Episode
This Issue Affects More Than Just Law Enforcement (ft. Task Force 70 Foundation)
- Podcast
- State of the Second
- Published
- Jan 21, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2864
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Summary
State of the Second hosts Kaylee and John sit down with John "Chappie" Chapman, founder of the Task Force 70 Foundation. Chapman has been a law enforcement officer since 1992 and has spent most of that career as a SWAT operator and a trainer. He started his first civilian training company around 1998 after noticing there was not much actual force application training going on beyond the square range. Task Force 70 began about three years ago and went public roughly four months before this recording. Its mission is to train the small-town cops who get little or no training, the officers who make up the 70% of American law enforcement working for agencies that serve fewer than 10,000 people, often 12 officers or less. The foundation takes no government money, partners with GOA and Hillsdale College, and runs on private donations. The conversation gets into why the gap exists. Chapman walks through the three levels of police training and explains that the large departments have gotten better at training over the last 20 years while the bottom 70% rely on second- or third-hand material with no full-time training guy. He draws a hard line between qualification and training: qualification is a standardized test that a person can safely manipulate a firearm and accurately hit a target, while real police shootings turn on decision making, prudence, legal understanding, and contextual processing. Shooting, he says, is only maybe 10% of gunfighting. The foundation teaches five topics, and the first is constitutional judgment, because officers are taught case law and amendments rather than the Constitution itself, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, and the original meaning behind the Second Amendment's "well regulated." The episode also speaks dir…