National Police Association Podcast with Guest, Det. Jim Hill (Ret) President, Maricopa County Colleges POA
Hi. This is sergeant Betsy Brantner Smith with the National Police Association, and this is the National Police Association podcast. We have somebody with us today that I have been following on X. I always talk about X, right? And there's so much information, if you can read through it, that you can find and people you can follow on X.
Betsy Smith:And I stumbled across a guy who goes by the name of Mr. Thin Blue Lines. So I thought, I gotta find out more about this guy. And I did, and it turns out that he is somebody that you need to learn about, that you need to follow, and that you need to learn from. So, of course, I had to bring him on the show.
Betsy Smith:Jim Hill, welcome to the show.
Jim Hill:Well, you very much. It's great to be here.
Betsy Smith:So you're a fellow Arizonan, and I love that because we're on same time zone. And so I'm gonna start by, of course, asking you the same question I ask everybody in law enforcement. Jim, why'd you become a cop?
Jim Hill:You know, I I listened to one of your podcasts yesterday. I knew this was coming. I was like, you know, it's always a simple question, and then you start to lose yourself down the rabbit hole. But simply, I hate bullies. I do.
Jim Hill:I mean, and this is the job there. I'm the guy that gets to go out and confront the bullies. Either externally or internally because I became a employee rep. And in high school, thought, they make policing sound like only the dumb people go into it when you can't get a job. I'm from a small town.
Jim Hill:And I was in the academic track, I'm like, well, these are the people I'm calling to solve a murder or find the bad guys, why shouldn't smart people be in the field? And I found, you know, we set the bar too low. And so I would you know, I wanted to see if we could raise that bar. Not to be smug or anything, but I'm like, hey. I'm pretty smart.
Jim Hill:Maybe I can help out.
Betsy Smith:You know, I'm so glad you said that because, you know, I came from an agency where you had to have a bachelor's degree to even apply. And that's where we were headed in the 1980s on into the 90s, where we were really wanting law enforcement to truly be a profession, just like being a lawyer or a doctor. And then, you know, the 90s and then into the late 2000s, you know, we became, you know, we were under attack, and then we just had to start lowering standards and taking anybody. Is that one of the things that you wanna see is bringing education back to law enforcement?
Jim Hill:I do, and we have to be careful about what kind of education too. It's one of the reasons that I'm like, okay, people ask me why am I trying to get a doctor I'm like, because I hate what they're teaching to people that are going into my profession. I had a kid, he just graduated from ASU, Arizona State University, a couple of years ago. He came over to the campus I work, and he wanted to know about getting into the field. And he was complaining.
Jim Hill:He goes, half my teachers came right out and said, I'm a Marxist. And I'm like, what's that got to do with teaching people to be a cop? And I'm like, we're not teaching the right things in academia. And you've seen it when you started correcting reports as the boss. When the standards start to slide, you're looking at these reports going, dear lord, what are they going do in court when you have to read this?
Betsy Smith:That's exactly true. I literally had a couple of recruits who could not write C Spot Run-in a police report, and some of them were well educated. So you're absolutely right about that, and you see it every day, that academia is not necessarily the place where people learn how to do practical things, like write reports and complete a spreadsheet and do complicated mathematics and things like that. There's there's way too much politics and politicization of academia, isn't there?
Jim Hill:Oh, too much. I for the most part, when I went through college, most of my professors, I had no idea what their political affiliation was. They came in to teach. You know, some you could tell which way they leaned a little bit. For the most part, I had no idea.
Jim Hill:And that's the way it should be. You know, if you wanna have these student meetings off the clock, you know, the old school, hey, let's get together and pick the professor's brain. That's one thing. But to try to use that as your soapbox, the classroom, when they're actually there paying you to teach them about whatever the course is, you're overstepped.
Betsy Smith:No. You're absolutely right. So I wanna go back and talk about your career just for a minute because you Okay. You made your way to Arizona in kind of a roundabout way. Talk about where you started as a as a cop.
Jim Hill:Well, I like to tell people I have a patch collection, but I collect them the hard way. I have to go work for the place. Well, when I got out of college, started throwing out applications, and the National Security Agency was just switching over from federal, FPS and Marine Guards to their their own agency. So I thought, okay, cool. They're hiring and I need a job.
Jim Hill:What's nice about it is I got to go to the Federal Academy. What was weird is you come back and you're like, okay, go stand and watch the skate. That's not why they got into police work. But you learn a lot coming from a small town to the no such agency is what we called it, NSA. And you got to see what was going on inside.
Jim Hill:I got restless. I wanted I'm young. I wanna go hook and book. So I this is in the eighties, and crack had just hit the DC area. So I went from Fort Meade to Laurel, Maryland, which is basically just down the street.
Jim Hill:And young cop working a crack neighborhood and, you know, talk about culture shock. Yeah. It was a was a cool experience. I was there about four and a half, five years. My wife got her was getting her master's degree at University of Maryland in college personnel.
Jim Hill:So we lived on campus at University of Maryland while I was a cop, which was an experience in of itself. And, when she graduated, I drew a two hour circle around DC and Philly. I said, you can look for a job, but nowhere in that circle. I'm done. I'm done here.
Jim Hill:I'm burned out. And we ended up back where we both met as undergrads at Indiana, Pennsylvania. She got a job working as an area director at the halls. I ended up at small town. We lived again in the dorms.
Jim Hill:So the first seven years we were married, we lived in dorms with students. And, you know, most of the docs in the middle of the night were actually for her. Although sometimes I'd I'd read reports and see my name dropped in there that had nothing to do with me, only because they knew I lived in the building. You know, and if you think after being in Maryland and the height of the crack and everything, that's where it'd be the most violent. It's small town, little Pennsylvania, a college town.
Jim Hill:I end up getting into a shooting. You know? And that was a, you know, a big mile marker in my career, obviously, for people. But, you know, small towns and I think just thank God it happened before the Internet. You know, there were op eds back and forth in the paper, so it didn't get the viral that you see now.
Jim Hill:But, you know, of course, I had people call me shoot to kill Hill when I'd show up on calls and things like that. But that you know, it turned turned out okay as far as, you know, the legal system, but it was the kick I needed. Okay. It's time to go. And put out a bunch of applications, said, well, if we're gonna do this, minus 22 sucks to be a cop, as you know.
Jim Hill:And that was our last winter in Pennsylvania. So came down to Scottsdale, Arizona and Orlando, Florida. And I let my wife make the decision and I thank her every time I see a hurricane hit Orlando. Or we might have a monsoon every now and then, but I'm not out there dealing with crocodiles, alligators, hurricanes, all that stuff.
Betsy Smith:Humidity? Oh,
Jim Hill:I you forget what humidity is until you go back for five minutes.
Betsy Smith:Absolutely. So Scottsdale, Arizona is it's a beautiful community. It's it's well known. You know, it's there's a lot of tourists. There's a lot of wealthy people, so you end up there.
Betsy Smith:But it's not all beautiful homes and rich people. Right?
Jim Hill:No. The first twelve years I was discussed at OPT, I was on midnight shift. And that was after going through a little bit of summer on days, I knew I had to stay on night shift. And the skin doesn't stand up well to the noonday sun all day. So I got to see a whole different side of Scottsdale.
Jim Hill:People talk about the entertainment district. We just call it the Bar District. Tons of bars, tons of people coming from all over. The gangsters in South Phoenix, they don't stay in South Phoenix. You know, you're gonna come here and party.
Jim Hill:Actually, my buddies on the gang unit in Phoenix would tell me, we don't work our neighborhoods until after bar close in Scottsdale because we know they're all over there. And then in the South End of Scott Scottsdale, and I would take normal people on ride alongs. I love doing ride alongs with citizens. People some people hate it. But I'd take them.
Jim Hill:They're like, why are we in Phoenix? I'm like, no. This is Scottsdale. They look at the neighborhood. They're, no.
Jim Hill:This can't be Scottsdale because they're used to the Scottsdale far, far north. Scottsdale's Thirty Five miles long. And they hadn't been down south at night to understand. And we had a couple of resident gangs, and then we had you know, those kind of gangs. And then we had people coming in that were their rivals, and people didn't understand the gang problems we were having in the in the South.
Jim Hill:So that's where I first got hooked in working gangs.
Betsy Smith:So let me ask you about that because, again, I was I'm like you. I was an eighties cop. We went through the whole transition from cocaine to crack, and and the the enormous gang involvement in, you know, the crack epidemic. And I remember in the eighties and on into the nineties, well, if we just have job programs and we just have social services and all these things, We can take care of the gang problem. And now here we are in 2025, and we have about 36,000 different identified street gangs in this country.
Betsy Smith:Jim, what what is it about street gangs that we can't seem to get a handle on?
Jim Hill:Well, the problem with our approach to gangs is we can't get our act together and coordinate. It's we have lazy police departments that wanna say, hey. We did a gang detail. Here are all the arrests. Well, great.
Jim Hill:Okay. You made some arrests, but then what? And you have the the other side says, we just need to do midnight basketball. Okay. So you gave them somewhere to hang out at midnight.
Jim Hill:Great. Okay. Well, how are we stopping them from recruiting kids? Because now the age of recruitment is 12. I mean, one thing broke my heart is, you know, I'm driving through one of the streets of Scottsdale.
Jim Hill:A kid used to ask me for stickers. It's now throwing up gang signs at me. So I mean, that was was one of those points where I'm like, alright. We gotta get rid of this gang and break it. And we don't do anything in the middle.
Jim Hill:Well, one is the attitude of cops. I'm not a hug a thug. And two, it's not about hug a thug. It's about being human. Get out of the car.
Jim Hill:Talk to people. You know, one of my one of my friends who's passed, there's a huge gang cop in the temporary, Chuck Scoville. You know, his whole thing was get out of the car and chat them up. And being an East Coast Cop, and you'd see that from Chicago, you got out the car, you knew who was in your beat. We've lost that.
Jim Hill:And I think that's one of the things we've lost. We don't have enough guys out there. We don't have they're all tied to their computers, or they're sitting there texting. You know, we don't have enough of that boots on the ground. Get out and just talk to the the citizens.
Jim Hill:So you have to attack it from all ends. How do I remove the membership? That's the that's the goal. Okay? How do I stop the new members, which are the kids?
Jim Hill:How do I take take off the ones that are just lost causes? They're the ones that are perpetuating the gang violence. And now how do I give those in the middle that are seeing this is no life for me. I want out a way out? But too many times we'll come in, we do the big raid, and we think, okay.
Jim Hill:Well, that's that's great. Well, did you do anything to solve whatever created the gang? So for the hardcore, cops out there, they're, you know, grumbling and everything, I said, alright. Think about when Rome invaded Carthage. They salted the earth so nothing else would grow.
Jim Hill:That's kind of what you're doing when you're in a neighborhood to to take out a gang. What caused the gang to grow and go after the root problem and make sure there's no more gang that can grow? So it's trying to get everybody on the same page. And unfortunately, too many agencies, it's what's the check mark? Okay.
Jim Hill:I had five felony arrests. I had 20 misdemeanor arrests. I mean, when you look at the what those arrests were, most of the time it's garbage.
Betsy Smith:What place do social programs have in all that? Because it can't just be up to the cops. I mean, do you think? Are you thinking churches, know, schools? What do you suggest having seen what you've seen over these years?
Jim Hill:They all have to kick in, especially the churches. When we grew up, churches were very active, And now they're just so passive. I never see them anywhere. But we were having an issue and actually, you know, even though our retired people came and said, hey, the kids have nowhere to play soccer and there's no the city soccer league is charging money and this. I'm like, have you talked to the churches?
Jim Hill:Because church sports used to be a big deal. Well, they're not doing anything. Well, they've got all this land, all this property. Why aren't the churches out reaching these kids? And these kids are always looking for something.
Jim Hill:That's what the gang filled the hole for. Maybe faith is what replaces that. But, you know, trying to get them to coordinate that. And then when you get to schools you know, when I was the president of the Scottsdale Police Association, one of the things we were trying to do is scholarships for the kids. We found out these kids were paying paying $150 to go play on the football team or the basketball team, they had to pay a fee.
Jim Hill:That's crazy. We all know how sports helps and builds character and teamwork and, you know, gives an outlet to aggression. So you're gonna make these kids who need it the most come up with $150. So we would try to do grants like that. And when I retired from SkySlows, my wife and I started our own nonprofit, Arizona LEO's, to try to start doing some of those programs so we could fill the void.
Jim Hill:Our thing is that we don't take federal grants. We don't want to play the political game.
Betsy Smith:Can you explain to people the multigenerational aspect of some street gangs?
Jim Hill:Sure. One of the most disturbing things I saw is working on the gang task force, and we're doing a street patrol in the little town of Guadalupe, Arizona. And we're driving through there, and I see a 60 year old woman with ESG tattooed on her chest. And it just, like, kinda shook me. I'm like, okay.
Jim Hill:That's an example of how it's become generational. And you gotta think about your family religion. This is how the gangs are to these these one of these families. How do you tell a kid you shouldn't be a crip? When mom was a crip, dad was a crip, auntie and uncle were crips, grandma and grandpa were crips.
Jim Hill:That's they get this passed on to them. So you're fighting all that. It's like going to tell some kid you shouldn't be Catholic, you shouldn't be Baptist. Why? My whole family is.
Jim Hill:So that's what we're fighting. And that's the neighborhood, that's how you have to get into those neighborhoods, is you've got to find that one senior person that said, yeah, you're right, enough's enough. I needed something better for my kid.
Betsy Smith:Now, about four years ago, we started importing foreign street gangs. You're a cop in a border state. How did that impact not just the state of Arizona, but really the entire country?
Jim Hill:Well, Arizona is the hub for for drugs coming in. So we saw actually, it was I don't know. Ten years ago, we saw a lot of the Midwest gangs show up. Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings started showing up. Latin Kings, I actually stopped a guy who's a New Jersey, King.
Jim Hill:And I'm like, so, you know, we've a lot of Hispanics out here. How come you guys don't have more of a presence? Well, we have an agreement with the Mexican Mafia. So they set these things up. Now gangster disciples, they were here.
Jim Hill:We don't have a strong black gang presence. They're they're very fractured. Where Midwest, they they're solid and people in folk nation and, you know, they're very established. So they actually sent people out here to learn the hubs and the connections and racked them like doing scholarships to send them out here and set them up so they would have that direct pipeline. So one of the things people always talk about is MS-thirteen.
Jim Hill:Well, MS-thirteen is a gang started in LA. It wasn't started in El Salvador. It was the El Salvadoran refugees who wanted to compete against the Eighteenth Street, so who were victimizing their people. So actually, took all the mannerisms of eighteenth Street, which is a notorious Hispanic gang, and decided to become the same thing. The 13 on on Marasavato Truche is them paying homage to the Mexican mafia.
Jim Hill:So, you know, we don't we get a lot of pass throughs with them, but they don't stick. They go on because, again, Mexican mafia says, keep moving. This is our state. Go do something somewhere else. Now East Coast, horrible.
Jim Hill:They've got murders everywhere. And I remember as a young cop when we had the first El Salvadoran civil war running across them in Maryland. And they actually killed a trooper while I was work while was running radar a mile down the road from him when it happened. And so it's been an ongoing process. The cartels, we were working a drug buy.
Jim Hill:We were going to buy a pound of meth. I was on the rescue team, so we're listening to the bug. And the guy in negotiating with her undercover says, if you give me twenty four hours, I'll get you a $500 discount. I have to get it across the border tonight. That's how porous the border was for drugs.
Jim Hill:So the gang members are just pouring across with the cartels, and they've created agreements with our resident gangs. So the distribution routes are already set up there. They would just solidify those. We're seeing in the gang, the prison gangs, that the prison gangs mix in Mafia and the Border Brothers are actually getting cartel members on their ruling table so they can solidify those. There's marriages.
Jim Hill:It's almost like Game of Thrones for the drug world.
Betsy Smith:So while American law enforcement is battling all of this, you know, we then come to 2020, George Floyd, and all of a sudden the law enforcement profession we're basically stopped in our tracks, and we are defunded, we are maligned, we are vilified, we are demonized, so how did that affect what we see as our modern street gang issue?
Jim Hill:We abdicated our position of strength. I mean, was bad enough after Ferguson. And then once George Floyd hit, all the cops kind of retreated into themselves. Why be proactive? I'm just gonna get I'm I'm gonna be the next guy on the news.
Jim Hill:You know? So, you know, you hear cops joke about, you know, find a parking lot, Netflix, and chill. We'll handle the calls that come in, proactive. Why be that way? And you see these never would I have let a gang member step up to me in the street and challenge me the way you see this happen.
Jim Hill:And these cops, well, they told me de escalation. De escalation doesn't mean you take abuse. You don't let somebody into your inner zone where they can harm you. There's still a reactionary gap. You're still you stuck to me.
Jim Hill:You're gonna I'm gonna clear that gap and I make it known to you. Even today, I mean, but some of the people have gotten very nervous, the bureaucrats, and we've got a lot of liberal activists now that are in command staff and chiefs of agencies that they'll go after the officer first rather than stick up for them and say, no, this is what needs to happen. Now, you're going into a gang neighborhood. You know, I was told we talk a lot about you got to be the silverback gorilla. You know, this no.
Jim Hill:This is my neighborhood now. You know, not yours. These people live here. I'm here to to, you know, to advocate for them. It's like I look at street gangs as domestic narco terrorists that are holding a neighborhood hostage.
Jim Hill:The neighborhood's not bad. That gang is holding them hostage. So you have to be able to meet that, and they have to understand that there's there is force on the other side of that. They push back. We push back.
Betsy Smith:Now you've been over the years very involved in, you know, in representation. You know, Arizona is a right to work state. You know, when you go east, police unions are a whole different thing. But there's been this really since Ferguson and even before, there's been this misnomer that police unions and police associations exist to keep bad cops on the job. Talk about that.
Jim Hill:Oh, that see, that's one of the ones that drives me crazy. I'm a due process person. If this person is a bad cop, document it, do the right process and get rid of them. I don't want a bad cop backing me up. You know, I'm still out there going to calls.
Jim Hill:I don't need somebody that's horrible or crooked or something like that showing up on my calls. So but I'm here for the due process because I've seen too many times where the agency finds it politically expedient to just trample the officers' rights and get rid of them. I had a case where the person in the HR department flat out said, well, you know, our policy out, Trump's, state law. I'm like, what? So we we have those things where they try to they just try to buffalo the officer end of just folding their cards.
Jim Hill:Now when I got to Scottsdale, it was like that. You know, I came from the East Coast where, okay, you they accuse you with something. Prove it. You know? But out here, it was okay, I didn't do it, but I'll just tell I had it's easier to do this.
Jim Hill:I'm like, no, let's fight this. Push back, make them prove it. If you did something wrong, own it. But if you didn't do anything wrong, don't take the rap for it. But there have also been guys that over the years have called me and go, hey.
Jim Hill:They wanna call me in. It's about that thing. You know, they're accusing me of it again, and they the detectives wanna meet with me, and, they're gonna read me Miranda. Like, stop. You need a lawyer.
Jim Hill:You don't need me. If they're talking Miranda rights, okay. I don't know. I don't wanna know anything more about this. You need a lawyer.
Jim Hill:You need to be protected that way and deal with whatever it is. But, you know, in internally stuff, you know, it's always the same. It's always the same pushback. You see agencies that, you know, it kind of I guess the wrap of being the the field test of who can make command staff, who's willing to, to go that route. Do we need internal fares?
Jim Hill:Absolutely. If you keep lowering the standards, you have to keep weeding the garden. That's another thing that this has done, is you keep opening those floodgates. We didn't keep the bar high enough, and now we're gonna pay the price for that. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for people to say, oh, these cops are brutal and crooked.
Jim Hill:Well, you've made it so the people that wanted to get into the profession don't wanna do that anymore, and we have to go after the people you thought were in the profession now to be in the profession. So congratulations. You got what you want.
Betsy Smith:Yeah. You're absolutely right. And that how do you think, well, first of all, let me say this, you have come full circle now, you're back working on campus and in college system. What do you see as law enforcement's future with the current political atmosphere in this country, where it's becoming more pro law enforcement? Think you know, we're starting to slowly weed out the Soros prosecutors.
Betsy Smith:We're starting to slowly bring some decent leadership back into the profession. What do you see as the future?
Jim Hill:We need to actually go out and start talking to the younger folks that want to get into this job, but not just to, you know, pump sunshine. We got to tell them exactly what the job's about. There's good. There's bad. You know, you're gonna deal with everybody's worst day you just got invited to.
Jim Hill:But you also were the one who showed up in a moment of chaos and made everything make sense. So we need people that are in the field to also be the academics and out there talking. It's funny because we have, you know, the practitioners, the cops. We have the researchers, and then we have the academic professors. But they all have separate conferences.
Jim Hill:They all do separate things. Nobody ever talks to each other. I proposed it once, and they're like, oh, I don't think that would work. Well, why not? Well, we've never done it.
Jim Hill:Oh, yeah. Great. Here we are. We've never done that before, so let's not try it. If you've got all this research, maybe I'd like to know about it.
Jim Hill:It might actually help me. But it's next to well, actually, Wednesday, I'm going into one of the criminal justice classes to talk about ethics in the field. One of the instructors asked me to come in. He's a retired detention officer, and this would be the second time I've been into one of his classes. But I'm willing to go to any class anywhere.
Jim Hill:One of my favorite things is going to the international students when they're here. And we'll have the English as a second language class, but it's from all over the world and ask questions. And they're like, we never in our country were able to even look at a police officer in the eye. But I can't imagine talking to one. You know?
Jim Hill:And it gives everybody a different view because, you know, we are very cloistered. We we expect we're gonna get hate, so why open yourself up to that? But we have to be willing to make that that talk. Get out there. Again, it goes back to get out and know your people.
Jim Hill:When I retired from Scottsdale, I was kind of proud. I had been away from my beat for probably eight years at the gang task force. I mean, they saw me in and out, but I wasn't right there. When I retired, half the people at my retirement party were from the neighborhood. So they still came out.
Jim Hill:They still recognized me. And it's about those relationships you build. We don't do enough relationship building.
Betsy Smith:Absolutely. Jim Hill, this is why I wanted people to meet you. We just have a minute left. Where can people find you, follow you, reach out to you?
Jim Hill:Well, if you wanna reach out, again, on x @misterthinblueline660 . That was my Scottsdale PD badge number. It's not hard to find. If you're on Facebook, the nonprofit we do shop with a cop. We're doing a football game for our injured officers.
Jim Hill:On Facebook it's ArizonaLEOS. You get all the updates on there. My wife updates that stuff. If you want to reach out, you know, message her and she'll get it to me. And I'm always willing to talk and answer questions.
Betsy Smith:That's fantastic. Jim, I can't thank you enough for spending time with us today. And if you'd like more information about the National Police Association, visit us at nationalpolice.org.
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