Episode 24 – Key Events in the Evolution of Swat and CNT

Jon Becker: My guest today is a true legend who is one of only three people to have served at all of the ranks in LAPD D-Platoon, Chief Mike Albanese. Mike has spent 52 years in law enforcement with 37 of those spent at LAPD, 26 of which were spent in SWAT and crisis negotiation.

Mike is one of only a handful of people to have ever served in the 10 David, or SWAT commander role at LAPD. Since retiring from LAPD, he has served as a captain, deputy chief and is currently the chief of police for the Burbank, California Police Department.

This is the first episode of a two part series where we walk through not only his amazing career at LAPD, but the evolution of history, of special tactics, creation of crisis negotiation as a discipline, and many of the historic events Mike participated in.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Mike, thanks so much for doing this!

Mike Albanese: My pleasure! Thank you for having me!

Jon Becker: So let's start with how your journey in law enforcement began.

Mike Albanese: So the journey began with LAPD in 1971. August 9th, 1971, when I started the academy, so got through the academy, went to a patrol division, West LA, was rotated to communications for six months and then went to 77th. And that's where I'm going to meet Mike Hillman. I'm going to meet Hillman Preciato, John Christensen. So I'm working a patrol and those guys ultimately are going to promote to sergeant and then I go to vice narcotics and I work for Jeff Rogers who was 10 David for about 13 years.

Jon Becker: David being at that, at that point, and still today, is the commander of LAPD Commander.

Mike Albanese: And for folks in the business, you all know what 10 David is – In LAPD world, there's only 110 David and there's a 110 David. But the 10 David at the time, that's associated with a name. So I worked for Jeff at 77 Vice and went to narcotics. Then ultimately I'm going to go to Metro. By then Jeff was back at Metro, made lieutenant and then McCarthy's there. And ultimately Christensen, Priscilla and that group, that era of SWAT supervisors are going to be in D teams.

So I think it went to the D team in February or March of 1979. So when you look at the history of SWAT, it still was relatively new to law enforcement as far as the model, and it was still evolving. Certainly the C and T process, which is going to be a crisis negotiation team, was only less than a handful of years old.

So kind of overwhelming to go from patrol, vice, narcotics, to a very specialized unit, because when you walk in the door, you know you're in a very special place as far as the folks that you're working with, as far as their understanding of a mission, the way they worked with each other, their physicality. So it was. I don't want to say cool, but it was just very cool just to be around them. And many were Vietnam vets. Some had other specialized skill sets. But what impressed me the most is how measured everyone was.

So a takeaway for leadership is measured, and it translates into tempo when we manage squat incidents, a crisis incident. So Mike Hillman was one of my supervisors, still kind of navigating what my role is going to be, where the interests were in SWAT. And he really encouraged me to get involved in the C and T process.

So just understand that I wanted to be a SWAT cop and not a negotiator. And he was trying to communicate to all of us that he was recruiting. It was the blending of verbal and physical tactics, and you get the best of both worlds. And he was so right on that. Because at a call up, if you're nothing on the entry team or on the perimeter, the two three corner is that you're on the phone, either as a primary or secondary or supporting that process, and you're really, really involved in the path to a solution during a crisis. That training has been the best training that I have ever experienced.

Now, it was 40 hours back then, and 40 hours turned into another 40 hours and 160 hours. And all this sort of training, you know, throughout. Throughout my career. But those are skill sets that I use every single day. Managing incidents, managing people, managing life, and best thing ever happened to me.

Jon Becker: Well, let's talk about that for a second, because CNT, I think, is very interesting. So at the point that you come into the unit, you start working CNT, it is a revolutionary concept right now. It is something that we accept as just. There are guru SWAT teams, have negotiators. We negotiate. But at the point that Hillman goes back to NYPD and meets with Harvey Schlossberg and comes back with this notion and kind of the idea that LAPD would do it differently than NYPD, to embed negotiators with the team. That is pretty revolutionary stuff.

So you, as you're coming into that, you're this. You're not even the second generation. You're part of the first generation of CNT as a concept, what was that like?

Mike Albanese: So you're absolutely right. So the notion you got to go back in time, in history. So sixties, seventies, civil unrest, you had terrorism acts of, globally, you had prison riots, you had hijacking, you had some really provocative and violent events. And then you're going to introduce this conceptual model, this notion that you're going to actually communicate with a criminal to encourage them to surrender.

So that was not embraced by law enforcement. It was not embraced by law enforcement, but it was embraced by your specialized units because they understood what the mission was. The mission was to introduce all, every resource, all the intellect that you had to get a favorable outcome. So it was embraced. It was guardedly embraced.

But as they had more successes or we had more successes, that it became an integral part of managing a crisis. The brilliance with Hillman was embedding the negotiation process into the tactical component. So as you've heard, the west coast east coast model and Schlossberg and Bowles did not like that reference, understandably, but it was brilliant.

And actually, I think it was Pat McKinley, because New York FBI was HNT hostage negotiation team. And I believe it was McKinley who said, these are not hostage situations. 98% of the time it's a crisis. So that's how it evolved to the CNT process.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's a barricade versus a hostage situation or some suicidal.

Mike Albanese: Suicidal that's doing something provocative and violence.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. So I spent time with ESU, talked about this. I've done quite a bit of research on it. And it's, you know, I didn't realize at the time, early in my career, interacting with D-Platoon as all this was evolving. You didn't understand at the time how revolutionary it was and how it was really starting to something that now is just assumed. Like, it's the idea that a SWAT team would now show up and not negotiate is crazy.

Mike Albanese: So you're absolutely right. It changed managing a crisis situation. And I'll use Hillman's nomenclature as far as the blending of verbal and physical tactics, and that's what we do. So the introduction of words to influence the outcome of a crisis. And this is where words matter. So you have to be thoughtful as far as the words that you're using because you don't know what is going to trigger some type of harmful response.

So it's strategic and that's why that training was so important. And as important was debriefing afterwards. And we would tape record and then we would listen and assess what worked and what didn't work, where it would amp up a suspect or it would kind of calm them down. So each case is going to be unique with his own set of circumstances. But at least you had some, some guidelines as far as introducing words to influence to manipulate the outcome.

Jon Becker: It's funny because in talking with Mike Hillman, one of the things that struck me halfway through my conversation with Mike was, and same thing that strikes me now, at the time that you guys are doing this, there is no tactic or strategy that is taught. You are literally figuring this out. And every operation is informing the next operation. It is a constantly iterative process because it's new now you think, okay, you just go to C and T school. There wasn't a C and T school. You guys were inventing the C and T school as you went along in debriefing.

And it strikes me that one of the things we've lost now as lessons are passed down, is we've lost some of the essence of figuring it out in the way that you guys had to. And I'm wondering, how do we bring back some of that spirit of invention?

Mike Albanese: Well, let me just follow up to your observations. And you're absolutely right. They were developing the playbook as we.

Jon Becker: Were moving during the board.

Mike Albanese: Right. So the first 40 hours C and T class you had, certainly Hillman, I believe Bud Graves, you had doctor Marty Reiser, who was the first police psychologist in US law enforcement. And they collaborated together, Hillman and a couple other folks. And it could have been bud graves. And I think Becky, Dr. Becky Adelin was also involved in developing a curriculum that was new to everybody. Where do you start? You can't even give the history of C and T because there's really no history. You can talk about New York and the FBI, but there's not much. Not much there.

So that first 40 hours class was the beginning of classes for the future. That as far as the sophistication, if you look back to the seventies, to what we're presenting now, just vastly different.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Mike Albanese: But they started so what it speaks to and Bowles and Schlossberg get high marks, Harvey, for introducing this conceptual model. They're introducing words into a crisis. And again, it was not embraced by law enforcement, but he was spot on. And so we depend on folks to introduce or at least start the discussion as far as what we can bring into law enforcement so we can be more effective and efficient. I'll give you an example. Today it's a different example.

So you have the C and T process, you have SWAT, you have all that stuff. But today, like right now, and I just had the discussion yesterday with sergeants and my FTOs is technology is optimizing on technology. So folks of my generation are not that astute as it relates to technology, but these younger folks really are quick studies as far as technology and know how to optimize on technology. If we optimize on technology, introduce it into a crisis or service calls, and we have a good outcome, we done good.

So we need to law enforcement today stay with technology instead of chasing technology. So the analogy I use is that when I came on the job and Hillen and I, that generation said the same thing, they gave me six bullets and a wooden stick. There was nothing else. So I got a revolver with six bullets and a baton. You look at today's police officer as far as all the technology they have wrapped around their body, then they're going to get into a police car that was never designed to be a computer hub with routers, different radio systems where they have to put extra batteries in just for them to. For the vehicles to support all the other equipment that they have.

So what's my point? My point is that we depend on folks to kind of read a need and step up and present it.

Jon Becker: Well, it's interesting, though, because I think having been around this for 40 years, what. What was unique about the OGs, you know, the originating guys, all of you. You were presented with a novel problem. And as a result, we're constantly having to come up with novel solutions. And it's interesting because even today, talking to you this many years later, talking to Mike Hillman, talking to Ron McCarthy, you know, talking to Sid Heal before we lost him, you guys were. Are still constantly looking at how to reinvent it. It's this constant drive towards how can I make it better?

And I don't know whether that is the right guys lined up for the job or the job created a mindset. But it is fascinating to me that I can have an easier conversation with you or with Mike Hillman about, hey, implementing drones that I can with somebody from my own generation who is theoretically 20 years younger and shouldn't have. Shouldn't be as resistant to technology. Yet we are.

Mike Albanese: Yeah. So another astute observation on your part is that I think the problem solving aspect, working squat, is that you're always, always looking to see how you're going to manage or solve it. So you're always looking for solutions.

So I challenge myself in the organization. Is that what, what can we do to provide equipment training to our staff so they are the most effective and efficient police officers that are going to deliver the most professional police service to our community? And you just don't get to this point and stop you. It's a constant question quest to find the best.

So it's safer for our officers, it's safer for the community and it's what we do or should be doing.

Jon Becker: So which kind of continuing on the arc of your career. So you get there in 79, 1984. So Munich massacre happens in 72. The concept of hostage rescue becomes a thing. The genesis of virtually all the hostage rescue teams worldwide is in the next two to three years. D-Platoon already at that point is a full time unit. It happens just a year before Munich, but the 84 summer games are coming to LA. And what's your role at D-Platoon as the Olympics come to town?

Mike Albanese: So I was a police officer, actually I was a team leader in 84. So we, it started years prior to 84.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Mike Albanese: So the acquisition of equipment or at least the wish list. So that's where we went to the mp system, NP5. So that was, that was the weapon of that time. So there was transition going to mp5 and the 33s, so there was the acquisition of equipment and then there was the journey of training. And that's all we did. And a credit to Jeff Rogers, who was the ten David, the SWAT commander at the time, and McCarthy imprecation is that they were able to carve out and convince the command staff.

But we had an advocate and that's Darrell Francis Gateshead. And where they told him is that, lookit, we need a year to train. We have to exercise every possible scenario in the event of go back to Munich and law enforcement. The military did not expect that they weren't prepared. There was a lot of things where they fell short. We're not going to let it happen in Los Angeles. So you have our team, you have HRT is going to be introduced into law enforcement. So do we cross train with them? And we do. So there was a dozen of us that went back to the FBI academy and trained with their HRT team, so that in the event something happened and we had to collaborate all our resources.

We knew what we were doing together. We collaborated with SCB, you had the intel community that was important because what were the trends and themes? I mean, we're focused on what we believed that we would see. And the intel community may have had a different read and we needed to be prepared for that. There was integration with the bomb squad, cross training with the bomb squad, all of that. So it was a year, a solid year of training.

Jon Becker: And not only training with HRT, but training with Delta, training with the European units, GSG nine and SAS. And it's fascinating and it ultimately sets the tone for kind of special tactics worldwide. And I just recently interviewed Phil Hansen.

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And Phil talked about how all of the initial hostage rescue training shaped a mindset about movement that they then carried forward to drug houses and began to realize, like, you know, why. Why are we going through the house so fast? Because the root was all. I mean, the root of all SWAT was in hostage rescue. And it wasn't until the mission began to develop that the tactics began to develop. But you're present kind of for all that, right? I mean, it's – What's your recollection post 84 summer games with what's happening at D-Platoon?

Mike Albanese: Well, there. There is a lot. So post post olympics. So that was, that was a big deal. And I cannot overstate it because as far as being at the. Of height of readiness, we were at the height of readiness. All of us, without bravado, knew that we were ready in the event of.

So the good news is nothing happened. So then you have all these high end skill sets with all the extraordinary equipment. Then we had these rock houses that we were doing high risk warrants. And you know that probably for another time as far as the services of those warrants because it was crazy times there.

And then really we had to get really, really conversant with managing barricade incidents with or without hostages. So if you look at the hard numbers. So if we average 100 call ups a year, you got to ask yourself or ask this question, how many involved hostages? It's going to generally be less than five.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Albanese: Okay. And then of that five, how many are stranger events? Zero? One?

Jon Becker: By stranger events you mean they take a stranger hostage.

Mike Albanese: Right. When they don't know each other, victim, suspect, don't know each other as opposed to.

Jon Becker: You know, father holds his kid captive.

Mike Albanese: Exactly. So the straight barricades are a challenge because you have a individual or individuals that are positioned in house, bathroom, under a house, in an attic, in a library, in a bathroom, wherever is it? How can we navigate that? How do we manage that? And with as less risk as possible to staff squad officers in the community?

And we got really good at that and we got better and better, you know, searching for suspects. You mentioned Sandy wall. I think we collaborated together on some addict search training because that was always a challenge. They had had some incidents where suspects were sequestered, an attic we had. And the limited technology. How do you clear an attic safely? Because at some point in time, someone's got to get in the attic. Someone's got to get in the attic. And that's one or two folks to clear the attic to make sure that the attic's clear.

So I believe that we got really good at that. And today, so I've been gone, you know, what, 14, 15 years, is that the skill sets of today's SWAT cop, I think their physicality, their fitness level is just over the top. I think their understanding of the mission is where it should be. They know how to incorporate technology and I think they work much smarter. They got there today based on the journey and the journey of a lot of folks that took some risk, exposed themselves. So that where we are today, they're in a really good place.

Jon Becker: I think one of the things though, so if you look at that time, shortly after the 84 summer games, the NTOA is created and, you know, it is, I think, difficult to overstate the role that specifically John and Janice Coleman, but also Mike Hillman and Phil Hansen talk to me about kind of the founding of the NTOA and the role you see that John played in this whole thing.

Mike Albanese: So it was significant. So when, in fact, I think I was in the first or second edition, I wasn't in there. I wrote an article, and it was kind of the big deal. It was a big deal for all of us because it was specific to what we did. Yeah, it was SWAT stuff. And, John. John recognized, took the lead on how essential this entity was for law enforcement. But it was even more important that the skill sets that we had in southern California, we believe that were at a high level were throughout US law enforcement. And that was the challenge.

So when the NTA was in – NTOA was introduced, it was an opportunity for Paducah, Kentucky, for Graham Rapids, Michigan to come to be with, in the, in the same room, the same training settings as other SWAT officers, Anchorage, Alaska. Those guys were great because they had different environmental issues that they had to deal with. So we could talk about tear gas and some of the stuff that we were doing. But they're talking about how do you rotate folks when it's 20 degrees below zero, and there's no guarantee that your gas is going to penetrate.

So it was an opportunity for all of us to get together and talk about what we did and not getting basic, but it was really like a fellowship, is that we were pretty confident that we knew what we were doing, but we were talking to some other folks, and I, we're going, okay, this is something we hadn't thought about. So we're all in that setting where we can really optimize on each other's experience, where we failed, where we fell short so that we could be much better moving forward.

Jon Becker: Well, I think today we would call that crowdsourcing. Right? That's kind of the term of the day, is, oh, they crowdsourced that to some degree. As you guys were trying to solve these problems, you were crowdsourcing it. That was the point of the NTOA, is it gave you access. If it gets really cold in LA, what do we do?

Well, we know guys in Anchorage, Alaska. Let's call them and ask them. We're dealing with stuff on the water. Well, we know guys in Florida. Let's ask them. And it just kind of, I think it did do things. It created a collaborative environment that allowed you to crowdsource the knowledge.

But then I also think, you know, it's like it took forever for the four minute mile to be broken, and the next time it was broken was like days later, because nobody believed it's possible to break four minute mile. And I think that what all of you were doing at this point is discovering what was possible and discovering, you know, what tactics worked and what didn't.

And it strikes me that, you know, I can remember getting my first full edition of the tactical edge, because when you advertise the tactical edge, you got the page your ad was on because it was an intelligence report, and John didn't share it with anybody that wasn't in the community. And I think I was the first civilian member of the NTOA, and I remember receiving the first official copy from John and being blown away by the level of discussion that took place in the magazine.

Mike Albanese: So is that June of 84, the original one? Is that where we had the June of 84?

Jon Becker: 84. Yeah.

Mike Albanese: So that was. I have that edition. Cause that was with the spy rig was on the COVID. I think so, yeah. And so I think it was either McCarthy or Jeff Rogers asked to do the article on Bomar. Cause that's post Bowmore. Bomar was 1983. That was a hostage taking incident.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Albanese: So I wrote the article, my wife edited it. And it was really kind of challenging because you're writing, kind of writing an article for that community. I mean, how much – how do you do it? But once that started, and it speaks to NTOA and the opportunities as far as case studies that were showcased in the magazine and as far as equipment and everything else that was so groundbreaking at that time, and then the NTOA training that they provide and all the training tracks.

So when I was in D team the last couple of years, NTOA was actually in Los Angeles, and there was over 900 tactical officers throughout the world that participated in that training. So not only it was us, there was probably about six agencies to include Burbank that facilitated venues so that we, when I say we, the NTOA could provide marquee training for those folks and they keep coming back. So the training we know is good.

And again, it was groundbreaking at the time and just, just a great opportunity for folks in that community, the tactical community, the CNT community, to be together, talk about what we do.

Jon Becker: And 40 years later, that's still the role it's playing. So I think in that sense, the legacy of all you guys that invested early into NTOA and contributed to it is panned out better than we could have expected. Talking about kind of, you know, so as your career is advancing, you get to Metro at 79, you're an operator in 84. When do you become a sergeant?

Mike Albanese: So I became a sergeant in 88, but I came back to D team in 1990. So I'm going to work as a sergeant from like 90 to 98. So another eight, nine years as a sergeant, then have a two year hiatus, come back as the lieutenant or ten David. And that's how I'm getting into my career.

Jon Becker: So when did you come back as ten David?

Mike Albanese: 2000.

Jon Becker: So, okay, so it's interesting because you, you seem to be there when kind of all of the, you know, the marquee events, like if you go back and you're like, what's the, what's the history of special tactics? You can kind of look at Mike Albanese's career and, well, there, there were, there were others. Oh, yeah, for sure. But like, you just, you were there at the time that it was.

Mike Albanese: And really, it was just shitloading because I could have been on vacation, I could have been on a day off. And then you're right in the middle of whatever's going on.

Jon Becker: Well, so I think, I guess the next thing, post 84 games, I think the next major pivotal point was North Hollywood.

Mike Albanese: Well, yeah, from a tactical perspective, as far as the most notable cases, it's going to be OJ Simpson. Okay, so you look at 94, 97, 98. So 94, OJ Simpson 97, North Hollywood 98 is going to be Columbine. So the nineties really changed law enforcement. So with North Hollywood, North Hollywood, it was a game changer as far as how law enforcement, not D team law enforcement, is outfit Southern California. There was no rifles, there was no slug rounds. There was, there was, didn't have the equipment that other agencies already had.

So we were behind the curve. And I can tell you right now, McCarthy used to talk about that all the time, is that patrol officers should have rifles. And I'm thinking, really, Ron? And he was so right. I mean, he really got that. And then when you go to Columbine. Columbine, is that changed how law enforcement, not SWAT law enforcement, responded to unfolding events is that this notion that you will stop and wait for SWAT no longer mattered, is that you're going to get the guns and go, we're going to train you.

And actually our department, D team with training division, we trained the whole department on the active shooter training response, if you will. And that was a big deal. And so that within four years you had a lot of changes. The only reason I mentioned OJ Simpson, because what it speaks to is the use of negotiations in the midst of a crisis, the use of the tactical component to actually make a picket fence for us so that we could complete the negotiation process.

And the other odd thing that I still shake my head out is that, is that it was reversed. Typically negotiate from the outside. In here we were negotiating from the inside out. He's out in front in a car. We're on the inside as the C and T team. He's going to surrender inside to us. Very foreign, but it worked. But what it speaks to is how agile we can be. So kick that aside. North Hollywood. North Hollywood. I don't think I that anybody expected to see that type of criminal activity in a community.

So that community is right down the street in North Hollywood and at a bank of America. The violence, and it wasn't short lived, 48 minutes or however long it was, and it was violent. And the outcome speaks to courage, training, discipline, and just understanding what the mission is. Concluding that incident, which if you watch.

Jon Becker: The North Hollywood, like for anybody that's familiar with watching the North Hollywood video, those three, Donny, Rick and Steve, are the three that roll in in the flat top car and engage the suspect across the pickup truck and ultimately stop him.

Mike Albanese: So I always ask folks in training settings, how many rounds did that black and white take the metro black and white at the time, how many times did it get hit?

Jon Becker: I don't know.

Mike Albanese: Zero. Zero. Zero. So what it speaks to, and this is actually a great interview would be with the three of them because just on that one incident, its piece to Donnie Anderson just driving directly into the vortex of the threat goes just like they taught you to do, is you just limit the field of fire from the suspect drove right into it. And also Gomez is popping off round.

So for the suspect, Imazirano, was the suspect's name Emil Matsurano. You can see his body where it shakes like, okay, something just happened. Something just changed. We got some other folks here. And then the tactics of Massa getting on the ground. He can't see the suspects lies down and at least can grab, some of the, his heel, Achilles Tendon.

And then just how that was all coordinated. And I don't know if you know that, Donny, Donnie's magazine malfunctioned. And in the middle of this gun battle is Donnie's going, hey, I need a magazine. Rick's throwing a magazine and not know that. And everything is very, very measured and even afterwards, so.

But that was yet another sea change for law enforcement as far as how we managed those events. A proud day for LAPD, for sure, because the proud moment, certainly our folks. But it was how the patrol officers contained those suspects. I mean, they really did a great job of containing them. Folks ran Dryden. Folks are throwing magazines to each other just to keep them until more. More resources can get there.

Jon Becker: I think you talked about Columbine. Also, I think that there are certain events over time, Munich being one of them, North Holly being one of them, Colin being one of them, where it is so graphic and plays out in such a way that it brings that type of event to the public consciousness and demands a solution for that kind of problem.

We talked about Munich and how that was the evolution of SWAT teams. But patrol rifles come out of North Hollywood, patrol tactics come out of North Hollywood. North Hollywood combined with Columbine, then is the beginning of active shooter. And it kind of is this evolutionary process where we're looking at what SWAT is doing and trying to then use part of that skill set and spread it into other parts of the agency.

Mike Albanese: Absolutely. So there's some baseline training that can be shared with all there is. You're a police officer. You have skill sets. Let's spend the time and the money to elevate those skill sets. So if you're first on scene at a crisis, you know what to do. So Columbine was a huge sea change for law enforcement.

And then you look at all these other shooting events, active shooting events, and the other one is Uvalde changed how law enforcement responds. And there's an expectation, and you have to be mindful of that. The community expects that when we show up, we law enforcement show up, that we know what we're doing, that we're well staffed, well equipped, and that we will make it safe for them. And there are times where we are very good at it and times where we fall short.

To your point, as far as North Hollywood, the community was furious that we did not have the equipment that we needed to stop that behavior. Furious. It was 48 hours of celebration of their police department. Certainly we had, what, 460 plus officers that were there, absolutely celebrated, and. But they were also angry that we did not have the equipment to make it safe for the community.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah. The outrage of officers having to go into B&B guns, that was closed.

Mike Albanese: That was closed. That was closed. So the irony this is way off topic is that the officer that went there, I think he ultimately got a rifle, but it was closed at the time because they opened at 10:00 and this was before 10:00 Jerry Fritz, who was a classmate of mine, Vietnam vet. So the watch commander recognized, okay, you got the skillset. At least you know how to use a rifle. Go to B&B, get a rifle, then he's able to get there. They're closed. They open. And I think if you listen to the radio, that you'll hear that he's on scene and deployable. But by then, I think we were on scene.

Jon Becker: It's interesting, though, because that became the narrative that then caused part of that community outrage. Right? That the police were having to go and borrow guns. Yes, I remember the outrage that people felt. So it's interesting how not a wholly accurate narrative actually kind of helped to shape the reaction to it, though.

Mike Albanese: It did. And I did not expect that fury, because we're just focused on what we were doing, what was needed. We didn't, at least, I didn't recognize or see it coming that there would be public opinion on all of this as far as where we're not supported, because that's typically not the case. We got tremendous support. When you get the mayor's office phone in metro and D team and say, I need a wish list within 24 hours, and I'm not going to say no, you know, there's going to be a good outcome.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That's a fantastic call for a salon team to get. Yeah, yeah, I love that!

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So, okay, so then talk to me. So you, between you get there in 90 as a sergeant, you're going to come back as ten David, in 2000, what had changed? By the time you came back, what had changed? How long were you gone?

Mike Albanese: Just two years. So really not much had changed. You're still scrambling for the noose equipment, more training time. So those bureaucratic issues were still going to be ever present. We did like 1234. The amount of calls were voluminous for us. One year we had 135 call ups and 136 warrant services.

Our CEO at the time was captain Rick Jacobs, who was one of the best guys I ever worked for, because he just, he just understood the mission. He understood that he had to move, make, put barriers in place so that we can do our job. So in other words, deal with the bureaucracy. And he came out to almost every call up. So it was just busy, busy times.

Jon Becker: So you get back in 2000, where is that relative to the loss of Louie?

Mike Albanese: Right, at 2000.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So he was March of 2000.

Mike Albanese: 2000.

Jon Becker: Were you ten David when that happened?

Mike Albanese: No, I was not 10 David. I came in, I think, in May of 2000. Just understand, Louie and I worked together in 77th. We were partners, we worked patrol together, we worked gangs together, and we worked vice together. And then one of our other partners, Steve Steer, who has actually worked more with Louie. So that was a gut check. And it was just a freak training accident, which speaks to training and having safety measures and safety officers don't blow that stuff off.

Jon Becker: Why don't we give context to it? Cause I'm sure some of the people are not familiar with it.

Mike Albanese: Sure, I'll let you.

Jon Becker: So March of 2018. March 18, I'm sorry, 2000. March 18, 2000. The D team is training at Camp Pendleton.

Mike Albanese: Camp Pendleton in the shooting house. They have several shooting houses there.

Jon Becker: And Louie is up on a catwalk, if I remember correctly?

Mike Albanese: So there was really no catwalk, it was more of a wall. And there was just kind of a small footing base. So there was no rails. So you can call it a catwalk, but it was like a path on walls to oversee entries and light fire.

Jon Becker: And loses his balance. Right? Tries to reach, to sit down.

Mike Albanese: So I was not there. He, I think, was either squatted or sitting on the wall. And they were doing kind of a group huddled debrief after a run. And when he went to stand up, he just literally fell off the wall. The way he landed was fatal. And so this is coming on over 23 years ago, and it was heartbreaking. Louis was a Vietnam vetted.

I believe he was a civil star winner, went to Vietnam twice. And in those days, it was not 3, 6 month tours, it was 12, 15 month tours. And he, in my opinion, was an American hero. And just the ending to his life was just heartbreaking. And that's the problem with life.

Jon Becker: Yeah. There is something extremely cruel and kind of ironic about somebody with that resume being killed in an accidental Bennett training.

Mike Albanese: Cruel is the right word, is just cruel. And it was incredulous to us, to me. And I was watch commander at 77th at the time. I didn't want to believe it. And for many of his partners, they were inconsolable. It just hurt so much. And for folks in the law enforcement community and family members that have a loss like that. The pain just never goes away. So that's just a freaking fact. And I've been in the business 52 years now, and it still hurts.

Jon Becker: How did that event, do you think, inform the way you, two months later you're coming in as Tim David? How did that inform the way you looked at that leadership, do you think? .

Mike Albanese: So I don't break down leadership. But it translates into leadership. Okay, what needs to be done? So when we're in a training environment, that we're in a safe training, so we can accomplish training. So what needs to be done in that environment, that setting, so that we can train, train at the highest level, ultimately, you're going to have 911, and 911 is going to be the sea change for all of us.

And for law enforcement, it was grant money that we got grant or funds for training and equipment. And that's when we were able to build our own standalone shooting house. And we designed it, we engineered it so that there were safety features in mind. Because be mindful of this. We're doing live fire. We're shooting ammunition. You have people moving in that environment. You have flashbangs, you have explosive entries. And how you can make it as safe as you can so you can get that training done.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it is. I had an experience with LAPD's bomb squad very early in my career. Sid Hale and I were building command initiated flashbangs, and Joe Powell was there with LAPD bomb. And Sid and I are putting these blasting caps together, and I look over my shoulder and Joe Powell and the entire bomb squad are hiding behind their suburbans. I said, Sid, stop. He said, what? I said, the bomb squad's hiding behind their suburbans. We're doing something wrong.

So I walked over to Joe and I said, hey, Joe, why are you hiding behind your car? And he goes, you guys are way too comfortable with explosives. And he said something that stuck with me, literally stuck with me to this day in my career. He said, if you are ever comfortable with something that can kill you or injure you, put it down. And it's so easy to become complacent with danger and with dangerous things that I think as leaders it's a challenge to constantly keep that in front of mind.

Mike Albanese: So I'll share flashbang story with you. And not a good one. So this is, I think, December 13th, 1984. High risk warrant. So post Olympics, that's why I was a little slow to talk about post Olympics. We were doing a lot of high risk warrants, dynamic entries, a lot of explosive breaches and the use of flashbangs. And the night before this incident, we hit a rock house. Did not have a violent encounter other than breaching windows, doors. To stop the suspects was challenging.

And my partner at the time, Steve Taylor, had thrown a flashbang and actually bounced across a suspect's back and his jacket got on fire and he's trying to put it out. And we ended up putting it out the very next night is that I deploy a bang that ends up in a fatality.

Jon Becker: Dolores Langford.

Mike Albanese: And that was another sea change for law enforcement. So that was the circumstances where it was on 48th Street, 748, 48th street, something like that. Breached it. And I was a team leader. We had the ground floor entry and I was going to deploy the flashbang. Then our team would go in as team leader. Then I would follow them. So there was suspect on the bed, suspect on the floor, very clear. We had announced, cleared. And I deliberately threw the bang over the bed to the wall and perfect placement.

So as we trail in, as they go by the bed, because the other two suspects are frozen down, I see a body and I, and it's like, where did she come from? And so I'm screaming at her, down, down, hands and all that stuff. And there's nothing, nothing. And so I pull her up, I throw her on the bed and her whole backside. And I'm looking at her African American woman and it's all white. Her old epidermal had blown off and died. So that kind of derailed the flow. But we were able to secure the house and everything.

And so there was, I'm not sure what the point of all of this is, but there was a couple learning opportunities. So one van Adder was the detective that investigated that use of deadly force. I was certain I was going to get terminated, was certain was going to a bad outcome. Darrell Francis Gates was the chief of police. There was a civil suit that had just a modest outcome.

Jon Becker: But Langford versus Gates, the seminal case on flashbangs in the United States.

Mike Albanese: Yeah. So there. But the bottom line was that when it was all over, after litigation and everything, there was a bit of a learning curve for me personally is that that was the first time I felt like I was on an island because it wasn't funny, but it was funny is my Jeff Rogers at that time goes, okay, who threw the bang?

Everybody goes, he did. He did. I'm going, guys, I would have told them. So it was like I was on an island. And I've been able to use that moment when other folks have had challenges during high profile incidents where, and I'll ask him and say, does it feel like you're on an island right now and that you're by yourself and there's not much support, let alone help coming? And it'll always be, that's exactly how I feel.

So I tell them, I empathize with you. I've been on that island. It's unpleasant, but you'll be okay. You're not going to believe it now, but you will. There is a process, it's a cumbersome process, but you'll be fine as long as you're grounded in that circumstance. The investigation, the DA's response, I think on page four, I was exonerated and it was going to be Gates's fault, but it was a learning curve for all of us. But it changed flashbangs. It changed the deployment of flashbangs. It changed that model of flashbang, that that military hand grenade simulator were gone the next day.

Jon Becker: M-116 A1.

Mike Albanese: Yep.

Jon Becker: Yep. You guys, you guys. It's interesting because Mike Hillman actually told me the story of the original M-116, a one that he brought back on an airplane from Delta and building flashbangs and taking them to Arleigh McCree, right. Really excited that he had done this amazing thing by taking a friction fuse out of a flashbang full of flash powder and gluing in a 201 a one fuse and then getting a lecture from Marley McCree about what a stupid plan that was and how he was never going to do it again.

Mike Albanese: Right.

Jon Becker: But yeah, I mean, that was when you look at the history of bangs, M-116 a one is the beginning of it. Langford versus Gates. That flashbang is where we start to go. Maybe bursting canisters designs is not the right idea because if it gets under somebody it's exactly what happens. And it wasn't just Langford.

There were several cases, Langford being the most high profile, but there were several cases where bangsa M-116 a one s the first american counterterrorism flashbang that was also bursting canister landed on somebody. And did you know in this case it landed between Langford and the wall if I remember correctly.

Mike Albanese: Right. You're right. Where I threw the flashbang was at the wall so it would drop. Did not know that she was there and her back and the wall with the bang between her. So all her body fluid acted as attenuated her and just shredded her.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But that is where the non bursting canister like the def tech number 25 flashbangs, those cases are the genesis of it.

Mike Albanese: Right. It changed the whole industry 100%. One incident because then you had McCree and his crew doing half loads. Yeah, half loads that weren't necessarily scientific. So, but it changed that equipment. And again, one incident and you had the FBI agent that was killed with the Bangdore. So I think those are the only two fatalities in initially.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because there were a number of things that were all occurring there. And that's right about the time that I started. I started ARK in 87 and that.

Mike Albanese: Was in December 13th, 1984. I want to know close to that.

Jon Becker: The first article I wrote for NTOA was a legal aspects of flashbang article and it was anchored in Langford versus gates. And the thing with Langford that I think Langford could have been the end of flashbangs because the proposal that they were making was to put flashbangs, the V100. And I think I figured there's one other tactic that they wanted to put under magistrate review. And ultimately Arleigh McCree is the expert that testifies in the case that the court cites to and cites to how LAPD had really thought about how flashbangs were made.

And ultimately they take the V100, but they leave flashbangs from not being under magistrate review. And that, that inflection point could have been the end of bangs because if it had gone that way, you probably would have then seen legislation to prohibit their use.

Mike Albanese: You're absolutely right. We were at least I was convinced that bangs were going to be out of our equipment opportunity, if you will. So the use of the V100 and I think the other was the explosive entries. But the V100 is that we had to have a judge sign off on that. And there was a lot of controversy because we had, we did so many high risk warrants, dynamic warrants, because of just the number of rock houses, the way that they were fortified, that it made it impossible to serve warrants.

So that was a unique time in LAPD law enforcement history. I don't know if other parts of the country were experiencing the same things that we were as far as fortification, but it was a sea change.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because there was this period of time where the solution to the police catching you with drugs was to turn your house into a castle and then destroy the drugs while the police were trying to get in. And the V100, for those that haven't seen the V100, it's kind of an early APC that had what my favorite rap song of all time, the batter ram describes as a ram, to literally at that point, you guys were having to deconstruct houses to get into them, taking walls out and tearing fortifications and gates and all kinds of stuff off. And there was that. There was a brief period of time where that was what everybody did.

But then you guys figured out how to overcome the fortifications. And so the plan changed. Right? Like all of special tactics is this, this tension between the evolution of a strategy and evolution of a counter strategy. And I think that that period of time was that, that pivotal point with fortification and rock houses and armor that I think is fascinating time.

Mike Albanese: It was interesting times. So. And then it just kind of went away.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well, stop working.

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: If you think about like, there's a period of time in the eighties there, late seventies, early eighties, where if you were terrorist, you would take an airplane, seize a bunch of hostages, negotiate the surrender of your friends, demand a bunch of money, go to a foreign country and be let go.

And then all of a sudden you had Prince's gates, you had Teby, you had all these cases where you took hostages, and then a counterterrorism team came in and killed you. And all of a sudden that was no longer strategy you could employ. And I don't think that. I think that we still see that developing. I think we're actually kind of real time watching that with active shooter.

So, I mean, as the rock house era is coming to an end, we then go into the nineties, which we talked about, and then in 2000, you come back as ten David. I think another kind of seminal events of that time is the loss of Randy Simmons. Talk to me about that.

Mike Albanese: So, yeah, as we chatted about earlier, that was a very violent incident. It was a family annihilation incident. And during the effort to rescue family members, Randy was fatally shot. So personally, professionally, it was just devastating. We ultimately finished the mission after we secured the location.

What I vividly remember is all of us in a street just weeping. Just weeping. Stood down the team for five days because no one was in a place to work. And once we got through the funeral time with the family, it was time to go back to work. But it was – Everybody was traumatized. The debrief went for 8 hours, and it was very personal for everyone. And it was needed to be in the room together to talk about what, what we did. And that's one of those incidents that, you just never forget. I think about him, almost daily. It's the second worst day of my life. My mom died at a young age, and then randy's. Randy's death just was horrible.

Jon Becker: Yeah. How did it change the way…..

Mike Albanese: Let me just make a comment that I haven't shared that much is that we had just finished a call up a couple days, days before, and during the debrief, Randy said something really profound. And I'm sitting there and I'm going, randy, to myself, why are you saying that? And he goes, look at kind of my words is that this is a real fragile process. There's no guarantees.

And then you would go around the room and say it could happen to you, you or you on any given day, so you make sure you know what you're doing. And again, I'm going, Randy, you're scaring us. But that's how passionate he was and how he clearly understood the mission and that there's no guarantees.

When a tactical team shows up that has extraordinary training and equipment, there's no guarantee that you're going to have a good outcome. You look at all these high profile events and many don't have a good outcome. And I had offline had talked to you about Nashville, and the young officer that was the hall boss in that incident knew what he was doing, knew that he had to coordinate and communicate with his peers to get to the threat.

And he was, from my observations, much younger than some of the other officers, but he knew what his role was and look at the outcome. So there is no guarantees. There is absolutely no guarantees. So I derailed your question. Go ahead.

Jon Becker: Yeah, but then as, as ten David, like the. I can, I can only imagine how that, I mean, everybody obviously loved Randy. Randy was a ridiculously popular character. And, you know, again, like Louis, the cruelty of it is just, you know, insurmountable. But as, at that point, as Tim David, that has got to impact the way you feel about your job and the way you're looking at what the men that report to you are doing.

Mike Albanese: Well, I think it put it in perspective for all of us. We all knew, we've all had talked about it. I mean, this goes back to the seventies, is that we're going to be at risk. At some point in time, someone's going to get hurt. And up until that point, no one had been seriously hurt. There had been injuries. We had folks shot. We've had other, other injuries that changed their life circumstances, but nothing like this.

And since then, I think there's been at least a handful of incidents where we've had officers shot, SWAT officers shot. It's probably been more than a handful, now that I think about it. And it's going to happen. You're exposed. You're exposed. You're in a high risk situation. There's violence. It's fraught with violence, and you have behavior that is violent. And we are tasked with stopping the violence.

Jon Becker: And it's unpredictable. Right? They always say the suspect gets a vote, and sometimes his vote is not a rational one.

Mike Albanese: Absolutely. And that's. That's the other challenge. So it's the old what to fret about is that you don't know with certainty about your suspect or suspects that are involved in the incident. You don't know their emotional state, if there's mental health underpinnings, if there's a chemical influence, if there's alcohol, if there's drug or it's a combination of all of them. Like a very volatile domestic violence situation where, again, fraught with emotion under the influence. There's been a history of mental health and just a reckless behavior that really compromises officers. It really does, and we have seen it many times.

Jon Becker: I think that's a really good place for us to stop. Mike, thanks for doing this!

I'm looking forward to sitting down with you again in episode 2.

Episode 21 – Critical Incident Review – Jordan MacWilliams Charged with Murder for Shooting a Hostage Taker

Jon Becker: My guest today is Jordan McWilliams. Jordan is a 15 year member of the RCMP Lower Mainland Division integrated Emergency Response Team, the second largest tactical unit in Canada. On November 7th, 2012, Jordan fired a single shot which killed a hostage taker while pointing a gun at the team after a five hour standoff at the Starlight Casino in New Westminster, British Columbia.

Although it was a completely justified shooting, this incident began an almost three year nightmare for Jordan and his family, which included Jordan being charged with murder by the newly created Independent Investigations Office, a civilian oversight board created just before Jordan's shooting. This was the first time a police officer had been charged with using lethal force in British Columbia since 1975, and Jordan was facing life in prison. Although the charges would later be dismissed, the damage to Jordan and his family had already been done.

Jordan's story is both a cautionary tale and a story of struggle, perseverance, and eventual victory over a politically motivated witch hunt. It's a fantastic conversation that should leave all of us repeating Jordan's mantra for the event. Be better, not bitter.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jordan, thanks for being here with me today!

Jordan MacWilliams: Oh, it's my pleasure! Thanks for having me!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with, like, your background. Tell me, you know, where'd you grow up? Why'd you want to be a cop? Give me that whole thing.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. Well, I grew up in the lower mainland of British Columbia, which is outside the city of Vancouver. My dad was a police officer for 36 years with Delta PD and saw him being a cop as I was growing up. And once I got over my rebellious teenage stage, I decided that's what I wanted to do a little while. I wanted to do the exact opposite of whatever my dad did.

And then when I was about 17, I was like, I want to be just like dad, and I want to be a copy. I was involved in sports, played a little bit of hockey, soccer, and rugby. Growing up, I did a lot of martial arts, competed in taekwondo, and then into my late teens, where I actually was managing a martial arts school.

And then when I was 19, I went to Delta and tried to submit my application to get hired. And they're like, we're not going to hire a 19 year old, but you can volunteer for us. So I volunteered as a reserve constable and I decided I wanted to do some more to be involved in policing work. A job in policing. So I applied to be a dispatcher for, actually, Vancouver city police. And I worked there for about a year, went to a few calls. I worked every weekend as a volunteer with Delta until after about a year, they hired me and, yeah, foolishly hired a 20 year old to become a police officer.

Jon Becker: Well, they got a year of free labor out of him first.

Jordan MacWilliams: They did every weekend.

Jon Becker: So then, okay, so you go on the job at 20 and talk to me about early career, what you do, what you want to be when you grow up, all that.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, I was living my dream, young guy, being on the job. Actually met my wife, who became my girlfriend at the time at the police academy. So everything was pretty awesome. As soon as I was on the job, I decided that I wanted to be on the SWAT team. Like, that was where I wanted to go. At that time, the team that my agency was a part of was a collateral duty regional team integrated between a few different agencies.

So pretty much right away, I started volunteering with them. I would be the guy at the guard shack for the Snipers to go to the range and I'd quarry for them as a role player for sims training, stuff like that. And then at about three years, I tried out and I made it onto the team. And that was just. Yeah, just early 2012 when I joined, and that was the municipal integrated emergency response team.

So then my day job stayed as a patrol officer and I was working part time collateral duty with the team. Similar to a lot of models we worked. We did a couple training days a month. We'd have call outs, moderately busy team, maybe like three, four calls a month. And, yeah, did that for just under a year before the incident. We're going to talk about today, and.

Jon Becker: I know we talked about this off mic, but I think it's interesting. Your dad was not a SWAT cop.

Jordan MacWilliams: No, no. My dad's career was more investigative. He did major crime, worked as a detective for a long time. And then when I got on the job, he actually. He was a watch commander. He ran a watch in our agency and we were just opposite or related.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So what was dad's reaction to, hey, dad, I'm going on the SWAT team?

Jordan MacWilliams: He thought that that was a cool thing to do for a little while that I should probably become a detective.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Well, it's not going to work out.

Jordan MacWilliams: No, it didn't work out. No.

Jon Becker: So why don't we kind of fast forward to the incident? Like, how long have you been on the job? How long have you been on the team when the incident occurs?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So it was November 2012. I'd been on the job for a Shears, just under a year on the team when this happened. And it was, I remember really well, it was my first day shift. We worked two days, two nights was our kind of rotating schedule. And then four days off and I showed up for day shift. I'm sitting in the briefing room and I get a call over the radio from dispatch asking if I'll switch, be able to switch to Newestminster because they've just had a shooting and we were worked in a relatively busy patrol area, went to tons of shootings.

And I'm not going to say I was complacent to them, but usually everything's gone by the time you get there. Maybe you're trying to help somebody with first aid or looking at some shell casings on the ground, but very rarely do you actually have some type of interaction with the public when you're dispatched to a shooting.

So I switch the radio over and the first thing I hear when I listen to their channel is a member just yelling at the top of her lungs, drop the gun. I hear that screaming on the radio. And I was like, okay, they got somebody there. And I just sprinted out to my car, jumped in and started driving.

Jon Becker: You say a member? You mean a member of the ERT team?

Jordan MacWilliams: No, that was a patrol officer.

Jon Becker: Just a patrol officer?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So I hear a patrol officer. And they'd asked for just if there was any on duty ERT members to switch to their channel. And that's how I got called originally.

Jon Becker: Got it. So as far as you know, it's a shooting and somebody's probably being held at gunpoint, but that's about all you've got when you roll up on it.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: Got it. So why don't we set up? Because I think you're going to roll into it and figure it out as you go along. But I think for purposes of explaining the incident, why don't we set up what actually had happened prior to that and then what actually occurs before you get there?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So before I got there, this is probably about, I guess it was 05:40 in the morning. There had been an ongoing domestic thing between this guy and his ex girlfriend. He'd been stalking her for a long time. He'd actually stalked her to the point where he had been putting gps devices on her car. He'd been breaking into her house, like, put a knife on her pillow, this kind of stuff.

A detective who worked the file actually was able to get surveillance on him, and surveillance picked him off following her around, and he was held in custody for a couple weeks prior to being released on a bail order. Within a few days of him being released, he goes to the casino where she worked, and he was waiting for her in the staff parking lot when she showed up for work that morning.

So she shows up for work, drives in, pulls into her parking spot, and he fires a shot into the air from a handgun he's got, and then tries to grab her at gunpoint, and he's now trying to force her back into her car. During this time, a number of people kind of come around him. He points the gun at them. He fires another couple shots off, and he's kind of fighting with her because she knows this isn't going to end well for her, so she doesn't want to go with him.

And she tries to get away a couple of times. He grabs her, pulls her back, throws her into the car at one point, and rips a round off, which just grazes the back of her hand really close. So this is all being seen live time by the casino surveillance camera.

So they've got really good surveillance of this casino, and they're updating in real time as this is happening, and patrol officers are getting there, and they roll up. And as they roll up, he's now got her in the car, and he's started to drive away with her. And he just kind of rolls to a stop. I think she actually pushed the shifter into neutral. And you see the car roll on the surveillance, and he sees the police there now, and he pops out of the car.

And as soon as he sees the police, he's kind of lit up by the spotlight from their car. You see him just bring the gun up right to his head, and now he's pointing the gun at his own head. He comes around the car, he grabs her. He's got her by her sweater and a gold chain around her neck, and he starts dragging her down the side of the casino.

I think it was a real challenging thing for these patrol officers to encounter. It's not easy without the context of everything that we got to see afterwards in surveillance of seeing a guy holding a gun to his own head and now dragging somebody away to make a decision. That's a real tough set of circumstances unless you know all the context.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, it's very confusing. I mean, if he's pointing it at her, it's a really easy decision. Yeah, but he's kind of, you know, dragging her to his suicide if you just kind of initially look at it.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay, what happens next?

Jordan MacWilliams: So he gets her down kind of the side of the casino. He pulls her down to this main road, which is now kind of parallels the highway. And the patrol officers do a good job of containing him there. So they've got some officers to the north who are trying to communicate with him. And then they've got a couple cars to the east with a supervisor there. And then some of their guys go around and they get into the ditch across the street.

So he's kind of contained where he is. And it's this little bit of a standoff where he's got her. He's holding her by the chain in the sweater. He's got the gun in his hand. He's pointing the gun at himself. And they're trying to communicate with him, trying to communicate with her. And they're not having any success.

So he's not answering them at all. They're just in the standoff. And to that is what I responded. So I've now been activated. I go, I'm the first ERT member who gets to scene. I'm there about half an hour after the incident originally started, maybe even less. Might have been 20 minutes. And I get on scene, and when I get there, I'm with these two guys who are to the east. And I remember seeing. They're probably about 100, maybe 25 yards away. And I can see this guy holding a gun to his own head and then holding her by the sweater.

And in my mind, I'm having that same thought you described, like, is this a suicidal guy? And she's trying to convince him to stop pointing the gun at himself? Or is she a hostage? Can she leave? I don't have the benefit of seeing that surveillance video. Just what I'd been told, which is there's been a shooting, and she's with him, and he's got the gun to his head, which is what I'm seeing.

And then in my mind, I'm like, okay, well, I've got to get closer if I'm going to be able to intervene at all. So I ask the patrol officers who are in the ditch to the south to try and communicate. Try and take over comms. So we're able to press up a little bit closer. And we do that and we end up getting within about 70 yards, I think it was.

Jon Becker: So you just kind of. You're trying to compress the problem. Get a little bit closer. You use the patrol vehicle for cover, if I remember correctly.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, that's right. And we just kind of crept it forward slowly. And in my mind, I was. I just had a short barreled rifle with an eotech on top. I don't have any magnification. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, if this is a hostage thing and I need to take like a hostage rescue shot, I'm not gonna be able to do that from 125 yards with non magnified optics. So I'm just thinking, I want to get close in case I do need to intervene.

Jon Becker: And to set the scene. If I remember correctly, this is kind of like a freeway access road. It's like running right along the freeway, right?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So it's like a parallel road directly north of the freeway. Then it goes on to the on ramp. So we've got this road now shut down. The freeway beside us is shut down. And there's no way for the people who are in the casino to leave. So they're all sheltered in place and there's a lot of people in the casino. And then behind us there's also the strip mall, which is just now opening up for the morning. And lots of people showing up.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So if he goes and either of two directions, he's going into large, crowded, populated spaces.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Becker: Okay, so then what happens?

Jordan MacWilliams: We're trying to communicate, we're trying to facilitate, um, we're trying different people. We're using loud horn, we're using just our voice. And we're not getting any response at all. We're not getting him to even look at us. He just is looking at her. They're having some dialogue. And then at 1.1 of the patrol officers actually yells at her, like, come over here, come over here. And she kind of looks over her shoulder at us. And he lets go of her sweater for a second. And when he does that, she just backs up and he's still pointing the gun at himself. She's backing up, she takes a few steps, a few more steps, and now she's about 30 ft away from him.

At that time we were communicating, obviously, what we were seeing. And the team leader, who, he wasn't on scene yet, he broadcast for us to initiate a rescue attempt based on the separation. So we had, uh, three ERT members on scene. It was myself and two more. We break our cover, we run out, probably cross about 100 ft of open ground. We push past her.

Me and one other guy, we just go shoulder to shoulder, kind of block her from him. And the third guy grabs her, puts her head down to bring her back. And I remember when I was there in that position standing, and I looked at him. I looked him right in the eyes and he's holding the gun to his head. And I had my carbine up.

And like, I'm thinking to myself, okay, if he moves at all, I'm gonna shoot him. But I didn't. And it's an interesting thing. Like I've seen in my career now, I've done hundreds, close to a thousand operations, tactical operations, and I've seen lots and lots of people holding guns. And I haven't shot people just because they're holding a gun.

And when people ask me to explain the difference, there's kind of nuances and there's legal considerations and everything. But when you – When somebody truly is going to kill somebody else or kill you, you know right away looking at them, and I didn't see that in that moment, so I didn't shoot them. And I pulled back. We pulled back to cover. We had the hostage safe. She's recovered. She gets turned over, the detectives.

And then we just kind of transition right into our open air barricade protocols, which is trying to now contain him where he is with all those people. We already talked about being exposed to this threat and work towards a resolution of either him surrendering or another tactical intervention.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, I mean, basically he's barricaded by the fact that he has a gun and can shoot himself or shoot you. So he's not. You can't move on him. But he's also not communicative and not cooperative. So you're just kind of at a stalemate.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. And it was frustrating, for sure, because we now we make good use armor. We got a couple armored vehicles on scene and we're trying to communicate with him. The negotiators, they're using the bullhorn. We actually deliver him a throw phone with a robot. Drop the phone beside him. He picks it up. He says he's only going to talk to her and gets off the phone. And we have this kind of stuff repeat a little bit.

And so now in our minds as the operators, we want to try a tactical intervention, look, to move up to some less lethal or something. Because my fear is, and I'm a real strong believer of this. If we wait to react to somebody's behavior, you are just by nature now reacting. So it's going to be on their timeline, and you're never going to have as good of a success with your less lethal interventions, etcetera. If you're waiting to react, it's on his time now.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You've surrendered the initiative?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. He gets to have the initiative. And I have seen numerous times when we do that, when we give him the initiative, we end up in a violent confrontation, rather than us trying to intervene with some less lethal, et cetera, sooner and prevent that violent confrontation.

So I'm a big advocate of if there isn't meaningful negotiation, if there aren't other strategies that are starting to work or have some effect, we need to take the initiative. Otherwise, it may end much more violently than if we didn't.

Jon Becker: Well, especially if he's there to commit suicide by cop. You're giving him time to build courage.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Becker: And either take a shot at you or provoke you, or, honestly, the longer you sit there, too, the greater the likelihood that somebody makes a mistake.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. And that suicide by cop, that was in my mind when I'm looking at him. So now this has gone on for a couple hours. We've been attempting negotiation. No success. The crisis negotiators, they've called him, they've delivered that thrill phone. He's not talking to them. They're trying the pa. He does kind of shake his head or nod his head in response to some of their questions, but, he is not answering them. He's not talking to them at all.

And I remember what was going through my mind as I'm watching him. So I'm thinking to myself, okay, he's probably going to kill himself. I'm going to watch this guy shoot himself. And he's just sitting there. He's sitting on the pavement. He's holding the gun in his one hand. I'm to his east now, about 40 yards away. I'm just in behind the front of the armored vehicle, and I watch him. And he pulls the mag out of his gun. It's 1911 style, Colt commander. And he drops the magazine on the ground. And he looks up at our group. He looks at our element. He points at his gun. He holds up one finger.

And I see him say, I've got one left. And I see that. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna watch this guy shoot himself right now. But then the other thought I have is, okay, why is he telling us he's got one left, like he's telling us because he wants us to know he can still kill us with it. And I think now, okay, maybe he's gonna try and force us to shoot him.

Jon Becker: That's a really strange thing to do. Like, you're not unloading the gun. No, but I wonder what was going through. I mean, obviously crazy s*** was going through his head point. But for sure, it's a very odd thing to do because, like, if you unload the gun, you're saying, well, I'm not armed. If you load the gun, you're saying, I am armed. He kind of splits the difference and says, I have one bullet.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Which I guess means if I miss, you don't shoot me. Very odd. It's an odd play.

Jordan MacWilliams: I think you're right, with the suicide by cop thing, because I think he wanted to die in that moment, and he didn't want to shoot himself. He was trying to work up the courage to do it. And so now he's got the gun there. He's thrown the magazine on the ground. He's looking at us, and he stands up, and I watch him stand up. He's holding the gun up at his own head, and then he kind of holds it out just aimed up in the air. And he starts walking in these little circles, and his circles start to get a little bigger.

And then he just looks up at my element, and he starts walking right at us. He's walking right at us. He gets to about 25 meters away now, and in my element, there's myself and two other operators. One of them's got an Arwen with impact baton rounds. The other one's holding an NFTD. And the plan is, if he breaks out towards us, we're going to intervene, hopefully by a little bit with the flashbang and with the impact munitions.

So he's now walking right at us. We start that deployment. One teammate deploys the flashbang. It goes off. Absolutely no response. Right around the same time, the other teammate, he leans around the front of the Bearcat, and he starts firing his impact weapon. And I think he hits him a couple of times but barely reacts. He kind of pauses as he gets hit, kind of turns a little bit. He is looking straight at us.

And I watch him take his gun, which is pointing straight up, and he lowers it, and now he's aiming it right at us and watching the video back. It goes so fast, but in my mind, it's such a slow thing that's happening. And I'm having this internal dialogue. Okay. Like, he's got the gun, he's got it. He's pointing. He's pointing it right at us. Okay, Jordan, you got to shoot him. And I can, you know, I could close my eyes and see my eotech superimposed over his torso. I take safety off fire, send one round, and he goes down right away.

Jon Becker: And at that point, like, so how, what's your distance from the suspect at that point?

Jordan MacWilliams: 25 yards.

Jon Becker: Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, he's well within. We's well within effective range. Like, he can make effective fire with a cole commander 25 yards all day long. And the fact that the less lethal didn't affect him is interesting, too. Okay, so he's 25 yards from you. There's three of you behind that bearcat, right?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Nftd Arwen and yourself?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. And then kind of off to my left is our TL, who's outside of the Bearkat. Then inside the bearkat, there's a couple negotiators and a driver and a police dog. So now, you know, I've sent the round, he goes down, and I'm just looking at him on the ground. He kind of rolls around a little bit. He reaches for the gun, grabs it, and then he kind of brings it back, and then he points at his own head again.

And at that time, the TL tells us, okay, get in the armor. We're going to pull up right beside him, and we're going to try and send the dog and drag him back towards us, away from the gun. I. That was a tactic. We trained a bunch. We did that for pulling people out of cars, etcetera.

So we get up right beside him, come out of the bearcat, we're on the other side. Now send the dog, and, you know, this happens to the best of us, but I think the handler got just a little bit jacked up and the line comes right out of his hand. So now he loses the long line that he was going to use to dry drag the dog back. And the dog latches on and grabs him, but it works out pretty good. So dog spins him and spins him away from the gun and just kind of spins him in a little bit of a circle.

And then he's now being pulled away from the dog. He's not really reacting now. He's really starting to feel the effects of the round. And we actually press up. I remember I just kind of reached down because the gun was in between us and him. Now I reached down, I picked up the gun and just pulled it away from the scene, put it down. And the other guys latched onto him, cuffed him up, but then really quickly just transitioned to medical.

Jon Becker: Got it. And where did the round hit him exactly?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, it was entered at the bottom of his rib cage, just offset to the right a tiny bit. Hit the bottom rib, went in, exited beside his spine. And really interestingly, we actually, the round that I hit him with was on the ground underneath him, like the actual bullet.

Jon Becker: That's weird.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, dumped it. Did a good job.

Jon Becker: All of its energy, I guess. Yeah. Made it two inches past.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So you guys transitioned to medical?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, we transitioned the medical. The medics comes out, we're running Thames guys at that time, and they come on up, they start working on him. And tl just tells me to go over to the bearcat, and she's like, go hang out on the other side.

So I remember I go over there, I sit down just on the rail on the side of the bearcat, and, uh, one of the, one of my teammates is running by to just come to help. And he just kind of pauses for a split second, um, as he sees me sitting there, and he just hits me on my helmet. And he's like, f****** great job, Jordan.

And it was weird in that moment because I hadn't caught up with what had happened mentally, honestly. Like, I was just processing things as they happened, and it felt just like training day. Like, it didn't feel like this strange high stress incident. I wasn't super jacked up or anything, but I was just starting to process the thought of shooting somebody.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because at this point in your career, have you been in a shooting?

Jordan MacWilliams: No. No.

Jon Becker: So you've never shot at anybody? Has anybody even shot at you at this point in your career?

Jordan MacWilliams: No. This is my first exposure to interpersonal violence at, like, a lethal force level. And as I'm sitting there and just kind of processing it, that positive affirmation from a teammate in that moment was really valuable. And I've tried to do that for others since, especially people newer in their career, because when you haven't had that exposure before, that can be psychologically a really vulnerable time for you.

And, you know, the fact is, we hire really good people to come into this profession. Like, people, you know, everybody, when they are standing in front of that board trying to get hired, what do they say when we ask them, why do I want to be a cop? I want to help people. We all want to help people, genuinely. And, you know, 99% of cops, like, they joined this job to help people. I didn't join policing to shoot somebody.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: I understood that that was a potential outcome of what I may have to do one day. But, you know, I'm a good person. I think of myself as a good person. And it can be challenging to reconcile that with your perception of yourself as a good person. But I don't have any issues with it now for sure. But for a lot of us, you have to work through that.

Jon Becker: You're four years on the job or five years on the job and 24 years old.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Like, you know, this is your first significant event. Yeah. You can see where that's. That's going to leave a mark and, you know, at least cause a little brief moment of introspection there.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Like, it should be introspective for somebody. That's a healthy response.

Jon Becker: 100%.

Jordan MacWilliams: If there is an introspection. Well, that's probably a psychopath and we should have them in place at minimum.

Jon Becker: Yeah, if you do, if you don't introspect after having to kill somebody, you're a sociopath.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay, so then suspect is put in an ambulance.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Called off to the hospital. Is he alive when he gets put in the hospital or put in the ambulance?

Jordan MacWilliams: He's alive. And I'm still kind of feeling almost like this is a training day, just kind of processing things as he gets wheeled by me on the gurney and put in the ambulance. That is the first moment where it really feels real, like I've killed somebody.

And that's the first time I actually really had that thought. And so he gets loaded up in there. A couple officers go in with him in the ambulance, and following him behind, gets to the hospital. He is on life support for a little while, for a few days, actually, before he dies.

Jon Becker: What were his injuries?

Jordan MacWilliams: Pretty significant. He, liver, colon, spleen, kidney, lung, collapsed lung. And, yeah, the pathologist report said died of exsanguination as a result of a gunshot wound. So fancy way to say he died from being shot.

Jon Becker: He bled out. Yeah. So, okay, so they take him to the hospital. You've now been in a shooting. You know, there's going to be a protocol. I mean, obviously there's, there's going to be a protocol and, and all of that. What happens next?

Jordan MacWilliams: That piece about there's going to be a protocol is really interesting because, like, for my agency at the time, maybe once every two, three years, we got into a shooting. Not very often. And until three months before this incident, all of our police shootings had been investigated by, like, internal investigations. Maybe another police department investigates it. But this was now going to be the very first one with our brand new civilian oversight agency.

So we got a civilian oversight agency in 2012, the independent investigations office. And their mandate became to investigate any incident where an officer has caused serious harm or death to a member of the community. And I know, you know, there's tons of civilian oversight down in the state.

There's push for it across the world, and. But this was brand new for us, and we'd been kind of briefed on it, but there certainly weren't, it wasn't a protocol we were familiar with, if that makes sense. This is a new thing for us. What we had been told were the new rules are you, if you get into a critical incident, you're not allowed to talk to anybody else who was there about what happened, and you will be going back to the office and waiting for further instructions. So that's exactly what happened.

So a couple of my teammates, they jumped in a truck with me. I'm still wearing all my kit. I'm holding my helmet and my carbine. And they start driving us back to the office. And it was the first couple minutes was this weird thing where they want to say something and they want to talk to me as my friends, but they know and they've just been told they're not allowed to talk about what just happened. We were told in no uncertain terms before we got in that truck. You guys can't talk about this incident. Drive Jordan back to the office.

So we're driving, and my buddy Dave up front, he's like, we should probably call your wife. We should probably call your wife. My wife's a cop as well, and she's obviously going to know something's going on. And I say to Dave, I'm like, okay, well, I'll call her. He's like, no, I can call her for you. I'm like, no, no, don't do that. Like, I'll stress her out. I'll call my wife. So I call my wife. I'm like, hey, steph, I just want to let you know I'm okay. All the guys are okay, been involved in a shooting. And she replies to me, okay, see you for the dinner. Bye.

Jon Becker: That's a hard a** wife right there. Only a cop wife would be like, okay, yeah, you shot somebody, whatever. I'll see you later.

Jordan MacWilliams: In her defense, as she will say this to her dying day, she's like, I didn't think you meant you shot somebody. I just thought one of the guys had shot somebody. And you happened to be there. But, yeah, shortly after that, she got a call from my dad, who was working for our agency at the time, and he told her that I'd been in, I'd shot someone. And she came to the office to meet me there.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you get back to the office. What do they do?

Jordan MacWilliams: Get out of the truck. I am still holding my helmet. One of the team guys grabs my carbine from me, and we walk into the office. We walk up the stairs, and we've been told to go down to the west boardroom. And I remember I snapped the corner to go down the hall towards the west boardroom.

And it's like every member of the brass of our organization was standing in that hallway, and they were all looking right at me. And nobody says a word. And I walk down, I'm walking past them. It was almost like the receiving line at a wedding, except nobody's talking and smiling. They're just looking right at me. And I walk by them, and I go into the room. And as I'm going into the room, the deputy chief stops the guys who are going in with me and shuts the door behind me. And I. At first, I'm in there by myself.

Jon Becker: So they basically just locked you in a room by yourself?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. That's how it started.

Jon Becker: That's good therapy.

Jordan MacWilliams: My teammates fought their way into that room pretty quick. I don't know what the conversation in the hallway was, but it didn't last very long. And they. They got in there pretty quick and joined me. And then we had that same deputy. He came into the room, and it was like he was our hall monitor, making sure we weren't talking. And there wasn't any conversation. He didn't. He never once asked me how I was or, um, said anything other than looking at me. He had some phone calls looking at my teammates, and I'm sitting there and I'm nothing. Talking to my teammates now, because we're worried about what we're gonna be if we say anything. We're getting s***.

And I'm staring at the wall, and I'm just sitting there for a couple hours until one of our union members shows up. And the police union guy comes on in and sees me wearing all of my kits still. He's like, why is Jordan wearing all of his stuff? Like, we gotta get him comfortable. Like, this is crazy.

And then the deputy chief walks out, and he's like, comes back in. He's all right. We've made arrangements. Jordan needs to go downstairs to forensics. So we get up, walk down the hallway again, walk downstairs, go into the forensics office, and the major crime supervisor is waiting inside there for me. He takes my helmet, takes my carbine, and then does photos. Has me take all my kit off one piece at a time.

So I take my helmet off, take my plates off, hand it over to him. He's photographing it or getting the forensics guy to photograph it. He's bagging everything up. And then he. I'm stripped down now just to my blues, and he's like, okay, I need your uniform and your boots. I don't have anything else to wear. He's just like, well, where's your locker? I'm like, it's at the north office. We had a couple sub offices, and I worked out of the north one. He's like, okay, well, we'll get you something.

So they send a patrol officer who goes and grabs me, sweats and a t-shirt, comes on back. I'm standing there the whole time waiting. He comes on into the room, gives me the stuff, and he has me change in front of him and gives him, give him my stuff. He bags up my uniform, and I'm sent back up to that boardroom.

Jon Becker: It's kind of a weird thing to take all of your clothes when nothing hit you. You weren't close enough to the suspect. I mean, just for those that don't know, like, you photograph people after shooting you, you document their gear, you document the status of everything, you know, number of rounds in the magazine and all of that, so that you can later go back if you need to reconstruct the shooting. But taking your clothes is kind of an odd one. How did that feel?

Jordan MacWilliams: I felt like a criminal. Yeah. I. I don't know to this day why he chose to do that. I think probably he was just erring on the side of doing the best evidence investigation that he could and seizing absolutely everything.

But at a certain point, like, I was thinking for a second he was going to bag my hands. He never said that, but I was like, I felt like a shooting suspect that we'd just taken into custody. I didn't feel like a police officer who had been doing his job.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I guess, you know, nt to defend him, but maybe to put, you know, best eye on that, not. Not that they deserve it, considering what's about to happen, but maybe he just treated it like any other shooting and was like, I'm just going to document everything, because that's what I do. And, you know, a little foreshadow. Not really concerned about your wants or needs.

Jordan MacWilliams: No, no, they, unfortunately, that was not one of the their concerns. And he definitely was doing his best evidence investigation and gathering all that stuff. So we go back upstairs, go sit back down in the boardroom, and still haven't gotten to see my wife and dad at this point, who are outside and waiting.

And eventually my union rep is like, this is stupid. Like, Jordan needs to get out of here. Like, what are we waiting for? So the independent investigations office, before we can go, have to serve us with paperwork that says whether you're a witness officer or a subject officer, and the witness officers are compelled to give a statement and hand over their notes, etcetera. And a subject officer isn't. They've got the right to silence under the constitution and don't have to say anything, but I have to be served with that.

And then they'll ask me to give a statement and then I can decline and leave. So they decided that they wanted to speak to all the witnesses before they were going to speak to me. So they go to the scene, they go to new west headquarters, but they don't want to come see me. They're leaving me for last.

Jon Becker: These are the independent investigators?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So they're, they're running, you know, an FBI style criminal investigation where the last person they talked to is the one they want to arrest.

Jordan MacWilliams: Exactly. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Fantastic!

Jordan MacWilliams: So that takes 8 hours. So it takes 8 hours before they eventually come to the office. And they….

Jon Becker: So wait, shooting occurs at what time?

Jordan MacWilliams: 10:30 in the morning?

Jon Becker: So you don't see the independent investigators until 435 o'clock in the afternoon?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, that's right.

Jon Becker: Are they feeding you? Are they giving you?

Jordan MacWilliams: Well, they weren't until my union rep spoke up and said how crazy this was and demanded that Jordan be allowed to leave. And they're like, well, you can't leave. We got to wait for him to get here. No, no, he's leaving. He can't leave. And they have this argument back and forth, and then he's like, well, I'm going to take him for a bite to eat and. Okay, but you gotta bring them right back as soon as they're here. Okay, fine.

So we drive out, go to a little burger shack, grab a milkshake. Now my wife and dad are there, I'm able to see them. And we come back and I walk my way back into the boardroom, my little prison, and sit back down and then wait there for the next few hours until it was right around 05:00 when they show up.

So the independent investigation's office members, they show up, they come on in. I'm now taken out to a different office, to the patrol supervisor's office, and it's just me, my union agent, and these two investigators. And they turn on their audio recorder and start trying to ask me some questions. And my union reps, like, he's not going to answer any questions right now. He just needs to go home. And they keep asking some questions like, no, Jordan's going to go home. Serve him as paperwork.

So they give me my paperwork, says I'm a subject officer. I sign it. They again ask me if I'll give a statement. And at this point, my union agent's, like, getting pretty frustrated. He's like, no, he's not going to give a statement right now. He needs to go home. So get up. Union agent walks me to my truck, meet up with my wife, who's waiting for me down there, and we drive home.

Jon Becker: And what day of the week is this?

Jordan MacWilliams: It's a Friday.

Jon Becker: Okay, so now we're Friday evening, 06:00.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, get home, probably 06:37. And I remember just, we went for a walk. We didn't really talk too much about the incident. I remember my wife saying that somebody had told her I should avoid watching the media. And I'm like, sure, I'm gonna watch the news.

Jon Becker: It's like telling you, don't look at the rock when you're mountain biking. You're gonna hit the rock.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I get that advice, and I've heard it again since, and other people have mentioned it. Don't watch the media. Don't pay attention to what they say. You are going to watch the media. This era we're living in of, you know, Twitter, Instagram, everything livestreamed. You're going to see it. You're going to hear it. Your family's going to see it. They're going to hear it.

The best approach is to be prepared for what you're going to see. You are going to see it. So just mentally prepare yourself for what you're going to see in here and know that the media is not going to say, Jordan showed up for work today like he does every other day and did his best to try and save somebody he's never met and then shot somebody who thought he was going to kill him. They're not going to say that. They never will.

Jon Becker: Oh, they're going to say, Delta police officer murders suicidal subject.

Jordan MacWilliams: 42 year old persian refugee. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So when is the first time, I mean, obviously, up until now, you're probably thinking like, this isn't going well. When is the first time you get an indication that this thing is going to go to s*** on you?

Jordan MacWilliams: Well, maybe just before we say that, I did want to mention the next morning something pretty cool happened that's had an impact on me for a long time since. And I remember I woke up the next morning, it was pretty early, and my doorbell's ringing. And I walked downstairs, open the door, and it's the chief of New Westminster police.

So the team I was a part of, Washington regional team. I worked for, Delta. New West was our neighboring agency. And then there was a couple other agencies part of the team, and this incident had occurred in New west. So their chief, who I did not work for, showed up at my house, and he knocks on the door. I open it up. I'm like, chief, how are you? He's good. Jordan, may I come in for a minute? Yeah, absolutely. Invite him on in.

And remember, he says to me, he shakes my hand. He says to me, jordan, I just want to thank you for what you did for my community yesterday, and I really appreciate it. And I want you to know that I appreciate it. And that was so impactful in that moment to feel like, okay, you know, because we talked about this already, you know, good person having to kill somebody first, exposure to real interpersonal violence. Like, I've been in fights before, but nobody ever shot at me. I never shot at somebody.

And now I'm getting that affirmation from a person in leadership, in authority, thanking me. He didn't, I didn't need him to get on the news and say, Jordan is a hero, and he did a great job. But I didn't even realize how impactful it was for him to say to me to my face, thank you for what you did and shake my hand.

Jon Becker: And at that point, did you talk to your own chief?

Jordan MacWilliams: No, no, I hadn't heard from him.

Jon Becker: So the chief, when you're back at the department, the chief never comes and sees you. There's no, like, you don't have a moment of like, hey, man, are you okay?

Jordan MacWilliams: No, no, we didn't have any of that. And yeah, I'd been around the department my whole life. Like, my dad worked for that agency for a long time, and I got on there pretty young, but I'd been to Christmas parties and I'd known these, these guys and their kids and, yeah, he, he didn't have anything to say to me?

Jon Becker: Lovely!

Jordan MacWilliams: So we get through the weekend, Monday rolls around. I get a call from the human resources supervisor, who tells me that they're just figuring out what they're going to do with me because this is a new process for them.

Normally, like, when they do internal investigations of shootings, they find out right away kind of what happened and they get like, an overview of the file, but they're getting none of that. The independent investigations office won't share anything with them until they're done. So he's like, we're going to have to remove you from operations until we get some more information about that.

And so he tells me I'm going to be removed from the tactical team and I'm going to be taken off patrol, and they're going to put me into the emergency planning unit. So 24 year old Jordan, who, 25 now, I turned 25 the day after the shooting. 25 year old Jordan, who my whole life now, to this point, all I've wanted to do is be this police officer, get on the SWAT team. This is what I'm really now wrapping my identity up in. And what I really care about is just getting ripped away from me.

And, you know, I'm not happy about it. I'm trying to, like, put on a brave face and just say the right things. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Where do you need me to be and what's my job gonna be? He tells me to show up Tuesday morning in the emergency planning unit. And I hope I don't offend anybody who works in an emergency planning unit.

But in our agency at the time, that was the unit where you'd go to go count staplers or life jackets and patrol cars. It was not what a young patrol officer, SWAT guy wanted to be doing. So I do. I show up. Now I'm working in the emergency planning unit, which fortunately for me, is in the same office as the training unit. And the training unit has a couple officers in there who, there's the firearms guy, there's the use of force combatives guy, and we're all in the same office, and they're good guys. They see that I'm not perhaps being used to my full potential in that emergency planning unit.

So they approach the patrol, the human resources supervisor, and just ask him if they could have me come give them a hand. And they say there's all kinds of paperwork Jordan could take care of, so they'd love to have me help out.

Jon Becker: Nice!

Jordan MacWilliams: They were just trying to.

Jon Becker: Look out for me, trying to rescue you from counting staples?

Jordan MacWilliams: And they did. Yeah. So they rescue me from the stapler assignment and just a couple awesome guys. I really look up to both of them and they start sending me on good courses. I go on some firearms instructors courses, use of force instructor courses, and start getting my certifications. And then they roll me slow, roll me into being a use of force instructor for the department where I'm now teaching this stuff. Ironically, I become like the top firearms instructor for the agency for about a year there.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that is ironic.

Jordan MacWilliams: But while all of this is going on, we are waiting for updates on the investigation and there's no updates. Not getting anything. So the union's hired a lawyer for me. I asked the lawyer, I'm like, hey, have you heard anything? No, haven't heard anything. Have you heard anything? No, haven't heard anything.

I prepared a written statement which we provided to them of my perspective. The event that was in consultation with my lawyer, we had sent that over to them. He thought that that would speed things up and help this go more quickly, but we still get no response. No response.

So now I'm working in the training unit. It's the best of a bad situation, but it is really wearing on me in my personal life. And just being removed from something that you identified so strongly with, you know, being an operator, being on the team, not having that was really hard for me. That was the hardest thing that was going through my mind for that whole time. And it took almost two years until we get the next update.

Jon Becker: Is there, I mean, obviously, if there's an independent investigations board, you know, office of Independent Investigations, there's kind of implicitly always a threat of being charged criminally.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, right.

Jon Becker: What if this, if the – Is it office of Independent Investigations?

Jordan MacWilliams: Independent investigations office.

Jon Becker: So I. Oh, that's really, that there's basically two ways they can go, right. They can say good shoot or refer you to a prosecutor.

Jordan MacWilliams: Exactly.

Jon Becker: So over your head are hanging criminal charges for two years.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, but it's funny you say that. That thought never even crossed my mind. Like, I was so confident in the shooting in my memory of what happened. And even the media of what happened wasn't bad. Like, these people, a bunch of witnesses saw what happened. They get on the news like, yeah, he took this girl at gunpoint and the police rescued her and then they shot him. Like it. There wasn't this big public outcry.

Jon Becker: There's nothing in that fact pattern that is even moderately troubling.

Jordan MacWilliams: No, and it wasn't troubling to me. Like, I wrestled for a short while with the fact that I killed somebody, but I was really confident in, you know, the choices I'd made. He made all the choices that led up to that moment.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: He made all the choices that led to me shooting him. He pointed a gun at us that he could kill us with, and I stopped him from killing us.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: So I was. I had no issues with that. I never thought for 1 second even that I was waiting for criminal charges. I just thought it was taking forever to get cleared.

Jon Becker: And you were frustrated because you were stuck in training until you did get cleared.

Jordan MacWilliams: Exactly. Got it. And that was a choice of the organization. And, you know, the organization. Nobody told them they had to do that. They took it upon themselves and they decided that in their best interests, it would be best if Jordan wasn't working on the road. Jordan wasn't working on the team, because.

Jon Becker: At this point, Jordan's a killer?

Jordan MacWilliams: I don't want to presuppose what they were thinking or they were just afraid because they didn't have information they didn't know.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And, I mean, for context, this independent investigations office is brand new. Who is running? Well, the IIO.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. I don't want to segue too much, but when this whole thing kind of spooled up in the years leading up to 2012, they looked for their rockstar to come run this organization. So they decide they're going to hire a fellow who'd actually come down from LA. He'd worked in LA for a while, and he'd been one of the lawyers at the DA's office during the crash rampart investigation with LAPD. And he'd been involved with that prosecution.

And then subsequent to that, he'd left. He'd gone, and he'd run the Colorado's version of civilian oversight board. I don't know what it's called, but he'd done that for a few years. So he had a little bit of resume. So they hired him. He came on up, and now he was running this organization. And I had no knowledge, I didn't even know his name at the time, but we had no exposure to him. We hadn't gotten briefings from them or anything. All we'd been told was an email with instructions. What you're supposed to do if you get into a shooting now that these guys are in charge.

Jon Becker: Nice!

Jordan MacWilliams: So, yeah, so I'm working in the training unit. Yeah. My job is, you know, prep for training, help organize training, run training days working as use of force instructor, firearms instructor. And this goes on for, you know, almost two years.

And then one day we're working, myself and Jim, one of the other guys in the training unit, we're working at this house that we owned, that we were just, the organization owned. We're just putting up breaching doors in it so patrol officers can train at it. And while we're doing that, like good coppers, we kept the radio on in our car that we had, which was just an unmarked pickup with some emergency equipment on it. And we're just listening. We hear this call come in about, well, these, the firefighters, they've seen a car that's driving all over the road, and it's going on, coming, and they're worried it's going to kill somebody, and they're just following it from a distance.

And so, you know, the plate comes back. Now they're getting some more information, and it's been involved in armed carjacking. And this guy took this vehicle at gunpoint and was armed, involved in another robbery, etcetera. So, okay, well, this is legit. And we're just kind of listening to this, and we hear he turns and he turns, and now he's going down the street that this house is on that we're at like, oh, perfect.

Well, what we can do now, we're going to get into the truck. I'm driving. Jim's in the passenger seat. We're just going to keep a long eye on this car until patrol officers can get into the area and deal with this guy. So he crosses my bow, I pull out, get in behind him. I'm just start following him. And, yeah, he's driving like a bit of a maniac. There's not a ton of cars right now, though. He's just all over the road. It's a little bit of a quiet street. And now he's going down, he's taking the on ramp, and he gets onto the on ramp, and he goes onto the highway. And it is like 02:30 in the afternoon rush hour is just starting. And Vancouver rush hour isn't nearly as bad as la rush hour, but we still have lots of cars.

Jon Becker: Oh, it's impressive! I've driven in it. Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: And we get in behind him, and now I'm. I'm saying, okay, there's all these cars. He's going to kill somebody. I got to light this guy up. So I put my lights on, and pretty much as soon as he does, I do that. He now crosses the highway and he. There's a little break in the concrete median and he's now going northbound in the southbound lanes and he's driving them up the emergency shoulder. And I'm like, oh my God, he is going to kill somebody. I've got to stop this guy.

Jon Becker: You say the emergency shoulder, do you mean the, like the inside of the number one lane?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yes.

Jon Becker: So the shoulder closest to the northbound traffic. So he's basically driving into the fast lane.

Jordan MacWilliams: Correct.

Jon Becker: Right alongside the fast lane, the wrong way.

Jordan MacWilliams: As rush on a free riding as Russia. Okay, so cars are ripping towards us. So now I'm going to stop this guy. So I'm trying to get up beside him and push him into the concrete so I can stop him, but I can't get beside him because every time I pull out, there's cars coming at, you know.

Jon Becker: 130 miles an hour.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, right at me.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: So fortunately, a real heads up patrol officer gets somebody with their semi to block the entire highway and stop traffic. And now if traffic thins out, I am able to get out. I get up beside this guy, I just pin him into the concrete and ride him to a stop. Then we challenge him, prone him out, take him into custody, high fives and belly bumps. And I think I've done a great job.

Jon Becker: Yeah, everybody's a hero.

Jordan MacWilliams: So hand them over to the patrol guys. I go home that night and just come back to work the next morning. Started at 07:00 a.m. and as I'm walking into the office at 07:00 a.m. the HR supervisor's there waiting for me. And he's like, jordan, you need to come with me. Come down to the deputy chief's office.

So I follow him down, we go into the deputy's office and for a moment I actually think I'm going to get a attaboy. Like, great job yesterday, Jordan. And I sit down and as soon as I sit down, the deputy chief just lights into me. He's like, I don't know what you were thinking yesterday with all this hanging over you, taking this upon yourself to intervene and to stop this guy, you shouldn't have done that. That's unacceptable.

And I'm just kind of taking it for a sec and then I'm, I do speak up and say, sir, I believe I had to do something. I couldn't let him drive the way he was. I thought he was going to kill somebody. And he just starts yelling at me. He's like, no, you're wrong. You shouldn't have done anything. Jordan, you are a disappointment. You have let this organization down. You've let your dad down.

Jon Becker: Oh, God!

Jordan MacWilliams: And you've let me down. And I'd known that guy my whole life. And I'm looking at him and I'm angry, but I'm also just. I'm super hurt. And I don't know what to say. I'm speechless. And I'm, like, basically in tears at this point. I don't even remember what he said to me after that until he's finished brow beating me. And I get up and I walk out of his office, and I'm just, like, processing what's happened. I think I've done a great job.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you're going in there thinking you're gonna get a commendation, instead you got a condemnation.

Jordan MacWilliams: And as I'm walking out, he yells at me. He might not even have been yelling, but in my memory, it is so loud that I am getting taken out of the training unit and being put back in emergency planning. And it was like that was his way of punishing me.

Jon Becker: Back to prison.

Jordan MacWilliams: Back to prison. More staplers to count. And I remember walking down the hall, just. And I go down towards Jimmy's desk, and I just kind of stop at Jim's desk, and I get a little dramatic, pull my badge off my belt and just slap it down on the table. And he jumps up. Jordan, what's wrong? What's wrong?

And I don't even have the words to tell him. And he just walks out with me. He walks me to my car, and we talk for a few minutes, and then I. He's like, you're sick for the rest of the day. Go home. So I get in my truck, drive home and get home, tell my wife. She's all up in arms, indignant about what way I'm being treated.

Jon Becker: Does she work at the same agency or she works….

Jordan MacWilliams: No, she works at a. She works at a different agency.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jordan MacWilliams: So, yeah, she got to be a spectator.

Jon Becker: Fantastic!

Jordan MacWilliams: But, yeah, so I've explained this to her. Then I get a phone call from that HR supervisor, and he's like, hey, Jordan, you know, understand you're probably going through a lot, so you're being. You're going to be put off on sick leave. Okay, whatever. So I get off the phone with him. Now I'm off on sick leave. So I don't. I don't really know. I pretty much had never taken a sick day up to that point. I was a very conscientious young police officer, and unless I was, like, on death's door, I was not going to be taking a sick day.

So now there's just one more little piece of my identity being stripped away from me that I'm. I'm not this iron man showing up for work guy. Now I'm taking sick days because I can't handle what's going on. And that's what's going through my head. And so the rest of that week, I'm just at home with my wife.

And there's, you know, next to. There's nothing really going on. And then it's Friday morning, and I'm sitting there. I haven't been sleeping well, so I'm up pretty early. And I'm sitting there at the kitchen table just drinking a coffee. And I get a phone call, and it's my lawyer calling. And he's like, hey, Jordan, where are you? I just tell him, I'm just at home. What's, what's going on? He's like, I've got some terrible news for you.

There's no other way to tell you this, but you're going to be charged with murder, and you need to show up in court Monday morning or you're going to be taken in custody over the weekend.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's terrible news.

Jordan MacWilliams: And I'm sitting there just like dumbfounded. I, trying to process, well, how does this happen? And I try and ask him some questions. He doesn't have any answers for me. We get off the phone, I tell him I'll see him Monday morning. He tells me where to meet him for the appearance. And I just have this thought pretty much right away after that, I must have made a terrible mistake. I have done something horribly wrong. I must remember it wrong. What did I do? And I am just crushed. Like, absolutely crushed in that moment.

And I don't know how much time goes by, but after a little amount of time, there's a knock on the door. And I go and answer the door. And it was my first patrol sergeant. I didn't work for him anymore, but he had shown up in my house. He'd somehow found out about this. I think he actually had been transferred to HR recently, and that's probably how he found out.

But he showed up at my house. He doesn't say anything. He just walks in and gives me a hug and, yeah, like, super, super powerful. I have so much respect for that man. Like, you know, it's. Remember we were talking earlier about, you know, when, when people, you know, are going through a hard time, you don't necessarily know what to say. You don't know what the right words are, but you can still be their friend and still try and be there for them. And that's what he did. And it was really meaningful.

Pretty quick after that, lots of other people showed up. My family, other guys I worked with. My poor wife is – We just had a baby recently before this. So we had our baby in March. This is October. So she's a few months old, and my wife's taking care of the baby. Her sisters are there trying to support her. My families are trying to support me.

And this whole time, I got my teammates there. I'm just in my own head thinking I've done something terribly wrong. What did I do? And that's the thought. Like I'm blaming myself somehow. This is my fault. We have some lawyers meetings on the Saturday and the Sunday. Then we show up to court on Monday morning.

And I remember coming into court, and they snuck me in a back entrance because there was going to be a whole bunch of media. And I walk in there, and I'm there with my dad, my wife, my legal team. There's like three people there, three lawyers there. And we walk down to the sheriff's office. So the sheriff's where we work. They run all the courts in the court system.

And we go down to the sheriff's office in the courthouse, and my lawyer says, you know, sheriff, this is Constable McWilliams. He's here to surrender himself on a charge of murder. And this poor young sheriff, he's just seen the look on his face, and he stands up and he says to my lawyer, I'll be right back. And he turns around, walks into the back, goes to his supervisor's office. Supervisor comes out, and she walks out, this sheriff staff sergeant and she comes to see me, my lawyer.

And she looks at me and she's like, are you Jordan? I'm like, yes, I am. She's like, I understand you're being charged with murder this morning. Yep, that's correct. And we're going to need to take you into custody. That's what I understand. And she says to me, you know what, Jordan? I think you can walk yourself to court. I don't need to take you anywhere.

Jon Becker: Good for her.

Jordan MacWilliams: So me and my lawyer, we walk on down, we walk through the courthouse, walk on up, walk into the courtroom, and I go to get into the prisoner's box, and the sheriff there stops me and tells me to sit down in the gallery.

Jon Becker: Nice!

Jordan MacWilliams: So I sit down. Now it's me. I'm sitting there with my dad, my wife and the lawyers are up, and they start arguing. And they read out the charge. I stand up, identify myself. Yes, I'm Jordan McWilliams. And the judge reads out the charge. And then they say, so it's one count of murder, one count of second degree murder. And the lawyers start talking.

And then my lawyer is starting to get pretty animated now. And I hadn't really been paying attention. And now he is arguing with the prosecutor because the prosecutor is saying that he's opposing bail. And my lawyer's like, my client is a strong member of the community. He's got deep roots, family. He's a police officer going on and on and on and on and on. And they are demanding that we need to put up bail.

So, fortunately, my dad's 36 years of police officer, he retired at the officer level as a inspector, which is like a captain. And his 36 years gave him enough income that he was able to put up my $50,000 bail with deposit.

Jon Becker: So your dad has to go and take $50,000. Cause canadian bail is different. You actually post a bond and, you know, you come up with a little bit of money, canadian bail, you. Your dad has to go, you know, cash out of savings bond or whatever, get $50,000 in cash and turn it over.

Jordan MacWilliams: He put it against the line, transfers the line of credit on his house. So my dad, 36 year cop, has to bail out his son, a copy for murder.

Jon Becker: And bad memories just keep coming.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, they. Yeah, they really piled up. But we – I do get released, get bail, go home. And now, like things, I'm suspended with pay and charged with murder and on bail. And things are like, for Jordan, they've pretty much gone about as far off road right as they can get. And now, you know, I've got a new baby, my wife's home on maternity leave, and my life is just falling apart like I am. I'm trying to put on a brave face, but I'm not sleeping at night. I am laying there beside my wife, looking at my baby in a little crib at three in the morning, thinking about going to prison for the rest of my life.

And that is the thought that just keeps going through my head. And then I just keep circling back to, I must have done something terribly wrong. And I don't know what it is. I don't know what I've done. I haven't seen anything. I haven't gotten to see the surveillance videos or anything from the scene yet because that's all been held by the independent investigations office. And now I'm just believing that I've done something wrong, and I'm remembering it wrong.

Jon Becker: That's terrible.

Jordan MacWilliams: And this goes on for. This goes on for a couple months. So this is October goes through to November and December, and by December, like, I am not doing good. Like, I'm just staying up all night drinking, trying to sleep during the day. I am basically a useless husband and father doing absolutely nothing around the house, just engrossed in my own mind about what's happened, thinking about going to prison.

And I remember one day my wife asked me to take the recycling out. We got, like, the little bin underneath the sink. So I grabbed the recycling, I take it into the garage, and I remember I put the cardboard in the cardboard bag, and then, you know, there's this beer can. I throw that in the return it cycle pile. And then, oh, there's another can. Oh, there's a bottle. There's another bottle. And as I'm doing this, I'm like, is my wife telling me something here? Is she trying to send me a message?

Jon Becker: You've been set up by your wife to give a quick self assessment.

Jordan MacWilliams: Smart girl!

Jon Becker: Yeah, very smart girl!

Jordan MacWilliams: So I walked back inside, and pretty much as soon as I put the bin away, she's like, I need to talk to you about something. I've decided I'm going to go back to work early, and you are in charge of our daughter. You need to take care of her. And we've talked about this since, and I knew exactly what she was doing, and she knew what she was doing, but she's also very bravely leaving her baby with this borderline alcoholic murderer who now needs to.

Jon Becker: Well, borderline alcoholic accused murderer.

Jordan MacWilliams: Accused murder. Thank you. Chronically depressed, who needs to take care of her child? And it was one of the best things she could have done because what it did for me was it gave me automatically structure in my life.

So now instead of staying up all night drinking, well, I have to get up at 06:00 a.m. and take care of the baby because Steph's going to work. So I get up, I take care of the baby, I get her fed, and then. Okay, well, I got to do something. Now is 07:38 a.m. in the morning. Like, I can't just sit here with the baby and get pretty bored just playing with the baby for hours on end. Okay, well, let's find something to do. So then I take her to mommy and me reading time.

Jon Becker: Mommy and me class.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, we go to.

Jon Becker: You're the one dude at the mommy and me class.

Jordan MacWilliams: I was. Yep. Parrot taught swimming lessons. And we're doing all these activities and, like, I got to have this connection with my daughter that so many dads never get to have during that time of their lives. And you want to talk about silver linings? There's a silver lining like that, for sure. I get, I got to have that really special connection with her.

But then, you know, I'd come home, and now it's time to put her down for her late morning nap. And I put her down for a nap, I'm like, okay, well, now what am I going to do? Well, I might as well work out. We have a little garage gym set up. So now I'm starting to take care of myself again. I'm starting to hit the gym. I'm working out.

And then, you know, get her up, feed her lunch now, take care of her for a bit, do something else, put her down for afternoon nap. And I'm like, well, I might as well get dinner ready. So now I start making these beautiful gourmet dinners for my wife. She loved the dinners I was making.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah. She's at this point probably becoming okay with you being charged with murder because she's got a babysitter and a chef.

Jordan MacWilliams: To this day, she tells people I'm the better chef in hopes that it makes me cook more.

Jon Becker: Well played.

Jordan MacWilliams: But, yeah, there's just like that structure that I got by having to be dad was so important for me to now, like, start to get things back on track, manage myself and manage my own mental health. And then it'll say, well, now I need to really work on finding a purpose.

And the purpose is I'm going to help my lawyers and I'm going to work with them. And so I showed up to my lawyers office and I'm like, hey, you tell me what to do. And I started going through case law and reading stuff with them, and I do research with the legal assistants.

And then in January, so now we've gone charged in October. Wife goes back to work for December, January. Now we get the disclosure package from the prosecutors. So now we get a hard drive with everything that they're going to use to prosecute me. And so in Canada, we have this presumptive disclosure where everything that is going to be used during the prosecution has to be provided.

Jon Becker: Similar to the US.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So they provide this, and it's a Saturday that my lawyer gets the hard drive. So he calls me, he's like, hey, I got the hard drive. You want to meet on Monday? And we'll go over it. And I'm like, David, I am already in my car driving to your office. I will be there. And if you're not Monday….

Jon Becker: No, we're going to meet at your office, or we're going to meet at your house. It's going to happen in an hour. You choose.

Jordan MacWilliams: If you are not there, I am going to break into your house and I am going to get the hard drive and look at it.

Jon Becker: And then, I'll be accused of burglary.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And murder.

Jordan MacWilliams: And so he understood how important it was to me. So we got in there and we. I remember. I remember really real clear plugging in that hard drive, and then, like, there's tons of documents and media on it, and we're just kind of going through folders. And I knew there was a video from the robot we'd used to deliver the throw phone.

And so I'm looking for it, looking for it, and I find it and I open it up and, like, I can't talk. I'm so anxious to see this video. Two years plus later, after this shooting, I've never gotten to see any of the media of, you know, the videos, the audio that we had, helicopter overhead. I've never seen any of that. I just have my memory.

Jon Becker: Which at this point you're starting to really question, because if your memory is accurate, you should have never been charged with murder.

Jordan MacWilliams: I absolutely think I remember it wrong and that I've done something wrong. And I opened the video and I watch it, and I watch the guy move around. He's pointing the gun in the air. He levels it at us. I shoot him. He drops to the ground, and I'm like, David, that's what I remember happening.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Isn't that what I said happened?

Jordan MacWilliams: Like, and he, like, he's a bit of a dramatic guy. I love him. He's on my Christmas card list. He throws some papers up in the air, and he's like, I don't understand. Like, I don't understand neither. Nobody understands. Like, none of the lawyers understand. I don't understand. And so now we have our next appearance in court. And, you know, in the Canadian legal system, they have preliminary inquiries to, like, test the evidence to see if there's enough to go to trial.

Jon Becker: Yeah, we do preliminary hearings in the US.

Jordan MacWilliams: ,So very similar. But the prosecutors, if they receive the consent of the attorney general of that province, can skip the preliminary inquiry and go straight to trial. But in order to do so, they have to file their theory of the case in its entirety with the court. And that skipping a preliminary inquiry called a direct indictment in our province. That never happens. Never do that. They do it in my case. They choose to go by direct indictment. And as such, they, instead of having a preliminary inquiry to test the evidence, they now file with the court. The theory of the Crown.

Jon Becker: No. So they have to reveal. They have to reveal the evidence. They don't have to reveal their strategy.

Jordan MacWilliams: No.

Jon Becker: So now they have to reveal the strategy.

Jordan MacWilliams: So I remember they file it with the court. We get it right away. And I read it and it says that they essentially, that the prosecution believes that Mister Bayrami, the fellow that I killed, moved the gun from a full upward to a full downward position, apparently unconsciously. And as such, Constable McWilliams, killing of Mister Bay Rami constitutes murder.

Jon Becker: So your inability to perceive. I mean, let's assume that their theory is correct, which it's not, but let's assume that it is. Your inability to perceive his intent in a quarter of a second at 25 yards constitutes murder.

Jordan MacWilliams: That's their theory. So their theory. And we do the frame by frame. They've done a frame by frame analysis and we get to look at them one at a time. From the moment he points the gun at me and my teammates to when I shoot him is 0.37 seconds.

So, like, yeah, it's not instant, but human beings can instantly respond to something. And then to say that they think he moved the gun unconsciously, that he wasn't intentionally aiming at us, well, whether you intentionally aim a gun at me or not, you can still kill me with it. You can accidentally kill me when you hit a gun.

Jon Becker: I think when you step on a bug on the ground, the bug doesn't care whether it was intentional. No, I mean, it's insane.

Jordan MacWilliams: So, like, part of seeing that and when I read that, like, that empowered me, I'm like, there's no way I am going to get convicted of anything on this theory. This is absolutely ridiculous. And my lawyer agreed, but he also gave me that caution. Like, anything can happen in a courtroom.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Anything you stick in front of a jury can go sideways.

Jordan MacWilliams: You never know. So we're working through that. I'm trying to help out with the prep for court. And something really amazing happened that pretty much completely deflated the prosecution's case. And that was in the spring, about march. So the hostage who we'd rescued, when the independent investigations office, they'd done their investigation, they never actually spoke to her. So she gets no contact.

Jon Becker: And ever spoke to the victim. Well, that's a really independent investigation, independent of the facts.

Jordan MacWilliams: When they defended themselves on the fact they hadn't spoke to her, they said, well, the moment in time when Constable McWilliams shot him wasn't affected by that, which is, of course, garbage.

Jon Becker: Like, that's the entire reason Constable McWilliams is there.

Jordan MacWilliams: I couldn't agree with you more.

Jon Becker: Well, I guess the American, you know, the American lawyer in me is confused by their canadian theory.

Jordan MacWilliams: My Canadian lawyer was very much on the same page as you.

Jon Becker: I think that's the whole good lawyer, bad lawyer distinction.

Jordan MacWilliams: So she has never been interviewed. She sees on the news that I am being charged with murder, and she remembers my face. She remembers seeing me run by her and put my body in front of her so that she can be pulled to safety. And she doesn't particularly care for that. Jordan being charged with murder, she thinks I'm her hero. And she.

Jon Becker: Because you are her hero. Yet, to be fair, you are the reason that she's alive.

Jordan MacWilliams: So she drives to Delta headquarters and she goes to the office, and she walks to the front counter, and she's like. She tells them who she is. She's like, I need to speak to somebody. I want to tell them what happened. Like, he saved my life. And they're like, well, you know, the independent investigations office is in charge of this file. You need to talk to them. Here's their phone number. You can call them. Like, I'm going to drive there.

So she drives to their office. She goes. Bangs on the door. This is who I am. I want to talk to you about what happened. They take her phone number, say, we'll give you a call back. They don't call her back. So now she's waiting around. Nobody's called her. And she's like, she's had enough of this. So she drives straight to the news downtown, and she goes on the news and says, this is garbage. He shouldn't be charged with anything.

This officer risked his life to save me and pretty much this woman. Pretty much as soon as this happens, the prosecutors start calling all their witnesses, and they're like, we're gonna. We're gonna do pretrial interviews early. So they're starting to do these pretrial interviews, which is my teammates, the civilian witnesses, other officers who were there.

And I got to see some of the interviews afterwards. And pretty much everyone's like, of course Jordan shot him. He was going to kill us. Like, he pointed a gun at us. What do you think was going to happen? And there were, there was some yelling. They were, they were pretty unhappy with these prosecutors charging me, but they also did a really good job of articulating to them, like, you know, this guy needed to be stopped.

And yes, you know, at the moment in time he was shot. Maybe it was 0.37 seconds after he pointed the gun at the police, but, like, a normal human can't even perceive that. Like, you can't perceive that change and react to it in time. You have to observe things as they happen. You have to make decisions as a result of what you've seen, and you need to act. That takes time. That's a process. And as some of that stuff started to come in, as they looked at their file, they decided they weren't going to prosecute me anymore.

Jon Becker: And so, hey, sorry we completely f***** up your life and, you know, ruined everything. But….

Jordan MacWilliams: And this was – Here's a, here's a very canadian, right, sorry.

Jon Becker: Yeah, sorry.

Jordan MacWilliams: There was no sorry.

Jon Becker: Sorry we f***** up your life.

Jordan MacWilliams: So this takes some time, though. So now this is kind of march, and it actually takes them to July. And then on, in July they dropped the charges. But I should tell you something else that was going on during this time that we talked about how organizations can support their members when they're going through tough times, regardless of a critical incident, personal tragedy, whatever. And for me, I got to see a huge contrast in that during this time.

So this is about eight months that I'm off work. I'm charged with murder. Pretty much as bad as it can get for a police officer. And nobody from the command staff spoke to me. I didn't get one phone call, one email, one text message, nothing. Like, nobody talked to me for months until, I think it was in March.

It was right around the time that actually, the hostage went on the news and I get a phone call and. Is this Jordan? Yeah, yeah, this is Jordan speaking. Hi, Jordan. My name's Neil. I'm the new chief of the Delft police department. I've just been hired, and first thing I wanted to do as the new chief, I wanted to reach out to you and give you my support, and I'm sure everybody's doing a ton for you already, but you just let me know if there's anything I can do for you. And I'm kind of…

Jon Becker: Since you called.

Jordan MacWilliams: I'm kind of taken aback by this. And I say to him, well, chief, welcome. To be honest, you're the first person with any brass on their shoulders who's talked to me since I got charged. And he says to me, he's like, Jordan, where do you live? I tell him where I live. He's like, can I come meet you for coffee? And that morning, we go for coffee, and we're sitting down, and we're talking, and he's like, you know, Jordan, I don't know what happened. I just know what was on the news.

But what I saw is that police officers risked their lives to save somebody, and what happened happened afterwards. But, you know, you're a hero for doing that, and I really appreciate what you've done, and I want to know what I can do for you. And I was just so taken aback, like, I'm completely abandoned by my organization.

For months and months, nobody's even talked to me. And now this new guy's come in, and he's telling me he believes in me, and it was just so powerful in that moment. And I told him, well, honestly, chief, like, I don't really know. I'm just kind of sitting at home doing nothing now. He's like, do you want to come back to work?

I'm like, you can't have a cop charged with murder working for your department. He's like, I can find some light duties for you, obviously can't carry a gun. You can't go out on the road, but we're going to find something for you to do. If you want to be at work, you can come back to work. Like, well, I would like to. And that brings up something else that I really found going through this.

The importance of connection and feeling like you're a part of the community. Like the law enforcement community, the SWAT community, like, not having that and being separated from it was so negative. Stripping away my identity, like I was talking about before, the idea of getting to come back and getting to be around my brothers and sisters in this profession was very appealing. And I realized how much I missed and how much I wanted to do that. And so I said, yeah, absolutely. I want to come back. You know, I'll even count staplers. I'm pretty sure I said exactly that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because at this point, the stapler job is starting to sound pretty good.

Jordan MacWilliams: It does sound pretty good. And so he arranged for me to come back to work. And I did come back to work. I'm working some light duties. And then let's just fast forward now, because we're here July, I think it was July 14th or 15th, and I get a call from my lawyer, and I'm at the office now. And he says to me, Jordan, where are you right now? And instantly I flashback to the first time the lawyer called and said, jordan, where are you right now? Where I get charged with murderous.

So now I'm like, how can this get any worse? Yeah, I'm at work. He's like, well, I've got some wonderful news. The prosecution's entered a stay of proceedings this morning. Your bail is gone. You are a free man. And, like, I can't even tell you how I felt that way. I got off the phone, people, like, flooded into my office.

I remember the union guys coming in saying that they were going to pay for a party for everybody, which they did. And the amount of beers they bought for that lasted me about three months afterwards.

Jon Becker: Good.

Jordan MacWilliams: But, yeah, just overwhelming relief for me and for my family, um, to be cleared and just. Just to come back to. To equilibrium, to homeostasis, like, back to normal. And so then it was. It was a bit of a process because, yeah, I had been cleared of the criminal charges, but I was also sued by the fellow's daughter that I'd shot. And we ended up settling that suit for some counseling for her, which I actually was super supportive of. If that guy was my dad, I would need some counseling too. So let's pay for her to get some counsel.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because she's a victim in this whole thing too, right? She's just a little girl whose dad got smoked.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, so that does get settled. Civil suit gets settled. And then they did a graduated return to work for me. I just kept working in that light duty spot for a little bit. And then I actually went to a detective section and worked there for three, four months, which was good. It was not operational. It was operational. But I wasn't out on the road doing much stuff and did some interviews and did a lot of paperwork.

And then I went back to patrol, worked on patrol for a few months. And it took about two months before I went to my wife and said, I want to go back to ERT. Like, I need to be back on the SWAT team. She's a wonderful, supportive woman. And she encouraged me to follow my dreams. And I did. I applied, went back, and I've been there since.

Jon Becker: That is a pretty amazing wife to not literally choke you out when you said, I want to go back on ERT.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yes.

Jon Becker: Last couple of years, or her life had not gone well from your service at ERT, right?

Jordan MacWilliams: No, no, they hadn't. But it was, you know, that was all positive on the professional side for me. But I felt a ton of anger towards my organization and I felt a ton of anger towards the independent investigations office.

And I remember, I'm back on ERT now and I'm working, and I still was certainly feeling that way. I was actually going down the road of a civil suit against the independent investigation Office for malicious prosecution. And I got a phone call and was offered the opportunity to speak with the head of the IIO.

During this time, after I'd been cleared, there'd been some other files that had a. Looked like their investigations were pretty garbage, which they were. And the fella from the states got fired. And they hired a new guy who was a prosecutor in eastern Canada. He came on out and, um, he'd made a bunch of statements in the media.

But we're going to really improve the quality of these investigations. We're going to have really good investigators here. He got the provincial government to agree to allow him to hire former police officers, rather than just strictly civilians, to give some expertise in there. And he'd made a bit of a thing about, you know, we're going to get better at this. We're going to be really good at this. And so I'd heard these things in the news, and I thought to myself, okay, well, I hate this guy because of what he does, like his role and what his organization did to me and my family.

But I remembered something that my mom always would say when I was growing up, like, you get to choose to be bitter or better. And I'm like, I want to be better. And so I took up that offer and I went down to his office and I sat down with him. And before I could say anything, he says to me, he's like, Jordan, I just want to tell you, I reviewed the file. You never should have been charged with anything. You did nothing wrong. You're a hero. And I am truly sorry. And, you know, here we are. This is five years after my shooting, so I've gone through being charged, civil suit.

There was an inquest, like all these things. I lost my job that I identified with so much, wrapped myself in, got to get back to it. Went off road, right? Basically in my personal life, borderline alcoholic, depressive. And now, like, here I am five years later hearing this guy say, like, you know, who is running the organization that did this to me?

And it felt good to hear that, obviously. And then he went on to say, you know what, Jordan? I want to make sure that we do a good job of our investigations moving forward. And we need to be balanced, and part of that is understanding the perspective of police officers, too. And I would love if you'd be willing to share with my staff the impact this has had on you and your family. And I said I would love that opportunity. And I did. I presented to his whole staff, and there were a lot of tears. A lot of them were crying, listening to me, talking about how this had affected me and my family, and just. And to them.

Jon Becker: They should be. Their organization destroyed your life.

Jordan MacWilliams: And to them, they're seeing this, and they're seeing me as a human now. They're not seeing me as a police officer on a body camera or on a surveillance video. And I felt like that was the definition of my mom saying, I got to be better, not bitter.

Jon Becker: That is absolutely the definition of being better than bitter, because I don't know that I'm enough of a man to go back there. I mean, that takes. You had to put on your big boy pants for that one.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. I almost didn't go. There's a couple times where even that day I remember thinking, f*** those guys. I'm not gonna go.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. I think I would have been exactly the same place. I'm just not sure I would have gotten past that stage.

Jordan MacWilliams: But I'm glad I went.

Jon Becker: So just, let's finish the career arc to where we are today, and then I want to talk some lessons learned here. So all of that, you know, you're doing that now. You're still at Delta as this is all evolving, right?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And now your team transitions from a part time team to a full time team, if I remember correctly.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. So around that time, there was a number of collateral duty teams in our area, and they all integrated into one big full time team, which was run by the RCMP. So when I came back to work and I wanted to get back on the SWAT team, I applied, got a spot on that team, and I was working there. But how it worked for Delta was they tenured their members. It's a bit of a union thing, give other people opportunity, et cetera.

So they said that I'd have a seven year term working on ERT, and I worked there for seven years and decided I didn't want to leave because it's a great job. And so I actually left Delta, and I work for the RCMP now.

Jon Becker: So basically, your choice was leave the team and go back to patrol.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Or leave the agency that had treated you like s*** anyways and go to work for the RCMP and stay on a full time team with your brothers.

Jordan MacWilliams: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That's not a math problem, is it was….

Jordan MacWilliams: It was a pretty easy decision.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. I think you're probably buying your red suit that afternoon.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. Looks pretty good on me, too.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Say what you want about the mounties, man. Nobody looks sharpen, sharper than the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Especially when you see them at funerals and events. And it's like the sea of red. Historically, our country does not like people in red coats.

Jordan MacWilliams: Well, you're warming up to us, but….

Jon Becker: We'll make an exception to the RCMP. So now you've been on this full time team for how long?

Jordan MacWilliams: We're going on seven years now. So 2016 is when I got back there. So 7 years, 2017.

Jon Becker: And just to give context, this is a tier one team, right? This is a, you know, the RCMP ERT is the national law enforcement asset for Canada. And because of Canadian police structuring, it's. It's difficult to. To give a direct analogy to the US, but it's kind of a combination of, like, La sheriffs, LAPD and FBI HRT in a provincial role.

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah. Like, we do have that kind of blended mandate, and it is unique. I actually haven't seen other than, you know, some European countries where they have, you know, one police force federal on down.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jordan MacWilliams: Whereas we have, where we work, a municipal mandate where we serve a few million people for, like, your day to day SWAT type calls. Then we have, like, a provincial policing mandate where we're the hostage rescue team for our province, and then we also have a federal mandate. So, you know, unit members of our team have. Well, I've deployed across the country and we've had guys to play internationally. We have guys overseas right now.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I went up recently, visited you guys, and can personally attest that it is a fantastic team.

Jordan MacWilliams: I appreciate you saying that!

Jon Becker: On par with any other national asset I've ever seen. Let's – So we end up with happy ending, right? We kind of end up with post murder charge, Jordan living his best life, still married to the same woman, still raising the same kids.

Jordan MacWilliams: Two kids now. Yeah.

Jon Becker: In better shape, drinking less, smiling more. Living a good life. What, retrospectively, with an eye on being better and not being bitter. What are the agency lessons learned here? Like, if I am a chief of police or I am an inspector in the RCMP or whatever, how do I not do this to my guys?

Jordan MacWilliams: I think if you just remember that we're dealing with human beings, and when I was a little kid, treat somebody how you want to be treated like that. That seems like such a simplistic way to answer that question. But if we remember, these are people. Like, I go back to what I said before I showed up to work that morning, like, truly believing, you know, I was there to help people. I still do. I didn't show up to work to hurt somebody. I was giving everything to my organization.

I put my body in front of somebody I'd never met before to protect her, somebody else I'd never met before who was trying to kill her with a gun. Like, I chose to do all those things, and I was willing to sacrifice all that for my community and for my organization. And then when my organization saw that there may be some controversy, they couldn't even bring themselves to talk to me.

And then when I got charged and things look really bad, you know, they definitely couldn't bring themselves to say anything positive. And in fact, they abandoned me completely. They wouldn't say anything. But then that changed because the new chief comes in and he remembered that I'm a human being and he couldn't change any of those things, but he could reach out and say he believed in me and supported me.

And what he knew I had done well, he thanked me for, and that took courage of leadership. Leadership. It's hard to do the right thing when you're the only one doing it, when everybody else is doing it, it's really easy.

Jon Becker: That's why it's called courage. Yeah, it's easy to do the right thing when everybody's doing it. One of my favorite sayings is that managers do what's right for their careers and leaders do what's right. And for me, the contrast between the initial chief, who subsequently retired and hopefully is suffering somewhere, and the new chief was that one of them was doing what was right for his career, and the other one was more focused on just doing the right thing.

Jordan MacWilliams: And he didn't even need to get on the media and say, I support Jordan. I didn't need that. But when he told me he appreciated me and supported me, that's all I needed. It doesn't seem like very much, and it isn't, but it means so much to people who, whether it's a critical incident at work or things have gone off road right in their personal life, or they've done something terrible, they didn't sign up that way, though. They were good people at some point, and we need to try and support them as people and help them.

Jon Becker: And, you know, the other contrast that I think is interesting is a contrast between the new west chief, who was. Wasn't even you. Like, that's, he's not even your chief, but he takes the time to go and see you and support you. Did you have any subsequent contact with him?

Jordan MacWilliams: I've seen him around since. He still works. He works for, as he's the chief of another organization in our area. And I just saw him at a call a couple months ago, and I have a ton of respect for that man. He didn't need to do that. He decided to do that. That was courage of leadership.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which is unfortunately becoming more and more scarce. We recently attended a ceremony where we kind of saw this same kind of courage of leadership. And I won't go into detail about it because it's a different agency, but it is that same thing. The parallels between your case and the cases of others who are accused of things that they didn't do and everybody in the agency just runs, hoping to not get tainted is appalling. It really is.

And in this case, it's just such. I understand there are cases where they've got to do the math, and it's a close call, and this is not one of those cases. That's the thing that's appalling is it just strikes me as a new office that's trying to build a name for themselves and doesn't really care what they destroy in the process.

Jordan MacWilliams: And don't think about humans on the other side. It's really on point, all those things that you're saying, and I couldn't agree more. For an organization, they have to focus on their people and try and support their people. And just knowing that it's human beings on the other side. For me, I didn't need all of this fanfare. Thank yous in the media. I understand all the pressure we're under from special interest groups and oversight organizations. It's going to be really hard for a senior manager to get on the news and say, I support so and so. They did a great job.

I understand that that takes a ton of courage, leadership, and there may be times where they need to do that when there's community outrage over things, but that's not what I needed. I just needed that little bit of support. Just don't abandon your people.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. What about your teammates and friends? Like, what did they do that was right? What did people do? People that you were more connected to? What did they do that was right? What, what didn't. What should they have done that they didn't do?

Jordan MacWilliams: Yeah, I've talked to a lot of them. I talked to a lot of them at that time. And since, like, my friends reached out. Hey, Jordan, I'm here for you. I don't know what I can do to help, but I want to help. You just tell me. And then they're like, well, you call me anytime. Two in the morning, you can't sleep, you call me.

Well, I'm not going to call them at two in the morning. I'm going to lay there awake for hours. But it meant a lot that they said that. And I remember. I remember one message I got. So the highest ranked person who sent me a note of support after I was charged was a staff sergeant. So it's like. Like a lieutenant down here.

And she had been, you know, so she's not promoted to the management rank yet. She's still one of the rank and file. And she had been working with me when I first started. She'd been a supervisor. She'd been supervising my field training, actually.

And she sent me a message. She just sent me a text. And she's like, Jordan, I don't know what to say. I'm just thinking of you. And that meant a lot because she was thinking of me. She didn't have to say anything else. And I've talked lots of people since. Like, when I saw you, I didn't know what to say. I'm like, you didn't have to say anything. Just the fact you showed up really mattered to.

And that's what I'll say for, you know, people's support groups, like, just be there for them. That support that I got from my family, my wife making that tough call to go back to work early and forcing structure on my life, doing those things to help me recognize the destructive path I was taking my life on, those are huge.

Those are hard to do, and those take courage, too. Those are the things you need your family to do to give you that baseline of support so you can start to make some good decisions. We don't have that support network around us, and underneath it, it's going to be really hard to make good decisions.

Jon Becker: One of my favorite Maya Angelou sayings is, years from now, people remember what you said, and they won't remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel. And the one thing that is very clear in this conversation is that what really damaged you was how they made you feel.

Jordan MacWilliams: I struggled for a little while with killing somebody. It maybe kept me up at night for a night or two. The way my organization treated me, kept me up for years and took my mental health into the garbage. And it's so backwards to think that killing somebody was the least of my worries for three years. It's unbelievable.

Jon Becker: That is a perfect place for us to stop. Jordan, thank you so much, man, for doing this!

Jordan MacWilliams: No, it's been my pleasure! I really appreciate you having me on!

Episode 12 – Buddy Brown: York County South Carolina

Jon Becker: This episode of The Debrief will have a slightly different format. Today, we'll be conducting a critical incident review of an actual event. We'll discuss the timeline of the event as well as the aftermath, recovery, and the lessons learned.

Our goal in this discussion is not to criticize or second guess any actions taken by those responding to the event. Their actions are beyond reproach, their bravery is without question, and their sacrifices are real and need to be honored.

It is our hope that by discussing this event, we will learn from and hope to improve operator safety in the future. With regards to form, we'll be using the officers actual names because they're heroes and they need to be remembered. For obvious reasons, we will not be using the suspect's name.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is James Buddy Brown. Buddy is a former United States Marine who is currently an investigator with the York County, South Carolina sheriff's office. In his 22 year career, Buddy has worked a variety of assignments, including property crimes, financial crimes, narcotics, and 18 years in SWAT.

On January 16th, 2018, York county experienced an incident that began with a domestic violence 911 call and by the time it was over, had resulted in the death of Detective Mike Doty, as well as the shooting of K9, Sergeant Randy Clinton, Sergeant Kyle Cummings, and Buddy. Buddy has graciously agreed to sit down with me and walk us through the events of that evening.

Buddy, thank you for joining me on The Debrief!

Buddy Brown: Thank you for having me, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with kind of your personal history, you know, your career and kind of how you got to here.

Buddy Brown: Grew up in the South Carolina, went to school there, 1987, joined the Marine Corps, was in the United States Marine Corps from 1987 to 1995 here in California. Actually got out of there, worked construction for a couple years while I was getting into law enforcement. Started in law enforcement in 2000, worked there, started with a small city department, and then eventually moved to York county where I worked there, worked my way through patrol like you said before, work narcotics.

I've worked in investigations and spent 18 years on SWAT. I was in the department. I ran the department's response to active shooter program for about ten or twelve years was started with when we implemented a patrol rifle program. I worked through that. Where I did, we wrote the lesson plans and the training, and kind of implemented the, with a couple other guys. The patrol rifle program for our agency did a lot in training with SWAT training, teaching, being a firearms instructor, those kind of things. That's always been kind of my passion.

Jon Becker: So talk to me a little bit about your agency. Like, how big is it?

Buddy Brown: We work with it. It's the York County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina. We're directly south of Charlotte, so we have a lot of interaction with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department. We're about 200 sworn, plus we have a jail where we do the jail. We're a full service sheriff's office. We do calls for service. We cover the unincorporated areas of the county, calls for service there. We do surf civil papers. We handle the jail.

We've got four districts throughout the county, kind of in a compstat style system. We run that. Each district is kind of different. You have two districts that are kind of rural and two districts that kind of are a little more urban with their proximity to Charlotte, North Carolina. So you really get a lot of variety in the ways you can police in York county.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about your team. How big is the team currently?

Buddy Brown: At the time of this, they were about. There was. We had about 25 to 30 members. Right now we're up to about 40 members, counting our. We have truck drivers, we have medics, we have the snipers. We have our regular operators. We have an intelligence guy, an intelligence and safety guy.

The York County Sheriff's Office and the Rock Hill Police Department are the two large agencies within the county. Rock Hill police has their own SWAT team. The sheriff's office picks up the smaller agencies. If they want to put their people on the SWAT team, they can do that. We have a lot of multi jurisdictional teams in the county. Our forensics is multi jurisdictional, our drug enforcement unit is multi jurisdictional, and our SWAT team is multi jurisdictional.

Jon Becker: So how many agencies are there in that? In the configuration of the team?

Buddy Brown: We have guys from the Fort Mill Police Department, the York Police Department, the Clover police Department, and the TKK police Department. So there's four different agencies that are supplying guys to the team.

Jon Becker: Plus York county?

Buddy Brown: Plus York county.

Jon Becker: So a total of five agencies?

Buddy Brown: Yes, total of five agencies.

Jon Becker: So, buddy, set the stage for me. January 15th, 2018. What's the area like? What's the weather like? Kind of give me the environment.

Buddy Brown: Well, and that's the big thing about South Carolina, is we have four very distinct seasons. You know, every, every season has its difference. Very hot in the summer. It's very cold in the winter. Spring and fall, you know, you get the, you get the in between. January is the middle of our winter, and generally January and February are the really cold times. And it was especially cold on this evening. It was 18 degrees, I think, when we were out there. Our 911 center gets a domestic call from, from the instant location.

Male and female there both been drinking a lot. She's claiming that she's been assaulted by him. Come to find out, she had poured his liquor out in the sink. While the call is going on, you hear her. You can hear him assaulting her while they're on the phone and she's calling for. They're trying to get the deputies out there. He grabs an AK-47 and a Bag, kind of a Go Bag of supplies, and he heads out, you know, and it's very cold. It's like 18 degrees outside. And he takes off from the house.

Jon Becker: So is the – Give me an idea. Like this is rural South Carolina, right?

Buddy Brown: Like, very rural. Where we were at was a. Was a housing development, but it was probably on acre lots, acre to acre and a Half lots. So there's a lot of room between the houses. It's a Pretty Rural area. There's a lot of woods. There's a lot of places for somebody to hide or to take off on foot and be able to get gone.

Jon Becker: So where is the suspect at this point? He leaves the house.

Buddy Brown: He leaves the house. Where does he go? He's in the wood line. He actually was, we had discovered in investigating after that he was a guy that liked to walk. He was like a hiker and liked to get out and walk. And there were paths and like, we have a lot of ATV, four wheelers. People ride ATV's and four wheelers a lot. And there was a lot of four wheeler trails. And he had gone back and hit a horse four wheeler trail that was near the house and was on it.

Around 10, 20, the deputies arrived. They decided to call out our K9. When our K9 guy got there very. It was Sergeant Clinton. Sergeant Randy Clinton. He had about, at that time, he had over 30 years experience running dogs, you know, teaches K9 all over the state. One of the premier, you know, dog handlers in the state. He doesn't really like what's going on, so he calls for the state helicopter, which is like, an hour away. And it's not like our state helicopter is sitting down there, you know, spooling up, ready to go.

So it takes probably till about 11:00 or so. 11:00, 11:30 takes an hour or so for them to get the helicopter up there. And also around that same time, around 11:00, 11:30 on the 15th, the SWAT page went out for a couple of additional runners to go with the dog team. When we know that somebody's armed or poses a little bit more of a threat, we'll have our SWAT guys go and run with the K9 guys to give them a little bit extra cover with rifles and the equipment that we have available for SWAT.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: So the helicopter was there when they started with the dog, and they wanted to just let him sweep the area before this, before they. They struck out with the dog.

Jon Becker: And how long is it before they make contact with the suspect?

Buddy Brown: At about 01:00, the K9 started the track. At about 01:10 is when the dog team got ambushed.They're on the track. They're coming up a trail, and they come up on the trail, and the suspect was hidden up behind some trees and just kind of opened up with them when they came around the corner and just started.

Jon Becker: They don't have night vision on at this point. [Crosstalk] – Okay, it's like, it's dark.

Buddy Brown: It's dark. They do run some lights. There's some lights and stuff that they run for the dog. And. And also, you know, that you kind of have to have. As dark as it is, there's not a lot. Wasn't a lot of moonlight that night. It wasn't like, a bright, you know? Cause there's sometimes where you can. Where you can operate at night, and then the moon will give you enough light to. Where you can kind of see what was going on. This wasn't one of those nights, okay? It was very dark.

Jon Becker: The suspect's basically lying in wait for this.

Buddy Brown: Yes. He was lying away for him, and. And. And they were behind the house down there off of Fair Lane, which was less than a quarter of a mile from the incident location from where the initial where the domestic happened at. They. One of the guys on the dog team returns fire, kind of suppresses him. He gets up and gets. The suspect gets up and gets gone. They drag Randy out of the woods. He's shot in the left leg. They put a tourniquet on him, drag him out of the woods.

Lieutenant Heath Clevenger was there. He was kind of the instant commander that was there. He figures out where Randy is. Drives his vehicle down there to him. It was a little bit difficult to find where he actually was in conjunction in the dark, trying not to put a lot of light out to figure out exactly which house he was at.

So they had a little bit of communication issues there. Getting that done. Finds the house. They load Randy in the car. He takes off with him in his – He had a Ford Explorer at the time. Load him in the explorer. He takes off with him. They try to make contact with the hospital. They had. They had a ambulance kind of on standby. When we do things like that, you know, we'll put medic on standby. And the ambulance was the opposite way from the way the hospital was. So Heath just took him.

Jon Becker: Okay, so Heath. Heathen throws Randy in the car, takes him to the hospital.

Buddy Brown: Takes him to the hospital. So as Heath is getting Randy, they're getting Randy into the car. Heath gives a rifle to the guys, to Lieutenant Liggan that was there, gives him a rifle. Here's my rifle. Use this. And then Heath leaves to take Randy so that Mike has a rifle. He didn't initially have a rifle when he went out there.

Jon Becker: Okay? So now when they. When Heath evacuates Randy, what do the other guys do?

Buddy Brown: They left Cole. They had Cole Green, Mike Lorenzio, and Lieutenant Ligon, and they made the decision that they were going to leave Cole Green at the scene where Randy's shooting happened because they wanted somebody to be able to find the crime scene again, so they left him there. Lorenzo and Ligona continued on. By then, the sled helicopter had picked up the bad guy.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: And had him walking down. While all this was going on, the bad guy started shooting at the sled helicopter. He shoots the helicopter, shoots the helicopter, turns around and starts walking away. And they have him on Flir. They're tracking him on Flir. And Ligand and Lorenzo are continuing to move in the same general direction that the suspect is.

Jon Becker: So now is the suspect walking back towards his house?

Buddy Brown: No, he's walking away.

Jon Becker: Walking away from his house.

Buddy Brown: He's found a power line, and he's trucking down that power line away from the house.

Jon Becker: Okay, so just, you know, I'm a city boy. So the power lines are running, like, through the middle of a forest. They'll cut a clear spot.

Buddy Brown: Yes, they'll cut a clear spot. It's called a right. They call it a right of way.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: It's that they'll cut a clear spot so they can get in there and do maintenance on the poles.

Jon Becker: So I do remember something. They kind of lost the dog for a while, too, right?

Buddy Brown: They did. When the shooting happened, Randy let go of the dog, and the dog kind of took off, and when everything calmed down, she came back and the dog was fine. That was. It was kind of a – It was kind of a funny thing as all this stuff was going on. And the people were very concerned that the dog had gotten shot. They were very concerned that. About the K9, that our public information officer had to go on. On the news and say, the dog is fine. The dog didn't get shot and show a picture of her running around in the kennels, because people were. They were concerned that we had gotten injured, but they were also very concerned that the dog, if the dog had gotten shot.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That happens out here, too. You know, police officer gets shot, people like, oh, yeah, it's kind of sad. Dog gets shot.

Buddy Brown: Oh, yes.

Jon Becker: Community outrage.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: Now, there is a perimeter that is set up outside of what's going on. The deputies have, you know, set a perimeter up, but that. But Mike – Mike and Chris are following along with the helicopter, guiding them. And when. When all this stuff happens, when he goes to grab the randy, he jumps on the radio and says, have the rest of SWAT respond out code three, which is our, you know, licensed sirens, you know, get there. So I – When the initial call came out for K9 runners, I had called in and said, hey, I'm available if you need a K9 runner. And they were like, no, we're good right now, but stay dressed. Cause it was – Cause I got up and put on my thermal, you know, my cold weather gear. They said, stay dressed because we're probably gonna have to come out on this guy, you know, after a while.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we get the second. We get the second call, I jump in. I jump up, grab my gear, jump in the car, we drive out there. Now, the call that the page, when we would get SWAT pages, we would just get SWAT respond to this location, code three. Or sometimes it would be SWAT respond to this location, normal run. They'd give us an address. Respond here, code three or normal run. So they gave us. There was nothing in the page or anything that was going on that let us know that Randy had been shot. We had no idea it was just respond.

So we get out there to the scene. I'm about. I'm one of the – I live not a long way from there. I was one of the closer guys to there. So I was one of the first ones to get there. So we get there, it's pandemonium. It's helicopters flying. We got two of our guys that are still chasing. There's myself, Grady Gonzalez, and then a dog.

There was a dog guy named Chris Kinsey. We all kind of got there at the same time, and at the same time, our head SWAT medic, Chuck Haynes, was on scene also. So I'm throwing my gear on. Grady's throwing his gear on. Chris has got his stuff. And we decide that we are going to load up. And Grady had an unmarked explorer. We're going to load up in that explorer and let him drive us to where go find Ligon and Lorenzo and go support those guys.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: To get. So we load up.

Jon Becker: So you're going to go fall in with them?

Buddy Brown: Yes, that's our plan is to go find them. And let's get some more guys to those guys.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we jump in the car. We get all geared up. We jump in the car. We go to the beginning, the entrance, kind of to the neighborhood. And I can't. People can't stop talking on the radio long enough for me to call Liggin and say, hey, I got three guys. We're coming to you. Where you at? So it's just….

Jon Becker: So you guys are all on one frequency.

Buddy Brown: One frequency at this point, so. And it was pretty crazy. So we're driving around, you know, in the dark, and Chris comes out and gets us, and we go. So we're going to our plan. You know, while this activation is happening, our truck drivers have been activated. So they're going to get our equipment, trucks, and our. We have an unarmored bearcat. Our plan was helicopter keeps the suspect in sight. He knows where he is. We get the armored vehicle there, we load up in it, we drive to where he is, and we do what we have to do. We take him into custody, or we.

Jon Becker: Do engage him from the armor.

Buddy Brown: From the armor, from inside, from the safety of that. So that plan went all to crap, but that was the plan, you know, you always have a plan till you get punched in the face.

Jon Becker: That's in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Buddy Brown: So we're down there and we link up and we do this. Danger crossing on the power line. We do all that, you know, we're out there, you know, moving around, and helicopter comes across and says, hey, guys, we gotta leave. We're bingo fuel. We've stayed as long as we can stay were out of gas. So the bearcat hadn't made it there quite yet. So they get there about the time that the helicopter has to leave, the bearcat shows up.

Jon Becker: Well, and just, just for context, on bingo fuel for the helicopter, those guys stayed until they d*** near ran out of gas.

Buddy Brown: They did run out of gas.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Just stayed not there, but on the way back to the airport.

Buddy Brown: They were headed back to the airport and started to flame out and had to land the helicopter in a Walmart parking lot. [Video playing – voice quality low]

Jon Becker: There's bingo fuel, and then there's bingo.

Buddy Brown: Bingo. They were bingo. Bingo.

Jon Becker: Bingo. Bingo.

Buddy Brown: And we. And there is no doubt in my mind that they helped save lives out there by staying as long as they did and keeping an eye on him and letting us know so that we didn't walk into another ambush.

Jon Becker: Okay, so, buddy, the bearcat gets there.

Buddy Brown: Bearcat gets there. We load the guys. We load the guys up in the, in the back of the bearcat, the technology, we have our handheld Flirs. We have our night vision. We have spotlights on the Bearcat. All these things. We're going to use them to try to see if we can locate this guy. You kind of have to be careful with it where you take it off road because it's a big, heavy truck and it's easy to get stuck.

So we turn around where we're at, drive, drive past the, where the command post is, and then we're going to go back in on the power line and drive down to where the last siding was before the helicopter had to leave. And when we're driving down there, I jump up in the turret. We've got. Our bearcat has a turret, but it's not one of the, like, completely covering. It's just one piece of armor that sticks up, and it's not nearly as much cover as you think it is.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: At all.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: So we started driving down.

Jon Becker: When you don't know where the suspect is.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. And we started.

Jon Becker: 90 degrees is not enough.

Buddy Brown: And I'm thinking, I really don't know where this guy is. And I'm just sticking my head up here. So we kind of went down and buttoned everything up and used, you know, the windows and we have ports in the. In the bearcat, so, no, no joy. We were probably there for 30, 45 minutes, you know, looking kind of trying to figure out where he was at. While we were there, uh, we hear the Charlotte Mecklenburg sent their helicopter down to where we were. We hear them arrive on scene, but we can't talk to them.

And we discovered that our comms weren't compatible. We're all on the same 800 MHz system, but we didn't have their channels in our radio, so we could hear them talking a little, but we couldn't talk back to them and tell them what we needed. And to Charlotte, and much to Charlotte's credit, they sent an officer down with radios so that they could go to the command post and relay what was going on with their helicopter. While we were down there, we kind of decided that we were going to go to two channels because there was so much talk on. You know, they were running the perimeter, running everything off of one channel.

So at that point, they put. I think they put Steven Ramsey in charge of the perimeter and move them to a different channel and then put us on our own channel, you know, for SWAT team, SWAT team to command, and then command had another channel to perimeter.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So we were the perimeter still could hear what we were doing, but it wasn't everybody trying to talk on the same, same channel at the same time, which was a problem. And one of the things, and we'll get to this a little bit later, and one of the things that kind of gets me is when we, when we were in the, in the bearcat, I noticed that not everybody had all the gear that they were supposed to have on because we were, you know, this thing had, had developed from a dog call now into the SWAT call.

So you had guys that kind of had armor setups for running a dog call and not armor setups for going after a guy with an AK-47. They still had some soft armor, didn't have helmets, didn't have the stuff that they should have on in there. And thought about it, and while we were sitting in there, that, hey, you know, this guy or that guy needs to have their different armor on.

But at the point that we were at as a team at that time, I didn't want to say anything to them because I didn't want to turn into a thing where they got yelled at by somebody else. So I just kind of let that go, and I wasn't. Not one of my best moments. I feel like, personally, I feel like I should have said, I should have said something to about that. That goes on. Lieutenant Clevenger takes Randy to the hospital. Sheriff, more K9 guys. They get Randy's wife. They get them all down to the hospital. Heath goes to the sheriff and says, hey, you guys seem to cause, you know, if you're the guy that brings the guy in, you stay with him, you know, until you're relieved.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Buddy Brown: He goes to the sheriff and says, hey, you know, there's plenty of people here to take care of Randy. I need to get back out to where SWAT is. And the sheriff's like, yeah, I need you back out there. So while this is going on, and, you know, this is South Carolina. And Heath had given his rifle to Mike Ligan, to his duty rifle to him. He asked the sheriff if he could grab another rifle that he had with a similar setup and use it and if it would be okay for him to use that. And the sheriff said, the sheriff okayed that.

So he called his wife on the way back to the call and said, hey, grab my rifle with the red dot on it and meet me at this location. And his wife brought the rifle to him, and he grabbed it and took off. So as we were coming, we had kind of used up everything that we could on the power line initially, where we were there with the. With the bearcat, and we pulled out and pulled back to the command post.

We're back at the command post. Lieutenant Ligand and Lieutenant Clevenger go out and they're talking with the Sheriff and the command up there to kind of figure out what our next steps are going to be. And while they're doing that, the sled helicopter. We had gotten a fuel truck to the sled helicopter, gotten him fueled up, got. He came back in. He's circulating the area of the last sighting, and he comes across the radio and tells us that there's a boat behind the house off of Perham Road. We call them John boats. Like a little flat bottom. Like a. What are the Cajuns call them? Pirro. Like a Pirro or a flat bottom.

Yeah, a little flat bottom John boat that you would generally row, you know? And he says, they've got this John boat out the back of the house, and it's got a heat signature near it. Now, it's, as we talked about before, it's a 20 degrees outside. It's freezing cold. As far as we know, this guy hasn't, like, taken a coat or taken any kind of cold weather gear. With him. So we're thinking he's pretty cold.

So it would be, you know, well within the realm of possibilities that he's out there hidden under this. Under this boat. So at that time, we decide that we're going to load up in the bearcat, and we're going to go to this house on Perham Road. It's 1475, and we're gonna go there and do go there, deploy, and see if we can find this boat, challenge this guy, see what we're gonna do with that.

So we load up in the bearcat, we drive over there, and it's not very far from where the command post was or from where this whole thing started. And earlier in the evening, the resident at 1475 had called in and said that a motion light had gone off in the back of his house. We didn't have that information at the time, but in it was information that was out there in the ether, you know, but I don't remember us getting that particular information.

Hey, guys, in the bearcat going there, a security light went off an hour ago at that house. The guy called in about it. I think it made it to command, but it didn't make it all the way down that that had gone on, or it may have, and we didn't hear it or, you know, it was. There was a lot of chaos going. The dispatch comes across the radio and says, there's some lady at an address, like a mile from where we are that says that she thinks she saw somebody walking in her backyard with night vision.

Now, I don't know if she had night vision and saw somebody walking in her backyard, which I don't think was the case, or she thought she saw somebody wearing night vision walking around in her backyard, which there were none of our guys were over there, so. And I didn't like it at the time, but the sled helicopter leaves to go investigate that as we're driving down the driveway to where we're going to check out this boat that's turned over.

Jon Becker: So do you have no air cover at that point?

Buddy Brown: We did, but it was the Charlotte that we couldn't communicate with, and we didn't know it. We didn't know that they were up there. So our guy leaves, our helicopter leaves to go do that, and we pull up to the house, and like we said, it's 20 degrees, it's dark. It's 03:30 in the morning. I've had a couple hours sleep. I laid down at like 09:00 and was back up at, you know, I laid it down at like 10:00 and I was back up at 01:00. You know, I'd worked the whole day, slept for a couple hours and now I'm back out on this.

Now it's 03:30 in the morning. I thought that this was a brick house when, until I went back out to it and it's actually a log, it's a big log cabin house. And just the way your mind, you know, processes things, we pull up in the bearcat and we get a plan in there. It was kind of funny in the way that things change because as you see, as you have pictures of the houses, it's a nice house with a manicured, with a nice yard.

And we didn't want to drive the bearcat too far into their yard. Just, you know, the way your thinking changed. We don't want to drive the bearcat too far in their yard and rut their yard up and have them calling the sheriff and being mad at us.

Jon Becker: Yeah, if you didn't find the suspect.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, you didn't find a suspect. Now we've tore our yard up, we've done all this stuff, or we've run over their sepi tank. We a lot sepi tanks and stuff out there. So we didn't drive the bearcat that far into the, we drove pretty far in the yard but not as far as we could have.

So we drive in there and we make a plan. And initially myself, Mike Doty and Kyle Cummins were gonna go left. We were gonna get out of Bearcat, we were gonna go left. Heath grady, Mike and Judd were gonna get out of Bearkat and they were gonna go right.

Jon Becker: So you guys gonna split the house.

Buddy Brown: And that was the plan.

Jon Becker: Cause you're in front basically in the front yard. We're in the front yard of the house.

Buddy Brown: We believe that the boat is gonna be back directly behind the house. So our plan is to take one team around the right side of the house, take one team around the left side of the house and then link up and be on each side of where this boat is.

You know, in a perfect world, we call out to the guy, he throws his hands up, he comes out, everything's cool. You know, we take him into custody. But we really believed based on the intelligence that we had from the boat, from the helicopter that he was going to be out there in that boat. That's, you know, we had, we probably believed that a little too much, honestly, in hindsight.

So just a quick second on, on that kid that was, there was two other people that were in the bearcat. When all this was going on, there was a guy named Charlie Three. And Charlie's a guy that. He's on SWAT now and has been on SWAT a couple years, but he had. He was driving trucks at the time, and that call was his first time driving the bearcat.

Mike Doty had told Mike Chanel, when the Bearcat got there, jump in the front seat and be there in case we need, you know, in case we need a medic. So Mike Chanel's in the front pasture. Charlie's driving the truck. First Callie, first SWAT Collie had ever been on. First time driving the truck is this. We were initially, like I said, we were supposed to go left. Mike was always a kind of a go get em kind of guy.

Jon Becker: Mike Doty.

Buddy Brown: Mike Doty, yes. And Mike jumps out of the truck and goes right. I yell at Mike a little bit to get him back to where I was so we could work out. Work together. I was on night vision, so I was on point with night vision in my rifle. Mike was about a double arm's length off of me at about 09:00, and then Kyle was at about 06:00, trailing behind. And when we got out of the truck. In South Carolina, sometimes you have where people will build little platforms off their houses, like, little wooden patio kind of thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like a deck.

Buddy Brown: Like a deck. But it's only, like, this far off the ground.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Buddy Brown: It's not something that somebody could get out of. I'm sorry. Get under. So when I come out of the truck and I see this on night vision at 03:00 in the morning, it looks like just a little platform. So we start making our way around the edge of the house. Now it is January. All the leaves are off the trees, and there's a wood line, and then there's the house, and there's a path, kind of a yard kind of in between the two.

Well, I thought about jumping us into the wood line, but with the leaves on the ground, I felt like we would sound like a herd of elephants coming through there. So we kind of shaded our way over towards the wood line, but stayed in the yard area.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: Because I didn't, I would have liked to have the cover. And we still believed that our contact was going to be from in front of us where we were out looking that way.

Jon Becker: Into the John boat.

Buddy Brown: Into the John boat.

Jon Becker: Which is in the woods.

Buddy Brown: Which is in the woods out by the pond.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: Which we still – Which the way we were moving would still be out, like 12:00 like, out in front of us.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So as we start moving around the house, I'm on night vision. We're moving the ground. I notice that the ground is starting to drop off. So as the ground is dropping off, I'm on my rifle. I come off my rifle and take my hand and point it out and say, hey, you guys check under that deck.

And as soon as I point my hand and say, you guys check under that deck, the suspect starts shooting at us, and Mike gets shot immediately. I get shot in the hip, in the handguard of my rifle. The round went through the top of my handguard. It should have taken the gas tube out of it, but it didn't. And I took a round to my helmet.

I kind of roll myself kind of over into the woods, and I return fire. I've seen people say, oh, I got shot. And I never knew it. When I got shot, I knew exactly what had happened. It felt like somebody had taken a sledgehammer and hit me in the hip. It was like, oh, I know what that is. And this is, you know, and it was that – There was a, you know, you see movies and stuff where you see people get shot. They cut flips, and they do all this crazy stuff. I just kind of got hit and turned and kind of stood there and stood there for what seemed like a really long time.

And then was like, I really. And it probably was, you know, split second, but it was like, I really need to be somewhere else other than. Than right here. And we had always trained when we did simonitions or when we did force on force training, that you never quit. You never do. Oh, I'm hit. I'm dead. I stop. You know, it was always, you continue to fight. You push on.

So I rolled over into the woods. I don't remember this, but Kyle said that I lit him up with my flashlight where the. Where the bad guy was. I light up. I see where he is. I remember. And I talk about this when I teach concealed weapons, when we talk about knowing your target and what's behind it, I remember seeing the block wall. That's the bottom of the house, like the foundation of the house behind where he was shooting at us from or where he was at.

And I remember thinking, okay, I've got a backstop in there. And I started shooting, and Kyle started shooting in on the suspect at that time.

Jon Becker: And on this deck, there's a hot tub.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, he's, like, around. Well, we found that later on. He was kind of hidden down in back behind the hot tub.

Jon Becker: Got it. So he's got at a minimum concealment. He's got a good actually probably cover.

Buddy Brown: And there was a bunch of four by four poles that were littered in between the whole area. So he's got actually, he's in a good position. And we kind of had to fight our way. We had to fight our way through, you know, the ambush with it. Kyle. I start returning fire with my rifle. Kyle starts returning fire with his rifle. His rifle jams. And he did a fantastic. He transitioned to his handgun and continued to fire with his handgun. And then in the ensuing gunfight, Kyle was struck and went down. So Kyle. I'm down in the woods, and Kyle's down in the woods.

So while all this is going on, the other. The team that Heath is leading goes around the left side of the house. So as they're about halfway down the left side of the house, because the house was l shaped. So we had gone to this corner. They were still back over here in this corner.

Jon Becker: So they've got a longer way around than you guys did. So even though you separate at the same time.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: They're now behind you.

Buddy Brown: Correct.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: And one of the things that me and Heath have talked about is, we should have set up a point. We should have talked a little bit more before we deployed, and we should have gotten together and said, hey, I'm going to go to this point. You go to this point. And then we get together on the radio, this hindsight 2020, that, let's find some points, get there, and then establish communication, and know where we were at. Cause we didn't do that. And while they're coming around the back of the house, the gunfight is going on, and they're seeing. They still believe that the suspect's supposed to be back here where this boat is.

We didn't have any lasers. We didn't have any cans. We didn't have anything like that. That differentiated us from, you know, and from who was who. So they held up. So they didn't realize. It took them a while to realize that the bad guy was under the deck, and we. I was in the woods, and Kyle was in the woods.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: So they come around. One of their guys from the other team ends up engaging back towards the deck in there. In the midst of that fight, he saw some muzzle flash, and he engaged that muzzle flash into the. Into there. I'm in the, I've rolled myself into the woods. I'm engaging him back in. Under there. The shooting stops. I feel like he stopped shooting at us. I don't know if I've eliminated him, but I feel like he stopped shooting at us. And out of my peripheral vision, I see, like, if somebody's running and their weapon light is on their gun and the dot bouncy light, and I see the bouncy light, and I see legs coming, and I'm laying down there, and I'm proned out, you know, and everything, so.

And then they end up moving up and finding Mike doty, finding that one of our guys is down in the. In the yard, that there was a guy down in the yard, and Grady Gonzalez runs up and is like, just lay down. You know, we're good. So I just kind of put my head down, and I remember. I know now that it was Mike, but I remember in that moment seeing what I thought was a pile of clothes or just, like, a pile, something laying there, and couldn't comprehend what that was, so I just kind of laid down there.

There's a point during the gunfight that Heath gets on the radio and wants me to tell him where we're at. Buddy, tell us where you're at. We want to know where you're at. Cause he sees the gunfight going on. I have no recollection of that, ever. Of that conversation happening.

Jon Becker: You've been shot at that point?

Buddy Brown: Yes, I'd been shot at that point. And I was on, you know, I was on a Delta four helmet with headphone, you know, earphones, everything, you know? And there's, you know, it was that auditory. We talk about auditory exclusion, tunnel vision and stuff like that. That was completely auditory excluded. I have.

Jon Becker: Well, to be fair, you'd been shot in the head with an AK-47, and a ballistic helmet had stopped it. That it's not really designed to stop.

Buddy Brown: So I guess if I knew you.

Jon Becker: Had a raging concussion, I would guess, at that point.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, probably so, yeah. So those guys came around from the other side. Heath was coming from the other side, shines a light under the deck, sees the guy under the deck. By now he's gone into surrender. Okay. He's behind his rifle. He's gone into surrender. We found out I was testifying in a trial not too long ago, and there was a sled. Our state law enforcement division has a firearms. Their firearms division worked this case, and they let me know that. And I always thought this, but I didn't know it.

The AK that he had, we shot it so much that it wouldn't fire. They had to stick a screwdriver through the. Through the trigger to get it to fire when they test fired it for the investigation. So it was inoperable after we had shot, after the gunfight between me and Kyle and him had. His gun was inoperable.

Jon Becker: So he surrenders cause he's run out of guns.

Buddy Brown: He surrenders cause his gun's dead. His gun's gone down. It was tough. It was hard. I mean, it was hard. And it's something that, you know, a lot of us struggled with the fact that, you know, he took Mike's life and he lived, but, you know, everything happens for a reason, and it happens the way that it's supposed to happen.

And they made the absolute best decision that could be made. And they go ahead and decide that they're going to bring the medics in. They call for medics, and one of the guys gets on the radio and is just. He's upset. This is probably, you know, probably one of the most horrible things he's ever seen. And he's so loud on the radio that you can't understand what he's saying, and you can't. You can't. We know that something bad has happened. They know that something bad's happened, but you can't figure out what had happened.

[Video playing – Low voice quality]

So they. He gets on the radio. Hey, you know, we need medics back here. We got guys down. We need asap. I've got the suspected gunpoint. And we were. When I was in the hospital. And I'm gonna get back to the – But this is kind of important for this part. When I didn't see heath for, like, it was like a good, solid day, you know. Cause he had to do his debrief and he had to. And I was in surgery. He comes to the room and we talk about, you know, what we could have done different.

And I told him, I said, I hope that if the roles were reversed and I had to be on your side of and I was on your side and you were on my side, that I would have done as good a job as you did. Cause he really did a great job over there and kinda took a chaotic situation and kinda calmed everything down. So we had our bearcat and the Rock Hill city police departments, SWAT team, they have an mrap.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: They had their mrap out there, and their guys drove the mrap to where we were. And actually, Rock Hills team guys were the first. They were the closest. That was a group a team. They were the closest to get to where we were. So they got there with our medics and started working on. Started working on us.

Somebody came across the radio, and it may have been heath, and said, let's get our guys out. I've got him. I've got suspect. If he does anything, it'll be the last thing he does. Let's get our guys out. That decision, their plan was they had enough guns on him that if he did something stupid, they were just going to shoot him, and then they would haul us out.

So the guy, Chris Rowe, comes over to me. He's one of the rock hill police department guys. And they roll me over and they start doing a – They're evaluating to see where my wounds are, and they go to take my vest off. Well, the vest that the city has is different than the vest that we have. So they pull my side panels and try to flip it over. They take my helmet off, they pull the side panels, and they try to flip the front of my vest up over my head and hit me right in the face with it, with a plate and everything in magazines and s***, and hit me right in the face with it. I'm like, ow!

So they pull it off my head and they start working on me. And they decide they're going to pick me up and move me out of the hot zone that we're in and take me over where the Bearcat is. Well, I'm 260 pounds of dead weight with a concussion, with a leg wound that isn't being a lot of help for anything. And they pick me up and they dropped me and they dragged me a couple feet and they dropped me.

And we have a guy on our team, Carlos Kohlbroth. And Carlos is a big, strong guy. Power Lifts. Just a strong dude. And he's got, like, a unique voice. And I know I've been working with Carlos for 15 years. And he come up behind me and he grabbed me under my arms and was like, I got you, buddy. And he drug me by himself almost all the way back to the bearcat. And after that, he told me, he says, I really need to work on my legs. But he – We did. They put a tourniquet on me. They tourniqueted my leg. And that was pretty unpleasant because it worked. I mean, they.

Jon Becker: So you're shot high up in the hip?

Buddy Brown: Yes. I'm shot high up in the leg. No bone, no bones. Just flesh. Just…

Jon Becker: And femoral vein.

Buddy Brown: Femoral vein, yes. Totally.

Jon Becker: You're bleeding out.

Buddy Brown: I'm bleeding internally, yeah. I'm not bleed. I'm not. What's the fancy? I'm not exaggerating, waiting. I'm bleeding internally. So, Kyle, on the other hand, they went to Kyle first. Kyle was the first one that they got to. He was hitting the femoral artery, and he was bleeding out.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Buddy Brown: And they couldn't get a tourniquet on him. And luckily, Chuck Haynes came in, stuck his finger in the wound, and got it, stopped bleeding, and packed it and put a tourniquet on it and got him his bleeding under control. But it was very touch and go for Kyle. And I firmly believe that if we hadn't had the medics with the experience that we had on scene, we'd lost Kyle out there, too. It would have been bad. And they had already gone in and got Mike and put him in an ambulance, and they had taken him out to the. Taking him to the LZ.

Jon Becker: Cause Mike is hit in the head.

Buddy Brown: He's hitting the head. Yeah. And I didn't know, you know, Mike was gone. Mike. In that time where I laid my head down and passed out for just a second, they had picked up Mike and got him out of there. He was. He was long gone before they ever started working on me. They did CPR on Mike and brought him back on the scene. They got him breathing at the scene. So, which was a big thing, because Mike was an organ donor, and getting him. Getting him breathing at the scene allowed him to be able to later on to them to donate his organs, which was important to him, which was a good thing.

So we get there. They're working on me. Chris Rowe comes in and puts a tourniquet on. My leg is already swelling. My stomach is swelling and turning black and blue as they're cutting my clothes, and they're cutting my clothes off, and it's 20 degrees outside, and they're dropping me on the ground, and, you know, it's just.

Jon Becker: And you got a concussion.

Buddy Brown: And I got a concussion.

Jon Becker: And they hit you in the face with a vest.

Buddy Brown: And they hit me in the face with a vest. So, you know, it's not the greatest day I've ever had in the world. They brought a pickup truck in that one of the investigators had and backed it in, and they loaded Kyle into the. Into the truck. Put him in first. They carried Kyle's. I say, like a normal. He's like a 170 pound normal sized guy. So they kind of just picked him up and threw him in the back of the truck.

At this point, I was tired of being dropped, so I was like, hey, how about y'all help me get on my feet, and maybe I can just kind of hop? And I had guys on each arm, and I kind of hopped my way over. And the guy driving, the investigator that was driving the truck is a very good friend of mine, and he told me that he remembered seeing me hopping and said, oh, buddy's not hurt that bad. He's walking. He's all right.

So they kind of hopped me over to the truck, and when they got me over there, I kind of sat down on the tailgate and rolled myself over. And I was sick. I was real nauseous. And I remember seeing Kyle, and Kyle was as white as your shirt because he lost so much blood. And I remember thinking, man, Kyle doesn't look good.

But, I mean, I wrote. I kind of rolled on him, and he grunted at me. So, you know, he was. You know, but he really lost a lot of blood. So then they take us to. They've established an LZ. They take us in the truck and drive us to an LZ quarter mile away, where they're going to land helicopters. So I'm laying there, and I'm in the back of the truck. Now, while all this is going on, I'm gonna break from that and go to them, getting the suspect out from under the – So the suspect is under the – He's under the deck. They hold him until we get out of there.

One thing that we ran into that we talk a little about in the debrief, and you can kind of see in some of the videos, is when they got on the radio and said, we need help down here. Everybody that was on that crime scene collapsed onto where we were, and there were guns pointed in the. Everywhere. If somebody would have shot, it could have turned into a horrific, you know, scene down there. But nobody. Nobody did. And they kind of kept everything under control. So they. They don't want him to have to crawl out over this rifle because they don't know that the rifle is. Doesn't work.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You don't want him to get his gun?

Buddy Brown: We don't want him to get his gun again. We don't want to have to shoot him because he inadvertently crawled over his gun, and we thought he was trying to kill us and shoot him. So they, Raquel, SWAT had a little. A very short statured guy that was out there, and he asked him, he said, can you go? And I'm gonna. I've got him. Will you crawl under there, reach out and grab that rifle and pull it out and bring it out?

So they did that, and he crawled on there and got the rifle out. He was wearing, like, the old. And you might be familiar, like, the old 782 gear that the Marine Corps used to use. He had. That was the pack he had on was like, that old 782 gear. And they made him take the pack off because they were concerned that maybe he had it booby trapped or because so much crazy stuff had happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: So they made him take the pack off, and then they got him. They got him to crawl out and got him enough to where they could get their hands on him. And they drug him out. And he had another pistol in his back pocket. He had a revolver in his back pocket also. So they get him. They get him, you know, under. In custody.

Jon Becker: And he's hit, too, right?

Buddy Brown: Oh, yeah, yeah. He's hit a good bit. His arm and leg are all shot up. And I believe that he – When we start. When me and Kyle started engaging him, I think he hid behind his. I think he stuck his rifle in front of him because the rifle had a bunch of hits on it, and it had a bunch of blood on it, like, where it hit his hands, where he was holding the gun. You know, if you ever do. If you ever do a lot of sims, you see guys that always get hit in hands. So they get him out. There was our state law enforcement agencies, the sled state law enforcement division. One of their investigators was there to work Randy's shooting when this shooting. He was on scene when our shooting happened.

Jon Becker: Oh, boy!

Buddy Brown: So he goes down there and he's like, okay, I need everybody from the county out of here. Cause the city guys were still there. The city guys took charge of the suspect, got it. So that the county guys didn't. It was a little, you know. Yeah, it was a little bit of separation. When we would have training, we would always tell the guys to find work, don't be standing around.

So after all this has happened and they've stripped all this gear off of us, the team guys start going and picking everybody's gear up and putting it in piles in the front of the house. So they catch them.

Jon Becker: And they're like, I'm gonna guess the investigator goes crazy.

Buddy Brown: When he sees that. Yeah, he wasn't very happy about that, but he. So. But the guys were, like, almost, like, in shock. I wasn't there. But from the way it's been described to me, they were just wanting to get busy doing something. So, that being said, we didn't know whose gear was who, who's – For a while, we didn't know my rifle was shot. We didn't know there was a lot of stuff that we didn't know. So in that deal, I ended up being shot in the upper left leg. The handguard, when I took where my rifle was shot, where I took my hand off to point under the deck was where my rifle was shot.

Jon Becker: So it would have hit your hand if you had.

Buddy Brown: It would have hit my hand if I hadn't moved it. And it went across the round, went into the handguard and went across the top of the barrel, and it should have knocked the gas system out of it.

Jon Becker: Didn't hit the gas.

Buddy Brown: Didn't hit the gas. The gun still functioned perfectly. It's crazy. And the round that was in my helmet. So you had a couple of really.

Jon Becker: Good little bits of luck there.

Buddy Brown: Yes. Yes. It was very unlucky day overall.

Jon Becker: Bad day overall, two moments of really good luck. Helmet stops the bullet at shot.

Buddy Brown: Yes. Hand doesn't get blown off, destroyed, and hand doesn't get blown off because it's still sitting up there on the gun. And, you know, to quote the mountain, I am big and hard to kill. So.

Jon Becker: Apparently so.

Buddy Brown: Apparently so.

Jon Becker: You've proven that.

Buddy Brown: But. So they take me over to me, and Kyle and. And Mike are over at the – They take us to the landing zone. Well, I'm in the back of the truck. I'm super sick. I can't, you know, I can't figure out why I have to lay on my side. If I lay on my side, it doesn't hurt as much. So. And I remember thinking they had me in a truck, and one of the guys was, like, on top of me just because it was so cold, and they had cut my clothes and everything.

So eventually, and I say eventually, but it was in a very short amount of time, an ambulance shows up, and they load me in the ambulance and load me onto a stretcher and put me in the ambulance, and there's a – There's a medic over here, and he's trying to get an IV going at me, and he's working on getting an IV, and they're gonna give me some fentanyl. And that fentanyl was. That's some pretty good stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it works.

Buddy Brown: And it was literally when they. When they pushed it, it was like, okay, you know, I just. I'll just drive myself to the hospital. I'll be all right.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm fine.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, I'm fine.

Jon Becker: So I may be dying.

Buddy Brown: But I kind of don't care. Yeah, I kind of don't care right now. Everything's good. So when. Right before I got hurt, I was working as a patrol sergeant, what we call a road sergeant. And I was in charge of a shift. And anytime that we had a death in the county, even if Nana went to see Jesus, you know, you had to go out and just make sure that there wasn't anything, you know, any problem with it. And we dealt with the – Not the – You know, the coroner is an elected official, but they have assistant coroners that are the ones that come to the death scenes, and, you know, unless a high profile or something.

So one of the assistant coroners is a guy named Butch. Lindsay and me and Butch were on the same rotation together, so most of the death scenes that I went to, Butch would come out, and we had a rapport, and we worked together a lot. And for years, we did this. Well, in all those years of us working together, I never knew that Butch was a paramedic. So I'm in there, and I'm laying in the. I'm laying in a stretcher, and I'm all shot to h***. And they're putting a fentanyl IV in me. And Butch leans over to me and says, hey, Buddy, how are you doing?

Jon Becker: Oh, no.

Buddy Brown: And I'm like, f*** you, Butch. Get out of here. I don't even want to see you.

Jon Becker: Not today.

Buddy Brown: And I did tell him that. I told him, not today, Butch. Not today. And we still, you know, we still laugh about that. He came to the hospital and saw me, and we laughed. And even when I see him now, we still laugh about, you know. Cause who's the person you don't want to see when you have the truck?

Jon Becker: That's the last guy you.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, that is definitely the last guy you. But that was the thing with me was there was really not much they could do for me at that point. There was nothing, you know, other than make sure that my tourniquet was good and push some pain medicine. They loaded me in a helicopter. There was some discussion about whether they could get me in because my leg was so swollen. You know, I'm big anyway. And my leg was so swollen that it was hard for me to get hard for me to move around. And they managed to wedge me into the helicopter, and they flew me to CMC Maine in Charlotte, andI learned something about the helicopters that I didn't know. They don't know.

The helicopter crews don't know who they're flying. They don't know if you're the good guy, the bad guy, whatever. Because when they got me to the hospital, the guy rolls me out of the helicopter, and he says, what's going on? He said, I said, I got shot. How'd you get shot? I'm a police officer. We were in a gunfight with a domestic violence. Oh, okay. Well, let's get you to the ER. I was like, okay. And it's a thing. And in, in learning about it, they don't tell them what they've got because they don't want them to, like, overstress the aircraft or do…,

Jon Becker: Or take their time.

Buddy Brown: Or take their time getting there. Exactly.

Jon Becker: So get lost.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. So they fly them to Alabama. They flew me and Mike to CMC, and they drove Randy. Once they stabilized him, they put him in an ambulance and took him to Carolinas medical center, which is level one trauma center in Charlotte, which is where you want to be. Charlotte Mecklenburg was fantastic through this whole thing. They shut down the whole interstate.

Jon Becker: Oh, wow!

Buddy Brown: Blocked all the exits, blocked everything. Drove them straight into. Drove. You know, they never even slowed down going to the hospital.

Jon Becker: Were you even aware at that point that Randy had been shot?

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Buddy Brown: Yeah, I knew then. Somebody told us when we got there that the guy had shot Randy. So my sense of time is a little. It's a little wonky at that point. And I get to the ER.

Jon Becker: Cause you've been hitting the head.

Buddy Brown: Cause I've been hitting the head.

Jon Becker: And you're on fentanyl.

Buddy Brown: And I was on fentanyl. So I go and I get to the ER, and there's already people from the sheriff's office there, and there's people there, and I'm like, I just flew here in a helicopter. How in the world? But I didn't know they had brought Randy up already. And there was already. Our people were, were in there, and they shut the ER down. Kind of a couple of the things. And you talk about how this affects your family and your. My girlfriend is a dispatcher, and she was. She was, you know, she was off. She wasn't working when.

Jon Becker: This was not as bad then.

Buddy Brown: And. But her friends, all of her friends were. And all of her friends were listening on the radio. To me, being in a gunfight. And they said my name on the radio. So they wanted to call her and say, hey, you know, buddy's been shot. You need to get to the hospital. But they got told, no, you've got to let the sheriff's office go and tell her that buddy's been shot.

Jon Becker: Go and get her.

Buddy Brown: Go and get her. So they drive. And this is kind of funny because she normally, when we would have a SWAT call, I would have my phone with me somewhere in the truck somewhere. And if we're sitting around waiting for something to happen or we got a guy in a house and we're. They're negotiating with him, you know, I'm texting her, hey, this is still going on.

Everything's, you know, everything's all right. You know, we're good. Or this is Bs, or, you know. But when the. When all this happened and she got to knock on the door, she realized that I hadn't texted her. And she told me that she thought in her mind, please don't be the coroner. Yeah, please don't be the coroner coming to tell me that he's, you know, that he's dead.

And it wasn't. It was our patrol captain was there because I still worked in patrol at that time, and he told her that he would take her to the hospital, but her sister lives nearby, so she went with her sister. So when later on, when she got up there and just to kind of talk about mindset and the guy, that's the patrol academy. She's known him for 15 years. Knows him. First name basis, knows the guy. I said, baby, who came to the. Who came to the house? Some patrol dad. Some guy in uniform. Some guy in uniform in a patrol car. She had no idea who came. And I was kind of mad. I'm like, did they just send joblow deputy down there to get you? Or, you know, what did they. And it was actually the captain had come to see her, and a funny.

So I didn't have my phone when I got to hospital, and I was trying to call. I couldn't remember my mother's number, but I remembered my dad's. And Veronica had already called my dad and told him that I had been hurt. And he was up. He lives in Alabama, and he was up getting dressed, and I remembered his phone number, and somebody gave me a phone, and I gave him the number, and they dialed it, and his wife answered the phone, and I thought I had the wrong number. And I was like, oh, I think I've got the wrong number.

And Diane said, Buddy, is that you? And I'm like, yeah. She's like, let me get your dad for you. So I talked to my dad from the ER when he was leaving to come up, to go up there where he had gotten up and was taking a shower and getting in the truck to come up. Cause he's like 6 hours away. But he said that being able to talk to me before that was a big, you know, was a big deal.

Jon Becker: Settled him down.

Buddy Brown: Settled him down. So we're all in the ER, and one of the things that we didn't realize the suspect came in the ER, also, and they had to coordinate keeping him separate from doing all this stuff. So they rolled me in. They had to do some scans on me, and my leg was so swollen up, it was hard to get in the scanning machine.

And one of the nurses was there, and I was not very pleasant. And she said, just cuss all you need to, you know. I know it hurts. We got to do this. And we got past that. And the funny thing that I talk about is when this thing was going on, when I was out there laying on the ground, when I was getting a tourniquet put on, when I was getting put in a truck, I don't ever remember being scared, like I was going to die. I never had that. Oh, my God. You know, I never panicked. I never, you know, and probably some of it with my brain was all scrambled up, too. Probably wasn't helping.

But I never had that feeling, that really scared feeling. And when they got me to the hospital, they were rolling me down the hallway to go to those scans, and I saw myself in a window as I was going by, and I was like, ooh, yeah, I don't look so good. And that was the first time that I got a little bit like, oh, this is, this is really serious. Uh oh, this is really bad. Because the fentanyl was starting to wear off then, and they couldn't give me anything else because they were rolled, because they literally took me from there and rolled me right into surgery.

And we were lucky because I had, Doctor Nguyen was one of the top vascular surgeons in the southeast, was there, was coming to work all fresh, coming to work nice, and walked right in and started working on saving my – It saved my leg. They put twelve units of blood through my leg to get the flow back going in it, and got it fixed. And the, they put so much fluid through me to get me, my blood flow going again that I swole up and they couldn't get the wound closed. So I had to have five more, five total surgeries on my leg to get it done.

Jon Becker: Put it all back together.

Buddy Brown: Put it all back together. And they were, from what I understand, they were very close to going ahead and taking it off at one point, and they got it to work. So I owe my leg to Dr. Nguyen. He did a great job. So. And all the guys came in and we talked to guys about planning for something like that, because it's never going to go the way that you think it's going to go. Like, my thought process would have been in that when I'm shot, Heath is going to go get Veronica and tell her. Well, he can't go get Veronica and tell her because he's right there with me.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Buddy Brown: You know, so the way that you think that plans are going to work or sometimes are not the way they're going to go. And then, um, that was, you know, you talk about time. Um, we start out on the 15th. We go, we. Randy gets shot on the morning of the 16th. I get shot further on in the morning of the 16th. We go to the hospital. It's still the 16th all through the day on into the next night. And then Mike passes late on the 17th. So there was like, two days there.

It doesn't seem like it, but it was a longer time because I remember when we were doing, when I was in the room. Cause people came, and that's one thing Veronica really did. People would come and they would want to visit, you know, and I was coming out of major surgery, and I felt like if people were coming to visit, I needed to sit up and. And talk to them.

And I was passing out while people were there. And she finally. And she's five foot one, and she finally marched out, and there was a. They had posted CMPD officers outside of all of our rooms, and she went out and told the CMPD officer, if it's not a member of his family, nobody else comes in. Yeah, he's got to get some rest.

And he said, yes, ma'am, and went out there and didn't let anybody else in. CMPD was great. They had a guy at our room the whole time that we were there, and we just. I finally got some rest and just the, you know, people showing up, people coming. You know, it was a. It was a crazy, just a crazy scene for a while there. But I spent ten days in the hospital, got to leave to go to Mike's funeral. I had to walk. I had to walk her or get up on a walker.

There was something I had to do that I had to do that for them to let me. And I still had all the tubes and pipes and all that stuff. They just taped it all to my legs and my body, and I put a BDU blouse on and sat down in a – They put me in a wheelchair and put a. I thought I was going to wear pants, but my leg was so swollen up, I could never have gotten pants on. And they just threw a blanket over my legs and took me to one of the local ambulance companies brought an ambulance that they could load me up in and took me to the funeral. And then I had to come straight back. They doped me up, gave me a lot of stuff so that I could hang in there for the funeral. And then as soon as the funeral was over, I had to go back to hospital.

Jon Becker: And then how long after that were you in the hospital?

Buddy Brown: Four or five more days.

Jon Becker: And how long, what was the recovery like? How long did it take you to recover from this?

Buddy Brown: Two years, probably a good two years to get back as good as I was going to get. Because I started with a home healthcare nurse would come in and do, just because I would get up in the morning with a walker and just make it to go make coffee. And it would take me, you know, just getting up and going to the bathroom was initially was, you know, just would wear me out and, like, I would start getting up in the morning and making my way and being able to make a cup of coffee was, like, my first thing. And then I had a home health care nurse that kind of worked with me, got me.

And that's kind of where we figured out about the concussion stuff, because she was helping me. I was doing some kind of stretching or something on the floor, and she went to help me up, and I got real dizzy and fell down. And she's like, what's wrong with you? And I'm like, well, when I get up too fast, I get dizzy. And she laid me on the bed and took my head, and you have, like, little pebbles in your ears that have to do with your equilibrium. The way she took my head and racked it back and forth a couple times, and it kind of resets that stuff.

And we had to do that several times, but it took several of that to get to where my head kind of cleared up. And I saw a neurologist, you know, and you had the physical portion of it and you had the psychological portion of it.

Jon Becker: Absolutely.

Buddy Brown: That you had to, you know, that you had to deal with. And that's the, you know, if I can say anything to guys is don't be afraid to. To get the help that you need, you know, because I couldn't imagine dealing with this, dealing with a situation like this without getting the help that I had needed. You know, and for the whole department, you know, everybody, you know, everybody that was involved was offered, and a vast majority of them used the help that was available to them. You know, it's a big deal.

Jon Becker: So, Buddy, talk to me about kind of the personal lessons learned from this event.

Buddy Brown: I went through a long time of kind of telling myself that this was my fault, that what had happened was my fault. You know, I would go through this. I had this cycle that I went through where I would get up in the morning, and my girlfriend used to always make me get up in the morning, take a shower and get my day going. I would get up and I would get in the shower. My leg hurt going in the shower, and my leg hurt because Mike got shot and Mike was dead, and it was my fault. And that's how I would start my day.

And it took a long time for that not to be, you know, and just to learn that, you know, things. Things happen the way that they're going to happen. We did everything that we could, you know, to kind of make that, you know, not have that outcome. But, you know, sometimes you can, you can still have a decent plan and things can go, can go sideways out there that night. And after this thing was over, us depending on each other and depending on, you know, if somebody needs something or if somebody need, you know, if we needed somebody needs some help and they wouldn't get it, kind of helping them do the things that they needed to do.

So it was, there was a lot of we – There was one of the things that one of the guys said in the, in the brief, and, you know, and you've got, you know, 30, you know, type a SWAT guys, you know, and you said you've never told so many grown men that you love them in your life, you know, as the way that, you know, the way that we all kind of came together after this thing and still, you know, to this day is a, you know, is a bond of going through some, some pretty horrible stuff, but, you know, working our way through it.

Jon Becker: Well, one of the things you and I have talked about, you know, before that, I think is worth talking about is staying in the fight.

Buddy Brown: Yeah. We definitely, in our training, even when we did simulations, training. Even when we did that kind of thing, we knew that we always trained that even if you get hit with a sim, even if, you know, you got hit with a sim, you continue to fight, you continue to go on. And when I was hit and I knew I was hit, I knew that if I didn't do something about it, I was, this was, you know, I was going to continue to get hit. And I took the mindset that I needed to, you know, get off that X and return fire and stay in the fight and get things done, and we managed to do that.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about lessons learned for the team.

Buddy Brown: We learned a good bit of instant command lessons, kind of span of control type stuff. We went through a long time of, it was kind of a first come, first serve thing. If you were the first one to get to the call, you were the first one to go in, regardless of, of your level of experience or what you had.

And when we were still kind of working under that, those assumptions when this call came out and there were, there were better equipped, better trained guys that we could have used in the Bearcat versus the guys, some of the guys, maybe some of the people that were in there, maybe if we were hindsight 2020, and I don't know that it's gonna, you know, it would have changed any of the outcome of it.

We would have had maybe some different people in there, some guys that weren't, like, one of the guys was a sniper and had a, you know, he didn't have, he had an ar, but his primary mission was a sniper, but he just happened to be the first one of the first ones to get there.

And he jumped in the Bearcat because he, you know, because we're all type a's and we all want to go. But since then, – since this, in that endeavor, we have been much more selective about who is going to go and picking the best people that are performing the best. And we always, we try to run our training like you're auditioning every time you come to training.

So if you're, you know, if you have a couple of off trainings, you might not be that first guy to go to get in the truck to go when we have a call. And if you're one of the up and coming guys and you're having really good, then maybe you move up to that point and you're the guy that goes. But not just, okay, you're the first one to get here, get in the truck and go.

We're a little more selective about that. And we have gear. We now have a guy that does that ensures that everybody's wearing the proper gear that they should have on, because when we were preparing for this operation, not everybody had plates in, not everybody had their helmets on, not everybody had all the gear that they should have. And now that is very much.

If you're gonna go, you have, you know, you have your gear on. We do a thing now where before we go on, before the team goes on a mission, they empty their pockets, because that way, if you have to put a. If you have to put a tourniquet on them up high, they don't have their wallet or a knife or keys or something in their way of putting a tourniquet on your legs, because everybody out there that got shot got a tourniquet except for Mike. I got a tourniquet. Randy got a tourniquet, Kyle got a tourniquet. And if I'd have had a set of keys or something in my pocket when they put this tourniquet on way up here, it could have been in the way of it. So now we. When you go, when you're deploying, you don't have anything in your pockets.

Jon Becker: That's a really interesting one. What about comms? You said you had a lot of struggle with comms.

Buddy Brown: Just the too many people on one channel. Just too many people trying to talk on one channel and not having that control of where, you know, these guys are going to go to this channel, and these guys are going to go to this channel, and just where you're standing there, you're standing there with your hand on the mic, you know, trying to talk, and you're waiting for somebody to stop talking. But. And it wasn't that anybody was, like, hogging the radio or talking, you know, overly talking. There was just so much activity that it was.

We discovered where it became overloaded. We discovered where things. Where we needed to branch off and make it and make another channel. And we have kind of guidelines set up now where, okay, if we have this incident, we have an incident and it becomes, you know, this becomes this big, then we'll. We'll get another channel and we'll move some of the people onto that channel so that we can still utilize the radios without it being so clogged up.

There was never really an established command post. There was where the commanders were, but there was never like, okay, I'm at here and here, and this is the command post, and this is where everybody needs to come and. And get jobs, you know? So that was like I talked about earlier. We, we kind of fall down on that. Compared to the firemen, we don't do the command and control and the instant command stuff. And we lost track of some of our people.

There was a couple guys that stayed out a little longer than they should have on different scenes, and, you know, and it was the. We had some. We had a weather, not a. We had a weather casualty. We had a guy that got some frostbite because he got left out. You know, he was out too long. He wasn't going to say anything, you know, but he was stuck out in the cold, and he didn't get relieved when he should have and ended up getting frostbite. Nothing, you know, he recovered from it. He didn't, you know, he didn't lose anything, but just things we learned about that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, it's so – so do. And you now, I'm assuming, have communications.

Buddy Brown: With Charlotte Mecklenburg that has been. That has been repaired. We've worked with them. We now have communications with their, where we have a channel that we can actually talk to their people and we can talk to their helicopter. That problem. But it still took a little while for that problem to get fixed. Even after something like this. When we talked about resources and all, having Randy calling the sled helicopter in the very beginning probably saved lives that, you know, nothing, you know, it's not beginning being able to keep an eye on where the suspect was.

The Rock Hill PD SWAT team, I guess the way I understand it, when Heath was coming back from the hospital, when he had dropped Randy off and was coming back from the hospital, one of the Rock Hill SWAT lieutenants called him and said, hey, do you guys need help? And he was like, yep, we'll take all you can get. And they sent a whole. They sent a whole element in their armored vehicle, and they came out and helped us out there. So that was a big part. You know, they were a big help.

And that kind of, you know, anytime you have multiple agencies, you know, you get a little. You can get a little. Or we do things this way and you guys do things this way. But us having this incident, you know, kind of galvanized us into one, you know, good unit that we work well. We work really well with those guys.

Our communication could have been a little bit better. Like we talked about earlier, me and Heath should have established communication at the corners of the bill of the house instead of just kind of, we were just planning on just kind of driving back to where the boat was and going from there. And some of the consequences of that lack of communication between the two of us is that we ended up in a blue and blue situation to where one of the officers involved sustained a non lethal injury as a result of that.

And I feel like that better communication between the teams, maybe we could have alleviated that problem. Problem. When we talked, we talked a little bit also in the. We talked a little bit about equipment. We laugh and joke about it, but when they were trying to move me off the X, they dropped me several times. So we ended up getting a portable litter system that goes on to the molly of your vest.

So that way, if you had somebody down like that, you could throw it out, throw the person on it, pick the litter up and take them out, because you don't realize how hard it is to move somebody until you're actually doing it. And when you don't want to be doing it is, you know, after a gunfight with a. With a, you know, suspect still downrange.

So we could have had a little bit better night vision and lasers. That's something that we're working on. We're getting. We're getting a little bit better equipment on that. That might have helped a little bit. Since this incident happened, we got two UAVs that we can use that's our own with Flir and the cameras and the whole. Just about all the capabilities of a helicopter, but it's in a. It's in a drone configuration that we've used a lot since then. Just, you know, I've sat down with some pretty. I've sat down with some pretty senior guys and gone over this thing, some pretty senior tactical guys.

And a lot of times I give them the, hey, if you had this situation, you know, how would you have. How would you have tackled it? And to a man, they've kind of said, well, it's really not fair if they have a lot more resources to use, you know, maybe a K9, maybe we do a, you know, a drone with a fliry or things that we didn't have available. So that's that. You know, we've been talking about this thing with, with different people from across the country. We've gotten a lot of good. A lot of good feedback.

And, you know, we – One of the big things also, that we were concerned that the guy was going to get in a house we were concerned he was going to get in somebody's house and take them hostage. And then we were going to have this hostage standoff thing. So that's why we were kind of pushing him. Cause they were like, well, didn't you kind of push, you know, couldn't you have waited till. Well, no. Cause then he gets in somebody's house, and now we've really gotta.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Cause until you identify where he is, which you identify by him ambushing you.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: He's at large. He's already shot a police officer.

Buddy Brown: Yes.

Jon Becker: And he's looking for a place to hide.

Buddy Brown: Yes. So that was kind of why we were pushing that. This other equipment. One of the equipment things is, when the K9 track was going on, none of those guys took rifles with them, so they only had handguns, even though they knew that the suspect had a rifle. They all took handguns, which they fired back at him when he ambushed Randy and kind of drove him off with the handgun. But, you know, if you're, you know, the one plus one, if he's got a rifle, we're gonna bring two rifles. You know, let's – Those are things we need to think about that.

Talking a little bit about medical care, putting a tourniquet on Randy. Randy, I think, was the first time that we put a tourniquet on such a severe wound was, I think, was that night. Yeah. We had. I don't know that we had ever used a tourniquet on anything, and we had them because the. The tourniquets that they used for all of us that night were manufactured in our hometown. They were an American rescue, and they were manufactured in Rock Hill, where we live.

I actually, me and Randy went and toured their plant where they make them at and met with kind of like they do with the saves. Yeah, we went to the plant and talked and thanked them and all because they weave them, weave them, put them everything, do everything together right there in rock Hill.

So the decision to load Randy up and take him to the hospital immediately probably helped out, you know, instead of, you know, we're. Okay. We're going to drive him here and wait for an ambulance. No, we're not. We're going to. We're. We're taking him to the hospital and getting him there. Um, placing the SWAT medics, you know, having the SWAT medic so close probably helped us, you know, helped Kyle's survivability, definitely, you know, helped with the way that we got. You know, those guys. Those guys definitely earned their. Earned their keep that night, you know? Cause I. I still firmly believe we'd lost Kyle if we didn't have. If Chuck hadn't been able to get his bleeding stopped. It's crazy, crazy, crazy.

Jon Becker: So, Buddy, in the aftermath of this, how did the team deal with the psychological fallout and the, you know, the. The emotional damage and everything that followed?

Buddy Brown: Well, we were pretty lucky. We have an organization called Sleep that does post critical incident debriefs, kind of where they get. They have peer support. It's a peer support group. They have guys that have been involved in critical incidents, and they come and get everybody together and allow them to talk about it. We went to a post critical incident retreat. Most of the guys have been to it. It's a week long thing, and it kind of talks about. You talk about your incident. You work with other people that have been involved in similar type incidents and kind of help you understand.

And a lot of it is understanding the stresses and understanding the way that your body reacts to all these things and learning that it's normal. I went through a state of, like, hypervigilance where I couldn't really sleep. Anytime I heard a noise, anytime I heard anything, you know, I was up, moving around, went through a lot of that, did. Had a lot of psychological, you know, had a lot of stuff I had to, you know, I had to deal with, had to get some counseling, had to work with a. I worked with a neuropsychologist for a while.

And that was offered to everybody, and most everybody took advantage of it. Most everybody. That was a key player in this thing. And the thing that sometimes I have to remember is, once I got to where I could drive again. I go out to get breakfast one morning, and the patrol chef is at this restaurant having breakfast, and I go and I go over and sit down and eat breakfast with them because I knew them. They were the guys, and they were asking me how I was doing. I didn't even realize, but they were out there that night, and some of their guys helped drag me out of the woods.

You know, this thing was so, you know, we had a thing that we talked about, and I've said it before, is that, you know, me and Kyle and Randy, and we lost Mike, and we were all injured, but, like, everybody was hurt by this thing. Everybody in the agency was had – It had some kind of, you know, because there was so much, you know, Mike's funeral was that you're familiar with who Delta was, the race car driver Dale Earnhardt.

Mike's funeral was at the same church where they did Dale Earnhardt's funeral. And it was completely packed and you couldn't even get in the doors in there and the community out. I mean, we got a lot of support from the community. It was, it was just, you know, I had, and it's kind of carried over, you know, it's carried over into the relationship that we have with the community and just, if anything, just trying to get guys to get the help they need, not be afraid to get the help they need, not be afraid to go through. And if they're having a problem with something, identify it and move forward.

Jon Becker: I think that's a fantastic place for us to stop. Buddy, I really appreciate you joining me, and thanks for coming and sharing this information with us!

Buddy Brown: Anytime!

Episode 34 – Claire Park – 10 Second Triage & The UK Approach to Mass Casualty Events

Jon Becker: My guest today is Dr. Claire Park. Claire is a consultant in the prehospital emergency medicine for London HEMS and anesthesia and critical care medicine at King's College Hospital in London. She's also an army consultant and retired lieutenant colonel with over 20 years of deployed military experience.

Claire is the medical advisor to the specialist firearms teams of the Metropolitan Police Service and has worked closely with all of the emergency services in London on developing the joint response to high threat incidents. In particular, following the attacks of 2017. She's the chief investigator of a UK nationally funded research grant looking at evidence for improving patient outcomes in the hot zones of major incidents.

I'm excited to have Claire on the show because she has a unique combination of real world experience in combat theaters and practical experience and research in civilian tactical law enforcement. She's also been at the forefront of the UK's new approach to mass casualty events called ten second triage.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Claire, thanks so much for being here today! I'm really excited to have this conversation.

Claire Park: Thanks so much for advising me! Jon, I'm really excited to be talking to you about it as well!

Jon Becker: So I think context probably matters more in this conversation than it does typically in one of my interviews, because your experience and the experience of the United Kingdom informed of, ultimately, the ten second triage system that you create. So why don't we go back and let's talk about kind of your background and history a little bit. Why did you decide to become a doctor?

Claire Park: Okay, so that's quite a long time ago. I actually almost joined the army before I became a doctor, but I decided to become a doctor because I was super interested in how people work in the human body, and I figured that life was probably quite important, so trying to sustain life seemed quite an important thing to be doing.

So I decided to go to medical school and then really wasn't even sure if I'd enjoy it, but absolutely loved looking after patients and then realized I could be in the army and be a doctor. So just before I graduated from medical school, I joined the army, planning to join for six years and 23 years later, I was still in until last year now when I left.

So I specialized in end up specializing in anesthetics, intensive care and pre-hospital emergency care trauma, which is my kind of main area of work. But started off in the army as a GP. Working with an infantry battalion in Iraq was the first place we deployed to where I spent six months with them and then came back and studied specialist training in anesthetics and critical care medicine, which then took me to the pre hospital care world, where when I deployed again to Afghanistan, I deployed with the medical emergency response team, which is essentially the sort of helicopter version on the Met in the Chinooks, and we would go out to treat the soldiers from the battlefield on the way back through camp bastion.

And then I do the equivalent of that job in the UK, where we call it Hems, or helicopter emergency medical services. And in London, we have a team that work for a service called London Hems, where we do exactly the same. We essentially take the emergency department to the roadside, where we do resuscitation procedures and examine and decide what patients need at multiple trauma scenes across London and the surrounding area.

Jon Becker: So you spent the last 23 years dealing with people who are in trauma in the field, not just treating people in emergency rooms, but between your work in the army and your work in the Hems program, like you're flying in on a helicopter to almost every patient you see.

Claire Park: Yeah, either on a helicopter or in the car when the weather's too rubbish. But we. Yeah, essentially, I guess we're, in a way, I see it as being pretty lucky to see patients at that really early phase of their injury trajectory, something that often people in hospital don't see. And sadly, some people were not able to save, and those people never get seen by the people in hospital. But we have the opportunity to see what we maybe could do to save people, and we also understand what it's like to try and manage people at the scene.

And I think that sort of that element of working within an emergency scenario and within the scene is something that brings me into the work I've been doing with the police, and particularly police officers in tactical environments. Understanding the situation they're working in is something very different to people who work within.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it's not, you know, it's not wasted on me that the 23 years you spent in the army were 23 of the most eventful years for trauma medicine, for the way we treat our injured soldiers. How many times did you deploy in the time you were in?

Claire Park: I guess that it was a total of. So it was in Iraq for six months. I went to Afghanistan three times for three or four months each time. And then I also deployed with small surgical forward teams that support our SOF units to North Africa. And during that time spent a lot of time, obviously, in training for those different varying roles with the military.

So probably particularly Afghanistan, Washington, really busy in terms of casualties, sadly, ISAF casualties that we saw, all of the international security forces, both UK, American, Dutch and everyone else that was deployed with us, as well as the Afghan casualties that we came across.

So, yeah, those few years were particularly busy and really glad to say that by the time we left, at least it was less busy than when we started and we were seeing less people badly injured. There was certainly a lot of bad injuries during that time.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But I think it's for your later life. I think it's fantastic preparation. Right. Like between the him's work that you've done of seeing people who are in car crashes and all kinds of traumatic injuries, to the time spent in Iraq and Afghanistan and dealing with gunshot wounds and frag wounds and concussion wounds and all those kinds of things, it kind of lays a foundation that then makes this, makes you perfectly qualified to do what you're now doing.

Claire Park: Yeah, I think it does. It focuses your mind a lot when you're there trying to save people. And if you're passionate enough about it, you really, really want to understand what it is that we could do to make a difference and seeing the injury patterns, trying to understand what's happening.

And I think now my other job, which is in hospital, as well as working for the pre hospital services, I work in hospital based in the emergency department, running trauma calls and in the intensive care department, looking after people on life support machines, essentially helps me understand that whole injury process and what we expect to happen and what's possible to happen for people that we do the right stuff for. And then in the pre hospital world, we see the people that sometimes we can't save and we look at what we need to learn to do better.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's the US they talk about the golden hour of trauma and it seems just in reading your bio and talking to you and preparing for the interview, it seems that you've spent the last two decades living in that golden hour with everybody from soldiers to cops to just average UK citizens.

Claire Park: Yeah, arguably it's not an hour. I think I know you've probably heard people say that, now there's the golden hour. But actually, for some people, it's five minutes. For some people, there's no time at all, and then for some people there's longer, but there's definitely, I think, a shift. And what we know is that probably the peak time to death, certainly from bleeding pre hospitally, is 30, 35 minutes.

So in some people, you have a really short time to try and do something, and other people who are bleeding from injuries to different parts of their body, you have longer. So I think our aim is really to get there as quickly as possible to make the decision about what they need.

And that decision is actually sometimes all we do, sometimes it's interventions, but sometimes it's just knowing, okay, actually, we just want to go with this patient, and in other patients, it's no, we need to stay and do something to try and get them relying.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I recently interviewed Kevin Menes, who was one of the doctors that responded to the Las Vegas shootings. And Kevin put it better than anything I've ever heard. He said, when somebody is injured in a traumatic injury, they have x amount of time to live, and that might be five minutes, it might be 2 hours, it might be the rest of their life. But if you do not intervene and stop what is killing them in the time that they have, they're going to die.

And, you know, I had never thought about the role of, especially the first physician that's treating as extending that time. But it's really, in reading your work and listening to interviews with you, that's really kind of the focus of a lot of your work, is trying to get there as quickly as you can to stop the dying process as quickly as you possibly can.

Claire Park: Yeah, and I think one of the procedures we started doing in London, which is something called riboa, it's essentially an internal tourniquet. So it's a resuscitative endovascular balloon. Occlusion of the auto. It's a long term for it, but basically you put a tube into the femoral artery and inflate the balloon in the aorta to stop bleeding below it. And we brought that in really, because we were seeing patients dying on the streets that we could resuscitate to get the hospital alive. We wanted to do something different.

So that process of essentially, because you can't compress that, that's non compressible bleeding that's inside the body as a piece of the stuff that you can put a tourniquet on or you can pack, then we needed to do something different. So as a service in London, we, even though it's fairly complicated. We realized that we needed to do something and we certainly had some patients and the complications of it, but we've had some patients who survived to hospital and done really well as a result of having that put in.

So we're still learning about it, we're still trying to push boundaries with who we can make it work for. And the sicker the patient, the harder it is to get it in. But we're constantly looking at what we can do differently and not accepting that there isn't something we can do.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I want to talk about some of the areas you're currently researching. I think, first, it may not be a bad idea to give context to our listeners, the difference between the UK and the US, as far as policing ambulance service, because you guys have a different approach than we do.

Claire Park: Yeah, I guess certainly from a policing point of view, it's unusual, or more unusual for our police officers to carry guns then it is not. And we've had one, actually had one American doctor work with us, but he was like, I can't get over it. I can't understand how police don't. More than half your police don't have guns on the street.

So for me, when I say that I work with our armed police unit, that most of our police in London are not armed, and there's a small unit of smallish unit of armed police in London, more in London than anywhere else. But that's probably the biggest difference.

Jon Becker: Which of the specialist firearms officers, if I remember correctly.

Claire Park: So we've got two levels, if you like, of armed policing in general. I mean, they're split into specialist areas, but the main armed response vehicles, as we call them, ARVs or armed firearms officers, standard firearms officers are the normal guys, the guys we work with day to day on the streets. They'll be driving around London in cars and they often go to stabbings and shootings that we go to with them. The specialists, the counter terrorist specialist firearms officers, or CTSFOs, are a little bit more like the specialist intervention units.

So a bit like GSG nine or raid or probably a high level SWAT team, more sort of special forces trained. And they have extra skills for hostage rescue and the more complicated jobs, and they would do more undercover stuff, both crime and counter terrorist work. And we have quite a few teams in London and I've worked quite closely with them as their medical adviser.

And then I guess some of the other differences we have in the pre hospital world is that our fire and ambulance services are split. So unlike in the US where often you would one day maybe be doing fire job and the next day be on an ambulance. We have totally separate fire and rescue service to ambulance service. And they're not interchangeable roles.

Jon Becker: So the firefighters are firefighters, they're not firefighter paramedics.

Claire Park: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And the paramedics rescue EMS or their own discipline.

Claire Park: Yeah. So we have – The fire rescue service tends to be the kind of fire and they have a rescue role. So their role in sort of high threat incidents or terrorist attacks would be, other than dealing with fire, to be the sort of extrication and rescue people, particularly, although they have some first aid training as well, and the EMS or the ambulance service would be providing the medical response.

Jon Becker: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. And the other thing is, it's common to have a doctor in the US. We think in terms of, you're going to get a paramedic who's going to get you to a hospital, to a doctor, but you guys forward deploy your doctors much more than we do.

Claire Park: Yeah, I think it's pretty standard across the UK. Not lots of doctor teams, not as many as they have in France. But in most areas of the UK, we will have a doctor paramedic team available to deploy to a scene to provide that kind of hems response, that emergency department response by the roadside. And it's been increasing. So it's probably 30 years ago. London Hems has been going for, I think, just over 30 years now, 34 years or so.

And certainly when we started, a lot of people said, this is ridiculous, why would doctors going to the scene? And it's kind of become an accepted kind of part of our response now, which is to have that enhanced sort of medical team going to the scene. Bizarrely, it's the one place that's not so accepted is in tactical situations or high threat environments. And I think my understanding that the reverse is the case in the US, where the only place physicians really seem to deploy to the scene is with a tactical team in some places.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's not. It's not uncommon in the US for a medical director to, you know, be embedded with a team. At a minimum, you know, you'll have highly trained tactical emergency medicine specialists, but. But it is not unusual for teams to take a team doctor with them. And, yeah, you're right, that is the one place that we for deploy our doctors. Although, you know, I think as we go into this, we'll find that probably both sides could, could stand to move the doctors a little forward in a mass casualty. Talk to me about interoperability there's a little bit of difference in the way you guys interoperate. Police, fire, rescue.

Claire Park: Yeah, I think it's probably standard for us in the UK. So we have a thing called Jessup, which is a joint emergency services interoperability principles. So for any scene, and most of our emergency scenes on multi agency to a certain extent, where we'll have an RTC, fire will come and secure the vehicles, while ambulance will sort of deal with the casualties and then police will secure the scene.

So most of our scenes involve at least two, if not three, of the emergency services. And we have a standard way of bringing those services together with principles of joint understanding of risk and situational awareness and the commanders all coming together in a huddle to make those decisions. And in principle it works really well.

And on the smaller scenes it definitely does and will have repeated land huddles between the three commanders just to kind of update, particularly on slightly more complicated scenes. It doesn't work if people don't come together in some of the more complicated, bigger major incidents. That's one of the issues we've had.

But I think in general it actually works really well. And we have specific interoperability liaison officers for each of the services that are specifically trained to pass the knowledge of their service onto the other emergency services they're working with. I think it does work quite well to bring our teams together and see and augment. Everybody's working together.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think that's kind of a good segue to talk about stuff that's interesting to you right now, because I know that you're doing research, you're involved in a lot of things. What's got your attention right now? What are the things that you are working on, are trying to move forward.

Claire Park: So I've spent probably the last few years at least, looking specifically, as I've kind of alluded to, higher threat responses, but also major incidents in general, whether that's a train crash or car crash or a fire, a big fire in a building, and from a sort of London air ambulance, London hems point of view, lead on that.

And it particularly looks at incidents across the world and how people have responded to that. As I kind of alluded to, I've been thinking quite a lot about what we could do differently to save lives. And what I've noticed at a lot of these scenes is that people talk about process and they talk about numbers of casualties and they maybe even talk about triage categories, but no one really talks about what's wrong with the casualties and how much, therefore, how much time we have to save them. And actually, that's probably because we don't have a lot of really good evidence on that.

So I spent quite a lot of time thinking about what is it that's killing people, how long do they have to survive with all of the various different injuries, and everyone responds a bit differently, and then who is there at which phase of their response to try and fix that, and trying to bring all of that together to the sort of chain of survival which we think do quite well for medical cardiac arrest, but we probably do less well for traumatic injuries.

So I've been looking specifically at a research project to look at all of the deaths from terrorist attacks in the UK, and supplementing that with stabbings and shootings and similar type of mechanisms since 2000 to look at specifically bringing in multi agency data.

So using police data to join with health data and with the coroner data to look at the time to death, how long did they survive or not death on the certificate, but how long it took till they went into cardiac arrest, what their injuries actually were, which we get more detail from in the post mortem report, and then what anyone who was there was able to do, and also the time of who responded, at what point in time, with what skill set.

So then we know who might have the ability to do something, so we can look at all of that data and pull it together, and we're still doing that now, but to look at potential survivability as well. And if a patient had an injury that is potentially survivable, who would we need to get there and what timeframe to fix it, and then translate that into exercising as well.

So that when we actually exercise these things, we have people playing casualties who act out in the way that the casualties would present, so that it's more realistic than having mannequins and people who are having a bit of a laugh, because it's quite funny to pretend to be a casualty. So trying to make it as realistic as possible, having casualties acting in the right way, presenting in the way the casualties would.

So people learn that and then deteriorating if they don't get the right intervention. So that by the end of the exercise, you have outcomes that say this number of people died, these patients might have survived if something different had happened at this time. So we can get better learning out of the training we do, which often is expensive and time consuming, and quite often we don't think as much out of it as we could.

Jon Becker: But you start really hitting the human effects kind of the human factors of training by increasing pressure and doing other things.

Claire Park: Yeah, absolutely. And the knowledge and the technical skills is one thing, but the human factors is almost a whole other kind of element of training that we spend quite a lot of time training in sort of small teamwork, which is kind of understanding what it is that prevents us maintaining that situational awareness. So simple concepts, I'm sure lots of people who are listening to this understand and train anyway.

But the idea of sort of bandwidth being the amount of head spare, the amount of spare headspace you have to take in new information and process it and make decisions. And if your task focused on something, how that bandwidth narrows to focus on the thing you're doing, and by default, then your peripheral vision and your peripheral hearing go. And so you miss stuff that's coming in. And if you become really, really task focused, you really don't focus on anything other than what you're doing, but you probably don't notice that at the time, so then you lose your situational awareness.

So a lot of the training we do is to train things like motor programs. So, for instance, when you drive, most of us, I certainly often drive and probably couldn't tell you what I was doing to drive. If I had to teach someone else to drive, I'd have to really think about it, because it's so ingrained in me that I just do it automatically. Even driving a route home that you drive every day, you don't think about it a lot of the time unless you're driving for a job where you're taking note of everything that's around you.

So that idea that you've embedded and rated program that then doesn't take up your headspace. So you've got more headspace to notice what's going on around you. To not become task focused and to maintain your situational awareness means that you're much more effective, particularly when there's a high threat situation. But even on a normal job, when we go to a scene, people become quite stressed by everything that's going on, and that also narrows their bandwidth because they're not used to taking it in.

So being used to turning up to scenes like that and then also focusing on how we respond to each other and noticing it in a teammate. So if my paramedic sees that I'm a bit focused on something, they can offload me and take some information or take something off me to give me a little bit more bound.

Constantly doing that as a team or keeping one person step back with the eyes out with someone else who's task focused and then switching between those two things allows us to maintain as a team that sort of situational awareness and is often the way we are able to make the skills and the decision making work and push the scene forwards. We spend quite a lot of time focusing on that and also in our training, breaking down the skills to focus on those bits as well.

Jon Becker: Well, it's interesting because we tend to think of the initial response to an active shooter or that kind of a situation, and we tend to train that a great deal. Teams will work on active shooter protocols and all that, and they'll work on tactical medicine, but they don't tend to necessarily work on them together where you're dealing with not just a patient, but a dozen patients, and having to choose where you're going to pay attention.

And I think it is an area that could use a great deal of augmentation for training. And we don't think about the overwhelming nature that happens to the medic too, you know, if you're lucky enough to have a doctor there, the doctor, because that's – It's not just an unusual circumstance for the team, it's an unusual circumstance for everybody involved.

Claire Park: Absolutely. I mean, this is, you know, we train for this all the time, but it's not the kind of thing you go through all the time at all. And there's a lot to do. You know, if you've got one sick patient, you could do so much for one sick patient.

When you've got multiple sick patients, having all of those sick patients there, you've got to have some way of starting and actually doing the immediately important stuff first, and have a sort of framework to approach that scene and having that framework to approach the scene, but also keeping one person, maybe even back, to stop people getting sucked into doing too much for each casualty forest before they've got around and done all of the immediate stuff is a really important part of making that scene work and is certainly a lot of the consideration that we put into a new triage tool that we've developed, particularly for those kind of tactical scenarios, but for all of our emergency services in the UK.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which is ten second triage, which I want to get to, I think, before we move to ten second triage, why don't we give context? Because the UK had a series of events in 2017 that not only identified the issue with triage response, but also, I think, gave the political will to the public and provided the funding to do the research and all of that. Why don't we start? I guess it's probably March of 17, right, is the Westminster Bridge incident, if my memory serves me correctly. Car versus pedestrians.

Claire Park: Absolutely. It was March 2017, and it was 02:00 in the afternoon, and it was a car that had driven into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and then drove into the barrier outside the palace of Westminster, which is our houses of parliament. And then the attacker ran around to the gate of the houses of parliament and attacked a police officer that was on duty there.

And sadly, that police officer was killed in the attack along with four other people. That was the first of the terrorist attacks we had had for quite a while. And actually what you learn about these kind of incidents is that corporate memory phase quite fast. In the sort of nineties, we had lots of IRA attacks in London. And then in the early two thousands, we had the seven. Seven bombings, but we hadn't had anything for quite a long time.

So a lot of people actually responding to that attack didn't necessarily know that it was a terrorist attack initially, certainly not the car vested pedestrian. That was one of the first vehicle attacks we'd had. And so. But it then became very rapidly clear what was happening since the police responded to the attacker at the palace of Westminster.

And there was – See, there's, as with all of these events, there was all of the distraction calls and the concern that there were multiple attackers and other things happening. And for that reason, even though it was, we now know in hindsight easily, that it was a single attacker, there was a lot of reticence to deploy teams to the scene because of the safety and because it was technically a hot or a warm zone.

And then that event followed by some other events in 2017 with some of the similar themes. But actually what happened, well, in that event was that the patients got really good care on the bridge because most people didn't know it was a terrorist attack. And when it does become known to be that, actually the response gets delayed because people worry about the safety.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you've got, at Westminster, you've got 49 people injured, five killed. But, yeah, it initially presents as a car crash. Like somebody just lost control of their car and hits a crowd. And so people are running into the scene and you're getting help, and it's not, you know, there isn't this immediate shutdown of, okay, it's a terrorist attack, shut it down. It's a hot zone, so you have better response.

Claire Park: And it was kind of split. So you almost had. It was very obvious what was happening at the palace of Westminster, that that was an attack. But the people who responded to the south side of the bridge that that kind of took a little while to filter, certainly from an ambulance point of view.

And I mean, quite quickly it became clear. But I think you still, by the time people had responded and were there already, the police who knew that it was a terrorist attack, went, if I stop people responding now, I'm going to stop a response that needs to happen.

So I'm going to take a risk and let them carry on, because we know that the one attacker we had is now secured. And that's happening in a different area, which is different to something like London Bridge, where there were multiple attackers and there were thought to be more, and then that whole area is kept hot or warm for a long period of time.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So why don't we skip, because London Bridge is the third in a series of attacks, but let's jump to London Bridge. So that's the 3rd June 3 attackers. Vehicle as a weapon.

Claire Park: Correct. 3 attackers, but thought to be four for quite a long time. A van used as a weapon over London bridge to go into multiple patients on the bridge and then crash that van into the corner of a pub, believe in the back of the van, there were Molotov cocktails that were intended to be thrown into borough market to use fire as a weapon.

And then the attackers got out with knives strapped to their hands and ran through the market area, which was 10:00 on a Saturday night. So sort of super busy time and a really busy small alleyway area of London.

Jon Becker: Stabbing everybody. They see her, basically.

Claire Park: Yeah. Essentially running around everyone they can get to through the market. And the police response was really pretty quick. It was, I think, eight minutes from the initial call to the air response vehicle turning up outside the other side of the market and shooting them. But at that point, they had fake IED vests on the IED vests that they didn't know were fake at the time.

So that was then a sort of slight further delay in securing that area or allowing people into that area. But from that point, the three attackers were killed. I pretty much together, and there was thought to be a fourth. And so all of those buildings in that area were searched sort of the next 8 to 10 hours.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's fascinating how often in these events the count is always off high. I'm not aware. In thousands of debriefs, I'm not aware of a single case where they thought there was three guys and there turned out to be four. It's always they thought there were three and there were two, Vegas being a perfect example where you have a single attacker and they were getting multiple reports of, you know, oh, there's three guys, there's four guys.

Claire Park: Yeah, yeah. And you know, the same thing happened in Manchester where there was one attacker, he blown himself up. We'll go on to that. But the same thing with wounds that look like gunshot wounds which are actually fragmentation wounds and people running away with those wounds and people going, oh, no, that they're being shot in the car park because they're now in the car park with those wounds having escaped.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So London Bridge is 48 injured, three killed. Similar. Eight killed. Sorry, killed. So 48 injured, eight killed. So similar effect size as to what you saw in Westminster Bridge with 49 and 5. And then between those two, 22nd May you have the Manchester arena bombing, which in the US is the Ariana Grande concert. It was interesting because as I started to dig into Manchester, I had no idea the scope of that event. Like it was reported as a bombing and it was not, you know, I mean, it got coverage as a bombing at an Ariana Grande concert, but 66 pound bomb, TATP bomb, if I remember correctly.

Claire Park: Yes, correct. And I. I think you probably don't work in kilos, but about 30 kilos. That is, I think 66 pounds of CACP and fragments, loads and loads of nuts, bolts, metal fragments that he put into it.

Jon Becker: And that is an injury scale. That is, I've seen a variety of numbers here, 22 killed, but the injury counts that I've seen have been as high as 1000 on scene. What was the, you know, give us some scale here.

Claire Park: So I think the reason the numbers are difficult to know is that quite a lot of people who were injured actually took themselves away from the scene if they weren't that badly injured that they couldn't get away from the scene. I've certainly, as part of the research we're doing, have interviewed people who've. Who survived lots of these events. And there was one lady who got in a car and drove herself to Wales because she was told no one was going to come and look after her in Manchester.

But yeah, I think in the room, the city room where the bomb went off, there were maybe 337 people kind of notably badly injured in there. But yeah, we put up to a thousand people injured, some with minor injuries. But I think we're talking about kind of. I think somewhere between three and 600 had decent injuries. The numbers will be different from everyone. And then, as we know, 22 who died, two of whom, two or three of whom made it to hospital but died either on the way or just after arriving in hospital.

Jon Becker: Yeah, but I mean, whether it's 300, 600 or 1000, it is a scale that is just ridiculous. It's similar to what we saw in the Vegas incident, where it's hundreds of patients and some of them are minor injuries and some of them are major injuries. And, you know, one of the things that, in talking with you and in doing the research, part of the problem is figuring out whether somebody is legitimately, you know, is this an injury they're going to survive, or is this an injury that we've got to treat them right now or they're not?

Claire Park: Yeah, I think it's in that very first instance of responding, you have to limit what you do. But there's knowing over the initial response of life saving intervention, of dealing with catastrophic hemorrhage and opening an airway. What is it that's killing people? And it's kind of obvious if someone's got an amputated leg, I think it's more obvious, and that's why, actually, some of the blast injuries that we saw in Afghanistan were easier to understand. I actually think blunt trauma to a certain extent, and blunt trauma where the blast has thrown you against something, it's fragmentation injury.

So you don't have an obvious amputation, but you've got those metal fragments that have gone through vessels in your legs that aren't, obviously your legs not off, but you're bleeding inside your leg. That's more difficult to understand how sick the patient is, I think. And so one of the things with bleeding patients, at least one of the things we focus on is trying to understand what a bleeding patient looks like in terms of their physiology.

So how do they present? They often pale, they often really shut down, often sweaty. You can't feel a radial pulse. Their breathing rate might be fast because they haven't got enough blood going around, so they're trying to get more oxygen to the blood that they have.

But using kind of simple things to try and understand if a patient is bleeding or not, as well as the injuries that you see is what you need to do for the people that have internal injuries that you can't obviously see a bleeding out. And that goes for whether it's bleeding into limbs. And that's important because for the limbs, you can put a tourniquet above it, but if it's what we call non compressible bleeding.

So one of the things I try and tell my medics is about this is blood on the floor, and floor more so. There's essentially four other places you can bleed into. One is your chest cavity, one is the abdomen, one is the pelvis, and the other is what we call long bones. But it's particularly the femurs. You can lose kind of two liters of blood into a broken femur that's expanding into the space where it's broken.

So those sort of four places, if you like, are places that you need to worry about someone bleeding and dying from that bleeding. And a femur, whether it's because of the femur, if it's because of blood vessels in the leg that are damaged, that bleeding can cause you to die. And if you can get a tourniquet above, it will splint the limb that's broken.

Then there's stuff you can do on scene to try and limit that bleeding, which is really important, because it might just limit it enough, even if they're bleeding from somewhere else as well, to get them to hospital alive. If they're bleeding into that abdomen or chest, there's not a lot you can do about that before you get to hospital.

There's a couple of things we might do as an enhanced team, and maybe if there's a couple of patients, we can try and do that. But if there's multiple patients, those are the patients that really need to go. If it's a pelvis, it is important that you might want to splint it, because you can, again, limit that bleeding.

So I guess it's about understanding where you can't do anything else, and you want those patients to just go to hospital and where the stuff that you can splint or stop bleeding to do it, because the longer you leave it, the more problems they'll be in when they get to hospital.

Jon Becker: Well, I think that's kind of a good transition for us, because. So in the wake of the Manchester bombing, they put together a blue ribbon panel to look at the incident, to look at the response. Produced a fantastic, lengthy report that we'll link to in the show notes. And I would encourage people to go in and at least read the executive summary of. But you at that point, are brought in to assist as an expert on the review, right?

Claire Park: Yes, I was involved in it from a couple of points of view. I was initially brought in as an expert witness to look at one of the patients who died. And that meant looking at all of the footage and all of the reports in terms of the response and what it looked like initially and what she looked like and how she presented from a clinical point of view with the body worn footage and CCTV footage. And that was extensive discussions about her injuries and what may or may not have happened to her.

But then the next bit after that was that I was asked to comment on what the chairman of the inquiry called the care gap, which is essentially based on something we published on a couple of years before called the therapeutic vacuum, or at least that's what we called it, which is this concept of a vacuum, or this gap in treatment for people who were injured at any scene, but particularly at something like a terrorist attack or an active shooter attack, where it's not safe initially for people to immediately run in.

And there's always going to be a delay in healthcare getting to see in anyway, but particularly in these instances where they may be kept outside because of a worry about safety, that delay in first responder, what I call first responder interventions, or bystander interventions. So the CNA or the m and a of march, those are the things that kill people in the first ten minutes. External catastrophic hemorrhage and opening an airway are things that need to be done by someone next to you or someone very quickly there, and that not happening for that first ten minutes.

And then the delay in healthcare getting in there, the delay in getting the patients out to definitive care quickly. And by definitive care, I mean ultimately to a hospital and if they need it in operation, and then delay actually in the final bits as well, that's not relevant so much at the scene. Actually, when we look at some of these inquiries, they happen four, five, six years later.

So we're not getting really quick learning of all of the things that we need to learn from, even though they go into huge amounts of depth and they're really complicated. Getting that multi agency, honest learning between different agencies, and the learning from the post mortem reports, which certainly in the UK are not that easily accessible, are things that we could still do better in the future.

So that's a long way of saying that this care gap that the chairman focused on, he asked me to look at what I thought could be done differently in terms of narrowing or filling that care gap and where we could make a difference for the future.

Jon Becker: So if we think of it in terms of, take the analogy we previously had, the minute you are injured, the bomb goes off, patient x has x amount of time until they're going to die. Let's just say it's 30 minutes. The care gap is the amount of time we are wasting out of that 30 minutes, because we cannot deliver care immediately, which obviously, there's always going to be a care gap right. No matter what, there's – Unless you have the medical team standing by immediately, there's always going to be a care gap.

But obviously, the more of that 30 minutes we spend trying to get paramedics there, trying to get doctors there, trying to get ambulances there, or in the case of hot zone, waiting for the scene to be secure, that care gap is spending that 30 minutes that that person has. And if we spend 15 minutes of that, then we're down to 15 minutes to save their life.

Claire Park: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, those initial interventions don't need a. A paramedic to do them. Anyone can do them if they're trained to do them, I think is the key bit. And I have certainly seen exercises in the UK a few years ago where there would be CTSFOs and armed response police standing. They've moved the casualties, they've put them all in an area to keep them protected in the hot zone, or made a warm zone in the middle of the hot zone and just stood watching them die, because the training is not or wasn't to provide a immediate interventions for them.

And like in the military, where every soldier is trained to provide buddy buddy aid for the person next to them. And if their mate is blown up, the first thing they do once they've returned the firefight, if they're in a firefight or made sure it's safe to approach them, is to chuck them a tourniquet, push them on their front and try and tighten that tourniquet for them.

So that kind of idea of the person next to you trying to help you is possible. I know in Afghanistan, because I know on the back of the met, the people that came on are alive to me, their mate put the tourniquet on. The people that didn't come on alive didn't have their mate put in a tourniquet on. So I know it's possible to do. It's just about putting it into practice in a way that you can do while you maintain your situational awareness of what else is going on.

Jon Becker: Well, I think there's been a big move, both in the military and at least in US law enforcement, to push down kind of those basic levels of hemorrhage control. And I recently interviewed an agency that'll be an episode later in the season that was. They had a team go into a bank robbery and six of their officers were shot immediately and two or three. Three femoral wounds. And those guys were alive because the patrol officers that responded had medical supplies, they had tourniquets, they had gauze they had bandages and knew what to do with them.

And so you went from, there was a single medic for the team, but instead of doing the interventions now, he was describing to patrol officers what to do, and you could see how the system works and how you layer the response.

But that's, you know, in the case of a mass casualty, in the case of very serious injuries, half the time the problem is that initial response and how complicated so many of the algorithms are. And I think that that's kind of one of the things that emerged from your research with Manchester. Right?

Claire Park: Yeah. So if we're looking at a framework for people to walk into that room, and everyone describes the overwhelming nature of walking into a bomb having just gone off, and we could see it from the CCTV, there's the alarms going off, the noise, the smell, the destruction, the body bits, all of those things that even if you know exactly what to do, you're struggling to remind yourself, to kick yourself into where you start.

So assuming as an operator, it's secured and you're not doing another job of securing the area, and you're just going in and you're faced with a casualty, is how do you know where to start with each of the casualties? How do you stick to just looking at them and dealing with Cambridge and airway and moving on to the next one, rather than getting stuck on everything else, or not even knowing where to start, because it's too overwhelming.

So one of the things that we'd actually developed before Manchester, but it was an opportunity to present it and suggest that this was something that we think would work for all of the emergency services, which is ten second triage as a way of having a framework to walk in and have some very simple questions to ask when you get to each casualty that allow you to just think about these things that are going to kill them in the first ten minutes, deal with that and move on to the next one, while prioritizing them at the same time with a P1, 2, or 3 tag.

Jon Becker: So one of the things that struck me when I first started reading ten second triage and looking at the system and listening to interviews about it, was that there was an underlying belief, and I guess was demonstrated in Manchester, that the existing algorithms were too complicated.

Claire Park: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of current triage tools, and there's something like about 20 at least, published a few years ago. When we started working on this, there were 20 primary different scene triage tools. Almost all of them, in fact, all of them require some form of physiology to be measured.

And by physiology, I mean feeling for pulse and counting it, measuring a respiratory rate, feeling for what we call capillary refill time, so pressing on the skin and seeing how quickly the blood flow comes back, those things really, really take up your bandwidth and narrow you, your focus and prevent you being able to have any situational awareness.

And I certainly never count respiratory rate or count pulse rate. I feel if it feels stronger or not, but feeling for a pulse and someone who's bleeding is really difficult because it's weak. And if you've got tactical gloves on, you're sweating, your pulse is racing, it's dark, you've got a load of other stuff going on. It's really not an easy thing to do, even in a well patient, but particularly not in a sick patient. And what does it actually mean?

Because in a lot of the research, when you look at the triage systems that have been developed and what they've been compared against, liberty as well, writes down that pulse rate and that respiratory rate of that patient at that point in time when they've just been injured, they get written down when the ambulance is in a position to record the heart rate or the ambulance crew are in a position to record the heart rate in the respiratory rate, and that's much later on down the line. So not only do we not really have good data from that early physiology to tell us that it means anything anyway, we know that it probably doesn't mean anything.

If you're bleeding to death, your heart rate can be slow or fast, so it doesn't necessarily tell us anything. And if you've just watched your daughter be killed, your heart rate is probably not going to be slow. Or if you're in loads of pain, your heart rate is not going to be slow, and your breathing rate is not going to be slow.

So actually, in that early phase, in those first few minutes of an attack, where we want people to have a really simple way of working out what to do, it's too complicated to measure those things, and then you have to remember what the respiratory rate is and which category they go in, all of which, again, it's not necessarily that helpful.

So what we wanted to do is take away anything that's not going to be helpful and anything that's going to make it too difficult for someone to put this into practice and replace it with simple questions that essentially ask about the, what we call the end organ effect of the physiology.

So what happens to you if you're bleeding a lot? If you've bled a lot. You're not going to have enough blood flow going to your brain, so you're not going to be able to talk properly over that. You're not going to be able to walk. If you've not got enough blood flow going around your body to be able to keep all of your muscles while walking, then the first step is you won't be walking. The next step is you won't be talking. So ask those questions rather than try and find a pulse.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So why don't we walk through? What struck me the first time I read it is like I'm far from a doctor and I'm an attorney and the tactical gear guy and I looked at it and thought, I can answer these questions. There's zero medical knowledge required as you look at the questions. It struck me as very simple and very quick to apply and, like, you could do most of it in legitimately in 10 seconds.

So why don't we walk through? We'll put up on the screen and also include in the show notes a graphic for this, but walk me through the questions I'm going to ask.

Claire Park: So the flow chart starts with are they walking? And I know that there are some. The reason we started with that is just as a simple way to get rid of some people out of the way. If you're walking, walk out. Direct them out, because obviously some people who are walking could collapse. But if you're walking, walk out. And then we come to the next question of, is there any severe bleeding?

The reason that we didn't put it the other way around is if you focus on the severe bleeding first, you've got more people to try and assess. So go into the walking. If they collapse, then they can be assessed. If someone. One caveat with that is we tell people to use their common sense. So if they're walking and they've clearly got an arm hanging off or they've clearly got a big hole in the front of their chest, then sit them down and treat them as if they're not walking because they won't be for very long.

But you can't afford to assess everyone who's walking out, otherwise you get completely swamped. If there's really thousands of people, the next question is, so if they're walking, if you want to tag them, they get a green tag, which is a P3. P3. Priority three is basically anyone that's walking. The next question is, do they have any severe bleeding? And that terminology, people will notice has changed from catastrophic hemorrhage in some of the triage tools to severe bleeding.

And the reason for that, we had a lot of discussion about it, but severe bleeding, a lot of people perceive, and certainly we've seen in training, that catastrophic hemorrhage has to be spurting up the wall to be catastrophic hemorrhage, and it sometimes is, but a lot of the time it isn't. A lot of the time, it just seeps into clothing. Even if it's an arterial bleed, it seeps into clothing. Seeps into the floor, particularly if it's dark clothing and the dark floor and it's dark, you won't see it's burning.

And what we don't want is for people to miss that. And then later, which we know, too, there's been two preventable deaths in Manchester. The findings were that two people died. Certainly one of them died from compressible lower limb hemorrhage, and he was young and fit otherwise, and he died at an hour and a quarter, I think, off to the. After the bomb had gone off, because he didn't have torn the case put on, because it wasn't obvious that it was splitting out. So that terminology has been changed to say, if there's severe bleeding, then manage the bleeding.

So however, you know how to do whatever you've got available to you. The little. There's a little diamond action box, which is the blue action box that says pressure packing or tourniquet. So if it's compressible with a tourniquet, put one on. If you can't or you don't have one pressure, and if you can pack it, even if you don't have specialist kind of hemostatic packing agents to pack it with anything, pack it with a t-shirt. It's about getting pressure on the base of the wound that's bleeding to stop it bleeding.

If you've dealt with them, they become a P1 automatically because they've got something that needs to be done, but also because they're obviously sick, so they become a P1 or a red tag. Then you go to the next question, which is, are they talking? And as I've sort of explained, are they talking? Is a really simple question. You can answer it quite quickly, are they talking to me or not? If there's a little bit more training time for people, we can nuance that a little bit more and say, are they talking normally? Because actually that will pick up. If you're not quite got enough blood going to your brain or you've got a head injury and you're a bit agitated, you won't be talking normally.

And those, again, are people that we would want to pick up to get out early. So in that way, for people with a bit more training time, you can nuance it to pick up some of the other sicker patients. But actually, if you have no training at all, the simple question of, are they talking or not? Will pick up someone, they're not talking, something's wrong, and then they become a P1.

The other question in that little bit of the algorithm is, do they have any penetrating injury? And this is the bit where I think the kind of stop the bleed campaign has kind of missed a few of the patients. And I think I listened to your interview with Kevin, and I know he spoke a lot about the kind of the bleeding that needs to get to a surgeon and those type of injuries from Las Vegas, where you've got penetrating trauma. But the bit that has been shown from quite a few of the recent events, from a lot of the Paris attack patients, and also from Las Vegas, and from quite a few other places, and from London Bridge, where we've had patients who've had stab wounds or gangstock wounds in that area between the neck and navel, essentially, where it's either gone through a vessel there or could have gone into blood vessels inside, or you can't compress it.

Those patients have a risk of non compressible central hemorrhage, and they need to be, ideally on an operating table with a surgeon rather than by the side of the road. We can try and do something for them as a sort of pre hospital doctor team. Preferably. They'll do better than a hospital. So we want to pick up those patients as being a priority one, and get them out over the people that have, don't have that non compressible hemorrhage, essentially.

So the question at that point is, do they have penetrating injury anywhere in that box? And the diagram shows you the area that you're looking at. And if they do, they become a P1 rather than a P2. Then we move on to the final question, which is, are they breathing? But you have to be able to open the airway to make sure they're breathing.

So there's a little reminder to open the airway if you're able to. And that's because it's for anyone, whether you know how to do a jaw thrust, which is ultimately the best way of opening an airway, or whether all you know how to do is put someone in a recovery position to maintain that airway, whatever you do, open the airway, if they're breathing, then they get a P1 tag. And if they're not breathing, they get a not breathing tag.

And that's quite a big change from other triage tags wherever trio systems where at that point people get a dead tag. That was important for a couple of reasons. One, because we want it to be applicable to every responder, and certainly in the UK, we don't want to put the pressure on. And it's not appropriate for police officers and firefighters to be pronouncing someone dead. Clearly, if they're cut in two and their bodies apart from their head, then that's different.

But in most of these patients, they may be resuscitable, and we're not asking those people to make that decision. And secondly, certainly for us in our inquiries and inquests and for our patients, in some people, resuscitation is appropriate because maybe they've only just gone into cardiac arrest and maybe you don't have that many patients.

And if the mechanism is something like a crush injury, like we had at our hillsborough incident, what they need is CPR. Now, if you've got huge numbers of patients, you can't afford to do CPR. So it only says do CPR if resources allow, and that would be dependent on the situation, on the threat, on the number of casualties.

But all we're saying is don't just automatically put a dead tag on at that point in 10 seconds without properly assessing whether they're assessable or not, and then someone will come back and reassess them. And if you haven't got the resources to do CPR, they just go on their front in the recovery position as well. The same as a P1C. But the P1 s get prioritized to go out because they're more likely to survive if they're breathing than the people that aren't.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's really. I mean, it sounds like a lot when you look at it in context, but let's just walk back through it again. So are they walking? If yes, walk out your P3. If not, then P1.

Claire Park: Essentially P1. You could do that. If they're not walking their p, if they're walking their P3.

Jon Becker: If they're nothing, you're moving down the algorithm.

Claire Park: Are they bleeding? If they're bleeding, they're a P1. If not, are they talking? If they are talking and they don't have penetrating injury, they're a P2. Doesn't really matter if they don't get a P2 tag. But that's just to differentiate the people that need to go with a slightly more priority than the people that are talking and don't have penetrating injury and don't have bleeding.

So are they walking, are they talking, do they have any severe bleeding? And are they breathing? Those are the four questions. And you can, you know, someone's walking past you, if they're sat there talking to you, that's all you need to know. And you can't see any bleeding anywhere, then you've done it and you can move on. And when we say looking for penetrating injury, it's literally just picking the top up and having a quick look. We're not saying strip them off naked and leave them.

So some patients, you can literally do in 2 seconds, some patients will take a bit longer, and I think the other important bit about it. So there's two reasons why the tagging is useful. One is to start that casualty flow. So put a tag on so you know the P1s and they want to go out first. So if they're not breathing, they get left a little bit later because they're less likely to survive. And if they're a P2, they get left to a bit later.

So when you've got limited people to evacuate and take P1s out first, and that optimizes your casualties to start moving, you've also started this whole process of who's going to go out first. You're not waiting for health to get in there to do that. You started it. And then it stops people going over the same work. Because what I would see before we had tags was that people wouldn't use.

But in the UK, police and fire went talk to triage before this. So we had a thing where previously it was said that only ambulance would triage. So we had to wait till ambulance got there for this to happen, which was adding to that delay. So where anyone that gets there can now start triaging, that started and people can start to be moved out.

But you would see people going over the same work because they couldn't see who'd been treated, because there was no marker to say they'd been treated. When they get tagged on, people see, all right, they tag. I'll just go past them and start working on the next person that I can see who hasn't got a tag until everyone's been tagged, and then you can start moving them out.

And in that process, what you're also doing is managing those life saving or providing these life saving interventions. So while you're tagging, almost more important than the tagging is providing that hemorrhage control and opening the airway. Because even if you didn't have tags, if you had the flow chart and you went around everyone and all you did was go, are you bleeding? Okay, I'm going to stop it.

Is your airway open? No, I'm going to open it, put you in a recovery position. I'm going to move on. Because the problem is when people have some medical training, the temptation is to get them and start doing everything they know. They start taking clothes off, putting chest seals on. Chest seals never saved anyone's life. In the first few minutes, they start trying to, you know, prettily bandage wounds. None of that matters because that's not going to save anyone's life. In the first few minutes, you want to get to the people that might be around the corner bleeding to death, then you can come back and do all the rest of it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because when you hear, you think about it, you think about it in a series of layers. There's that kind of initial. And I mean, triage by definition, is filtration. Right. That's what you're doing, is filtering people. And so right away, let's get rid of anybody that is going to be a P3, because that's just noise to the initial life saving process. Trying to get to the P1 patients who you can help. The P3 patients have a long, you know, their clock is longer. Right?

Their countdown timer is much longer. So really what we're trying to do is initially look for people that have, you know, a ten minute countdown timer on them or less, and get them as quickly as possible to treatment. So it's kind of like the first step is get rid of the P3s, and then from there, try to get down to the treatable P1s is kind of the way that it strikes me.

Claire Park: Absolutely. And what I would expect any medical people to do. So that's for anyone in that initial wave. So we would have whoever turns out five police enamorants doing that. We're also now pushing to have our kind of, if you like, physicians or enhanced paramedics, getting as far forward as possible to then work out between those P1s. So you've got a load of P1s, which ones are basically what we call P1 classes or the P1ERs. P1s, which ones are going to die now as opposed to P1. Est P1s.

Jon Becker: That's the quote of the day, the P1. Est P1s.

Claire Park: So we want to know which ones need something? Either to get them away from hospital alive, or they just need to go. So then we try. It's that whole casualty flow in keeping casualties moving. So we don't want anyone delaying one scene, but we want the right ones going first. If you have the option, if you've got loads of people to carry them out, just take more lap. Don't let anyone get stuck. Stuck in there.

What we've seen in the past, and this is one of my slight soapbox things about major incidents, is this concept of a casualty clearing station that we have, certainly in the UK, where people, I think, see it a bit like a field hospital, and people just get stuck there and everyone has a clipboard, people start writing down observations.

Meanwhile, there's ambulances on the other side of it waiting to take people to hospital. But there's a process they have to go through. So they sit here and the whole point is not to do that, but to just keep people moving to what they need. That's fine. If they're P3 and they're fine, and they've got some minor cuts, they can sit in the casualty clearing station. They don't need to go to hospital, but the P1s needs to go.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think that one of the things that I walked away from my interview with Kevin Menes about was that a lot of the reason that people survived in Vegas was because they didn't wait for medical to come in, they didn't wait to clear the hot zone. They literally were flagging down cars and filling them with bodies, just telling him to take him to the nearest hospital. There were a lot of people that ended up getting to hospital because a particular police officer who had traffic just started putting people in cars and said, go, take them to the hospital. Take them to hospital.

So you had patients coming in taxis and limos and police cars and all kinds of stuff. And it strikes me here is the same thing. We get the P1s to the hospital as quickly as possible. Trying to filter out the people who have the shortest timer certainly is challenging.

And the more complicated the algorithm, the less likely it is to be applied, and the longer we have to wait for expertise to get there. To go back to that concept of a care gap, anytime we're waiting for expertise, we're in that care gap, and we're spending time on everybody's clock.

Claire Park: Absolutely. I mean, we're starting from a much later point. If you wait for health response to arrive, if everyone who's there already is just sitting, waiting for that to happen, all that stuff, and there isn't time, you know, anyone that needs, certainly the external hemorrhage stopping and the airway opening, that's got to be done in ten minutes, otherwise it's too late anyway. So that has to be done straight away.

And then you want to start moving people out and there may be some people who. What they need is for you to take over their breathing because they've got a really bad chest injury. They're not bleeding as much, but something's fallen on their chest and they just need you to take over their breathing. We can do that in the casualty clearing point. We can do that at the scene with inherent care. What we want to do is pick up the ones that are bleeding that we can't fix and need to go.

So that becomes the kind of more complicated bit that we do further on. But we don't want to wait to get in there to work out who that is. If those people are already being brought out to us, then they're already on their way. And what we certainly seen with our police starting to do this is they started to nest patients, so they would go in, deal with the threat, secure it, then start to.

All the next people responding would come in behind them while the armed police are dealing with a threat, and they would come in and start to do this and they would do the ten second triage walk through. Everyone put the tags on, see someone's tags, go to the next one, go to the next one. Once everyone has tags on that aren't walking, then they start to nest them. So they start to move them to an area where they're closer to the door or you're optimizing your resources, even if it's not safe to take them out. Because rather than protecting people in every corner of a building, if you can drag them all to one corner, you need less people to stand around and protect them.

You've got all of your resources and your kit together, and then you can move them out and you can see which are the P1s. Take the P1s in one area and take them out first, and then the P2s, and then you're not breathing. Someone can come in and assess them later. So you're optimizing your resources and your casualty flow by making your life easier and splitting them into sort of triaged areas, but also getting everyone together.

Jon Becker: So this has now been adopted as a national standard, right, by the UK?

Claire Park: Yeah. So this is now being trained this year. So by April this year, we started training in April last year across all of ambulance, police and fire. So by April this year, we've given everyone a year to train it. We expect to see all of the emergency services using ten second trailers and it's been written into our joint operating procedures for maoridding terrorist attacks.

So whereas before those operating procedures said only ambulance would triage, they now say any emergency service can triage as long as they're using their NHS England recommended tool, which is ten second triage. And the benefits of having everyone doing the same thing is what we saw when we did the testing for it, which is not only more people are doing it and so it starts happening quicker, but people work together much better and you suddenly get a much better sort of shared mental model of what's happening. Because all of the services, when they say a P1, they know what they mean rather than people using different terms to describe a sick patient. And that terminology starts to be passed out sooner.

So if health ambulance are delayed, the message comes to them, oh, we've got 20 P1s. That means much more than we've got 20 casualties. Because of the 20 casualties there's P3s. You've got a bit more time and you maybe need less resource, so you immediately have some better communication in terms of understanding the number of casualties and how sick they are.

Everyone's working together, people understand what the priority is and we get that casualty flow happening much sooner because they're already tagged, they've already had the life saving intervention. So by the time you get the next step happening, either people are moving them out or at least they're on a process that starts to move them out.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, what you've done by teaching it at a national level is you've created common nomenclature. So if I say P1, you know exactly what I mean by P1. Whereas if I say, oh, this guy's really bad like that, that doesn't mean anything really bad to me. Might mean, you know, I spent 20 years as a medic in Afghanistan and this guy's going to be dead in 30 seconds or I've never seen somebody injured and he's got a toe that's been cut off. Yeah, exactly. And like I'm. By defining a common triage tool and then giving nomenclature, now everybody speaks the same language and a P1 is a P1 and we know exactly.

Claire Park: What to do with it and it's still. The other triage tools use the same nomenclature. P1, P2, P3. But I think they're too complicated for people to actually use. And as you sort of suggested earlier on, the ones that need all of the other stuff where it's not as straightforward, people know about it, but they just don't do it.

Whereas with this one, we've tested it, we've given the flow chart to people who've not had any training and just said, here's some scenarios. What do you think? What category are they? And they just go, yeah, and they pretty much get 90% correct. So the point is, we want something that people are going to use and practically is going to help them maintain their bandwidth and actually know what to do, rather than walk in and be like, oh, s***, where do I stop? And we've certainly had it used on smaller scenes.

Some of the people that did our initial training have taken the card away before we brought it in, but they've used it on scenes. And I know a few of the police in London have used it where they've got to a multi patient RTC or a multi patient stabbing with quite sick, you know, four or five sick patients, one dad and some. Okay, and they've just gone, okay, let's get this card out.

And it's just allowed them to spend that first few minutes when they're there on their own, one of two of them knowing how to approach it, knowing what to do, not to get caught up in what should I do? But just do those simple steps. Even without the tags, I know that I'm looking for. Are they walking? Have they got any severe bleeding? Are they talking? Are they breathing? Move on to the next one. And then by the time they've done that, other people have arrived to come and help them and they've already gone. Right, well, that's the sickest one because those are the P1s that are there. So you go to those and have a look.

Jon Becker: So the placement fireman, everybody's literally carrying a card with ten secondary on it in their wallet or in their pocket.

Claire Park: Yeah. So we've designed. The flow chart is on. Is accessible to anybody, so it's on the NHS England website. But all of our services are being issued with little laminated cards and they'll have that on them and then they get a set of tags for their medic bag and some of them will get individual issue, and we've got lots of different police forces and fire services across the UK, so everyone will do something slightly different.

But essentially they'll have the tags available and they'll have the flow charts available so that, yes, you can remember it, but we don't want people to have to worry about remembering. The idea is that it's really. There's not too much on it when we designed it, so it should be quite easy to get it out and just look at it and it should be clear enough that you can quickly follow it without having to think too much.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And we'll link to the NHS website and the charts and everything in the show notes so that people can go and find it.

Claire Park: Yeah, and there's some training on there as well. Actually, if people, anyone could take that stuff. We've written some PowerPoint and some training points, so if anybody wanted to look at that, it's all kind of openly available on that website, too.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic. So moving past TST, like Claire, you've been involved in response to a lot of events, you've looked at a lot of events, you've done a lot of research. I would love to get your lessons learned or your kind of soapbox thoughts on mass casualty events and the way we're responding. What are we getting wrong?

Claire Park: So that's a really interesting question. I think there's lots. What's interesting, I think, is that when you look at a lot of the reports and learning, there are a repeated things that seem to be commented on. And I. I guess it's because they're complicated things to address. One of the first things I would say is that in general, a lot of people try and make the plan work.

So for major incidents, mass casualties, ambulance services have. They have saps. And one of the faults, I think of some people is that they try to make the SAP work, whatever the situation. I think that's probably less the case for police and policing and operators, and I think people are more used to making it work.

But certainly one of the things that we sometimes see is people not thinking outside the box and just going, well, we just want to make this plan work, whatever, and not understanding that every situation is different. You can't write a plan for every situation, so you've just got to try and make something work. But if we look at specifics, things that often are commented on, the comms don't work is something that multiple people say.

Jon Becker: That's every debrief, everything I have ever attended, I've been to a thousand plus debriefs, and every single one of them has started with the comms didn't work.

Claire Park: Yeah. And to a certain extent, what do you do about it? I hear people say, we're gonna get different comms, different radios, whatever. Basically I would say to people, assume they're not gonna work and then have a plan for what's gonna happen when they don't. So work on face to face comms, work on people running with messages, if you really want to make sure you're passing messages reliably or work on pieces of paper, but have a plan, because they probably won't work with everybody on the same radio net turns up to the same place and they're all trying to work and they're all overloaded anyway.

So that's one point that I would say that we should plan to overcome, as opposed to be surprised when it doesn't work. The second one is kind of linked to the sort of concept of the joint emergency services principles of getting joint command, or unified commands, as I think it's sometimes called in the US, getting everyone together to that command huddle, which is great in principle and easy on a fairly small scene, but actually much more complicated.

Certainly when you have different control rooms, different services, all responding on different radio nets, actually getting the point where people come together to get that shared mental model and shared understanding of what's happening and understanding what each other are doing. So the sort of spending time trying to understand not just your aim and what you want to make happen, but having the respect and the understanding and trust of other services there so that you understand they. They are trying to do and you all work together to achieve that is really important.

And I kind of say that because that links me into the higher threat stuff where one of the things that I think works really well, and one of the things that works well in the military and works well in services where they have embedded medical response within their tactical response, is everyone being on the same Agnet, if it works, and everybody having understood what the plan is and understanding both sides of it.

Social instance at the battle clan, where the raid went in with their two doctors, who went in with their tactical response, they trained this so many times that they got there and six minutes later they all went in together and the two doctors went in and triaged everybody in the orchestra pit. While the terrorists were still being held hostage in the corners of the Bataclan. Their operators knew what they needed to do.

Two of them provided them cover while they triaged everyone out, while they came up with a plan for what they were going to do for the terrorists. They could only do that because they trained it over and over again, because they were integrated within that response and they all understood what was happening. That wouldn't work for anyone that wasn't fully embedded in the response.

And the same thing happened for us in the military. If I deployed, I got the security information from my infantry team in Iraq, I knew what was safe, what wasn't safe. They were there to support, to protect me. And that speeded up all of that stuff happening. It's a long way of saying, I think, that having the best option is to have people integrated, but most of the time that's not possible.

So if you've got multiple agencies and multiple people, really get to know the people in your area, really get to know the people you work with, really get to trust them, so that when you get to the scene, you know who it is, you know how they're going to work and what they want, even if there's a different service in a different agency to optimize that working together, because that's the way that you're going to achieve what you really need to achieve for the best outcome for the people involved.

Stretches is something that often comes out in debriefs, and certainly the battle clan and Manchester both had everybody carried out on barriers, and I don't know if you've seen the pictures, but both of those were quite big events where every single casualty was carried out on some sort of kind of crowd barrier or advertising hoarding. And that takes like ten people to carry people out. And some stretchers take up lots of space, but small carry sheets don't take up much space.

So it's a bit of a soapboxing in mind. But I say to people, just have a big bag of carry sheets so that two people can carry people out on a carry sheet. If you're going to keep casualty flow going, have some way of getting carry sheets out, rather than trying to take ten people to carry a barrier because it's not going to work. That's three. So comms command together stretches and then probably the other key thing is, I think, people not really understanding this fog of war idea and decision inertia.

So it's easy to criticize in hindsight when all of the information is available. And it wasn't at the time. But a concept that I try and get across to a lot of our teams is the idea of not needing all the information to make a decision. So 40% of the information is probably too little, but 70% of the information, if you're getting past that, you've probably got too much and you need to have made the decision, because there is always risk involved in the jobs that we do. And every second you delay someone might die.

So making a decision about doing something going in, don't go in and get yourself killed, obviously, if it's really unsafe, but not delaying too long to be really sure it's safe, because that's what we've seen in quite a few of our events, and that often comes back as a debuff point afterwards, certainly from a health point of view.

Jon Becker: I like the term decision or inertia. I think that's – If you look at the Uvalde tragedy, that is a perfect example of decision inertia. Nobody wants to make a decision. No one has taken command. And it's interesting, I heard a trauma doctor talking about, actually, is it? ER doc was talking about the difficulty in making decisions and I didn't. It was a post Uvalde debrief that I watched. And one of the things he said is, you know, I can tell you, when somebody calls code blue in the hospital, I can tell you how old the patient is by how many people are in the room.

And he said, you know, if I walk in the room and there's one or two people, I know it's an old person and they're trying to save them, they're doing the best they can. He said, if I walk in the room and there's 30 people, I know it's a kid. And he said, the difference between the one or two people and the 30 people is the 30 people are frequently not doing anything because they're afraid to make a mistake. And there begins to be so much weight to decisions that it becomes easy to not make decisions. And it's exactly what you're saying. It's just decision inertia. And it is trying to break that decision inertia and get decisions made quickly.

Claire Park: There's all the, you know, the worry, the things that you've had put in your head in training, like the. Is there a secondary device? Is this a CBRN incident? Is this this, is this this? And you have to have all that awareness of the possible threats, but you've also got to go, in reality, how many attackers are still unseen when people turn up to these events?

If you're worried about another attacker, in reality, how often is this likely to, where's the. I mean, where's the zebra and where's the horse or the dog or whatever the common animal is, as opposed to the one from Africa that doesn't come into the UK? So what is common? What's not common, what's likely? What's not likely, what information do we have? And just accept that you're going to have to make a decision with as much information as you'd like.

Jon Becker: Realistically, the time you're taking. Going back to the care gap. Right. There's also a decision gap, the time that you're taking to make a decision. Everyone's clock is running.

Claire Park: Exactly. And that's my, I think the final thing is, I would say for the care gap, do that, avoid that delay, try to get someone doing something. Have kits available, like equipment for bystanders who are often going to be the people that can do that initial response, because often trained off duty people in these public scenarios where things happen, who could do something. So just try to ensure that that stuff is available and people know where it is that something like ten secondary age or the life saving interventions is trained to people so that they know to start doing stuff. Because often it's the not knowing.

Most people want to help. It was really clear to me from watching people in the Manchester footage, everybody in that room desperately wanted to help, but they just didn't know where to start. So they just did what they knew how to do, which was talk to people trying off of the water or do CPR if that's what they knew how to do. But they didn't know about stopping bleeding, they didn't know about opening airways.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And what we learned with the San Bernardino incident was literally rolling people on their sides. Save people's lives. Like it is. It is in that first ten or 15 minutes. Really simple stuff can, can make you huge a difference. So one last topic I'd like to pick up with you. Claire, you know, has spent a lot of time embedded with tactical units, with sofa units. You're currently affiliated with the counterterrorism specialist firearms officers, which is the tier one response for the meth metropolitan Police in London.

If you're the czar of the universe and you're training tactical teams and working with them, what do you want your teams to know? What are those critical points that if you're a guy listening to this that's on a team, what do they need to take home from this conversation?

Claire Park: Okay, so I'll try and keep it. I've got ten points, but I'll keep them brief, clear points kit. Keep it simple. Ideally the same kit in the same position, like if you're carrying tourniquets, put it on the same position on each other, so in the dark, you know where to get it off your mate. And that motor program idea of just being able to get it without taking up headspace so have the same kit. Keep it simple. Don't go for all the Gucci complicated kicks because it's only going to make your life more complicated.

Secondly, do the basics well. So even though it seems really simple, stopping, bleeding and opening and airway save people's lives and drill the motor programs of doing those things. Don't over under rate them because they're really important. But remember those things, do the basics well and be able to do it in the dark and maintain your focus to do other things. So if you drilled them enough, you know how to do that.

The third thing would be a lot of the stuff we've talked about today, understanding what kills people so and the stuff that you can do about it. So understanding what kills people in the first ten minutes is the external bleeding and opening an airway that's obstructed. If you can fix those things, you can save their life. And then pick up the people that have non compressible hemorrhage, the people that might be bleeding into their chest, abdomen or pelvis or long bones, and get them out with a priority.

And understand that there isn't something apart from splinting limbs that you can do on scene for those patients. So if, particularly if it's penetrating trauma, the ambulance service is not going to do anything different. You just need to get them to somewhere, either to an ambulance that can take them or to hospital.

The next bit was again, making your life simple. So talking about the ten second triage stuff, nest your casualties if you can, so that you can order them. Keep them in one area, don't have them split over everywhere so that you're spreading your team. Keep them in one area and then put them into areas of P1, 2S and 3S so that you make your life more simple. Bye. Separating them and knowing which ones are which.

So don't make it complicated by having them higgledy piggledy all over the place. So nest them, keep them in areas and then your evacuation will be easier. And actually, if you can move that nest to walk closer towards the exit or the hospital, you're starting that casualty evacuation process.

So thinking about where you're going to put them, don't take them back upstairs. I'm sure people would, but it's just simple process of thinking. The closer they are to getting into a vehicle, to getting to hospital, the better. And if you are going to put them in a vehicle and use your vehicle as a Kasovac vehicle, think about preparing it.

So I know that a lot of my teams would have said, oh, yeah, we'll put them in a vehicle and take them. But they haven't actually thought, who's got the keys? Are the keys in the vehicle? Is the back of the vehicle down? Is it filled with kit? So if you're going to do an operation and plan to use that vehicle, think about preparing it and having a proper plan.

Next one would be about having a medic team leader along. The idea of them maintaining bandwidth, if you've got enough people, so you'll have a tactical team leader, but if you have someone who's a medic, maybe don't have them doing the stuff, but have them as a person standing back.

Everyone will have the basic medic skills, so have them standing back, keeping everyone else and you can directing what needs to happen, because that allows them to keep the bandwidth. It's what I would do. If I go to a scene with the guys, I'll try to do nothing. I'll just go around everyone, make a quick decision and direct them what I want them to do, rather than getting stuck in doing stuff myself, because then I lose my observation.

And that's where you see the person that hasn't been treated or the person that's deteriorating. So having someone to take that kind of overview medic team leader role is really useful, particularly when it comes to charging multiple casualties and keeping people in check for adjusting the basics and carrying on.

Jon Becker: So almost like a medical incident commander.

Claire Park: Yeah, essentially just someone who's kind of got the overview. So the multiple casualty event, you know, you're more likely to see someone in a vehicle that someone hasn't searched or stepped behind a door. If you standing back, just keeping an overview over everything, and there's a temptation and we've seen it in the testing and training as a tool people want to get stuck in and help people more particularly relatives and stuff there, it's about going, no, don't start doing that. Just airway, breathing airway, cat hemorrhage, move on until we've got around everyone.

So that kind of sense check, keeping everyone pulled back. The 7th one would be just most of the time, I think they can do everything and they should start to move people out. A time where they might want medical help forward is where they're stuck with multiple P1s and the ability to only evacuate one at a time.

So the situation that I would see is like a maritime situation. So for us, if we've got a vessel off the coast or on the Thames, and you can only evacuate a few at a time by boat or air. Then somehow you've got to choose who goes and what order. And that's where really ten secondary edge doesn't give you enough. There's not enough knowledge there. You need someone with more medical training to do that, to pick up the one that's a P1 is that really needs to go.

So that's where you might want to think about taking your medical care with you forward or bringing them forward if there's a siege and you've got a whole load of people stuck, a bit like the guys did in the battle clan, to decide who went out next. Otherwise DTS team just start moving them out rather than wasting time trying to get people in, because they're not going to do anything different in that immediate sort of seeing.

And the final few points are probably stuff that I think tactical operators are certainly high level tactical operators are really good at doing anyway, but maybe just don't acknowledge that they do. Debriefing really well, as you will be very well aware, but debriefing to understand why you did something.

So experts tend to do something without knowing why they did it. Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, that talks about the unconscious, unconscious decisions we make because we're doing something from learning about it before we do it, because we know it's the right thing to do without clocking why we did it. And I have only learned why I do stuff by debriefing it in detail afterwards and going, oh, that's why I decided to do that and then logging it for next time.

So it reinforces my decision making for the future. So the debriefing in the sort of honest, why did you do something? Let's try and learn that for the future way. And then along with that, the idea that everyone has a different black box recording of the event.

So an example I have is of one of my forced protection from Afghanistan, who got off the back of the helicopter to triage the casualties. He was so focused on getting that triage right because he got it wrong the last time we debriefed it, which may be my fault for not leading the debrief well, but he was so focused that he didn't notice that the Taliban were firing past him one way and the force protection were firing past him the other way and he was in the middle of it. I honestly thought he wasn't going to get back onto the back of the helicopter.

And it wasn't until we got back and debriefed, he still didn't believe us that that was the case until we got the air crew and the force protection in to reinforce that. Because his black box recording was of Australia during the casualties, he didn't see or hear it because his hearing went.

So just reinforcing that idea and that's a bit of an extreme view, but reinforcing the idea that when you debrief, understand that other people might not have seen and heard stuff that you saw and heard. But I listening to them will bring the whole story together and then you will really learn what happened and understand it.

And again, I think operators are really, really good at doing that and being really honest about what happened and trying to learn from it. Much better than medical people sometimes. And the final point, which maybe they're slightly less good at, is it being okay to be upset about something? I think we all do this job and we all see stuff that probably affects us. And most people deal with it by talking amongst their teams. And that certainly talking to someone who understands what you've been through and processing it is a way of dealing with it and moving on, definitely.

But sometimes there's just one thing that gets you, particularly if it's treating a casualty that you didn't manage to save, or treating one of them worse, treating one of your team that you didn't manage to save. And it's okay to be upset about that. And it's normal. There doesn't need to be any bravado about being obsessed about that.

And the only way you'll deal with it is to be upset about it, talk about it and accept that that's a normal response than anyone. Dealing with them, whether they're medical, tactical or otherwise, would feel the same. And I think that's how people process it and move on. And I think people are really good at doing that mostly. But sometimes that kind of alpha mindset doesn't allow you to accept that it's okay to be like that. And that's probably my final point.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think that's a really valid point. Claire, I can't thank you enough for doing this. It's really interesting! We'll link to all this stuff in the show notes and make sure that people get it. And where can people find your work? What is the best way for people to contact you or to learn about what you're doing?

Claire Park: So they're welcome to email me if they want to email me. I can put that in a link to the show as well, if that's the best way to do it. Or you can google some of the papers that we published and yeah, I guess that's probably the best way to do it. I have some links to the CTech group in America as well, so there's a few people that have contacts for me. But email out if people wanted to get hold of me or find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Jon Becker: That's great!

Claire Park: Excellent work!

Jon Becker: We'll include that in our show notes. Claire, thank you so much! I really appreciate you being on the debrief with me!

Claire Park: Thank you so much, Jon! It's been an absolute pleasure talking to!

Episode 13 – Inspector Kevin Cyr – RCMP ERT

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Kevin Cyr. Kevin is inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and is the current commander of the RCMP Emergency Response team for British Columbia, which is the second largest tactical unit in Canada.

Kevin has been with the RCMP for 22 years and has been with the team for seven years. He has a master's in law from Osgoode Hall Law School and has published internationally in law and criminology journals. He teaches instant command for the Canadian Police College.

Kevin, thanks so much for joining me today!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Thanks for having me, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with kind of your personal history, your background, education, when you started with RCMP.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Sure. Yeah. So I grew up on the east coast of Canada in New Brunswick, just north of Maine. I went to university. I did my undergraduate, actually in mathematics and physics. And when I was finishing my degree, I had pretty decent marks. So I had some, I had like three different job offers. One was as a actuary, which is like just crunching numbers for a financial firm, and the other one was going to do graduate level mathematics. And the other one I had done.

The other thing I'd done during my final year was apply to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police because I can't pin when it happened. But ever since I was a kid, wanted to be a cop. And not only that, but I wanted to be on a SWAT team. That's just what I wanted to do. So I turned down those other job offers, which probably wasn't the best financial decision of my life, but probably the best happiness decision of my life, and went to depot, which is our academy. Did that for six months. I then was posted up. So maybe we'll start explaining on how the RCMP works. Cause it's significantly different than how American policing works. And if I don't say to, nothing, I say will make sense.

So the RCMP is, first of all, it's a federal policing agency. So it is the American equivalent of the FBI, ATF and DEA. We only do one RCMP. So we do our international drug smuggling, we do financial crime, we do all that stuff. But the way it works is certain provinces. So the equivalent of a state can contract the RCMP to do their state policing.

So instead of having, like, imagine if a state. Instead of having, you know, their state patrol or their state troopers, they'd be like, hey, why don't we get, you know, contract the FBI to do uniform policing? We take those contracts as well. And then some cities also contract us for their city policing, so we do municipal, provincial, and federal policing all in one agency.

The result is you can transfer around to a lot of different places still in the same agency, and that's, in fact, what we see a lot of. So I started in a super small town up in northern British Columbia. There's like nine cops in the whole area. I did a few years there. I then went down to the interior, like, 30 cops, and then I went down to the big city just outside of Vancouver. Along the way, uh, got into the SWAT program, which we call emergency response team. But I always, usually just say SWAT, just because most people. It's the colloquial term.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's become the brand.

Insp. Kevin Cyr:

Exactly, exactly. So we call it ERT. It's SWAT. It's the exact same thing. I got into the SWAT program as a collateral duty officer. So a lot of our program is, you know, you just do it off the side of your desk. You train when you can, except in the big city just outside of Vancouver, where I am now, it's a full time team. And so I got onto that full time team in 2014 and stayed there for three or four years. Left. I took my commission. I had to leave to get commission, always with the intention of coming back to the team as the OIC. Finally, when that job opened, I was able to come back, and I've been back there almost three years now.

Jon Becker: So commission two, inspector.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. Yes. It's a commission rank.

Jon Becker: So give me the rank structure.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So it's paramilitary organization. In fact, the RCMP is a cavalry unit, officially, which is kind of cool. So it's constable is your base level. Then you have corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, sergeant major, but there's only a few of those. And then you get into the commissioned ranks, which we call, you know, the white shirts, and you have inspector, superintendent, chief superintendent, assistant commissioner, deputy commissioner, and commissioner.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's very similar to, you know, American law enforcement. It's just different nomenclature.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Probably like some British influenced nomenclature to it, right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. And it strikes me as you're talking about it. The RCMP's approach to your FBI, La county sheriffs and LAPD kind of pressed into one vertically. And that's more of a European model than it is the American model because we have so many small municipalities and we're divided up so much that there's 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, that's right, and there's only 180 in Canada. So although you guys have eight times the population, you have 100 times the law enforcement agencies. And I think there's some advantages and disadvantages to either model.

The advantages to our model is, like you said, my team gets to engage in. We're doing barricade and drug warrants on a daily basis, which really helps us prepare for the armed ship boarding for the migrant vessel or the hostage taking on the ferry or the hijacked airplane or whatever we need to do.

So we get a really broad spectrum of operations, which helps. And you get a lot of reps, which helps. I always say we run about 200 to 220 calls a year. We have 200 times a year that we make mistakes and learn from them. And that's our secret sauce is just exposure.

Jon Becker: What's the population that you cover that your team covers? How big a population?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So if you think so, my area of operations is not the city of Vancouver, but all the suburbs and cities around it. In total, we cover 12,000 sq. miles. Most of that is just like mountains that you. There's no reason to go up there, but our population is about 2.3 million that we provide service for.

Jon Becker: So you've got, I mean, just to put it in perspective for, you know, us law enforcement, you've got a quarter of the population of the city of Los Angeles and about the same volume of callouts that LAPD SWAT would have.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, but it's always like, it's really hard to compare because, you know, we would probably engage on some lower threshold calls that might be handled by other units. And, like, LAPD's got, you know, I know they've got a fantastic guns and gangs unit that does a lot of high level arrest, whereas in our agency we'd be doing those, you know, they have all alternatives. So I think it's very difficult to compare because it's not apples to apples.

Jon Becker: Which is one of the things I think is most interesting. And part of the reason I wanted to sit down with you is it is, you know, it's such a unique approach. And I think there's other things we'll talk about later that I think are interesting for teams that are listening. Why don't we start with the origin story of the team? When did the team begin? Like, what was the genesis of the team?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, so the genesis of our program was back in the eighties, like late seventies, early 1980s, when you started to get, you know, the Munichs, the Iranian embassy. And for us the big seminal moment was the Armenia, sorry, the Turkish embassy.

So we had in 19, I think it was 83 or 85, some armenian terrorists took over the turkish embassy, shot and killed the guard, took the ambassador's family hostage. The ambassador was able to flee, but he was actually, he fled out the window and broke his ankle or broke his leg in the backyard. So he was not ambulatory. So he was stuck there. And it was only a four or five hour siege.

Jon Becker: Is it Ottawa?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: This was in Ottawa. Yeah, this was in Ottawa. So on the heels of when you map that incident, although it was handled quite capably by the city police force, you map that onto how bad it could have been and that there was really no solution to that. You could still find the news story from it. And they're talking about the sharpshooters have been deployed and it's some dude with a shotgun. You know, like, it's just these guys have no equipment, they've got no training.

So that's when the RCMP started the, they called it special emergency response team. So assert. And of course, now listen, at the time, they were already experimenting with, you know, emergency response teams and, you know, it's like smaller scale, part time collateral duty, SWAT teams, et cetera, et cetera. But this was the first foray into higher level of team. And so they got the SAS to come over and give them their startup training. And in fact, to this day, we still have a lot of that SAS verbiage in our operations.

So, you know, we're not the one, two, three side houses. We're white, black, red, green. You know, you still get that, you know, that old school, you know, Papa Lima Yankee, papa lima golf. And it's kind of neat. It's part of our heritage. And I think we might talk about how that heritage, though, we've had to move away from some of it because it was handcuffing us to the past in some ways. And I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later.

Jon Becker: But yeah, I think it's just about every team had its origin. I mean, Munich was really, if you go back to a single event, Munich was the seminal event that drove the development of special tactics and counterterrorism worldwide, because that was a very public, very violent, very ugly resolution. And everybody said, I don't want this to happen here.

And of course, with the 84 Olympics coming to the US in LA, that drove the development in the US, special tactics. But it's interesting because there was that kind of air quotes, golden age of terrorism where it's like, oh, we're gonna take something and take hostages and negotiate our friends getting out of prison or whatever it was. And you watched over from 72 to mid 80s when you guys developed this kind of like, we don't know what to do. We're kind of figuring it out.

And there's a distinct switch there that flips right around Prince's gate where if you are a hostage taker and you take hostages, you're gonna die, you're all gonna die and the hostages are gonna be rescued. And that tactic then stopped being used. And it's kind of, you know, Ottawa was kind of one of those events at the tail end of that where you could see like, yeah, this is, this, this. The game has changed because SAS, GSG9, Delta, DEVGRU, all these groups started to form and started to train everybody. And you saw this kind of fusion of law enforcement and military tactics, which was. It sounds like the origin story for the team.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Well, one of the interesting little footnotes buried in our origin story is that the original mandate of that special emergency response team was as a lethal force option. Like, that's how it was envisioned. You know, in the original documents, it says this team is for when all other efforts have failed and precise, lethal, you know, force is to be used. They're like, you know, a kill squad. Like, that's how they were designed. We, that is not our reality anymore.

Can you imagine if that was my mandate? Like, hey, listen, patrol guys, when, you know, when you can't do anything, you call us and we'll take care of it. Like, yeah, that's not the reality anymore. There was de-escalation, didn't exist. Les Lethal didn't exist. Like, none of these things existed. These guys were designed for a very, very narrow mission set. And I think it took a long time for us to realize that some of the leadership and operational strategies we were learning from those higher tier teams are not always applicable to the broader spectrum of operations that we're engaging on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, I've spent my career working with state and local, federal and DoD. And the way that DoD entities worldwide view the use of force is a switch. When we make a decision to deploy the military. We are throwing on the h*** switch. We will turn the h*** switch off. When there's a surrender. Force is viewed very binary.

Have we reached sufficient provocation to meet our rules of engagement? Okay, send the marines. And I think when you saw the evolution of first in Somalia and Afghanistan, where we're getting more into peacekeeping missions, you saw this kind of blurring where law enforcement tactics started to be used. Somalia. La sheriffs trained the marines for Somalia because it force wasn't a switch anymore. The enemy was no longer a von Clausewitz battle of two guys with tanks. It was an insurgent embedded in a civilian community.

And I think that initially, that's, if you look at NYPD, ESU had the machine gun squads, you know, like, the initial response was, oh, let's. We'll just build a, you know, a bunch of trained killers, and then they'll go deal with it. But then they quickly realized, like, no, it's not a switch. It's a rheostat.

And now it's a rheostat with media coverage that, you know, you have to not only get the dimmer switch, you know, correct at the end, you've got to start it at the right position and be able to turn it back down. And so I think that's part of what kind of drove not only your team's evolution, but everybody's evolution.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, I like that analogy a lot. That's excellent!

Jon Becker: That's the way we've always explained it when we're trying to explain to military leaders. Like, when we first, when I was doing the first briefings for Operation United Shield in Somalia, and we were doing, we did all the non lethal gear for the Marine Corps, and I ended up in a lot of conversations with people that were way above my pay grade, talking about, like, how less lethal works and how you have to reach provocation under rules of engagement.

And so that was the easiest way to explain it is the difference between an on off switch and a dimmer switch. And the dimmer switch has gotten very complicated. Now it's got about 800 settings, and if you get it wrong, we're going to charge you the crime. Okay, so Ottawa happens. There's the initial ERT teams, and then how does the team evolve from there?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So concurrent to that, there was the establishment of the collateral duty ERT teams, and it was when I joined the program, I think it's 20 years ago now. You got two days a month training. Your equipment was bare bones. We had, like, iron sights on our mp5s. Like everyone in the business knows the history. 20 years ago and we had a lot of part time teams kind of everywhere. I think we had about ten or twelve in the entire province, something like that.

Our team started as a full time team in 2006, before the 2010 Olympics. So until then, yeah, it was all this, you know, all these part time efforts and, you know, tons of ERT trained members kind of just going to calls when they could sort of thing. In 2006, it was just too expensive to run those multiple programs, so they amalgamated into a single program for all the police stations in the area. And that was. Yeah, that was in the lead up to the 2010 Olympics.

Again, 2010 Olympics, much like laden is, you can mark in our team certain turning points of when we significantly scaled up our abilities, you know, form the team in 2006, that was a turning point because now we, instead of having 20 hours a week of training, now we've got a minimum of 40 guaranteed. Plus we're going to add on top of that. Now we have better gear. Now we've got, you know, fewer guys to spend more money on.

It was a significant step up. And I'm a big fan of full time teams. I feel like full time teams, I understand the benefits of collateral duty teams, but full time teams, in my view, are the way to go. Certainly works for us in our area. 2010, our team gets the Olympics, and with that became a lot of higher end training that was made available to us because of that. Exactly like in LA. And then we can, over the last ten years, we can point to certain other events that have been very influential for us.

Jon Becker: So 2010 Olympics were in Vancouver.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. Yeah, Vancouver. And Whistler.

Jon Becker: And Whistler, yeah. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I'm assuming that much like, I mean, when LAPD went through it in 84, you know, they had a lot of training with international military units who were dealing with counterterrorism. And I'm assuming that probably as you guys are building up, that's kind of the direction you also went.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, that's one of our advantages as being a federal agency is we can avail ourselves to some of those joint training opportunities with our military as well as with international partners. So it kind of helps when you're the federal police force, you've got a bit of a bigger name and you can kind of get access to a few other units that you have a different peer and near peer group that you can access.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. You're viewed as the national asset.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. That's right.

Jon Becker: I mean your national military assets? JTF2, I'm assuming. And then the national law enforcement asset is you guys.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Correct?

Jon Becker: Yeah. So talk to me about current configuration of the team. Full time team, how many operators, what's. How's it split up?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Full time team. We're funded to 63. 63 full time bodies. Of course, we don't always have that. We break it down into three teams. So we've got three teams with a sergeant, three corporals, and twelve constables. So about like 16 guys per team. So we've got three operational teams and they. They run in a three week cycle. So you do. Each team does a week of ops on your day shift, which is busy for our planned ops and our kicks, you know, our drug warrants. Then you do a week of nights, which is your primary on-call team, and then a week of training.

So a dedicated week of training every three weeks. So we've got three teams, about 16 guys each. Then we've got a full time training debt of sergeant, a couple corporals and a few constables, that's eight members. And then we've got a couple logistics guys because there's always work to be done that just doesn't get captured or is just too much to throw on the ops teams, like, you know, hey, man, can you take care of the armored vehicle? Hey, can you take care of this? Can you take care of that?

You know, it's like when it's everybody's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility. It just doesn't get done, even if everyone has the best intentions. So we focus that on a few logistics guys who actually, you know, you know, quartermaster and keep our vehicle fleet running and keep our training building going. It's a huge job for those guys.

Jon Becker: So basically you have, you have day duty for one week, you have night duty for the next week, and then you're training for a week.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And you're in this constant rotation, the three teams.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. So we've taken the deployment strategy of not spreading our resources out. So we have 24/7 coverage instead. Because we don't have enough people to mount a full team response 24/7 we just don't like, you know, like to follow the, you know, the patrol watch of like a four on four off schedule. We can't do it enough guys. You wouldn't meet your training hours.

So for us, we said, okay, what do we need to do? What is like the thing we cannot say no to? It's like, well, our planned calls and we know when those come in. You know, we do most of our planned warrant execution, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and that's when the investigative units are working.

Now look, there's always ones that happen anytime, but we know that that's the majority of our calls. So let's staff that, first of all. And we can do analysis on when the other calls come in. So we staff when our calls have been happening and we staff to the level. Like each team works in its entirety. So I always have twelve IRT members on. That's our shift minimum. Like, there's never less than twelve on and there's never less than twelve on call.

So the other thing is all guys have take home trucks. That's another thing we have. So regardless of the time, 24/7 they're on a 15 minutes notice to move on their, on their, on call. So if that, if they get the ping on their app, they have. And you know, it's like Sunday at three in the morning, they've got 15 minutes to be in their truck and rolling to the call. Our average response time is actually nine minutes. Of course, guys live all over the place, so you tend to get a few on scene right away and then more just kind of keep showing up.

So it's expensive, it's an expensive way to run it, but there's advantages to it. So we're not just constantly trying to make it work. Like, whoa, okay, you only have like, you know, one squad on of six members and it's not enough, but see what you can do, and then we'll call more and it's like, no, it's like we show up, we roll as a thing. It's a light switch, it's not a dimmer switch for us. Now, look, sometimes we scale things, of course, but for the most part, we treat it as a light switch, our resourcing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, no, I think that you see with a lot of the bigger teams, the full time teams, that they do begin to view it more as a switch because otherwise it becomes incremental. It's almost like you have to be able to draw a line where a response looks like this, it's this many people, or we're not coming because otherwise, like, oh, well, just send us three guys, you know, send us a sniper and a medic, and pretty soon you have this very watered down and dangerous capability where your guys don't have the resources, they don't have the support, they don't have enough people, and you start to kind of end up in a potentially dangerous situation.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: You start making trade offs, and you make. So this is one of my big things. This is a big strategy. I employ a lot on calls, and I'm gonna. If I can just, like, we'll go off road right here a little bit. I'm gonna bring it back to what you're saying. So we were chasing a guy once.

So this guy, he was at a transit station. He shot a transit officer, plainclothes transit police officer, who had approached him. You know, these two plain clothes guys. They scope this guy, kind of Acton hanky. He takes off running, runs up to the platform. They approach him, turns around, and shoots the transit officer, like, a few times. Point blanken takes it in the vest, takes one in the hand. He's able to return fire. The guy doesn't get hit. The guy takes off on foot.

They track him about a quarter. You know, all the witnesses are saying, of course, flood of officers. The witnesses are, like, quarter mile away. Like, he went that way. He went that way to a known drug house. And it's like, okay, great. He's in this drug house. So we. You know, this is actually right by our office. So we're there. Quick, solid lockdown on that place. He didn't get out. So we start doing call outs. There's no answer.

Finally, one guy comes out. Well, no, there's no one in the house. What do you know? Two other people squirt out the back door, right? No, there's no one else in the house. And then a few minutes later, you know, so we're doing some, you know, some bangers and stuff, and then another guy comes out.

Well, I was sleeping, so it's like, okay, these people are lying to us. It's a known drug house. We're a quarter mile away. Like, this dude is in there pretty sure of things, right? We sent in our drone. Too many locked doors. So it's like. It's almost like a rooming house. Everyone keeps their doors closed with a lock on it because otherwise people steal their.

Jon Becker: Cause there are a bunch of drug dealers who are stealing from.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Steal each other. So we can't clear it with our attack. There's too much crap on the floor for the robots. And the challenge was, well, how are we gonna clear this house? It's like, well, we're still gonna gas it. We're a pretty gas centric team. Seems like a solid plan. Well, what happened, though, is that all of a sudden, this is taking a bit longer. Oh. The witnesses are starting to be a little unclear on things.

Jon Becker: Oh, God!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: It's not. Well, you know, the clothing doesn't make sense. And it's like, well, that's easy to explain away. Like, when are witnesses ever reliable? Well, we want to believe they're reliable when they point to the house, but we don't want to believe they're reliable when it's like, maybe we need to go home here. The dog track was inconclusive, and the backtrack was inconclusive. Like, well, maybe it got contaminated. We're starting to get download some good video from the scene. That guy's not associated the house. So it's like, I'm not sure he's in there. Now, he could still be in there, but we're not sure.

So the question is, you know, I've got essentially, well, three choices. I could pack up and go away. We're not going to do that. We could gas the house out. Oh, and here's the other thing. The house was owned by a police officer who, like, rented it. This is like a whole area is going under. You know, it's probably going to be a great neighborhood 15 years from now. Right now, it's not – And, like, a guy running from a sudden flood of police cars is not a weird reaction in that neighborhood. So it's like, I'm not sure if that guy's in there.

So the question is, how do we get them out? Do we gas them out, or do we send the guys in with, like, dogs and long line? Well, if they find them, there's probably gonna be a shootout. But if I gas the house. Well, if he's not in there

Jon Becker: He's not in there. Just bought a house.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, that's not actually, that's not true for us, but, yeah, like, I opened the argument of someone laying, you know, some civil liability there, and I came to the conclusion there that, you know, what? If I do things, if I conflate the decision of if I want to clear that house with how I want to clear that house, if I conflate those two into a single question, I'm asking for trouble. So if I need to clear the house is a yes. I cannot leave. Right?

So once it's regard, it's irrelevant if I'm 100% sure if I need to clear it, or if I'm 40% sure I clear it. But I only needed a 35% sure sureness in order to make the decision. It's like, once I walk through that door of that decision, I'm in the room. I need to act like I belong there. And what I decide is that if I try to mitigate risk by attenuating the aggressiveness of my action, it's the worst of both worlds. People, they think it's the best of both worlds. Well, I'm still kind of doing something, but maybe I'm ameliorating the risk a little bit. It's like, no, you're taking all the risk of taking action, but you're not taking action that you know is going to be effective.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. You're jumping out of the airplane with maybe a parachute.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Exactly. So, I view that as the same as, you know, how many guys, you know, what is a full team deployment? Yeah, we could send three SWAT guys and maybe pretend we're checking the box of, you know, we've deployed SWAT, but we haven't. So we've taken all the, I've taken all the organizational risk of deploying my unit. My unit's name is now on that call. Yeah, my guys are in green, they're going to be in the media and if that. But I haven't sent enough to secure operational failure or operational success.

So I'm signing my name to something. I'm signing my unit's name to something. I'm creating organizational risk, but I'm doing it with the risk of operational failure. It's a trap, but it's so easy to come into because it feels like we're doing the right thing. I can send to three officers to all calls all day long, 24/7 but they're not actually doing anything. It's just, it's a trick. It's an illusion. It's an illusion of protection.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's giving yourself the feeling that you're making a decision and that, you know, you, you are. Yeah, we're solving the problem, but in reality you're actually increasing the danger.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Exactly, exactly. Yes. It's an illusion and it's, it's a very alluring one and it's one, I think managers fall into traps a lot on because they don't understand the difference between cheap and expensive. Right. It's like having my twelve members on shift is expensive right up until the minute it's super cheap when we really needed them.

Yeah, but you only focus on, you know, it's cheap one day out of the year it's expensive. The other 364, it's like, do you have the intestinal fortitude to ride out those 364 waiting for that one? That's tough.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I have that discussion a lot with people. It's like, you know, SWAT teams are expensive until you have a very scary hostage situation and need the expertise, and then they're free. You have to. I remember years ago, I had a friend that was a fireman, and he's like, oh, come do a ride along with us. Okay?

And we sat around and played Xbox and cook steaks and kind of standard firehouse protocol, and I said, I can't believe we're paying you to do this. Like, you're basically hanging out with your buddies and barbecuing, and he goes, you're not paying me for what I do. You're paying me for what I'm willing to do. I'm willing to run into a building that's on fire, and when you need me to do that, it's worth me sitting around and playing on my Xbox. And I said, yeah, you're right. It is. Because in the end, if you're the guy trapped in the building on fire, I need somebody to run in.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So that's the difference between effectiveness and efficiency, right? Police or fire departments are not efficient. You know, they park their fire trucks at the grocery store. They're not efficient, but they're effective. And they do a really good job of saying, hey, within x number of minutes, we will be at your house. Like, they have all that math down. If they know exactly what resources they need in what amount of time, based on the average burn rate of a residence, those metrics don't exist in policing, much to our detriment.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: But, yeah. Like, my ammo budget on our team is $400,000 a year. That is expensive. And it felt really expensive up until one of my guys had to make a hostage rescue shot with a human shield with a four inch area of target on knots. Then $400,000 was a very good deal.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Because there's no way you're going to be able to do that without catastrophic outcomes if you're not willing to pay the price.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it raises the. It's kind of like insurance, right? Insurance is really expensive until your house burns down, and then you go, oh, my God, I'm so glad that I had it. And I think that things like ammo budgets, things like training, are difficult in a modern environment. It's difficult to defend spending $400,000 in ammunition when people are like, oh, my God, we need to cut the budget. Well, let's cut the ammunition budget. Right?

What we see with a lot of our teams is its ammunition budgets, its training budgets, and it's one of those things where you can attenuate that until the point that it snaps. And unfortunately, you don't get to choose when it snaps.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: These decisions are often hidden. The downsides are hidden for a long time until they're nothing. But a lot of people play that lottery and they win it all the time. Like, um, you know, one of the trainers I have a lot of respects was will petty out of centrifuge training. And he's a – He always says, you know, he's not surprised when these bad things happen. He's surprised they don't happen more often.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: And when he told me that, I was like, you know, that actually makes a ton of sense. But you look at managers who are given a large budget or sometimes even a small budget, sometimes that's even harder decisions. But if you're given, like, a large policing budget, what training do they have to map that onto decisions? Like, if you're asking me to sign a check for $400,000 for ammo, I don't spend $400,000 on anything that eclipses my family budget, which is the only money I've ever ran in my whole life by an order of magnitude. I have no frame of reference for spending this money.

And that was one of the big challenges when I took over the team washing. You know, every one of these decisions just made me sweat. I don't know if I'm just dead to it now or if I've just got more experience and I realized the value of it and have been through the wringer a few times, and. And they've. The decisions that were really hard have paid off, and now the next decisions aren't as hard anymore.

But I worry about, you know, the next boss who comes in and has been being asked to spend, you know, hey, we need a new piece of armor. Hey, we need it. We need this. We need that. Like, new sniper rifles and new optics. That's expensive up until it's cheap, and they've never seen when it's cheap, so they just think about it as expensive. It worries me.

Jon Becker: It's funny, I was having a conversation early in my career, one of the teams that I worked with was in a gunfight, and they ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street, taking rounds, like, taking heavy fire. And two of the guys ended up basically hiding behind a curb and returning fire at this guy. And I said, like, a curb is not very big. Like, I can't imagine hiding behind a curb. And the guy that was the team leader said, when somebody's shooting at you, a curb is amazingly large. You would be amazed how much cover you get from a curb. Cause you can cover half or three quarters of your body.

And that's a lot. And I think that a lot of this technology people look at and they're like, oh, my God, it's, you know, it's $20,000 for a drone. It's $50,000 for a robot. The guy that has to stick his head in the attic is absolutely convinced it's worth the 50 grand, like, every time. And part of my day job is fighting that argument of, like, well, why are we spending so much on technology? Why? You know, and chiefs of police are always, like, looking at the SWAT team and saying, well, you know, we don't really need armor.

You know, why do we need to buy, you know, why do we need to buy a bearcat? It's like, well, when you're having to go somewhere without armor, you quickly realize how valuable the armor is. And we went through this whole demilitarization thing in the US. We're like, well, they want to take away armored vehicles.

Well, taking away armored vehicles means you're going to put somebody there without armor which creates two problems. One, you're more likely to get the operator killed, but two, everything is now instant deadly force confrontation because they're face to face with the suspect now.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, it's a really short sighted thing. I think there's another side to the coin, though, on the when to spend money. And I know, and this is something we've battled on our team as a lot, is, you know, there's not an infinite budget. Of course, the problem we have, or the trap is looking for the next newest piece of kit to solve your problem rather than going back and assessing what your current weaknesses are that are within your existing span of control.

For example, we need a new comm system right now. That's what we need right now. Okay, but what can we do right now to tidy up the way we're talking on the radio? Because sometimes we have verbal diarrhea on there and it's causing problems, or we're not using the right pro words, or there's a million things we could do to clean up our comms that has nothing to do with buying a new comm system. But buying a new comm system is easy to do because we can all focus on it. We can be like, hey, look, it seems like the solution.

If we try to fix an existing problem, we have to admit to ourselves that we're not as sharp as we need to be or could be. And that's a much harder conversation. And then you have to change humans behavior, also difficult. And then for us, we have to change it across three teams in a consistent way. For guys who've been doing it that way for 15 years, hard buying new piece of kit as long as you have the money is super easy.

Jon Becker: It's funny, because I come from both worlds. I deal with military units, law enforcement units. One of the primary differences in their thinking towards equipment is law enforcement tends to look at technologies and figure out how the technologies fit into their operations. The military looks at their requirements and then finds technologies. So it's like top down, bottom up, or however you want to look at it. If, you know, when Taser first came out, our law enforcement agencies were like, ah, we're going to buy a taser.

Yeah, it's going to work great. And like they had to sit and think like, where does that fit in our force continuum? And is that above pepper spray? Is it below pepper spray on par with the baton? And you could watch them like struggle to kind of shove this technology they wanted into their concept of ops. The military said, we don't have a requirement, but tell us what it does. And the army said, oh, yeah, no, we actually, we have a requirement that we need an intermediate force option that's less lethal, that covers from zero to 25ft.

And so from their concept, when I talk to my military program managers, they talk about this is the need that we have, this is the, this is the gap in our current capabilities. And they identify that gap and then they write a requirement around fulfilling that gap. And the result is it's usually a much more thought out plan by the time they go to acquire technology because they've thought through where does it fit in our conops and how do we use it and what does it need to be? Not, oh, it's shiny, I want to get it.

And so a lot of our, you know, my job is helping units understand, like, I know this is shiny and new, but if you don't figure out where it fits, it's useless to you. You know, if you get a dog and you're gonna, you know, your intent is to use the dog one way and the dog has different capabilities, you know, to get a bomb dog and try to use them as a bite dog, like that doesn't work.

So, think through how you're gonna use it and what you're gonna do with it first. And I think the same is true with budget. Right? When you look at the problem, you go, okay, this is what we need to do. Does this make sense for us? That also makes it easier to triage which of these things is more important to us? Which one do we care about more? Which one can we work around more easily?

So I think it's an interesting study of, like, how you spend your money has to be driven by your requirements, not by, you know, what's shiny and sexy and new.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, for sure. Now, I think one landmine we have to look out for, though, from the building, the requirement, then finding the piece of kit, is overbuilding your requirement to something that's impossible. So we actually made this mistake in our organization. I think it was about 15 years ago with our armor. So we sent out a spec.

So the way the federal government procures things is they write us back, and companies can bid on that spec of whether or not they meet it. So when they go to build, build this armored vehicle, they ask all the teams, what do you guys need in it? And the laundry list of things.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: It was just insane.

Jon Becker: It's like, it's got to go 100 miles an hour, but it's got to weigh 6oz. It's got to be made of gold, but be able to fly.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. What are they called? Like, unobtainium or something?

Jon Becker: Build it completely from unobtanium. 100%.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So it's like if you overbuild your requirements, and I just have. I'm a huge fan of super simple, like, basic simple stuff that will work perfect for 80% of things, and then the other 20% you'll figure out. I find we always fall into the trap of looking for that 100% solution and never getting anything or spending too much money on it. And it doesn't work because it doesn't work. It works in 0% of the circumstances.

Jon Becker: Well, it's also, you know, I talked about this previously, but it's also what. What makes tactical decision making challenging. Right? Like, in the same way that the guy doesn't want to spin the budget and doesn't want to make decisions because he's never made a decision that big. The same applies to tactical decision making. You're like, oh, we're going to wait for perfect answer. We're going to wait till we have all the information. And in the process, you miss window. You miss an opportunity. You almost begin to use the analysis paralysis as an opportunity to not have to make a decision.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, we see that a lot with our incident commander training, where they want to keep collecting information because it feels good. It feels like they're doing something. They feel busy. It's satisfying. They're learning more. But what I always say is that they're observing the problem, they're not solving the problem. And it's like a boxer in the ring, right? You can only dance around with your back to the rope so long.

Eventually, you have to be willing to throw a punch and take a punch, and that's the only way you're going to actually win the fight. But that's hard. It's terrifying, right? It's easy. Like, I can sit back at a call, at a barricade, call collect information all day long. I feel busy. If something bad happens, I'll probably say, well, we were trying to negotiate and de-escalate the situation, so I failed my mission. But maybe that's my little get out of jail free card, is what we're trying to negotiate.

And it's really hard, especially in today's environment, to criticize someone who was trying to de-escalate a situation verbally. It's hard to criticize them or it's not. It's easy for someone who knows what they're doing and knows what the actual mission was to criticize or to identify gaps in the problem solving strategies.

But that's almost a get out of jail free card for, hey, but you actually didn't do your cop stuff. And, you know, because of that, you know, maybe the hostage was killed or, you know, a member of the public was put in danger or an officer was injured. We've created, I think, by not over focusing on de escalation because it's hugely important. But we have to be careful that we don't misuse it as an excuse not to actually do the job that we're supposed to do. And you're talking about analysis paralysis. It feels good, though, right? Like, you don't realize you're doing it cause you're busy.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Gathering information, you're weighing your alternatives. You're. You know, in the meantime, like, the house is burned down and the problem is gone. It's funny because it was recently on a podcast called coffee and change, and one of the things we talked about was, as a society, we're creating expectations of our law enforcement that are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist.

So the example I used was, we want our police officers to be golden retrievers. We want them to be warm and fuzzy and snuggly and friendly to everybody that they meet and not offend people and not hurt their feelings. But we want to take that golden retriever and we run around a K9 mission, and then we're surprised when the golden retriever doesn't bite anybody. You look at situations, Uvalde being the most recent example of where a situation happens.

And we as a society expect intervention. We expect the problem to be solved. And yet we've brought a pack of golden retrievers to the party. We've promoted the people that were not willing to take chances. We've promoted the people who didn't have any bad outcomes and haven't made mistakes in their careers and have avoided difficult assignments.

And then we hand them a school shooting. And the net effect is an hour and 17 minutes of people standing around unable to do anything. And it's like we have to decide as a society, do we want a K9 or do we want a golden retriever? And I think the correct solution to that is to have a K9 unit and let it be a canine unit and have a golden retriever unit and let it be a golden retriever unit. Don't try to merge the two into one thing. And I think as a society, we're spending too much time trying to, like, we don't, oh, we don't want militarization. We don't want, you know, tactical units. Oh, my God. Why didn't you guys do something? And I'm sure you probably see that same tension where you are.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, well, I think that's one of the benefits of having a full time SWAT program, is that you can take that K9 unit. You can, first of all, make sure they're really, really well trained, and then you're going to put it in the K9 and you're only going to take it out when you need it. Otherwise you're going to run your golden retrievers and it really constrains. So when we made our full time team, we actually reduced the number of SWAT officers in the area because we didn't have to, they didn't have other jobs.

So transitioning, I would say transitioning to a full time unit, particularly if you're doing, like, multi jurisdictional to get that economy of scale, helps you reduce that militarization footprint. The whole militarization of police footprint, it's especially in Canada. It doesn't map onto Canada, really at all. We are actually having a reduction in the number of SWAT units. We're not.

So first of all, it's all based on Kraska's studies back in the eighties and nineties on the proliferation of SWAT teams. That's where this militarization argument comes from. It's like, of course they were proliferating, they didn't exist before then, and it was a new capability when they started with one.

Jon Becker: And then they had two, they've gone up 100%.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, and this guy's alarmed by that, right? He's completely flummoxed. Now he does have an interesting position where he says, hey listen, if you go to a country where you can't tell the difference between the police and the military, that's probably the sign or a good indication of a repressive regime. I think he's right in that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I can remember as a kid going to Paris and it was when the embassies were under the eighties, and seeing soldiers outside the embassies with, you know, machine guns in military garb and thinking, oh my God, like, what is that? Because I was, that was not what policemen looked like. And in that situation it made perfect sense. But it is, you're right.

The more the military looks like the law enforcement or becomes like the law enforcement, you are more likely to see a repressive regime. However, the flip side to that is, and one of my favorite Sid Heal quotes is I interviewed Sid and he was talking to a military operator and he was asking them, la county sheriffs, like, hey, help me understand kind of how you guys conduct urban warfare. And he's like, well sir, we don't really do warfare.

And he said, well, are they shooting at you? And he goes, well, yeah. And he goes, are you guys shooting back? And he goes, yeah. He goes, well that's warfare. He's like, if they're trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them, that's warfare. And I think it's easy for us to forget that 99% of law enforcement is community service, but the 1% that you guys are tasked with dealing with is frequently very violent.

And there isn't a big line between military tactics and law enforcement tactics. And I think the war on drugs kind of conflated those two. The nomenclature, the approach. I can remember early in my career fortified drug houses and they were building crack houses and they were fortifying them in five layers of barricades.

And the only way you were going to get in was destroy the house. That created this image of domestic law enforcement destroying homes and using armor and all of those things. And I don't think we've ever escaped from that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, so I think the root authority of the police is to use state sanctioned violence to impose the will of the government. Right? Okay. Ultimately, that's why people listen to the cops. That's why police officers have guns. I am allowed by the government to shoot someone if certain conditions are met. It's an incredibly heavy obligation. And. You know what I mean? Like, if you think about it, like, that's. Oh, no, we actually have a government that sanctions the use of violence against its citizens if certain conditions are met.

Jon Becker: Well, it's terrifying. Yes, the government sanctions it, but ultimately, we sanction it. Right? Like, if you look at a constitutional form of government, we are giving the government permission to use violence against us, to protect us and use it against certain people in our society.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. No, no, you're exactly right. So you can map it back. But I feel like every new movement has a lifespan, and the militarization of police has sort of been fading into the background, at least for us, somewhat. The problem is when you have very restrictive policies that are created during the, you know, the heat of the moment of the, you know, you get some watershed incident that's a total outlier event, will never happen again. Has never happened before.

You build some piece of policy, you know, some new reporting requirements, some new limitation, you take away a tool, something like that, and now you're gonna live with that forever because no one's ever going to repeal that rule. Like, we're all great at making new rules. No one's good at canceling old policies that don't exist or that don't. Aren't relevant anymore.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I live in the state of California, where we. We legislatively boa constrictor ourselves. Every time something stupid happens, we tighten the laws and we never take them away. And we end up with this kind of complex legislative milieu where even the people who are enforcing the law don't understand the law. Because you look at California gun law, there's so much nuance and complexity to it that even the people who are tasked with enforcing it are like, I don't know.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: I was looking at your lethal force laws and the definition and has something about it has to be imminent and immediate danger. I don't know the precise wording, but I was like, that is an incredible restriction. I almost fell out of my chair reading it, and I can't imagine trying to have a mission of saving innocent people's lives with that restriction on there.

And I think that I like to believe that the people who wrote those laws, they're not bad people. They just. They don't have the real world of experience to know how that verbiage is going to. It's going to get someone innocent killed.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That law actually was a topic of discussion in a couple of our previous podcasts because it's, you know, if a guy's standing on a porch with a hostage and pointing a gun at their head and saying, I'm going to kill her, okay, that's pretty clear. It's immediate, imminent, you know, whatever. What if he shows her in the building and he doesn't have the gun in his hand, but he's got the gun in the back of his pants and he walks back into the building? Like, that's not immediate and imminent. It's not imminent.

The gun pointed at her might be 60 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes, maybe. It's going to be an hour. Like, where do you draw that line? And going back to the analysis, paralysis. And the difficulty in tactical decision making when you create this, you know, this eye needle. Needle of an eye. Eye of a needle that you have to thread as a tactical commander, where you're like, have we met this very refined standard? It becomes easy to not take action, even if it results in a bad outcome. If you take the wrong action, we're going to punish you personally.

And, you know, qualified immunity is a thing in the US that exists, and it's under attack. And the idea as well, we don't want them to make the wrong decision, but I think we don't understand that that also means we're not gonna make a decision, which is really scary.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, and they create that little get out of jail free card of wow. I was trying to de-escalate. Or I can wash my hands of this because I was trying to do A, B and C, but I failed the mission. It really bothers me that, you know, a doctor can, you know, accidentally kill a patient, and we don't call it murder. There's lots of professional things that can go on, but it happens all the time, and oftentimes nothing happens. It's like it's what it is. It's an honest mistake. It's a complex environment with a. With a human error. So doctors can do it. They don't get charged with murder.

You know, a judge can release someone on bail, and that person can go out and murder someone. Their bail decision is not reviewable. They're not going to be liable. At least where we are, the prosecutor's action is not to charge someone or to agree to bail. They're not liable. But we have all the exposure, the police, like, we are responsible for everything, but no one else in the system is just us. That strikes me as unfair, and I don't like it.

Jon Becker: So, I mean, well, first of all, doctors and lawyers practice literally, the definition of what they do is the word practice. You're practicing law, you're practicing medicine. So it's okay to make a mistake because it's practice. But I think there's a root in that, at least in the United States. The root for that is our basic contempt for government. You got to remember, the US was founded by basic hatred for government. The constitution of the United States doesn't grant rights. It doesn't say, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to not be searched. It says the government can't. The US constitution is a restriction on government. It's not a granting of rights.

And as a result, that basic contempt for government runs through everything we do. So our tolerance for the government making a mistake is really low. And although that was 200 plus years ago, that spirit is still very much alive. We're still kind of all mildly anti government in a very strange way.

And I think that's part of what underlies that is like, oh, the doctor's a private citizen. So, like, yeah, he killed somebody, but, you know, he did his best. But this guy that works for the SWAT team, he works for the government. And the government killing somebody's not okay, and so we're gonna persecute this guy.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So for all the similarities, like, when I come down here on courses, the similarities between how Canada runs SWAT teams and how the US runs SWAT teams is remarkably similar. But there's all these, like, these little cultural differences, and that innate distrust of government is one of them. Like, that just simply doesn't exist in Canada. That's, I think this is me guessing why we see larger police agencies or, like, a federal agency. Imagine a federal agency that also does state level work and municipal level work.

Jon Becker: We don't allow that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: No bueno. Right? No one would like to city…

Jon Becker: It doesn't trust the county, and the county doesn't trust the state. The state sure as h*** doesn't trust the federal government.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. And when you look, especially how the RCMP works, is our commissioner is actually, I believe the position is the equivalent of a deputy minister. Like, it reports to the prime minister's office. It reports to the minister of public safety. So there's not even the insulation that you would see reporting to a municipal police board that a city police agency would. We're very. We're probably a little not separated enough from government. So the end result is we actually don't get as much scrutiny, I think, as American agencies. I think we do a little. We do a little better on that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, again, it's one of those things. You bear a legacy of your origin story and both good and bad. The good to the United States is our government is so fragmented that trying to implement a tyrannical government, like if you're the guy that's going to try to implement the totalitarianist government in the United States, good luck, because 500 million guns and it's Texas alone will attack.

The downside legacy to that is that basic distrust of 13 states coming together to form a federal government. But then none of the states, the states didn't even really like each other. And it was kind of like, we're making a deal because we need to make a deal because we got to be a country. But even you look at early papers, like the federalist papers, and you look at early conversations between Jefferson and Hamilton, they all kind of didn't trust each other. The Virginians didn't like the New Yorkers.

And so we're going to agree to this constitution. It's a little hinky, but we're going to sign it. But we're all agreeing. We're going to come back, we're going to do a bill of rights and we're going to make sure that the states have the ability to own guns and the federal government can't prohibit it from speaking. That's the origin story for the constitution. But that has led to this still kind of carrying over into us, kind of not trusting the government and our agencies bear the scars for that.

But one of the things that you and I talked about earlier was kind of how the origin story of SWAT teams and the kind of SAS and these early militarized roots of responding to terrorism are complicating modern law enforcement, modern tactical problems and how you are looking at it's all built around a coordinated attack and that's how the system was thought through. But that is complicated for warrants and other current operations.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, we had a problem with some of our operations just being clunky and we weren't being super responsive and we were really, really slow. And the team leaders were getting super frustrated with the incident commanders. And I was like, man, why is this? So let's look back to the origin story. Let's say the Iranian embassy siege in UK or the Turkish embassy in Canada. It's like, let's say you're the SWAT team commander and you have that problem.

So you've got multiple terrorists, multiple politically relevant hostages. Maybe you're already someone dead. You've got someone making demands. Like, you know, in the armenian one, they think they wanted, like the armenian genocide of 1914 admitted, and they wanted Turkey to return some land that was stolen from Armenia.

Jon Becker: It's like, yeah, the RCMP has the authority to do that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Like, I could bring you a pizza. So what do you think? You can't solve that, right? So imagine all the people on the phone that are, you know, like, you've got to get government offices involved. You're going to have your negotiators, you're going to have your tactical, you're not going to have a great tactical resolution.

Like, you, as the commander, are going to have to control absolutely every aspect of that operation. What are the negotiators saying? What are the demands? What am I reporting up to government? What concessions are we able to give? Tactics? You know, how can we incrementally make this problem smaller? What are our resolution options?

The commander in that command post is going to have tons of information and they're going to be best suited to make those decisions and they're going to have to make those decisions because none of those individual elements can make those decisions on their own.

So that is your classic, you know, hostage taking. That is for ideological, political goal, right? It's a big problem. So we've got our highest level unit tasked with solving those problems. Then concurrently we've got all our local SWAT teams who are doing the regular barricades. Well, where does local SWAT teams like to get influenced by top tier military units? SF units? And here's the story. I don't. Have you ever heard the one kneepad story? This is like proof positive that SWAT teams get inappropriately influenced sometimes by top tier military agencies. I'm going to leave the teams out of it.

But one team was shooting on the range and a top tier military SF unit sent a couple guys. They're going to go shoot with them. So the two SF guys show up. One of them has forgotten his knee pads. So he says to his buddy, hey, man, can I borrow a knee pad? So they each at least have one knee padded, so they all go to the range with one knee pad. No problem. End of day, the next day, shooting range. What did the entire SWAT team show up with?

Jon Becker: One knee pad.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: One knee pad. It had nothing to do with anything. So we have to be really careful of how we're influencing those things. So the local SWAT teams are learning how to command calls based on how we do these big calls, but it's not always appropriate. And I'll give you an example. Let's say we're going to do a warrant execution at a house, the warrant service, as some people call it, and the team rolls up and I'm in the command post and they roll up and there's a surveillance camera.

The old way we would do it is like, you know, Oscar Charlie, you know, can we take out the surveillance camera? And I would say yes or no. It's like, okay, I'm in a command post. I can't see the house. I can't see where the members are. I can't see what the camera's pointing at. I can't see what the backdrop is. Like, what magical decision making formula do I have in my head that I can make a better decision than the operator on the ground who can actually see it?

But that's how we did it. Why? Because if that is at the hostage taking call, well, it matters a whole lot if they ask me if they can, you know, deploy a 40 mil to take out that camera because it's going to have follow on effects of all this other stuff that they don't even know. You know, they might not have all the intel to make that decision.

So we had those, you know, top tier units dealing with those high level, you know, golden age of hostage terrorist events that started trickling down then to, like, domestic hostage takings. So I'll give you an example. Like if you do a, you know, a bank robbery. So the guy robs a bank, comes out, the police are there, he runs back into the bank and he wants a million dollars in a helicopter on the roof. What's your strategy for that?

Well, you're going to try to de escalate his emotions. You're going to. And you're going to probably do some sort of give and take negotiation strategy because you want, you want his million dollars in a helicopter roof, which seems reasonable to him. He feels like that's a good deal based on his power. You're going to erode that to the point where him coming out and getting smoked before going to jail is a good deal.

Jon Becker: Where he gets a pizza.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: He's going to get a pizza. Here's your pizza. Now we can map the hostage taking for the political ideologist onto that functional hostage taking. The guy who wants a million dollars in a helicopter on the roof. A lot of those strategies are applicable. But when we go to a domestic hostage taking where the guy doesn't want a million dollars. He has what he wants. He has his wife, his ex wife at the end of his gun, and he's got the new boyfriend already dead. If you apply that long term give and take negotiation strategy, you are gambling with that woman's life.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: And we've been on that call. So we've learned the hard way that you cannot map that origin story directly onto your tactics or onto your command principles. So, one thing that, you know, if we wanted to boil it all down, I say that the person who should be in charge of making decisions is the person who has the appropriate training to do so and has the best situational awareness and has the appropriate amount of time to make that decision. If you're missing any one of those three things, it can quickly unravel.

So one of the worst habits I've seen on SWAT teams is that the chief's in charge of the call or the deputy chief is in charge of the call. It's like, what expertise do they have? They might not have any training at all. It's like, well, it's the highest ranking guy. He's now in charge. It's like, no, that's completely wrong. The highest ranking person in charge can support the decision maker, but they don't have to be the decision maker.

One of the most powerful decisions you can make is delegating your command authority. And that's something we do a lot of now. So we just pre brief things on, hey, man, if you run into a camera and we're on a warrant execution, just take it out. Don't ask me questions that I don't have any situational awareness to answer. Why you ask me that, it's because we didn't talk about it beforehand. We didn't debrief enough. We had a command failure.

Jon Becker: But I think that requires two things. It requires, first, that the command staff have faith in their operators, and they're enlisted, for lack of a better term, to make good decisions. And second, it requires leadership that understands delegation of authority, understands that expertise.

And I know one of the things that you're really passionate about, and we've talked about is how we're training our future tactical leaders. So kind of, as a last topic, why don't we pick that up a bit? Like, what are your thoughts on how. How we should be training our future command staff, future tactical leaders?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, I think, first of all, we have to train them. It sounds so silly, but honestly, I was given command of the second largest SWAT team in Canada, and I had no leadership training at all, so I had command training how to run an incident command. But that's different than actual leadership training. Hey, if you want to, you know, if you want to achieve a different mission or you want to change tactics on something or if you want to, you know, you want to change the schedule or you want.

You know, you have a new budget constraint, how are you going to deliver that out to the team? I had zero training in it, so I think we have to make, first of all, just almost any training is better than no training, but we have to do something. I think one of the biggest gaps we. We have, and we've hit on it, is. Is teaching our leaders to be courageous. I don't. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm a wimp.

But when you ask me to sign a budget of $18 million of expenditures, most of that salary, but it's like, you want to sign. You need me to spend $200,000 on new sniper rifles and optics. I'm sorry. That feels scary to me. I feel afraid of making a mistake. When we go on a call and I have to approve whether it's a go or no go, I feel the pressure, this weighing pressure that it's going to be, that maybe I'm going to make a steak, maybe I'm going to be criticized, that professional risk is just enormous.

Maybe I'm going to do something that is going to get the agency sued. I think one of the keys is we have to teach our leaders that. Just expect it. Expect that feeling of you're not going to feel sure ever. And if you're looking for sure, like, listen, if you wanted people to be 100% confident in their decisions, there's no worthwhile decisions to be made that require that. That's just process. If you're 100% sure, then you are a spreadsheet. Like, if I could just.

Jon Becker: You have made a choice.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. You haven't made a choice. You filled in.

Jon Becker: It is a decision because there is an uncertainty involved.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yes. And it sucks. Like, it sucks. Maybe I'm a wimp. I don't think so. But I find these things scary. It weighs on me heavily.

Jon Becker: Well, and it's interesting, because if I said, hey, Kevin, I want you to walk across this 2 x 4 sitting on the ground. You go, okay. And you'd walk across the two by four, and you wouldn't be scared, you wouldn't worry about it. Kevin, I want you to walk across this 2 x 4. It's a thousand feet in the air, and it's over shark infested waters with alligators and concrete blocks. It's an entirely different decision. It's really not. It's exactly the same decision, but the consequences of the decision go up so much that your ability to make the decision is compromised.

And part of the problem with the way that we are treating modern tactical leaders is you are making imperfect decisions in confusing circumstances. And don't believe and don't trust that if you make a mistake, we're gonna protect you. Right? You go back to the doctor. The doctor feels empowered to make the decision, because if he makes a mistake, even if he gets sued, he has malpractice insurance. Your malpractice insurance is unemployment or being charged with a crime.

And I think that one of the things that I try to teach when I teach culture centric leadership, is if you are a leader, you have to empower the people below you to make decisions, and they have to trust in you that you will not crucify them as long as they made a good, grounded decision. Like, yeah, it can be, you know, people make mistakes, but if it isn't a bad act, we shouldn't punish it.

The problem is we don't understand that. And so we raise that two by four up to a thousand feet, and if you make a mistake, you're going to fall off the 2 by 4, and as a result, you're no longer comfortable walking across it, which you could do a hundred out of a hundred times on the ground. But we've created this artificial pressure for you to make that decision that actually ends up making you less likely to make the right decision.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: I think we do one worse, too. I think if you – What happens next after the catastrophe or after the crisis? We all have a tendency, I think, to focus on how we manage that crisis, and we'll congratulate ourselves. So say, you know, say I'm the deputy chief, you're the chief, and we get one of our officers, you know, one of our officers gets killed on a call. We now have to manage that crisis, and we're gonna work really hard, support the rest of the team that's on. We're going to reach out to the family. We're going to do all those good things, and we're going to be very capable at it, because we got our jobs for a reason, and we're going to feel good about ourselves.

The tragedy of the event will weigh heavily on us, but we'll feel like we did a good job leading what we rarely do in policing is look back and say, wait, why was that officer on that call by themselves? What deployment policies have you and I decided on here that created that circumstance in the beginning? Why is our 2 x 4 a thousand feet in the air over shark infested waters?

So I always say, like, people think I have an exciting job. My job is to make my job boring, painfully boring. I want to mitigate as much risk. I want to walk on two by fours on the ground all day long. I don't. You're sure? It's exciting to walk on. And what people do a lot of the times is they don't mitigate their risk in advance. They successfully get across that two by 4000ft in the air and it feels exciting and exhilarating and they treat that as evidence of their great leadership and risk management skills. Hey, we survived the 2 x 4 walk of death. It feels good. No, that should feel bad to you. That should feel bad.

And then if you fall, it should not feel good to you that if you somehow survived the fall because you're a great swimmer in shark infested waters, like, no, that's bad. Why was it your two x four up there in the first place? So I think we failed in two realms simultaneously. We don't mitigate the risk in the first place.

If we survive, we congratulate ourselves on how awesome we are. And if we fail, we don't ever look, we congratulate ourselves on how we manage to survive the crisis. Look, almost no crisis is going to bring down an agency. These are government bureaucratic offices. They're incredibly robust. Almost nothing you do is going to make or break anything. It's a game of increments. It's a game of inches. And it's a game of inches to make your job super boring. I think we miss that sometimes because exciting is fun.

Jon Becker: I completely agree. Why don't we finish? I want to run you through some just kind of quick answer questions to conclude our time together. And these are off top of your head. Give me your one sentence or whatever. What do you think your most important habit is?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Is this where I say, like, I journal every morning and take an ice cold bath and yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it could be your yoga practice or, you know, or it could be trying to make your job as boring as possible.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: What is my most important habit? So my most important personal habit is getting ready the night before, getting all my stuff squared away. That sets me up for a good day. I don't have a great morning routine. I try to have a good evening routine. If I would have. If the one thing that I do well personally that sets up for success, it would be that I would say professionally, my most valuable habit is that I have a habit of taking risks, very calculated risks that are just slightly outside my comfort zone.

And the ability to do that and do that consistently results in long term growth of a team and of a program that's. That's faster than normal. Now, that's a little different than not accepting or sorry. That's a little different than trying to make my job exciting, because I try to do that to make my job boring. Yeah, like, super boring.

Jon Becker: What's the best book you've read on leadership?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Extreme ownership. Chocolate one.

Jon Becker: What's the most profound memory of your career?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: In 2015, we got called to a hostage taking. So a guy had come to his ex wife's house, shot the new boyfriend, and took the ex wife hostage at gunpoint with her two year old grandchild. The rest of the family escaped. The boyfriend was injured. She actually ends up escaping. When she convinces him to let the kid go, she runs as well, and he tries to shoot her and misses the incident commander. So I was a team leader on the call. It was my first time team leading a call. I was not experienced enough for that call. I learned a lot from it, but there probably would have been better guys on the team to do that call. But it was, for whatever reason, it was my turn that day.

So I don't profess to have any sort of tactical excellence that was displayed that day. My cup was full, for sure. But my most profound memory is, is we got called to do the IA plan, the immediate action. So the emergency rescue of the injured victim and the host. The suspect was waiting for us. He was waiting for us in a dark hallway in a crouched position with an SKS. We were able to. Two guys in front of me were able to take care of that threat. I didn't have an arc, so you never want to be the guy at the back of the bus trying to try to make the shot. That's just not a good move.

So it kind of bothers me that, you know, I was almost there. You know, I feel a little useless, but I was able to give a great witness statement that resulted in the guys getting cleared, and he shot himself almost simultaneous to us shooting him. So it was a very dynamic event. But I say that because I remember as we were approaching the house, I realized, like, I was pretty sure one of us was going to get shot. Could have been me. And I realized that it really wasn't me making the sacrifice if that were to happen. It was my family that was going to make the sacrifice, because I would be dead. I would have…

Jon Becker: Yeah, your problem is solved.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: My problem is solved. At the time, my wife was going through stage three b breast cancer, which is triple negative, which was, if you get one, that's not one you want. And my daughter was, I think, about seven years old. And so this briefly entered my brain as I was approaching that door. And I was like, well, I realized that I'm actually living my dream job because my family is taking the risk and my family is the one that are going to ultimately pay the price. It's not going to be me. And I've never been able to rationalize that. I've never been able to square that away to a point of comfort in my soul. And I don't know if there's a way to do it.

Jon Becker: I can't think of a better place for us to end in that statement. Thank you so much, Kevin! I appreciate you doing this!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Thank you!

Episode 4 – Brent Stratton and Marcus Sprague: The California Association of Tactical Officers and The Doctrine of Tactical Science

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Walk up to The Debrief!

My guests today are the hosts of the very successful California Association of Tactical Officers podcasts, Brent Stratton and Marcus Sprague. Brent is the assistant chief at a Southern California agency and the president of CATO. Marcus is the vice president of CATO and a lieutenant at a northern California agency.

Guys, thank you for joining me today!

Marcus Sprague: Thanks for having us, Jon!

Brent Stratton: Thanks for allowing us to be here, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with just kind of your personal stories? Marcus, why don't you lead us off with your personal story, how you became involved in CATO and your background?

Marcus Sprague: So I worked at one agency my whole career in northern California, but under 200 officers and found myself about mid pack on our SWAT team and was promoted to sergeant. And due to some other issues in the agency, I found myself in charge of SWAT and didn't really understand why we did a lot of the things we do, did, and felt the burden of leadership, knowing that if I didn't understand some of these tactical problems, I could make a bad decision and someone can get hurt.

So someone mentioned to me I should reach out and learn about tactical science. So I jumped on the field command website, left my email account. A couple months later, received a phone call on my personal phone from Tim Anderson inviting me to attend the course I attended the course. Had to take my own time. Sid and Tim and Odie were, for whatever reason, liked me, kept giving me opportunities. So I read every book they suggested, every chance they said, do you want to come see this or do this be a part of CATO? I did.

And quite honestly, I was embarrassed at some of the principles that I didn't understand until that late in my career. So that's kind of how I found myself here today to continue that, because I think there's a lot of people like me trying to find those answers, and our agencies and the state don't have the time or resources to teach all of that. And so I just kept saying, yes, those guys really changed my life and taught me a lot of stuff. And my goal is to just kind of continue their work with CATO.

Jon Becker: I love that. Brent, what about you?

Brent Stratton: A real similar story. Actually working at the department I've worked in early on in my career, I was fortunate enough to get picked up on our SWAT team, but it's a collateral assignment team. And I spent time working in our gang unit and in patrol and promoted to detective and was on the team. I enjoyed the work, but mediocre at best as a SWAT operator.

But as my career progressed, kind of real similar to what Marcus is describing, just the way the stars aligned within our organization. I became the only sergeant on the team and felt similarly a tremendous burden for the team and the decision making that needed to occur. And I felt ill equipped and ill prepared.

Our agency had not really done much of sending people outside of our walls for training, and so I began really doing a lot of research into what was out there and found there was so much that I really did not know. And CATO was the answer for me.

Similar to Marcus had to put myself through trainings and reading magazines and conferences to see and hear people speak, you know, Sid Heal, and to hear RK Miller and Ken Hubbs speak and Gene Ramirez. And then I would put myself through their classes and stay afterwards and ask them questions and bother them with emails and phone calls. And they were all kind enough and gracious enough to give me information to help really develop my thought process.

And the more I got into it, the more I really started to love and really appreciate the organization and the mission regarding the organization, what it can do for our officers throughout the state of California. When the strategic leadership program was announced, I applied and was accepted, and that really started to help develop additional areas for me. Kind of a critical thinking and from a leadership perspective.

And I got to be introduced to a variety of other instructors, including people like Mike Hillman and Tim Anderson and Odie Odenthal. And I got to be classmates with people like Marcus Fregg and Travis Norton and Toby Darby, Kenny Brayton, John Cabrera, people from all throughout the state, Mitch Brulette. Just to be able to start to learn and understand from each other. And it really changed the path of my career.

And then hearing Sid talk, his principles of leadership and tactical science principles, he helped me realize that these aren't just principles in a tactical environment. These are principles that translate into life, and it's something that helped make me a better husband and a better father and a better person, because the principles are the same whether you're in a tactical situation or just trying to be a better human. So I'm forever indebted to CATO.

So as the transition started to occur, and I, some of our heroes were stepping out of the organization, really took the opportunity, even though I didn't feel like I was the best person to be able to do it, I think I was one of the only people willing to do it, along with Marcus, was to kind of help move the organization forward and to volunteer to help lead CATO.

And we feel a tremendous burden that we volunteer a lot of our time. Kind of a labor of love to help keep the organization alive and running and moving forward. That way, we can serve officers who can go back and serve their departments better, who can then serve their communities and make their communities safer. That's the entire mission of what we do.

So it's been a great road, and I'm thankful for the opportunity. And I gotta mention throughout that way, I got to meet you and learn from you and speak with you along the way, and get to develop a friendship with you. And I've learned a lot from you as well. So there's been just led to me getting to meet a lot of really, really great people. One of the absolute pleasures and highlights of my career so far.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think one of the things that's really interesting is CATO has gone through basically three generations. The first generation was Ken. Hubbs kind of is a one man show who all credit to Ken created CATO, ran it by himself for an extremely long time and built it into a pretty robust organization.

And then when Ken was ready to transition out, Sid and I, Archeage and Ramirez, all kind of took over and ran it until this third generation. And I think that the discussion from the beginning about SLP was to find the next generation of leadership. And if you look at the SLP one class, which you named everybody in, I think it's created this third generation. And I think that the guys that were in SLP1 are the guys that are now leading the organization, yourselves included.

Brent Stratton: Yeah. And it's interesting because it's a different dynamic. Right? None of us are coming from a full time team like Ken or Sid or Tim or these guys that have literally written the book about tactics and have done these type of things.

We're not the tacticians in that way that those men are. They're our heroes. They've written the books, and they've done those type of things. Where I really see us focusing is being able to keep the organization alive, to grow the organization, to build the infrastructure of it, to be able to help integrate with police departments, to be able to take the broad spectrum of things that are out there, to identify best practices, to be able to collect data, to take it to where it's a little bit more articulable, to a little bit more synergistic, and be able to take it and launch it and move the organization forward to serve officers based on the challenges and the unique challenges that our cops out there are facing today, and to truly make it a profession and take the things that we're learning. And that comes from a variety of different mediums.

And Marcus has really helped us in that regard with, you know, the podcast and the website and moving things along. And there's just a tremendous amount of people on, you know, the board of directors, people that volunteer their time and effort because they care about the profession, the work that's out there, and then just making cops better so they can serve, like I said, their departments and their communities better.

So there's a definite different style of leadership than we have from our predecessors, but it's our hope that they can look at the organization, be proud of where it is and be proud of where we're going and where we're trying to push it towards.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at the way that SWAT has evolved, it really started with the bigger teams, right? I mean, the expansion of SWAT in it was really the 84 Olympics what drove it on the west coast, and that was all the full time teams. And as SWAT has evolved, it's moved down to smaller and smaller agencies. And you've gone. I mean, in CATO’s jurisdiction, there are a handful of full time teams.

So SWAT now really is a 90% to 95% part time team scenario. So it seems logical that the organization would transition more into a mindset of part time. Marcus, what do you see the role of Cato being in the role of regional associations?

Marcus Sprague: Well, there's a lot of talk out there about national policing, especially recently due to George Floyd protests and stuff like that. But in America, you should have a standard, but you should police – Your policing should reflect the community and the values of the community you serve. So the things that police officers have to do in Los Angeles are going to be slightly different than, say, where I work in northern California.

So the role of our association is to bring up that standard, to maintain a professionalism, but have the flexibility to meet the needs of everyone's community. And those are different, and those go all the way back to Robert Peel. So our role is to give that information to raise the training across the state, but give the flexibility through our region rep program that we can meet the needs of your community and where your team is at, because each team's missions are different.

And if we look at historically law enforcement, there are no new problems, but there's a lot of new technology. If you look back when the plank holders of CATO started before Columbine, a lot of that was weight for SWAT to come with their equipment. But if you look now at the average equipment a police officer in California wears, it's tenfold. They carry a lot of the munitions that used to only be for SWAT.

So in some ways, the job is more complex or has more tools. And so we need to reach out and expand those tactical principles to everyone. They're not exclusive to SWAT. And so the mission of our organization is, let's make our SWAT teams better. Since the majority of teams are collateral, how can we help those teams make their departments better? Because then everyone's gonna make better decisions, and the community is gonna be safer, and the officers and deputies are gonna be safer.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a good point. I think the National Tactical Officers association synthesizes the viewpoints of kind of the whole country. But if you look at regulation and you look at litigation, it tends to happen in state court and be state driven. So it makes sense that the interests of California would vary from the interests of Arizona.

Apart from the cultural differences between California and Texas, there are legal differences between the two states. And I know later we'll talk a little bit about where the state has gone with legislation, but why don't we start with kind of talking about what you see as the hot topics in California? I know from previous conversations, we've talked about the lack of a defined standard for tactical teams. Brent, you want to riff on that a little bit?

Brent Stratton: Yeah. I was fortunate to get to be a part of the second iteration of the California post swot standards and regulations and recommendations on there. So helping be able to kind of shape definitions of SWAT teams and being able to make recommendations for agencies. And the hope then that each agency is able to take these recommendations and then figure out how to be able to apply them for their specific department and their specific community. Because you've talked about some of the differences that you see across the country.

Well, you see a tremendous amount of those differences even throughout the state of California. And that's where I think that there's tremendous amount of value in Cato. And one of the things we've really tried to do is make sure that our board, that our instructors are reflective of really going across the expanse of the state of California.

We have from the top of the state all the way down to the bottom, we have small agencies represented, mid sized agencies, large agencies, collateral assignment teams, full time teams, regional teams that are there because everybody is facing kind of a unique situation, kind of wherever they are being able to take that information and be able to push it out. So it's very difficult to have kind of a one size fits all role and regulation.

So what we do have are some of those standards and are breaking the standards down to a variety of different areas. And it's our hope that teams are able to take those standards and be able to see and identify what the baseline recommendations are and then be able to apply them.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting problem, because, you know, if you look at the LAPD, La sheriffs, you're talking about 10,000 man agencies that have 60 man full time SWAT teams. That's a very different thing than a 30 or 40 man agency in the middle of nowhere in California. But they still are faced with the same problems. The frequency varies based on agency size. Obviously, there are more problems in the city of Los Angeles than there are in small northern California agencies, but the problems that present themselves the same.

So, Marcus, what are your thoughts on how we are, how CATO can play a role in defining those standards and helping teams to understand what constitutes mission readiness?

Marcus Sprague: So you bring up a great point. The community I serve doesn't really, I wouldn't use the word care, but doesn't recognize that I don't have 270 emissions a year, like, say, LAPD or LASD. When that tactical problem comes to our community, I'm the one that signed up to solve it. So we have to train to that level that we can meet that.

And so part of what CATO brings to the table is we're gonna learn from the experiences of everyone across the state and bring that to you. And one of the biggest values I thought, for me, in my career, Washington, I had an opportunity to meet the plank holders of SWAT for our country. And they're older, and our generation will probably be the last people to get to sit down and learn. But I could call, and through CATO, I can call someone at LAPD or LASD or San Diego or Sacramento and go, when you had this problem, what did you do, and how did that work?

And so that's kind of how Ken started. How do we share information? How do we share these lessons learned? And it's something our profession struggles with. And a lot of times we kind of hide under the blanket of liability. Well, you know, this is a litigation really can't tell. And there's some legal arguments for that, but there's also some organizational ego to that.

And so we're really working on how can we appropriately share information right now so that you can learn from this problem in case it comes to your house? And a great example is our after action report program. We send CATO representatives around the country or the world to be on the ground and go, how did you solve this problem? So we can come back and go, hey, here's a very unique, low frequency, high risk event, and here's the lessons you need to learn.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, I think we do a really good job throughout our profession, oftentimes of being able to explain what happened, especially in critical incidents. And oftentimes you'll find this was legal, it was reasonable, it was necessary. But what we don't see a whole lot, you see it more in tactical teams than you do in other areas of the profession, is being able to critically look at something and identify, here's what we did, and what we did was within policy. It was within the confines of the law, but we could have done better if we'd have done this. And what you see is you see a lot of opposition from it in law enforcement all the time. I'm being second guest. I'm being Monday morning quarterback.

Yes, it's no different. We're trying to get better. It's no different than playing football growing up. You're gonna watch the game, film the next week to be able to identify where you had problems, and then you try to work on that and train to it, so that way you get better the next Friday night. It's no different playing baseball, growing up, filming your swing, your hands are too high, they're too low, they're inside, you're too far in your front foot, you're too far on your back foot.

And being able to work on and getting better with that, with some of the technologies and things that we have now with body worn camera, these are the type of things that we should be doing. It's still okay to be able to go in and defend ourselves criminally, legally, ethically, as to what we did, but also still being open to identifying areas where we can improve and then building in the ability to be able to go in and improve, and then the humility to share that information with others.

And that's difficult to do, to step in and go, hey, we could have done better here, or this is what we did here, people ask you a question, why didn't you do that? And when you sit here and say it like that, I really wish we would have done that. I didn't think of that at the time. I should have done that. Really getting to where we can learn from others.

And thankfully, some of the things that we see is some of the bigger, more experienced teams do share that with those of us who come to collateral assignments teams or smaller teams that don't have the amount of reps, that don't have the amount of operations to help be able to maintain that proficiency.

Cause like Marcus said, the people that we serve in our community, they don't care that we don't have the same level of tools, training, equipment, personnel that the bigger agencies have. We still have the same responsibility. To be able to solve these problems, and being able to help identify and develop critical and independent thinkers, to be able to do that is really the only way we're going to solve these things as a profession.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. When we started our lecture series, somebody asked me, why do you do that? What's the point of doing this lecture series? So the first person to pick up a rattlesnake learned a really valuable lesson about rattlesnakes. They bite and it hurts really bad and it can kill you if he didn't tell anybody. The second person to pick up a rattlesnake learned the same lesson as did everybody after him.

However, if he went back and said, hey, that thing with a rattle on the tail, don't ever touch one, theoretically, nobody got bit by rattlesnake again. And you know, it's very easy when you have a bad operation, when you have something go sideways to want to not share that information. The problem is, that's where the value is. It went perfect, is not valuable. This is how it went sideways.

One of the first questions I ask people when we're thinking of using them to present our lecture series is, what went wrong in your operation? And if they say nothing, we're done talking. If they go, oh my God, how long do you have? I've got a list. That's our guy.

And I think that one of the services that CATO provides to the community that is easy to overlook is the aggregation of those lessons. And because CATO sits in a position where you have a variety of different regional reps reporting in, one guy finds a rattlesnake, one guy finds a kingsnake, one guy finds a gopher snake, and pretty soon CATO's in a position to say, hey, if it's got a rattle, don't touch it. If it's this color, it's safe. And I think that not everybody has to go out and get bit by rattlesnake.

So one of the things that strikes me is that modern law enforcement, there is no mechanism for capturing lessons learned. There's no mechanism for ensuring expertise. How do you see CATO affecting that?

Marcus Sprague: So I think part of it is the ruler. What's the ruler that we're using. So we all intellectually acknowledge that police officers and deputies can do the right thing and have a bad outcome, but we say that, but we don't mean it. And so often we measure success by the outcome. And so I think it starts with the principle based decisions.

So, recognizing that, I can demonstrate to you all the things I did as a leader, to move all my chess pieces around the board, to bring about the safest and most peaceful resolution possible. And so it starts with the right ruler for Cato. It's teaching those principles at every level and then bringing not just a debrief to you, because everyone likes stories. I love stories.

But if you're going to hear the debrief, you have to know what the Debrief's about. And we struggle this a lot in our profession right now. This happens every five to seven years. I got a lot of emails this week on my executive told me not to write an SOP manual or standard operating procedure manual, to not write after action reports, because those are the sticks that our adversaries used to beat us with.

So basically identifying our mistakes, and I think we're looking at it wrong. I think it's identifying those mistakes, documenting them, and then telling the public, here's what we're doing to fix them. And I think if we had done a better job as a profession of that, we wouldn't see some of the legislation we see today.

So going back to expertise, it's starting earlier in our careers, teaching these principle based decisions so that we don't jam the wrong solution into the wrong problem. And if you look across the country, when you see a, yeah, travesty, you can usually trace it back to some people not understanding the problem for what it really was. So they went back to their most comfortable procedure and tried it. And sometimes they understand that and make adjustments, but a lot of times they don't. And I was one of those people. I would follow the procedures and did them really well, but I didn't understand the principles at play. So if I was ever faced with something I had never seen before. I didn't know how to start kind of.

Brent Stratton: Steal from our friend and colleague Travis Norton. One of the things that he's pointed out and talks about in our profession, we've trained a lot about how to do something, but not a lot of why to do something.

So I would think when you talked a little bit about some of the trailblazers, they're trying to figure out there was no manual on how to do things and kind of move forward from there, then the next generation of law enforcement, I think we've actually done a pretty good job of taking a some of that information and being able to move it forward. That's the basis of what CATO is and other organizations, training organizations, and each department has a training department, and there's post regulations and things that we want to be able to train to.

But we're just starting to get back to the point of understanding why we are doing things instead of just how we do things. And so being able to test competency is your how to do something, but why and what are we trying to accomplish? And I think there's some leadership failures that have occurred as well.

And kind of getting back to a principle of end state, of being able to identify what is the end state? What are you wanting? What are we wanting to be? What does success look like? Are we defining these type of things on the front end? If we're clear about what the problem is and we're clear about what we want to see, then we can start to develop. That's kind of getting to your why. Then we can start to develop how we're going to get to that point and be able to do that.

One of the biggest areas, we've seen some significant issues in our profession, and I think that's true at a local state or a national level. And so really getting to that principle based decision making is really where we want to be in moving that forward. Throughout the entirety of tactics. And we touched on a little bit earlier, too.

We don't believe our organization, while it's generally the bread and butter, has been for tactical teams, we believe that tactics belong to everyone. And that it's not just for tactical teams, but it's for investigators, it's for traffic cops, for patrol officers, for K9 units, for EOD. It's for negotiators, it's for TAC dispatchers.

Being able to take and understand what tools that we need would take the set of circumstances that you have, what are your principles, what you wanted to get to and then be able to move forward from there. And that's really where we feel driven to be able to help provide that for officers.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's an interesting point because the. The how is extremely important for a technique. It becomes less important as you move to a tactic, to an operation, to a strategy. As you're moving up the spectrum, the why becomes more and more important. The problem is that the why is not testable and the how is.

So we can say, Marcus, go on the range, fire this many rounds, you have to hit this percentage, and we can inspect that and say, okay, Marcus has x shooting proficiency. What we can't measure is, does Marcus know when he should or should not?

Brent Stratton: Right. And you're not going to know those types of things until you're able to speak with people and be able to communicate oftentimes. Where do we find these types of things? We find failures in criminal interviews, we find failures in civil litigation, where we have people who are unable to articulate why we're doing these type of things. You're 100% right that these are very difficult sets and circumstances to be able to quantify, to put in some sort of a testing, scoring matrix or things like that.

So I would definitely encourage law enforcement leaders. You've really got to get out and be able to communicate yourself. Make sure that you yourself can communicate it. And if you can't, make sure you're going out and finding as much information that you can to where you're learning and you're constantly learning, you're constantly evolving to help, be able to make sure you have that articulation yourself, and then find ways that you're doing that within your organization and testing people and be able to have these type of conversations and have people articulate these type of things and ask why we're doing these things and ask them to justify it. To be able to do these things.

You don't want to find out that somebody doesn't know why they're doing something when they're being deposed civilly. You don't want to find out they don't know why they're doing something when they should be articulating themselves in a criminal interview. We need to find these type of things out in training and then build that kind of into our training component as well. So it is quite difficult to be able to quantify, you know, what. What some of these sets and circumstances are, but there.

Marcus Sprague: There are organizations that have done it. If you look to the military model, and that's not very popular in law enforcement to say, we take things from the military right now, but we're at a disadvantage.

So when you sign up for the military, they kind of own you, and they'll say, we're going to teach you this principle, read these six books before you show up, and we're going to have you for a month. We take those same principles in law enforcement, and we say, we're going to give you an eight hour class, and we can't make you read anything ahead of time because we'd have to pay you.

And then we measure that success by, we were here for 8 hours, you probably handle this, and then we're off. And we all have limited resources, and we all need to meet the demands of minimum training mandates, and those have almost doubled, if not tripled, in the last five years. So everyone's agency is struggling with meeting all these demands.

So if you're gonna measure true decision making at an operator level, at a entry level, sergeant, say, position or lieutenant, you're gonna have to take the time, do the exercises, do the practical exercises, do the written tests, do the tabletop exercises, so we can measure how you think and teach you that ruler, which I would argue 99% of the time, law enforcement makes the right call.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure.

Marcus Sprague: We do a horrible job at articulating why that was the right call. And that's kind of one of the things that we're passionate about at CATO, is, hey, we think you're doing the right thing, but when it comes to writing it down or explaining it, we got to do a little bit better.

Jon Becker: Well, and constitutionally, I mean, if you think about it like, law enforcement is depriving people of their constitutional rights by definition. That is what law enforcement is. Right? It's seizing people. It's charging them with crimes. It's things that are specifically within the scope of the Fourth Amendment. And what separates a lawful action from an unlawful action is being able to articulate why you did what you did, because the same thing, shooting somebody, can be completely constitutional or completely unconstitutional. And if you can't articulate why it's unconstitutional.

And I think that one of the places that we've failed as a society in supporting law enforcement is, as you guys so eloquently put, focusing on the why and teaching the why. But the why takes a long time. Right?

The why takes a lot of time to learn different paradigms and learn from other people's experiences. One of the things that Kato is doing right now that I absolutely adore, and we're going to actually do an entire podcast on is your decision making exercise. Can you just kind of give us a brief overview of how the DMEs work and why that started?

Marcus Sprague: So everyone likes stories, but there's principles that we can demonstrate in those stories that will help you remember. So there's a lot of science behind how we remember things, and you'll remember the emotion. And so our goal here is to give you a tactical problem that's real and break it down into chronological order with trigger points.

So here's what you have, and you're the leader on the scene. What would you do? And we discuss it, and we go through a series of steps as that event progresses. And the goal here is to see your thought process. And while you're doing that, we have experts participating, legends participating, that will kind of question you on your thought process to help you kind of fine tune it and hone it. And then when you're done, the actual law enforcement officers that were at the event will tell you then what the event was.

If we're fortunate, they can show videos and maps and really break down what worked for them and what didn't work and kind of fill in those gaps. So what we found was it helps you make decisions. It gives you something to put in your rollout X.

So as you see a problem, you don't start from scratch. You start from this is similar to, but we also reinforce the principle part of making those decisions, and then we tell you what really happened. So you get multiple benefits out of this one thing, and you're doing it with officers from around the state with a variety of experience.

So you've, by the time you're done, you have a real life scenario. It's not a made up thing. You've learned what worked for them. You've articulated your decision making process, and you've learned from other people's decision making process, all overseen by people with really thousands of missions under their belt.

And so is very hard to quantify based upon your experience, because it depends on who you are and what you came with. But in the end, you can go back to your shop, give them the same scenario, give them the same talking points, and build up your people and go, what would we do if that happened in our town with the resources that we have?

Jon Becker: Yeah. So much of tactical decision making is paradigm based. Right. It's looking at a situation and saying, okay, this is like. And then being able to draw inferences. And I think one of the things that's challenging about it is if you go back to the snake analogy, we can't measure how many people didn't get bit by a rattlesnake because they knew you shouldn't pick up a rattlesnake. We can only measure ones that do get bit by the snake.

And so that is what I really like about the direction CATO is going right now is it is much, you know, you guys are leading it in a much more proactive DMEs and restructuring classes and. And focusing on tactical leadership because most of the problems actually start at a leadership level. They don't start at a tactical level.

Marcus Sprague: People can execute like the practical application. The skills were very good at training, and we have the time and the budgets to at least meet minimum qualifications for that. But it's much harder to develop thinkers to you. And the older I get, the more I think. It's not really what I think that's important. It's how I think, because what I think is very context specific, but how I think I can apply to any situation that you throw at me.

Brent Stratton: And that's really where the decision making exercises are coming from. And we owe a lot of different people. Again, it's a synthesis of a lot of different areas. It's a synthesis of after actions and debriefs and having the relationships to bring that in. A lot of guys will take a list of these things and they said they kind of keep them as hip pocket exercises when there's downtime and training with their teams pulling them out. And they're kind of just going through some of those trainings that are there.

And this is something that we were forced through with COVID. When we couldn't train, we couldn't get people together. We couldn't be able to provide any of the information that we needed to be able to provide. You know, this turned out to be something where, you know, Toby and Josh, who was studying about, you know, working on his. His doctorate, on how people learn in education and studying these type of things.

And we're thankful that he asked if he could study CATO and some of the training components that we have. And they took some of these, a compilation of all these ideas and then started pushing it out on Zoom. And then we started having more teams that were sitting in there.

And I know I spoke to one commander in particular who said he was talking through what occurred and then was a very difficult set of circumstances where he used every tool at his disposal in a very difficult set of circumstances. And it created a divide within the team from operators, from supervisors, from commanders, about how things went. The decision making that was there. And he's been very torn over his decision making, not wanting to just accept that because it ended well, that things went well.

He said for Sid Heal to be in there and to critique it and then to say, I might have done this instead of that. All in all, your decision making was sound, based on these principles and was here. And I think what you did was reasonable. I think what you did was necessary. I think what you did was right. It provided me a ton of peace on top of that.

So you have people that are learning along the way. You have people that are willing to be critiqued. You're taking it and moving it forward. And I was really proud of the organization to be able to, especially during a difficult time, figure out how can we still take this information and push it out.

And it's really kind of catching fire and moving forward. So we're really proud of Toby and Josh and the work that they're doing and for all the people that have contributed towards it.

Marcus Sprague: And it brings up a great opportunity for us because historically, our profession poorly provides data and research for what we do. It's very much based anecdotally. And then we'll have academics do studies and tell us what we should do. And it's hard for them because they're looking at the data, but they don't understand the other parts of the job. And that's because we have not consistently partnered with academics to have more rigor in our research, in our data, but also have it address the right things.

And so this was one of our opportunities to partner with Josh on developing a little bit more science behind how we teach and have a better, more efficient and economical approach to giving you a product that these folks can use right away.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, we have the ability to add the context to the data collection and things that are going on academically to help be able to get to where we've generally not wanted to work towards that. We really want to push the organization towards being open to these type of things. We think that is what's going to lead us towards some of the answers. We think that it's very easy to say, well, there's these huge political or philosophical differences and divides, and politicians are pushing this, that or the other on us. And maybe it's true, maybe it's not. I don't know any of these politicians personally to know where they are, but we have the laws that we have here.

And I think a big portion of it is not just because of operational failures. I think it's because it's been our inability to be able to capture data, to be able to tell our story, to be able to articulate it and move these things forward in that manner. So if we want to be able to get to where we're more closely aligned with those who we report to the public, those who have authority over us, the politicians, then we've got to do a better job of being able to capture this.

And we really see CATO as being in a unique position to be a clearinghouse to capture that information. But we have to develop the skill and the educational component to it to then be able to tell our story and put context to it and be able to push it out, because generally it's the joke that we always say no comment type thing or we capture things.

Anecdotally, we've got to get better at being able to tell our story and what occurred. And I'm really proud that we're seeing law enforcement moving in that direction, and we're really happy that CATO's playing a role in that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think historically there's been kind of a circle the wagons mindset that everybody is attacking us, so let's circle the wagons and protect ourselves. And unfortunately, what ends up happening is law enforcement begins to fall behind. So the organized opposition that wants to take away tools and limit power and everything else are out collecting data and they're collecting every bit of negative data and they're aggregating it, and they're using academics to build a. A very clear, articulable story.

And law enforcement is frequently blindsided by that attack because there hasn't been engagement with the opposition. It's you look at people that are critical of law enforcement and frequently, in conversations, you'll hear, well, no, I'm not going to read that book. That guy, he's anti-cop.

The problem is, if you read those books, you learn how the opposition thinks. And recently there have been a series of books and articles that have come out, and, I mean, the most popular being the Radley Balko book, the Rise of the Warrior cop. I disagree with probably.

I agree with probably 95% of what's said in that book, the Constitution, the discussion of constitutional law, 5% I very strongly disagree with. The problem is, if we focus on the 5%, the 95% is how they sell the 5%.

And I think it's a good segue to talk about kind of what's happening in California from a legislation standpoint, because that book, combined with an ACLU report, have funded a spate of legislation probably starting with AB 392. That is certainly redefining the competitive, the law enforcement environment. Let's start with AB 392. What are your thoughts?

Brent Stratton: Well, to kind of get back to what you're talking about, too, even before we go in that direction, I 100% agree. And you're seeing these books that are coming out. You're seeing the legislation that's coming out.

And if it's out there, I'm not gonna say it's not out there, but if it's out there, I'm unaware of people who are writing kind of the flip side of that coin who are able to say, no, that's not what's happening. This is what's going on here. This is what we have. This is the context to that. This is what we're trying to accomplish. These are the standards that are here. This is what our accountability looks like. This is what our transparency is. This is the data that we're trying to capture, to put the data that you have in proper context to be able to tell the fullness of that story. And there's a major gap in law enforcement.

And again, I'll say that a little bit ignorantly in that maybe there are those things that are out there, but if so, we're not seeing it. And we're just now getting to the point where we're starting to be open to it and understanding it and building the infrastructure to be able to have that conversation, to be able to put that type of information truly in context. And if you care about, you know, this profession, you care about what you do.

And I think the extreme majority of the people that are in this profession do that. This job is not just something that they choose to do. It's a little bit about who they are and the service and the things that they have in their heart. That's naturally a part of who they are, then we've got to get to the point where you're not just tactician who understands what tool to use, that you're not just a tactician who understands why you're doing these type of things, but that you can take it and contextualize it and be able to articulate it and speak it in a manner, to be in the same language of those who are speaking a language to us, that's coming off as quite foreign.

So, yeah, I mean, the AB 392, Assembly Bill 48, you know, the changes to penal code section 835 in the a section militarization on Assembly Bill 481. I mean, there's just, there's a ton of them that are coming out, and these things have been building for the last several years because we've not done a good job of being able to put these type of things in context.

Jon Becker: Yeah. To counter the narrative, the example I always use is, it's like a plane crash, right? People are afraid of planes. They're afraid of sharks. You're more likely to die driving to work. But because the sensationalism of a story of a plane crash or a sharkbite, it draws attention. Everybody worries about it, everybody focuses on it and ignores the real risk.

And there are certain incidents in law enforcement going back to Rodney King that have driven this kind of anti law enforcement narrative, and there hasn't been an organized counter. There's a story of Albert Einstein that he was teaching a class, and he wrote ten problems on the board, and they were simple arithmetic problems. 10 plus 10 is 20, kind of thing. And he got the last one wrong. And somebody raised their hand, said Professor Einstein, laughing like, you're supposed to be a genius. You got the last one wrong. And he said, there's a very valuable lesson here, and I did this for a reason. I got every other problem before that. Right?

You don't remember any of that. All you notice is the one I got wrong. And the problem here for law enforcement is there is no one telling the story. Right? There is no one out saying, look at all these times. You look at the recent LAPD hostage rescue, you know, that lady was going to die if they didn't intervene, and they intervened flawlessly. That's not the story we hear. That was a 30 second news story. But every bad outcome is weeks of news. So it strikes me that the role that Cato is playing of trying to be a clearinghouse and provide that information goes a long way to protecting the profession.

Marcus Sprague: Sure.

Brent Stratton: And the fact that it's news in and of itself, in my estimation, shows how infrequently that it occurs. So, again, it's hard to capture and articulate the absence of problems, the absence of death, the absence of force, the absence of those type of things is not and cannot be sensationalized. You could make the argument that it's actually pretty boring.

So when you have these type of things that occur and that's becoming sensational. Yeah, we need to address that. We need to fix those things. If we have failures, of course, we need to own it, move on, and be able to do that. I think sometimes it gets complicated by the economics behind what happens whenever you admit to doing something wrong civilly. But it's big business, but being able to get to the point where we can to articulate those type of things, that's really where I think we need to be. We're not there yet.

Jon Becker: I recently interviewed Lee Macmillan from LAPD SWAT. And one of the statistics, one of our heroes that Lee brought with him was in their last 1200 operations, they've used force of any kind in 8% of the operations, and that includes just twist lock on a wrist. 8% of their operations, they use deadly force one and a half percent of the time.

Brent Stratton:

Right. And you think about that, right? There's a common thought process at one point that talked about SWAT being an automatic escalation of force. When you bring a SWAT team out, you're escalating force. I actually have a different opinion. I think the utilization of SWAT is, by its very definition, de escalation. You're bringing additional resources, you're creating time, you're creating training, you're creating distance, you're bringing a negotiation team to work on communication.

You're bringing drones or robots to help facilitate communication, to open things up. You're trying to utilize time to be able to get to where it is that you want to be to help try to minimize the risk to the suspect, minimize the risk to the public, to the officers, to help facilitate a peaceful solution and resolution to it. You're bringing less lethal tools. You're bringing four to millimeter launchers, you're bringing canines, you're bringing tasers, you're bringing all these things in markets. Touch.

These are things that patrol officers are running with right now, thankfully, in many different departments as well. But you're bringing a whole array of tools to help facilitate a peaceful resolution, ideally. So that's the very definition of what we're trying to do in utilizing tactics to be able to achieve those positive outcomes.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's funny, I recently had Mike Hillman on the podcast, and one of the things Mike said is people tend to focus on the weapons. It's special weapons and tactics. And it's really not the weapons that solve the problems, it's the tactics. It's the negotiation. It's slowing the entire event down, creating less opportunity for the suspect to think he's going to win. It's those types of things that result in a better outcome for both the suspect and the public.

Marcus Sprague: And you're talking about the science behind tactics. So that's the science. Right? Our goal at any level is to manipulate time and train to place that adversary at such a disadvantage. And our people at an advantage that the disparity is so great that they will surrender peacefully or we will use the least amount of force necessary.

And that's the art, the arts, and the application of that. And that's what we're teaching at CATO, a version of that in all of our classes, because that's the science behind what we do. Very rarely will a piece of equipment overcome and win. It can take it away, suspect center of gravity or critical vulnerability, but it's how you manipulate all those pieces.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's funny. It brings back when I first started my career. Sid Heal was very influential in my career and has been a friend now for 30 some odd years. But two things that he said very early on in my career stuck with me. One is that good tactics can often overcome the challenges of bad equipment. The converse is not true.

And the other is that the objective of any type of tactical operation is to put the suspect in a situation where surrender is likely and resistance is futile. And the more we can make the suspect understand that, the more likely you'll have a peaceful resolution.

Brent Stratton: And it's funny that it seems to me that your job becomes to minimize the effects of bad tactics when they get utilized. Because if the equipment isn't going to overcome that, then let's work on having good equipment, because there's going to be times we are going to have bad tactics or bad decisions or bad things are just going to happen to be able to minimize that and provide for that safety. So it's interesting hearing you say that and seeing how you fit in the equation.

Jon Becker: Yeah. There has always been a tension between what the community has taught me and my job. And my goal with Aardvark has always been to vector my career towards providing tools that protect operators. And protecting operators might mean putting in a drone or a robot instead of putting a person. Protecting operators might also be doing a lecture series, doing a podcast, trying to create an opportunity where the people that we encounter every day that are amazing and knowledgeable, like you guys, have a broader platform to reach other people.

And a lot of my personal job as CEO is introducing people. It's saying, oh, you guys have this problem, you should meet this guy. And very early on, Sid and Mike and the guys that really brought me up taught me that information is not something you own, it's something you steward. And if you have information, you share it no matter what.

I mean, I remember Sid teaching a flashbang class when I was probably 19 or 20 years old, and a guy walked up and said, hey, sir, can I have your slides? And this is back when they were overhead slides. And Sid said, yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I think that you guys are doing that is really interesting is this CATO podcast. Can you kind of tell me a little bit more about the podcast?

Marcus Sprague: So the podcast started at a conference, a CATO conference, and we all met. Brent and I met, and several of us met through the strategic leadership program of CATO. And so we developed a pretty good bond with that group of students. And one of our mentors, Tim Anderson, got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. And we all were kind of talking about it because you don't survive that. And we were talking about the lessons Tim had taught us, and we'd all taken notes, but we felt like that didn't really do injustice.

So we're trying to figure out how do we capture the wisdom that a guy who was a colonel in the Marine Corps and an LAPD metro sergeant, all the things he taught us. So we're kind of figuring that out. And I volunteer to just go down to LA and record my conversations with Tim because I respect and love all three of those guys for everything they did for me. But for whatever reason, Tim and I really hit it off.

So I volunteer to go to LA and record my conversations with Tim, figuring at best, we'll have these recordings, we'll figure out what to do later. Now, I'm not going to lie. There was some whiskey involved, like, a lot of good ideas. And someone mentioned that that should be a podcast.

So next thing you know, I did a podcast, and my first episode was interviewing Tim. We hadn't seen each other for several months, and we met in San Diego during a team leader course. It was the first time I saw Tim in a wheelchair. He couldn't walk anymore. He needed help breathing, using his hands, he could steer the car, the cart. And so the hotel was great, gave us a place. We did our first podcast, and it was just lessons learned from Anderson. And if you listen to our first podcast, you can't even tell, because that's the devastating part of that disease.

But we realized after that that not all these folks are going to be around forever. And the cool thing about the strategic leadership program is there's a lot of leadership programs out there, and there's several that post recommends and that are kind of the staples of law enforcement.

So my argument with my executives attending was, they're great. I've read the books, I'm sure the class is great, but I got to meet the people they wrote the books about. I got to meet Mike Hillman. I got to meet John Coleman. I can call Jack Ewell and ask Jack Ewell, what would LASD do? I can ask Lee. Hey, Lee! How do you guys do this? I can learn from these people. And so Tim would challenge me every. Every session. He would say, what did you learn? What did you learn?

And at the end of SLP, I sat down and he said, tell me. Give me your top 18 things that you learned from this course. And one of them was, your life never goes in a linear path. So invest in yourself, invest in others, and follow it. And so here I was doing a podcast for Tim, and it just kind of spiraled after that. And Brent and I, quite honestly, we're selfish. We do this podcast so that we can learn the questions that we have, and we just hope that there's other people out there listening that would find those lessons valuable.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, it's, you know, when you're Sid, I don't. I don't know who Sid learns from, you know, but he writes these books, and I feel like he has the answers. You sit in a class, and you're listening to somebody who has the answers.

But for us, I know that we are completely dedicated to constantly learning and evolving and trying to get better and never feeling like you reach a rank or a level or a point in your career where you have this stuff figured out, at least. I know I don't. I'm certain I speak for markets and that we don't. And we build in the time to do these things so that way, we can ask the stupid questions that we want to know. And it amazes me that anybody listens to this thing, because sometimes, like, it's probably common sense to everybody listening and probably like, yeah, you're an idiot.

Why are you asking these type of questions? We all know that, but we get to learn and talk to some of the best people, some of the brightest minds, some of the most inspiring people, and it's just another medium to be able to get information out.

So we owe a lot to Marcus, and his idea for bringing that forward is another way to do it, because we've always only relied on the magazine. Being able to write articles in the magazine, that was great. A lot of people really liked it, especially when we stopped doing it. Like, man, I love getting that magazine a couple times a year and being able to have it and read through it.

But based on some of the different financial challenges we had, some just different issues that we had as an organization, we decided to kind of transition to a digital newsletter and then be able to have the podcast as another way for people to be able to listen, just another way to be able to communicate.

So he deserves a lot of credit for being able to move that forward. And just in the year or two that I've been serving as his wingman on that, I know that it's opened my mind exponentially. Helped teach me. I learned something. I learned something every time.

So when we'll call each other usually, and like, hey, happen to get an email or somebody happened to say something kind about the podcast, that they learned this from it, I immediately call him and he does the same thing. Because, you know, obviously we volunteer our time to do this stuff you listen to. We don't have the all the equipment that goes into it. You know, it's not a big, it's not a money making thing, it's none of those things.

So when somebody actually gets some use out of it, it really makes it worthwhile because we're sitting in there, you know, trying to keep the door shut. Kids are playing in the background years usually after work, and you kind of smoked already anyways, and just trying to do something that's useful and beneficial for people.

Marcus Sprague: It's like a lot of things in this profession, you do it because it's the right thing to do. You hope somebody gets value out of it and your family thinks that you're just screwing off in the other room. And that's partially true also.

Brent Stratton: That's what my wife you're just hanging out with your buddy over there, talking on the phone, talking about whatever you guys talk about in the room.

Jon Becker: It can be fun and productive. If I've learned anything in my career is I can have fun and still do productive stuff. I think you've undersold the podcast a lot. I mean, I know that it's got an international following now. I think that one of the things that you guys, by design or by luck, created was an environment where magazines are great, but not everybody will sit down and take the time to write a magazine article and edit it and submit it and go through all that. And not everybody will take the time to sit down and read a magazine article.

And I think that as CATO has evolved, you've moved into a digital platform, you've moved into a means of reaching this generation of officer, but also it gives you the ability to sit down with Tim, who is dying from ALS, and capture hours of the wisdom that we all knew we would lose. Tim has forgotten more than most people will ever know.

And so I really loved the fact that that was where you guys started the podcast. It was an inevitability. And part of what has driven this podcast is that same inevitability, because I was brought up by those guys, and as they're getting older and they're having health challenges and they're dying, we're losing that first generation of information.

Brent Stratton: Is there a week that goes by at your shop where you don't quote something that Tim Anderson taught you? I mean, hand to God, there's not a week that goes by that I will not use one of the phrases taught me in any conversation I have with anybody at my shop.

From differing levels of the organization, the principles that he has said, and the most frequent one that I use, round peg, round hole, square peg, square hole, goes, you learned it in kindergarten. It's still appropriate in law enforcement about how you apply people into an organization and how you can select and evaluate and move them forward, and the training, dedication. I mean, it was just the things that we learned from him have been tremendous.

But when you talk about lessons learned from that, a life lesson for me from this, I would love to tell you, there's this grand strategic plan, and maybe Marcus had it in his mind. It wasn't clear to me that we're going through this, and it was going to create all this different opportunity for us.

I think it's just, you start walking through one door and other doors open, and, like, it kind of takes some of those, that initiative that leads to other opportunities, which has been a very valuable lesson that I learned from you and from the podcast in other areas of my life, too. Just taking those steps and then moving forward, and then that brings other things.

That's kind of my estimation, it's a life well lived, is a series of good decisions made over and over again incrementally. Very rarely do you look back and think that it was this one thing that happened, that everything went right, or this one thing that everything went wrong. It's usually a series of small, bad decisions end up something bad, a series of good decisions, things are gonna end up good. And so it's really been a pretty cool road to get to walk down and excited to see where it takes us.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Talk to me about where CATO is going, what's coming up, what's on the horizon?

Marcus Sprague: So we survived COVID and being shut down. We were able to continue some of our flagship courses. Right now, we are developing our online content decision making exercises, and really, we could have thrown those out a lot sooner. It's easy to tell a story and tell people what went right and what went wrong, but we want to make it so that we can replicate it so that it's not just you attending it.

But now we can give you a product that you can go back to your agency and do that hip pocket exercise with your group. And a lot of them are swap problems, but some of them aren't because the principles apply to everyone.

So we're working forward on that. We really see our mission is continuing on Ken and Sid's work, and that is improving on the professionalism of the organization, improving law enforcement officers as a whole ability to solve tactical problems.

So, you know, this last conference was way back in 2019 now, but we had probation officers there. We had different crime suppression teams there. We had a variety of law enforcement officers from around the state, in the world attend because we hope that they're seeing the value in the leadership track, learning these leadership lessons, listening to people from all around the world talk about their tactical problems and what worked and what didn't work for them.

So we really feel, I guess, a burden to how can we better prepare everybody that has dedicated their profession, their career, to serving their communities so they can make really good decisions and they can explain those decisions, defend themselves to their executives, to their subordinates, prepare their subordinates into the community.

And so, you know, we've expanded. We had a demonstration response class, and it was really because we've identified these principles that a lot of us got wrong in demonstration response. So you'll see that roll out this year. We have our normal skill, staff skills like nonlethal technology, grenadier, chem agent, team leader, commander, those kind of things. But really looking, how can we help the patrol officer in their advanced tactics? How can we teach tactical strategies?

So we, we teach, we have a four hour and eight hour block, and that's a class that Sid created with Darrell Evans. Daryl still teaches it from time to time. I teach it. And post is looking at adopting a lot of those principles for frontline supervisors. And so that's really the mission of CATO. Right? To impact the law enforcement community, to prepare them to make good decisions.

Brent Stratton: Yeah, we're not 100% certain about what it's going to look like. We sat down and wrote a strategic plan a couple years ago just to see, to get us to almost about where we are and keeping the organization alive and functioning and healthy and thriving, being able to move it forward and just to see, we just want to stay in the game and then continue to develop and bring people along. They're going to help move the organization forward with the fourth iteration of CATO whenever that's coming, and I'm certain it's not too far off.

So we've made changes within our board and within our instructors to make sure that it's 100% comprised of people who are active in law enforcement. We have our emeritus board, which is containing of our heroes and the people that help mentor us and develop us, and Hillman and Odie and Heal and RK and Kent, you know, who are helping to make sure that we have the historical perspective and their voice is still there and present while we're kind of trying to move things forward.

But we always want to be pushing out new and useful classes like you talked about, some of the less lethal technologies and the critical incident decision making and developing these type of anything that we can do training wise to be useful and beneficial for officers and membership going forward.

So not 100% certain about what it's going to look like in three to five years, but we are always trying to stay a year or two ahead. Some of the issues that are comprised, though, of having people who are all active in law enforcement, is that we're all spread throughout the state. We're all working well over 40 hours a week at our shops doing things.

So then trying to figure out how we can at the same time dedicate our time and volunteer our time towards CATO and then keep another organization running to help serve other organizations. So that's a definite critical vulnerability for us that, you know, it's incumbent upon Marcus Nye to kind of figure that, and that's going to be a constant, constant balance.

There's always going to be kind of a little bit of friction there, figuring out where that fits time wise and being able to make those type of things happen. But we know that the alternative is not having that and not having that service that we can provide. And that's not an option.

So we'll figure out, we'll continue to grind through it. It looks different day to day, week to week, month to month sometimes, but the organization's here and it's strong, it's recovering financially, and we feel like we're in a good position, that we're uniquely qualified to be able to continue to move forward and serve.

Marcus Sprague:And one of the biggest benefits of CATO is the community. And so we're really investing in our region rep program, and that is men and women who volunteer to represent CATO in their area that they work in. And we really see that as a way that can make us more flexible. So we have the standards that we want to meet that are best practices throughout the state and throughout the country.

But then we have to meet the needs of each community. And so our reps will help help us by giving us the latest information. And at the same time, in turn, they can call and say, hey, I'm having this problem. How do I solve it? And if it's not us, we'll put them in contact with someone who has solved that problem before and really shorten that. And especially in the last ten years, the technology for that is available.

And if there's any positive things we got out of COVID it's just how I can talk to somebody in France and go, hey, what just happened? And I can learn those lessons right away. So we really see that as part of the future of CATO, and that also gives us an opportunity to speak educatedly to the legislature and say, hey, here's what's happening. Here's where we're training our people, but here's the challenges that we have.

Here's why we need more funding or we need more training or we need better grants and really see the organization as a way to represent everyone.

Jon Becker: I like that you're expanding to kind of tactically adjacent because tomorrow SWAT operators start in patrol. All tactical problems start in patrol. And so the idea that the organization is broadening, you know, it's membership to allow people who are fledgling SWAT cops, because it's not like you start, you know, they put a pin on you and all of a sudden you're a tactical operator, right? That's, there's a spectrum that has to develop in an education that has to develop.

And I think one of the problems of the past is that we've just kind of assumed that, oh, well, you're going to go to SWAT school and then you'll know everything. And realistically that education can start much younger.

And so things like the podcast, things like the upcoming conference, create an opportunity for people to get exposed to those more knowledgeable minds, more experienced minds. What's the best way for people to interact with CATO? How can people get ahold of you guys, follow the podcast, all those kinds of things.

Marcus Sprague: So because we're a statewide organization and we're spread throughout the state, Brent's in central southern California, I'm in northern California. We meet a lot online, but we have a website that people can contact us through. We have a phone number, and you also have a region rep.

So you have somebody that speaks a similar language and has common problems that you can go to right away, and that happens often. We had a tragedy in northern California, and we had a bearcat that was disabled. And within hours, everyone in the state knew. Here's the part you need to do in order to make sure this bearcat, this doesn't happen to you. And that's kind of the power of the community, right?

Last night, we had a tragic aircraft crash, and within moments, everyone in the state knows what's going on. What do we need? And so that's what you get from CATO. You know, think about little Liam, you know, and that's hard to not talk about emotionally. But that was a time in law enforcement where there wasn't a lot law enforcement could do that was good. Even when they were doing good, a lot of people didn't recognize it.

Jon Becker: And so probably give some context on Liam.

Marcus Sprague: So Liam was a deputy son who had cancer, and he's struggling with cancer and great family. Someone reached out to CATO and said, hey, we need to help these guys. They're, you know, missing work. They're staying in hotels. They're doing all the stuff you have to do to save your kid's life. And it was during a hard time in law enforcement, and everyone kind of felt like they didn't have a lot of control, and that was a lot of morale issues because you couldn't really impact your environment.

And so they came together and raised money for this little guy who's fighting cancer, and we all get to go down and give the family a check and give him his little vest, which I can't even talk about, that letter. I couldn't read it. I had to make Brent read it. And that's the power of the CATO community. And it wasn't just the gift for Liam and his family, which is a great family and super thankful, but the gift really was ours. The gift was our ability to do something positive for somebody who, you know, served his country and served his community.

And proud to say, Liam's doing great. I got a picture of him the other day. He has big, curly hair, and he is looking forward to being able to go back to school. Still can't go quite yet, but that's the power of having that sense of community that sometimes we forget. We get busy, and we all have the same problems. Brent and I were sitting down at LAPD, D-Platoon, and all the guys are in there.

We're sitting beside Lee, and the presenter talks about an issue with ear pro and testing your hearing every year and all these things that happened, that SWAT cops, that in the end hurt them. And we kind of looked over at Lee and we're like, hey, do you guys get to do A, B, and C? And he's like, no. Do you guys? I'm like, no. Like, we're all the same, you know, and I'm not the same as Lee.

There's not a lot of Lee's around, but we all have the same problems and we need to learn from them. And that's what's kind of cool about CATO, is I'm not going to tell you that I have as much experience as LASD or LAPD. I don't. But I can learn from their experience. And if I have something, I know I can call somebody and they're willing to help.

Jon Becker: Well, in the end, it's a community that has more experience than any individual. If I want to join CATO, how do I do that?

Marcus Sprague: So you can jump online and you can sign up to be a member. As of this date, it is still the second lowest professional law enforcement association in the country. As far as your cost to join with your membership, you know, you have access to our website, all our after action reports, and you can get behind kind of the public facing wall of the website. You can jump online and throw out questions. You can utilize the region reps, you can come to our classes and again, just contribute to the profession.

For me, people ask me sometimes why I do so much for CATO and all that. And quite honestly, my agency, no fault of their own, just cannot spend the time and the money to train me to the level that I need to know. And if you're going to take a leadership position, my opinion is it's your responsibility to go seek that out and become a student of the craft.

And that's something we grew up not having to do because we had the Mike Hillman's and we had the John Coleman's, the plank holders that solved these problems no one had ever seen before. And so we can learn from them. And so joining CATO, I get that opportunity. And I get that opportunity to look outside my village and see how other villages solve these problems.

Jon Becker: Yeah. For less than the cost of a pizza and a beer. I mean, membership wise, it is a ridiculously low amount of money. Guys, I really appreciate you being here and sitting down with me on The Debrief. Before we let this end, Marcus, can you give us where people can find you on the Internet and how they can get a hold of CATO.

Marcus Sprague: So our website is. You can find us on your social media platforms as catotraining, CATO training, and our podcast is on all the normal streaming platforms as CATO Podcast. [One word].

Jon Becker: Thank you so much!

We'll put all of that in our show notes also to make it available to everybody. Guys, I can't thank you enough for being here today.

Marcus Sprague: Thanks for having us!

Brent Stratton: Yeah, thanks for having us, Jon!

We appreciate you and all you've helped develop and teach us as well. So thanks for letting us come hang out with you!

Jon Becker: My pleasure!

Episode 35 – Toxic Leadership & The Pat Tillman Case – Pete Blaber

Jon Becker: Pete Blaber had command at every level of one of the most elite counterterrorist organizations in the world, the US army first special forces operational Detachment Delta. His time with the unit included most of recent history's significant military and political events, Panama, Colombia, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In 2006, Pete retired from the military and transitioned from leading elite combat teams around the globe to leading elite corporate teams for one of the world's largest and most innovative biotechnology companies. Pete's first book, the Mission, the Min and Me Lessons from a former Delta Force commander, is one of the most widely read books among tactical units and has required reading in many tactical leadership programs.

His second book, the Common Sense, a new way to think about leading and organizing, builds on the legacy of the first book, providing specific and concrete guidance on how to implement common sense into your leadership style. His third and most recent book, common sense leadership matters, toxic leadership destroys, is a case study of the death of Patrick Tillmandeze, looking at how toxic leadership led to Tillman's death at the hands of friendly fire.

Pete has an MBA and an MS in national security studies and strategic affairs. I'm excited to speak to Pete not only because he commanded one of the most elite combat units in the world, but because he's a deep thinker on the topic of leadership and has spent a great deal of time thinking about the way we lead and how we can improve it.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Pete Blaber!

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Pete, thanks so much for being here, man! I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me!

Pete Blaber: Great to be here, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we just for the uninformed or unaware, let's go through just kind of a quick bio with you and talk about your career arc that led you to where you are now.

Pete Blaber: Sure. Born and raised in Old Park, Illinois. Middle kid of nine kids, had a great upbringing, played sports, you know, all the things that make America great, you know, are part of my upbringing and why I was so appreciative of it. I went to college in southern Illinois University, didn't really know much of anything about the military. But, you know, my life experiences were steering me that way. Without a doubt. I chose southern Illinois university because it was surrounded by a 275,000 acre national forest.

And, you know, my most of the time, instead of doing homework, I was out hiking around in the woods, learning how to navigate, you know, learning how to read terrain. And, you know, when I. While I was there, I think my first year, the Iran hostage rescue mission had gone awry, and that had a big effect on me. It was like the first time as a kid that I began to reflect on how good I had it and all the freedoms that you kind of take for granted as a kid. That incident made me realize how amazing this country is, how amazing it is to have the privilege of growing up here.

And, you know, I was a cross country runner and triathlete at the time. I'd go on long runs thinking about it, and it was on those runs that I realized I need to pay something back to this country. And that's what set me on a path to join the military. I didn't know anything about the military other than, you know, just what I heard in the movies and things like that. My dad did two years during the korean war, but he was not, you know, he was drafted and just did something in Maryland. Wasn't in Korea, but so he wasn't a military guy. He, you know, didn't know much about the military himself.

So, you know, I just started going to recruiters and trying to find someone who would give me what I wanted. And, you know, I knew from studying the Iran hostage rescue mission that what unit did that? It was, you know, it was Delta Force. And I wanted to be. I wanted to be a member of that, you know, that unit, because I really, not just because I thought it was cool, but I was very frustrated about what happened. You know, they were doing investigations, and for those that don't know it, they were refueling in the desert, and a helicopter landed on top of a plane and both blew up, and eight guys died out there.

So for me, it was kind of like, how could this have happened? How could we have let it happen? And I really just wanted to, you know, be in the thick of it so that it would never happen again. And I joined the military through OCS. It was called infantry OCS. And OCS was taught at Fort Benning, Georgia, the home of the infantry.

And, you know, while I was there, I picked the brains of prior enlisted guys, whatnot, to find out how to, you know, get to the unit and how to get. And they. And they told me that the way to get the unit is go to Rangers. I, of course, love the rangers, too. They were also at desert one. And so, you know, the only way you could go to the Rangers, I learned, was to go to Korea first.

So my first tour was in Korea on the DMZ. I came back from there, was fortunate to get accepted into the regiment, went to second ranger battalion of Fort Lewis, Washington, and I was a lieutenant there. I was there for four years. And the significance of that which I talk about in the third book is that that period was a defining period of, for me with regards to leadership. It's where I learned what a leadership climate is. A leadership climate is simply the sum based on the sum total of choices made by all the leaders in the climate system.

So climates are not just made by one senior leader, they're made by all the leaders. It's not any one thing. It's a whole bunch of things. And, you know, a healthy climate is created based on those choices that are made. There are positive choices made by all the leaders. And, you know, my definition of, you know, what a leader should do came from there, too. It's just make good decisions and solve complex problems that set the conditions for your people to succeed. And that's what they did. I had two great battalion commanders there.

My second one was the one who basically defined my whole career. He was a fantastic leader, totally approachable. He would talk to private the same way he would talk to a general. Any lieutenant could come up and ask him a question, and he'd give him an answer.

And, you know, not just a straight, you know, a straight lace dancer, he always added humor and a couple of shots of wisdom. Every time he talked to you, it was like he knew, you know, his job was more than just battalion commander. He knew his job was to teach future leaders how to be leaders. And the way you do that is by modeling good behaviors. And back to what I talked about, making good decisions.

So from there, I went commanded a company in light infantry company in Fort Ord, California. It was during the invasion of Panama. It was a fantastic company, 130 guys. We were very successful down there. And the criteria to get into the unit is, for an officer, you have to have a successful company command. So when I was about two months from the end of my command, which is, you know, all commands are about two years in the military, I started applying for the unit. I, again, very fortunate, you know, I was accepted, went to selection in 1991, and again, didn't get injured, was fortunate, made it through selection, and I was in the unit starting in 1991, and I stayed there with the exception of about an 18 month period.

I returned to second Ranger battalion in the infantry to be a s three major operations officer. And, you know, I did that because another senior leader told me, hey, you know, you don't have to go back there, but, you know, in the same way you join the military military to pay something back, it's kind of, you know, a way you can pay back the Rangers by going back there and bringing some of your new training back there and doing the same thing my battalion commander did. Model leadership behaviors, model common sense leadership.

And, of course, I loved Rangers. I loved the Ranger regiment. I loved Fort Lewis, Washington. So going back there to second battalion was a joyous. I totally enjoyed it for two years, and then I went back to the unit where I served out my career till 2006.

Jon Becker: So you're a lieutenant and a captain at the unit, then transfer out when you make major and come back as a major and lieutenant colonel.

Pete Blaber: Yeah, I was a captain when I got to the unit. Senior captain. Most guys, usually you're a major, but because I got command so quick, you know, I didn't have to be a staff officer before command, so I got there quicker than most people. And, yeah, I was a senior captain by the time I got to the unit, pinned on major, you know, a few months after that, and stayed there all the way until I was a full colonel. And when I went to…

Jon Becker: Retired as a full colonel?

Pete Blaber: Yeah, when I went back to second Ranger battalion, I was still a major.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So, I mean, you're there. You're in the unit in some of the most tumultuous times, maybe, in American military history. Right. From basically 95 to 06?

Pete Blaber: 91.

Jon Becker: 91 to 06, with two years out in the ranger regiment. I mean, that's Panama, that's Bosnia, that's Afghanistan, Iraq. I mean, it's kind of everything up to and including 911.

Pete Blaber: Right. Yeah, I was very fortunate. I'd been to Panama with my company, my light infantry company, and then right when I got in the unit, 91, 92, I think that's when Pablo Escobar escaped from prison. And we, a small team of us, went down to help assist the Colombians in the embassy with the situation. Colombia was a mess at the time, but it was, again, an incredibly formidable or formidable, you know, experience for me. I learned first I worked out of the embassy part of the time.

So, you know, wearing a suit, dealing with Department of State, the CIA, the DEA, and, of course, the big military, you know, that has a mill group commander and all kinds of other conventional military goals and programs going on. But, you know, it was like nothing else. It was, you know, there was no. There was no da Pam or no doctrine for, you know, counter narcotics warfare, if you want to call it that.

And, you know, at the time, you could easily call, you know, you could easily say that was terrorism, call, you know, narco trafficking, terrorism. But it wasn't because, you know, that whole narcotics thing meshes in with the people, you know, you got, they grow, you know, cocaine down there, coca plants, and people grow those for their livelihood.

But, you know, you also have to be very careful in a situation like that to always be comfortable being in the background. And we were very comfortable with that. We did not want to. There was no need to try to hold us back from doing the job we wanted the Colombians to do. The force we worked with was their HRT or aprobacion, and they were competent guys, but they were the guys that needed to do whatever needed to be done down there.

You know, the real foundational lesson for me was how important interagency unity of effort is. You know, the ambassador called us down there because he wanted, like, a neutral group to advise him. The DEA and the CIA were at war with each other as much as they were with the narco traffickers. And I would go on in my career to see that all over the place in many different embassies, it's kind of a natural byproduct of competing for missions, competing for dollars.

But a lot of it is also competing for credit, because those drive, you know, their budgets, those drive their reputation. And, you know, I had a bunch of senior guys with me when I was down there. I was probably one of the more junior. And those senior NCO's especially, you know, taught me a big part of the unit culture, which is we don't care who gets credit for anything, and we certainly don't have care about credit for ourselves.

We prefer to, you know, never get the, you know, external credit, let that go to someone else. All that matters is that we know, you know, we. We did what we needed to do, and we accomplished our purpose. And like I said, you know, I spent an unbelievable amount of time, like, refereeing between different agencies, trying to get consensus on things. You know, as we searched for Pablo and his lieutenants, there were a lot of, you know, small missions and small operations that had to be executed, but they had to be approved first.

And, you know, here I was a senior captain, you know, going around from agency to agency saying, hey, what do you want to do? What and what's your thoughts on this? And what do you think about this? And, you know, really just spreading logic, you know, facts and not ever allowing, you know, myself or me and my guys to, to be partisan in any way to take sides between these agencies. We were just always about the mission. And, you know, all the successes down there I think inevitably were due to that.

But again, you know, if your behavior doesn't change, it means you didn't learn a thing. And it changed me from that day forward. I was in many other embassies all the way throughout my career, similar dynamics, and, you know, you'd see the same thing over and over again. And, you know, I felt like we had a role in a lot of those situations to be that referee, to be that, you know, that mitigator, someone trying to find common ground between the group to do the right thing and, you know, accomplish the overall purpose. So it was a great, great mission there.

And, you know, that was, I went left right from Colombia, went to Somalia, and we were the second element into Somalia. I got there the night of the firefight, so we were actually taken over for the guys on the ground. I think you had Tom Satterlee on here a while back. So he was in C, I was in A, and we were supposed to swap out for them. That was going to be the changeover day.

And what happened, you know, they obviously, you heard from him how devastating that was and, you know, took a pretty significant toll in injuries and death on all the forces that were on the ground. So we took right over, started flying missions to rescue Durante. And, you know, that was in my first two years in the unit right there.

Jon Becker: That's pretty eventful couple of years. And I guess you're there if the world of soft can be demonstrated in Tom Clancy novels, you're there for all of the major Tom Clancy novels, right. It's kind of the, you know, it's the rise of soften is that era where we start to realize that conventional forces won't solve all the problems and we are better off with smaller, more highly trained units like Delta.

Pete Blaber: Yeah, I think so. I think. And people misinterpret that by people. I mean, especially in the military. You know, I think there's a then and now a population of more senior leaders who instead of looking at it matter of factly and, you know, with complete objectivity, they allow things like, you know, jealousy and, you know, hey, we could have done that, or we need to get in on that.

And, you know, to me, that's not what it's about. One of the things about the unit is, you know, just what I said to you. I couldn't get in until I had successfully commanded a company. So the fastest you can get to the unit as an officer is about six years. And for a lot of guys, it's about eight, eight to ten years. And, you know, NCO's same thing, I think you got to be a staff sergeant to get in.

And, you know, your record matters. And, you know, what is – What does that mean? It's biologic. You know, the average age in the unit when I was there was 32 years old. So there were always guys, you know, older than you in their forties. And, you know, I learned firsthand what a difference that makes, especially going back and forth to even the rangers, where they still have privates and E4s and whatnot. Age matters and experience matters, and the age part is science. We now know that the male brain doesn't fully develop till we're almost 25 years old, and so we're lucky.

Yeah, exactly. So think about that. And what does that mean? It means the neocortex, the thinking brain, doesn't fully develop in size or functionality until you're almost 25 years old. And that's the most important part of our brain. That's, you know, that's what happens to people in combat is the negative thing that happens is they panic or, you know, they allow their emotional brain to ride herd over their thinking brain. And, you know, it's much for that to happen. It's much more conducive to happening before your brain is developed than after.

And so, you know, young guys, it's just much more difficult. You know, the unit, you know, everybody, why they're there. You know, they've, they've been down the long, winding road and have gone through many experiences to include combat. And that wisdom, you know, can't be attained anywhere else. So I think that's, you know, that's what people saw then the reaction to it, instead of being, you know, what you, what you just stated was, you know, people going, well, you know, give us a chance. Give me the money. Give me the. Let me get down there and run the show. And it just doesn't work.

And, you know, the second part about that is, you know, age and maturity is, is the first part, but the second part is just the approach to combat. It always bothered me, even early in my career in the infantry, why do we approach every problem the same way? Why is the answer to every combat mission, a platoon, a company, a battalion, a brigade, a division? It doesn't make any sense.

You know, take the mission, understand what you need, understand what you're trying to accomplish, and then array, allocate, and group your forces accordingly. And, you know, that's part of the unit culture. To go down to Colombia, there were no homogenous teams that went down there. It was all one guy from this element, two guys from over here. You know, it was the right type of guys, but just guys from different elements and size.

It was, you know, you approach every problem with incrementalism. Don't put 100 guys on the ground if you only need 2 or 10 or 20. And the way to find that out is to put two on the ground. Who tell you, you know, we could. We could really use ten. And then once you have 10 on the ground and you're accomplishing some success, you might hear, hey, we could use 20, but that's it.

And, you know, now you're learning to adapt. You're organizing to learn, and you're learning how to organize. And to me, that's not just on, you know, high speed missions like that. That's everything. Iraq, Afghanistan. Don't just say, we got to get three divisions over there, you know, put some guys on the ground, assess the situation, listen to their recommendation, and take it from there. I know we have a lot of, you know, a lot of first responders on the civilian side, the police and fire in.

I believe it's the exact same thing. I've worked with a couple of police forces here in southern California and did some work on past active shooting situations to kind of brainstorm what's the best way to see to those and to approach them. And it's the same thing, you know, organize to learn, and you'll learn how to organize like the military. You know, a lot of other first responders have taken this top down approach to things.

So, you know, if it's an active shooter situation, what you'll hear is the first thing that needs to happen is we got to get a command post set up. And in a lot of these active shooter incidents, things are happening and they're not able to coordinate because they're trying to set up a command post.

And I believe that what first responders should be taught is first have a way to communicate with other first responders. But when you get on the ground, if it's two cops, and two firemen, they should come together, change frequencies, and start developing the situation, figuring out what's needed next. Don't wait till, you know, a command post four blocks away is set up and they have time to talk to you to find out what your recommendation is.

We need this kind of self organizing approach, and it's not because it's some, you know, high speed way. It's because it's common sense. That's the best way for humans to organize, especially when you're dealing with total unpredictability in complexity, like you are in an active shooter situation.

Jon Becker: Well, I think you've seen that play out. Right? Like you look back to Columbine, which was kind of the watershed event. And the big criticism of Columbine was that they set up and waited and waited for the SWAT team to get there. And, you know, we saw it repeat in Uvalde.

But for the most part, I think the mindset is moving more towards a task force. Let's grab a couple of guys and start moving. And I think that has been one of the positive effects that the SOF community has had on law enforcement. There's always been tech transfer. I spent my whole career working on both sides, the blue and green side of that equation, and there has always been tech transfer, and there's always been tactic transfer.

But I think one of the consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan and kind of house to house fighting, and the stuff that happened was you saw this more ready engagement between state and local agencies who were teaching military agencies their tactics in an urban environment, and then military units going out developing it, coming back and saying, well, actually, here's the way we were doing it. And I watched the teams that we deal with on both sides change and evolve much more to a smaller team, more aggressive, direct action kind of mindset.

Pete Blaber: Yeah. And ironically, we got that from police. In the early part of my career, one of the things that, from 911 forward, kind of impeded and almost ended was before that, to do our urban training, we went to a city and we linked up with the local police department in that city. So, you know, New York, LA, Chicago, Nashville, all these places. And we'd link up with the police and they would be kind of our guides to go do our training, and they'd be with us.

But in the daytime, we did ride alongs with the police, and that was not for any other purpose than to get to know each other and to better understand what a cop does day to day. And it had a huge effect on a lot of us. And in fact, even in Colombia, and we were being micromanaged quite a bit in Colombia. The headquarters for Columbia was at that time called was Southcom, which was located in Panama. And, you know, there was no, this is the nineties. There was no other, you know, war going on. We were the only show in town.

So they were trying to get in on everything. And anytime we'd have, you know, a, just an operation we needed to do to either collect intelligence or to maybe conduct reconnaissance to see if we could, you know, find someone to lead us to the guys we were searching for, to get permission for that was just an unbelievably, you know, difficult thing.

And the answer was always, okay, so you want to, you want to walk into the vestibule, this apartment, you want to just make sure you understand the locking mechanism on the door. How many guys you got? I'd say three. That's not enough. You need at least 15 there, a QRF ready to go in case anything happens.

And what we constantly were saying in those days, and this went on for many years, was, hey, if two cops seed, you know, a guy who's on the most wanted list and they got a tippy upstairs, they don't wait for the rest of the department or the SWAT team to come, you know, they're going to go up and check it out.

And, you know, there were many examples of that, the way police operate and something, you know, if there's six cops, you can isolate a house and you can still go in and clear it. And so we took that away from police forces, from our training that always try to go with the always economy of forces is one of your most important things because it equals speed. And without speed, you got nothing. Especially when you're trying to collect intelligence. It's fleeting. And waiting around for, you know, 20 more guys is a surefire way to collect no intelligence.

So, you know, kind of interesting what you said. I mean, the truth of the matter is we were heavily influenced by the way, you know, your, your regular day to day cop and detectives deal with developing situations on the ground in cities all across the US.

Jon Becker: Well, I don't think people understand. I mean, you go back to the Munich massacre in 72, and that is when all of the CT units pretty much worldwide, except for maybe 22 sas, are born. Delta HRT, LAPD, SWAT, everybody kind of has their genesis in Munich. And that evolution was an exchange. It was a constant culture exchange between soft units, military SOF units, and state and local special tactics teams, LAPD and delta, LAPd and Devgru la sheriff and Devgru. It was for a time there, early in my career, there was this constant partnership of somebody would discover something anywhere in the world. And it was shared both through the soft community and the law enforcement, special tactics.

So I think that there's a lot that people don't realize that actually was kind of co-development, because in the end, Delta's problem is HRT's problem. It's just in a different place when it comes to hostage rescue. And so I think that one of the roles that certainly the unit has played throughout quietly behind the scenes, is being a conduit of information between state and local and between international foreign forces.

Pete Blaber: I agree.

Jon Becker: So let's move forward. So I want to make sure we're covering the book. So you've written a total of three books over, what, the last 15 years?

Pete Blaber: Yeah, about 15 years.

Jon Becker: Starting with the mission, the men and me, which is standard reading in a lot of special tactics units. It's standard reading in a lot of tactical leadership courses and reading. I went back and reread that prior to this interview.

And it's funny because when you read the three books, you can see themes that developed early in your career as a young ranger leader. I remember distinctly talking about a long march that you did Fort Lewis and laying a foundation that then carries forward into your most recent book.

Do you see the three books as kind of one big story arc, for lack of a better term?

Pete Blaber: Definitely. And, you know, I did not set out to write three books. I didn't even set out to write one. You know, that first the mission met, and me, I left the military in 2006, took a job out here in Southern California in a biotechnology company. And, you know, I was out, but all my friends were still in. And of course, the global war against terrorists was raging, you know, six to eight that period.

And, you know, it was very frustrating for me because my buddies would be telling me, you know, about what's happening in both Afghanistan and Iraq and kind of the evolution, you know, how in the early days when you, you know, when you read about when I was commanding AFO, there was. In the beginning, there was no C2 on the ground. It was just us. We were our own c two. Then it started piling on. And even, you know, while Operation Anaconda was going on in Shahi coat, it was metastasizing into this, you know, massive, technologically techno centric c two model. And, you know, so that was what was going on, six to eight. And I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe we weren't learning all these amazing lessons that, that everyone knew. They were very prominent from 2001 forward.

And the way the unit teaches you is, don't complain about it, don't obsess over it, do something about it. What I could do at that time was to write a book. And I thought, I'm going to take these foundational lessons that I didn't come up with them. They've been around forever. I just had the privilege of being in a situation or situations where the application of those principles reveal just how important they are in any leadership environment and just how fundamental they are to the success or failure of any operation.

So, you know, always listen to the guy on the ground. That's one of the first things that happens when massive c two infrastructure takes over. What you're doing is building friction between the guys on the ground and whoever the ultimate decision maker is. And, you know, we should be doing the opposite. We should be always, you know, leaders should always be trying to remove friction barriers, remove levels of staff, levels of command that, you know, have to be weaved through to either get permission or to hear what the final decision is on the ground.

And so, you know, that's why I wrote that book. It was in, it was because we were not learning these basic lessons. And, you know, I had, I was in the corporate world. So the ironic thing is, as I'm writing it, I'm realizing how they're just as applicable in the civilian world as in, you know, as in the military or any first responder organization.

And all the same problems exist, you know, in the corporate world with, you know, micromanagement, not listening to the people who are on the ground. And it's not just the person on the ground. It's when you're on the ground, you're dealing with the reality of the situation going on around you.

When you're in a talk, a tactical operation center 100 miles away with a million dollars worth of electronic gear, you are not, that's not the reality of the situation on the ground. You know, it's not cold, you're not hungry. There might not be a guy, you know, lurping up on you right now behind that tree over there. You know, all the things that go into decision making and problem solving are absent in that environment.

And, you know, people get deluded into thinking that, you know, whether it's a view from a predator or some other ISR asset gives them, you know, the. This knowledge that's on the ground and it's not. It's just a substitute. It's just a way to better understand what they're going through. But it's those guys on the ground.

And so that's why I wrote that first book, was to, you know, share those basic lessons that, again, I was so privileged to learn, not just from great leaders above and around me, but also because I had the opportunity to go through these combat situations that prove they work anytime, any place, because they're principles. They're principles based on how the human brain hardwired to make decisions and solve problems.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's interesting because leadership books, obviously, I don't think there's any new leadership concepts. I don't think any of us have discovered anything. I kind of look at leadership books the way I look at music, right? There's twelve notes, but every single one of us takes those twelve notes and puts them into something different. And what makes different songs is your ability to hear those twelve notes in a different order, in a different rhythm.

And I think that, yes, there are certainly a plethora of leadership books, some fantastic, some not so much. But in the end, what any book on leadership is doing is consolidating the knowledge that you've learned and articulating it in a way that it hopefully relates to a broad audience. I think one of the things that's great about the first book is it does that, and it gives very specific, concrete examples that bring home the truth of it.

I mean, the one thing about there isn't a lot of difference in leadership in the military and in the corporate world, except the consequences are much more apparent and much more violent in the military world. And so I think that it has a way of clarifying errors that can otherwise be concealed or smoothed over in the corporate world. And as a guy who's been in the corporate world since I was 17, I think reading through mission men and me, it's a lot of stuff that I have learned over the course of 25 years.

Ground truth being a perfect example is the longer you're in a leadership position, the more you begin to realize that, yes, you are in a position to gather information from a variety more sources than anybody on the ground has. The guy on the ground has one source. You might have 100 sources, but every single one of those is filtered. And so it is a function of being able to get through the filters.

And for me, that means walking through the warehouse. For you, that might mean talking to a guy on an airfield, hey, what are you seeing out there? What's really going on? But I think that the first book did a great job of articulating that in a way that is very relatable from a law enforcement, military or a corporate way. What inspired you when you were done with that? Obviously, some time passes. Why did you decide to write the common sense? Why? What drove the second book?

Pete Blaber: Yeah, so, you know, I lived that first book. I was, my civilian job at the time. I was working in a biotechnology company, great company out here. And, you know, you see all the same dynamics. You know, we were squandering opportunities because the, you know, exalted senior staff not just didn't listen to the guys on the ground, never, you know, even had a conversation with them.

And, you know, it's kind of the same thing. If you think about, you know, the funny thing about our federal command and control element, when you hear, like these four star generals talking, there should be a sign above their head that says, I have the least amount of knowledge of what's really going on of anyone here. And we, it's a byproduct of the media. You know, we've been led to believe that these are the experts on everything, and they're nothing.

You know, in fact, there are some of the most detached and unknowledgeable people that you can find about specific situations and events. What's going on right now is a good example in both Ukraine and Israel. You know, they do not know.

And one of the things we advocated for after 911 is, you know, whoever the president is, someone needs to tell the president that when you really need to make a difficult life or death decision, don't just listen to the PowerPoint slide given to you by a person who got a PowerPoint briefing from someone beneath them, who got it from someone beneath them. On and on. You got a little conference call thing in the middle of the table. Hit that and call someone on the ground and, you know, just let them start talking about what they're seeing and what they think.

And that's, you know, one of the, one of the scientific or the psychological parts of this, you know, or I should say biologic parts of this. Most ideas are just flying around in our heads. Most knowledge is just, you know, a non physical thing that exists in our head. It only becomes, you know, cogent or transferable when we say it out loud. And when we say out, say out what we're thinking out loud, we're actually narrating what's happening in our brain.

And most of the time, we don't have time to do that. So for now one of the big reasons you always want to get that guy on the ground talking is so they can unload all that tacit knowledge that's in their head, you know, and it's. It's knowledge that has never come together before until they start talking. So that person is gaining insights as you're asking them the question. But from a decision making, problem solving perspective, it only makes sense to talk to that person. If you care about making good decisions and really solving problems, then you should know that it doesn't matter who you are.

If you're right 50% of the time in your life, that's a pretty good batting average, about 500 in major league baseball, and you're in the hall of fame, but you should always be trying to hit that 500 mark and beyond. And so tapping into guys on the ground is the way to do that. It's the way to self correct. It's the way to get fresh information. And I spoke about tacit knowledge. It's so easy to uncork that all you gotta do is ask the question, what's your recommendation?

And suddenly it just starts flying out of the person's mouth. Give them a few seconds, and you're going to hear all the answers as they begin telling you what they know, what they see. And I had an opportunity. I was given a talk to go out, did another ride along with a police force, and they had a domestic dispute hostage barricade situation. And I. It ended up just as what we were talking about earlier. Two of the first couple cops on the scene were the ones up at the breach point.

And, you know, no one knew what to do. But you had two cops all the way up at the breach point, which was the back door, and they had been there for like 25 minutes, so they knew the situation. And the chief was trying to figure out what to do. And he had a, you know, he had a SWAT team saying, we can do this. He had the mayor calling him, and, you know, we had just talked about this, and he got on the radio and he said to the guy, who was the first guy in the stack next to the door, hey, what's your recommendation?

And there was a pause, like, wow, you know, I get to actually unload this. And he did. And he spoke for about 35 seconds. And I. He just laid out, you know, it was like a salute report. He told you where everything was, what they were armed with, what he thought they were going to do, why he thought they could get in through that breach point right now. And if they sent a couple guys to the front door to do a near simultaneous breach that, you know, they'd all be in without any problem and be able to take down the perpetrator. And they did.

And then afterwards, I wasn't there for their after action, but the chief told me, you know, everyone was coming up to me saying, you know, that was the greatest command and control you know, I've ever seen. You were amazing out there. And he told me, the only thing I did was ask him, what's your recommendation? And, you know, I learned that again because of the privilege of experience. I learned that in, during Operation Anaconda when I had three ops surrounding the battlefield and, you know, different situations.

One of them, there were three al Qaeda guys within about 40ft of my guy's position. And it was before h hour before we were going to initiate the assault. And as these three al Qaeda guys stood there scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do next, there were three dots bouncing all over their head and their body. And my team leader said, told me what was happening.

He said, panther, what's your guidance? I just said back to him, what's your recommendation? And he talked through, he said, well, you know, we could drop them right now, but if we shoot them, even with silencers, you know, it's going to make a little noise and those guys aren't going to go back to where they're, whoever is expecting them and they're going to come looking for them and realize something happened and we might end up compromising the whole assault.

So based on that, if they just keep doing what they're doing and head on about their way, then I say we just let them go. And that's what happened. They stood there talking, joking, and about two minutes later turned around and made their way away in a snowstorm. And so again, you know, and someone said to me afterwards, hey, that was a great decision. I said, I didn't make any decision. I didn't do anything except ask them, you know, what your recommendation is.

And, you know, I used it throughout my career. That was, that was the first, but the first of many, you know, hundreds of times. That was, that's always my go to question. And, you know, the other thing to remember, and we started this way when I, when I was talking about active shooters, link up with whoever's there, get on the same frequency.

Remember, radios are not a way that we talk to commanders and higher headquarters radios are the primary way we share knowledge. So when you get one guy on there, you know, talking about what he's seeing and what he thinks. All the other guys are listening, too. And this is the second benefit of it. They're able to. They're seeing it from a different perspective.

So they're able to pressure test what he's saying and maybe say, yeah, agree with all, except they're actually 200 meters away from the ridge and there are three more guys. You can't see them. They're behind the rocks right up next to the ridge. Now you're building this incredible, like, depiction of what's really going on, the reality of the situation. But it's coming from all this tacit knowledge.

And, you know, in a cultural perspective, once you start doing that, the guys start getting the hang of it and realizing that they're sharing knowledge every time they get on there. So when they, when something fundamental happens, they realize, I need to get on here. And so that everybody else knows, you know, the active shooter is turned around. He's now going in the other direction, heading the other way. So really important.

But again, just foundational stuff. And so, you know, back to your question, why I wrote the second one. The second one, you know, I was at a biotechnology company, so I worked with a lot of regular people and a lot of scientists. And it was there I started for the first time asking the question, you know, what really is common sense? What makes common sense? How do our brains make sense? And because I had access to the knowledge there, I was able to begin to understand the biologic underpinnings of common sense. And it's pretty straightforward.

That's what the second book is about. Still stories, military and one corporate story, but it's about the biologic underpinnings of common sense. You know, to understand what common sense is, you have to understand how we make sense first. And we humans all make sense a common way via our senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. It's the only way we make sense of the world around us.

And it's why we all have two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a brain, and a spinal cord elegantly wrapped in skin. If we made sense any other way, we'd be another species. So common sense refers to the common way we humans make sense. And that's why once it becomes knowledge, once something becomes knowledge, like, you know, sunrise, light, warm and safe, sunset, dark, cold and dangerous, that becomes common sense because that's how we make sense.

And over time, it becomes common sense. And once you understand that, you understand it's very helpful today, especially because so much of information today that's being transferred and expounded. It doesn't make any sense at all. And if you're not seeing, hearing, or touching it or smelling it, then you should be skeptical of it, especially today, especially with videos, especially with, you know, news reports and whatnot.

But among, you know, each other, it's an incredibly important thing, too, because that's how you explain things. You know, I saw it, I smelt it. You can feel it. And so that second book explains that and explains, you know, why it's so valuable. The other part of that that I think is especially important for first responders is, you know, the simple way to think about the human brain.

And it turns out it's not just one brain. It's three brains called the triune brain. And that's the way our brains evolved. We've got, you know, at the base of our spinal cord, we have our reptilian brain store. And that came from when we, you know, were reptiles from an evolutionary perspective. And it's still there. And all reptiles, all animals have that reptilian brain, and it's a radar. It does only one thing. It detects danger.

So you don't know it's there until something that you're not used to or you don't expect shows up. So your reptilian brain is why you panic when you're startled. It's why you panic when you get really cold or really hot. And you have to understand that because you can turn it off when it does that.

So the second part of the brain is our emotional brain, and it sits on top of the reptilian. And those are our social emotions. Most of them are positive. The negatives reside in our reptilian brain. But that emotional brain is very powerful, and it's what rides hurt on most people today.

When you see these crazed people on the news or whatnot, salivating, spitting as they talk, hurling expletives, that's 100% emotional brain. That person is not thinking. That person has no idea what's really going on around them. And that's because the part of their brain, the only part of your brain that can understand real time sensory information is your neocortex. That's why it's called your thinking brain.

Your neocortex only engages when you pay attention to something. The way you can turn your thinking brain on is by taking over. It's the only part of your brain that can take over unconscious processes. So you don't think about breathing. We always breathe. And your reptilian brain is controlling that. That's why if you start, your oxygen gets cut off. You'll feel panic. Your reptilian brain is telling you, hey, this is something that could kill you. And, you know, it tells you to panic. But your neocortex is the only part of your body that can take over unconscious processes.

So one of the ways to turn on your thinking brain and turn off your emotional brain is to breathe. It's to breathe deeply, because the only way you can consciously breathe is by engaging your neocortex. Same thing with speaking. If you speak, the only way you can speak calmly is with your neocortex.

The other two parts of your brain have no idea how to understand language and no idea how to produce it. The understand part is important, again, for first responders, because someone in a riot, you know, a rioter, they're not thinking. They're 100% emotional brain. And when you say to them, hey, knock it off, the reptilian brain can't understand language, so they're not listening. They're not hearing what you're saying. Only when they can somehow snap into their thinking brain can they understand it.

And for us, for actual first responders, if you want to understand what's going on around you, you have to engage your, your neocortex, your thinking brain. You have to stay calm and think. So breathing and talking calmly, when we talk calmly, we calm the way we act. And you can act calm, and you will calm the way you act.

So, you know, walking calmly, acting stoically, also calms your brain down. But we all, you need your reptilian and emotional brain. So you're going to always feel that, you know, if you're out hunting and hunting deer and you see a deer, you're going to feel your emotional brain kick in, and you got to start breathing to get back to your neocortex to, you know, get that perfect sight picture and to be able to pull that trigger without any trembling, but making sure you're pulling it at the right time.

Jon Becker: So, you know, I think that's challenging, though. I mean, you know, as you pointed out, the reptilian brain is, you know, earlier in our development, it has more direct access to the systems. And it's, you know, I always try to describe it as the reptilian brain. It has you running because you hear something scary, and then the neocortex is like, wait a minute. Why am I running? Yeah, what did I hear? But you're running, you know, for most people, you're running before you're asking why you're running.

And I think especially in dangerous situations and emotionally fraught situations, you have to teach yourself that. I'm going to pause before I run and I'm going to take a deep breath. I'm not going to react violently. I'm not going to react angrily. And especially as a leader, that is a skill that you have to develop and learn, not to allow that to hijack, not allow the emotional part of your brain to hijacked what you say and do.

Pete Blaber: You're right, and it comes with training. The more you do it, the more you automatically shift to your thinking brain. And in the book I use, to me, the best example is a bear encounter. You're always going to feel, your heart rate is always going to pick up when a black bear or a grizzly bear pops up on a trail in front of you. But you're trained and, you know, you immediately begin breathing. You immediately begin talking calmly to yourself and you understand your life is on the line here.

And, you know, history proves that those who panic around a bear are, you know, the walking dead. But if you stay calm and think what you've learned in the past, which, again, the only way to access that is through your thinking brain, your neocortex, your, you know, reptilian and emotional brain are not going to give you answers. They can't access all your knowledge. They can only access knowledge that was learned under the same emotion.

So when you're afraid, you only remember memories of when you were afraid. But if you switch quickly to your neocortex, you're going to remember all the times that you did things based on bravery and based on common sense. And it becomes an automatic process once you do it a few times in the real world.

So for anyone, that's why, you know, experienced people, you always hear this about, wow, they were so cool, calm, and collective. It was like nothing happened. Well, that comes with time and experience, and that's if you don't correct yourself when it's happening, you're going to lose that ability.

And, you know, it's not just at work. You got to do it at home, too. You know, we're far more likely to get emotional on family members than we are with coworkers or people we don't know. And that's just from familiarity. But if you really want to build that neocortex, that muscle up, you've got to practice it all the time. And that includes at home.

And I think you'll find if you do it at home, you're a better, better spouse, better parent, you know, all around. And so it's, it's very simple, but it's, it's a secret to success that, you know, everyone should practice. And it's just what we said. If you want to stay alive, you've got to stay calm and think.

Jon Becker: So it's kind of an interesting time to segue because your third book, your current book looks at what happens when the emotional aspect of that takes over and we find toxic leadership. And you use the Pat Tillman story in your investigation, the Pat Tillman story, not only to explain what actually happened there, but also to explain the underlying mechanisms. How did you first get involved in the whole Pat Tillman thing? Where did you first become aware that maybe the narrative that was out there wasn't totally accurate and it started to get your attention?

Pete Blaber: Yeah. So my involvement and my knowledge of what happened evolved. It goes back to 2003. During the invasion, during the build up to the invasion of Iraq, we deployed to a forward staging base in the Middle east. The unit, and at the time I was the unit ops officer and the unit commander had a brain aneurysm over there. And as soon as you had the aneurysm, I was promotable to colonel at the time, they frocked me and made me the unit commander.

So I took over as commander of the unit for the invasion and everything post invasion. While we initiated the Iraq invasion, we were behind enemy lines for 23 or 26 days. Some of the guys went back at three, the rest of us, 26. At the end of that, we came back and we set up our base of operations at the Baghdad International Airport. So it was taken during the famous thunder run in the beginning of the war.

So we went to Baghdad International Airport. It fit what we needed. We needed to be able to launch missions at a moment's notice as actionable intelligence came in. So it gave us standoff distances across the runways, but also access to vehicles, helicopters or just walking out the back gate. And so while I was there, we had a raid mission where we took four casualties, which is the highest number of casualties we had ever taken. They all injured, but two of them severe, life changing injuries. So it was a significant event. My staff, in classic unit fashion, was only about five people.

So when the medevac helicopters came in, we had a, a military, a special surgical unit that was co located with us just for situations like this. So when the medevac helicopters came in with the four men on stretchers, about, only about four of us could run outside and, you know, carry one or two stretchers at a time. As we were struggling, a bunch of rangers ran up to the helicopter and said, you, you know, we're here to help, sir. And they started helping us get the stretchers off and bring them into the triage area for the JMO unit.

After, you know, we dropped off the patients, one of my guys said, sir, we could have used some of these rangers out there. We were a little light on external security. And I was like, roger that. I'll put a request in and get these guys out for future ops. The night after they helped me in with the stretchers, I was approached by a senior NCO in the second battalion, and he asked me if he could talk to me.

And I said, sure, let's go walk and talk along the Runway. And as we walked, he talked and told me about this unbelievably toxic leadership climate in the battalion. And his purpose was he was afraid something really bad was going to happen. He didn't say what that was, but he just said, you know, nobody trusts the leadership. We can't. We're not allowed to do things we know we should be doing to keep our guys alive.

You know, instead of doing medical training and zeroing our nods and our lasers, we're standing by behind our ponchos at parade rest hoping that, you know, our canteen cups are clean enough to pass an inspection.

So, you know, it was startling to me because, you know, senseless leadership in a combat zone is as deadly serious as it can get. Later that night, I ran into two more senior NCOs from the battalion, and they told me the same thing, along with a bunch of additional examples. So, you know, once an incident, twice a coincidence, three times a pattern. It was pretty obvious what was going on, and it was very obvious to me. I had a duty to do something about it.

So a night after that, I saw a senior ranger officer, and I approached him and said, hey, you know, I. I have some information about one of the battalions. What's going on in one of the battalions is pretty serious. And, you know, can I tell you about it? He's like, sure. So I very carefully told him the exact same thing that these three guys did, but he wasn't saying anything. It was dark out.

And so I stopped and to see, you know, get some feedback from him, and he just put his finger into my chest, and I knew this guy. We were, you know, had a good relationship. There was no. Nothing negative between us. And he said, you, you already said you don't know anyone in the chain of command. And you're not in the Rangers anymore, so why don't you tell your anonymous sources to stay in their lanes? And if I had a nickel for every time a disgruntled NCO complained about obeying the orders from his officer, I'd be a rich man.

And then he walked away and I never saw that guy again. Many years later, someone gave me John Krakauer's book on what happened to Pat Tillman. And as I was reading it, I came across he had Pat Tillman's journal and he published some of the things Pat wrote. And so he published what he wrote in Iraq.

And in it, you know, he had this one passage that said, last night four guys from Delta Force were shot. I never thought, you know, it really brings home the war. Something to that effect. You know, I didn't think it was that serious. It just goes to show you. And then his next passage was, you know, we're leaving Iraq at 04:30 tomorrow morning. Thank God! And when I read that, I was like, holy cow. You know, first off, I didn't even know he was in second ranger battalion, but I was like, he was there. He helped, you know, bring my guys in on the stretchers.

And so I started talking to a bunch of senior NCO's who, you know, I grew up with in second Ranger battalion about it. And, you know, they started enlightening me to that period of time. You know, I found out from one of them that Tillman's mom was still investigating everything. Still, you know, she didn't believe what she was told.

So I was put in contact with her and I explained it and she said. Said to me, you know, and, hey, I appreciate it, but I really want to find out what happened in Afghanistan. She knew she had read my book. So she knew who I was. She knew I had been in the Rangers. She knew I had been in Afghanistan. And she asked me, hey, I have all the investigations. Would you be willing to take a look and let me know what you think? When a gold star mom, you know, the mother of a fallen colleague asks you if you can help out and give some advice? I don't know that I'm capable of giving any other answer than, of course. And when can I see the document?

So that got me on to the – I drove up there, got the four investigations paper copies of it, 3500 pages. Pictures, videos, maps, and mostly testimonials from the guys. And I just started immersing myself in what happened and trying to recreate it while also not just tapping into the guys I knew in the battalion, but reaching out to many of these guys who were never allowed to, were never asked follow on questions, were never allowed to say, hey, you know, you said this to the investigator.

Is that what happened to you? No. Well, that was part of it. That's because he asked the question that way. Here's what else happened. And, you know, I started learning all this information.

Jon Becker: It might be helpful to just kind of set up what the official government narrative was immediately following the event and why that was called into question.

Pete Blaber: The initial take was just, you know, he was killed charging up a hill during an ambush. And we don't know, you know, it was not friendly fire initially. It was just, you know, it was what was written on the Silver Star, and the Silver Star was read at his memorial ceremony on May 30th. But the unbelievable part of this is what I found out from investigating. It was they knew beyond a shadow of doubt he was killed by friendly fire within 24.

And then for the higher headquarters, 48 hours for sure after it happened. But they didn't tell Pat's brother, who was in the platoon or the family for 35 days. So, you know, they went through this period where, you know, they obviously, it's tragic. You can't. There's no way to, you know, make, make any positivity out of this situation. You're devastated by the loss of a loved one, but, you know, finding out 35 days later that he was killed by friendly fire does nothing but make it, you know, ten times worse.

And the other thing that did was it, you know, made Pat's mother, Mary Tillman, you know, ask the question, why? Why would you come up with such a long, complex story? You know, why would you lie about it? That was her question at the time. And, you know, again, back to the science of the human brain, when you've been lied to once, lied to twice, you do not believe anything.

After that, she never gave up. And, you know, I told you my initial conversations with her, one of the things she said, Washington, you know, if the situation was reversed and it was me that was killed, Pat would never give up until he found out what the truth was. And she. That's what she did. And, you know, in aggregate, it took 19 years to find the truth. But, you know, that's what we found by talking to the guys, putting it back together.

And again, just applying common sense, deductive logic to what happened, you can better understand how it happened. And that's incredibly important for future leaders, for future warriors and leaders, if we don't learn again. We can never adapt, and the same thing will just happen over and over in the future.

So, you know, among among the many transgressions of not being completely honest with the family or with the unit itself, you know, perhaps one of the biggest is you're denying, you know, future warriors, future first responders the potential to learn from it, to adapt to it, and to prevent it from happening again in the future.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which literally means that that person was just wasted. You know, it's bad enough that they're killed with friendly fire. If you don't learn anything from it and are destined to repeat it. You've almost killed them twice. It's appalling.

Pete Blaber: Well said.

Jon Becker: What I mean, obviously, the book goes into great detail, and you did a wonderful job of laying out kind of the circumstances and the details. And, I mean, it's the maps, and it is really fantastically done in the Cliff notes version because I really want to talk about kind of the leadership lessons. Give me the Cliff note version. Give our listeners a cliff note version of what actually happened and why. What was the underlying cause of this friendly fire incident?

Pete Blaber: So this area that we're going to be talking about is Kaust province, Spera district. It's in the far eastern part of Afghanistan. It's right up against the Pakistani border. And when I say border, I mean a invisible line that just happens to be on a terrain feature. There's no fences, there's no patrols. There's nothing like that. It's governed by two of the pashtun tribes who are, you know, some of the oldest pashtun tribes. They've been there for a thousand years.

They, you know, by trade, they're they're smugglers and, you know, importer exporters. There's a lot of bandits that go through that area. You know, you've heard the expression win the hearts and minds. Well, we never use that expression because it's impossible to win the hearts and minds of people unless you live with them and you stay with them.

So a foreign expeditionary force can never win hearts and minds of – And it's where we always go wrong. Talking about winning hearts and minds, the first thing you do is you try to bribe them. You know, you start building stuff and giving them stuff that doesn't win hearts and minds.

And again, you can't win the hearts and minds unless you live with someone. But what we did talk about was losing the hearts and minds. You can lose the hearts and minds, and when you do that, you've created enemies where there were no enemies before you lost them. So to put it in perspective, you go back to the first book, and I fought in the battle of Shahi coat, known as Anaconda. That's only 8 km away from where Pat was killed.

And so you could not pick a more dangerous, inhospitable area of Afghanistan. You couldn't pick an area with more daunting terrain than this area. I'm sure there's some that are tied, but no, no more daunting, you know, so it's a volatile area.

And this platoon of rangers, most of them on their first tour ever in Afghanistan, are land in an airfield, are flown to another airfield, put on vehicles, and they're driving out into this area, you know, three days after they landed. It's crazy. And they're told to go in there and town by town, search every single house for weapons caches and potential terrorists. And the way you do that is you break down the door, you toss, basically the house. You're looking for hidden compartments. It's a formula for losing the hearts and minds.

So this platoon's out in the middle of bad guy country. They're being controlled by what's called a CFT, a cross functional team, which was a concept put in place by the commanding general, where every staff looked exactly the same. And the staffs were all 20 men, ten on each side of a U-shaped table with the commander in the middle, and then a wall of screens up front, usually with video teleconference information and electronic maps, things like that. Their day was defined by how many video teleconferences they had.

And that was a big change in warfare. That started with Afghanistan and Iraq war by VTC. And it's, you know, the generals get on there, they pontificate, then their staff officers get on and pontificate. It's actually completely backwards. The only guys who should be pontificating are the low level guys, and the pontification should flow upwards, but that's not the way they go. They go down and, you know, a day for a staff officer can have five or six of those, some of them 3 hours long. That's their day. That VTC, and it's, you know, various general officers.

So you're, you know, you're stuck to your chair and your eyes have got to be forward the whole time. This reflected the first time in my lifetime that I know of, or even in modern military history, where I believe we can look at that moment and say, we went backwards. If that platoon had been out there during Vietnam, the company commander would have been on a hilltop that was halfway between the tock headquarters and the guys, and he would have had two rtos with massive antennas. He would have had a small security element, and he would have lived on that hilltop until that mission was over.

And that platoon would have always had someone who could make a decision, always have someone who could help support them when they needed it. But that wasn't the case here. So off the Rangers go. They realized within a couple days that this was just an exercise in futility.

So back to the guys on the ground. If someone had come in and said to them, hey, what do you think about this mission? Should we keep doing it? You would have gotten, I think there were 36 guys in the platoon. You would have gotten 36. No, let's get the h*** out of here. This is complete waste of time because they weren't finding anything. They found, like a rusted machete, a couple old black powder guns, you know, two AK-47s.

And they found a ton of weed, you know, not anything. No intelligence. They've been out in the field eight days, driving around. They're low on water, low on food. That day starts out right on the Pakistani border. They're in a place called border control .5. It's run by the Afghans, but it's a, you know, joint American Afghan outpost. Just a little postage stamp up on a ridge with a helipad and, you know, probably 20 Afghans, man in it. That was their base of operation. That's what. Where they started on day eight. And they started with one of the Humvees. Not, you know, not starting. They couldn't start it. They had eleven vehicles at the time, and they were packed into every one of them.

So even one vehicle down would affect, you know, the way they were arrayed and allocated as a platoon. But, you know, they worked on this vehicle, could not fix it. The platoon leader called back to the rear, said, hey, this thing's deadline. Recommend we leave it here. You can either send in a higher level mechanic or, you know, airlift it out. And the response was, you know, denied. Tow it along with you.

So, you know, to put that in perspective, like, when the platoon leader told that to the guys, they were, you know, the WTF phrase was the first thing out of everyone's mouth. You got to be kidding me. And anyone who understood this terrain could never even get the words out of your mouth, hey, just drag it. But drag it they did. They hooked up nylon straps to it and took off from border control .54 and a half hours later, and 6 miles later, they were traveling at 1.5 miles an hour.

The vehicle just gave out, the wheels busted out sideways, the axle broke, the steering column snapped. It was completely inoperable. And they were in a little town called Maggara, again, a stone age town, about 100 people living in cliffside dwellings, very friendly.

As they came out, you know, there was no hostility, but obviously you're now surrounded by, you know, 100 plus people around your vehicles. And so the platoon leader did what he, you know, what he should have done. He called back to headquarters and reported, hey, this vehicle now is completely deadlined. Can you get a CH 47 helicopter in to airlift it out? Or a wrecker, which is a big tow truck. So when the platoon called in, they were on a VTC, that was their battalion headquarters.

For that CFT to make a decision, it had to get permission from the CFT in Bagram, which was their regimental headquarters, and the regimental commander was there. And for that one to get permission for, you know, out of the ordinary things, they had to call the CFT that was in a place called Balad, Iraq, with our higher headquarters in it, and get the commanding general to approve it.

So you have these massive, you know, staff officer CTFs, million dollar talks, trying to control these guys, conducting a simple operation. And I. Well, so the first response came a little over 1 hour later, and the response was, hey, there's no helicopters available. And the wrecker, the tow truck can't leave the Calista Gardez highway, which was 15 km from where they were.

And so the platoon leader, you know, talked to his guys and he came back with, well, how about we blow it? And, you know, they asked to blow it, went through another hour long wait for an answer. What came back was, you know, request denied. You're not allowed to blow vehicles. You need to tow that thing to the highway, to the wrecker. And as if that wasn't bad enough, they were telling them, hey, you're way behind schedule now. You need to get back on schedule. To get back on schedule, we want you to split the platoon in half.

And here's how you need to split it. And they told them, you know, mortars need to come back, snipers need to come back. A couple of these guys, every vehicle is set up, you know, with five guys. One guy's on the gun, one guy's the TC, one guy's the driver, two guys got rear security.

So when you start breaking up that organic, you know, organ, the way they're organized organically. You're messing up everything. They've agreed on all of their little sops they've learned over the days, and that's what they did. They tore the guts out of this platoon, split it in half. What you find is the guys did the right thing over and over again. And in this case, the platoon leader did the right thing. He pushed back very diplomatically. And remember, he's a lieutenant and this is his first time in combat, too. And he pushes back.

He says, well, splitting the platoon doesn't make sense, and here's why. And he firstly, secondly, thirdly, gave three great reasons. And his first reason was Como. If we split in this terrain, we probably won't have any camo between us. And if one of us makes contact, we're not going to be able to. The other elements not going to go to their assistance. Given the fact that it's almost sundown right now and that we have an SOP, that you can't go into a village at nighttime. You have to wait till the morning.

It doesn't matter if we get there right now, we can all drive to the highway, take the inoperable Humvee, drop it off, drive back. We'll still have plenty of time to get, catch some winks before sunrise. At sunrise, we'll wake up, clear the village and be on our way. And, you know, he laid that out to them. Same thing. Okay, I'll get you an answer. VTC is still going on. Answer comes back denied. And he's like, well, why? And there was no why. It was just because you were told to. And so he had enough. He knew when, you know, I can't fight this anymore. And they hired a civilian Jenga truck driver to help tow the Humvee to the Kg highway to the wrecker.

Now they're going to drive through a canyon with a dump truck dragging Humvee that can't be steered. And, you know, so frustration, anger is set in. These guys do what they're supposed to do. They split up the first element with the platoon leader and Pat Tillman. They're told to get to this town of Mana by sundown. Off they go.

The first one bolts out, comes to the Y intersection outside Magra, takes a left. About five to ten minutes later, the second element comes out. This is the one towing the Humvee that's supposed to go the highway. They take a right, which is the planned route to the highway. The first two vehicles go.

Then the Jenga truck gets that, sees him taking a right and he won't move when they go to ask him, hey, what are you doing? Why won't you drive? He said, you can't go that way. That goes over a 6950ft ridge, and it's impossible for even my Jenga truck to get over it, much less a Jenga truck towing a Humvee. So they figure, hey, which way should we go? And the Jenga truck driver told them, same way as your other element went, it's the best road and you'll actually make it there quicker. So they turned around to follow the first element.

Unfortunately, when they turned around, the Njinga truck took the lead. So now the Jenga truck with the Toad Humvee is in the front of that column. And sure enough, as they turn around, the platoon sergeant's trying to call the platoon leader to tell him this, but they have no comms. It's negative comms.

So he continues moving down behind the first element, unbeknownst to them, on the same route that the first element moved through. Now we come to the culmination. To get to this town of Mana, you have to go through a slot canyon, which is a canyon cut through the rocks, in this case, walls 1000, 1500 ft high on both sides, the creeks on the bottom. It's peppered with massive geometrically shaped boulders. To watch both sides, your head has to be crooked back all the way. It's very uncomfortable.

So this is how they're pulling security while driving over the most uneven, undulating terrain you can imagine. The first element made it through there without any problem. And they pull up damana. You know, they're there. It's not quite dark yet, but they – There's nothing they can do. All they can do is wait until the other element has dropped off the vehicle and comes back.

But as soon as they pull over, they hear boom, boom, two explosions. And those two explosions are either mortar or RPG rounds landing on the side of the canyon wall while the second half of the platoon is driving through and again watching the video paint. It's worth a thousand words. There's many parts in here where you literally have to make hairpin turns, left, right, left, to get around these boulders. And they're in an ambush.

And everyone knows, in an ambush, your first immediate action is to get out of the ambush, and they have no way to get out of it because this Jenga truck towing this mv is now moving less than 1.5 miles an hour. So you've got a civilian, unvetted civilian, speaks another language, you know, who's driving the Jenga truck trying to thread this needle with a Humvee while they're under fire.

After the first two rounds exploded, two more exploded and then rpg machine gun fire opened up from the ridges. And when that happened, the rangers in serial two did what? The only thing you can do, which is suppress the target. Meanwhile, the guys over by Mana, the platoon leader, Pat Tillman, they're hearing this and, you know, they know something's behind them. They know it's a firefight. Some suspect it's the other half of the platoon. Others have no idea.

But the leaders realize, hey, we have no camo and we can't see anything. Let's scoot up to the high ground here. We should be able to see what's happening in the camo, and the elevation will give us line of sight communication with the other half of the platoon. One of the squad leaders and the platoon leader grabbed most of the guys and they head up this path. Pat Tillman, who was a team leader at the time, he grabs his guy and he says, hey, let's go help our boys and let's go kill some bad guys. And off they move up onto this high ground. So they get up 1000ft up on this spur.

So a spur is like a tongue that sticks out from a ridge line. Usually it has a creek on each side of it, but it's a piece of terrain that slopes down like a finger off of a ridgeline. That's what a spur is. And they come to the end of the path and they are smoked, number one.

But they realize we can't see into the canyon from here and it's not enabling us to make line of sight communication with the other element. The guys on the spur are under. They were under fire. They saw the enemy up on the ridge at first, but as they got up to the top, the fire became just thousands and thousands of rounds. The shape of the canyon explains a lot of what was happening.

And when you look at the map of the canyon, it's shaped like a mushroom. The first investigator came to the conclusion that anyone does and reads it, and that's that they were probably getting the crossfire from the other element.

Jon Becker: So the two elements think that they're engaged and in fact they're engaging each other.

Pete Blaber: The guys in the canyon are trying to fire at the north, but these are non gyro stabilized weapons. So think about driving off road. You're shaking the vehicle. You only need an inch to move the barrel of the weapon an inch over. Now the fire arcs over the hill what looks like just an inch is 500 meters once it plays out across the terrain. And so they didn't hit any of the guys in serial one.

But I'm pretty confident many of those rounds were landed behind them. The guys were hearing the sonic crack of bullets over their head, so, you know, they weren't hitting each other. But the rounds were adding to the confusion. So the machine guns in serial two, the 50 cal, the 240, even the m four, are all at about 150 decibels. The mortar, the 203, a little bit less. But all of them are over 130, all the way up to 155 decibels. And they were exposed to that 150 decibel noise for twelve to 14 minutes.

Jon Becker: So after 30, they're all effectively deaf.

Pete Blaber: Then they're all effectively deaf. I'm reading all the guys testimonials and they're all separate. And as you finish each guy, you're. They. They go, you know, the investigator always ask them, anything else? And these guys go, well, yeah, I was. I couldn't hear anything. I was deaf after about two minutes. And so I couldn't talk to my squad leader or he couldn't talk to me, or we had to pull guys up, right up by your face to talk and read lips.

So finally the canyon opens up wide enough where they can pass the Jenga truck and the Humvee that's at the end of the canyon. Now they're coming out and there's one more sloping ridge as you come out, dividing them from where serial one is on the spur.

And unfortunately, when they ran up there, when path Tillman and his guy ran up there and Afghan decided to follow them at one of the afghan soldiers while this ten to twelve minute firefights going on, they're starting to think, hey, he's drawn enemy fire on us because they are getting fire from both the south and the north. So they're trying to get him back, back here, come on. Using their weapons, their hands, but he won't move. He's standing 10ft in the front of him firing his AK.

So it didn't dawn on them as they realized he was probably drawing enemy fire, that he might have the same effect on friendlies. And sure enough, when this lead Humvee with, you know, five guys in it, a 50 cal, a 240 a saw, a 203 M, 4S with ACOG sights, you know, this thing had as much firepower as a full platoon in one vehicle. They come around the corner and the first thing they see is this Afghan and he's firing his AK either right at them or right over their head to the south.

And, you know, the squad leader picked up the site in his ACOG site and shot him on the spot. And again, all the guys are deaf. And what you're trained as an infantryman is when in doubt, shoot where your team leader and squad leader shoots. So when that squad leader shot the Afghan, they turned their machine guns on that Afghan. And 10ft behind that Afghan was Pat Tillman and that private hiding behind the boulders.

Now, from their perspective, you know, the only guy, the only account of what happened is from the ranger private who was with Pat Tillman. You know, they dropped the Afghan. And now these guys are under intense machine gun firing and they're looking down at. These are Humvees on a – In a creek bed, you know, that is mostly tan in color, a few river rocks, but, you know, the Humvee sticks out.

And so when they saw him, they were like, hey, you know, we're friendlies up here. They were yelling at the top of their lungs, waving to them. Well, these guys are all deaf and they had no way of knowing that, so they're just screaming louder. And as they scream, their frustration is rising because it's like, why the f***, you know, we're yelling and, you know, why aren't they hearing us? And why aren't they seeing us?

Well, it's last light. You don't quite need your nods yet, but you're minutes away. You could actually flip them down in preparation for darkness, which is coming in minutes. But from the creek bed, looking up, this spur is. You couldn't have asked for better camouflage to hide a bunch of Mendez. It's got a mottled surface, kind of lava, black and brown, with massive cracks going from all directions, no contiguous shapes on it. And it's full of foliage. You look up and you can barely see humans on this spur. This is last light.

And, you know, they're driving in a Humvee on a rocky creek bed. They're both deaf and blind. They can't see anything. And all they know is this Afghan with a beard. And Ak was firing at them from the same direction as they've been firing at the whole time. And they opened up.

Pat was providing incredible guidance to his private, you know, telling him, hey, stay calm, think, stay focused. Which helped this guy to better, you know, kind of, you know, move his body so that it would stay behind the boulder as the vehicle is, you know, moving out in front of it.

So he saved that, you know, that private's life. And then right toward the end, he tried to throw a smoking aid to give one more signal that was friendly. And when he threw that smoke grenade, it's believed, is when he was hit in the head and killed very tragically right at the end. You know, this is now the 12th or 14th minute of the firefight. And so the guys pull up the vehicle. No one knows what happened. No one suspects.

You know, from the shooter's perspective, they're, you know, they're – They don't even know. Why would the rest of our platoon be up on the high ground instead of by their vehicles? But they start piecing it together and, you know, guys are very honest. They're, you know, soldiers are, will always come to the, you know, the reality, the realistic conclusion. And they did. They pretty much figured out, you know, that night, the next day that they were shooting right at them.

And then as they pulled bullets out of the rocks, the boulders around where Pat was killed, they realized, hey, these are your 50 cal, your 7.62 rounds. And those guys were like, s***. You know, we shot him. And the platoon headed back. It was two nights later when they got back to the rear in KAOS. They did their first hot wash.

And, you know, it's in the book, but you can, you know, very much be proud of these guys. The. The leaders immediately took responsibility. You know, if I had, you know, my guy shot where I shot, said the squad leader from the gun jeep, and the guy up top said, tillman wouldn't have been up there if he hadn't followed my squad up there. So, like great leaders, they're taking responsibility.

And in the book, I point out there's a big difference between taking responsibility and taking blame. When you take responsibility, you're just acknowledging that you're responsible and you're accountable for everything that happens to while you're in a position of leadership. But it's very different from taking the blame. Taking blame means you're saying it was my fault. I did it, something I did caused it.

And of course, they didn't take the blame, and they shouldn't have ever taken the blame. They couldn't figure out how the whole thing happened. And as the investigation began unfolding in those days after, they were completely kept in the dark about all the decisions that were made behind the scene and why what happened happened on the ground.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, I mean, at that point, the plane had already crashed. Right? Like the plane was going to crash 20 minutes before that, and they just didn't realize that they were on a course that was going to lead to this how. I mean, how, from your perspective, how did toxic leadership result in this? Like, what was toxic in the leadership chain that caused this to occur?

Pete Blaber: Yeah. So, you know, toxic leadership, which I explain in depth in the book, is, you know, the way you understand toxic leaders by the choices that leaders make. So I define leadership as. I define common sense leadership as using common sense to take care of your people by making good decisions and solving complex problems that set the conditions for your people to succeed. Pretty simple!

That's your job as a leader. All the accoutrements and, you know, glory that comes along with being in a leadership position, the higher pay, the privilege, you know, you get that, but you also better get that you are responsible and that your job is to make good decisions and solve complex problems that enable your people to succeed. And that's where toxic leaders go off the rail. They don't give a s*** about their people. They treat everyone with equal derision. They believe that they're always right, that they've earned this position.

And by God, while I'm in this leadership position, people are going to do what I say or else. We talked about the three part brain. Toxic leaders are emotional and reptilian brain leaders. That's all they operate off of, you know, when someone p***** them off, you know, or they don't like somebody, they don't like their personality. They live that with their decisions that seeps into the decisions they make.

So, you know, if you didn't like this platoon, when they call up and say, hey, this vehicle doesn't work anymore. We're at BCP five. Can we leave it here? And you guys come pick it up, it's like, no, I don't like those guys. They're behind schedule. Let's teach them a lesson.

And I'm just mimicking the way a toxic leader thinks here. And so send them off. And now they're in Magura and they're still behind schedule. And, oh, it, you know, the way they decided to tow it didn't work. And now the thing's completely deadline, and they want, you know, a helicopter or a pickup truck. Hey, let's – They're even further behind schedule now. Let's teach them a lesson, you know, and let's make them do this.

So you're giving orders and making decisions that are the opposite of enabling your people to succeed. And what that translates to on the battlefield or in any, you know, emergency situation is failure of the mission and the inability of the guys to accomplish what you sent them out to. Accomplish.

And so, you know, remember, I started this. My connection to it was from one year earlier. And for, you know, three NCO, Ranger NCOs to jump across command lines and come over and talk to, you know, the Delta Force commander about their own command, that doesn't ever happen. Range. You can, you know, you can physically torture a Ranger NCO and, you know, you still have to, you know, cajole them or somehow get them to tell you what's bothering them. They just suck up pain. They do not complain. You know, you admire this. It's a. It's a known trait, and you admire it over time.

And so I didn't start looking into this thinking this was all the result of a toxic leadership environment, but I went into it knowing that that was present. Remember, this platoon leader never talked to his company commander. He never talked directly to the battalion commander. He never talked to the S3. He was always talking to a middleman, the XO.

So one of the recommendations you brought up, I put in the end of the book is it needs to be mandatory. Technology has lulled us into this sense that leaders can send emails or have a staff officer contact you and tell you, hey, you need to change the way you're working, that we need to end that.

If you're in a leadership position, you cannot give an order unless you give that order. You've got to say that order out loud to those individuals, or there is no order. And you've got to explain the logic of why that order makes sense, or there is no order no more. Just do it because I said so.

And, you know, trust has a lot to do with that. Once you trust someone, you will do. You can take something like, hey, I need you to, you know, run, run down to the end of the canyon right now. If you really trust that guy, you know, you might do it, but there was no trust here already.

So in order to do it, they should have had the logic of why it made sense. Denying them the ability to leave a Humvee at a secure base instead of dragging it through the equivalent of the Grand Canyon. You can't make sense of that decision then Magara not allowing them to blow this Humvee. It turns out this Humvee wasn't even on their property books. They found this Humvee at Bagram when they arrived.

And, you know, from my perspective now, looking 19 years later, we left over 10,000 Humvees in Afghanistan, many of them armored. And we certainly don't seem to think that was much of a big deal or no one's getting upset about leaving those Humvees behind, 10,000 of them. None of these decisions made sense. Splitting the platoon violates principles or the ten principles of war. You never split your forces. And just the callousness of the way these guys were treated afterwards.

Pat Tillman was revered like, you know, and I don't use that lightly. You know, he validated for a young private to see a guy come from the NFL or have any job where you're making millions of dollars, you know, incredible admiration. But it's, you know, it's affirmation, too, that, hey, what you're doing makes sense. And it's not just the dregs of society out here, everybody. It's patriots from all walks of life who do it.

And after this happened, and they came to the realization that they, you know, this was a tragic accident. You can imagine. These guys, you know, needed some talking to, some picking up, but instead, they did the opposite. They began the scapegoating process right there from day two on that, hey, these guys, you know, not. They didn't just cause it. They're not just to blame, but they. Every phase of this, they f***** up in.

And, you know, in these original investigations, they lay it right on the platoon leader for, you know, not doing good, troop leaning procedures, the platoon sergeant for not using the radio more, and then the full. Everybody in that front vehicle, you know, it states, these guys were yelling to them and they ignored their, you know, verbal warnings. They were waving their arms, and they ignored their visual warnings. We have an SOP. You never shoot at anything you don't positively identify.

But as far as I know, no one, including my old unit back then or even since, does maneuver live fires with friendly and enemy targets. That's what you do in a shooting house or CQB. No one drives around in vehicles, comes around corners, and, you know, you got to shoot on a hill.

And three of the paper targets are, you know, women, and three are guys with knives or, you know, or guns. No one does that. So they had never been trained from a motorized perspective to conduct targeted discrimination. But even if they had, you couldn't see anything. You couldn't hear anything.

Jon Becker: And because they asked, guys were turning fire at them, right? Like, yeah, it's just they're disoriented, they're auditorily excluded. You know, it's dark. Like, it's just. It's one of those things where you look at it and you go, every single thing pointed towards a tragedy. And the. The opportunity to avoid it occurred when they should have just blown up the Humvee.

Pete Blaber: You're right.

Jon Becker: Right. It's not the last act that causes the crash. Right. It's always, you know, aviators talk about it as a chain of events, and it's, you know, ten things have to happen for the plane to crash. And in this case, the avoidance.

And this is why I would encourage people to read your book, is you realize there were a lot of opportunities to avoid this happening, not because you would know that it was coming, but because you know that you're just making bad decisions and you're getting feedback from the field saying, hey, this is a stupid idea, and it's not a good idea to schlep a truck around.

Oh, it's an even worse idea when the front axle is broken. It's an even worse idea when it's a slot canyon. You're pulling it with a Jenga truck. It was 20 little decisions that led to one catastrophic event from a perspective of lessons learned. What do you think? You've got a few minutes with a team leader now to sit down. What do you leave them with? What is the lasting legacy of this story, you think?

Pete Blaber: Yeah, I think it starts with its leadership lessons, and it starts with climate, back to what we talked about in the very beginning. A climate emerges from the sum total of choices made throughout this climate system. And you just said it, this event happened nothing because these guys couldn't discriminate or because the Afghans stood out there. It happened because of the sum total of choices that were made in the 12 to 15 hours before it happened.

And, of course, that goes way back. You could go back the whole year, but specifically on this day, it was the sum total of choices, all the way from doing the mission to border control .5 to Maggara, splitting the platoon, not monitoring the platoon at any point.

So your job as a leader, it comes back to, what do leaders do? And that definition is really important. They take care of their people by using common sense to make good decisions, solve complex problems that set the conditions for their people to succeed, period. It doesn't matter if you're in the military, doesn't matter if you're a civilian first responder. It doesn't matter if you work in the corporate world. That's a leader's job.

And, you know, the art of doing that goes in a lot of different directions. One of the most important, I think, that needs to be institutionalized for all first responders is that part about the logic of why you cannot give an order without attaching the logic of why it makes sense. And the logic of why comes from your neocortex. Your thinking brain is the only part of your brain that can produce logic, and we all know what – it is first of all. Second of all. And thirdly, if an idea doesn't have three legs to stand on, it's probably not standing on solid ground, right?

A tripod will support anything a two legged stool tips right over. And usually the third reason is the hardest, and that's because if you can't come up with a third reason, it's telling you what you're thinking probably doesn't make sense. So going through just as a leader, coming up with three reasons that whatever you want them to do makes sense is a check and balance for yourself. It's going to prevent you from making stupid decisions and potentially affecting the safety and well being of your people.

So, you know, decision making, problem solving, go into that logic of why technique. But really just, you know, the title of the book says it all. Common sense leadership matters. Toxic leadership destroys. There's no place for toxic leaders. They should be fired from any job that they're found out in. They do not belong in a leadership position because toxic leadership destroys. And so that would be what I'd tell a new aspiring leader or first responder from this event.

Jon Becker: Well, what I love about the book and what I love about this is you've kind of created this arc of doctrine that toxic leadership is a very easy thing to think. Has no consequence. It's very easy to go. Oh, yeah, I know. Those two guys hate each other. Well, that's no big deal. And, yeah, they're both a*******, but that doesn't really affect the organization. It affects every part of the organization.

And I think it's easy to sugarcoat it and think that it just means people aren't happy or people don't get along, and there's no real world consequence. And I think the great thing about this book is that you take a very public event that everybody knows and do a fantastic job of articulating this and give us a concrete example of why we really do need to care and why we really do need to strike, you know, to focus on trying to eradicate toxic leadership.

So, Pete, I appreciate all the time you spent with me today. I'd like to end these episodes with five rapid fire questions. Before we do that, though, how can people find your work? What is the best way for people to engage with your work?

Pete Blaber: Yeah.. I've got a website. You can go there, look at all the pictures of the spur. You can watch video of the canyon. You can see all the maps. They're in color of the platoon's journey. I know it's a little difficult explaining it with just words, but if you go on the website, you'll see, and you can play around with it as long as you want. So and check it out and let me know what you think.

Jon Becker: Beautiful! Okay, let's. Let's go with the five rapid fire questions. Short answer, kind of gut reaction. What is your most important habit?

Pete Blaber: Probably just, you know, controlled breathing, understanding the power of breath, how it calms you down, how it optimizes your athletic potential, how it shifts you away from your emotional, non thinking brain into your logic based thinking brain, where you can, you know, make good decisions and solve those complex problems.

Jon Becker: What is your favorite, current, favorite online resource? Web, you know, website? Podcast?

Pete Blaber: You know, online resource. That's a tough one. I, you know, I go to a bunch of different news, try to get my, you know, find the most truthful in there, and then podcasts. I like the team house. I just did that.

Jon Becker: What's the most important characteristic of an effective leader?

Pete Blaber: The ability to make common sense decisions and solve problems. It's decision making, problem solving. That's what, to me, leadership is. It's the only litmus. You can be funny, you can be handsome or pretty or whatever. Nobody cares about that. Your job as a leader is to make good decisions and solve those complex problems. And if you can't do that and you don't love doing that, then you probably shouldn't be in a leadership position.

Jon Becker: What's something you've changed your mind about in the last few years?

Pete Blaber: Probably, you know, the whole conspiracy thing. I never thought, you know, I never was a big believer in. In what we thought were conspiracies. Now I see that, you know, conspiracies don't have to be explicit. They can just be a bunch of people with a common interest who tacitly agree to collude with each other for that, you know, that self centered purpose.

And I think what we've seen, you know, in our country over these last years has changed the way I think about potential for some of these outlandish things to happen and specifically for our freedoms to be taken away.

Jon Becker: Last question. What's the most profound memory of your career?

Pete Blaber: Probably, you know, now it's this. The interaction with the Tillman family and with the men of the platoon, we didn't mention it here, but, you know, there were casualties in the firefight and then the follow on casualties. I'd never seen such devastation, PTSD devastation as I saw with the platoon. And here we are 19 years later. These men are all in the prime of their lives. They're now in their mid and early forties. Some of them can't work. At least two of them are still battling suicidal thoughts. And most of this came from not being told what really happened, not having access to knowledge.

So when I get on the phone with these guys, you know, after studying these 3500 pages, the terrain, putting everything together, you know, each guy, I'd say, wait a minute. Have you read any of the investigations? The answer is always no. And then I'd go on to tell them what really happened and to tell them, hey, you did nothing wrong. That was not your fault.

There's nothing you could have done in that situation. You couldn't see, you couldn't hear. You shot where your squad leader shot. Stop beating yourself up for it. And the reaction from these guys was like I was giving water to someone crawling out of the desert. Unbelievable gratitude, which I deflected.

I said, you don't owe me any thanks, you know, but the military owes you an apology and, you know, the government owes you an apology. You were put through the wringer over nothing and just that, you know, that feedback from the guys and of course, the family misses Tillman, especially to me. Washington, you know, if not the most rewarding tied for the most rewarding thing I'd ever experienced in my military career.

Jon Becker: Pete, thank you so much for your service to the country, for your work on leadership and for taking the time to sit down with me today on the debrief!

Pete Blaber: Thanks, Jon! I enjoyed it!

Episode 25 – Lessons Learned From 5 Decades of Police Leadership

Jon Becker: This is the second part of a series of discussions with Mike Albanese, a true legend who is one of only three people who have served at all ranks in LAPD D-Platoon, Chief Mike Albanese. Mike has spent 52 years in law enforcement with 37 of those spent at LAPD, 26 of which were spent at SWAT and crisis negotiation.

Mike is one of only a handful of people to have ever served in the ten David, or SWAT commander role at LAPD. And since retiring, Mike has served as a captain, deputy chief, and is currently the chief of police for the Burbank, California Police Department.

In this episode, we discuss Mike's second career at Burbank PD, his views on leadership, and discuss the lessons learned from a lifetime of service.

My name is Jon Becker. For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Mike, thanks so much for coming back and sitting down with me!

Mike Albanese: My pleasure!

Jon Becker: I'd like to pick up from the point that you retire from LAPD, looking at the arc of your career now you retire out of D-Platoon.

Mike Albanese: I do.

Jon Becker: So you retire after. Was it 13 years? How long were you there as ten David?

Mike Albanese: No, it was just there 9 years. So it was like 27, 28 years in D team officer, sergeant and ten David officer.

Jon Becker: So there have only been a handful of people, if I remember correctly, that have been there at all of the ranks. I think it's. Is it you and Lee McMillian and Jeff Rogers? And Jeff Rogers are the only three that have been there?

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So how long are you retired before somebody says, hey, how would you like to work for Burbank PDD?

Mike Albanese: So what, about 13 months? So just from a personal position at that time in my life, is that the day I retired, I just, I didn't look at my watch anymore. I drove slower. I was at peace with myself because I told myself, they don't owe me anymore. They are not going to phone me anymore. They're not going to phone me at 1, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. They're not going to phone me on Christmas day when we're sitting down to have dinner. They don't owe me anymore. So I am done with law enforcement.

Jon Becker: Yeah, but from a context, standpoint, you spent more than two decades.

Mike Albanese: Yes.

Jon Becker: On call. And is Tim David always on call?

Mike Albanese: In fact, if the phone didn't ring at night, because it wasn't necessarily that you're going to roll out of. It could be some consultation. It could be. This is what we got going. What do you think? At 02:00 in the morning, they're energized. I'm half asleep.

So then I get a call from Chief Scott Lachoss, who was my bureau chief when I worked at LAPD, and said, hey, we're doing some organizational restructuring. He was just appointed to the Burbank Police Department's chief of police, and this is in 2010. Would you consider being part of the command staff? It'll be for six months.

Jon Becker: Famous last words.

Mike Albanese: Right. So cross staff with my wife. Six months, not a problem. So six months. And I'm in my 14th year. So it's been a great journey. It's been challenging personally and professionally. It has been very stimulating. It has introduced me to different aspects of community, law enforcement and government. Community government.

And so what I share with people now, kind of tongue in cheek, is that I have become what I have had disdain for 40 years. I am now a bureaucrat.

Jon Becker: So from racehorse to plow horse.

Mike Albanese: And that's it. But I've enjoyed the journey and we'll see how it ends.

Jon Becker: So when do you become chief of Burbank PD?

Mike Albanese: So that was in 21st July 21, 22. So you're a. I've been chief for two and a half years. Two years.

Jon Becker: Two years?

Mike Albanese: Two years.

Jon Becker: So you're moving from one of the….

Mike Albanese: Here's the deal. The dates don't matter anymore. They really don't. When you're in my former life, they mattered. I can give you the dates that came on, the dates that I promoted, the dates that I went here and there. Here. It didn't matter. I was the DC, the deputy chief for six years and then a short period of time, interim chief, and I've been the chief for, you know, two plus years.

Jon Becker: So you went from one of the largest agencies in the United States to a smaller agency?

Mike Albanese: We would be considered a mid sized agency.

Jon Becker: How many officers do you have?

Mike Albanese: So we're authorized 160. So have another 120 plus as far as non sworn staff. So just under 300?

Jon Becker: Just under 300.

Mike Albanese: Not counting volunteers and crossing guards.

Jon Becker: How did the LAPD experience inform you to run an organization? How did the culture contrast between the two agencies there? Talk to me about that.

Mike Albanese: Okay. So I'm going to fast forward to where I'm at today. It's shared with me what not to do, what not to do, and where we weren't successful at Lep, where we can be successful here. So, first of all, it's delivering marquee police service.

So that is developing personnel to deliver service on any call for services for LAPD. It's just not mandatory. The call load for them is voluminous. Voluminous. So they work, they try very hard. Good service. But we here, I can say with absolute confidence, you can walk down the hallway, go out into the parking lot, talk to any of our officers here, and they will tell you the service that we deliver. And I bleed LAPD blue. And I very passionate about the organization, just anecdotally about me. My grandfather was on the job.

Jon Becker: Oh, really?

Mike Albanese: So he was on the job under 30 years. His brother was on the job. My godfather was killed on the job. So from 1923 to 2023, there's been someone in law enforcement in our family. My oldest daughter's in law enforcement. Her husband's in law enforcement. My middle daughter, her husband's in law enforcement. So this is a service that I've embraced for many years.

So I look at large and mid size as far as how we can be the best. So the quest here, and it can be achievable, is to be really one of the best law enforcement agencies in the region. So that's training. That's who we hire. That's the service we provide, the equipment that we have. And it involves sworn and also non sworn. And the non sworn component is an essential part of what we do to deliver professional police service.

Jon Becker: I would love to, you know, 52 years in law enforcement. Right? Like, living through many of the most provocative and transformative times. I would love to just kind of conclude our time together, talking about leadership and talking about kind of your views on a variety of subjects, if you wouldn't mind.

Mike Albanese: So I'll probably be all over the place here. The most critical part is communicating with your folks. So I'll give you the example. And this is going to be odd for some folks, is that in this organization, in LAPD, is that they didn't use the locker room. First day heroes in the locker room. I change out every day, even now in the locker room, just like the officers. That's where I started and that's where I'm going to end.

And it was a little odd and unsettling for some of the folks because you're in the locker room, but I work out at the gym here sometimes, but I'm in the locker room. I start my day, I finish in the locker room, and it gives me an opportunity for casual conversations.

So I work hard to know every officer, to know their first name, to know if they're married, if they have children, because their life outside of law enforcement is impacts how they work. Yesterday I met with the some sergeants and FTOs, and I try to personalize that as much as I can as far as I could, as far as defining expectations.

For the most part, folks will know what the – or believe. They know what the expectations are, but they need to hear it from you. And like I told them, I'm depending on you to do a really good job of developing our officers so that they are well rounded, productive police officers serving our community.

And so work, work hard on that. I typically, every day I try to do at least one lap around the building to stop at the comm center. Maybe not as frequently as I should go through records, the jail, not so much, but periodically. So one, they know that I'm in the building, that I'm paying attention, and that their service is valued. They are needed to make us successful.

So communication, being present, and also listening to your folks. And this is when I talk about smalls matter. So if there's a small. Ask a small b****, is it something that is doable? Is it reasonable? Is it for the betterment of the organization? If we can turn that around in a short period of time, that is a big, big deal.

Jon Becker: One of the things you mentioned there in passing, but I think is worth kind of digging into, is you run an almost equal size sworn and non sworn staff.

Mike Albanese: Yes.

Jon Becker: And although they both contribute differently to the organization, I know that you're a big proponent of the non sworn staff side of the house. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Mike Albanese: So you have to think about it. And I didn't pay attention to it in my former life. I really didn't. You take a lot for granted. I took the non sworn for granted. I mean, I recognized him and thanked them, but I just didn't recognize him like I do today. And the same with city government. As far as paying attention to city government, what your city council, your city manager, what are their goals? What are their objectives?

So that we can be part of that, as far as making it happen for them. And if it is going to require equipment, training, personnel, I can talk or speak intelligently to them and say, look, this is what your goal is for 2035. That's great, but this is what we're going to need, so that that goal comes to fruition. So for our non sworn folks is it all starts in the comm center, 911 calls. So 911 calls.

So if you're in trouble, you need help, you have a question, you have a medical emergency, you phone 911. And if you have a locked on 911 center, comm center, then the foundation is at a good place, and then you build from there. And who manages the evidence?

So evidence is a big deal as far as that chain of custody, how it comes in, how it's memorialized, that's non sworn for records, it's important for prosecutorial considerations, it's important for the detectives, it's important for all of us. And if there's a question from the community of how many of these crimes or this and that, it's typically going to go to an analyst who's going to go to records to get that information.

So everybody has to work together so that we can, and I've overstated it many times, deliver professional police services, and then you have a jail, we have a jail. So there's custodial issues. Are we in compliance with the feds, in compliance with the state so that there's no issues there? And simply put, we're open 24/7. We never close the building doesn't get a break. The vehicles, for the most part, don't get a break. We're here 24/7 so I'll tell you a proud moment.

So the proud moment was during COVID. So COVID, in within 48 hours, this department moved the organization so that we can address all of the issues associated with COVID and the restrictions and their compliances and all of that, so that we can provide police services. Now we're going into people's homes that may be ill or don't want us inside their homes. We are still stopping people in the street.

We have a jail, we're transporting them. All those things became significant as far as how we manage it. A simple thing. Like every day we had a service come in and detail, decon our cars, because we had officers going in the cars, officers coming from home. Officers are going back to their home so that we don't, in fact, them. We're transporting people. We're transporting people to jail, we're going to hospital, all of that.

So it's not only the mask and the gloves and are we coming into your home, but all of that had to be considered, and we had to move the organization 24 hours. This is what we didn't have. We had no pushback. Everyone showed up to work. There was no pushback at all.

There was other organizations that were challenged because they were concerned about their own safety, medical safety, if you will, going home after working in the public where you had this pandemic. So very proud of the organization. Our officers, sworn and non sworn, recognized how important it was for them to be here.

At the height of COVID, I had 27 folks off at one time, 27 sworn, 27. So you start doing the math as far as days off and how are we going to be able to have enough officers to deploy and folks stepped up. Stepped up big time. So for in the review process. And we ended up doing a after action, port after action report on what we did, what worked, what didn't work. Very proud of the organization.

The other thing too, just prosecutorial stuff, is that now we're doing trials from our jail, we're doing prelims remotely. So everything changed and we were able to adjust to those changes and did it exceptionally well.

Jon Becker: Which I guess is a testament to organizational flexibility. Right. It is having a mindset and a leadership team that recognize that. I always jokingly say I've been self-employed since I was 17 years old. Every day I have been unqualified for the job that I had because my job was different than it was the day before. But I think that the mindset of organizational flexibility and this look at what do we do when presented with challenge and how do we react to it.

Mike Albanese: Okay, so look at where I came from and some of the other folks came from, is that you come from that SWAT model where features change in 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. So in this circumstance with COVID the pandemic is it was constantly changing. And our ability to move and to adjust was pretty much seamless. We had a really good command staff, my police administrator at the time. We would meet an hour a day to see what was needed so that we could make stuff happen. And we did it.

But what was important is that we didn't have pushback from our folks. Did not have pushback, is that they understood the mission. And this is where communication comes in. Why we're doing what we're doing, understand, is that we're going to close the lobby, but we have to make it available for folks. So how does that work? We are, our 911 center is that if it's an emergency, we're going to respond, but we're going to ask more questions.

As far, is this something that we can do? Telephonically or do you want an officer at the scene when the officers get there, is there anything that they should know about inside the house? And are they okay going inside the house? Just balls like that. And it worked.

Jon Becker: Yeah. No, it's interesting because it's very much a – Almost like we talk a lot about in our organization, about Kaizen and this idea of constant improvement and small changes and using those things. And it's interesting now, looking back on your career, that has been a theme since the beginning.

And it makes me think one of the challenges that organizations are having right now, apart from staffing, which is a huge problem for organizations, but we'll come back to that, is that frequently the most talented people in the organization are in the SWAT team and SWAT teams, especially in full time agent, you know, full time teams in agencies have kind of been places that guys go and they retire from.

And it's true of most of the guys I know in the D-team, they get there and then they don't leave. And it's great for the team. It's a challenge for the organization. I'm wondering now, retrospectively what your thoughts on that are.

Mike Albanese: So, again, you're very astute. So you have all this talent, all this leadership, all this knowledge, and it's sequestered into one model. Try to encourage folks to promote all the time. If all those guys spent five to seven years and promoted out, probably would have a better organization. But they love the mission, they love the camaraderie, they love their teammates, and they just don't want to leave. I was a police officer for 17 years before I promoted. I did not want to leave.

So I understand that dynamic, but for the organizational good is that we invested all this time money, and you have all this institutional knowledge, or all this knowledge is that share it with other folks and there'll be good sergeants, lieutenants and staff officers moving up. So you're spot on. This is kind of silly, but you can cut it out. I don't care is that I'm a woodworker. I have a hobby. And I would also encourage folks is that not to be one dimensional, have something else in your life. Have something else in your life that you. That energizes and stimulates you.

So I have a big word, working shop. And I would also know that if I was getting ready to glue up a big project, that the worst thing that could happen is that I have a call up. So I have wood glue all over the place, and then I have to leave it, and then I'm going to script the project. So I would literally phone the metro desk and I'd go, I just. Is there anything percolating? Because if there is, I'm not going to glue up. And they would laugh and I'm sure made commentary about it, but I didn't want to screw up project.

But I also knew that when the phone rang, is that it went from the shop to the car to the call up. So, you know, this is what I would encourage folks to do, is have something hobby wise, something that is going to interest you that separates from an all consuming job.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's balance. Right. It's finding balance. And I think that that kind of goes into, you know, a topic that I know is near and dear to your heart, which is staff wellness. Right? It's as leaders trying to ensure that those we lead are healthy, happy people.

Mike Albanese: So, the suicide rate in law enforcement is staggering right now. I have known more than one that have committed suicide, and it is just confounding. In fact, the one that's very personal to me. I actually recruited him on the job, and if you had given me a list of 100 names, he would be 100. He would be the 100th guy that I would have believed that was at risk of committing suicide.

So it speaks to – You just don't know. You don't know what's going on in their personal life, in their professional life. And once they move to that dark, dark place and we've dealt with them, any negotiator will tell you is that it's really hard to move them because it is not a rational thing. You're bringing rational words into someone who is not rational.

So we have a pretty robust wellness program here, and I think it's essential for law enforcement. The era that I grew up in is that that was foreboding. Is that if you had an issue, just deal with it. But folks are exposed to just horrendous things. And it doesn't have to be a gun battle. It can be a traffic accident. We had right up this street here, and I'm pointing is that two years ago we had a multi three fatal body parts were all over the place, and it was horrid.

Who's going to investigate that? It's going to be our officers. What non sworn folks are going to come out and photograph that scene over and over again? It's going to be our non sworn folks. So their care in the moment and post moment has got to be a priority for the organization. So the wellness of our staff, sworn and non sworn, is in a good place.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think there is – The dialogue has started and I think is improving in this area. I recently interviewed Tom Satterlee, who is a delta operator and wrote a fantastic book called all secure that talks about how he was when he came out, and suicide and PTSD, you know, I think we cannot talk about it enough. We recently, like, within the last two weeks, lost a friend of suicide. That was same thing. Kind of unexpected, kind of the guy you didn't expect. And I don't think it's possible to overemphasize the need as. As leaders to know your people and know what. Where they are on the Maslow triangle.

Mike Albanese: And that's why communicating with your folks, in my position right now, uh, the reality is I'm probably going to be the last to know on a lot of this stuff. If someone's going through a divorce, someone's got an issue, or some type of personal crisis. But, uh, every family, no one is immune from a medical issue, uh, some other catastrophic event in their life.

So you just need to pay attention to that. And it's. And it's okay to get some help because the number of years that we have in life, we want to optimize on those years. And I want folks to separate from this organization. Healthy, healthy. I want them to look back and go, I had a good career, I was productive. And in my last season, it's going to be a healthy season.

Jon Becker: I think one of the problems that we're seeing right now with law enforcement is, you know, it is extremely difficult. You know, as somebody who's dealing with police departments all over the world, everybody's at 60, 70% staffing. Everybody is struggling. You know, teams that I've talked to, chiefs of police, are like, you know, we used to get 300 applicants, now we get 35. What are your views on what we as a society need to do to improve what is currently going on in law enforcement? Like, if Mike is the czar for the world today, what do we change?

Mike Albanese: So that's a tough one. Uh, and, uh, your illustrations. Right. Uh, so, uh, wheel back to 1971. So it started the process in 70, and there were thousands of applicants for the job at LAPD. They're down over 1000 officers. CHP is down. Long beach sheriffs are down. We're down 1212 bodies, which is significant. It's not 10%, but it's 8%, which is significant. And the candidate pool is very small. We're vying for the same candidates.

So for us, if we have two or three in the hopper, we're typically competing with Glendale, Pasadena, and maybe one of the bigger departments. So how fast we move is important. The job is complicated. It's difficult. We're asking folks to know a lot of information, to be subject matter experts in a lot of areas, from law to per se to driving to, you name it, to be a family mediator, if you will.

And on top of that, you're going to put a camera or a TV on their vest. And everything they do, every word they used, is going to be memorialized forever. And we're going to review it and we're going to look at it and we're going to be critical of that review process. The national narrative has not been helpful at all. It takes one or two events somewhere in the nation that changes law enforcement folks. Most folks support and embrace law enforcement. Loud voices that have disdain for law enforcement want to defund law enforcement.

And when you have that narrative every single day and you're just getting out of college, you're getting out of the military, you're working at Best Buy and looking for a career, you go, you know what? I think I'll pass on that. I work for Apple, Google or whatever. So you have that dynamic. You also have the dynamic of kids today. I don't know if they have the heart to serve as far as the numbers. They have the heart to serve because we have folks doing some remarkable things but are not that service oriented.

When you look at the service groups, it's going to be middle aged or older, whereas before a lot of service groups, you would have a cross section age demographic. You're not seeing that now. And it also is with families. You may. That's one of the questions that we ask during the Chiefs oral, is that do you have family support? Does your family support you going into this career?

For the most part, it's yes, but sometimes they'll say no, the family really doesn't support it. They'd rather me go into a different type of work. My family, my parents did not support me going into law enforcement because my mother's father was in law enforcement. He was a homicide detective that was on call all the time, and she never saw him. And they were not supportive. They were after I got through the whole process and then moved forward in my career. So I understand it.

When my daughter went on the job, I said, you're kidding me. And she goes, yeah, I remember we were at a dinner table and she goes, what do you think of Beverly Hills police department? I said, it's a great police department. What do you think about me going on? I said, stop it. What are you thinking? And she's had a great career. Her husband's had a great career. It's just a challenge. I work out every day and at the gym, if there's some new young folks there, I try to engage them to see if there's an interest. And my success has been zero. Absolutely zero. Most of these folks have an interest in other career paths.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think we've done a very good job of vilifying and demonizing our police departments. And, you know, one of my favorite sayings, my friend Toby Darby from Glendale PD is known to say is play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I think we've been playing stupid games for quite a few years, and we're beginning to win stupid prizes. And it troubles me because, you know, I see teams all over the world are short staffed. Departments all over the world are short staffed.

Mike Albanese: And so, having said that, is it, again, is it, how agile can you be being short staff? It's a challenge. It's a challenge. But if you hire the right folks, have the heart to serve, that are mission driven, you still can be successful. And we've done a fine job. Very proud of our organization, very proud of our folks because they have embraced the mission and so they have the interest in serving and they. They do a good job.

Jon Becker: Let's just do two more quick topics with you before we end. First one is decision making.

Mike Albanese: Yep.

Jon Becker: So, I mean, obviously, you know, you've been in positions for most of your career and most of your adult life where you've had to make very difficult decisions consistently. What would your advice be for young leaders on decision making?

Mike Albanese: So don't be afraid of making a decision, and don't be afraid of making the wrong decision. So typically what I've seen is that folks, and we had a short conversation about this, is that they want more information. They want more information so they can make an informed decision. You're not going to get that information. And when you're in the moment, is that the information you have, just understand what you have and what your rationale is for your decision.

So we all want more information, but you're not going to get the information. So the information that you have, optimize on that, make your decision, and then if you're critiqued afterwards, which you will be, is that okay? This is the rationale to my decision in that moment, at that time, this is what I knew, this is what I didn't know. These are the resources that I had, and I was confident that that was the right choice for that moment.

Jon Becker: I think it's kind of a trap, though, you know, as a guy who's made decisions to my – Again, leading an organization, making decisions constantly, never with complete information, I think it is a very seductive trap to think, oh, I just need this piece of information, and then I'll be able to make the decision. And at some point, the acquisition of information eliminates the need to make a decision, and so it becomes kind of a crutch.

Mike Albanese: Agreed. You just can't be afraid of making decisions. You got to understand you're going to make a wrong decision.

Jon Becker: 100%.

Mike Albanese: Yeah. And you're going to want to redo, and you're not going to get the redo. You can't recall the decision. Just stand up and say, look, I made the decision. Hindsight, with all the information I have right now, I would have made a different decision. I wished I could have reversed myself, or I rather, I would have reversed myself, but I didn't in the moment. And you'll be fine. Folks will accept that.

And that's why debriefs are so important, is that when you do point counterpoint with your peers, and we're all peers in that setting, and they'll go, well, why did you make that decision? And I'll say, this is. This is why. Hindsight, not the best decision. So that's it.

Let's move forward. And it's, you know, it's a challenge for some folks, and for other folks, it's not a challenge. You don't want to make rash decisions. It's also great if you have a sounding board, and, like, on personnel decisions, it's not unilateral. I usually meet confer staff, go point counterpoint.

And so this is where I'm leaning. Tell me what I'm missing, and you'll get good feedback. You may be right on, or you may be off base. You may have missed something, but it's part of doing the work that we do, and we make decisions every day. Patrol officers make critical decisions all the time. I would just ask that. This is what I do. I'll have a conversation with myself afterwards. I always give myself a letter grade. As far as that decision, is that A, B, C decision, or was that the A decision? And there are times that I reversed myself on decisions because it's just not the right decision.

So just declare it and move forward. Folks will understand that and respect that, but just understand that there's an expectation that you will make a decision. So I had a question yesterday that, in fact, I saw the lieutenant ask a question, because it was a great question. It was about probationary employees who are not meeting the training expectations. And as far as separating them from the organization, what's your position on that?

I told him it's typically a heavy sigh associated with that. I mean, I agonize over that. So I asked myself this. Is that, where did we fail as an organization? Fail's probably a little harsh. Was it the written? Was it the hiring process? Was it the academy training? Is it our FTO program? And the centerpiece there was for the FTOs? Are we falling short?

And if we are, then it's on us. And if it's just that, it's just not the right fit for that individual and us, then we separate. And I just want to make sure that we've exhausted all those training opportunities or development opportunities for that individual before we cut their losses.

Jon Becker: But it's interesting because a recurring theme in everything you're saying here is introspection. Right? Is taking a moment to really look at yourself. You know, you mentioned debriefs in passing, but I think I heard you speak at a counterterrorism conference. I think it was. And you were talking about debriefs kind of in passing, but it struck me that it's changed. Right? You go back to the early days just of my career. Early days of your career. Debriefs were a much more introspective and brutal process, and there was a lot more willingness to say, man, we really screwed this up.

What I see now developing, and it's not just in law enforcement, it's in the corporate world. It's everywhere, is an unwillingness to say you made a mistake for fear that you're going to be canceled. And so as a result, you don't improve, you stagnate. And when you do make mistakes, you either try to cover them up or you look at the positive things. And it feels to me like we need to go back to a much more introspective debrief. What are your thoughts on that?

Mike Albanese: So, I absolutely agree. So let's just start with the basic debrief. There's no absent Sid Heal. Who? Military. I think they have a structured debrief curriculum.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Albanese: So, for us in law enforcement, there's no structure. This is how you conduct a debrief. This is how you do it. So it's typically learned or past practice. So how does that model look? So, who starts the debrief? Who closes the debrief? If we had missteps, how is that addressed in the debrief? If there is a training issue, if there's an equipment issue, how is that addressed during the debrief?

So, I think at LAPD, we had a pretty good model. So, typically, the sergeant and the team leader would lead the debrief. So they would do the storyboard of why we got there, what the circumstances were, challenges that we were facing, and then ultimately, we'd go around the room, and this is where we defined expectations.

The expectation I have is that when we went around the room, is that you would remind us or tell us what your position was. I was on two, three corner. I had gas. I didn't see or hear anything. Or I was at two, three corners. I could hear all sorts of ruckus that was communicated. I ultimately put four rounds of tear gas in and could see them moving, communicated that, and he was ultimately. He or she was ultimately taken into custody.

If you miss something, the expectation that we had is that you would call it out. Is that I missed it. So I don't know if it was my comms. I did take my earpiece out, because when I went to put on my gas mask and something happened, I didn't want to step on anybody on the air, but there was a moment where I didn't have all the information. That's what I want to hear. If you had a misstep, if you had a misstep, is just declare the misstep and go, this is an opportunity. This is an opportunity for all of us to be better moving forward. I look at missteps as opportunities. So we have a misstep. So it's an opportunity. We can generate training around that.

Again, is there an equipment issue associated with that? Is there decision making associated with that? How does that look? So, exploit the opportunity. Exploit the misstep so that you're better moving forward.

So, with specialized units, whether it's R SWAT team, others, or even investigative or even patrol, is that if you get that kind of energy in a debrief, you will be successful? If you have someone that just puts her arms, folds her arms in kind of that negative body language and doesn't say anything, and they. They have information that would be helpful. They're undermining the process, and they need to be called out.

So going around the room, we'd call going around the horn was essential because everybody who was there, even if they were at the SWAT truck, provided commentary as far as the role and their belief on how it came out. Then in D-team, I would typically close it out so I'd recap it so to make sure that we had all the critical points that were exposed so that we can address them. And then it would be, does anybody have anything? Because once you go outside, there's no secondary debrief. If you have secondary debrief, we're going to call everybody back in and redo it.

So those folks were pretty good, but it's. There is, and I think I shared with you, there is a video, and it's a very dated video of the Blue Angels and their debrief. And what I really liked about it, we showed it to our folks a couple times because, again, there's no training curriculum, eight hour post class you can go to on debriefs. But what I liked about it, they were all self-effacing. They were all professionals. They knew there were professionals and they were self effacing as far as what went well.

And where the one guy I said, I turned, I'm going right, but I was actually turning left, whatever he called out. And, and, and that was important. So debriefs are healthy, even when you're uncomfortable, but it's okay to be uncomfortable. In fact, we probably should be more uncomfortable than comfortable. And moving forward, it is better for the organization better for your team if you're in a specialized unit.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's very easy to like making mistakes sucks. And making mistakes really sucks. That's the only way you improve. I remember I raced cars for a hobby. And I remember I went to the track. I spent the whole morning driving. I had not gone off track once. I had not spun the car. I was feeling like a [Crosstalk]

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: I go into lunch with my coach, he sits down, he goes, how do you feel about the morning? I said, I crushed it, didn't lose the track, didn't, you know, never went off track, never spun the car. I'm doing this. And he said, that's because you're slow. If you want to be fast, you have to be on the edge.

Mike Albanese: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And the thing is, if you want to improve, you have to take opportunities. You know, I love the term missteps or opportunities. And I think it is, it is a cultural question as to how you view mistakes. And if you view mistakes as this is an opportunity for us to get better, then it's a lot easier to address them.

Mike Albanese: It is. And there's a bigger picture and I'm kind of on top, but a little off topic. So what? In my former life, I didn't have to experience this. So if we have a misstep, so let's say driving, you crash a car, someone else's problem. Now in my position right now, it's my problem because I have to go to city council. I go into closed session, and I cross examine about the driving misstep.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Mike Albanese: So again, I hearken back to my CNT training. It's navigating that whole process is that you're going to have human failure, and they are humans. So it's going to happen. So as long as there's no malice, just understand that it's going to happen.

So it can happen here in law enforcement or on the PD side, the fireside, public works, water and power, they all have people. And people are going to drive cars. They're going to work equipment, they're going to have a misstep. They're going to cut a pipe that they shouldn't have cut. That's going to cost the city money, and that's what you need to pay attention to. Again, smalls matter.

Jon Becker: That's a great way to put it. Okay. I want to finish our time together by asking you five rapid fire questions.

Mike Albanese: Oh, God!

Jon Becker: So the goal here is one. Yeah. Short answer, initial off the top of your head reaction.

Mike Albanese: Right.

Jon Becker: What is your most important habit?

Mike Albanese: I'm very regimented as far as when I get up, get up and then go to the gym. So very regimented when it comes to that.

Jon Becker: What do you think the most important thing for building an effective team is?

Mike Albanese: Presence in communication.

Jon Becker: What's your current favorite online resource? Website? Podcast? Where do you go for information?

Mike Albanese: So I'm all over the place. I listen to a variety of podcasts. I like Mike Rowe because he listens to or interviews such very different individuals. The one individual that he interviewed had a GPA and is a PhD at Harvard. So how does that happen? So I listen to him.

Jon Becker: Interesting! What do you think the most important characteristic of an effective leader is?

Mike Albanese: There's gotta be humility. And just understand that you're not gonna know everything and you have to depend on people to pick you up when you're not seeing what other folks are seeing.

Jon Becker: Final question. You've been through 52 of the most advanced years, the most transformative years. What's the most profound memory of your career?

Mike Albanese: There's too many. I can't identify one. There are too many incidents, too many call ups that I'll think about, and I'll go, okay, that's it. And there's just been too many. So I wish I could give you one, but I really can't.

Jon Becker: Mike, thanks so much for doing this with me!

Mike Albanese: Hopefully, I didn't babble too much.

Jon Becker: That was fantastic!

Mike Albanese: Yeah. Okay, great!