A St. Louis Homicide Detective on Solving Murders, Going Undercover, and 40 Years of Policing

Bob Bayes [00:00:00] This is the Vance Crowe Podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:07] Welcome back to the podcast guys. I'm glad you're here. Today's interview is with a man named Bob Bayes, a St. Louis County detective that had a career that spanned more than 40 years. This conversation was completely spell binding. In fact, at about five and a half minutes, you can hear me tear apart the index card I'd used to prepare my questions and thoughts for the interview. Bob was so good at telling stories and actually opening up the view of the world from that of a police officer that all my expectations were blown away. And in fact, as we went on further and further in the conversation, I became so engrossed in it that when I realized I was doing an interview, I had to step back and say, wait, is the recorder on? Is the video camera still working? Because I just couldn't believe that I was capturing a conversation that was this deep and rich on camera. This conversation may actually not be appropriate for all young ears. Bob's career was one where he had to look at some of the darker parts of the world. He's gonna be talking about homicide investigations where he was searching for the killer of a young girl. Stuff that many people in St. Louis may even actually remember the cases he talks about doing drug stings and trying to break up prostitution and child pornography rings. So some of the content there is a little bit heavy and may not be suitable for children. But within these heavy stories, I hope you'll hear the genuineness with which he comes to this conversation.

Vance Crowe [00:01:40] Bob talks about being a father while also looking at some of the darker parts of life. He talks about what it feels like to be a police officer that's trying to serve and protect. While people at things like the Ferguson riots think that he is a part of a group of people that are not good and are doing bad things. Bob was also very open and candid about his views on things like gun control, legalized prostitution and drug use. This conversation is one that I had never heard before and I was so proud that Bob was willing to sit down and talk with me and really quite grateful. I hope that if you enjoy this interview, you'll hit the like button and subscribe and even consider sharing it with people that would find a conversation like this, something that would help them understand the world a little bit better. These conversations have turned out to be absolutely fascinating and I hope you are finding them to be valuable. So I hope you buckle in and and enjoy this conversation because it was one of the best I've had so far. So Detective Bob Bayes, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the podcast. Thank

Bob Bayes [00:02:51] You. Thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:02:51] So when we were starting, I was actually asking you what, what rank are you? And I think a lot of that stems from the fact that I don't actually have any idea how the rank system works in the world of police officers. So if you were to start off, you are a St. Louis detective, but what does that mean? Where does that fit in the, in the world of police officers?

Bob Bayes [00:03:11] Well, when I first started off, I was a probationary police officer, and that's coming right outta the academy. And you're usually on probation for about a year. And after a year you can start looking towards rank or detective units if you want. The detective units don't pay any extra money unless it's a high risk like a bombing arson, something like that. But then you can start taking exams to go up the ladder, become a sergeant, lieutenant, captain major. But it depends on where, what you want in your career, if you want that. I personally wanted to be more of a working bee. I liked the work. I didn't want to supervise people when I was a young policeman. I just wanted to go out there and do it. And that's pretty much what I did.

Vance Crowe [00:03:54] What did you think being a police officer was gonna be? You, when, when did you join? How old would you have been?

Bob Bayes [00:04:00] I was 21. I, I came outta the academy in March of 78 and I was transferred to the North County precinct, which, and I patrolled the Castle Point area for 10 years. And the whole time I was up there, i i, I enjoyed it. I had, I had a very good time. I really did doing, doing patrol work. Ultimately after 10 years, I got the opportunity to put in for a bureau job, which was the Bureau of Special Investigations. And they, and it encompassed a lot of things. The main thing they did was vice type crimes, prostitution, sexual assaults, human trafficking, things like that. But we also did police corruption, politician corruption, a lot of different types of stings. And what I mean by stings, like, like prostitution stings, John stings, where you're catching the patronizers. And so we did a variety of that. You did a little bit of the drugs, but not a lot. You did some contract killings where people would hire us to kill somebody. And then I switched over to, to start doing a little bit more of the drug cases. Drug cases were okay. They were, they were, what do I wanna say? They were, they were long hours, a lot of long surveillances. You had to sit out and watch people for a long time. People think that you just get dope and you kick a door and it, that's far from the case. You spend a lot of time just watching one person. And then ultimately after I spent some time in, in that unit, I got an opportunity to go into homicide.

Bob Bayes [00:05:34] They were in 93. We had a large homicide increase in St. Louis County with drug killings basically. So they moved me into homicide, which I, I really hated. That is not something I wanted. I thought I, you did a lot of work on shootings, murders, and your end result was you didn't catch anybody. And the reason I say that is a lot of the murders then were drug related. So you didn't have cooperation. Family members wouldn't tell you what was going on. Witnesses wouldn't tell you. So you would literally write a 50, a hundred, a hundred page report and you had no idea what was going on because you just didn't have the cooperation. Now the cases that I really enjoyed when I was in there was the really, like, who done it? Like a, like a real, and I don't wanna say, when I say a real homicide, I mean a homicide where a person, like a store owner and somebody comes in and kills 'em. That's like a really, who done it. Those were interesting to work, how they all came together. I did that for a year and like I said, I really didn't like it. And then I had the opportunity to go to DEA, so I was attached to the drug enforce administration for 10 years. And I did some major conspiracies, did cases that went to various places in the United States. And after I did that, I came back and did like five more years in the bureau investigation. Again, the train guy. 'cause I was coming down at the end of my career and after I left St. Louis County at 51 52, I retired and the city of Kirkwood called me and wanted to know if I'd come and train their guy.

Bob Bayes [00:07:07] So I kind of came outta retirement after two weeks and went to work for the city of Kirkwood.

Vance Crowe [00:07:12] And that's a suburb of St. Louis for anybody. It's, it's not from the St. Louis

Bob Bayes [00:07:16] Area. It's, and I worked for them on their streets for about, about a month and they wanted me to take over their unit and they had a unit called the Special Enforcement group, which was basically four guys. And then they did pretty much what things I did through all my career, but it was just a four man unit. And being in the city of Kirkwood, it wasn't a very large area, but they did have some problems and they pretty much wanted me to teach their guys things that I've learned over my career, like search warrants, how to get the federal government to help you on cases like the F-B-I-D-E-A-A-T-F and how to work stings. So I did that and I worked there for nine years. I was looking to retire when I turned 62. But an injury caused me to retire earlier from, from a previous fight on the streets. I'd injured my shoulder on two different occasions and had it operated on. And it finally ended my career after I got cut on again. So my career ended probably about two years sooner than I wanted.

Vance Crowe [00:08:14] Holy gee. I mean, I could actually actually just tear my notes in half because whatever I was expecting about this interview, to be like, this is not at all. So you had a much more colorful career. I thought you were going to come in here and say, you know, I was a police officer and we like to keep the streets safe and yeah. You you really had a career that showed you the darker side of the world it sounds like.

Bob Bayes [00:08:37] Yes, I did. I, yes I did. And, and I'll go back and start a little bit more like on my patrol when I was working in Castle Point back in the late seventies, early eighties, or it was, it was the, the, the, the the, the neighborhood was predominantly black and white. It was pretty much mixed. And back then, believe it or not, not we would get calls for cross burnings in the front yard in 78, 79. What you had was a lot of the airport had bought out large sections of Ken Lock and people now had money that lived in those areas and they were buying into North County and a lot of the whites didn't like it. So you pretty much had racial problems between the two groups. And it went on for a couple years and eventually

Vance Crowe [00:09:21] Wait, so I don't understand. So there were, people got their land purchased and then they had money to buy more land. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:09:28] People that lived kinda like in Ken Lock and Berkeley and the airport came and had bought out a lot of the land from war airport and people basically came into money, which was good for them. 'cause now they could buy a better house, better school district. So a of, a lot of the Afro-Americans moved into North County. A lot of 'em moved into the Castle Point area, bought houses there. And a lot of the old timer white people really didn't like it. So, and, and I'm not saying all of them, but we, we did have some racial problems back then back in the late seventies.

Vance Crowe [00:09:58] But that's totally different than the image that most people imagine you, you don't that I've not heard that before. Right. Where where you're saying a group of people came into money into money and they were gentrifying in a, in a different way. And now you had people saying, we don't care if you have money, stay outta here. Right,

Bob Bayes [00:10:13] Right. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually the neighborhood did change. A lot of the white people moved out and I, I continued, like I said, worked there for 10 years, had a very good time up there. I did things and I'll, I'll touch on a little bit that, and I don't want your audience to take it wrong, but I did things which is now called neighborhood policing. And I did it back there 40 years ago. And what I mean by back is they started programs later on with neighborhood policing where they wanted policemen to get out and talk to people and, and, and, and just, you know, get to know the, the neighbors. Well back then, that was normal for us. I mean, and what I mean by that is I use a, a lot of the kids didn't have a lot and I literally would use some of my own money to buy things and I could only buy things that I could buy in bulk that I knew I could get the most out of. And what I mean by that is like a, like those freezing popsicles, I'd go to the Schnucks and buy a case of those and I don't remember how much they were $5, but look, I could probably give them to 30 different kids. So we'd sit, well, I wouldn't say sit, we'd stand behind the police car and we'd all be eating these bomb pop things, you know? And, and I enjoyed that with a lot of those kids. A lot of those kids didn't have anything. And what I'm talking about is I went out and bought like watermelons 'cause I could get a watermelon for like a dollar 50. It snuck back in those days, I could get the most out of it. So I would open up emergency blanket on the trunk of my police car and we'd cut up watermelons and we'd sit there in the street and eat watermelons being all the kids. Now why I say that is this day and age, if somebody would associate a white policeman eating watermelons with black kids, people have a tendency to think, oh well he's racist 'cause he's, he's putting those two together.

Bob Bayes [00:11:56] And that was far from that. It was, it was using what resources you had to buy the most what you could because it was your money, you know? So.

Vance Crowe [00:12:05] And what was the benefit of spending time with those kids when you were a patrol officer there? Just

Bob Bayes [00:12:08] To get to know the kids. The kids were great. I mean, during, usually during the daytime and evening times, the people out there were, were really good people. It's the nighttime where you started having the people come out that caused your problems, you know, your crime, your car break-ins, your assaults. So those kids, pretty much, when it started getting dark, it was time to go in the house and pretty much stay in the house. And I think that's pretty much where it is. A lot of, a lot of your, your impoverished neighborhoods are like that, where when nighttime comes, people go in the house. They don't, they don't wanna be out there. So I did it more so because I just enjoyed the kids, you know.

Vance Crowe [00:12:46] And when you were a patrolman, what were you seeing as an officer that you didn't see as a regular civilian? What, what changed about your view of the world when you're now interacting with some of the rougher parts of life?

Bob Bayes [00:12:59] Well, the biggest change that, that I saw was domestic. I didn't realize, and I'm going back then, and I'm talking back in those days, is domestic was a family domestic assaults were handled totally different. Pretty much you would go to a call and you would tell the husband, grab your stuff and get outta here. And if you did lock the husband up, usually a majority of the time the wife would drop prosecution and the case would be done with, there was nothing we could do. And then day later, a week later, we'd be back at the same houses all the time. And when, and changes came eventually where the state would automatically prosecute you, if the wife didn't wanna prosecute you, the state would say, we're prosecute you anyway, which helped law enforcement a lot. I mean, it, it kind of took it out of the victim's hands and put it in the state's hands. And it, that, that part helped. And when I, when I'm, when I reason I'm bringing that up, I didn't realize there was that much domestic violence out there until I got into police work. Gimme

Vance Crowe [00:13:58] A sense. What do you mean? Oh,

Bob Bayes [00:14:00] I would say it wouldn't be uncommon to go to two or three a day of domestic problems. And sometimes you would on a, like on a Saturday or, or on a holiday weekend, you could be running from a domestic call to domestic call. And not all of 'em are real super violence. It could be an argument, a fight, a push, but sometimes it would be a stabbing stuff being thrown through the windows, you know, clothes set on fire. I mean, some of 'em got pretty bad, but there was a lot, a lot more than I really thought were out there when I got into police work. I didn't, I didn't expect that many.

Vance Crowe [00:14:34] And then you think the, the fact that the state started prosecuting that, did that mean you locked more people up or you just separated more couples that were having disputes? Or what, what do you think

Bob Bayes [00:14:43] Changed or you were forcing locking people up then? Because the way they wrote it was whoever appeared to be the most aggressive or the, or the other person had the most injuries, you were forced to lock that person up. And it helped because you'd, your victim couldn't say, I don't wanna prosecute. And you had to walk away. You literally were locking people up on that very first call. And back then you could go to a house five or six times in one day and if the husband wouldn't leave, you pretty much had your hands tied. You know, he may walk around the block, come back and they'd fight again. And the wife said, well, I don't wanna prosecute. So that would go on and on and on. But when we started locking people up for, for the assaults that helped that, that was a, that was, that was an eye-opener for me how many there really were.

Vance Crowe [00:15:33] It has to be, if you're a police officer and you're seeing whether it's domestic disputes or somebody calls you, people don't call police officers very often when things are going right, they, they call 'em at some of their lowest moments. So you had to have been seeing aspects of humanity where, where people were really in a vulnerable spot, not just domestic violence, but somebody died in their house.

Bob Bayes [00:15:55] Yeah, I seen a lot of that. One of the, one of the cases that I remember I was, I was a probationary police officer, I was riding with my training officer and I was, it was my third day on and it just shows you how you remember things that, that that hits you is my third day we get a call for a suicide and we go to a man's house in Castle Point. And an old man had shot himself with a rifle, stuck it to his, under his chin. And literally we were trying to figure out how he did it, but it looks like he might have used his foot. But anyway, he couldn't admit to suicide. It was the first time I ever had to touch a body to get it, pick it up. 'cause he was wedged between the bed and a dresser. And I had to pick it up in order to get him on a gurney to get him outta the house. So for me, being 21 years old, it's the first time I've ever seen a real body and I had to actually touch it and pick it up. I remember washing my hands all day long. I just felt like I need to keep washing my hands. And that was, that was an eye opener. I remember that one to this day, the very first body I ever saw. And then you had to deal with the family who showed up and obviously they were distraught and there's not really, I don't think in my whole career I've been able to come up and say something to a grieving family that I felt was the right thing to say. 'cause you don't know what to say. I mean, they, they're just hysterical. And there's not much I can say to calm 'em down just to talk to 'em. Some people take it better, but most people it's pretty hard on them.

Vance Crowe [00:17:23] And how frequently is this happening for just a regular patrol officer? How many times are they going to touch a dead body or, or tell a grieving family in this area? I mean, certainly it

Bob Bayes [00:17:34] Depends. It depends. I mean, there's a, there's a lot more suicides and, and death overdose now than there was back in my day when I started working for Kirkwood. I made the comment to those guys, I go, you guys have a lot of suicides in this town and you have a lot of death overdoses like heroin, stuff like that. And I don't know if it was because of the change with the dope, more dope was being used, but I don't remem I don't recall back in my St. Louis County days having a lot of hair, a lot of drug deaths. They were either typical homicides, suicides type deaths. Did you handle a lot? No, but you know, some of 'em, sometimes you could handle a couple, sometimes you may not handle one for a long time. And on homicide, when I was in homicide you were obviously called out for every homicide and some of the suicides you were called out to. I would say in my one year in homicide, I probably probably dealt with probably 10 to 20 deaths

Vance Crowe [00:18:40] In one year.

Bob Bayes [00:18:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm, and I'm talking about combination of suicides, drug overdose and sudden death. Infamous.

Vance Crowe [00:18:49] I've never seen it. Well I've seen one dead body outside of a funeral outside of that. So, so to hear you say 20 in a single year is staggering to me.

Bob Bayes [00:18:58] Yeah, yeah. It's not, if you're a homicide investigator, it's not uncommon to come across multiple deaths. In, in my career, I had a couple of cases that were very big cases in the St. Louis area. And when I talk about 'em, I don't say they were mine, I worked with other guys. We solved those cases as a group. I would never like to see a person say, I solved this crime myself. No, you didn't. You did it as a group while one person's running off doing a lead that takes him nowhere and you happen to get the lead that takes you somewhere. Everybody has a job to do. So I had some, I had some pretty good cases. I had, I had a, the Cassidy Center death, I don't know if you recall that one.

Vance Crowe [00:19:45] No. You know, I'm a transplant to St. Louis. And so, which which is probably good for our listeners because you can tell me and I'll kind of back you up if I don't understand the St. Louis geography or history.

Bob Bayes [00:19:54] Okay. Back in 93 there was a, a girl that was abducted and murdered and she was found in Bush Wildlife and her name was Angie Houseman. About a week later, another little girl was abducted in Haywood, Cassie Center. And her body was found a couple weeks later in the city murdered also. So at that time in 93 when I was in homicide, everybody started thinking we have a serial child killer. 'cause we have two little girls dead within a month. And everybody was pretty scared back then. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners from the St. Louis area, the older ones probably remember this. My, my group was part of that investigation and, and my daughter for some reason always likes to hear about how it was solved. And it was solved by, by forensics, I mean it is really what solved this case. And the way the case went down is pretty much the little girl had a lanyard on her wrist, which was an alarm, and somebody found the alarm in the street going off and she was gone. So they like, she got pulled into a car.

Vance Crowe [00:21:05] Now why, why would she have been wearing a lanyard with

Bob Bayes [00:21:08] An alarm? I, I'm not really sure why the mom got it. I think the mom may have got it because of the first murder. But

Vance Crowe [00:21:13] Was this around the time when children were showing up on milk cartons and your

Bob Bayes [00:21:18] I don't really recall that too much about the milk cartons, but, but I, I'm not sure why the mom gave her a lanyard. Okay. But it was basically a pin and an alarm and if the pin got pulled out, the alarm went off.

Vance Crowe [00:21:26] Okay. And

Bob Bayes [00:21:27] The alarm was found in the street. And ultimately when she was found in the city, she was wrapped up in a, in a blanket. One thing that you do in homicide is you have the debriefings every day. You gotta know what everybody's found out the night before, the day before. You gotta know what evidence that the lab is processed. And so every day we'd have a debriefing. The FBI was involved and it kinda show you how forensics doesn't really makes your case is the FBI originally had a profiler and they were saying that it was probably a white male and he probably did both murders. So when you're told that, you start thinking that, you're thinking, okay, let's look for white guys, let's look for this, let's for that, well the forensics, and I'll give you some of the clues and we'll see if you can find out what it was since you weren't from St. Louis on the blanket, when they did the blanket, there was aluminum shavings and there were paint chips, some white, some orange on the blanket. So that's one of your clues. So what are you looking for?

Vance Crowe [00:22:36] Paint chips on the blanket? I, I have no idea. So

Bob Bayes [00:22:40] We started looking at maybe a machine shop. Okay. Okay. All right. And then they told us that they had tire tracks of dually tires. You know what duallys are?

Vance Crowe [00:22:50] Oh yeah, yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:22:51] Okay. So that was, well

Vance Crowe [00:22:52] For anybody that doesn't, it's it's two sets of tires on each side typically in the, in the back. Correct.

Bob Bayes [00:22:57] So they had dually tire prints on the lot where the body was found. So, and, and when I say this, I'm not saying I was the only one. Everybody had a part, me and my partner went to the U-Haul in the neighborhood. Now what is U-Haul?

Vance Crowe [00:23:12] Oh, big trucks. Yeah. What

Bob Bayes [00:23:14] Color?

Vance Crowe [00:23:16] I guess red and, or like an orange and

Bob Bayes [00:23:18] Orange. Orange and white.

Vance Crowe [00:23:18] Oh yeah, yeah, you're right. Orange and white. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:23:20] And the floors are made outta aluminum

Vance Crowe [00:23:23] And they'd always have chipped paint coming out of them.

Bob Bayes [00:23:25] So we went to the local U-Haul and we asked 'em, Hey, give us a list of everybody that may have rented the trucks.

Vance Crowe [00:23:31] No way

Bob Bayes [00:23:32] Between the day, two days before the murder and a couple days after the murder and one person showed up in the neighborhood who lived in the house right where the lanyard was found on the street. So now that was my part right then and there another investigator got a call from a lady the same day that lived across the street and she says, you know nothing for nothing. I know you guys have been around the neighborhood for a couple weeks now, but the neighbor across the street had a U-Haul truck and he backed into my mailbox, can you guys do something about him damaging my mailbox?

Vance Crowe [00:24:08] And

Bob Bayes [00:24:08] That's when it all started coming together. They checked the tire prints, the tires matched the one at the scene and they did some more forensic on the, on the blanket. And they found a Afro-American pubic hair. And that threw the whole FBI

Vance Crowe [00:24:24] Profile or thing out. Wow.

Bob Bayes [00:24:26] Yeah. So it was, it was a guy named Thomas Brooks. He confessed to the murder and he drug her in the house and beat her, tried to rape her. And they left the body in there for about a week and it started to smell and he decided he had to get the body out of there and he rented a U-Haul and took it down to the city where you used to live and dumped the body in a vacant lot. And that's how the crime was solved. Yeah. So a lot of your listeners might remember that, that that crime.

Vance Crowe [00:24:50] So when you, when you decide it's him, you have the evidence, were you then on the case to go arrest him or you said

Bob Bayes [00:24:59] No, like I said, well, you, you, your partner's a two. And my job that day after we figured out was him, 'cause he originally had an alibi. He worked at a McDonald's and they checked his alibi and it showed he clocked in. Well, somebody else clocked him in. They later found out when it all started coming out. 'cause he was, he was, he was spoken to the day of the murder because the landry was found in front of the house and on, and, and a footnote of some of this stuff is his sister and the lady in the house knew he did this and the body was in there and they were also charged with some crimes. And he pretty much confessed to the whole thing. He ultimately died in prison of aids. So that's the end. Good Lord. That's the end of that story.

Vance Crowe [00:25:44] How many years did you work in police?

Bob Bayes [00:25:46] I was in 40 years. 40 years.

Vance Crowe [00:25:48] So this sounds like a once in a 40 year story, but I mean, is this, are are solving cases like that comment?

Bob Bayes [00:26:00] No, I mean there's, there's a variety of ways crimes are solved. I mean, I could tell you a couple, I, I had, I helped on another case and basically what happened in this homicide case is we get a call to the guy's house. The house has been ransacked, he's laying there, he'd been executed, looks like a drug killing. His pockets are pulled inside out, has no shoes on. One of his socks is hanging there, has his clothes on. And the sad thing is, is before we got there, the family went through the house and took everything they wanted. So the scene has now been contaminated Anyway, the guy that was doing the case now,

Vance Crowe [00:26:39] Like they're stepping over the body to get to, to

Bob Bayes [00:26:42] Personal items. Yeah, they, they, they basically, I hate to say looted the house before the police showed up.

Vance Crowe [00:26:46] Good lord.

Bob Bayes [00:26:46] So knowing that the scene's been contaminated, I went on to do other investigations and the, the guys that were handling that one, so I, I do recall that one. But the reason I tell you the story is they arrest a guy, they take it to court and the defendant's sitting at the table with his lawyer and they bring the victim's sister up to the stand to testify. And while she's under the stand, they swear her in and they say, do, do you know the individual at the table? And she says, yeah, he's a friend of the family and he's wearing my dead brother's boots that he had on that day.

Vance Crowe [00:27:25] Oh my god.

Bob Bayes [00:27:26] He had the boots on. And when I told you about how the socks have moved off, they had taken his boots after they killed him. He had some really expensive like alligator boots or ostrich boots. So she pointed the boots out and they stopped the trial right there and had a mistrial. He ultimately pled guilty. So it just shows you some of the weird stuff that happened

Vance Crowe [00:27:47] When you were a, a patrol officer and you're doing this for 10 years. Are you looking at being a detective and thinking, oh this, this'll get me out of all the domestic disputes that I'm having to go to over and over again. Or like, 'cause it sounds like you went towards an inner circle of hell is what it sounds like. Why would anybody choose that?

Bob Bayes [00:28:09] I think a lot of guys that want to go into detective bureau want to something specialized, something that that might interest them. There's some guys that love patrol. I like being a policeman day in and day out. I wanted a change. I mean I enjoyed patrol. If I never would've got it, I'd have been happy. But I was asked by a lieutenant that I had that was a street lieutenant of mine and he asked me to come into the bureau. He says, I think you'd like this. So I gave it a shot and that's when I went into the, the Bureau of Special Investigations had a lot of prostitution cases. Human trafficking did stings with Johns. You know, if you're talking about stories, I have a story there for you that a lot of your listeners will remember this one too. Me. Now let me back up. I'll preface this back then. Police officers in the bureau did stuff that they probably shouldn't have done. And what I mean by that is

Vance Crowe [00:29:03] We

Bob Bayes [00:29:03] Would go out and do a dope deal and there would just be two of us. You buy dope and I'd back you up. That was it. And that was the way everybody did it. That's the way we were taught. And what I'm saying, that's not the way you probably should have done it. When we would do prostitution stings, it would be three of us. It'd be a female undercover copper and two guys. And that was it. So what I'm saying is you never knew when danger was gonna come, but you never thought of it. 'cause that's the way you were taught. That's the way everybody did it before you. So that's what you did. And why I say that is we did a sting, and I'll tell you two stings. We did a sting at, out at the airport. We got hired by a guy that was running a prostitution business. He hired the undercover. And reason we were after him is he was, he was manufacturing child pornography. And that was the goal of trying to get this guy. So before he would let us get into the manufacturing of child pornography, he wanted the female undercover to go see a really special client of his $150 for sex basically. So he set it up, we wired her up, she goes out to the airport and goes to this hotel room and meets this guy. Well the deal is made sex for money. And she goes, are

Vance Crowe [00:30:16] You guys following behind in a van or

Bob Bayes [00:30:18] No, we're at, we're in the hallway, she's in the room, we're in the hallway monitoring the listening device that she's wearing. And she gives a code word. And believe it or not, your listeners might get a joke, but the code word back then day. 'cause you have to make fun of some of this. We used to say potato soup,

Vance Crowe [00:30:35] You

Bob Bayes [00:30:35] Know, and reason

Vance Crowe [00:30:36] Working that in sense.

Bob Bayes [00:30:37] Yeah. And the reason we would say something 'cause it was so out of normal, you know, 'cause some coppers would use like a, oh it looks good, you know, as a, and you would think, well what happens if you're looking at something like food and you go, it looks good. And we barged your door down.

Vance Crowe [00:30:52] So we told

Bob Bayes [00:30:52] Guys and I trained guys, you gotta use something that is not part of the conversation. So we told her potato soup, so she was talking blah blah. And something along the lines probably like, oh yeah, I had lunch and I ate potato soup. Man, my stomach gonna feel good. Well there you go. So anyway, we knock on the door and get in and the person in the room turns out to be the head prosecutor for St. Louis City, George Peach.

Vance Crowe [00:31:15] Oh man.

Bob Bayes [00:31:16] And that was a firestorm when we did that guy. A lot of your listeners may remember that.

Vance Crowe [00:31:21] Did you know it or you, you you were sitting in the hallway thinking this is just gonna be some random guy. Random

Bob Bayes [00:31:26] Guy. We had no, and people thought that we knew it, that we may have sent, we had no clue we were being sent that, like I said, we were sent to him by a third party to service him before we could get into child pornography. And when, even when I walked into the room, I am looking at him and I'm like, I know this guy. But he had a flannel shirt on and blue jeans and usually he's always in suit and tie. And I'm thinking, man, what I, I go, you got id And he throws his city id, which is shows he's a prosecutor for St. Louis City. I mean he's like the boss. And I'm like, oh my god. Now what? So obviously being low million on the totem pole, I call supervisors and says, you may wanna come out here, make a decision what we're gonna do. And I can go into a longer part of store about brief it up at

Vance Crowe [00:32:10] By all means we got all the time there. There's unlimited amount of tape here. So

Bob Bayes [00:32:13] I I will say stuff that right now that probably if a, if a supervisor from St. Louis County is listening back then would not be happy with is when we caught peach, we were ordered to come back to now we took all this information and didn't arrest him, didn't do anything. We left him and we all went back to headquarters. And I was given the task being the oldest guy there to write the report, which I wrote most of 'em anyway. So I wrote the report the way it happened and I turned it in and I was told to write it where charges really couldn't be brought against him.

Vance Crowe [00:32:52] Whoa.

Bob Bayes [00:32:52] Yeah. Who,

Vance Crowe [00:32:54] You don't have to name names, but it's somebody that's your supervisor that's saying, hey, a

Bob Bayes [00:32:58] Pre a fairly high supervisor, pretty, I mean, a couple levels up.

Vance Crowe [00:33:03] So write it in such a way that if, if somebody were to read it, if the

Bob Bayes [00:33:06] Pro, if the, if you would read it and the prosecutor would read. 'cause we weren't gonna take it to the prosecutor because you, there wasn't enough evidence in the report. But if somebody would've found out and pulled the report, they would've gone Well, they never had a case anyway.

Vance Crowe [00:33:18] Okay.

Bob Bayes [00:33:19] Okay. So me, that didn't sit well with me at all. And I, and I I I remember having a little bit of an argument saying, this is not right. I said, I will write it, but I'm gonna write it based on your, your directions. And they go, what do you mean? I'm, when 'em say it's gonna start off per the authority of blah blah, blah, the following circumstances have happened. And they and they weren't happy with that either because

Vance Crowe [00:33:48] They didn't want their name on that line.

Bob Bayes [00:33:50] Absolutely. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:33:50] And,

Bob Bayes [00:33:50] And you gotta remember now, this was a, this guy was a very important person. I mean, we were getting calls from all the daytime talk shows, I mean wanting interviews from us on, on this guy. And we were told we couldn't talk to anybody. I ultimately made a copy of the original report to protect myself. 'cause I figured if I write a report that's not true and he decides to sue, I'm the one who's gonna get it. And so I, I made a copy, I turned in the change report under protest and ultimately he was found that he had done other things with while in office embezzling money. They found it later on and they came back and go, we're gonna go ahead and keep that original report. And I remember distinctly remember opening up my drawer and pulling out the original. I go, here it is. And they just kinda looked at me and I said, you weren't gonna put me in a trick bag on this case. I'm just gonna let you know that. So that's the way that happened. A lot of people don't know that on that case I'm probably shocked. But I think they didn't want the head prosecutor to take charges.

Vance Crowe [00:35:01] Holy geez.

Bob Bayes [00:35:02] So

Vance Crowe [00:35:03] And so as you're writing this up, are you thinking my career is on the line? I'm I'm

Bob Bayes [00:35:10] You, I I thought of a lot of stuff. I mean I, I thought of, well, if I don't write it, I'm definitely getting kicked out of the bureau. It's gonna be, it's gonna black flag me my whole career. If I do write it, I'm basically lying in a report I'm covering for somebody that I shouldn't be covering for the guy. And

Vance Crowe [00:35:26] You don't care about him. I

Bob Bayes [00:35:27] Don't, I don't care. He's

Vance Crowe [00:35:28] Doing something wrong.

Bob Bayes [00:35:29] You know, but I thought, okay, I'll write it based on your you telling me. And that way it puts it back on them. So they ultimately never did submit the, that change report in the system. They held onto it and then when all this other stuff came out.

Vance Crowe [00:35:45] But it did, it did, it did come out in the, in the news that he had been trying to pick up a prostitute. Oh yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:35:51] It was big news. Big news. If you, if you google his name, it was big news here in St. Louis. Yeah. 'cause he was real big against pornography, prostitution. I mean he was one of those crusader type guys. And

Vance Crowe [00:36:03] Here

Bob Bayes [00:36:03] He gets caught, you know, and tap of, like I said, they found out that he was embezzling money to pay for the prostitution stuff as well. He, I think he gave up his law license and they, he pled guilty to some felonies and they actually tried it like Cole County because he couldn't do it near in St. Louis, everybody knew him. So I don't know whatever happened to him.

Vance Crowe [00:36:24] So as a person that worked in the, in prostitution stings, there's definitely a movement going on. Probably more out in the west coast to decriminalize prostitution as a police officer. What do you think of that?

Bob Bayes [00:36:38] You know, I got mixed emotion on it. I I've seen both sides of it. I've seen moms prostitute because they made very good money and, and, and there's nothing I could say or do for them to quit on the other side. I see people that were forced into it that had no choice. Moms put 'em in early, dad's made 'em do it. A pimp made 'em do it. So I see both sides of it. I I I, I'm not, I'm not sure what the answer's gonna be if you have it, you definitely got some type of regulations. I mean, you obviously have diseases forcing somebody to do it that doesn't want to do it. I don't know. I mean that's, that's, that's, you're gonna have to debate that one to figure out if, if they ought to legalize it or not. You know. And then you get into the marijuana stuff, you know, 'cause I did narcotics for a long time for DEA, this will probably shock people. I, I always thought it should have been legalized. I mean, I grew up in the seventies. I felt it should have been legalized. It's not, I have to enforce a law, you know, change the laws. I think the problem that with 'em legalizing now, I don't think we've thought it through. And when I tell people that, 'cause when, when they ask me, what do you think? I go, well I think that'll legalize, but I think they ought to make sure everything's in play. And they go, what do you mean? I go, well do you want some policemen showing up at your house that's smoking dope in a police car? No. Well, why can't I, if you, can you tell me or do you want that surgeon operating on your brain right after you had a joint? So you gotta regulate when you can smoke, how much THC should be in the product, just like alcohol and drinks.

Bob Bayes [00:38:09] And I don't think a lot of that's been in play. Even the money, the federal government says marijuana is still illegal. A lot of the states say it's not, you can't deposit your money in banks 'cause they're federally regulated. So what do you do with the money? I mean, it's just, everybody's not on the right page. Everybody just, you just can't say legalize it and then it's legal. There's things gotta be put in play. And I don't think anybody's thought all this out yet.

Vance Crowe [00:38:32] Yeah. And I, the people that I've met that have been associated with it are almost look at it as like the gold rush in the sense that the only people that'll make money are the ones that get the first mover advantage.

Bob Bayes [00:38:43] And

Vance Crowe [00:38:43] So there is a lot of, I'm gonna jump in there even though things are not clear. How do you think this will play out?

Bob Bayes [00:38:51] Well obviously it is going in the direction of legalizing it. I think eventually it's gonna have to sort, its out. I think the federal government's gonna have to decriminalize it and maybe to a point where they hand pick certain cases based on criteria. And what I mean by that is if you got a guy that's that's growing two or three plants at home, he's not a big money maker. He is doing it for per, you got a guy that's bringing in tons. You're talking about a whole different aspect of money coming in. You know, I've done cases with tractor trailers with 2,500 pounds of marijuana in and the amount of money that was being generated being sent back, I did a, a Jamaican operation and all the money was going back to Jamaica then, you know, it's big money makes people do a lot of crazy stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:39:43] So I lived out in Mendocino, California, which is the place that people that think Berkeley is too conservative, they move up to Mendocino. And at the time it was considered the Emerald Triangle because California was right on that verge of legalizing for medical. And I, I had actually, I don't, maybe in college I saw marijuana, but I never saw it. Then I moved to Mendocino and you could go to people's houses that had a greenhouse that was, you know, put together the three or four greenhouses would be bigger than a football field. And that's when you realize like, oh, this is a huge operation. You, this is, this is on a scale of factory work. And I, that was what told me we're, we're going in the direction of legalization because you can't have this much done in the open this much money. But I guess you could say the same thing about things like heroin. And you were saying that that's becoming a pretty big problem in the, in the US or in St. Louis. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:40:38] And, and you have people that wanna legalize heroin and you got people that wanna legalize meth. I mean, where do you draw the line? I I, I don't know. Do you legalize one and not the other one? Do you legalize 'em all? I I don't have the answer for that. That's, that's, that's for people to debate and to find out what is the best solution for all of us, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:40:58] So you mentioned that when you were doing the prostitution stings, that was all a part of vice as a whole?

Bob Bayes [00:41:05] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:41:05] What is vice that's, you know, you always hear it with Miami Vice, but what does it actually mean? And what, what is the purview that you were kind of overseeing?

Bob Bayes [00:41:11] Well, the vice that we did, and like I said, the unit we belonged to was called the Bureau of Special Investigation. And predominantly we did prostitution cases. We did John's guys that were looking for prostitutes. We would do human trafficking where somebody wanted to have sex with kids. We would do, back then St. Louis County had an ordinance that you couldn't sell pornography a video. So we would enforce pornography laws and then you would have problems at your mall. Bathrooms and rest areas like homosexual activity. We were, we had to do those type of investigations. And I remember, I, I talked to a guy out of California at one of the rest stops that we were working and we'd worked these things for like six, seven weeks straight every day. You know. But I remember talking to a guy to California and he was saying like, California, it wasn't a big deal for, for a gay guy to come to one of the rust stops and pick up somebody. And I told him, I said, do you really think it's fair to everybody else that you picked this as a place? And he wanted to know what I meant by that. And I go, I've been doing this long enough. I remember sitting, and this might sound kind of weird, I remember going into the bathroom, standing there acting like I'm washing my hand to get picked up. And moms would send their little boys into the bathroom by themselves when I'd have two guys in the stall basically doing each other.

Bob Bayes [00:42:45] And I would think that that's why you enforce the laws in these, in these places. 'cause you have that type of stuff. I mean, I remember having guys come out, masturbating, walking across the floor, you know, and you're thinking this is a, this is a rest area where people come in and out. People are sending their kids in. And I told the guy, I go, that's why we enforce the laws here. This is not the place if you want to go do it, find a place that, that you can do that. 'cause some people we, we would get criticized by some people that would just say, you know, we are against homosexuals. No, that's not what it, it's how are you're doing it that we're against. But we did a lot of those.

Vance Crowe [00:43:22] How old were you when, when you're in the vice squad?

Bob Bayes [00:43:28] I probably was 31.

Vance Crowe [00:43:31] So raising kids then at that point?

Bob Bayes [00:43:32] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:43:33] And what is that like to be a father, have kids at home and you, you know, you were talking about child pornography and sex trafficking. I mean that, that is pretty grizzly things to be seeing every day, thinking about every day working on all the time. And then come home to your wholesome family of wife and kids.

Bob Bayes [00:43:54] Yeah, when I first got into the child pornography stuff, that was an eyeopener that some of the videos that you would see that somebody could be that heartless to a child and brutalize children like that. I mean, those things haunt you. I still think about some of those. And then you get home and you think about your kids and you're thinking, where's society going? You start getting, like, you think society's falling apart. You think like, oh my God, I'm not ever gonna let my kids out. And I do believe I was probably very protective of my kids. I mean, I taught 'em things that just was probably not normal dad stuff. You know? I was always telling him to look out, watch where you're going. You know, I had the, your typical police attitude of going into a restaurant and you pretty much can pick out policemen that are off duty. They're the ones that sit towards the back with their, with their back against the wall watching the door. And that's just something that's instilled in you. You know, how they carry their hands. You know, the right hand is always a free hand so you can grab your, your gun. You're used to putting things in your left hand, like your flashlight. It's just things like that that you don't even think about that you just do. And to this day, I still sit at the back wall in a restaurant and watch the front door waiting for whatever's gonna come through the door, which never happened.

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] So of all the things that you're teaching your kids and you know, you maybe went over the, the top a little bit. What are the things that you would say, Hey, but of these, these are actually good things to teach your kids in order to keep 'em safe,

Bob Bayes [00:45:29] You know, and obviously you're typical. Don't talk to strangers, don't play for the, I got the puppy dog candy type of stuff. You know, we also had safe words. If somebody tried to come and get you, what was your safe word? Later on in life, I used to tell 'em, you know, when they started getting to school shootings, any place you go look for the exit, know where you're gonna, where, how you gonna get outta that room if something goes bad, no matter where you're at, the movie theaters, anything. Think about what you're gonna do when the shit hits the fan and how you're gonna get outta here. And we, we told our kids that all the time. I mean, always be prepared to your surroundings, going to your car. Just don't walk up your car and get the key and stick it in there. Get your keys out and start looking around and, and you almost think it's like a paranoia, but you want your family to be safe. You hear about stuff like that all the time. And I sit back and think, well, I hate to be a Monday quarterback. But if you would've been looking around prior to getting out there, you may have saw it. And some people, it's amazing how their head is in the sand. I've done surveillances on drug deals, murder investigations, and I'll be sitting in front of somebody's house for hours and not one person would call the police on me, just they'd see me sitting there, older white man sitting in a car by himself for three or four hours. That's not suspicious to you. It's suspicious to me. I'd call, I'd call the police on you. I just would, what's he doing? He, he doesn't live here. I know the car. And most people didn't care.

Bob Bayes [00:47:01] You know? And, and every once in a while you'd have somebody walk up to you where every great once in a while and go, can I help you with anything? I go, I'm a police officer, I'm watching how Oh, didn't mean to bother you. You're not bother. I'm glad you ask. It's very good of you. You know, some policemen on the other hand would take offense to that, you know, after the person leaving, what the hell is he bothering me for? He'd stay outta my business and I'd always turn to home and go people like that's the one that solve our crimes. 'cause they're watching.

Vance Crowe [00:47:26] Yeah. The citizen that's willing to go up and and knock on your window is gonna be the one that's keeping their eye out on other things too.

Bob Bayes [00:47:32] Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean you gotta think about that. How, how, how ballsy that is for someone to walk up to a window and knock on it and say, can I help you? What are you doing here when you have no clue who's on, who's in that car? Like, be it for me, it was a policeman.

Vance Crowe [00:47:47] So you're doing a lot of stakeout work and I believe you said you did some undercover work as well.

Bob Bayes [00:47:53] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:47:53] Yes. So what, in what circumstance does a group of police officers get together and say, we've gotta go undercover. And then what cost is that? You know, if you're gonna change who you are and start behaving like you're somebody else, that's gotta be psychologically a little difficult. Well,

Bob Bayes [00:48:10] You know, it really depends on how deep undercover you're going. I mean, there's different levels of deep undercover. I mean, I didn't do real deep, deep undercover. I know guys that, that, that got deep in the motorcycle gangs that look the part that if they walked in a room, you go, that guy's gonna kill me. They looked the part, I didn't go that deep. A lot of the stuff I did, I may grow, I may have grown my hair out, maybe some fake, but I didn't go real deep. I had fake IDs. And the fake IDs were more so for the prostitution industry. They would ask you for your identification and then they'd quiz you,

Vance Crowe [00:48:43] Wait, wait, who would ask you for your,

Bob Bayes [00:48:45] The prostitutes?

Vance Crowe [00:48:46] They, they would ask you, if you go to a prostitute, they'll ask you to CID.

Bob Bayes [00:48:50] Yes. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:48:51] Why?

Bob Bayes [00:48:51] They wanna make sure you're not the police. They wanna make the sure you are who you say you are. Because with, with the technology today, I mean, if somebody got on the computer and Googled my name, they'd probably come up to something go, oh, I think he's a policeman. You know, you just, so you would get legitimate fake id. I mean they were real IDs but they were fake. Yeah, you'd get quizzed. You get, sometimes you get quizzed hard. Some of the really good prostitution operations that were ran by very smart pimps and a lot of 'em were, believe it or not, out of Florida and New York and Minnesota. And they would bring the women down here and it was more human trafficking. They were forced to come down here. Those guys would school their girls to check other id. Social security card. If I said, I flew in, let me see your license, your, your airplane license or your,

Vance Crowe [00:49:42] Your ticket ticket.

Bob Bayes [00:49:44] I mean, we get those types of quizzes and, and if you weren't a fast talker and didn't have the proper identification, they'd turn around and walk out of the room. I, so

Vance Crowe [00:49:53] You said smart, smart pimps. The only ones that I have any concept of are the crazy dressed people that I see on seventies movies. Right? Yeah. What is a pimp really like in, in the us

Bob Bayes [00:50:07] They haven't changed a lot. They're still violent when the money's not there. The girls are coerced into doing it and, and a percentage of 'em are fed the drugs that stayed in it. But the majority of the pimps that I've come across and I've made into human trafficking cases, which I prosecute federally 'cause there's more jail time. All of them is your typical pimp that you see on tv. Really nice that you see. But violent and vicious with the girls. You know, I did some investigations on some pimps outta Minnesota where some of the girls never probably dead, but they never showed up. No one ever know what ever happened to 'em. So it wouldn't be uncommon for a pimp to kill some prostitute because no one's gonna be looking for her anyway. So are there pimps out there like that? Yeah. Are there other pimps out there? Not like that. Not so many, at least in my career there was it.

Vance Crowe [00:51:02] Wow. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:51:03] Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:51:04] I expected you to, to say no. They look like a businessman or nothing. No, no. There there's a,

Bob Bayes [00:51:08] I I had one guy outta Kansas City. I did a, did a prostitution case outta Kansas City and they were bringing the girls here to St. Louis. And I will say the guy was smart. His wife and him ran it. They had several girls. I had 'em hire one of my undercover females and we were stinging the johns and then we were sending the money back and they were also doing credit cards and we were sending it back. And the IRS was working with us on this one. So ultimately what ended up happening, they got charged for, for, for promoting prostitution and for laundering money. We hit their house in Kansas City and this house, half a million dollars maybe. I mean, beautiful house. They had a custom built, they paid cash for as much things as they, they they could. And the reason we looked into the, how they were spending their money 'cause the federal government's like to seize your stuff. Well they, they put a pool in for $30,000, paid the contractor cash. And he said it was all in tens and twenties. He thought they were dope dealers. Well they weren't. They had a false room in the basement. And the only reason we found that out is a contractor told us, Hey, by the way, do you know about this false room in the basement? And we're like, no. So when we hit the house with a federal search warrant, we found the room behind a glass mirror and all the credit card slips and everything to the businesses in this room. And ultimately they pled out the money laundering and promoting prostitution on a federal case. Yeah, they brought in a lot of money. But what I'm getting at this guy didn't fit your stereotype. He's a white guy, businessman.

Bob Bayes [00:52:41] If you saw him, you would thought he was probably a banker or something. I mean, didn't fit the stereotype.

Vance Crowe [00:52:47] So you're talking about sending in female police officers. What is it, what are the, what are the thoughts going through their head as they're putting on a microphone or they're going, I mean, are they in danger as soon as they go to do this or No, the cops are right outside. So it's not a big deal. Like how, how does some, I mean, most people that are going to work at State Farm Insurance or you know, into their office job, they never encounter this level of pressure. Correct.

Bob Bayes [00:53:14] Correct.

Vance Crowe [00:53:15] So who wants to do this and what's going on in their head when, when they start doing it?

Bob Bayes [00:53:20] Yeah, you, you, first of all, you gotta want to do it. You know, you can't have somebody, Hey, I want you to do the undercover work. And they're like, I don't want to do it. Because part of the stuff I've done in my career is train people. And sometimes I would get a girl off the streets police officer and say, Hey look, you wanna do some undercover? And they go, yeah, buy some dope. I go, no, you gotta be like a prostitute. No, I can't do that. You know, you, you wanna make sure they want to do it. The ones that wanna do it, I tell 'em we can do all the preparing and preparation we can do. But once you go behind that closed door, you're on your own until we get the door open. Now you gotta ask yourself, how long is it gonna take me to get through this door before you get killed? It's gonna happen in a blink of an eye.

Vance Crowe [00:54:03] Wow.

Bob Bayes [00:54:04] So knock on wood, we never had any problems. We had a guy once try to try to rape the undercover by grabbing her and all that, you know. But we always get a master key before we, because if you know, you're going into it and you have the time to prepare for it, you prepare for it. So we got a master key from the front desk and there was potato soup being yelled on that one. But anyway, we got in, we charged him with sexual assault 'cause he actually tried to rape her. So I I I don't think there's any real preparing. You do. You, you do the best you can and you just kind of cross your fingers. I hate to say that. And hope everything goes right. I mean, we teach 'em the, I teach 'em to do certain things. You know, if you feel uncomfortable at any time, walk out, leave.

Vance Crowe [00:54:52] Well, you probably feel uncomfortable time.

Bob Bayes [00:54:54] Well, I'm just saying if you're talking to, if, if if female officer's talking to a John and at any time you feel like something's not right, the case ain't worth it. Say, look, I gotta go downstairs. I gotta tell my driver to come back in an hour, walk out or walk into the bathroom and say, look, I gotta go to the bathroom. I'm gonna clean myself up, lock the door, start yelling potato soup. 'cause it's over with. You know, don't I, I, that's one of the hardest things undercover people have is shutting down a deal. They, they want to do the deal. No matter how many danger flags come up. I mean, they want to do the deal. You know, I had a deal go bad on me on an undercover deal. I was buying $30,000 worth of meth. And I distinctly remember I had a red Mustang 5 0 2 door and a super fast car. Really nice and unknown to me. The informant that I was using basically double crossed me. He introduced me to a guy that basically wanted to rob me. So we met on a parking lot. He thought I had $30,000 in the trunk, the undercover, the ci competent informant sitting in the back seat. So I feel confident that he's not gonna do anything. And the bad guy's sitting in the passenger side, well the passenger pulls out a gun, smacks me in the face with it, tells me he wants the money. And I tell him, and now everybody knows 'cause I'm wired up, the car is wired, everybody knows it's going bad and you prepare for these things, but it still doesn't matter how much you prepare a blink of an eye.

Bob Bayes [00:56:34] So he wants me to get the money out of the trunk. And I said, well, I gotta get out. And he goes, and he wanted, I was, I was buying time by talking to him. He wanted me to give the keys to the CI and the CI to get the money out, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, I see the backups coming up to the car and I roll out of the Mustang and they basically pistol paralyze the guy, put the guns on him and get him outta the car. And then we later find out interviewing him that the CI had set this up as well. So we charged him, both of them for attempted robbery.

Vance Crowe [00:57:07] He had, he had told the guy, you're gonna be able to rob the, even though he knew you were a police officer.

Bob Bayes [00:57:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:57:13] Was he stupid or did he think

Bob Bayes [00:57:15] We to this day, couldn't understand? Why would you tell a guy that I have 30,000 when, you know, police are all around the place? He goes, well, I thought maybe you could pull it off. I mean, you, you lay off and and people are that stupid. You're like, are you for real? Yeah. Well anyway, the end of the story is when we got the gun, it was a, it was a nine millimeter and he had pulled the trigger and they had dented the primer, but it didn't go off. So he tried to shoot me. Obviously I'd have been shot in the back probably when I rolled out. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:57:44] My God.

Bob Bayes [00:57:45] So.

Vance Crowe [00:57:47] Well, what do you think about the, the issues around people have about guns? You know, you mentioned school shootings, you've now said, I had a guy attempt to shoot me. What do you think about guns being, being available in the US the way that they are?

Bob Bayes [00:58:04] I think we got enough. I think we got enough laws. I think the problem is that we just don't enforce 'em. Right. I, i, there's a lot of laws out there. I just don't think we enforce 'em. And what I mean by that, there's laws out there about people that are, that are on drugs or drinking, are not supposed to have guns. And, and I don't know why. Nobody wants to take people's guns. They don't wanna seize 'em. I think that the courts probably need to step in and basically say, if you violate any of these rules, we're gonna take your gun. And I'll even go farther than that. I, I've handled calls where people's cars have been broken into. And I, and when I mean broken into, I mean, they didn't lock their car and somebody got in the car and took the gun from out, from underneath the seat. Now, to me, that's a little irresponsible. Why did you have a gun in an unlocked car? Under the seat?

Vance Crowe [00:58:50] Yeah. Why are you storing a gun in a car at all? Right. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [00:58:52] I had a guy in Kirkwood had a gun stolen. And they call us just, I, we have an informant can find out. Two weeks later, same thing happened again. He bought another gun, put it in the car unlocked, and they stole the second gun. So to me, people like that, the laws are there. I think you need to hold people accountable for some of these guns. When you talk about kids shooting themselves at houses, why wasn't the gun locked up? You know, I mean there's, there's, there's accountability for these guns. I just don't think we enforce enough. But I i, I do think there's enough laws on the books. I really do. I just think you need to enforce 'em. You know, one of the, one of the, one of the laws that helps me and law enforcement a lot is convicted felons that are caught with another gun federally. It's an automatic five years. So, and that's, that, that's a pretty good law. So if you're a felon and you get caught with a gun, you're going to jail for five years and that, that is, is one of the better ones.

Vance Crowe [00:59:51] And is that forever? If you, if you've committed one felony, then forever, you can't own a gun in the US if you've

Bob Bayes [00:59:56] Been convicted of a felony. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:59:58] Okay. I guess I didn't know

Bob Bayes [00:59:59] That. Yeah, yeah. You can't, you can't own any guns. Yeah, you can't even have ammo. We've, we've arrested gang members for having like boxes of ammo and they're like, well, I didn't have any gun. Well, the law says you can't have ammo either, but why do you have ammo? The gun's somewhere? We just didn't find it.

Vance Crowe [01:00:17] Yeah. Ammos not gonna, you're not gonna go hit

Bob Bayes [01:00:19] It with a hammer. Yeah. So that, that, that's a good law. But I, I do, once again, I do believe there's enough, there's enough rules on the, on the books.

Vance Crowe [01:00:26] When you think about, so people have pulled guns on, you

Bob Bayes [01:00:32] Have,

Vance Crowe [01:00:32] Have you been forced to, to pull out your weapon? Yes,

Bob Bayes [01:00:36] Yes. Several times. I I've only had to discharge it once in 40 years. I, I was working the streets. And a a little bit backstory on this is back in the early eighties, there was a couple that was abducted and murdered from a schnooks lot. They found their bodies in the city. She was raped. And it was right before Christmas. I remember. Well anyway, uniform patrol guys were really like, basically, as they say, hitting the bushes, trying to find out, talking to people, what, who, who did this murder? And I remember trying to stop a car that was in the area of the schnook store, like about three days after the murder. And the guy took off. So I get in a pursuit and we go down a subdivision and he jumps out and runs between two houses and it's dark, as dark can be. And I run and come around the corner and I hear the fence and I'm thinking, oh, he cleared the fence. And I come around the corner and towards like the back of the yard. I didn't, I don't recall hearing it, but I sure saw it. And the muzzle flashes, pop, pop, pop. And I hit the ground and started doing return fire on him. And we threw rounds back and forth for a couple time. And I, I had the forethought to know that I probably shouldn't move because the streetlight was at my back, so I would've been s sated. And I just laid on the ground and got on the radio, started screaming for help, and everybody got there, couldn't find him, found my rounds.

Bob Bayes [01:02:10] He had run up a hill and the rounds had went into the hill and his rounds had hit the house behind me. But we didn't find him. Ultimately, they fingerprinted the car and they later found him. And he had nothing to do with the murders, but they ended up charging him for attempted murder on me.

Vance Crowe [01:02:30] And when you think back on a guy shooting at you trying to kill you, do, are you angry with him?

Bob Bayes [01:02:37] Not at first. You know, I, excuse me, when it first happened, your, your training takes over. But I will tell you when it's over and you're like, help's there, you're scared. The, I mean, I don't care who you are, the scaredness comes in, you're like, good god, almighty. I mean, you really start thinking about being scared, you know? So these, these stories where you see policemen or a matcha and all that, don't buy that for a minute. You, you put any policeman in the right situation, they'll walk away and they'll be scared. That one. Yeah. You know, just wanna start throwing some rounds at you and you're thinking, first you're going why? And then you're thinking, well maybe I do have the killer that killed this couple. You know, and oh,

Vance Crowe [01:03:19] You're thinking about the case,

Bob Bayes [01:03:21] You know, I mean, you're thinking, you're thinking what, what's going on? And, and, and it turned out the car was stolen. He ran because the car was stolen. I forgot they had that, that's why he ran and thought he to with some rounds at me. So

Vance Crowe [01:03:32] What is the calculus that's going on when it, when it's time to go from my hand is on the gun to, I'm pulling it out and it's now ready to go.

Bob Bayes [01:03:42] Pretty much when you fear that your life is about, that's in danger at that moment, that, that it's a sense that you, you, you feel that get your gun. And what I mean by that, I've had, I've pulled over cars in the middle of the night, four deep with people and everybody's fidgeting around and acting weird. And right off the bat, those are all red flags. Just something don't feel right, you know? And so you usually call for a backup, but sometimes your backups are pretty far away. So ultimately you still have to walk up there and talk to the people. Now, do you walk up and have your gun in your hand and stick in their face? No, you don't do that. Do you pull your gun out and put it by your side? So all you have to do is raise it up a few inches because your reaction is gonna be a lot slower than their actions. So if they pull a gun, you've already almost lost the fight. You know, so you're just trying to, trying to make your odds better. So what I say like that is, yeah, I've had to pull it out, hold it on my side. I've had burglary calls where I had to go into a house and walk through the house with the gun out and, and, and catch people in the house doing the burglary answer call for bank robbery, you know, going to the bank with your gun out, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:04:57] Wait, people really do rob banks?

Bob Bayes [01:05:00] Yeah, yeah, they do. Rob banks still. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:05:03] That sounds, you know, I see bank robberies on movies and I think only an idiot would do that. Don't they all get caught?

Bob Bayes [01:05:10] I'd say a large percentage of 'em get caught now. Yeah. With the technology out there, I, there's a lot of technology out there. One of the things, it's probably a little bit of a trade secret, I shouldn't say, but a lot of the money is, is, is trackable electronic tracted. So when you rob the bank, it tells you right where you're at GPS

Vance Crowe [01:05:31] Oh wow. Oh yeah.

Bob Bayes [01:05:33] So if you rob the bank and take off with the money, it automatically is given police cars. Certain police cars have the, have the equipment in it and automatically tells you where you're at. And all you do is file like a GPS and go, there he is. So yeah. The technology,

Vance Crowe [01:05:49] When you're going in and you've pulled out your service weapon, what's going on with your emotions or your, your adrenaline system? Is it, is that something you learn to control and it becomes not that big of a deal? Or are you, are you hearing your pulse in your ears?

Bob Bayes [01:06:06] You, you hear your pulse? I mean, everything is heightened. I mean, you definitely know you're on your game. Your heart starts pounding, you know, you're, I mean, everything you're trying to, trying to take everything in to, to assess the situation you've just gotten yourself into. But you know, in the back of your mind, you're thinking, I don't want to die today. So you have to make a choice. You know, some people are very offended when they hear a policeman pulled a gun and went into a house or something. You know, I, I, I tell people, you gotta look at, you gotta look at their, their angle, you know, like walking up to a car. Would you just walk up into a car and act like nothing's going on? You have no clue what's in the car. You have no idea what they did just prior, you know, are most people, good people? Oh, absolutely. But I can't pick out all those, you know, if I, if I had a crystal ball that said, oh, this is a bunch of great kids here in this car, even though there's 10 of them, great. But you have no clue. So,

Vance Crowe [01:07:09] So what should people know then about? So I would say in the last two years, three years, I five, since Ferguson, there are a lot, there's a lot of tension around police officers using their weapon on people that are unarmed. And when I watch the news, it seems like the, the, it seems like it is portrayed that the police officers are are being brutal or, or irresponsible. But as a person that's been there 40 years, what do you think of the way they're portrayed and, and the, and the, and the sense that police officers are really kind of trigger happy?

Bob Bayes [01:07:48] Are there bad policemen? Absolutely. There's bad people in every profession. Once again, I tell people, don't make a judgment until you have all the evidence. If a policeman shoots somebody and he's not justified, let the evidence take you that way. It seems like, and I'll use Ferguson, it seems like when a, when a police officer shoots somebody and predominantly of color, it was a bad shoot period, bad shoot, no matter what the circumstances are. And I think once the evidence comes out and people go, well, that probably was more justified than we thought, but by then the damage is already done because people have already formulated their opinion. Ferguson is, is a prime example. I mean, when that first come out, I remember talking to police officer and says, you know, what's gonna solve this crime on whether it was justified or not, is the people that live in that, that neighborhood, those apartments that actually saw what happened. If they step up and tell the truth, we'll know what really happened. Because obviously you're gonna have people that are gonna side with the victim and say, Hey, he, his hands up, he didn't charge. Okay, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. And then you can have other people that say, oh, policeman was straight out, justify it. The evidence will show it. But let let it, let it follow its course. Don't, don't, don't assume that he's, that he did something wrong. And like I said, fer was one of 'em. I had to work to Ferguson riots and it, it's not a fun thing to work, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:09:15] When you say the Ferguson riots. So for anybody that wasn't living in St. Louis, you wanna give a little bit of a background as to what happened?

Bob Bayes [01:09:22] Yeah, pretty much Ferguson, there was a white police officer that shot a young black male killed him. And originally people come out and thought it was an unjustified shooting and the crowd got angry. And there was other things that that led to it also. Not just the shootings. It was, it was a combination. I think people were just tired of being treated certain ways in regards to tickets being issued, traffic stops. And I get that, and I can expand on that too because I, I've been part of that. But I think people were like fed up. I think the shooting was a catalyst that set it off, but I think it was the wrong one. I think people should have waited for the facts, let that play out and then address what your problems really were. Anyway, in that case, people didn't like that he wasn't being charged immediately. And people started rioting and burning the city up. And then ultimately the case went to a grand jury and they found that it was a justified shooting and they burnt the city up again and rioted. And that's when a lot of law enforcements from different police departments, municipalities were called in to try to quail the disturbance.

Vance Crowe [01:10:36] And so then what would your role have been when you were responding to the Ferguson riots?

Bob Bayes [01:10:40] Our role was to keep people away from certain areas, kind of trying to, trying to contain people to stay in a certain spot. Not to let 'em just roam all over the neighborhood or the business district and destroy everything. You try to, you try to keep 'em in a certain spot so you can keep an eye on everybody and let 'em protest. But then it gets to the point where you have to disperse the protest for a number of reasons. Either they're throwing things or shooting at you, or maybe the city has decided, hey, we wanna open the street up and get commerce going. So whatever the reason is, you have to disperse to rioters. And that just inflames people. They don't want to be moved, they don't wanna be told. And from there it just escalates every time. So you start getting pelted

Vance Crowe [01:11:26] What happened in the Ferguson riots that a police officer would see that somebody just watching it on television wouldn't have seen.

Bob Bayes [01:11:40] One of the things that really surprised me and, and not really surprised, but I thought, wow is how many shots were being fired?

Vance Crowe [01:11:46] Shots? Yeah,

Bob Bayes [01:11:47] Random shots. And not by police, just people shooting. Just, you'd hear bullets going off constantly. I mean, and you'd hear some high powered rapid like assault rifles shoot being shot somewhere. And you kept thinking, boy, I sure hope one of these rounds doesn't find a spot and hit me. You know? So that, that was kind of a surprise to me. How many, how many rounds of ammo were being shot off randomly, you know? Other than that, most people during the daytime weren't bad people. They were violent, not violent. They were angry, understandable. They wanted their opinion heard, I get that. But when it got more towards the nighttime, people just wanted to steal and loot. And the, and the, the crowd itself changed in like, who was really in the crowd. It wasn't people that wanted to, wanted to protest. It was people that wanted to, to burn the place down. So you have to deal with that.

Vance Crowe [01:12:45] You would've been an older police officer relative to a lot of the guys that were on the street. And I remember, I don't know, maybe six months ago, as they were doing inquiries into people's text messages as they were getting ready, I read that as, you know, 20 something year old young guys that are having a lot, maybe some fear and adrenaline, the police officers that are saying, Hey, we're gonna go crack some heads tonight or we're gonna go, I, I read that as, you know, a bunch of young guys trying to psych themselves up to go be an tense situation. And then when it gets brought to the light of day, there are a lot of text messages that nobody really wants brought to the light of day when you think you're talking to your buddies. But as a police officer, that also represents the, the side of law enforcement. What, when you read those text messages of those guys sending back, I don't know if you did or not, did you?

Bob Bayes [01:13:38] I saw a couple of 'em, but I didn't read all of that. What

Vance Crowe [01:13:40] Do you think of that?

Bob Bayes [01:13:43] I call, I got a name for policemen like that and I run across 'em in my career and I call 'em yahoos. You get this guy that, that gets into police work, usually the young ones, and you got some, most of 'em are really good guys that, that, and women that do a really great job. But you get a small percentage that are straight up yahoos that just think I'm a cowboy and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that. You know? And those are the ones that usually start sending the texts back and forth to each other. And then they get their buddy up on it and he starts sending texts. And to me, first thing I wanna say, you're stupid. You can't be that stupid, but you're stupid. You know? And that's what I sense it some Yahoo cop that just, he'd be the one that would cause the problem. He'd be the one that would go into the crowd and probably crack somebody with a stick and the whole thing starts and

Vance Crowe [01:14:34] Now they've got a reason to push back and now they've got a reason. Yeah.

Bob Bayes [01:14:36] You know,

Vance Crowe [01:14:36] That's right.

Bob Bayes [01:14:36] I mean, I remember going to calls as a, as a policeman and the con the, the, the, the, the situation's come and then you'd always had that one policeman show up when it's all over with and cause everybody to up in arms at you. And before you know it, you're fighting the whole family because one policeman came in there has either said the wrong thing or tried to push his authority when the situation's already come, you know? And every once in a while, when you get that policeman among other policemen, you, you'd always say, oh God, here he comes, get ready because you, you label him. You know? And, and, and usually the older coppers that knew it would call 'em out and go, look, you need to get out. Go back. We don't need you here. You know, as a younger copper, you're like, he, he's been all longer than me, but I know he's gonna cause me problems, you know? So Yeah. And younger coppers have a, have, back in my day, were a little worried about saying stuff because they want to be accepted. And I think that still holds true now, but I don't think it's as bad as it was, you know, I don't mean it in a bad way, but I'm just saying you, you just kind of didn't want to rock the boat, you know? So he just kind of went along with things. That's it really.

Vance Crowe [01:15:50] So now you're training police officers or you, you have been in, in Kirkwood. Yeah. What is different about the police officers that are entering now than were when, when you joined up in the seventies, when

Bob Bayes [01:16:01] I joined up, majority of the people, and I, I tell young people this, when I got on, it was a career. I, I, I wanna be a policeman for a career. I knew I was gonna do this probably forever. A lot of 'em that come on now, it's a job, job. There's a big difference between a job and a career. The guys that come on, I don't say all of 'em, but the, there's, there's a lot of 'em that coming. It's a paycheck. I'm here. If I find something different, I'm gone. You know, I don't, and when you have that mindset, your heart's not really into the job. You're not really there to help people. You're just here handling your calls, moving on, write a ticket or two, get your paycheck and you're happy. You know, guys that make it a career, go out there and, and really try to make a change. You know,

Vance Crowe [01:16:47] Trying What do, what do you think changed that made it so people view it as a job instead of a career now?

Bob Bayes [01:16:52] I think it's because it, it's hard to find people to be policemen. You know, back, back in my days, it was a, it was a, a career that had honor like a fireman. You know, if you were a policeman, oh yeah, you know, great, you're a soldier. Great. Now it's not that way anymore. You know, you're a policeman. It's almost like you need to hide because

Vance Crowe [01:17:14] You really feel that way.

Bob Bayes [01:17:16] I, I did right during the Ferguson and, and shortly after I got his horribly with policemen. I mean, wow,

Vance Crowe [01:17:21] Everybody's

Bob Bayes [01:17:21] Against you. 'cause that's all we dealt with. The people that were cussing you out, throwing stuff at you. I remember going to a gas station in uniform to gas in my car and people wanna say like sli remarks, you know, pig sounds, stuff like that, you know? I mean, come on, would I get upset? No, but I'm thinking Jesus, really, you know, I mean, you want, you wanna make a scene at a gas station 'cause I'm a policeman that you'd get that kind of stuff. I will also say that eventually, and how do I wanna explain it? The minority is what everybody heard. We weren't hearing from the majority of the people. And what I mean by that is I think the majority of the people realized, Hey, this is wrong. Treating all these police officers like that, that then the majority of people started stepping up. And that's when you saw, saw seeing like counter protest and backing the blue up, they called it in my, at that time, I was probably 35 years in the career now, maybe 37 or first time I ever had people walk up to me and thank me for being a police officer in my whole career. You know, I remember my wife and me were at a, at a restaurant eating in a uniform and somebody bought my, my lunch for me. And I have no clue who it was and what I'm getting at. It's not that everybody got by my lunch, but I'm like, wow, people do really care, you know? And that meant a lot to me. And I'm talking probably 37 year patrolman by that time. It's the first time I ever had my whole career.

Bob Bayes [01:18:52] You know, you had more people coming out and thanking you for your job, but originally during the Ferguson you couldn't do anything, right? You couldn't even stand there without people screaming and spitting and throwing stuff at you. I think a lot of people saw some of that stuff on news, but I don't think they realized how bad it really was, you know?

Vance Crowe [01:19:13] Yeah. Certainly not the, I was living at the time about a half a mile off of the Delmar Loop,

Bob Bayes [01:19:20] And

Vance Crowe [01:19:20] There was, it wasn't anywhere near what Ferguson was, but there were certainly people showing up to throw rocks and break all the windows there. And I had not, since I had lived in Africa, I had never seen a group of people that, that you really didn't know what they were going to do next. And I, I was pretty conflicted about the whole thing because on the one hand, you, you see that people are, are, are feeling like they have to be heard, like something has gone really, really wrong in their city and that they don't view the cops or really any of the systems as being on their side. But on the other hand, I had also never been afraid living in the United States, but when, when you, you could go outside of my backyard and hear the mobs of people yelling, I don't want that. Sure. Whatever we need to do to stop that, let's stop that. And so that was a really tense time. I think if you weren't living in St. Louis, it's easy to look and just say, oh, that's a, you know, a bad place or a rough place. But I don't think people really knew how, how that all felt to everybody.

Bob Bayes [01:20:26] Right. Right. I I I, I do believe, and like I told you, I think the, the, the murder was just something that set it off. I think the underlying problem that I see it being a police officer was, and I don't wanna label, but I'm just gonna say what I think is a lot of smaller departments and some of the medium sized wrote a lot of tickets for some stupid stuff. And I, and I get you gotta write tickets to people, but sometimes you can overdo it.

Vance Crowe [01:20:59] Oh, well, and I, I can, I'm, I'm in agreement with you on this, that, that, so for anybody that's outside of St. Louis St. Louis is actually divided between the county and the city. The city is not a part of the county. And instead there are how many, how many uni municipalities,

Bob Bayes [01:21:14] I I wanna say 90 something, I think

Vance Crowe [01:21:15] 90 some municipalities. And there was a period of time, particularly in the northern part of the county Correct.

Bob Bayes [01:21:20] Where

Vance Crowe [01:21:21] Municipalities were deriving more than 50% of their income from speeding tickets and parking tickets and all, all sorts of like minor violations. And in effect was a huge tax on really some of the, the, the least able to pay that tax. Now they're getting into the court system and now every time they turn around, they're getting harassed by police. Oh

Bob Bayes [01:21:45] Yeah. Would

Vance Crowe [01:21:46] You agree with that?

Bob Bayes [01:21:46] Oh yeah, I do agree. I do agree. You could drive a car through North County, probably from one end to the other, probably go through five or six municipalities. Now, let's say you don't have plates on your car. You theoretically could get stopped six times, given six tickets in one day for the same thing. Now think how, what the cost of that is. Now you try to pay it, you don't have the money. You go to the courts, they try to work a payment plan out for you, you miss a court date. Now you get locked up.

Vance Crowe [01:22:18] And if you're already the type of person that doesn't have money to get plates on your car or things aren't

Bob Bayes [01:22:23] Sure

Vance Crowe [01:22:23] Coordinated enough, now you're locked up. Right now you got a real problem.

Bob Bayes [01:22:27] Right. Right. And there's, there was one police department, which I, I even told the kid I had to pick a prisoner up for Kirkwood, and I won't say which police department was, but he got locked up in another municipality. That police department had to go to that municipality, pick him up and bring him back to their department where they booked him through. They charged him another $50 on his fines for driving him from one department to another. And now he's responsible for the ticket. They originally had plus another $50 for the tick for getting a car ride. And he was telling me this, I go, that's wrong. I mean, you probably need to get an attorney that, that, that's just money taken right there.

Vance Crowe [01:23:08] And if you're making $8 an hour, that's, that's a full day of work. Just Oh,

Bob Bayes [01:23:12] Absolutely. Absolutely.

Vance Crowe [01:23:13] So

Bob Bayes [01:23:13] I'm saying the underlying problem, in my opinion was that kind of stuff. And that was, that was a lot in North County. You know, I'm not saying pre predominantly Ferguson did that, but I do know some of the municipalities were counting on that money and they would ticket the hell out of people

Vance Crowe [01:23:27] If there was, if there was one small good thing that came out of that Ferguson riots, it was that it made people really pay attention to some of these issues that you're talking about. So five years ago, they made the realization that there are a whole bunch of these municipalities that are doing this. So they, I don't remember the exact names of the laws, but they essentially changed it. So you couldn't derive 50% of your income Correct. From these tickets. How, how did that end up working up? Now you have police officers that are, that were spending a majority of their day basically being tax collectors. What, what, what did, what was the result of that law change?

Bob Bayes [01:24:05] Well, in my opinion, the, they're real policemen now. They're out there doing what they're supposed to be doing, looking for crime, patrolling the subdivisions, patrolling the malls, business districts. The problem that you have is you can't measure preventing crime. And what I mean by that, if I go out and write 10 tickets, oh wow, you wrote 10 tickets. I run around a neighborhood for a week and doesn't have a burglary. You hear crickets. Okay. You, you, that's something you can't measure. So you can't tell a police officer, oh, you did a great job. You had no burglaries in your, it's like, well, how many tickets did you write? You know? And they would never come out and tell you, Hey, you need 10, you need 12. They can't do that. But you can kind of get an idea when some guy writes 10 and they say to you, oh, well he wrote 10 and you have three. You get the, you get the, you get the idea what they're telling. They're not coming out, but they're, they're telling you. So I think the good thing was is people got back to real police work. You got out there and you did your job. You find criminals, you lock 'em up. It's not all about writing tickets, do tickets play a part in. Sure. But it shouldn't be the main thing you do as a policeman, you know? And, and that comes in, and I'll bring it up, is the cameras. You know, I get asked a lot about what I think about the cameras at policemen wear. And I, I really have mixed emotions on both of 'em. I think there was always a small percentage of police officers that were bad. And I think statistics,

Vance Crowe [01:25:30] Oh, you're talking body cameras, body, you're not talking traffic. Cameras talking, talking

Bob Bayes [01:25:33] About body cameras.

Vance Crowe [01:25:33] Okay. Body cameras.

Bob Bayes [01:25:34] I, I think there was always a small percentage and I of policemen that were banned. I think statistics kind of show that from what I read. But so the cameras come into play and I think there's a play place for them, but it's a double-edged sword. And people say, why is that? It keeps the policemen honest that you're not doing, you shouldn't do it. Well, what it does, it tells everybody, if it wasn't video recorded, it didn't happen. If that guy punched a policeman and it wasn't recorded, he didn't punch him. Well, that's what people think about cameras is if it's not recorded, then it didn't happen. Well, that's not, that's not true.

Vance Crowe [01:26:09] I never thought about that. That that ends up becoming a, a real challenge because I don't want, I don't want a surveillance state. I don't want everything we're ever done recorded. But then at the same time, I do wanna be able to check and say, who was the instigator here? Who really did cause the problem?

Bob Bayes [01:26:27] Sure, sure. And, and, and going along those lines is with the camera system, it took discretion away from a police officer and people kind of look at me and go, well, what do you mean? I go, okay, I pull you over. You're 17-year-old kid, you got a bag of weed on you, you got two joints. I don't care what you have, I got a camera on. What do you think I'm mandated to do now?

Vance Crowe [01:26:49] Yeah. Because now there's evidence to be

Bob Bayes [01:26:50] Able, I I gotta lock you up.

Vance Crowe [01:26:51] Yeah. Wow.

Bob Bayes [01:26:51] I gotta tow your car. Wow. And I, you know, back in my day, I tear it up and put it on the streets. Hey, dump this out. Get outta here. Because I don't wanna ruin some 17-year-old kid's life. I mean, people may say, well, you're a police officer, you're gonna force law. There's more to police work than ruin people's lives. You know? And they go, well you're, you're picking and choosing who, which that's, that's, that's part of discretion. You know, have I come across a kid who's outright belligerent and ignorant and probably had multiples? Will he probably get a break? You know, probably not. But it really depends. I mean, I've given kids break that had really bad records because they honestly seem like they were trying to change their life around. You know, some kids get to a point where they just need that break. But anyway, back to the cameras. If it's on camera, you gotta do something. You pull the guy over for speeding, sir, you're speeding. 'cause the cameras click on like 30 seconds before you actually turn him on. Like, if you flip the lights on, they're on, they go back 30 seconds. So they record everything prior. So you pull the guy over for speed, you give 'em a ticket, don't give him a ticket.

Vance Crowe [01:27:57] Well that's, I, that would add to the tension that you were talking about. If, if a police officer doesn't have any discretion and they're just robotic, and you have to decide on the side of the road, and I mean, I guess you could play the devil's advocate and you could say, well you, you as a police officer, you aren't, I, I don't know if you guys are taught to have discretion, but you could say, somebody would say, well I don't really want the police officer to have discretion 'cause I want it to be even for everybody. What do you think?

Bob Bayes [01:28:25] I'm gonna disagree with that because I don't think you need to lump everybody up in the same bundle and say everybody's the same. Everybody has their own problems in life, their own issues, financial problems, family problems. And for me to, to blanketly treat everybody the same, I, I just don't think that's fair to the individual. I really don't. Now the person that probably gets to break thinks it is the person that doesn't, thinks it's not, do you give everybody tickets? Do I lock everybody up for a joint? I mean, think about it. Everybody gets locked up. First of all, you're gonna inundate the court system. You know, the guy's not, you know, you're gonna get people not gonna show up. Then you run into this municipality thing, you know, where you get bounced around and about. I, I think you need to give officers discretion. You know, I do recall one in particular case where, and you may or may not agree, the, the officer had a body camera on, he turns his sirens on and everything. So the camera's activated and while he's driving to get to a priority call, people are not pulling over, cutting him off. You know, you get that. So as he's driving windows up, he says some few choice words, you know, well, they review the body camera for whatever reason. And they see him like, you know, someone cut him like, Hey you asshole. They send him the man anger management class and write him up for inappropriate language.

Bob Bayes [01:29:57] Now, is that fair? I don't know. To me, no, it's not. You know, you're in a car, you're pissed off. 'cause people aren't a blatant law. You're saying it to yourself. You're not hanging your hat out, you're just saying it. But it got recorded on camera. So, you know, you get that kind of stuff. You know, you, like you say, you don't want to state to record everything. And law enforcement originally, I think the camera system came out just to validate that a crime had happened. Now it's turned into a big brother to a point of like, well, we reviewed the camera just to be reviewing him and you didn't have your hat on when you got outta your police car. That's a reprimand.

Vance Crowe [01:30:36] And they're really doing that.

Bob Bayes [01:30:37] They can't do that. Okay. They can do that. Back in my day, hat were a big deal when I first came on the police department, and I'll tell you a funny story, but anyway, you would get wrote up for stuff like that. When I applied for the City of Kirkwood, one of the things they do is a background check on you. Well, obviously I'd have been a policeman for 30 years prior to that. And they ask me, have you ever been rode up in your career? And I laugh and I go, yeah. And they go, well how many times? I go six. Whoa. You know what I mean? That people whoa, six times you, what do you, you know, why are you a policeman? And they go, what'd you do? I go, well, four of, I didn't have my hat on. And they go, no, really? What'd you get locked? What'd you get wrote up for? I didn't have my hat on. I got wrote up for not having my police hat on back in the early days. And I got wrote up one time for not having my tie on. I had clipped it off to the side and forgot. 'cause I was writing a report in the police car. And when I got out, I got wrote up for that. So five of those for that. One of 'em was when you read the, and I and, and when I say it, the last one, people are like,

Vance Crowe [01:31:39] Wow, no, I'm looking forward to this. I wanna know. Yeah. The

Bob Bayes [01:31:42] Last one I got the heading was Forged County documents. I got wrote up for Forging County documents. Now you're thinking, whoa,

Vance Crowe [01:31:50] Whoa. Well you should, you should been. I've got a bad dude on my, yeah, you should be fired for this one.

Bob Bayes [01:31:55] Well, the circumstances on that was, is back in my day when you wrote a ticket to somebody, there used to be a box that you had to write with their, where their employed, their employer. And I think I'd wrote like five tickets, speeding assignment I had. And my sergeant had already taken off. I had a habit of just putting a line in the box. If you weren't employed, I'd just write a line. And the other two tickets, I think I put what they did. So I turned the stack of tickets in to the incoming sergeant. He looks at 'em and puts a note to him, well, you need to put something in the box. And he puts what is called his DSM, which is kinda like your badge number on the bottom of two of the tickets. And the other three, he didn't put it, which means they're approved. So I, I put unemployed and at the very bottom I wrote his DSN his badge number, and I put him back in his box. Well, next day he comes and he sees him and he, I remember he calls me in and he goes, did you fix those tickets? I go, yeah. He goes, did you put my DSN on the bottom of those tickets? I go, well, yeah. He goes, I'm writing you up, you forged official county document. And I got wrote up for that.

Vance Crowe [01:33:00] What, what was his case? That he just didn't wanna have his number written on, on a,

Bob Bayes [01:33:05] I didn't have the authorization to write his badge number on those three tickets.

Vance Crowe [01:33:08] Whoa. Even

Bob Bayes [01:33:09] Though I turned it back into him, I wasn't trying to get past him on it. I just turned the three tickets back in. So it just shows you some of the stupid things you get rode up with and that goes with you your whole career that stays with you. So I tell people, especially upper management, when you start writing these people up for stupid stuff, and let's say something happens like a lawsuit against a police officer or the department, and they bring you in and they say, officer, can you tell me how many times you've been wrote up? Six. Okay, no more questions now, what's that leave you with?

Vance Crowe [01:33:41] Yeah.

Bob Bayes [01:33:41] You're like, whoa, what are you in police work when in fact, well, what were they? I didn't have my hat on, didn't have my tie on, you know? But anyway, they kind of got away from that kind of stuff. You know, they don't, they, they don't enforce a lot of that stuff anymore. Like hats and ties and police departments have changed over the years.

Vance Crowe [01:33:59] It's interesting to think about a police officer having the same sort of challenges at work with a, with a grumpy boss or you know, the HR department as just anybody else that has a job at a, at a regular place.

Bob Bayes [01:34:14] Oh yeah, yeah. It really is. I mean, everybody wants to second guess you after it's done. You know, the bad thing of this job is you have to wear so many hats and make so many decisions. And some of 'em are good decisions. Some of 'em are bad decisions. Some of 'em, I'll be the first to say you're not sure what the decision should be. You know, when you get into certain things like court orders for families, the moms and dads, the kids, you may have two or three court orders and you're like, which one is it? I have no clue. You know, you make the wrong move. People wanna take you to court and sue you right off the bat. You know, so it, it's, it's a lot harder now, but it's still a fun career. That's something you wanna do.

Vance Crowe [01:34:58] So the, the, the last question I'll ask today, and it's one that I thought of actually the very first one that I thought of when I found out you were gonna be able to do this interview, which has been great. I'm so glad you've come. A few years ago I was talking with a, a boss of mine at my last job, and they were making some decisions that were about, they, they were kind of political decisions, and it was really what I perceived to be really, really liberal. And I was just saying, Hey, just so you're aware, this is going to be perceived as you, you representing the company as being politically active in this direction. And, and the, and the woman sat across from me, her face just, you know, got really dour and, and she was like, no, no, no, you, you don't understand. I have a thin blue line sign in my front yard. And, and meaning like, I'm not liberal. I am thin blue line. And I actually at the time had never even heard of that. So I have wondered for a very long time what the origins of that are, how police officers actually feel about that sign and, and what in the hell she meant by that. And so I, I'm interested in, in your take on this. So for anybody that doesn't know, what is the thin blue line sign that people put out?

Bob Bayes [01:36:25] It's pretty much a, what it looks like. It's pretty much a American flag that's basically in, in black and white. But right in the middle of the stripes, there's one blue line. And basically what it what it represents is that we support you as law enforcement. And that really took a grass hold right after the Ferguson. Because like I told you, when Ferguson came around, you had a, in my opinion, you had a, a, a small group that were really anti-police, didn't matter what you did. And then finally the majority of the people said, you know, this is not right. You can't blame all these policemen, you can't be against all of them. They're family men. And people started supporting policemen and the support was the blue line. And it just kind of grew from there. So when you see 'em, it's, it's not that they, they they're liberal or they're not liberal, they're conservative. It just means they support the police officers. That's all that means. That, that, that we know you have a hard job and you gotta make some decisions and we support you. That's all that means.

Vance Crowe [01:37:24] It was interesting when I first observed that it would be out in the suburbs of St. Louis, but my wife and I were in New York two weeks ago, and I saw that thing everywhere. I I I was shocked. I mean, it was on cabs. It was on SUVs. Are you surprised to see how much that spread?

Bob Bayes [01:37:44] Yeah, I am. Like I said, and going back to Ferguson, when, when all the riots and everything was happening, you really, as a policeman, you really thought, what did we do wrong? I mean, what, what did I do wrong? Why does everybody hate me for me doing a job? I'm doing a job that you hired me to do. I didn't kill that boy. I didn't break the windows and loot. I mean, I'm no different than anybody else. And you, and you started to wondering maybe, maybe nobody does like me anymore. You know, and you start thinking that, you're thinking, golly, and then you count on other police officers for support, you know, and then society as a whole, I think grabbed onto that and said, Hey, these guys need support. You know, they're, they're, they're here for us and we are here for the people. So when it took hold and it started spreading, it kind of kind of cheered you up, kinda like, wow, people do think we're doing a good job. You know? And, and like I said, you do have police officers that are bad. When I, when I was in the Bureau of Special Investigation, we investigated police officers for corruption. And if the case was found, we'd present it to the prosecutor. You know, so do we police our own? Yes. Do we police the way people want 'em, police probably not. 'cause I think everybody thinks every policeman's done something bad. I I kind of think that. But it's like anything else. Wait until the evidence comes in and then the, then whatever, the charges will be appropriate. Sometimes people just can't handle that.

Bob Bayes [01:39:17] If there's no charges. They're thinking, oh, there's a coverup, there's something bad. If you can't prove in a court of law, you have no case. And that's with anybody. It doesn't have to be a policeman. So.

Vance Crowe [01:39:27] Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. It's actually by far the longest conversation I've ever had with a police officer and probably the longest conversation the listeners have ever heard. So thank you and I will definitely be inviting you back.

Bob Bayes [01:39:39] Okay. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:39:40] Let's, let's do this again. Detective

Bob Bayes [01:39:42] Bob, thank you so much.

Vance Crowe [01:39:42] Bob Bayes, thank you for coming.

Bob Bayes [01:39:44] Alrighty, thank you.

Vance Crowe [01:39:45] That's it for this week's podcast. A big thank you to Bob Bayes who sat down and had no idea what we were gonna talk about, but was willing to be so genuine and open and honest, and we got to learn so much. If you liked and learned from this podcast, I hope you'll hit the like button and consider subscribing. And if you are on a podcast, just know that last week we had a big bump in the number of people that reviewed the podcast and gave us five star reviews. That really helps us out, no matter what platform you are getting your podcasts from, because it tells the algorithms to say, Hey, this is something that people like and they're enjoying, and we wanna show it to more people. If you have any comments or things that can help me get better, you can always tweet them at me at Vance Crowe or make sure You can leave something on a comment below, I'd be happy to read it and I'll try and reply. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you have a great week. We'll be back next week with a conversation with a dietician that I think is gonna be pretty interesting and open up some views on the way food works that you might not have thought of before.