Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with the program longer than he was with the department. He told Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth he has never had three bad days in a row — the standard he set when he took the job.

Most people's memory of D.A.R.E. is a T-shirt and an officer at the front of a classroom talking for 45 minutes about the evils of drugs. That version is gone. The original curriculum ran 17 lessons and worked as what one educator called "the sage on the stage." Today it runs ten lessons licensed from Penn State, the officer speaks for six to eight minutes, and the students work in small groups applying a four-step decision-making model to situations from their own lives. New topics arrive as enhancement lessons that slot in without breaking the sequence — which is how vaping, online safety and suicide prevention entered the program.

The threats have changed as much as the teaching. Pegueros describes a vaping industry that he says engineered its devices so illicit substances could be substituted in, then marketed bubblegum and soda flavors to children. He describes websites that publish dosing guidance for minors. He describes foreign actors extorting kids online, and a teen suicide crisis that D.A.R.E. now addresses in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

What holds it together are two stories he tells almost in passing: a student who had not spoken in six years of school, who read her D.A.R.E. essay aloud at a full assembly; and an officer whose students' older siblings quietly decided to put themselves between her and a gang's retaliation plot. Every D.A.R.E. officer, he says, has one of those every semester.

Part 2 covers what police work costs the people who do it — and the academic whose research built the case against D.A.R.E., who now chairs its scientific advisory board.

Contains discussion of teen suicide, self-harm and online exploitation of children. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988.

Learn more at https://behindbadge.org.

They had decided that in

retaliation they were going to take out a cop.

And they decided that the best target would be a D.A.R.E.

officer because they're at the

school, they're by themselves.

That officer never found out how close she came.

If you went to school in

America, you probably sat through D.A.R.E.

You remember the officer, you remember the T-shirt.

What you almost certainly don't know is what the program

teaches now or how little of the original survived.

The man who runs D.A.R.E. today spent 26 years at the Los

Angeles police department before he took the job.

Frank, I was so delighted when Craig

said that you were going to be joining us.

I think every one of us have

seen that D.A.R.E. logo, that D-A-R-E.

That is one of the best logos, a guy

having come out of the marketing arena.

I love your logo, always have the

T-shirts on the side of a police car.

You know what it is instantly, but

here's the thing that I'm excited about today.

You spent 26 years with LAPD,

retired as a captain.

And we were talking about this before we started.

Daryl Gates in 83 decided to start the D.A.R.E. program.

Apparently in 84, you became one of

the first ever D.A.R.E. officers in LA.

Now you're almost 30 years with D.A.R.E.

You've spent more time with D.A.R.E.

Right now you're the president and CEO.

You've spent more time at D.A.R.E.

than you did in the police department.

So there is no person that I know that would be more

qualified to speak to us about this question that I've had.

What the hell is going on in our schools today?

What are the kids thinking?

What are your officers having to do?

How do they change the curriculum to

suit the needs of the current students?

What's going on in the heads?

I bet it's different than it was when you started in 1984.

Much different.

The curriculum is different.

The teaching methodologies are different.

The whole approach is different.

In 1983,

the

curriculum was developed specifically

to address drug abuse, substance abuse.

And we transitioned to a curriculum that addresses the good

decision-making regardless of

the situation a child might be in.

I like that.

We teach a decision-making model

pretty straightforward and pretty simple.

Actually it's been adopted by

a lot of business and schools.

But it's trying to get that eight-year-old, that

ten-year-old, or 16-year-old to slow down.

Think about what you're making your decisions on.

What's involved, the

consequences, maybe what your choices are.

Just slow down.

Nothing's so important that you can't

take a couple of seconds to think about.

Applying decision-making model.

And we still use

these substances for the discussion points in a class.

But the decision-making model that is taught can be

applied to any situation that might have consequences.

Not just drugs, anything.

It's involvement in gang activity, involvement in violence.

It could be personal safety.

It could be interpersonal relationships.

And part of the decision-making model is offering students

the tools to say, "Hey, I don't want to be involved in

this," without jeopardizing their personal relationships

with their peers and friends.

Right.

Isn't that a big issue with kids?

They have at least one eye and one ear on their friends, and

they don't want to jeopardize that.

So is it drugs these days, Frank?

Is it other social issues?

What's the main thing on the

mind of the kids in schools today?

Best that you can tell from talking to your D.A.R.E. officers.

Yeah, so we went

through, unfortunately, it's ramping

down pretty quickly, the vaping issue,

which was pushed by the tobacco industry.

It was.

Before that,

we went through a few years of increased abuse of

prescription and over-the-counter medications.

And we were fortunate to be able to work with some very

talented partners in developing

curriculum that was specific to that.

And a lot of that,

unfortunately, was promoted by some very

questionable websites, and providing advice to minors on

what over-the-counter medications to take,

what dosage.

I can't conceive of, personally, drinking

seven bottles of alcohol and a pint of vodka.

Some of these websites are actually giving you

age and body weight.

Here's the right

dosage.

And

it's just crazy.

So there's a lot of intentional

negative influences out there.

as well as

what we went through growing up.

That's a great point.

Talk about vaping, Frank.

This has always confused me.

And I think they try to act like

vaping is not as bad as cigarettes.

It's not going to hurt you.

So why not do it?

I don't know if they're doing it to get high.

Is it a substitute for cigarettes or is it a form of, do

they smoke marijuana in the vape?

I don't really get it.

So initially, the manufacturers and distributors pushed it

as a safe way to enjoy the

benefits of tobacco without smoking.

Yeah.

But quite honestly,

just the thought of inhaling

boiling smoke doesn't make any sense if

you actually think about it.

But the devices were designed so that illicit substances

could be substituted for the tobacco products that

came with the vape over the counter.

And I don't think it was by accident.

There's a huge industry behind the legalization movement.

Most people are familiar with the marijuana industry, but

quite honestly, it's, I think, it goes beyond that.

A lot of it is driven by money, but

some of it's other bad intent as well.

Well,

what do the studies tell us about vaping?

I mean, have any studies proven

that it's as bad as cigarettes?

It's going to get you lung cancer.

You're going to have all kinds

of health issues later in life.

But what's the information out there?

There's no positive association.

It's all right.

It's all right.

The medical profession will cite that there's no medicinal

protocol that involves the equivalent of vaping medicine because of

the damage that it does to the soft tissue in your mouth,

in your throat, in your lungs.

There's no positive to it.

So the only positive to it is the

advertising money that's been poured into it to make a

seem that it's harmless and beneficial.

So, you know, is vaping legal at a certain age?

Do you have to be a certain age to

vape or to purchase vaping products?

Not really.

And they're sold at convenience stores and gas stations.

We've recently signed on and issued letters individually to

Congress to try to put age requirements on access to the

access to the vape, to prohibit the introduction and advertising of the

substances that are intentionally intended for the use of

minors with some of the bubblegum flavor.

It's candy names, soda names.

You can tell they're not

intentionally designed to be sold to adults.

This is

our next generation of customers that they're trying to

entice into becoming addicted to their products.

Wow.

So Frank, I want to jump in.

I want to ask you a quick question.

Then I know Craig is going to ask you

about how you got into law enforcement.

We're going to jump into your career, some highlights about

your career, some exciting

moments, rewarding moments of your career.

But before I turn this over to Craig, I want to ask you for

you, what was more rewarding, 26 years on

the LAPD or 30 years in D.A.R.E.?

That is a hard question.

Yeah.

Which child do you like the best of your three children?

So with LAPD, I had the opportunity to work a

significant number of assignments,

probably more than the average person, the average cop.

And when I retired and moved to

D.A.R.E., it really wasn't retirement.

It was almost like another transfer to another

part of the PD.

Every day I get to work with

police officers from all around

the world over the United States.

And so it's really not, I didn't suffer

the

withdrawal that police officers experience

when they

leave law enforcement and move on to another career.

It was just like, it was just like picking up and moving

from 77th Division to Southwest Division.

Right.

I get to work with wonderful cops.

And it was funny when I started

with, with D.A.R.E.,

I'm retired from the LAPD.

I don't have to work.

And my attitude's always been

three, three bad days in a row.

I'll consider retiring again. 30 years

later, I haven't had three bad days in a row.

That's good to hear.

So Frank, we call this show Heroes Behind the Badge.

All right.

And I was so excited to have you as a guest because clearly

what 56 years of work trying to help young people,

especially being a mentor, trying to keep kids away from

drugs, trying to help them make good decisions.

I'm curious about what motivated you to go down that path.

It was 1984, I think during your police career in LAPD

became one of the first D.A.R.E. officers.

And obviously there was something that, that piqued your

interest to go down this path that you've done for, you

know, 30 plus years at D.A.R.E. and a lot more at the LAPD.

Tell us about that.

What, what motivated you originally to, to go down this

path of helping young people stay

away from drugs and make good decisions?

So in 84, my involvement with

D.A.R.E. began, and it was an indirect involvement.

When Daryl Gates and the superintendent of LA Unified

School District, Harry Handler, decided to develop and

implement a prevention education program,

Chief Gates realized that if he waited for the city

budgetary process to catch up,

we'd be even further behind the curve than we were in 1984,

83.

The adult and adolescent use of substances

dramatically increased in the 70s,

but kind of plateaued around 1980.

But the trajectory of youth use was still increasing.

And everybody, everybody recognized that if

it wasn't stemmed, it was

going to continue.

Gates approached Dr.

Handler was not only open to the idea, they had

actually tried to implement substance abuse prevention

education programs in the schools.

But

they had found that the students didn't give the classroom

educators the credibility that was needed to

support the program, the

programs that they had implemented.

So they agreed to kind of switch tables and teach police

officers how to function in the classroom.

And there were some expenses involved.

And the chief decided that we needed somehow to support the

program. It was implemented in LA, and it was never

intended to go any place other than LA.

There would be, there was no marketing program.

There was no thought that this program was going to be

taught in an adjoining city, let alone around the world.

So we formed what was called a Los Angeles Police

Department Crime Prevention Advisory Council,

which were

well intended and well respected

citizens who wanted to support

not only the D.A.R.E. program, but a lot of other initiatives

that the police department was

involved in that weren't funded by the city.

Our SWAT team wasn't funded.

So

the Crime Prevention Advisory

Council took to underwrite all of them.

So

that was my initial involvement.

Like most people involved with D.A.R.E., once you're introduced

to it, it just draws you in. And the kids are fantastic.

And a lot

of respects from when I grew up,

their childhood had been stolen.

They don't get to experience a lot of things that I thought

were positive in my childhood.

It's just those things just don't exist anymore.

So Frank, let's, Frank, can we jump into that?

So when you're talking about childhood, these kids'

childhoods and their experiences, you know, everybody likes

good stories and rewarding

stories or, you know, cop war stories.

Let's talk about some of those.

What are some of the most memorable stories where you

personally were involved or through

D.A.R.E. that saved a kid, changed their lives?

Maybe it was a punk kid that you influenced and he became a

cop or he became a doctor or

something, some of those kind of stories.

Well, what comes to

mind is a young student. One of our officers,

up in Ontario, Canada,

had a special needs student.

A student that was non-communicative.

They had an adult assistant assigned to the student, you

know, at all times when they're in class.

The student had not spoken

all the way through kindergarten through the sixth grade.

And part of the D.A.R.E. program is completion of an essay.

And the officers at the end of the course select those

students with the best essay to be read in front of an

assembly or in the classroom.

And in this case, the essay that Harry and Gerrit judged to

be the best was actually written

by this child that hadn't spoken

in their entire six years in school.

That's kindergarten through sixth grade.

So they got together with the teacher

and the assistant for the student.

And

the student wanted to read their essay

and actually did read their essay at the

assembly of the whole school.

And this is the first time the

student had ever spoken in school.

And it was to read the essay.

I had an officer in LAPD, Cynthia.

One day, she just noticed the

kids were super clingy.

She couldn't move without students being all on top of her.

the gang unit in that

division approached her to tell her that

there had been an officer-involved shooting.

A gang member was killed.

And they had decided that in

retaliation, they were going to take out a cop.

And they decided that the best target would be a D.A.R.E.

officer because they're at the school.

And the peers of the gang members,

their siblings, found out about this.

They were going to put themselves between the officer and

their older gang member brothers and sisters to protect

that officer, make sure she didn't get injured.

So it's just every officer, every D.A.R.E. officer has one of

those stories for every semester in the classroom.

Wow.

I have a question about the curriculum itself.

I'm a big fan of curriculum, how things are presented.

And from my research in preparation for this, I think there

was a way that they used to do

D.A.R.E. and a way that they now do D.A.R.E.

Let me tell you what I learned.

And then you tell me if I'm right or wrong.

Okay.

It used to be almost a lecture, like a 50

minute lecture about the evils of drugs.

And now ever since you reinvented it,

I think you call it keepin' it REAL.

The officer only speaks maybe eight or 10 minutes.

And then the kids get to participate, they get to role

play, they get to get involved.

Did I get that right or wrong?

Yeah.

The initial curriculum was 17 lessons.

And each lesson was 45 minutes to an

hour, depending on how much time the officer had.

And like you said, it was an information dump.

Right.

The officer got up there and for 45 minutes, they were, as

somebody said, the sage on the stage.

I mean, they just talked, talked, talked, talked.

We went through several iterations of the

scientific community, the prevention science community

actually developed, well, it came

about after the introduction of D.A.R.E.

The

Society for Prevention Research was

founded eight years after D.A.R.E. was founded.

And so as a prevention science industry is

catching up, but the results to the

curriculum weren't what we hoped they would be.

So we went through a lot of iterations of the curriculum.

We went through some new curriculums that were developed.

And then in 2007,

we went in search of a curriculum that everybody recognized

and being science and evidence-based.

And that's the keepin' it REAL curriculum that you

mentioned developed by researchers at

Arizona State and Penn State University.

We partnered with Penn State

and they licensed the curriculum to us.

We've since adopted that curriculum

and the curriculum, as you said,

and the follow-up really addresses

decision-making and refusal skills rather than

teaching kids specifically about the

negative aspects of certain types of drugs.

And the officers spend about six,

seven, eight minutes at the beginning of the class,

recapping the last week and introducing that topic for this

week and providing the students some information and then

the students work in what we call a small cooperative

learning groups to apply those decision-making skills to

their actual experiences that they live through every day.

So it's not the officer coming

in and saying don't do this, don't do that.

The students actually get to say,

"This is what happened to me yesterday.

This is what I think is going to happen to me this afternoon.

And the other students can work through the

decision-making model, or what approach that student may take.

Wow.

So they actually get hands-on during that hour-long period.

It's what, like you said, a 10-week curriculum?

It's 10 weeks, the core curriculum, but

we're talking about vaping.

In the past when

a new issue arose, the

original curriculum was 17 weeks long.

And that's about the number of weeks that

we're in the traditional school semester.

So as a new topic came up, the only way you

could introduce it was take something out.

And so over the years, the threads

between the lessons had been destroyed.

So with the new curriculum, it's 10 lessons and what we've

created is a system of what we call enhancement lessons.

So as a new topic comes up like vaping,

we can actually develop lessons that follow the core

curriculum that can be introduced as an enhancement lesson.

The students don't know that they've transitioned from the

core curriculum into additional lessons.

And the school and the police department can decide which

lessons, which enhancement lessons, are

appropriate for that community.

For vaping, we work with people

from Stanford and Kaiser Permanente.

We have lessons on

teen mental health and suicide prevention that we worked with

the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

So we're able to work with some very talented and special

people to come up with those

enhancement lessons. And we see it in a lot of places.

So I'll read or hear about

students graduating from their 16-week program.

And I know, okay, they've not only done the core lessons,

but they've added six supplemental

lessons and enhancement lessons in that school.

What about the

grade level?

I mean, do you do you give it to all grades or is it a

certain grade level that gets it?

So elementary school, the ideal

grade level is the exit grade level.

And so it depends on how the schools are organized.

Could be fifth or sixth grade.

Middle school, ideally it's the entry grade level and high

school, the entry grade level.

Frank, you talk about teen suicide.

To me, this is maybe one of the biggest issues that we need

to be concerned about with young people.

There seems to be a real increase in teen suicide.

I don't have all the data, perhaps you do.

But what is the cause of this increase in teen suicide?

What's happening in the schools or with young people that's

creating this very serious problem, this crisis really that

we're facing and how can we prevent it?

Yeah, I

don't know that there's a single answer.

There's probably as many answers

as there are incidents.

I

don't think it's just awareness.

The suicides, I think, personally, I think there's more.

The pressures that the teens experience today are just so

much different than what I experienced as a teenager.

There's so much bad

information on the internet that would convince somebody

that suicide is an alternative way to solve your problems.

There's

so much opportunity for negative

peer pressure to cause people to

not only develop suicidal ideations but carry them out.

I mean, we

don't offer a suicide prevention course.

We offer information about suicidal ideations and the

resources that are available to students.

And we actually have students

come to the officer after that class and say that

they need a referral.

We have one incident where the student had actually

planned to commit suicide that day on the school ground.

We've had a classroom educator in the classroom that's

after the lesson who approached the officer after the

lesson and said they needed a referral.

And this lesson is taught in conjunction with the community

representatives of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

So it's just,

it's real.

It's an increased reality.

And it's

tragic.

Not only for the student.

Yeah, I think we've seen some really high profile cases

around the country lately in regards to that.

And a lot of it has to do with

the internet and it has to do with

foreign actors in other countries that are posing as

whomever, a young girl or boy, depending on the situation.

And they're extorting them and exploiting them and doing

all these things, shaming them to the point where, okay,

well, we're going to send all this stuff to everybody at

your school and all your friends and

your parents and this whole big business.

And like you mentioned, as a kid, you didn't have that.

We didn't have that on the internet.

And so I guess in furtherance of what Craig asked about

that, is that something that D.A.R.E. delves into now about

computer safety and how to go about dealing with that?

Yeah, we deal with online

safety, personal communication device safety,

security, not just safety, but security.

It's

keeping up with technology.

Unbelievable.

I

I sit on one of the committees at IACP.

And we had a presentation at the mid-year conference about

child predators using drones

to monitor the activity of the target

while they're

going back and forth from school or

while they're at their homes in the backyard.

and actually spy on them with drones.

I

saw a video one day, not too long ago, and literally

they're telling the kid to kill themselves.

Yeah,

telling them you're not worth it.

You're a piece of whatever it was exactly how to go kill

yourself and you need to go do it right now.

I was like, wow, that's unbelievable.

Okay, it's out there.

That's the unfortunate part.

And that's what a lot of kids are looking at.

It's just...

You intrigued me with a statement you made a while back,

which really got

my attention.

We teach kids how to make decisions.

I like that.

Can you expound on that a little bit?

Do you give them a framework or a series of questions?

Or how do you do that?

So we use the acronym, D-A-R-E,

to represent four stages of decision making.

D would be define.

So define the situation you're in.

What am I faced with?

Assess your situation.

What choices do I have?

What directions can I take?

R is

respond.

You make a decision.

And the most important one is E — evaluate.

After you've made that decision, step back,

Look around.

Was it the right decision?

If not, how am I going to correct course?

In most situations, it can be corrected.

Unless

there's been some kind of a

criminal act or a death of some type, you

can correct that action somehow, somewhere.

And

blame your D.A.R.E. officers if you need to.

I think

that's brilliant.

I mean,

I don't know about Craig and Billy.

I never had any curriculum like that when I was in school.

How you make decisions can be applied to anything, to

suicide, to drug use, to gang involvement.

I mean, go through the list.

I mean, to me, that sounds like the core essence of D.A.R.E.

I mean, am I overstating that?

Not at all.

And it's

the decision making model itself, it's pretty

straightforward, pretty simple, four steps.

It's been adopted by a lot of

educational institutions, a lot of industries.

I noticed the other day, one

of the

departments within Virginia, the state of Virginia, has

published a

guide for seniors that are transitioning to retirement.

And they use the D.A.R.E. decision-making model for some of

the decisions that people make relative to their retirement,

transition to that retirement.

So it's not

exclusive to substance.

It's

not exclusive to high-risk situations.

It could be applied to any aspect of your life.

But just to get the students to slow down,

Rarely is there a decision that you

need to make that you can't work

through a decision making model.

Take a couple of minutes, work through it,

and save yourself a lot of grief.

Do you see any feedback at all from the kids on that?

I mean, do they understand how

critical that is or maybe not yet?

Or what's your feedback?

The feedback is positive

and it's long-lasting.

I was thinking about this the other day.

I can remember,

D.A.R.E. officer, it's a coveted position.

If you're a full-time D.A.R.E.

officer, you rarely come to the station.

You're out in the field all the time.

And I would see D.A.R.E. officers in April, May

coming back

to the

station, looking through their records.

They've got a high school

graduation announcement from a student.

They're trying to place the student.

It'll be a student that they had in the fifth grade.

And

they remember that officer, what that officer meant to them, and

want them to participate in their high school graduation.

Wow.

I had officers that were invited to weddings.

I had officers receive

birth announcements.

But

I was standing with,

and this was probably in...

After 2000, I was standing at an intersection

in Los Angeles

with a former D.A.R.E. officer, Scott Gilliam.

And this young lady walked across

the street and she saw Scott in uniform.

And she asked him if he knew

her D.A.R.E. officer, Scott Gilliam.

And she didn't recognize him because he

was about 30 years older than he had been.

But she actually remembered his name

and wanted to know if he knew Scott.

Maybe.

Scott.

Maybe.

He didn't let on that he was

Scott, but he said he did know Scott.

That's great.

But that's not an uncommon question that I've received.

I'll be traveling somewhere

in Alaska, and they'll ask if I know Officer So-and-so.

And this will be somebody that was in their classroom.

These are young adults that are asking this.

It's been 15, 16 years since they had that having changed

with experience with that model.

Frank spent 26 years with the Los Angeles

Police Department and 30 more running D.A.R.E.

In part two, hear what police work costs the people who do

it and what a classroom gives back.

The loss of a fellow officer, it's pretty hard to

compare that with anything other

than the loss of a family member.

And the researcher whose work built up the case that D.A.R.E.

didn't work and what changed his mind.

Heroes Behind the Badge is

produced by Citizens Behind the Badge.

You can learn more or support the

work at citizensbehindthebadge.org.

(Upbeat Music)