DEA task force running gun buys and federal wiretaps. He consulted on Training Day, and his dog's alert on a FedEx package helped kick off an MLB HGH scandal.
We get into buying crack straight out of dealers' mouths, booking 30 bodies in an afternoon, and buying rifles from a man who had told an informant he planned to rob him. He also walks through six hours in a prison van, wired and shackled, next to a man who killed his pregnant girlfriend.
We cover Flock cameras and the Fourth Amendment, fentanyl killing two people a day in eight blocks, reactive policing after 2020, and his one-word answer on how much of a dent 27 years made.
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Today's sponsors:
Black Rifle Coffee:
https://www.blackriflecofee.com
Firecracker Farm
https://www.firecracker.farm
Timestamps:
0:00 Retirement, staying busy, and law enforcement AI
3:39 Flock cameras and San Francisco policing
11:06 Why proactive policing vanished
18:18 Can San Francisco be salvaged?
24:43 BASE jumping and tandem skydiving stories
28:24 Narcotics conferences and undercover security
31:51 Surveillance technology and Fourth Amendment concerns
36:03 Undercover narcotics work and the fentanyl crisis
1:10:00 Federal task force work and undercover tradecraft
1:21:59 Jail infiltration and a murder confession
1:37:08 High-risk gun buys and cartel threats
1:49:03 Why the war on drugs has failed
1:55:15 SFPD morale, homelessness, and missing resources
2:01:04 Trauma, identity, and life after policing
2:15:15 Working for the district attorney and reconnecting with family
2:23:16 Writing a book and consulting on Training Day
2:29:23 The Giants HGH package investigation
2:33:57 Keeping an open frequency in life and policing