Let me tell you what a badge is not. It is not a lifetime membership card that entitles you to permanent public trust. It’s not a credential you earn once and then cash in forever on YouTube. And it is definitely not a substitute for knowing what you’re talking about.
Brandon Tatum has built an entire career pretending otherwise.
Tatum’s rise is genuinely a story. He played football at Arizona, didn’t make the NFL, and joined the Tucson Police Department — where, by his own account, he worked SWAT, did field training, got crisis-intervention certified. Real cop stuff. Then in 2016, still on the force, he went to a Trump rally, posted a video about it, and the thing went off like a rocket. Fox & Friends booked him. He told the country Trump was the guy who’d make America great again. He left policing, plugged into Turning Point USA, and never looked back. Today TPUSA lists him as a contributor and specifically sells his law-enforcement background as giving him “credibility and insight” on policing.
Millions of people follow him now. And to be clear about what my problem is not: it’s not that he’s conservative. There are conservative cops I respect. It’s not that he backs Trump. Believe whatever you want.
My problem is narrower and it’s this: he uses the authority of the phrase “Officer Tatum” to dress up partisan opinion as objective law-enforcement analysis. The badge isn’t part of the résumé. The badge is the product.
And credibility built on a badge only works until the moment someone asks you a real question.
You may know the Nolan Wells case. Eighteen years old, disappeared after a July Fourth boat trip to Horn Island, Mississippi, with a group of friends. His body was recovered later. The circumstances are unresolved, the theories are flying, and social media has been busy trying the whole thing before investigators have finished doing their jobs.
Tatum didn’t cover that story from a distance. He inserted himself into it — traveled to Mississippi, interviewed one of the young men who’d been with Wells, and teased it to his audience by promising the footage would “shock” them and that people were going to owe these boys an apology.
Stop there for a second. That is not how anybody presenting himself as the seasoned investigator in the room approaches an open death case. You don’t announce the verdict in the trailer.
But the wheels really came off with Nancy Grace. Tatum had been leaning on lie-detector testing as proof the young men were credible. Grace — who does this for a living — pressed him on a simple point: what test, exactly, did they take?
And the confident former cop suddenly got very vague. Because it turned out this wasn’t a standard polygraph at all. It was a voice-stress analysis. And Tatum’s move was to wave off the difference as basically semantics.
No. It is not semantics. And any cop holding himself out as an investigative authority should be embarrassed to say it was.
Set aside the polygraph-versus-voice-stress fumble. Pretend, for the sake of argument, these guys had sat for a real, textbook polygraph and “passed.”
That still wouldn’t prove they were telling the truth. That’s not a hot take. That’s the first thing anyone serious learns about the machine.
A polygraph measures your body — breathing, heart activity, sweat — and then a human being interprets those squiggles. There is no truth sensor inside it. Courts have fought over its reliability for decades; plenty of jurisdictions bar it or fence it in tightly. The Supreme Court, in United States v. Scheffer, flatly recognized there’s no scientific consensus that polygraphs are reliable and upheld a rule keeping them out of military trials entirely. The Justice Department itself has warned prosecutors that this evidence can be unreliable and misleading and is often best kept away from juries.
So “they passed a lie detector” is not a fact that settles anything. A former cop should know that cold. That’s Polygraphs 101, and he flunked it on live television.
Look at the branding again, because it’s the whole game. He isn’t billed as “Brandon Tatum, commentator.” He’s Officer Tatum. The bio leads with the badge. The organizations that promote him lead with the badge. Every booking introduces him with the badge. And the implicit message to millions of people is: this man understands law enforcement, so when he tells you what happened in a case, weight his judgment accordingly.
Sometimes that’s fair! Real experience is worth something. But experience curdles into something dangerous the second you use it to launder speculation and partisan takes into the appearance of professional authority.
And the conservative media machine knows exactly what it has in a guy like this. Former cop. Black. Conservative. Aggressively pro-Trump. That’s a five-tool player for a movement that keeps getting hammered on race and policing. Now every criticism of cops can be met with the Black former cop. Every accusation of racism can be met with the Black conservative. Every law-enforcement controversy gets Officer Tatum on stage explaining why the right was correct the whole time.
I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it. Maybe he believes every word. People are allowed to change their politics; Black Americans are allowed to be Republicans; cops are allowed to support Trump. That’s not the argument. The argument is that movements love a validator — and a validator who happens to carry a badge is worth a fortune. You can build a very lucrative career being that person. He has.
Here’s the standard, and I hold myself to it because I have to.
When I talk about police use of force, people don’t hear some guy with a channel. They know I did this job for two decades. That doesn’t buy me a pass — it buys me an obligation. To be more careful, not less. When the evidence helps someone I can’t stand, I have to say so. When a cop is in the wrong, I have to say the cop is in the wrong. When I don’t know what happened, I have to say I don’t know.
That’s the whole difference between an analyst and an influencer. An analyst’s job is to help you understand the evidence. An influencer’s job is to keep you watching. Tatum has gotten extraordinarily good at the second one — millions of followers, a radio show, TPUSA, Fox hits, a media company — all resting on those two words.
Good for him. But a former badge doesn’t obligate the rest of us to permanent deference. So the next time somebody tells you to trust their conclusion because they used to be a cop, don’t look at the title under their name.
Watch how they handle the evidence. That’s where the truth is — and it’s exactly where Officer Tatum came up empty.
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