From the historic campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true, and the beautiful are taught, nurtured, and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.

There had been immense tension between the United States and Great Britain ever since the American Revolution.

The British were not convinced that we would actually remain a viable republic.

This is your host, Scott Bertram, and that's Dr. Brad Berzer, Professor of History and

Russell Amos Kirk Chair at American Studies at Hillsdale College. We'll talk with Dr. Berzer

later on in today's episode about one of America's forgotten wars, the War of 1812, and its consequences.

First, we're joined by Patrick Whalen. He is assistant to the president here at Hillsdale College,

and we talk today about Hillsdale's new Law Enforcement Constitution course.

Patrick, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Scott. My pleasure.

This is interesting, and I've read a lot about it here in the past few months as it's been rolled out the Hillsdale College Law Enforcement Constitution course. Before we talk about what it is, tell us where this story begins. Where do the idea come from? I'd say about a year and a half ago, we started getting a trickle of requests from various law enforcement agencies around the country.

And it started with a training sergeant from the El Paso, Texas Police Department.

And he reached out.

And this request found its way to me.

And essentially, what he was saying, he was an imprimus reader, and he was saying, I'm responsible for training the new recruits into our police department here.

And what I'm finding is that increasingly they're not getting any kind of a civics education in high school.

So they're coming into the department where they are taking an oath to support and fund the Constitution.

They're learning some like very practical elements of constitutional law in how they execute their duties daily.

But they don't have any kind of a foundation for it. So it doesn't often make sense or, you know, various Fourth Amendment or First Amendment issues are just, they're just kind of random rules and they don't have any sense of understanding where this come from.

It was a request like that. And so we, you know, he said, I know Hillsdale. I know you do the Constitution. And so is there any way you could come out and teach us about it?

And so we did that.

We worked with one of our politics faculty, Kevin Slack, and went out there and ran a series of seminars for them.

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