# Marcus Delgado, Deputy Chief of Training at Hargrove PD (183 officers, New Mexico) — read of De-Escalate Pro, June 14, 2026

> 19 years on the job, last 6 running our training division. I coach U12 soccer on Saturdays and have a 34-minute commute each way where I listen to police leadership podcasts and catch up on the emails I ignored all day.

## How I got here

A colleague from the NM Police Chiefs Association shared this in our private Facebook group after our city council started making noise about use-of-force data. He didn't say anything about it, just dropped the link. I opened it during lunch, expecting to close it in 45 seconds.

## What I clicked first

"Proven curriculum from 50+ police departments" is what stopped my scroll. That's a specific number. That kind of claim is either real or it's the first lie and everything downstream is suspect. I kept reading to find out which one it was.

## Where I paused

The testimonials. "Chief Martinez, 120-officer department, Southwest." "Captain Johnson, Police Academy Director, Mid-Atlantic." No last names I can Google. No city. No department. Every single testimonial is a first name and a compass direction. That is not how chiefs talk about their departments. We are not embarrassed of our agencies. If I gave a quote to a vendor, my name would be Chief Marcus Delgado, Hargrove Police Department, Hargrove NM. I do not say "Southwest."

Then I kept reading and found this at the bottom: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So the testimonials are fabricated. Not embellished. Not anonymized with permission. Just made up. The page presents Chief Martinez like a real person who saw a 23% drop in use-of-force incidents. Then 800 pixels later it tells me no one has actually used this. That is not a quirk. That is a credibility problem that makes me want to close the tab.

## What I distrusted

Beyond the testimonials, the whole framing is odd. There is a "Wishdeal Factory scores every idea" section with "63/100 Adoptability" and "1 in 14 Meaningful-success odds." That is not language you put on a product homepage. That is language you put in an investor memo or a business school assignment. It signals this thing was never actually sold to a police department. Someone built a pitch deck around an idea and dressed it up like a product.

"$-79,765 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" is on the page. Fermi. As in a back-of-envelope guess. That is not a confidence builder.

## What would convince me

Tell me which 50+ departments you pulled curriculum research from, even if they are not paying customers. That is a verifiable claim. Show me the Police Foundation or IACP research you cite and link to it directly. Put one testimonial with a real person's full name, their department, and their city. One. I will call them. If they pick up and confirm the story, I am scheduling a demo that afternoon.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. Your page says "Proven curriculum from 50+ police departments" and also says you have no live customers. Can you help me understand what "proven" and "50+ departments" actually refers to in that context?

2. We use PowerDMS for training compliance documentation. Does your dashboard export in a format that feeds into that, or are we managing two separate compliance records?

3. Who specifically at the Police Foundation or IACP reviewed the curriculum? A name or a published study I can read would go a long way.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The training problem is real and the product concept is solid enough that I am not dismissing it outright. But the fabricated testimonials sitting right above an "honest disclosure" that admits there are no live customers is a conflict I cannot get past without a direct explanation. Fix that and call me.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-14. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*