Uncategorized Archives - The Debrief with Jon Becker

Episode 41 – Inside the NYPD Emergency Service Unit (ESU) Jon Becker: There may be no US tactical and rescue unit more well known than NYPDs emergency service unit, or ESU. Featuring a mission set that ranges from high angle ropes work to water rescue, from high risk search warrants to hostage rescue, and from CBRN response to counterterrorism, ESU has sometimes been described as 911 for NYPD. My guest today is Joe Bucchignano. Joe started his emergency service career in 1997, working as an EMT and completing paramedic school in 1999. Joe worked as a full time paramedic until 2003, when he joined the New York Police Department and spent his first seven years assigned to the 52nd precinct in Norwood section of the Bronx. In 2010, Joe was selected to join the ranks of NYPD's emergency service unit, where he spent the next 13 years of his career. During his tenure, Joe's assignment included patrol in ESU, truck three and truck one, being an adjunct instructor and medical instructor at ESU Specialized training School, and he finished his career as a full time member of the ESU apprehension team. Joe also served with New York Task Force one, a joint police and fire urban search and rescue team, which is part of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue response system. There, he deployed several times to natural disasters within the United States as a rescue and logistics specialist. Joe retired from the NYPD in June of 2023 and now serves as an assistant paramedic coordinator for an EMS agency in Westchester County, New York. He's also the founder of Crisis Zone Consulting, a multidisciplinary training and consulting company that works with public safety agencies, private entities, and individuals to enhance their organizational and individual emergency preparedness. I'm excited to share my chat with Joe because it gives us an inside view of one of the world's premier units, including how they train, how they operate, how they manage, their ridiculously diverse skillset, and the lessons learned from a career in ESU. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Joe Bucchignano! 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! Joe, thanks so much for being here with me! I'm excited to talk to you today! Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Jon! I really appreciate the opportunity! We've been trying to do this for a while, so I'm glad that we finally found some time to get together. Jon Becker: Yep, 100%. So talk to me. Why don't we start with, like, you know, give me Joe's career arc. Joe Bucchignano: I mean, realistically, my career arc goes back to, like, when I was 14 years old. That's kind of when I started getting involved in EMS. I grew up in Yorktown, New York, a suburban community of New York City. And at the time, I had to do some community service, and not for, like, criminal reasons, but for religious reasons. And at the time, my neighbor was the captain of our local voluntary ambulance corps. And, you know, he kind of said, hey, you know, we have a youth group program for high school kids. Why don't you come check it out, see if you like it, you know, and you can do your community service through there. And that just – That got me hooked, you know, that was kind of my start into emergency services kind of as a whole. And so I did the volunteer ambulance stuff kind of all through high school, and finished up the EMT school right before I graduated high school. And I had all these anticipations of going off to college and doing the pre med thing and the medical school thing, and just spent a little too much in year one at college doing things other than studying. And so the college thing didn't really work out for me. And so I came back home and went to paramedic school. Finished up medic school in 99, and started a career in paramedicine. And unlike other places or parts of the country, here, especially in New York and in the areas surrounding New York City, the paramedic stuff is really not a career. It's more of a launching pad for people to go into other career fields related, whether it's nursing or PA school or law enforcement, fire department, there's just more of a career path in there. So I can remember back in fourth grade, I had a friend of mine at the time whose father was a police officer, and he had brought in this book to school one day. It was a book by Samuel Katz that was NYPD life on the streets with the NYPD's emergency service unit. And I checked this book out, and I was just enamored. The guys and girls in that book, they were just like gods and goddesses to me. I was like, man, what a cool job. I would love to do something like that one day. And so I was working as a paramedic, and I just kind of took the NYPD exam more as a fluke than anything else, kind of take it and, hey, see what happens. And I got a letter from them, like, hey, you want to come in for start your process? Yeah, why not? Might as well. Doesn't hurt to do it. And next thing I know, like, six months later, it was like, hey, we're offering you a job. And so I made the transition from working full time ems as a paramedic into the police academy in July of 2003. And I graduated the police academy right before New Year's. So my first night out on the street, like so many other cops that have graduated, at the end of December, was, you know, New Year's Eve and Times Square. Jon Becker: Oh, God! Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. Thrown to the fire, so, yeah, that's. Jon Becker: Losing your virginity to a gang range. My God, man! Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, the job really knows how to just throw you right into the mix, so. But, yeah, it was a great experience, you know, like, definitely one of those, like, iconic moments. Like, you know, here you were. Here I was, like, six months ago, just working as a paramedic, and then here I was six months later, like, standing in Times Square New year's Eve. Never experienced anything like that before. I was not growing up, other than going to Madison Square Garden for, like, ranger games, I was really not much of a city dweller, so it was overwhelming, to say the least. Jon Becker: Yeah. Six months ago you're a paramedic, now you're arresting Times Square Elmo. Joe Bucchignano: Oh, yeah, it was. It was good, you know? Jon Becker: So what made you select into ESU? Like, I mean, so it's. It's a lifelong dream. You do seven years ish in 52nd precinct. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, I was in the five two precinct, which covers, like, Norwood University Heights, you know, by Marshall Parkway in the Bronx. So I ended up there, like, right out of the police academy and did my initial field training there, and then did mostly patrol there. I did some small condition stuff in one of the units, and then did some highway safety stuff, believe it or not, just writing tickets. So I kind of went from that, and ESU had a – And they still do to this day. But in order to apply for ESU, you have to have a minimum of five years with the department before they'll even let you apply for it. And so I waited, and ESU typically puts in one class a year. So the day that I hit five years of service, my application was, like, filled out, went down to the personnel office down at one police plaza, dropped off the application, and then there was basically an ESU, for lack of a better term, hiring freeze. So I sat there in purgatory for two years, three years, until they finally had put in the next class. And I got picked up in that class in 2010. So it was, the great thing about the NYPD is just there's something for everyone. There's so many different units. And I mean, you can go from being, if you enjoy photography, they have a film and TV unit. If you are an artist, you can go and do profile sketches and so on and so forth. So there's just so many units. But I really had, from the day I entered the police academy, my mindset that that was where I wanted to go. It was just that type of work, especially with my paramedic background, that just really attracted me to that unit specifically. Jon Becker: So you get to ESU and where do you go? Joe Bucchignano: So my first assignment was a squad three emergency service. Squad three, which is up in the Bronx, basically covers I the 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49 in the Bronx, which is essentially the South Bronx, from kind of the Manhattan border all the way through the South Bronx, all the way up the east side of the Bronx, up to the Westchester county line. So I started out there in squad one on the scooter chart, worked with some real senior guys, some great guys, definitely got immersed into the ESU life, and those guys were just really great at welcoming me and kind of getting me spun up. Because realistically, I think it's like anything else you go through. You know, at the time, the school was about seven months long. You go through seven months of training. When you graduate, you get to a truck and you realize you don't know anything, you know? And so now you're really learning. Once you get out to a truck and you start doing, you know, Esu patrol stuff. So I spent the first couple months there on a scooter chart, doing a kind of a flip flop of days and four to twelve tours. And then maybe six or seven months after I got to the truck, I went to steady midnights and I spent a – my whole time in truck three on, on, or the remainder of my time in truck three on midnight. And then from there, I transferred down to truck one. When I had about maybe six or seven years in the unit, I transferred down to truck one. The opportunity kind of was presented to me by the truck one lieutenant at the time, and truck one is known as the Hollywood truck, you know. And so I kind of said, like, yeah, I mean, I like change and trying different things and going different places. So I was doing a training stint at the time with two of the subunits that the department had created to help out with some of the counterterrorism efforts, which was the strategic response group, or SRG, and then the critical response command, CRC. So we, myself and four or five other guys were kind of tasked up with training up these new units and very basic kind of tactics and active shooter response. They were outfitted with long guns and helmets, plate carriers. And so we kind of working them through some team tactics stuff and deploying long guns in kind of a CQB environment. And so maybe my last year that I was officially assigned to three truck. That's what I was doing. And then when that kind of wrapped up and finished, I ended up down in truck one in Manhattan. So that was a different flavor of work. Truck three was a lot of what we called perp work, a lot of tactical work up there in the Bronx doing midnights. We had a fair number of highways, and because we were kind of out there on the road, we would sort of be first at a lot of pin jobs, we call them, which were, you'll see the NYPD's got a ton of vernaculars. I'm going to try not to go crazy with the vernaculars, but it's like a whole other language in a language. So we would get a lot of vehicle extrication calls on the midnights, especially on the highways, and you would get the occasional jumper, a lot of emotionally disturbed persons. So that was kind of the bread and butter work up there. Truck one, definitely a different vibe, different environment. Truck one covered Manhattan south, basically from Battery park all the way up to 59th street. So just kind of the south edge of Central park there. And that was definitely more rescue oriented work. A lot of water jobs, a lot of jumpers, a lot of rope jobs. So definitely a different type of work. Not as much, you know, tactical work. Then I was doing up in truck three, and then, yeah. Jon Becker: Good for those that don't know, like Manhattan. Like that's basically the south end of the island, right? It's the end of the island. And it's surrounded by the rivers and high rise buildings. Joe Bucchignano: East river on the east side, and you got the Hudson river on the west side. And that's basically the heart of, you know, new York City. When, you know, if you're a tourist and you think New York City, that's, that's truck one's area. And, you know, that's why it has the nickname of the Hollywood truck, because, you know, that's where a lot of news agencies are as well. And so, you know, being in truck one, you constantly ended up in the paper or on the news or something like that. Jon Becker: Yeah. And for those that are uninformed, like the World Trade center is in truck one's area. Joe Bucchignano: Yes, that's correct. Jon Becker: Wall street is in truck one's area. Joe Bucchignano: Wall Street, Battery park. Yeah. Times Square, Empire State Building. All the major iconic, you know, Statue of Liberty. So all the major iconic kind of tourist spots really are sitting in truck one's area of responsibility. Jon Becker: Literally every New York postcard is located in truck one. Joe Bucchignano: That's a good way to put it. Yeah, yeah. Maybe with the exception of Yankee Stadium. Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. Fair, fair. So, okay. And just for, you know, I'll periodically pull in NYPD vernacular. So EDP, emotional, emotionally disturbed person. Joe Bucchignano: Yes. Jon Becker: Which is I'm sure we're going to use regularly because EDP is a frequent topic with ESU. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, it's definitely the bread and butter of a lot of what we do. Jon Becker: Yes, it is. So, okay, so you're. You do truck one for several years, and then what makes you want to move to a…. Joe Bucchignano: So, you know, prior to that, I got pulled down to our specialized training school out at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn as an adjunct instructor. But more so, I have a knack for PowerPoint and lesson plans. And so, like anywhere else, you know, when they see that you have a strength in something, they want to utilize that. And so I basically went down there to kind of just help out on the administrative side of the school with kind of updating a lot of our lesson plans and training programs and stuff like that. And so I went down there, did some adjunct instructor work for about a year, and it was partially missing being on the street definitely played a part in me wanting to get out of there. And then it was also some differences of opinions that I had with some of the command staff there that, you know, an opportunity came up for me and an offer came up for me to go up to the apprehension team, and I jumped all over it at the chance. I had done a rotation with the apprehension team back in what I say, maybe 2012 or 13, I had maybe two or three years in the unit, and we can get into the A team and how it operates and what the rotation means and stuff like that. I guess later I'd went there for rotation, had a blast. Absolutely loved it! And then after my rotation was up, went back to truck three and then continued my time in ESU. And when the sergeant that was in charge of the A Team at the time, who's still the sergeant in charge of it now, reached out to me, and he basically said, hey, listen, we got an opening up here. We would love to have you. What are your thoughts? And I said, I'm packing my bags, you know, basically, when can I start? You know, put me in, coach. So, yeah, so I made the move up to the apprehension team. And I gotta say, like, you know, throughout my whole career in ESU, I worked really with some. Some great people. And everywhere I worked had things about it that I absolutely loved. But those last two years or so of my career, two and a half years up at the apprehension team, was really the best two, two and a half years of my 20 year career with the department. Jon Becker: Well, if you look at ESU as an elite selected unit within NYPD and a sought after unit, the A team is certainly, even within ESU is this unique small cell that does this very interesting job that we'll talk about. I mean, it's, you know, out of, you know, whatever, 18,000 NYPD cops. There's a dozen guys in the 18. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, like, I'm never one to throw around the word elite when it. When it comes to the unit. I mean, I think that there's, you know, there's some guys there that have done just, you know, some real amazing things. And every cop has. You know, the thing about ESU, really, is you spend any amount of time in there, and you're going to be tested. There's no question about it. Not just necessarily on a tactical assignment. It could be anything. But you're going to be tested, and you're going to have your moment in the sun. That's normal for everyone. The thing with the A team is that we were not necessarily better than the guys out in the trucks. We weren't any more elite than the guys in the trucks. The advantage that we had was that we were very singular focused. Our whole job, there was just tactical work, and that was it. And specifically the execution of search warrants. And so because we were kind of singular focused, we were able to just devote 100% of our training and attention and everything else to that one single task that we did day in and day out. Whereas when you're in the truck, I mean, the litany of things that you're responsible for and have to know and have to be competent at, just, it grows exponentially from there. And so that was, like, the biggest benefit that we had was that kind of just laser focus and singular focus on a very specific task that we were given. And that's kind of what made us maybe a little bit more efficient in the way that we did things was just because we were doing the same things kind of day in and day out. Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, even. Even people in the law enforcement community, people who, you know, I know that are well versed, don't really understand ESU. It is – Of all the units that I've dealt with and all the units I've interacted with, it is probably the most mysterious. Not because it tries to be intentionally mysterious, because it is very difficult to put it into any box that makes sense in any other police department in the United States. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, it definitely is. It's very unique in terms of the mission set that it has. And historically, ESU, for the most part, was a group of relatively silent professionals. It was very frowned upon. I can remember when I was a new guy in truck three, and I had posted something very innocuous on social media, and I immediately got called out on it. We don't do that. We don't advertise what we do. We don't look for pats in the back and so on and so forth. And that was a big learning lesson for me. And so there really hasn't been, I think, more so lately, especially with them being in the spotlight a little bit more in some of the bigger assignments that have happened that have kind of hit news, whether it's local or national. Obviously, after 911, that was a very big moment for ESU because they lost the most number of guys. Out of the 23 police officers that were killed, the majority of them came from emergency service. And so I think that kind of that silent professional mindset as well as you see these guys walking around or driving these trucks with these big utility bodies on them, and they're breaking out tools, and you're like, are these guys plumbers? Are they handymen? Are they tactical guys? We can't quite figure out what these guys do. And the real funny part about that is it wasn't until a few years ago that the sergeant who is running the specialized training schools, he's been in that position for a while and a wealth of knowledge. He said, we really need to do kind of an orientation with people that want to come to the unit before they even go for an interview, because a lot of patrol cops don't even understand the work that we do. And we would get, you know, you know, guys and girls that would end up, getting, you know, making it through selection, and they would join, you know, they would go to the specialized training school for their initial train up, and, you know, they would at one point maybe say, what do you mean? I got to get in that water? I didn't know you guys did that. And it was like, how do you not know that we did that? Like, you applied to come to this unit. You don't know what we do. And so, you know, there were police officers just within our own department that had no clue what we do. And now we get people that show up for that orientation, and they, they go through the videos and the PowerPoint, and they explain to him, hey, this is what's going to be expected of you as an e man. And we get people that say, nope, not for me. Thanks, but no thanks. And they walk out and we'd never, you know, never hear from again, never see them again. So, you know, it's just funny that even with their own department, that that holds. Jon Becker: True. Yeah, but. But I mean, to be fair, Joe, like, there, there are a certain number of phobias that human beings have, right? Confined space, high places, somebody shooting at you, water, darkness. It is literally like animals. ESU's mission is almost like a who's who in fears and phobias. And it's fascinating because when you look at the mission set and you look at kind of the origin story of the unit, it is unique. And I use that term as a guy who's done this for 38 years and dealt with thousands of tactical units. There is no, the closest equivalent I can come up with is LA sheriff's, SCB. And even there, they're split into different teams. Right? So it's, I guess it probably. It probably merits going back to the origin story. Right? So ESU's formed in 25? Joe Bucchignano: So the. The official ESU as we know it, know of it today was, was officially formed April 16, 1930. Now, I'm not an ESU historian. There's guys in the unit who are much better historians than I am. So I'm going to try to do this some justice. But if you go back to 1925, there were emergency automobile squads. There were two of them, squad one and squad two. One was based in Manhattan, two was based in the Bronx. And just like to the origins of ESU, the whole purpose of these squads was to really assist the police officer on patrol, just to be able to bring individuals that have some specialized, we can call it training and access to some specialized or not so specialized equipment. To be able to essentially be problem solvers. And so those emergency automobile squads were started up, and it was maybe a year or so later that the police commissioner at the time saw that the benefit that these emergency automobile squads kind of offered to the department. And so they added a third squad. And I want to say, by 1926 or 28, they were up to ten squads kind of spread out throughout the city. And at the time, they were dealing with things like, you used to have horse drawn carriages in New York City at that time, and I'm not talking about the Central park tourist ones as a means of normal transportation, that when a horse ended up in the water, who do you call to deal with that? Building collapses and aided cases and stuff like that. At the time, it was really more of a unit that dealt with the unique stuff that the police department didn't know how to deal with. They said, hey, we got to take a group of people and give them some training and more importantly, the equipment that they need to be able to deal with some of this stuff. And so that was kind of really how they started. And by 1930, April 16th, was when the emergency service division was formally created. And at the time, there were 20 squads at the inception of what is now today the emergency service unit, which falls under the Special Operations division. But that was the origins. And in addition, I think at the time, there wasn't tactical training. These guys, they got training in machine guns, but you're talking, like, Tommy guns. We have old ESU photographs from way back then of these old school, rugged e men on the back of the 1930 Mac with Tommy guns. I don't think that there was much of an emphasis on tactical training at the time, because obviously, we're talking 1930. Their emphasis was more geared towards what comprises a lot of ESU's work, which is just mitigating incidents or situations that the average cop on patrol either doesn't have the training or doesn't have access to the tools and the equipment that they need to do it safely. Jon Becker: The origin story is also in the era of Al Capone. This is the, you know, this is the mob days of New York City. And, you know, the Tommy guns were probably just to equalize what the suspects were carrying. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I think at the time, you know, I think you can look back to, like, ESU's first major gun battle. You know, that as far as I know, was documented in, like, 1926 at something known as the Tombs, which is the correctional facility in lower Manhattan, with a couple of escaped prisoners that resulted in, I believe, two or three deceased perpetrators and one or two deceased corrections officers and stuff like that. Prior to the emergency automobile squads, I can remember reading stuff about the machine gun squad, which was, I think, even a precursor to the emergency automobile squads, which was all guys coming back from World War one that joined the department, and they had some, you know, military experience and some exposure to combat. And they were there as a kind of a counterterrorism effort at the time, you know, to protect the ports of New York. Jon Becker: Crazy! Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, it's wild. Jon Becker: So almost 100 years later, you know, 95 years after the formation of the emergency services division, let's talk about the current structure of ESU. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, so ESU as it stands today, I mean, you know, definitively, to give it a number count, I know at its highest, we had about 400 people in emergency right after 911. I think that number now is down closer to maybe the 320 number somewhere around there. So I think it's safe to say between 300 and 350 somewhere in there. The unit is based out of Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York. It's also where the aviation unit is. So you have your administrative offices out there, the specialized training schools out there. We have individuals who are assigned to the school full time as subject matter expert instructors in the different disciplines that we have. And then the admin office is responsible for all the regular admin stuff. Payroll and roll call and the executive staff and stuff like that. The unit itself, the trucks, there's a couple of distinct, different sections of the unit. So you have the trucks. There's ten trucks throughout the city. Each truck covers a certain geographic area of the city. And then within that geographic area, there's a certain number of precincts that they cover. So in Manhattan, you have truck one and truck two. In the Bronx, you have truck three and truck four. Staten Island is served by a single truck, truck five. Brooklyn. Because Brooklyn's a pretty big and dense borough. There's three trucks that cover Brooklyn, six, seven and eight. And then nine and ten cover large. I mean, queens is enormous, like truck ten. Service area east to west is huge. But truck nine and ten cover queens. Truck eleven is not an official truck, but it's stationed out at Floyd Bennett Field. It could be staffed by the admin and instructor staff that's out there. And then you have the apprehension tactical team, or the A team. And you have the weapons of mass destruction unit, which turns out of Manhattan. So they're their own separate entity as well, especially at the height of white powder envelopes that's kind of where they were created from the initial hammer teams that were created to kind of specifically just deal with hazmat related stuff. So that's kind of like the overall structure of the unit. You know, within the trucks you have subspecialties. So every person in ESU gets the same initial training, the same initial school. You know, back in, in 1930 or 1928, whenever the first ESU school was, was officially created at the police academy, I think it was in 1928, but it was. It was two weeks long. And that's – You had two weeks and you were. You were a member of the emergency service division. And the school now is. It's eight months now. So that's just how much things have grown. And as the responsibilities and the equipment improves, obviously to accommodate all that, it now takes eight months to train up an ESU officer. So besides the initial training that everyone has the same base level of training. You have individuals who are tactical paramedics, you know, individuals who either came into the unit as paramedics, such as myself, or individuals that went to paramedic school after they had graduated from STS. You have members of the counter sniper team. So, you know, those individuals are usually spread out throughout the trucks. You have individuals who are energetic breachers, individuals who are divemasters and repel masters and hazmat specialists. And so you have, you know, everyone has the same base level of training, and then you have individuals that maybe have some specialized skill set that they can use, you know, for certain incidents that might require that. Jon Becker: But at a base level, every member of ESU is a diver, you know, an EMT, a physical extraction specialist. Right. Whether it's vehicle extraction or getting somebody out from under a subway, Cardinal has a base level of tactical and high risk entry training, has ropes training. And ropes in New York is the George Washington Bridge. It's not ropes. Three story building. It's skyscraper. It's like vertical axis. As a guy who grew up in LA, you go to New York and you realize vertical access. This is a very different meeting in New York. But like, the breadth of the skillset is really like in most other parts of the world, you have fire doing the extraction part. You have maybe somebody else doing the water part of it. I think that is one of the things that makes ESU so unique. And even within the individual trucks. Like, one of the things I love about ESU is it is the land of absolute understatement of everything. Joe Bucchignano: It is a playground for adults. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just the amount of equipment. It's ridiculous. You know, like, I mean, the big trucks have well over a million dollars worth of equipment on each one. Jon Becker: And that's a perfect example of how ESU understates everything. So you say, oh, truck one. Right? So somebody in their mind is picturing a pickup truck, and that's what constitutes a truck, but that's not what constitutes a truck. What constitutes a truck in NYPD? Joe Bucchignano: So the truck. So the term truck gets confusing because each emergency service squad is referred to as a truck as a whole. So, like, when I say, oh, I worked in truck three, that's, you know, emergency service squad three. But then each squad has what is called the truck. And the truck is essentially a heavy rescue truck with an armory on it. That's essentially what it is. And so there are eleven of those spread throughout the city. So each squad has a heavy rescue that acts primarily as a support vehicle to bring extra manpower and equipment to jobs that are more than just an atom car job. So the atom car is the Ford F 550 with the utility body on it that you routinely will see out on patrol. And that truck is, I don't want to say like a quick response vehicle. It's just, it's out on the road, it's on patrol. It's usually going to be showing up at an incident first. And it has a decent complement of equipment on it to, you know, for the two individuals that are staffing that atom car for the day to get a job started, especially a job that might require more personnel or more specialized equipment. Jon Becker: So on any given shift for ESU, you'll have an atom. An atom car. Joe Bucchignano: An atom, generally speaking, yeah. Throughout the city, generally speaking, you're going to have what we say is like truck across the board, meaning that all ten squads are going to have, you know, two individuals in the truck, two individuals in an atom car. And then if there are additional people now, you start to get, you know, a boy car. So a boy car would just be two additional, you know, ESU individuals that are staffing a second, you know, utility style vehicle. And now when you have an Adam and a boy car working a certain. In a certain truck, now, instead of maybe covering ten precincts, maybe they'll each cover five. They'll split up the responsibility for that geographic area a little bit. Jon Becker: So I think one of the things that helped me understand ESU in the times that I've interacted with you guys and tried to understand the unit is to think of it in terms of Legos of different colors, and we'll talk more about this as we get to load spread. But it is. The mindset of ESU is very much like we need a variety of different color Legos, you know, different skill sets, and we're. We're going to place those Legos all over the place. But all the Legos will work with all of the other Legos. So a guy on truck ten could work with a guy on truck one. And although they might have little local flare differences, they're going to do stuff the same way. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. And that was a testament to the initial training and the importance of everyone getting that same kind of base level of training. And it was not uncommon for guys from truck ten to work with guys from truck one or vice versa. Because if truck one was running short for a day and they only had maybe three people that were assigned for that day or for that tour. Well, we're flying in someone from another truck. Maybe truck ten has five people working, so there's an odd person out. So we're going to fly someone from truck ten down to truck one for the day just to balance it out and be able to stamp both those vehicles. So, you know, yeah, absolutely. While everyone has the same base level of training, I will tell you that, you know, being someone that. That came from truck three, which did not do a lot of the style of work that truck one is known for. When I, you know, first got down to truck one, you know, I was in a very, very senior squad down there, and the three senior people in that squad were all guys that had been there for ten plus years, some longer. And, man, I had a lot of learning to do because I didn't do a lot of what we call man unders, you know, people that get struck by subway cars and now they're trapped underneath the car, and it's either, you know, a body removal or an aided rescue. And so these guys were moving at 100 miles an hour, and I just was trying to keep up because they were a finely tuned machine. And truck one gets a lot of train rescue jobs. And so I basically, even though I knew the basics of it, just the speed and the precision at which these guys worked, it was a whole new experience for me. And that's one of the great things about the unit and being able to, because it's a citywide unit. New York City is very diverse, and neighborhoods are very different, and different neighborhoods have different, different problems. And some have more water than others, and some have more trains than others. And some are more known for getting motor vehicle accidents and out in Staten island. When you're dealing with animal jobs, now you're dealing with deer. You're not dealing with deer really, other than maybe in parts of three truck up in Pelham Bay park there. So now you're just dealing with things that are not the norm for you. And I know for me, I always took comfort when I was working with someone who was assigned to that truck, and we got something that was out of the norm because it was like, man, you're the subject matter expert on this. I don't care if I've been here for ten years and you've been here for three. I'm going to just let you run with this because you've experienced this before and I definitely have not. Jon Becker: Yeah. It is an interesting aspect of ESU that there is this diverse mission set within a very diverse city. Both. I mean, you get out into queens and you have a very difficult, very different problem than you do in South Manhattan. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. Jon Becker: Like, it could literally be a different country and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. I mean, different cultures different. And especially when you start talking about, you know, barricaded subjects and negotiations and the different, you know, maybe cultural norms for a certain group of people and being able to manage that, it's a challenge. You know, it is a. It is a challenge. Jon Becker: Well, so why don't we. Let's talk about, like, within a truck, you know, using the truck in the collective. Now, let's talk about the mission set of a truck. Like, what that truck is responsible for in its geographic area. Joe Bucchignano: It's really responsible as a patrol omnipresence and. And as a, you know, an asset that responds to request for service. So, you know, as a patrol omnipresence, um, generally speaking, you know, the atom car is out on patrol, and you are driving through, you know, the different precincts that you're responsible, you know, for covering, and you're in a marked vehicle in uniform. So you are a patrol omnipresence. And, you know, while ESU does not handle arresting people and writing, you know, summonses and more normal police functions, you're still out there, and you can still get flagged down for things that are, you know, not necessarily within your role of responsibility, but you're still a police officer, and so you're still kind of expected to at least deal with that until the patrol units get there to kind of take over the scene from you. But realistically, the primary role within a truck is to respond for requests for service so the saying in ESU is that when the public needs help, they call 911, and when the police need help, they call ESU. And so you're driving through different precincts and you are responding to requests for service. And you're also, you know, if you're driving through the 40 precinct, you're listening to that division radio, and if you hear the 40 precinct going to something, maybe it's an EDP with a knife, maybe it's a dispute with a firearm, you're going to start heading over that way. Because like I said, you're still a law enforcement officer. You're still a police officer. We all wear the same patch on our right sleeve regardless of what's on the left. And so you're there to just support and back up, you know, the patrol cops that are out there doing a very difficult job. So, you know, that that's kind of really the main mission set or role and responsibility within the truck. There's other things, you know, related to equipment maintenance and, you know, internal training and maintaining quarters and all that other stuff that is kind of unique to ESU, you know, because of the armories inside the trucks. Like, we don't have cleaning staff like, like a precinct does. So you're responsible for cleaning the toilets and the kitchen and all that other stuff. Our setups are definitely more of a firehouse style setup with our quarters. So that's kind of the day to day stuff within a truck and the mission set. Jon Becker: What's the work schedule like? Joe Bucchignano: So we do well, at the time, I think since I've retired, it's changed. But at the time, you either were assigned to the scooter chart, which was a week of days and then a week of four to midnights on a 52, 53 schedule. So you were constantly rotating your days off, or you did steady midnights with a rotation. Certain units either had. When I was on the a team, we had kind of a Gucci schedule. It was Monday to Friday, you know, which obviously within law enforcement is kind of unheard of, but, you know, it was well welcomed at the end of the career. So, you know, some units had a Monday to Friday schedule or maybe a piece of the weekend where they had off Friday Saturdays or Sunday Mondays, I believe. Now they've to try to help retain some people because that schedule is not, you know, ideal for home life and stuff like that. I think now they've gone to a steady chart where you're either working steady days, steady four to twelve s. You know, there's pros and cons to both. You know, Manhattan was very different from the other trucks working in truck 1, truck 3, the 4 to 12s. And the midnights were busy. And the day tours, they were not as busy. There was not as much going on in the outer boroughs during a day tour, whereas truck one was historically busier on day tours because you have to consider the influx of people coming into Manhattan for work, that the population density increases tenfold during the day. And so a lot of truck one's work was during day tours. And the four to twelve s were generally on the, you know, on the quieter side. So, you know, the nice thing about having that flip flop was you kind of got a taste of both and different types of work, which I think made you very well rounded. Jon Becker: And just from, like from a mission set for any one of the trucks, like, obviously, anything tactical that happens is your responsibility, right? It. If any kind of tactical situation, barricade, whatever hostage situation is going to become an e issue problem, you know, but kind of walk me through some of the other things that, you know, as you get to work each day, there are a number of things on the menu. What does the menu look like for ESU? Joe Bucchignano: Well, the menu is pretty diverse, so I guess I could start by talking about the things that we would just respond to, like, automatically once you hear it over. So ESU is on sod radio, special Operations division radio, which is ESU. K nine, aviation, harbor, scuba, all are on Sod radio. And so Sod radio is where we got dispatched on. But then we also had the capability within the trucks and the atom cars to also monitor division radio. And so anything that came over either Sod or division radio, that was a unconfirmed. So in New York City, everything's either confirmed or unconfirmed. And generally 911 calls when they first come in, until an NYPD cop gets there and puts eyes on the problem, all these things are unconfirmed. And so. But if you heard an unconfirmed jumper, unconfirmed water rescue, unconfirmed pin job, unconfirmed active shooter, you know, things like that, like those jobs, that unconfirmed building collapse, those were kind of, hey, we're going to start going and we're going to monitor the radio and we're going to listen for updates. Obviously, if the job is confirmed by precinct units showing up on the scene, then we're going to continue in on that. And if the precinct unit gets there and it ends up being an unfounded, then they could just put the cancellation over, and then we would just kind of resume patrol. So those were the jobs that we kind of automatically responded to every single time. The New York City police Department gets about 80,000 EDP calls a year. So those were not necessarily, and we get assigned every single one of them. And so those were not necessarily responding automatically just because you might have 3, 4, 5, 6 EP calls, like, in your queue at any given time. And so it's just impossible to obviously respond to six simultaneous EDP calls that you're holding. But if it was an EDP with an indication of a weapon or an EDP that was a jumper or something like that, then those, we would start to just head over that way, start taking a ride, monitor division radio, listen for the updates for patrol. And this way, if they get there and it's something that. That they are going to be requesting us for, we're kind of that much closer in terms of a response. So EDP's animal jobs, even the routine, very mundane stuff of individuals who are either locked out or locked in of an apartment, or if the patrol cops need us to come by and secure a door for them so they can resume patrol, or they lock their keys in the car or drop their keys down the sewer grate. Like, we have all of the tools to be able to solve all of those problems. And so a lot of the tools that we have can be used to either maybe recover a gun from a sewer grade that was just used to murder a police officer, or that same tool that we have to do that can be used when that police officer drops his keys or his radio down the sewer. And, you know, hey, can you just give me a hand and get that thing out so I don't have to tell the boss kind of a thing. So there's an overlap, you know, in terms of, while some of this stuff that we do would be considered to be, I'll use the word mundane, or like, man, you're taking a guy that went through eight months of trading, driving around a truck with a million dollars to get keys out of a. Out of a grate. And, yeah, on the surface, it looks like, why would you do that? But the reality is that it's those mundane tasks that we do kind of day in and day out that really help to prepare us for the incidents where like that having that experience or having done something like that before prepares you for something that's much more meaningful in terms of the resolution. Jon Becker: I also think that, you know, the one of the things I've consistently heard from everybody I've interacted with ESU is that ESU is a, you know, and, you know, you pointed this out to me. It's not the emergency services unit. It's the emergency service unit. Right? It is a unit that provides a service to the police department. Joe Bucchignano: We provide a unit, a service, you know, to the police department. And in turn, you know, in turn, that service is Isdev, you know, provided to the citizens of the city in New York. So, you know, it's. We are a full scale unit that provides a service, and that's what we do. We just bring individuals that have some more training and access to some more equipment than the average, you know, cop does on patrol. And we are there to provide a service because, you know, even something as mundane, I'll use that word again, as a police officer that is stuck guarding a door that maybe a super or the fire department, you know, or someone broke a door for a legitimate reason, and now this door is insecure and there's no way to lock it. Well, you know, we have drills and, and other hand tools on the trucks that we use for, you know, structural collapse and other things that could be also used for that purpose. And so, you know, if we have the ability to secure that door, that means that that police officer is not going to be stuck sitting on that door for 12 hours. That means that police officer is now going to be back on patrol, patrolling the neighborhood, responding to calls that maybe are a little bit more important than just having that cop tied up, you know, guarding a door so nobody goes in and steals items from an unsecured apartment. So there's always while some of this stuff, and, you know, I was just as guilty at times of saying, like, why are we doing this? Like, this is silly. Like, you know, I have all this training and all this equipment and I should be handling, you know, you know, things far more important than going in and securing a door. But, you know, when you look at it from a bigger picture and, you know, I think as you get more mature in the unit and you get more time there, you understand that stuff like that. Like it matters, you know, and, and it has a bigger effect than you realize that it has. Jon Becker: I think, culturally it's huge, right? If the focus of the unit is providing service to the patrol officers, there is a service mindset and a humility that comes with that. Right? If you're showing up in the middle of the night to help somebody secure a door, you're a lot less likely to end up with a mindset of, well, you know, with these super, super elite warriors and we're way more important than everybody else's. You are part of the team. And I think that from a patrol standpoint, they're much more likely to want to call ESU because they do have a relationship with ESU that that, you know, ESU is providing them service, and it's a partnership. It's not a, you know, an ivory tower. Oh, look at those guys. They think they're important. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. I mean, when I first got to truck three, you know, the senior guy that I worked with on midnights, there had been an ESU for a long time. In fact, he was in transit rescue before the merger. So he had been in that kind of world for a long time. And in full transparency at the time, it just didn't make sense to me. We would go and we would meet up with these patrol cops one night. It was social hour and coffee and this and that. I'm a junior guy. I kind of went along with it, obviously. You know, I like looking back at my career and, you know, there are certain things that, like, that absolutely make me cringe in terms of, you know, when I was young and cocky and thought that I was this, you know, super elite, because everyone always tells you, oh, you're a part of the elite emergency service unit. An elite and an elite. And when you get told enough times that you're elite, you start to believe it, you know? And I know that I absolutely went through a phase where, you know, I had an attitude that I was just better than. And I think there's a difference between, you know, having that attitude that you're better than and then just being, you know, confident and having expectations of the guys and girls that you work with. And I think the big thing that really kind of changed it for me was when I was four, this opportunity to train up these subunits because I got really emotionally invested in giving these guys and girls just a good training experience with the limited amount of time that we had to train them. And then at the end of it, I kind of sat there and I'm like, well, wait a minute. We're giving these subunits this quality training that really goes into detail onto why they're doing certain things and we're really promoting certain things, but we're not doing that for our guys. And so I was able to kind of, like, channelize that, that desire that I had to, you know, just to better individuals and police officers and then start to kind of channel that attention or that energy into, like, hey, what can I do to help the unit. And so, you know, like, just getting back to the original point, like, the guys and girls in ESU are some of, like, the best humans that I've ever met. You know, they just – They come to work every day, and especially some of the individuals who have been there, like, what we call the dinosaurs, right? The guys and girls that have been in the unit for 20, 30 years and are still out in the atom car every day. Like, my hats off to them. I mean, I give them a lot of credit, and some of them are just so dedicated to service that ethos. And their day to day is just about helping cops. And I think that as a calling and what these guys and girls bring to the table, it really is admirable. Jon Becker: I think a lot of that is a function of culture, too. It's a function of not only the culture of the unit, but it's also a function of selection. Right? Like, it's picking. Ending up with the right people is frequently picking the right people. What is – Talk to me about ESU selection process. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. And so just to, like, touch on the first thing there, I always kind of make the joke that, like, within the NYPD, there's a lot of things that we don't do right. But I think one of the things that the department does right is the culture of being very welcoming to people, and especially individuals, police officers from, you know, from outside agencies. And so, you know, my time in ESU, there were plenty of times where we would have police officers from other states, other countries stopping by truck one. Hey, I heard about this place. I want to check it out. Or units from SWAT, guys from other departments that would come up to the A Team and say, hey, we want to see how you guys are doing things. And we maybe have some questions about hydraulic breaching or tactical operations and elevated structures, things that we were used to dealing with. And it was always so funny afterwards, talking to guys offline, and they would say, man, you guys are unbelievable in terms of how you welcome people, because if you came to our city, no cop would pay you two cent. They would just, whatever. Yeah, great. You're NYPD. We get it. So I think that culture, just as a department, and now you kind of get down to the micro view of now an individual unit, and having that culture kind of be already in, instilled in you once again, police officers in Times Square, like, how many tourists are they dealing with day in and day out and taking pictures with people? And for a lot of them, you're almost like, a celebrity just because of the NYPD's reputation in film and everything else. So I think that translates over. But to get to the question about the selection process. Jon Becker: Hold on one sec, let's go back to that, because I think you actually raise a really interesting issue. I've experienced the hospitality of the issue and feeling like, you know, they never had anything to do the whole day and everybody was there just to be nice to you. And so, I've seen that. I've seen that at the school. I've seen that at truck one. I've seen that at the A team when you were there, there is very much a culture of warmth, you know, up to and including attending the Macy's parade with ESU. But while I was at truck one, one of the things that Tommy Longa said to me that I thought was very interesting was a New York police officer has to be able to talk to people. And one of the things that strikes when you go to truck one is it's not at an ivory tower station somewhere in the middle of its own area. The trucks are parked on the street in the neighborhood. And the biggest thing that struck me while I was there was the people walking by, you know, oh, hey, Tommy, we're going to bring you cookies. And, oh, you know, hi misses Rabinowitz. And, like, this whole interchange between the department and the community. You know, we in LA, we talk about community oriented policing, but watching the way that NYPD officers are interacting, because you have no choice. Right? You're embedded in the neighborhood. You have no choice. There has to be this interaction. But it struck me when I saw that, and one of the things that Tom Longa said to me was, that's a big selection criteria for ESU, is you got to be able to talk to people. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, absolutely. And that experience is definitely is unique to truck one. And I can't speak for a lot of the other trucks. I mean, I've flown to other trucks and I've worked in other trucks. I have not spent much time out on the apron at other trucks. But I know that from my time in truck three where, you know, I was on midnights most of the time that I was there. And who's wandering around at two in the morning in the Bronx, you know, it's usually not the person that's waking up for work the next day. So we didn't have that kind of community interaction. And especially, like, you know, geographically, where truck three is located, it's just not a heavily residential area right there. But when I went down to truck one, very different, you know, like, why is there a box of milk bones in the garage? Like, what is that for? Oh, that's for when people walk by with their dogs. And I'm like, we could feed dogs here. This is great, you know, so it was definitely, like, it was definitely, for me, it was a culture shock because you would stand out on the front apron and the same people, especially on a day tour, like walking by to go to work or people that lived in the Gramercy neighborhood there and stuff like that. Truck one was very involved with the Gramercy Park Block association, and so we were really, really a part of the local community there, maybe more so than a lot of other trucks. And I don't want to speak for other trucks because obviously, like, never being assigned to the trucks, you know, I don't know what their experiences were like, but I know just from truck one, you know, you were a part of the community and you got invited to community events and, you know, they would have every year, 911, you know, they would have memorial services, and there was always a good showing from the local community and stuff like that. But I think the being able to talk to people is an interesting thing that you bring up because I think that is what sets us apart, really, from a lot of other teams across the country. And the unique thing about ESU is that everyone in ESU is a negotiator without officially being labeled a negotiator. And we can get to that later. But in terms of selection, you know, as I mentioned before, before you can even apply to come to ESU, you have to have a minimum of five years with the department. And so that kind of sets the foundation or the groundwork where it doesn't matter really what precinct you're in. Obviously, the busier precincts in the city, you're going to just have more experience. And along with that experience comes experience talking to people, you know? And so, you know, we're looking for individuals who, who, you know, come from precincts relatively active. You didn't have to be, listen, I was not, by my own admission, I was not like a superstar cop in the five two, you know, I did what I had to do every day, and I came in and did my thing and I had the dream of going to ESU, you know, but, like, police work was not exactly my forte, nor was it something I never had the aspiration of going to, like, a detective squad and, you know, being a big investigator one day or anything like that. But one of the things that I felt that I was good at was talking to people. And I think that really came from my, you know, my paramedic background where I was, you know, interviewing patients day in and day out, you know, talking about whatever ailments they had and so on and so forth. And so, you know, what ESU is looking for is really kind of motivated individuals who preferably worked in busier precincts doesn't mean if you worked in a slow precinct that you were automatically disqualified individuals that were active as police officers. Because again, to go from it could be very difficult if you worked in a slow precinct and did not have a lot of experience to now get thrown into the ESU world where you are responding to, you know, some of the worst of the worst and some of the most critical incidents that, you know, that the city sees. And now you're expected to be the guy or girl to resolve that incident and hopefully to resolve it either peacefully or, you know, without any added or unnecessary, quote unquote, drama that might go along with the incident. So, you know, that's really what they're looking for. And that all happens through, you know, there was a time, especially, you know, when I first got into ESU and the time before that, that getting into ESU was really having either a hook or a crane. You know, like having somebody that was already in the unit that can kind of vouch for you definitely helped. And it was almost at a time where it was almost necessary, like you, you had to have somebody from within the unit say, yeah, I know this guy, know this girl. They're a good guy, good girl, whatever it is, they get the stamp of approval. So that now still carries weight. I don't think it carries as much weight. That whole mantra of, oh, you need a crane to get into ESU. That's not true anymore. We pick up plenty of people that don't know anyone in ESU, and it's their first experience or exposure. So obviously, physical fitness is a big part of the job because it is physically, I was nothing specimen of, you know, physical fitness. But, you know, like, you have to have a base level of physical fitness because it is very physically strenuous between diving and obviously, tactical work and, you know, doing six, seven, eight story walk ups and carrying the equipment and all that other stuff. And so these are things that they kind of, you know, test in the initial, you know, selection process. One of the other things that they do, and it goes back to what you said before about phobias, is they actually test you for certain phobias. And so you have to crawl through this real tiny dark tube into this rock pile and drag a mannequin out. And what they're really testing is not only your physical ability to do it, but also, hey, are you claustrophobic? There's the balance beam, which is essentially you are tied into a high wire and you have to walk across an I beam. It's 20 or 30 ft, maybe 20 or 30 ft up in the air. You have to walk kind of touch thing, turn around, walk back, and that's a test. Your fear of heights. So they do look for individuals that have certain phobias, because if you're afraid of the dark, you're afraid of the boogeyman in the dark or you're afraid of heights, you're not going to make it through the initial training. So that's the initial selection process you put in your application. There's an oral review board, there's physical fitness testing, there's some of the phobia testing, there's some shooting testing that all kind of collectively goes together. Then they're going to look at obviously your CPI file, your background, your disciplinary record, your sick record. They're obviously looking for people that don't have significant disciplinary records, people that have very good sick records, because ESU is not a unit where it's frowned upon if you're just calling out sick to call out sick, because obviously the trucks have to get staffed and they have to get manned. And so looking for people that have very good sick records as well. And then obviously if you bring a special skill set to the table and it could be something silly like, hey, I'm a certified locksmith or I worked at a bird rescue, or like people who are EMTs, volunteer firemen, people that have military backgrounds, all those special skill sets. You're bringing now something to the unit, you're bringing something to the table, elevator mechanics, whatever it might be, that is bringing now an expertise into the unit that the unit can now exploit and benefit from. Jon Becker: That's really interesting. That's a very interesting perspective. Talk to me about school. You get selected into ESU, you've got eight months of school, school ahead of you. How does that break down? What do you, what do you learn in what, you know, what's the kind of rough order? And how do you build the skillset that is required to be in ESU, man? Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. I don't envy the sergeant at the school that does scheduling because that is a task and a feat in itself. After kind of seeing behind the curtain of, of how all that works out. An average ESU class is anywhere from 35 to 40 individuals of, you know, from police officer up through lieutenant captains and above. They don't go through the full school. They will go through certain parts of it to have an understanding of ropes, hazmat tactics, scuba, more so from an oversight scene management, scene safety kind of perspective. But everyone from police officer up through lieutenant goes through the full school. And so those 40 or so individuals will get broken up into four separate groups. So you figure ten people, twelve people per group, depending on the size of the class. And then. Excuse me, and then each group is now going to go to a certain discipline on a rotating basis throughout the eight month schooling. So realistically, within the eight months, you're talking roughly eight. And my weeks, I might be off by a week or two here, but anywhere from eight to ten weeks or eight to eleven weeks of firearms and tactics, you're looking at four weeks EMT school, you're looking at, I would say four to six weeks of ropes and jumpers because those kind of go hand in hand. You're looking at four to six weeks of hazmat and CBRN, you are looking at like a week of structural, structural collapse. So some of the, you know, the structural collapse rescue technician training, you're looking at time dedicated to, you know, maybe another week or so of confined space trench rescue, another couple days of vehicle extrication and train rescue. And you're talking weeks of a lot of the ancillary skill sets that kind of overlap into a lot of what we do, like animal control torches, hand tools, power tools, pneumatic tools, hydraulic tools, lock picking, protester locks, all of that stuff as well. You're looking at maybe I want to say the dive program is two weeks. The first week is like Padi, open water and then week two is public safety diving. And then you have another week, week and a half of surface water rescue and ice rescue and then more time allocated to small boat handling for zodiacs and John boats and stuff like that. So they have to fit all of that within that kind of eight month timeframe. Helicopter operations, helicopter rappelling, fast roping, some of the more fancy stuff that we're doing, familiarization with all of the specialized equipment that we have. So the bearcats, the bears, the MRAPs, the TCVs, just the endless amount of specialized equipment that we have, you at least get a familiarization on it within sts, more so not to become familiar with its operations, but just the capabilities that are out there and to have an awareness that this equipment is available to you because after you finish sts you show up the truck day one, more than likely you're going out in the atom car that day and whatever comes your way comes your way. So just having a familiarization and an awareness to the equipment that's available to the unit. So that's essentially what the eight months kind of covers. I mean the major disciplines, obviously tactics, hazmat, technical res, all the aspects of technical rescue, ropes, EMT and then scuba water rescue. I think I hit them all. But those are kind of the major disciplines. And then there's obviously the smaller ancillary offshoots of all of that. Jon Becker: That's really, it's an amazingly broad skill set. And, you know, I think one of the challenges has to be trying to maintain expertise too because once guys are out in the trucks, yeah, you're doing stuff and you're picking things up. But like if you're, you know, like you said, if you're in the Bronx, you may not be doing high angle rescue stuff like you would in Manhattan. How do you – how does ESU maintain this expertise when, when guys, you know, are, you know, assigned to a certain place or like you go to the A team, you're not doing any rescue anymore. So it's. How does that happen? How do you maintain that expertise? Joe Bucchignano: And, and that's the challenge. You know, like the challenge with ESU is that any particular discipline, take tactics for example, has, you know, four full time instructors. Ropes has three full time instructors, let's say. And then Hazmat has three or four full time instructors. When you have a unit of 400 people, you know, how do you, you know, how do you expect two to four people to do not only in service training, which you think about it, if a particular school is a month long and an STS is eight months, they are basically dedicated to four months out of the year to just doing new ESU, you know, school training, like ESU recruit training basically. And then, you know, they need time as well to re-up for the next class and everything else. And so, yeah, that's the challenge. Right? So there's a couple ways to, I guess, combat that. It kind of starts at the individual and the truck level where you have to take some self motivation within your truck or within your squad to do some training. And one of the great things about the unit is because there is such a diverse set of skill sets out there in the truck. When I was in truck three and truck one, if we decide to do medical training for a day, hey, I'm going to take lead on that because I'm a paramedic, so I have that background. And then maybe the next week, generally speaking, like truck based training, there was no official schedule for it. It was just on the individual squad to say, hey, we're going to do some training today. Saturdays or Sundays, I think it was Sundays was what we call trio training. So the way the patrol works with supervision is you have a citywide north supervisor and a citywide south supervisor. Citywide north covered the Bronx and Manhattan, and then citywide south covered Brooklyn, Queens, Staten island. And so, you know, generally a lieutenant could be a sergeant covering that position, but usually it was a lieutenant. And that lieutenant would say, hey, we're going to do trio training this morning. We're going to meet at truck two. It's going to be truck one, truck two, and truck four, let's say, because they're all kind of bordering trucks to each other. And this is what we're going to do today. And they would pick a topic and they would pick someone to kind of, you know, run that training for trio training that day. And that was kind of some dedicated training that was kind of, you know, run by one of the supervisors. So you had your truck training at the squad level, and then you had trio training that was a collective of two or three neighboring trucks getting together at the kind of, you know, discretion of a lieutenant saying like, hey, this is what we're going to do today. And then you had refresher training that was sponsored or run by the school after. So generally speaking, if, let's say the scuba section had a month break, maybe their next STS group to do scuba was coming in in a month. So they had a month of downtime. They would send guys and girls down to the scuba section for refresher training. So generally speaking, like most ESU guys got refresher training yearly on tactics, on ropes, on scuba. Hazmat EMT was recertified every three years. So those were kind of the major disciplines where you went for some ongoing refresher training that was sponsored by the unit of. There were opportunities for guys to go to training with outside training venues and training companies and whether they were federally funded programs out in New Mexico or Alabama or something like that, or we didn't do a lot with private training companies, but we did some stuff with some private training companies. The problem was with a lot of that training is that we're limited in the number of people that we can send to that. So the expectation was that, hey, if you went out to this training in wherever it was, bring back what you learned and share that experience with the rest of the unit. So, yes, we were out doing a lot of this work every day. Doesn't necessarily mean that we were good at it or we were doing it right. And that is the importance of the ongoing kind of refresher training. I think that one of the pitfalls that we fell into by a lot of our executives was the thought that drills were training. Oh, we're doing a drill, so that counts as training. And my personal perspective on drills were, they were great for testing your current capabilities, and they really should highlight the areas that we need to focus our training on. They were not training because at the end of the drill, if we completely botched it, we would all shake hands and turn around and walk away. You walked away defeated, like, well, we really just messed that up. What are we doing to fix it? And that was never really addressed. And so we do get involved in a lot of drills, and the drills really highlighted maybe areas that we were deficient in, and then we would hope that those deficiencies would be addressed by the school during the ongoing refresher training yearly. Jon Becker: Why don't we? So now we got a pretty good sense of what everybody's doing and how the unit works. I mean, you were there for a long time, you know, thousands of operations under your belt. Like, let's talk through your lessons learned. Like, you know, give me. Give me the lessons learned from ESU. You know, Joe's version. What, you know, what if somebody. If you have an opportunity to sit down with a tactical unit and go, here's what I learned at ESU. What's that list? Joe Bucchignano: So Joe's version might be. Might be controversial, but I don't shy away from controversy. So, you know, I think the biggest thing that I learned is, you know, there's always a plus, a pro and a con to things, right? So talking about, like, our operational tempo, you know, I guess we could start with that. And I'll bring this specifically to the apprehension team, you know, because that was my last two, two and a half years within. Within the unit, but, you know, at the apprehension. So ESU as a whole, collectively was executing somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 search warrants a year, with the apprehension team executing, like, 87% of those. So, you know, our op tempo there was right around 500, 500 plus search warrants a year. So the apprehension team was a full time sergeant, seven full time members on the team and then three to four individuals that rotate through on a three month rotation. And so one of the guys that's currently still serving on the A team, he's been there over ten years. So you consider over ten years doing 500 search warrants a year, we'll say 400 if you count in vacations and days off. That's still over 4000 live search warrants that some guys have done. What I learned from operational tempo is that, number one, I always like to focus on the downside first is your operational tempo doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing things right just because you're walking away every single time unscathed. And I think that keeping that kind of in perspective and that humility I think is important. ESU always had a pretty good culture of being honest with itself at more of a micro level. Meaning after any big job, it was always customary to get together at the back of the truck afterwards and kind of have a powwow. Hey, let's talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. And certain individuals didn't really want to hear about or talk about the bad and the ugly. We just wanted to focus on the good. And that's obviously a bad way of doing business because it instills very false sense of maybe competency, and that's dangerous, you know, so, you know, for me, especially when I got up to the, to the A team because it was a smaller unit and, you know, because I had a very good working relationship with the individuals who had been full time members of the team before I got up there. You know, we kind of adopted a culture of focusing more on the bad and the ugly and not so much the good. And, you know, one of the things I always would say to guys that were rotating through the team from day one was, you know, listen, we're going to nitpick every single search warrant that we do. And yeah, we're going to acknowledge the good stuff that you do, but we're going to focus a heck of a lot more on, you know, the bad and the ugly because that's how we learn and that's how we get better. And, you know, if we're nitpicking on really little things, take it as a compliment because that means that all the macro picture stuff, all the big stuff is like really, you know, you're knocking it out of the ballpark there. Now we just really want to refine what we're doing to get as close to perfect as possible. And, you know, in my opinion, there's no such thing as a perfect OP. There's always something to learn from every single incident that you go on, regardless of how great you think you did. So, you know, the reality is keeping the mindset that you could do 1000 search warrants a year with a girl scout troop if nobody ever gives you any legitimate opposition, nobody that's committed, willing to exploit a mistake or cracking your tactics or whatever it might be. And so just volume of work in itself is not a true measure of success. The real measure of success is when you are challenged by an individual who is willing to exploit a crack in your tactics or mistake that you made and what the outcome is. After that, there were plenty of times where I could say that we just plain flat out got lucky, and that was it. There was no skill. There was no nothing. You know, with some of these incidents, it was. It was pure luck. I mean, there were plenty of times where it was skill and it was based on, you know, lessons that we learned before that maybe we made certain adaptations or changes to the way that we did things that. That resulted in a much better outcome. But, you know, that being said, there were plenty of times where it was really, it was just pure luck. And so, for me, one of the big lessons learned is just because you're doing something a lot doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it right. And you need to be honest with yourself, whether it's as an individual or as a unit, as a team, as an organization, to say, hey, did we just get lucky here? Or was this really skill? And if it was luck, what can we do? How can we adapt our training or equipment, our TTPs, to avoid maybe this not going so well or running out of luck in the future. So that was definitely like, one of the big lessons was coming from a unit who has an op tempo that might be running two or three barricades simultaneously while the A team is executing back to back to back search warrants and everyone walking away from those incidents, there's definitely a lot of skill involved and a lot of experience that goes into resolving these things, but there are also the times where it's, hey, we just got lucky, and maybe the way that we normally do things doesn't work for every single situation. And I guess that's kind of rolls into the second lesson learned there. I don't know if you want to talk about or address anything with the first before I continue on here into the second. Jon Becker: I think the one question I had is a little bit on kind of debrief process, you know, like, your views on best methodologies of doing after actions, obviously, candid, immediate. But what other tips and tricks did you learn? Cause, I mean, at 4 or 500 search warrants a year, that is a ridiculously high op tempo for 13 guys. It is unique. Even among other tactical units. The A team search warrant volume is higher than, for instance, combined LAPD and LA sheriff. So, like, what are your lessons learned in an after action there? Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, I mean, I can talk about the way that we did it, you know, especially, and more specifically the A team. The way that we handle our debriefs is after we finished all of our hits for the day, the debriefs were rather informal. So unless you did something, like, real egregiously dangerous, where then maybe the debrief was not so warm and fuzzy, we would stop, pick up breakfast on the way back to the office. Then we would just sit around the table, and the debriefs and the after actions were kind of a level playing field. So it was, regardless of rank, seniority, time of the unit, whatever it might be, everyone was kind of held to the same standard. And I think for us, the A team was a full time sergeant, seven full time police officer detectives, and then we would get three or four truck guys or girls that would rotate through the A team for three or four months. And that was a chance for them to just get a kind of immersed in a lot of tactical experience and see a lot of different things and kind of learn from the 18 members that obviously we're doing this every single day, day in and day out on top of the level playing field in terms of rank and seniority, I think the other big thing that we really tried to set the example of self critique and taking responsibility for your actions. So for me and some of the other guys on the team that were more senior guys in the unit at the time, we all had over ten years in the unit, which in the span of a 20 year career is half your career. For us to sit there and start up these AARs and say, yeah, this is where I screwed up. This is what I did wrong. This is what I should have done, and this is why I should have done it. And I think that was important to kind of set that tone where, you know, hey, there are these guys who are senior guys in the unit, pretty well respected overall, permanent members of this team that do this every day. And here they are basically admitting where they felt that they had screwed up or could have done something better or whatnot. And so I think that really set the tone to kind of have these guys that in girls that were rotating through to start kind of following our footsteps in terms of doing a good self critique of themselves. So it wasn't always us saying, hey, you could have done this better. You should have done that, you should have done this, you should have done that. Instead, it was them saying, yeah, I screwed this up, and this is what I did, and this is what I should have done, and this is why I should have done it. And the other benefit to that is it just shows that the stuff that you're teaching them, that it's kind of sinking in. They're retaining it because they're realizing certain things in the moment that they're realizing afterwards that maybe they should have done differently and why they should have done, why they should have done it differently. And understanding the why is such a massively important part of this. But, you know, for us, that was the big thing, was level playing field self ownership for your mistakes, regardless of how long you had been there, you know, or whatnot. So it was kind of setting that example. And then we would, you know, use not only our own personal observations as teaching tools and critique points, but we were body cameras, you know? And so the body cameras were just an excellent tool for us to be able to go back and say, like, hey, see how you're set up on this door? Like, you know, maybe next time consider doing this. Or, you know, hey, you see where you're positioned here? Or, you know, you went left, you should have went right. Obviously, when you got the, you know, the guy that would say, like, I didn't do that. Oh, let's go watch the videotape, you know, like, yeah, see, you did that. You know, oh, man, I didn't realize I did that. Okay, we'll let it slide, you know? So utilizing some of the resources that we had available to us as a teaching tool just so we could keep on getting better, I mean, that was really, at the end of the day, it was all about just getting better, doing the job better, being efficient, proficient, being professional. And one of the most gratifying things about the A team was you would get the seven of us that work together consistently. We worked pretty smoothly together, because you're working with the same guys every day. You start to learn guys' body language and their verbal cues and stuff like that, just the way that they operate. You get used to it. You get accustomed to it. Obviously, that makes for a very good flow state when you start doing a lot of the search warrants that we were doing, which were primarily no knock entries. You know, when you get three or four individuals now rotating into the team that you've never worked with before, and you just see the progression from week one to the end of month three or month four, however long they're there for, just to see how they really – It's kind of like the general progression was like month one was just getting them kind of just up to speed with just real basic stuff, you know, like, for a lot of them, you know, especially in the trucks and especially working the scooter chart where most, you know, guys and girls go to when they first graduate sds, you're not really doing a lot of search warrants. Most of the search warrants are happening, you know, 06:00 a.m. and if the trucks are doing a warrant that maybe the apprehension team is not doing, it's usually the guys and girls that are working midnight. So they kind of get the volume of the search warrant work outside of the A team. And so a lot of these guys and girls that come rotating through the team, some of them have never done a search warrant in their first year in ESU because it's just. It's never come up in their area or an emergency search warrant just never popped up when they were working. And so for a lot of them, it maybe is their first time doing a warrant. They've been on dozens of barricades, but obviously, that's a different, you know, operational tempo then. You know, for us, the way that our team worked our tempo for. For search warrants, because we were doing no knocks, was different from the way that we were doing barricades. But for a lot of them, it was seeing where they started. And then by month two, they were getting more comfortable and the mistakes were less. And now we were just really fine tuning that. By month three, the debrief points were now very, very either minute, minuscule, nitpicking stuff. You know, once again, just to always try to get as close to perfection as possible. You know, so just seeing that progression over a three month period, it just – We saw how the deep, brief stuff really helped. You know, like, at the end of it, at the end of the rotation, they would say, man, just sitting down after these hits and talking about them and seeing, you know, talking about, you know, what was good, what was bad, what could have been done better, and how it could have been done better was such a great learning experience for everyone, even for the guys that were on the team for a long time. There's just always something to learn from every single operation you go on. Jon Becker: But, you know, with that volume of work, right, doing 500 search warrants a year, I think it would be very easy to get sucked into the trap that, like, we do this all the time. Why do we need to debrief it? Why do we need to, you know, you've got a huge volume of work. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. And like we said, you know, like, it's. You could do 500 search warrants a year and without opposition. You could take a Girl scout troop and do those 500 search warrants. If nobody's really willing to give you legitimate opposition to exploit a crack in your tactics or your techniques or your procedures, it is that. 500 search warrants. Any real measure of. Of success? In my opinion, no. The measure of success is when you are tested by someone who's maybe willing and committed and see how you fare after that. I think some of the – Going back to what was discussed before, I think there were definitely search warrants where we just flat out got lucky. We got lucky. There was no question about it. A lot of what we did in the way that we mitigated some of the warrants that kind of went sideways was definitely based on our experience and skill that we kind of brought from our past experience. And, you know, we were always learning. I mean, even in the short two years, two and a half years that I was there, we made a lot of changes, and it's, you know, we would, we would go to something and, you know, we would do a warrant, and it just would not. It just didn't look right. It didn't feel, feel right, and we would come back afterwards and, you know, hey, how'd you guys feel about that? And it was a collective, like, yeah, not. Not so good. Okay, well, what do we do to fix this? You know, how do we – What can we do differently that's gonna make us better and not put us in that position again? And so, you know, there was just always something to learn. I don't care if you do five warrants a year or 500. It doesn't matter. There's always, always, always something to learn from each and every single one. They're all unique. And so I think, again, when you're nitpicking the little stuff, I think that means that the macro stuff, the big picture stuff, is being done good enough to the point where maybe it doesn't require discussion. Now we can start really focusing on fine tuning. Jon Becker: So let's talk about training culture a bit of. So, I mean, obviously, unit culture for debrief is one thing. Training culture is a different thing. And so I'm kind of curious. You know, you spend time at the schoolhouse, you spend time, you know, in 3 and 1 and 18. What are your thoughts on training and the way that we are training our tactical law enforcement currently? Joe Bucchignano: I think so. I think collectively, just broad blanket statement. I think we're lacking, like, significantly. Now, there's some teams that train more than other teams, and that's great. And I think it's finding that balance between operational experience and training. And so you could have a team like ESU that has a lot of operational experience but maybe doesn't do as much on the training side. You know, like I said, the a team a little bit different. You know, Monday nights were kind of our dedicated training night where we would come in once a week and we would work on some isolated skill. Usually, you know, especially in the very beginning when we got a new rotation, we were very heavy on training. So, you know, I think when it comes to training, you know, collectively, you just look at law enforcement. Now, I guess we could start with patrol officers, because I think within the tactical community, there's a little bit more emphasis on training. I think it's a little bit more accepted. I think guys are more motivated to train and stuff like that. But the benefit in a city like New York is you have a unit like ESU that's available 24/7, 365. We're a full time unit that's on the road 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so, you know, we're generally showing up to incidents pretty quickly. You know, you go to other parts of the country where, you know, maybe you have part time regional or multi jurisdictional teams that are going to take time to assemble and show up in an incident, and maybe there's one or two patrol guys there that are kind of left holding the bag until they get there. It's interesting, you know, like, I had done a – I don't want to call it a study, because it was by no means a study, but just a little survey maybe a year or two ago of police officers from, like, different parts of the country kind of saying, like, hey, you know, how often are you doing active shooter training or refresher training on active shooters? And, you know, I got everything from the most common answer, yeah, we get 8 hours a year. You know, we get one day a year. Okay, 8 hours. By the time you show up, by the time you go through all your safety procedures and maybe PowerPoint and this and that and lunch break, and everything else, that 8 hours really gets watered down to 5 hours of training a year for something like responding to an active shooter all the way to other guys that went, active shooter refresher training. Hey, what's that? We haven't seen that in years. Once again, we talked a little bit before about the difficulties of training a unit of 300 to 400 people with only four people maybe assigned full time as instructor cadre to a certain discipline. Well, now, you take the NYPD. Let's look at the macro picture as a whole. Now, you have a department of 35,000 police officers. Even if we said that, you know, 25,000 of them were individuals in the rank of police officer. Detective sergeant, lieutenant, how are you doing? Ongoing refresher tactical training for an agency that has 25,000 people that you have to train on top of everything else. Logistically, it's a nightmare. And so I don't even know. Well, I shouldn't say that. I do know how you can accomplish it. You just have to dedicate the manpower and the time to do it right. So that's the easy answer. In my eyes, that's the easy answer. Hey, this is an important skill set that individuals need to know, and so we're going to dedicate the time and the manpower in order to make this happen yearly. But logistically, probably not feasible or possible. So I think that a unit like ESU is, you know, microcosm of the bigger NYPD, meaning you have individuals within the unit who are very training oriented. They enjoy going for training. They eat up training anytime they can get it. They're self motivated self initiators to do training within their truck or their squad or whatever it might be. And then you have other individuals who just kind of shrug their shoulders and what do we need training for? We do this all the time. And it kind of goes back to that first point of, just because you do it all the time, it doesn't mean that you're doing it good. And if you're not willing to really sit down and be honest with yourself, your organization, your team, whatever it is about, hey, maybe we're not as good as we think we are, but we can get better. We just have to dedicate the time to getting better. I think that's the important thing. You could have all the, you know, the cry precision this and the night vision and the lasers and all the fancy toys and tools and everything else. But, you know, if you – For lack of a better term, if you suck at the basics, all that fancy stuff means absolutely nothing. In fact, it's usually more of a hindrance than it is a help, you know, and equipment will never take the place of tactical, you know, officers or police officers who are truly problem solvers. And I think that's one of the things that really sets ESU apart from a lot of other teams, is we have a lot of equipment. There's no doubt about it. We have all the armored vehicles you could think of and everything else that goes along with it. But I think what sets us up kind of different is our ability to. Going back to before, our ability to talk to people and our ability to problem solve. And that's where something as simple and mundane as, like, you guys are like dog catchers. You go around doing animal jobs. Yeah, absolutely. You know, so now when I've used, you know, an animal restraint pole or loaded up, you know, ketosis to tranquilize a dog 50 times before in a non tactical environment where the stress level is relatively low, now when I'm doing it at three in the morning, hitting a gang spot, you know, with a four dudes inside with guns, and they got two pit bulls that are guarding the place, like, managing that problem. I've done it 50 times before in routine fashion. This is nothing. This ain't my first time doing this. Just the dynamic and the environment surrounding that problem is obviously a little bit different. And there's other considerations, but that's where us having this wide skillset in this wide day to day experience, doing the mundane, it pays off in dividends when that mundane is now a part of a bigger, more kind of complex problem. Jon Becker: Yeah, but also, it's interesting because as you talk about that, it's stress inoculation, too, right? Like, you've done this, you tranked a dog enough times that that's not a stressful event for you. And so everything else that's happening, you know, I recently interviewed Brittany Loney, who's a performance psychologist that works with soft units. And we talked a lot about stress inoculation and how not tying up your cognitive space with stuff that, you know, shouldn't be stressful allows you to perform at a higher level. And that strikes me as the same is true here. Joe Bucchignano: Absolutely. And that, and that stress inoculation goes across such a wide, you know, array of things that we do, because a lot of what we do is stressful. You know, scaling the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, for the first time is stressful. And, you know, going under a subway car when there's electrified third rail and like that's stressful. And all these other things that we do, you know, non tactical are all stressful. And I truly believe that the more that you're exposed to that stuff, you know, the more that you get conditioned to it, the more that you're inoculated against it. That just leads to better decision making. And I think that that is one of the biggest benefits that we have, you know, is especially when you first get to a truck and you're out in the atom car, you're, you know, you're usually with someone that has some experience. And so, you know, the first time you show up to that barricade and you take control of that door and you knock and start talking to that person on the other side of the door, you know, this time it's not training in John Jay. It's for real, you know, and there's now consequences to the things that you say and everything else. And it's for me, I found the more stressful part was knowing that I had a whole team of people behind me from the senior guy in my squad all the way up through maybe the duty captain that was working that day, listening to every word that I was saying, judging, evaluating and everything else, you know, like, that's stress as well. And so that's where, you know, the volume of work that we do has a benefit because, you know, now maybe in your first year, you'll have handled, I mean, between barricaded, emotionally disturbed persons and cell extractions and jumpers and all these situations where you're just talking people to mitigate a crisis. You're going to do that in your first year a handful of times, if not two handfuls. So you start to get that confidence and it becomes you get a repertoire that you start to find what works and what doesn't work. And obviously you're also learning from watching other people and maybe more senior people to see how they kind of handle these incidents. And so all of that just kind of plays into the bigger picture, that it translates over into the little mundane stuff, translates over into the bigger things that you have a better grasp on generally your own emotions. Jon Becker: That's a really good way. Really good way to put it. Just a couple more things I'd like to hit on with you before we call it a day from a training culture and training mindset, there is a lot of crossover taking place between law enforcement and military training right now. And there's certainly been a lot of opposition and the whole rise of the warrior cop thing and counter militarization and all that. But you see, in the tactical culture, there is, I mean, obviously there's a great deal of experience coming back with 20 years of fighting wars and all of that. What's your read on kind of the way we are training tactical units right now. Joe Bucchignano: So again, pros and cons, you know, and I think individuals from the military community, especially those individuals from tier one units and special mission units, have a lot to offer. You know, there's, there's a level of real world experience there dealing with deadly force encounters that the average law enforcement officer will never experience nor has ever experienced. And so, you know, for example, I've never been involved in an officer involved shooting. So I am definitely not the person to stand up in front of a class full of people and talk about what to expect in, you know, in a deadly force encounter. That's never happened to me. So, you know, I'm not the one to speak to that. But you take someone from a tier one or a special mission unit that has been involved in close quarter engagements, and there's a lot of learning that can be taken from that. I think especially in the realm of command and control and deconfliction and large structure clearance management and stuff like that, I think there's a ton that we can learn from military guys and girls coming back and sharing their experiences and stuff like that. I think the downside is, unless you were a police officer, and especially policing in today's day and age, which is much different from what it was even five or ten years ago, there is nuanced stuff that is very, very specific to how law enforcement operates, how we should be operating and how we should be conducting ourselves. And, you know, the whole goal of a tactical team is preservation of life. And it's not just preservation of innocent life, but it might be the preservation of the life of a suspect. And so I think there's a very fine line and a very fine balance between the quote unquote warrior cop and the individual who has the skills and the mindset to, to do a job when it needs to be done, but also realizing that it has to fit within the letter of the law and that it has to fit for the situation at hand, that we're not, we can't just go out there and just start shooting and killing people and stuff like that. That's not the role of a tactical team. And this is going to lead me to another point. But I've had some experience training with some of the military based training companies out there, and I've learned a lot. In fact, it was going to – One of those courses was my tactical awakening. It was like, here I was, younger guy in ESU and thought I knew everything because, well, I'm an ESU man. We do 1000 search warrants a year and barricades and we do all this stuff. And I have all this experience. And then I went to a five day tactics course that was given by a bunch of, you know, former tier one and special mission unit guys. And then I realized, like, how much I didn't know, just like foundational principles and stuff like that. And so it was really eye opening for me. The problem I had with it was that some of these stuff was definitely too much on the warrior part of it where everything was like, kill, kill, kill, shoot, shoot, shoot. And there was no de-escalation there. There was no nothing about incidents where maybe deadly physical force is not applicable for a situation. And so I started being a little bit more open minded to thing. I think that the training companies that are out there that are military based training companies that also incorporate active and retired law enforcement in their training programs, to give that perspective as well, deliver some of the best programs that I've seen. There's a large training company that I've done some work with that they really pick from a cadre of both the military side and the law enforcement side because there's teaching perspectives from both that are very applicable to law enforcement. And some of this stuff is very, very nuanced. When you're doing debrief points that the military guy might not realize or understand that, hey, before law enforcement breaches that door or as they're breaching the door, maybe they should announce that they're law enforcement police and that's something that maybe they never had to do overseas. Whereas for law enforcement, that becomes a pretty important debrief point, that if a team doing a search warrant doesn't announce who they are and now they get engaged by an individual, that individual might use an affirmative defense that I thought my house was getting broken into. So if there's castle doctrine or something like that. So I think training companies that dive into or that delve into the experience of both military tier one special mission units as well as law enforcement individuals that have a lot of experience from the SWAT, tactical, and bringing kind of those two worlds together, I think they deliver, like, phenomenal products from a training perspective. Jon Becker: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, a lot of it is what you're looking for, too, right? Like, if you want to learn to shoot proficiently. You know, there's probably no more proficient shooters in the world than we have in our miss special mission units like that. From a skill standpoint, it's staggering. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. And even from the civilian sector, I mean, there's individuals that have no law enforcement background and no military background who are some of the best shooters in the world. And so I always, when I get into the conversation with people about individuals and teaching and teaching stuff that's either with or within their wheelhouse or outside of it, I always tell people like, hey, you don't have to be a law enforcement super duper SWAT guy or Navy SEAL or Delta Force to teach something as simple as fundamental marksmanship. But now, when you get into applying fundamental marksmanship in a CQB environment where you're adding additional things that are now out of that individual's wheelhouse, now that's where that stuff really starts to become applicable for me. I'm never an advocate of people who teach things that they've never really done in real life. We never ran nods. You would never, ever, ever see me teaching a nods class. I can go out now and take a nods class and immerse myself in it and become as proficient as maybe the next person running night vision, but I never did it for real. I'm not going to turn around now just to make some money, say, hey, you know, we're going to do a night vision class because I'm just teaching notional stuff without any real world kind of backing to anything that I'm saying. Jon Becker: Yeah. One of the things that is interesting about ESU is it's very, like your approach is very. I don't want to use the word vanilla, but I can't think of another word. Like, it's not sexy. Archaic. No, it isn't. But the thing is, it isn't archaic. Like when you. When you talk about the why with guys, there is a specific why, right? The use of tear gas, the use of explosive breaching, the use of nods, things that units think are very sexy and want to go hunt. And then you have a conversation with ESU and it's. It's very, you know, it's hydraulic breaching and it's very bland because it's safe and it's been proven safe. And there does seem to be almost this, like, counterculture within the unit to kind of the latest, greatest influencer, you know? Look how cool this is. It almost feels like the unit is kind of like, yeah, no, we're not cool. We're just very professional. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, once again, I always look at pros and cons, and so just to touch on both of those, I think it's a testament to the unit, the fact that we mitigate a lot of incidents every single year without night vision, without utilizing energetic breaching, without utilizing chemical agents and stuff like that. And a lot of these incidents we resolve by simply talking to people like that. There's no super secret playbook. It's just we're good at talking to people. And so we're able to continually resolve incidents without utilizing a lot of this extra stuff. The downside to that, and this is, this is the struggle with this, is that sometimes our success, because it is the norm, it becomes the expectation. So now, especially the higher ups in the department who are not within the special operations division, not within ESU, when you start to request, utilize certain things like chemical munitions or, or energetic breaching, they turn around and they say, well, what do you need that for? You guys do this all the time. You've never had to use it before. Why do you need to use it now? And obviously, the risk aversion light starts going off because no chief wants to be the first one to give approval to do an energetic breach or to utilize chemical munitions. And then something goes wrong, and then it's obviously going to be on their shoulders and they're going to have to kind of answer for it. Regardless how much stuff rolls downhill, they're still giving the ultimate approval and authorization for it. And so one of the, especially the environment that we work in, very dense apartment buildings and stuff like that, we have to consider cross contamination. We have to consider the effects that an internal energetic breach might have on neighboring apartments and stuff like that and everything else. And so these are obviously factors where I think professionals, you do stuff when you need to do it, you don't do it just because you can. And so for us, it was a lot of these incidents. We did not feel that this added stuff was necessary. I was always very adverse to night vision guys that I worked with. Oh, we need night vision. We need night vision. We need night vision. Me, it wasn't so much a, what do we need night vision for? We've done this for X number of years without it because I see the use for it and I see the benefits to having it. You know, it's New York City, but we still have areas like Pelham Bay park and Central park and Casino park in Queens and these large wooded areas that get pretty dark at night, you know, and we've had incidents where individuals have run off into the woods, and now, you know, we're hunting through the woods with white light, which is obviously not ideal from a tactical perspective at all. But my issue with the night vision comes back to what we were talking about earlier with, how do you maintain training for a unit of three to 400 people? And now you add a skillset like night vision that guys and girls are not going to be utilizing on a daily basis. You can't just say, like, hey, yeah, throw on some night vision and turn off the lights in the garage and walk around and there's your truck. Training like that, that doesn't work, and that's far more dangerous than not having it at all. So I think that if we had a methodology or a means of providing that necessary ongoing training to complement specialized equipment like that, then it might be realistic. A team of 20, 30 guys that are full time, that maybe do 100 operations a year and have a lot of time to spend training and perfecting that. Yeah, it makes sense. Like, absolutely, I'm not anti night vision, but for us and for our purposes and for the maintenance of just being proficient at its use, that was why I was against it. And it was like, hey, until we can figure out this training stuff, we have no business at all utilizing something like that. So the problem, like I said, comes into now when you encounter a situation where maybe this stuff is warranted. And I think I can think of two incidents off the top of my head, and one was a search warrant. When I was on the A Team, we had gotten some intel from an outside agency of an individual in Brooklyn who was threatening to do a mass shooting inside of a supermarket. This was shortly after the mass shooting that had happened in Buffalo, New York. And so he had made some indications of wanting to do a similar attack, kind of a copycat sort of a thing. And so it ends up getting kind of pushed down through our intel division, and it ends up on our desk as an emergency search warrant. And so the challenge to it was the structure was a three story brownstone, and the target of the search warrant lived in the basement, which had an internal staircase that led up to the second floor. His mother lived on the second floor of the location. And so, doing our kind of scout stuff before going to execute this warrant, we determined that the only breach point into this structure or into the first floor. The warrant that we had got was just for the first floor or the basement level, I should say, of this structure. And so it was a single breach point. We didn't have another option other than an outward opening door with three locks on it. And the individual had posted photographs. We had photographs of this individual with an AK-47. And so we started game planning this about how we were going to handle the situation. And our initial thing was, hey, we're just going to do a surrounding call out. You know, we're going to get perimeter and containment. We're going to initiate our call out procedures. We're going to have all of our guys behind armor and observation team up and the whole nine, and we're just going to call this guy out. It's not worth us rushing in there just to get into a gunfight. And so that was the initial plan, which quickly devolved after that, because we had gotten intel after that that his plan was to do some harm to another individual that was inside of the location prior to committing this planned mass shooting. And so now we started to look at this as a, well, if we initiate surrounding call out and he kills this third party inside of this location, now we're kind of holding ourselves responsible knowing this. And so it became a very delicate balance between, hey, are we going to do a surrounding call out and put ourselves in a position of advantage, or are we going to do this as a – We had a no knock endorsement on the search warrant. So it was like, hey, are we going to do this as a no knock entry with a dynamic entry, almost in the perspective of considering this like a hostage rescue, just because we did not want this individual to kill an innocent third party inside the location. And so the breachers, in fact, I was one of the breachers that day. And so looking at the target door going, man, that's a heavy outward opening door with three locks on it. Like, that's not an easy breach. There's really nothing for us to hook up a chain or a strap to, to do any kind of a pole. And so we are now kind of stuck doing this with manual tools between hydraulics or a halogen. And so we said, hey, you know what? This is a good situation, or this is a good scenario for us to use explosives like we have energetics. I was one of the explosive breachers in the unit. And so based on all the circumstances, the type of door that it was, the difficulty we knew that we were going to have getting through it in a timely manner, and the fact that it was an exterior door. So we were not worried about internal overpressures in an apartment door right across the hall and all that. Other stuff we said, hey, this is the perfect scenario for this. We went to the duty captain that was working, and he was on board. Yeah, this makes sense. Everything you guys are telling me, this makes sense. And it made it way up the chain. And once it hit a certain level at a certain individual, it was like an immediate, like, no, you guys don't need that. You've done this before, so on and so forth and everything else, and was, like, shot down without any other consideration. And so that was one of those incidents. Where did it work out? Like, yeah, I'm still here with no extra holes in my body, but the individual came and opened up the door as we were trying to breach it. Cause that's how long it was taking. And so, hey, that only worked because he made the conscious decision to come to the door with nothing in his hands and open it up for us. Had he made the conscious decision to give his ak, come to the door and start shooting through the door? I mean, you know, like, I might not be sitting here right now having this conversation with you, but, you know, the way that it was looked at afterwards, we were very defeated as a team. Like, that was collectively, we were like, that was garbage. Like, that was not good. That was cowboyish. That was totally unnecessary, completely put us at risk for absolutely no reason when we had these tools available to us. And in the eyes of the individual that made the decision to deny the energetic breach, it was, see, everything worked out of. Everything worked out and got in his car and drove away, you know, so, you know, yeah, it's a testament to the unit that we get this stuff done and, you know, yeah, I use the word archaic because we don't have the latest and greatest with everything. Some stuff we do, some stuff we definitely don't. There's definitely teams out there that have, you know, a lot sexier gear and equipment and I access to certain things and everything else that we don't. But I think that's a testament to the unit, the fact that we are able to be successful without it being due to luck, but instead just being due to skill and experience that so many of these incidents every year are resolved simply by talking to people. The vast majority of our barricades end up in involuntary surrenders, and I think that's really amendable. Jon Becker: 100%. Yeah, I mean, that's the funny thing about the current modern dialogue about SWAT teams is SWAT team shows up and it's going to get more violent. And you look at ESU, you look at LAPD, deep platoon, you look at SCB, that's the exact opposite of what happens. A professional tactical team gets there, the situation slows down, it becomes more deliberate. You know, it de-escalates. It's more negotiation. It's, you know, I think, it is a testament to ESU's professionalism that that still is very much the mindset. Joe Bucchignano: Yeah. And, you know, I think that a lot of people that are not in the tactical community don't understand that. You know, the body armor and the armored vehicles and the chemical munitions and the impact rounds, like all of the tools. Tools that we bring to a situation, to an outsider, they look escalatory, but they are all completely de escalatory in nature. You know, if I'm behind armor, maybe I don't have to shoot a person that's shooting at me. If I'm sitting in an armored vehicle and the nine millimeter rounds are just plinking off the side of it, like, okay, we're safe in here. Let's try to resolve this without using deadly physical force. But, you know, I think, again, there has to be also the mindset that, yes, we can resolve 99% of the incidents through our regular, conventional means, but we have to be prepared, ready and willing and equipped and trained to deal with that 1% that falls outside of that spectrum, that, you know, committed, trained individual armed with a long gun, body armor, like, not willing to, you can talk as nice as you want, use every trick in the book that you've amassed over your career and everything else. It's not going to work, you know, on that one percenter. And so, you know, those, I think those are the incidents that really kind of set, you know, set you apart. And those are the incidents I used to tell people, like, hey, we're going to train for the 1% because that's going to make the 99% of the work that we do easy. It sets you up for success. That that 99% we're going to be able to handle with no problems at all. Yeah, maybe we'll be here for a couple hours, but eventually it's going to result in a voluntary surrender, and everyone's going to go home and be happy in that feeling of accomplishment, knowing that we're able to resolve an incident just through verbal de escalation, utilizing some negotiation techniques and stuff like that. But it's not the answer 100% of the time. And I think that is the problem is when you encounter an incident that gets resolved purely on luck, but the upper level or the executives look at it as just another win. And then they go out and they tout the equipment and look, oh, this ballistic shield got shot and it stopped the bulletin. Well, maybe that guy didn't have to be there in the first place. Maybe if we had utilized chemical munitions, we wouldn't have had to put one of our guys in a situation for his ballistic shield to get shot. So that has always been my critique, is our level of success that we have. It's not always the answer. That's what we should strive for. We should always strive for the lowest level of force possible to resolve an incident. And if we can resolve an incident just through negotiation, fantastic. I mean, that's a win. And I think I used to tell people it's a lot harder to talk someone out of a crisis than it is just to walk up and punch someone in the face. Anyone can punch someone in the face and use physical force, but it takes a lot of skill and patience to take someone who is on the edge of a crisis and kind of talk them back to reality and then get them to submit to you. That is far more powerful than any tough guy. Macho. Yeah, I punch this guy in the face, like, whatever, nonsense. So I just, it's a very, it's something I'm very passionate about. It's a sticking point for me that, that we let our success is, it's a fantastic thing that we should be touting, but it's also a very big downside. It's a very big negative, because, like I said, it just becomes the expectation. Jon Becker: I think that's a fantastic place for us to stop. Joe, where can people get in touch with you, see what you're doing, all of that? Joe Bucchignano: Yeah, so I'm not really super active on the socials, but, you know, I retired in June of last year, June 30th, on my 20th anniversary, and I started up a company, crisis zone consulting. Just trying to share some of the lessons that I've learned over the years. And just give agencies, and whether it's public safety agencies like law enforcement or EMS agencies, businesses, private entities, or even individuals, just good training, just based on some of my experience. So you can find my website,. I'm on all the socials as well, under the same name. You can find me there. I'm going to start getting a little bit more active there, so please feel free to reach out through the website if I can ever offer up any assistance or advice or whatever it might be. That's what I'm here for, just to continue service in my retired life. Jon Becker: Joe, thanks, man! It's great spending time with you! Joe Bucchignano: Thanks, Jon! I really appreciate the opportunity!

DME-05 – Bank Robbery & Police Ambush in Saanich BC – GVERT5

DME-05 – Bank Robbery & Police Ambush in Saanich BC – GVERT5

Episode 49 – Bank Robbery and Police Ambush in Saanich BC – GVERT

Episode 49 – Bank Robbery and Police Ambush in Saanich BC – GVERT

DME-04 – Patrol Based Domestic Hostage

DME-04 – Patrol Based Domestic Hostage

Episode 48 – Improving Tactical Decision Making – Dr. Gary Klein

Episode 48 – Improving Tactical Decision Making – Dr. Gary Klein

DME-03 – Injured Hostages: The Critical Decision to Initiate a Hostage Rescue Team

DME-03 – Injured Hostages: The Critical Decision to Initiate a Hostage Rescue Team

Episode 47 – LODD on HRT Crisis Entry – Austin PD SWAT

Episode 47 – LODD on HRT Crisis Entry – Austin PD SWAT

DME-02 – Critical Choices in Hostage Situations

DME-02 – Critical Choices in Hostage Situations

Episode 46 – Escaped Inmate Hostage Rescue

Episode 46 – Escaped Inmate Hostage Rescue

Episode 45 – Improving Tactical Performance with Cognitive Training

Episode 45 – Improving Tactical Performance with Cognitive Training

Episode 41 Transcript

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