Episode 9 – Chief John Perez: Securing the Rose Parade/Bowl & Authentic Leadership

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Chief John Perez. John recently retired as the chief of police for the Pasadena Police Department in California. In his nearly 37 years of service to Pasadena, John served at literally all ranks in the department. During his career, John worked patrol, narcotics, counterterrorism, as a SWAT sergeant, lieutenant, and commander.

John helped form the first generation of Pasadena's tactical team, which had the challenge of deploying as a full time gang enforcement team and as a SWAT team for many years. John was twice awarded the chief's medal of excellence and received several commendations for his service over the years.

John, thank you for joining me on The Debrief!

Chief John Perez: I appreciate being here, Jon. Hopefully I have something to contribute on leadership.

Jon Becker: I'm sure you do. Tell me, let's start with kind of your history and background. Where'd you grow up? What was the decision that led to you becoming a police officer?

Chief John Perez: Absolutely. I've been a LA kid my whole life. I was born in East La, and Belvedere Heights now refers to as East LA, a large family. First generation Americans had brothers that were born in Mexico and parents born as well. And so they migrated here. And from East LA, we generally made the migration east of over to LA Puente. And then from LA Puente after about 1213 years old, 14, we went over to hues Covina, which was a dynamic change in lifestyles. And where we were moving with a father who really worked hard all week long and a mother who raised us and worked part time. And we were also raised by a woman from Mississippi who was my mom's best friend.

So I have the best of both cultures and culturally as a Latino. And then moving into a mostly white area of town, going to South Hills High School in West Covina really produced a view of the world and life, and with one incident that occurred, really pushed me into policing and prepared me better than I thought.

Jon Becker: Will you talk about that for me?

Chief John Perez: At 14 years old, I had a. I was probably 12, 13. My cousin was 14. He was stabbed in an incident outside of a liquor store where he was just buying candy and he wasn't, in fact, a gang member and a good kid, a good natured kid in a great family. And he was stabbed and later died in the hospital. And that was just. And we grew up in this gang area where, you know, we really couldn't use the parks if the police or the gang members were in the parks.

So you learn to have a way of life where it really gets in the way, you know, as a kid, to really go out there and grow and be in a safer place. When I became of age to move around about 14 years old, and finding a group of friends in West Covina, it changed dramatically. I was able to move around, enjoy life, but I never forgot, you know, the experiences we had as a family going through the death and the reminder that there are bad people out there. And since that point, at about 12, 13 years old, all I wanted to do was be a police officer and serve. Nothing else. Not the military, not the firefighting. Just serving as a police officer was my goal.

Jon Becker: And was passed in the first agency you went to work for?

Chief John Perez: It was the very first agency I applied for, and the last and the last it was. I applied for the sheriff's department and passing at the same time as a police cadet. I was able to take the entry police officer test in those days in the 1984, just in the beginning of 85, took the test. So when I became a police officer, I didn't have to take a test again.

It was more of just updating my background and sending me to the academy at 20 and a half, being not only the youngest person in the academy, but the youngest person, the youngest police officer in the department for a while until somebody else was hired at 21. The average age back then was 24, 25. Now it's closer to 30. So you can imagine at 20 and a half, you really got to make sure you're mature and trying to move into an area of making good decisions.

Jon Becker: I have a 20 and a half year old son. I don't think I'd arm him.

Chief John Perez: My parents probably said the same thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's a fair point. So talk to me then, through the early parts of your career, I know you worked a variety of assignments. Kind of walk me through the big periods of your early career.

Chief John Perez: Well, you know, it was dynamic. In the eighties, it was about the violence, right? We saw the crack cocaine and gang epidemic kind of crash into each other. And being a young officer out in the field, I think it was only about four weeks into it, there was a shooting where we responded to a street there in Pasadena, with a lot of gang activity. As I make the turn with my training officer onto the street, you could see the smoke coming from casings. I'm 21 years old, thinking, you know, they're paying me $12 an hour for this.

So I get into the street, I get out of a car, and the person shot as we're talking to him was somebody I had stopped prior and knew him a little bit. And we're kind of connected about the same age, you know. And then to see him taking his last words as he dies, as he's talking to me, and, you know, you're going through these emotions, but you also have your field training officer, you know, yelling at you to get a statement from him who did it, you know?

So it's a really odd place to be from an emotional standpoint as a young man and having care for people that you're right in the midst of this event where somebody's dying on you that you remembered a week earlier that you had a pretty good conversation with, and you knew he was a gang member, or I knew he was a gang member. But nevertheless, life went. It was gone right there in front of me.

Jon Becker: And that was how far into the job?

Chief John Perez: That was about three, four weeks. Two to three weeks. Less than a month, for sure. And my training officer walked me through all that much. Shortly after that, we had somebody jump off our Colorado bridge. And as soon as the body almost hit, my training officer was yelling at me to look the other way, because that thumping of a body hitting the ground, these are things you experience, along with a high level of calls for service and the murder rate that we were experiencing in California, especially in Pasadena, one neighborhood was way too much.

Give you an example. Back then, we had 13,000 part one crimes, major crimes, and most of it was in one neighborhood. Today, Pasadena probably has about 3600, and it was the lowest period we've ever had during the nineties.

Jon Becker: So it's 80% reduction.

Chief John Perez: Without a doubt, in violent crime even more. And so, during the nineties was by far the best decade of policing. After the LA riots. Haven't experienced that. It was a very unusual period of the smelling sensation of buildings and the amount of people we arrested out of Pasadena. Rodney King was from Pasadena in Altadena area.

So you knew him from pet stops, and you're familiar with him. But it was a terrible period of time to go through that purpose, that time, and then move into the nineties with the best research we've ever seen in policing. Federal grants, problem oriented policing, community oriented policing. We really were becoming skilled at what we were doing during the nineties.

But then came the advent of other things. Bike patrols, SWAT teams for many other agencies. Many of these departments started to hire more officers. The crime bill was written in 94. In 96, 97, we had 100,000 more officers added across the country.

So all these things were occurring, and we're all moving to a place where we didn't know. We were finding so many opportunities for equipment, tactical training, police vehicles. It really was setting us up for failure into the future without knowing that, because at some point it was not managed as well as it could have been.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you had this period of time where it kind of started with the 84 Olympics, and the development of SWAT starts in 71. At LA, full time SWAT 84, everybody's prepping for the Olympics. We have this massive expansion in tactical teams all over the country. And then Rodney King, 911, Columbine. There's this series of events, the North Hollywood shootout, where the patrol side almost followed at that point, the tactical side, and began to professionalize and increase equipment and all that. When did your team start?

Chief John Perez: Our team started in 1997, and I arrived to the team late in 97, as a team was just taking off. And one of the concerns chief Malikian had the time as his team was developing, was to create it into a neighborhood policing team equally as much as a tactical team. Now, if you look today at our specialized units, SWAT teams and neighborhood policing teams, and even gang units all function differently. A mindset is different.
SWAT teams are trying to slow it down, control it, the tempo of the event. Neighborhood oriented policing has to do with creating relationships in neighborhoods, having people call us as often as possible to try to find long term solutions to neighborhood problems.

Then you have gang enforcement teams. Their effort is open up that car door often, make the arrest, look for something that might be a crime to stop the next violent incident from happening. And now you're taking all these three and putting them into a blender and just sit and go. It could be a train wreck.

Jon Becker: It's going to go sideways. One of the three areas. It's going to go a little sideways.

Chief John Perez: At some point it will. And we were creating. That group of officers were all hand picked, and we were careful as to who we brought into the unit under Lieutenant Darryl Qualls and our commander, which was Wayne Hills, who ended up becoming the deputy chief. The minds that they had were excellent for what we were trying to create.

We were looking for the right police officers to come into that unit, reviewing police reports, see who everybody wanted did they have the mindset to follow good directives, to be part of the community, to want to engage the community? At times, we didn't get it right, and we had personnel issues and problems. And during that time, we also had Rampart.

And so I read the entire Rampart report. I was talking to some of the personnel from Rampart that transferred out to learn the lessons, the top ten lessons, of how to run these type of units. So we ensured the most basic of approaches on leadership were there. But much of it was management. It was about making sure we read the reports, the arrest information. We went out to see what kind of arrests were being made. We looked at the quality of the arrest. We had conversations, debriefs, and discussions on everything.

So, really, it was an unusual period of time to create such a big team, but realizing there was a dynamic out there that reminded you on cautionary tales, what could go wrong.

Jon Becker: So at that point, it was neighborhood crime task force.

Chief John Perez: It was a neighborhood crime task force from 19. They were developed in August 28th, 1985. I remember that memorandum that was written, and we just went to this fantastic technology, which was called collating copies, where you could make more than one copy on a machine. And so I remember making one extra copy of that memo for myself, and I still have it today. It is something that I glean on.

And there was a lot of good information from that report, and it basically stated that the amount of violent crime and what was referred to as Northwest Pasadena was just outrageous, and something had to be done. And they broke it down by area codes and some of the violent crime and the races and the cultures, and then decided that we needed a 24 person team to go out there every day and make arrests. And they did top end. They made thousands of arrests.

And we look now, 30 years later, and the criticisms that we get, as well as the damage of that, well, okay, we probably put a lot of people who deserve to go to jail, but we also took a lot of people and put them into jail that maybe could have had diversion or just needed something more than a ten year or five year prison sentence for your fourth arrest for rock cocaine. Right?

So there was a better way to have done it back then, and we just went all hard and all heavy with the. With the war on drugs, and we're not talking about those that needed to go to prison and should never come out. The wide majority should have the opportunity to relive their lives.

And I think we destroyed a lot of lives. Not Pasadena, but the general reform across the country and very careful about that. For somebody to have a federal charge of, you know, one rock cocaine and to go to jail for ten years from that, and you see 18 year old kid tearing up like, I got no life no more.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting because retrospectively, I think history has not been overwhelmingly kind to the war on drugs, and especially the federal sentencing guidelines. I remember the article that I wrote to get on to law review in law school was about federal sentencing guidelines. And it was contrasting a guy who had an ounce of cocaine that was laminated into a suitcase and an ounce of cocaine in the suitcase. One guy goes to prison for 30 years, one guy goes to prison for 10. Cause the container counts. So I think that retrospectively, there was that moment where it was like, okay, that might not have worked.

Chief John Perez: Yeah, we have enough science now and data to make better decisions. And that's what I'm hoping here in post retirement, to be able to run around and help that education. Not from a place of thinking we know it all, but provide the cautionary tales and the study of what we need from a police officer today and the prototypes we're looking for.

Jon Becker: When did NCTF move into being a SWAT team? Like, when did that – When did you stop the neighborhood crime?

Chief John Perez: Tasmania, 1985, about 92, 93, became a special enforcement team. And then by 95, the idea started to come out about a team that was really more tactically inclined and SWAT trained. And so by 96, we went to the special enforcement team, SES.

Jon Becker: And at that point you were a sergeant?

Chief John Perez: I was a sergeant moving into the unit at that point. And brand new officers, all brand new, really. The age difference between me as a sergeant and the average officer was maybe two years or three years. Same with my lieutenant, that he was the youngest lieutenant wooden, Darrell Qualls, and he was probably, you know, 34, 33, 34. So we had this perfect team being set up. Culturally, what a leader that was, african american and Latinos, two latino sergeants, and then a team that was made up of everybody, Asians, blacks, whites. It was really a team you could be proud of. And it was by far a period of time.

We learned how to be better leaders with each other, with the community, and really manage all that work that was coming through at times. We were deployed 7, 14, 21 straight days. And not only were we the gang unit for the shootings, to try to stop more shootings, we were also the SWAT team. Then we became a fugitive team. And at the time we had a janitors for justice.

So we became the dignitary protection and the protest team. So we were doing it all. And it was rough on families, it was rough on people's personal lives, where their personal lives were, in fact, a professional life. You couldn't escape it. And so that's just the way it was. You worked out together. You spent the night in the locker room, sleeping on the floor together in the offices, standing by, waiting for hours for events to happen, if the president visited or some high dignitary came to town. So it really was an extraordinary period of time. When I look back and all the work these officers did.

Jon Becker: So, and at that point, the primary focus is criminal. With 911, that changes. Right? When did you promote, you promoted a lieutenant? Around that time, right?

Chief John Perez: Right before 911. A month or two before 911, I was a patrol watch commander. Very unusual period of time when 911 struck that morning and my wife was a dispatcher at the police department called me and woke me up. And it was just a very. I mean, the feelings we all had that day, you know, it was, this depression was sitting in. The world seemed smaller, like you couldn't breathe, and you're wondering what's going to happen next and all the potentials for another attack. And started to think out the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl games and things that we host.

And the next thing I know, they created a counterterrorism unit of two people, and I was the lieutenant of that section. So literally, they walked me to a closet, called me in and says, this room with all these boxes needs to be done. And you have, you know, it was September, obviously, so we're getting into late September by the time I get up there. We need you to move all this and get ready for new plans and security plans for New Year's. So hurry up.

Jon Becker: So clean out this closet in the next two months, secure the Rose parade and the rose ball from a terrorist act to tier one events.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: In two months.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Seems reasonable.

Chief John Perez: And at that time, we didn't really have a lot of federal support. We had some support, but it wasn't a system that we created as a result of it. And I was sent off to New York to work with their counterterrorism team and work on the Macy's day parade through the neighborhoods and the bureaus that they have.

So I learned a lot from that experience going up there. Greg afshuriandhennae, who was the corporal in the room, incredible. Always owe him so much for what he did during that period. We worked seven days a week, sometimes 20 hours a day. For all those months, there was no rest, rewriting policy protocols engaging people.

And we were responsible for the potential investigations that came up. And it wasn't about proving that you had yourself a possible terrorist event. You were disproving was the approach we took, because that was a much better and healthier way to try to prove something. You could rationalize as to why not proving something puts you right automatically on the opposite side here. You become your own critic on these things. And we had some very interesting calls of, you know, Middle Easterners, for example, you know, using plastic bags to block older windows out at night.

And they only come in after one in the morning to have a cigarette outside in an apartment complex. And they'd go back in, and we're a month off or less than that from New Year's. How do you handle that? You know, getting our bicycle team. We were all set up on surveillances, each one that came out for a cigarette to smoke. What did we do? We gleaped them. Good old police tactics. Each one that came out one by one.

Finally, the last one came out, like, where's everybody at? We gleaped him as well. We get in there, we hold the place, we call the FBI. They come out, and they do an investigation. They say, we got nothing. These are just Saudi Arabian kids, students with money from their parents who are going to school at PCC, and they just need some direction. And so I remember the FBI agent leaving as we all left after 4 hours of an investigation. They said, just don't embarrass us. And it's like, wow, we have a lot of learning to do in terms of culture.

And so we went out, and really we were taught by the mosques about the culture and building our relationships around those communities in Altadena and Pasadena was hugely important. So that incident kind of drove that, like, hey, we need some training here. You know, we can't just use our instincts in policing every time we think we're right, which is the hardest part about police work, right?

Figuring out whether a crime is actually occurring, not chasing the guy with the money bag, with the mask and the money sign on the bag. That's simple. It's thinking there might be a crime. That's the most difficult part of policing forever.

Jon Becker: That's an interesting way to put that. It's interesting how, like, you think about 911 and the effect it had on the country, but the effect it had on Pasadena was pretty profound, because I'm sure that prior. Well, talk to me about prior to 911, what was securing the Rose parade and the Rose bowl like, and maybe give us some. Some give us some perspective on the Rose parade and the Rose bowl.

Chief John Perez: Well, you're talking about the parade itself. That is a month's planning just for the actual operation, but it starts months in advance, if not at the beginning of the year, as each event goes on and UCLA season begins. Our planners, which are amazing people, they're assigned a lieutenant, a sergeant, a corporal, a couple of officers, and that's it.

Nothing more than that. And they would go out and plan every event, taking every type of precaution and trying to reduce the cost. We could make everything as safe as you would want at a high cost. The freedoms are going to be restricted and it'd be unaffordable. We'll end up being like today's soccer games in Europe, right? Fully fenced off and so many, it becomes a man's game. Families don't go and it's getting better these days, but.

So we were in the same predicament as after 911 to see how we're going to approach this. But before that, a lot of planning, a lot of effort. You depend on mutual aid, you depend on relationships. Cost was always a factor that was more of a dynamic as law enforcement began to increase the cost with salaries and retirements.

And these things made it more difficult. So before that, it was tough. But we had fantastic people from Roger Kelly, who planned the World cup, to people we had that were known across the country by their name and what they did with people like Alex Uribe and Bruce George and people that just knew how to do this work. And Randy Taylor was a well known name. But these are people that traveled the country to other stadiums.

Jon Becker: What was the primary fear for the Rose parade and Rose bowl? Pre 911?

Chief John Perez: It was managing the crowds. It was an event happening of violence on the parade. The parade's a million people. They thought it was probably closer today as h***. Tech did their numbers, maybe between seven and 800,000 people.

Jon Becker: Actually, on the physical parade route,.

Chief John Perez: It’s the biggest parade that we know of anywhere globally, but definitely in the country. At five and a quarter miles from the last float to where we park them is seven and a half miles. This is a lot of space and it's easy to maneuver as you pass. TV Corner, which is like a stadium. TV corner runs about four or five blocks around Colorado and fair oaks. It fits about 40, 50,000 people and is the most secure place in the country at that time. And in fact, we have so much security there, we start 48 hours in advance.

As the stands are going up, we are making sure that we have complete security with bomb dogs and searches and turnstiles and who's coming in. We've always had that to make sure we didn't have somebody taking over afloat or some kind of attack of any type that we made sure that happened. And so that was always a concern before 911, but it was also managing the crowds into old Pasadena with 80 drinking establishments in a small area of less than a mile square. That's a lot of restaurants and bars that have even been there.

Jon Becker: 700,000 people and a bunch of alcohol.

Chief John Perez: And now you move into the next morning, you're dropping into the Rolls bowl. At the time, they almost had 100,000 people fit prior to the bowl being redeveloped, from 100,000 down to about 85,000, not to mention people working the outside events. So you're always looking at about 100,000 people there.

Jon Becker: So when 911 happens, the switch flips, and it goes from we're concerned about demonstrators, we're concerned about street crime, to we're concerned about the Rose parade of the Rose bowl being used as a stage. How does that change at that point? You're running counterterrorism, right? So how did that change your preparation and your relationship with your partner agencies?

Chief John Perez: And so you have to look at the reason why. Right? Simon Sienk, what's the why behind it? The why is that we care about the fact that this is the number one tv event in the morning on New Year's across the globe, you know, with a lot of people, hundreds and hundreds of millions of people watching this event.

So it matters that the bang for the buck right there and then would make a difference about America if you wanted to attack it. And so the why was clear as day. And so the way we went about it, Wayne Hilts, again, he was the deputy chief and loved his leadership, and he says, get that phone and start calling agencies and start getting federal resources.

So you basically have a phone and you start making phone calls and work your way up the ladder to people. And, you know, these days, all those relationships paid off over the years. But I was finding frontline people like myself that would say, hey, we'll be there, we're coming. I said, well, we don't have any overtime. We don't have money to pay you.

And they would, in fact, say, don't worry about it. We're coming from all portions of this country and this globe. We'll be there. And so we had to make sure we had hotels, hotel rooms set up. We had all the resources.

Again, Greg F. Sherman was running most of the investigations at the same time. We're trying to coordinate flights and hotel stays and this and that. So there was a lot of work, not to mention looking at every part of the parade. We walked it, we were underneath the street with public works, looking at the waterways. We were looking at newspaper stands, trash cans moving. Everything you could think of was being redone.

And I remember. I recall Wayne hilts walking in saying, hey, I need a name. We're doing a press release. This new federal team that you're going to, that's going to work with us, what's going to be that name? And we're doing it in the next couple hours. You need to hurry up.

So I'm sitting in the room and Greg's busy. I'm sitting in there. I thought, well, threat assessment response team, we finally got to. I said, how's that sound? Sounds really good. I wasn't smart enough to think it out when I gave him that name, that from. From 2001, 2002, all the way forward, it's known by our street name, Tart.

Jon Becker: Tart.

Chief John Perez: So I wish I'd been more creative. The name itself made sense to me. The threat assessment response team brought every level of tactical response from bombs, dogs and tactical teams and chemical sniffers, planes and military set up all over the region. But the name Tart really didn't reflect the effort.

Jon Becker: It might not have been your best.

Chief John Perez: Branding moment, not at all. The long name was good, so over the years it stuck. The planning was redeveloped and changed, and as we went forward, it was adjusted when needed, and so it still continues on, and these federal partners really make it work for us.

Jon Becker: So you're a lieutenant now. We go post 911. What happens – you then become a commander, if I remember correctly?

Chief John Perez: Nope. I recall there was an opening in the special enforcement section now for a lieutenant, and I thought, they're going to send me over there. I know they are. And so I started packing my boxes. I remember Wayne hilts telling me, hey, you know what? Don't worry about it. We're going to keep you here. You're not going to move. But we've set up all our plans. Everything was already moving.

Once you get to that point, you'd love to work it, but it now has its own life and we as leaders have to realize that it's set up well. It no longer needs me. New leadership can take it to another direction. And sure enough, the chief made a decision to move me to the special enforcement section.

So I spent another three years going back to that unit with a new generation of officers and different dynamics. And we had seen our violent crime rate drop with all the work that was being done with the prior team. In fact, they dropped it to maybe, ooh, one or two gang homicides from the double digits. Incredible work. But then we saw that the leadership changed a bit by 2006, 2007. I became a commander in 2006, and as the leadership started to change, the officers were as great as they ever were. But some of the direction, some of the emphasis changed.

And again, you got those three dynamics. If you mess with one and it's not balanced the right way, you're going to get something different out of it. And sure enough, we saw gang violence skyrocket back up to double digits, and we had a couple double homicides in the street and thinking, oh, my gosh, we need to really do something about this.

So the team was again reformatted, rebranded. We created a fugitive apprehension team to really go after many of the gang members that had warrants that needed to be arrested. And that was a facet we used in the late nineties to go after people with just simple warrants to incarcerate you.

And so those broken window type of approaches does make a difference, and it does incarcerate the more violent, and you throw off the planning because their leaders are now incarcerated. People don't know who's running what from a gang level. So it was helpful to bring it back down again.

Jon Becker: And when you came back to the team as a lieutenant, now having been, you know, post 911, going to New York, going to Boston, seeing the experience, having the experiences you had, did the emphasis of the team change?

Chief John Perez: It did. In the perspective that my lenses, I had multiple lens to look through. And the things that I worried about grew, and I was worried about how much work the team was able to really focus on. The team had shrunk in terms of number of officers, it was hard to get to all the training.

The SWAT component, as important as it was, was a huge restraint on the neighborhood policing and the gang enforcement, because we got to a point with the blue ribbon report and some others that it was about having at least two days of training. And now with court time and special operations, we may lose the visible, preventable part of policing to be out there. Our cars were known. They had no lights on top, no police lights. They were slick top. And whenever anyone saw the slick tops, the street just got quiet.

So we used all kinds of shock and awe over the years on somebody was, you know, their wedding or their birthday or an event or we just needed to rest. We would have patrol guys drive those cars for the shock and awe of it. We'd have people call the station and want to know if John Perez was working or John Baker so we could make sure that the SES is not out there. And so they had everything they tried to do from a criminal standpoint to know if they could run freely or not. And so these were challenges that we had.

The SWAT component was the largest of trying to control how quick it was now growing with weaponry, bearcats, and the need for more training. More training, more training. We were getting away from neighborhood policing and the gang enforcement.

Jon Becker: So at some point you promoted to captain, or was it commander?

Chief John Perez: It's commander straight from the special enforcement section, which is at the time was unheard of for usually they want you to go through administration, have some other type of staff level jobs. And the chief, Chief Malikian, again, had confidence in me to take me straight from that type of unit, from a strip mall all the way north of the city in some little building, and bring you all the way downtown to the upper levels of the department and command staff.

It was a daunting feeling of this overwhelming thing, like, oh, my gosh, the first day I opened up that key to that office, it was like, man, I am not ready for this. I don't think you're ever ready for an assignment. But it was like, holy smokes.

Jon Becker: So how did you cope with that feeling?

Chief John Perez: I was fortunate. I learned it was a learning growth and I ensured for people that I was learning. I had a reputation of running hard. The world to me was SES. So in that unit, tactically planning things, you always made room for discussion before a big decision. And the team kind of understood one another and where we were going, we all knew the why to it, and we all bought in.

As a commander, the world changed. Suddenly I had 100 and something people of civilians, professional staff working. And so I had this reputation from coming from there. I had to adjust myself that I get used to who I was. And many of the administrators that we had that were level equal to a lieutenant were far more skilled than most of our lieutenants when it came to technical work within the department. The systems that we had, from computers to excels to whatever we were doing, they were far advanced compared to the average lieutenant.

And so I learned a lot during my two years as a commander of the civilian division of dispatch records, much of our technology that was going on, our jail systems. And it really was important to learn that avenue of work for me and was a great foundation, much as was a police cadet in my first two years, where all the administrative work of working the computer systems was the foundation for me all the way through my career.

So it really was an amazing period of time for people who are in law enforcement. Pay attention to those type of assignments that you think are not what I call the meat eating assignments. That's the vegetables on the plate, and it's good for your health. Right? And we have to learn to go after the vegetables on the plate. I would never replace those years as a police cadet and knowing how the systems worked.

By the time I was a trainee with an FTO, I was teaching people how to pull information out of the computer they never thought was possible. And working with the administrators, they taught me so much, was another growth to understand that dynamic and to understand the mindset of a professional staff, civilian workforce compared to the, again, meat eating workforce of police officers. So it was the best growth I ever had as an executive was that period of time.

Jon Becker: So you were admin commander for two years?

Chief John Perez: For almost two years I was in that assignment before moving on to the field operations division, which was in fact, our patrol division. And that was a frontline position where you are really, really trying to manage lieutenants and senior lieutenants at that – With a way of doing business.

So the directives that come in from a police chief, whether they're that police chief's directives or they come from the city manager or they're given by a counsel in terms of guidance, many times it's the commander that's got to go down and sell those directives. And you can't say, the chief told me, you really got to help people understand this is, we're trying to go with this directive and trying to expand people's vision.

So I don't think my skill sets then were developed enough as an executive to walk in and help people understand some of the changes we were trying to make to gain the trust of the public for the type of police work we had to do. And it's quite the challenge.

So I spent three years in the patrol division, really trying to manage many of the obstacles. Every ten years or so, we were losing a large part of our workforce due to the amount of overtime that we have forced overtime. It was a problem that we were dealing with all the way up until I made interim chief, and it was a way, we found a way out of that, but it was a constant problem with officers leaving us and having to rebuild the system again.

Jon Becker: So it's interesting you know, you see guys that are promoting the chiefs of police. A lot of times they'll come in one of two ways. They come in through an admin route where they have a lot of admin experience, or they come in through, you know, what you described as the meat eating route, which I think, knowing you as long as I've known you, I think is a very accurate description of, you know, Sergeant John Perez.

How did you synthesize, though? Because it's knowing you as long as I've known you, you always had a reputation of being like a hard charging, go getter, meat eating cop, and all of a sudden you're thrust into a very political environment. Right? I guess it's probably when you become the patrol commander that you were introduced to the politics of the city, right?

Chief John Perez: Oh, absolutely. You're at the whim of who the police chief and the senior people of the organization are, and people jockeying for positions, people looking to show they got control over something. You have to live in that environment. And for the goodness of it all, keep focus on neighborhood policing and doing this job for the people that need it. Not everybody on the block gets to vacation in Hawaii or the cabo. For them, the best it gets. Their kids get to play out front, man. That's the best it gets. And our police officers sometimes forget that everywhere across this country, we forget that basic tenant. We're here to make your life better. If maybe the deputies in my town would have done that more, I could have used the park without them being in there as gang members.

So everything I did later on was a lot to do with how I grew up in the first half of my life, to say, that's how we should police. I was policing from a 13 year old eyes of John Perez thinking, this is all I want from you. You know, it's like a young John Perez talking to the older John Perez. Don't forget about that. Nobody's going to like it. People are going to push back at you. People are going to think you're weird about that and maybe not going to like you over that.

But I had to stay true to my approach to policing, that it was about prevention, making, developing relationships and really trying to make it safer for people by prevention first being visible and then by intervention, and then if we have to enforce, well, who knows where that's going to go, right? It usually goes very well, but when it doesn't, we see the video of that. So that's why prevention and intervention are hugely important today more than ever before.

Jon Becker: It's interesting, because it's, as you come into higher and higher leadership positions, the politics of the world begin to get you. And as a chief of police, there's a lot of political pressure for you to act a certain way or to try and appease certain groups.

And, you know, I have a lot of friends now that I'm an old man, and we're all old men, a lot of friends that have come into those jobs, and you see it change them. I didn't see that with you. I never saw you kind of undergo that transformation. You were still a meat eater, but somehow you learned to speak fluent vegan.

Chief John Perez: Well, you know, I'll tell you, that's great. To put it, furthering my education as a lieutenant, getting my master's degree, I went for my bachelor's as a sergeant. As a lieutenant, my master's. I started working on my PhD as a lieutenant, I mean, as a commander. And I think that learning how to do peer review reading was a game changer. And picking up great books over the years from the early nineties all the way through to where we're at today with the leaders and what they're using from previous history really changed the format on using science into policing, really using science. Like, okay, how can I take that and use it?

There were some ideas I held for ten years. I'd write a memo to myself and hold it on a flash drive or the computer drive, wherever it was at, and bring it back up or print it out and put it into a book. And I have a ton of memos from the 1990s I wrote myself. It's like almost I was talking to myself into the future. And so I used much of that from. We reorged the entire department. I used much of that documentation and reading the peer reviewed stuff that was out there on the science. And it really was the nerd part of us coming out and willing to try new things and being progressive. A really difficult place to take a piece of equipment.

I mean, we visited your place on occasion. Always remember the janitors for justice and saying, hey, man, we need stuff. We don't have money to buy any of the munitions we may need. You said, take what you need, but you use anything. You have to pay me for what you use.

Jon Becker: You recommend stuff, you gotta buy it.

Chief John Perez: You basically said that we're talking the 1990s, and that's before the period where I knew you selling your leather from the trunk of your car for handcuffs. So we all made this progression over the three, four decades now where we're at today.

So I think that was. And spending time with smart people around me and people I respected. You're a big part of my own growth because you are well accepted by law enforcement and you're not in law enforcement. I think most people, the younger generation would probably think you were at one time. That's a frequent question.

You are well respected and accepted because of your mindset, what you provide and, you know, you put away the ego. You put all that stuff away and you deal with us. But you're a big reader. You use science and you use everyday rational thinking. And I believe that's what connects you to many of the leaders in law enforcement today. That's why you're so well accepted.

Jon Becker: It's one of the things that I think, and I think we share this. The more people I command, the bigger the business is, the more responsibilities I find, the more terrified I am of being wrong.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: And I see that same thing with you where it's kind of driven. You know, it's like they say that, you know, talk about Kobe Bryant. You know, he liked to win, but he really hated to lose. And successful people, it strikes me, are people that they want to win. Like, I like to win. When I win, I'm over winning so fast because I'm worried about the next fight and how I might lose that.

Chief John Perez: There's not a lot of learning lessons from winning.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's true.

Chief John Perez: When you lose, unfortunately, that sets up your winning for later. And I had a lot of learning to do. And losing, you lose credibility. It's how you lose credibility in an organization. As a leader, you are going to lose it. You have to gain it back. You deliver directives. You're taking a chance. Many of the leaders of today, you have to be actuarial. You're reading tea leaves and you have to have the confidence in yourself to say, I think, first of all, we're heading this way. And this is why you may be wrong.

At the end of the day and for a while, you lose credibility from that. You could be an NFL coach and third and one, and you decide to do a set of plays for a while that aren't working. The growth in, that's amazing. But in the meantime, you are well hated. I'm a big Ted Lasso fan for the leadership lessons that are in there. Right?

And so these things are huge. When we look at where we lose in life and the credibility we lose on any given day, the next day you get to wake up and get it back. It takes a little bit longer, but there are times I tried to do things or my ideas were way off, and I had to deal with it. And you have to fall forward, right?

You have to, as I say by Maxwell, you got to fail forward. You have to be able to get yourself back up, stand back up, and keep going forward. You can't just give up and say, man, I'm no good at this. And that's part of the learning lessons for the greater growth of it all.

Jon Becker: The thing is, I think that ultimately, what is at the root of a lot of that and a lot of what I hear you say is kind of two things. The first is authenticity, right? It's being who you are and manifesting your principles.

Chief John Perez: When do you find out who you are? You know, I mean, you always are who you are. And you're confident. First argument in the morning is yourself in the mirror, right? And you move on with your day. But who you are and you believe in yourself. When you start to find out who you might be as a leader, it really does start to change. True north, authentic leadership. It was a book written 30 years ago that is still one of the lead top books about true north, about being yourself.

And in the beginning, when you're developing yourself, it is a bumpy road. It is a bumpy road to trip and fall as you find out who you are to get to a place. And you adjust along the way, because you might fall into a circle that maybe they like to, you know, criticize every directive from command staff. And you're in that circle for a while, and you're like, man, you know what? This is not my circle. That's not me.

So you learn to circle yourself in with over a lifetime of people that are good for you. And in an organization, you may lose touch with them once in a while because you're in different parts of the department. So much of the people I made command staff are with me when they were young officers. And you might call them yes men or yes people, but they're yes people to the point they support you, but they're the first people to get in your face and tell you when you're wrong, you know, really important.

Jon Becker: I've said for a long time, like, you know, somebody on your staff who agrees with you serves almost no value, right? I won an argument, and I go hunt an argument.

Chief John Perez: But you know what? You don't want people just say, don't like something either. I've seen those people on command staff. That's a bad idea. We shouldn't do that. You're ready to fall forward.

Jon Becker: Right.

Chief John Perez: Like, you give me something. I'd rather go with the yes person because they're on board to work that directive.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a good point.

Chief John Perez: And we're like, well, we don't know where this is going to go, but I'm with you. I'm, oh, hey, I'm not sure there's a good idea. I'm with you. Let's go. And we're good. We're good with that perspective. As opposed to saying, I don't like where you're going, I gotta go. You know that doesn't work.

Jon Becker: No, no, it's, it's, it's, I want you to argue with me. I want it to be creative. In the end, we're on the same team so we can debate the play. And I want to hear your thoughts on the play. And I want us to argue what the best play is at the point that we go to the huddle, the play's call.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: We're all on the same team.

Chief John Perez: My staff, we got to move. My staff knew that our discussions are more important than a decision. Discussions are more important than the decision. Now there's times you can't have that discussion, but you got to make time for it.

Big part of our early planning with the city hall occupation was a preplanning. And having these discussions. I always recall a quick story as a chief with Lieutenant Bill Grossoffe, our chief of staff. I wrote an email. I was going to fire it off the council and the city manager. And Bill happened to walk in. I said, alt, take a look at this thing. Ten what you think of it? I'm relaxing, stretching from writing it. I'm smiling. I feel good, right? I just wrote something good.

Jon Becker: Feeling pretty good about it.

Chief John Perez: He's at my desk reading the computer, and he says, h*** no. F, no. He says, you can't send this. He goes, I'm erasing it. And he deleted it. He, right there. He deleted everything I had worked on. Now, granted, you get it back from the deleted, but he went through the effort of deleting it. And those are the people you want around your.

Jon Becker: So what you're saying is Chief John Perez. Was Chief John Perez because of a deleted email?

Chief John Perez: Yeah, absolutely. Or you look to a great commander like Art Shute, who's NFL coach of command staffs, and art has this ability to, to argue with you. But in the beginning when he was a new commander, he didn't have that. I actually kicked him out of the command staff office twice, but yet by far, he was the strongest leader that we have today in policing along the San Gabriel Valley, on his event planning experience, his leadership, his willingness to tell you did wrong, we give you a hug. But in the beginning, he had to figure that out as I did.

So I tried to give him the leadership. I wish I would have had more when I was coming up to the organization.

Jon Becker: So you mentioned the Occupy Pasadena movement. I think it's an interesting topic in authenticity and in placing yourself in peril. Will you kind of walk us through that?

Chief John Perez: Well, the pandemic really put us off. Right? It changed everything we were doing. And that's part of this evolution, that we had staff meetings every single day. Our lunch was in the office in our, what we call our department operations center up on the top floor of the police department. And it was important for us to review every division we had, every protocol.

We must have adjusted at the end of the day, over 100 protocols in the organization based on the pandemic, from how we were doing investigations, how we were going to deploy people. If there was, you know, people being infected and were positive with COVID how do we respond to that? How do we put you off from work? How do we notify everybody in the department without notifying them?

Well, I did some things our human resources division or our legal department didn't like for the city. If somebody was positive for the COVID we put your name out and said, John Becker has his home waiting, testing. Now HR and the legal department is like, what are you doing? That's a HIPAA violation. We are in a world global pandemic. And you're worried about that? Thats what we were worried about how tactical, some organizational policy in a matter of war when you're being shot at, right? No, no, no. It doesn't work that way. But what we were able to do is we had very few work related contacts. Much of it was coming from outside of work.

So we were able to control it. And people understood what was happening and say, well, I think I need to get tested as well. And so more people would get tested and we'd have more negatives coming back, or you were put off early. So that type of approach up and staff worked. Then you go through what was happening with social justice, the cabin fever, right?

People were coming out of their homes, vehicle pursuits, driving fast, shooting their weapons. People were stuck with the pandemic in what I call that moment in the shining where his head comes through the door, here's Johnny the Nicholson incident. And so people lost it, and people were doing dumb things. And this was creating this environment and then you had the incidents that happened in Atlanta. You had these shootings that were going on that were driving the George Floyd incident.

From May into June, more shootings were happening, and everyone now was under the spotlight. And so we're thinking, man, we got to get ready for something like this and having the discussions. And then came August, August 15th. We had our own officer involved shooting with a young man from our community who had a gun. The rumor after the shooting was he had none. And it was very difficult. We had the gun recovered with DNA on it, and people said, well, how do you know that that was implanted by you guys?

We think you guys went to the hospital and did all that stuff. And as well, the rumors were flying. Even the council members said, you know, how do we know that gun wasn't there beforehand with his DNA on it? Isn't that possible?

Jon Becker: Could have just been laying there, parked on that street, happened to run by it.

Chief John Perez: I get the emotions. I get where everybody was at. I know the difficulty of all this. It was tough, but it led to a place after that shooting where people were upset. And I actually received emails threatening to kill me, kill my family, kidnap my kids. And the officers were going. The officer involved was going through a lot. We had a right to protect him. And so it was a very difficult period of time. I did meet with the family. I discussed it with the family, the incident. They hired an attorney, a civil rights attorney, and another one that represented George Floyd.

And so these were very difficult times. And so within a week of that incident, and this is where it matters, to work intel early and put yourself in a position to grab that information. I learned that from the science of reading. Whether the old books of the seven habits and a courageous follower and good to great, all these great books were the start of our leadership reading.

Then you forward it today to YouTube and where we're at and the great writings going on with Simon Sinek. And you got Jocko Willek, the retired Navy SEAL that was a lieutenant commander. And what I like about his video and his books and his writing is that he's a study of leadership. He'll read for hours and hours to come out with 30 seconds of stuff, and we could respect that.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, totally.

Chief John Perez: And he applies his experience to it, and I really appreciate his approach to that. And it's the fact that he wasn't the most decorated warrior out there. He led the most decorated unit in the military. Now, that's leadership. That's where you have something to say. I am listening and I am going to go back and study what you are saying.

So we are in a place where we really use that for our future thinking. We had a place in a time in the morning where we had a BLM activist who had a restraining order to stay out of the city of LA, and she had occupied their city hall. And as Michael Moore told me, it was hundreds of $1,000 in damage in overtime and blah, blah, blah. It's problematic for all of us in our community. She shows up at our city hall now. She's from Pasadena, she lives in our town.

And we dealt with her in every shooting. She was out there on Facebook Live saying, hey, you know what? We're going to occupy city hall. And I'm in my workout gear and, which is probably word and stuff from 8th grade or something. I don't know how I look, but I'm getting ready to go down the weight room and my staff is in their office. About 07:30 in the morning. Hey, chief, she's going to occupy. She's not going to occupy. We're not going to become Portland.

We're not going to become all those places. City hall has way too many important services in a much lower level. It's much like occupying the capital of a state or a country. You stop all services. It's the wrong form and the wrong view for us to make the real change we need. No way. I can't allow that to happen.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The symbolic nature of occupying the city hall is.

Chief John Perez: I went across the street. I left the station, went across the street and talked to her right there on Facebook. And she gave us everything we needed to be able to understand what was going to happen. And from that point, as I left, there were people that were driving by that saw the live Facebook, that drove to city hall and engaged me out there in a positive conversation.

So it was pretty good that we were able to talk to one another for people in our community. Based on that interaction that led our day, though, and planning our intelligence, we acted early. We had tabletops. We set everybody up, making sure we were ready in advance by 10:00 in the morning, who was going to be held over at night, who was going to be ordered overtime.

Tactical teams, all this department operations center up above all the team leaders and the debriefing and deconfliction that went on really saved us that early planning of having unique things in place and being able to gap up and allowing frontline supervisors to question our approach, say, wait a second, we're not sure that's a good idea.

Okay. Why? Back to the why. And they have that discussion. It wasn't just that you had people that were in disagreement with the idea. They also provided their experience. And that's the difference right there, is that you're not just saying, I don't like something, but you're saying, I don't like something, but let me offer you a different route, or why I don't or. We adjusted this and we were able to work all those kinks out during the day, nonstop, that we secured some of our areas early so they couldn't occupy those areas and we used mutual aid.

The equipment we needed, we brought in tow trucks was very, very unique and something we trained to after that day, to other local police chiefs and police departments, to be well prepared, well situated and placed, but unseen by the public. Hugely important to allow the public to demonstrate in protest. That's their constitutional right. We should support that. Offer them the traffic units they need for traffic control and the safety. But you don't need to see 500 tactically dressed officers 20ft from you when you're protesting. It really jacks up everybody's emotions.

So if you would have opened any closet door, 20 officers would have fallen out, you know. But we were well prepared with equipment, a lot of debriefs and brief backs. The brief backs were hugely important. The rehearsals of what we were doing, it was. This was all led after the ideas were formatted with the command staff. Commander Art Shute and Lieutenant Johnny Mercado were enormously important to this whole growth.

Now they go back years, decades before, to ses. The learning curve we had back then about neighborhood policing and gang enforcement and SWAT team and balancing all that. So their mindsets understood those different directives and wasn't just tactically planned. We opened up our eyes and ears to the leadership.

Look, people don't often say they are overlaid and under-mannered. Right? It's the other way around. That's what people say, that we're over managed or we're undermanaged. Over-management and we're under led is usually the issue that we're in. We tried to make sure it was the other way around. Everything we do, we manage. We absolutely manage most of our lives, everything about it. But there are opportunities for us to identify a point, to be a leader. You can't be a leader 24 hours a day. It's impossible.

But you look for the opportunities to make change, to lead in the right direction or change culture. That's really the learning lesson that came out of that, was to look and ensure that you are taking the opportunity to lead. When it presents itself, when it presents itself right there, you have to have the ability to say, that's the moment I need to do something right here. And that's the importance of it all.

Jon Becker: So in that occupied Pasadena, you had, obviously, the tension of a city council that's divided and has different views. A community that's divided has different views. Pasadena, although a small city, does have a relatively activist mindset in some of the critics and within the council, what made you make the decision to deny, nope, you're not taking city hall?

Chief John Perez: It was a decision I had made early on, looking at Portland and looking at what happened in Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, at third city hall. And I realized if we allowed occupation, many people wouldn't get services.

Jon Becker: I'm guessing that was not necessarily a popular decision with some of the members of the community and some of the members of the city staff.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely. Our city manager, we had a long discussion, very supportive, and he had mentioned that there wasn't support for this entirely. In fact, we had one council member said, just let them occupy. Let them have it. You shouldn't stop them. He said that the following week. And so that's problematic for me to have that type of loss of government, and what could happen and trying to clean that up later could be difficult. And so we had that discussion we talked about the following morning. Maybe I would be released as a police chief, basically terminated.

So I called my wife, let her know that that might happen. She just wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing, and I was doing the right thing, and she was fully in support. So I knew I was in a good place at home.

And so a few hours later, when Antifa started to show up and we started to see the name changing on the street signs to freedom way, pig way, this, that, this. You know, they had duct tape, and they had the spears and they had shields. They were putting on very scary stuff when you're that close. City manager, after we talked, he says, okay, well, we'll talk later. He shows up at about four or 05:00, and, you know, in police work, we have what's called a go bag.

And so he raises his bag. He's got my go bag with me. I'm here with you guys. And oftentimes thereafter, during the protest, we invited everybody to our department, operations center, council members, city people, city managers. He was almost always there with us throughout the night just to listen and to provide his guidance and what we needed to do and full support. And it was really good for him to be out there.

But our situational awareness, this is the key. The situational awareness for people, for counsel and the city manager and the legal department, for the city attorney's office, it would have been delayed because of the usual processes of policing. In this case, we worked and gave him immediate information because he was on the scene with us. He was seeing it himself firsthand.

And I'd walk up and it's like having the general right next to the battle scene and give them what we were doing. He was then able to relay that to the council quickly and give his assumptions, his assessment of what was happening.

So the situational awareness was a big factor in all of this. But having that support from the council and keeping the city attorneys up to date and everything we were doing with phone calls every less than an hour was tremendous in making sure everybody supported our direction.

Jon Becker: But it was almost a suicide pact between you and the city manager then, because him showing up knowing that there's at least one council member that thinks it's time to turn over city hall.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: And he has a chief of police that has already expressed that that's not going to happen.

Chief John Perez: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: You know, I mean, I realized that you obviously had done the calculus, that you were willing to lose your job.

Chief John Perez: The risk. The risk assessment. And that's why I think he's one of the best city managers in the country. He'll put me in check in a moment if he had to. Not a problem. He'll shut me down. He's the boss. You know, it's what the structure of. I'm not an elected official as a sheriff. Right?

Jon Becker: Yes.

Chief John Perez: So there's a lot more decision making processes going on between a group of people that's got to be collective and best for our community. So it worked.

Jon Becker: But it's interesting because I think one of the things, when I teach leadership, one of the things that I talk about is the difference between leaders and managers, and one of those differences in my brain is the willingness to place yourself in peril for principle, the willingness to go, you're not taking city council well. They may fire me. Okay. Like, you had already made a decision that you were willing to lose your job and not give up city council.

Chief John Perez: We kept that quiet. We didn't want the officers to have to deal with that emotion. Whether they supported me or not was, you know, we have a new chief in the morning. During this whole episode of a officer involved shooting had just occurred, and by the end of the night, it worked out extremely well, in that nobody went to jail and only one car was impounded that wouldn't start.

And it was a careful approach that we had from having hundreds and hundreds with the potential for thousands to having less than 100, and then dealing with a group of 20 or 30 walking around marching and doing things, and our tactical officers having the discipline to handle it correctly. And at the end of the day, we learned a lesson.

One of the lessons was, as command staff members, if you're not part of the planning process, you're not allowed to make last minute adjustments. You can imagine a coach coming out of the locker room with 20 seconds left in the game, and the head coach picks a play, and all of a sudden the coach comes running out of the locker room criticizing the head coach about, that's a bad idea right now. Oh, wait a second. We've had three and a half quarters to figure out their weaknesses. We think this is the best decision. So we learned some lessons coming out of there.

But at the end of the night, the officers were really satisfied. They did something right for the community. And, you know, coming out and talking to the majority of officers that were going home at 03:00, 04:00 in the morning, had some great discussions and a lot of thank yous to us and the command staff for making the right decision.

That was, you know, good for us. As command staff, you make the decisions, you go on to the next battles on whatever that's going to be. But to have a couple hundred people coming out and going home and shaking your hand, saying thank you, I think that mattered.

Jon Becker: As somebody who knows a lot of people in your department and grew up in the city of Pasadena, that decision had more impact on your brand than you could have possibly recognized.

Chief John Perez: Well, even in the community, we had people the following week, officers go get their food, and people were paying for their food and, you know, clapping for them, and they walked in to pick up their food because there were still the pandemic rules, but they had a lot of community support from people for doing what we did. It got very little attention because it went the opposite way. The news stations were looking for occupation, not the other way around.

So it got very little traction, and that was fine by us, but it got very little traction from the public. And we had another 75 protests thereafter. And all of them were handled in the same regards, except for having to put out the line of officers, because it wasn't an occupation, it was a protest or demonstration, which they had the constitutional right to do. And we supported that. And so all those other 75 protests and demonstrations, we allowed that to occur without our presence.

Again, we planned in the same way, the same accord. Again, you opened the door and everybody would fall out. But we were not seen other than the traffic officers on the motorcycles providing the traffic stops and the brakes that they needed, or those moments we had to run out and make an arrest for a gun or a fight or something that was happening. Those were the only times you saw the majority of our officers.

Jon Becker: So you see, you have 75 additional protests. It's an interesting choice in a modern law enforcement environment to decide between having a large presence or allowing a protest constitutionally. You're there to protect their constitutional rights and give them an opportunity to protest the government, which is the whole point of it. And so you need to let them go. But the amount of presence and the type of presence seems to almost give these things the ability to create their own weather.

Chief John Perez: Yes, it is possible. You never know. Once again, going back to leadership principles, we're going to the true north. It is the foundation of what I believe that in doing my experiences over the years with janitors for justice, the occupation period during the great Recession, and then reading literature, Madison, Wisconsin, maybe the lead in the country in the 1970s, writing literature about campus protests and not being seen and how much the chances were heightened that it would conclude safely for everybody.

And so I took all that into an equation and came out with the fact that we should go on that route as often as we can. There are moments in which we can't. Occupation was one of the city hall. Correct. But I had to be able to try to identify those or have a team that could identify them. And that's only going to happen through discussions and having our staff meetings and giving people the confidence to say, this is not the one, or, we need to do something better on this other one. So that was really important. But it really goes to the true north principle.

Believing what you believe, knowing you've studied the confidence, everything that you're done, and you got to wait for the fastball to come at you. I had a great talk with Matty Moda back in 2018. He came to our station, and we donated equipment, and I asked him, what is it like to be there?

And Walter Austin or Tommy Lasorda asks you in the 9th inning to come up and get ready. He says, well, you know, you've done all your study. You prayed to God, you've done everything you're supposed to. You lived your life well. He said, this is for a pinch hit, right? The guy who led the most in the season for decades. It was the record, he says, but then you studied everything you needed to. You knew you had it. When you get to the plate, you make your decisions. The ball comes at you and you say, bring it on to the pitcher.

And basically that's, I love that because that's the same approach we basically took, was to say, look, we've studied everything. We're taking everything into consideration, but now we're at a point to make a decision.

Jon Becker: But I think implicit in what you're saying, apart from what we've already talked about, authenticity and having true north, is being a student of the game, right? Like you're not walking into the bottom of the 9th inning wondering what could happen and having no plan in place. So what are your thoughts about that? It strikes me that you've always been a student of the game.

Chief John Perez: And one of the terms I use often is a student of the profession for us, and being a student of the profession means you're always studying, you're always learning, you're always bouncing things off your mentors, listening to other people, debriefing situations and taking all that into consideration. And this was part of all that understanding. You're going way back in time and pulling things out and knowing where you want to be.

And so this was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do, not to be present in the dozens we had out in front of the police station where people wanted me to take a knee or the hundreds of people, you didn't see a police car, police cars driving by. And it was very peaceful events where people got to experience the emotions of other people and the tragedies that have happened in their lives and to share them without us being in the middle or me coming out in uniform and for a moment, taking the knee and taking all that away from everybody, that wasn't the point.

At the same time, we had to know when we had to be present and when it was about protecting the proper property of the city or people. And I believe that that was the right time to do what we did. So it took a lot of thought and support from people around me, and not everybody around me was in support of what we did. At the end of the day, it was the right thing. We did take a chance. We had an opportunity to be leaders in the organization and in the community, and we took that route and we stayed with it.

Jon Becker: I think that another interesting thing about your career was your willingness to almost follow a Lincoln principle. And I think of all the chiefs I've known over the years, hundreds, possibly thousands of chiefs of police, I've never seen anybody walk into a crowd of people that did not like him. Maybe Daryl Gates walked into a crowd of people who did not like him and said, tell me what's wrong with me the way you have. Talk about that.

Chief John Perez: For me early on, you know, learning from other chiefs like Bernard Malikian, the others that have been around, you have to engage the community and you have to do it your way. And I believe the only way to do that was to be as open as I could with our community. We had something called community conversations where we went in with frontline officers to engage the community and talk to one another about real issues in policing.

Anytime people called me on my cell phone, I answered. Anybody sent me an email, I answered it. You invited me to your forum. I did my best to be there. And those engagements were hugely important, not just with people that I connected with. And philosophically, we might have been the same arena. It was connecting with people that we weren't in agreement philosophically on a lot of issues. And some of them are very close friends. They're what could be considered activists, people in the community that wanted police reform. I wanted police reform.

And for them to understand the route I was going and reorganizing the whole department. We flattened it, we regrew it, we put new equipment, new training, new technologies. We're a better police department. And many police chiefs and departments had asked, hey, how did you do that? We created new units. We put more officers into patrol without raising a penny on the budget. All that done.

And so how did that really happen? A lot of work, a lot of meetings, and a lot of teams of people coming together. And not everybody was in agreement. I eliminated the gang unit for a new model, a contemporary model that was intelligence led model that we have today. We still put units out there when we need to on overtime to patrol these neighborhoods. But much of the work we're doing up front is intelligence led.

We're going to identify these career criminals, the gang members, the people that are doing this crime, and arrest them before they do it or immediately after the arrest. That's the goal to ultimately get.

Jon Becker: I think saying philosophically disagreed is a gross understatement of people who are calling for your resignation while you're inviting them to be on a chief's counsel.

Chief John Perez: And some people even threatening my life.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, literally, it's interesting because, you know Sen. Tzu, know yourself. Know your enemy better. Hold your enemy close. Hold your friends close. Hold your enemies closer. It was interesting to watch you start a chief's advisory council with people who strongly, philosophically disagreed with you and then open yourself up to criticism in a forum you created.

Chief John Perez: Right.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about what that. What was the advantage of that?

Chief John Perez: Well, it's where it came from. And where it came from was, you know, on July 29th, 2016, I had a v fib incident where I had died for, they said 60 something seconds on a heartbeat and came back and had a surgery and blah, blah, blah.

Jon Becker: I think you might be skipping over.

Chief John Perez: Yeah, probably.

Jon Becker: How about you dropped dead and were dead for a minute or more.

Chief John Perez: Yeah. So with that.

Jon Becker: And would have remained that way if.

Chief John Perez: Not for people in the room.

Jon Becker: Not for people in the room putting you on.

Chief John Perez: You know, Bill Sanchez and many of the officers in that room did a wonderful job in making sure I was still around. But during the time I was off a lot of reflection. I always thought I was a pretty good person. But, you know, when this happens to you, you want to be even better, you know, and you strive for ways to do that. And much was done in terms of reading and really finding yourself. And part of that was reading about Theodore Roosevelt and many of the presidents I read, including team of rivals on Lincoln and how he brought people into his cabinet that were against him.

And when the opportunity created itself for interim chief, which nobody was searching for at the time, not me, and the permanent chief, which I really wasn't searching for, and let the city know I wasn't going to apply for that job, it really was interesting that that reading, that approach, that study, helped me embrace the activists even more and create a chief's advisory that, in fact, was made of people that were looking for deep, deep rooted defunding or, you know, changing the police department in ways that was not healthy for the community. And many of them, if not all of them, I believe, really changed their perspective over the years of how they viewed the police department.

And, in fact, in the beginning, the union. Absolutely. You know, I love Roger Rodin, one of the best presidents in any police union anywhere in the state, if not the country, and the way he approaches his work, but he heavily was saying, hey, man, this is not a good idea. I don't think we should be doing this at the conclusion of all this.

If I were to get rid of it, Roger would have beat me up first, because the union appreciated this group of people, to engage them and to have meetings with them, because each one of the board members represented multiple nonprofit organizations, representing hundreds in each one. So you're touching on thousands of people. Some of the chiefs advisory members even lost some of their credibility in the community for what they were learning at the police department.

So when they see how diverse we are, when they see the changes we're making, you know, change doesn't come from the outside. Change comes from the inside, not just on the leadership to say you're going to do it, but the management work that's taken to create the systems and the budgets and the protocols and all the things in management that are hugely important. And that's a learned skill, as is leadership, which is a leadership, which is a tool. It's a skill set you have to have.

So all that put us in a place that helped me during that period of time to really function through and keep the chief's advisory updated. If that chief's advisory was made of all John Perez friends in the community, what good was it to brief them before the occupation of city hall? Really, it wasn't going to do me any good. I needed people that were going to criticize me and say, well, wait a second. But to explain to them why they helped market some of the things that needed to be done in the community from an education standpoint.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. There is currently, with law enforcement, a bit of a siege mentality, where there are a lot of vocal critics and a very quiet law enforcement lobby where every bad thing that happens gets publicized and dragged through the news. And law enforcement is not proactively defending itself. And it strikes me. Yeah, but not at an organized level.

Chief John Perez: I understand that completely.

Jon Becker: And you look at some of the legislation that's happening in California related to law enforcement, and some of it is just moronic. AB 481 and this idea that, oh, military equipment is what's causing the problems. Well, first of all, half the things on that list have nothing to do with the military.

Chief John Perez: Military use it.

Jon Becker: But it strikes me that part of the reason that that happens is this siege mentality and this kind of pushing out of criticism and not having a willingness to engage.

Chief John Perez: It's a lack of education that we really need. Even internally, on both sides. Yeah, even internally. I started a Sunday email that was based, you know, it was based on our last chief, Chief Sanchez's Sunday email about everything went on in the community. Way too much information for what I could do.

So I changed it to a format which was about educating our personnel, the new laws coming out, the promotions, the areas that needed policing focus, as well as leadership issues, providing good video on leadership and things we could all learn from collectively. And it was a starting point in the organization. No matter where I went, I could start my conversation at the Sunday email. Hey, chief, you wrote this in the last Sunday. I agree or don't agree. Well, let's talk about it. And it was a great place that when I didn't do them on Sundays, I would get half a dozen or more texts from people.

Jon Becker: Where's my email?

Chief John Perez: Where's your email? Yeah. And in the beginning, I didn't send it to everybody. I only sent it to the lieutenants. I wanted them to talk to these points. And I quickly discovered there was a portion of the lieutenants that said, I don't talk to this stuff. They could read it on their own. I said, nope, not until you guys learn how to read it to your people and have this discussion. I'm not going to get it out. So a lot of pressure started to come to send it out to over 400 people every Sunday, and not just the command staff and lieutenants and the administrators of 23 people.

So it really was a platform I stuck to as long as I could before I released it out to everybody. And it was helpful, and I tried to do it all on my own. So it came for me. You know, it wasn't ten people writing it, sending it to me, and whatever mistakes or things you didn't like, it's my stuff. This is from me to you in a love letter here. And so I think it really did help in a lot of our communication with the new laws that were coming out and things that were happening.

Jon Becker: But it's once again inviting potential criticism. Oh, without a doubt, it's once again commander's intent, open to discussion, which, I mean, that's kind of leadership 401, right? That's not – You better have your ego in a pretty comfortable box.

Chief John Perez: Let go of your ego.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, you got to leave it at the door. But I think that comes back to kind of last thing I'd like to talk about before we go into the rapid fire questions, which is this notion of servant leadership and this notion that, you know, the most important person in the organization is not the one at the top of.

Chief John Perez: 100%.

Jon Becker: Tell me your views on that.

Chief John Perez: Well, growing up, playing sports, and having a large family with seven brothers, servant leadership is the direction you go. You follow others, and you're a strong follower in supporting your family. Coming into the police department as well. Always following the new chief, following people around me, following to learn, has really always been part of my platform foundation for myself.

If I believe in you and I support you, I'm following you everywhere because I want to learn from you. I want to learn how I could be better. And I want you to believe in me. And that's just part of having a circle of friends. I have the same friends for the most part I've had since I was 13, 14 years old, you know, which is really cool, right?

Because we believe in one another. And the same friends that have been core with me over my years at the police department are still close friends of mine because we haven't lost that connection. And with other people, you come and go depending on the decision. And so servant leadership is an actual management leadership principle that was written by Dr. Peters in the early seventies. And his leadership principle at that time was about learning how to follow others in your leadership, knowing that it's important to listen to people around you and their issues so you could become a better manager. But it was also about leading.

And I believe that this foundation of servant leadership is something that is going by the wayside and we got to bring that back. The most underrated leader forever will be the most consistent leader. It's an unusual place where we define our leaders by the home run, by the moment, by the things happening.

But the most consistent leaders over a period of time are usually lost. You know, they're lost in time. For some reason. We just say, well, you know, John was really good, always treated us well over those 20 years as a leader. But it, you know. Cause it wasn't that one time the building burned. You carried everybody out, man. He was the guy.

So we tend to devalue the consistent leaders over time that do it in a servient leadership style. Yet it is the essence of everything we do in leadership.

Jon Becker: That's a fantastic place to move on to our rapid fire questions. So these are…

Chief John Perez: Do I need a lawyer?

Jon Becker: Say again?

Chief John Perez: Do I need a lawyer?

Jon Becker: Probably not.

Chief John Perez: Okay, good.

Jon Becker: I mean, you did for the last five years of your career, probably not now. So these are kind of single sentence. I want your kind of quick reaction thoughts. What's your most important habit?

Chief John Perez: Relationships. People around me making sure that if you're going to lead, that people believe in you, at least they know who you are. So it's about creating those relationships and the conversations with people around me.

Jon Becker: Leader versus manager, what's the difference?

Chief John Perez: Leader versus manager? Leader has got to know the opportunity to lead. Managing is something that we do every single day, the majority of the day, hugely important. But we have to really have the skill sets to be leaders, to understand when to identify it and how to treat it with respect and love.

Jon Becker: What's the best book you've read?

Chief John Perez: I would start probably with 7 habits of the most effective people by Dr. Covey. But that could probably be sharply debated with Jocko's extreme ownership, which took a lot of those principles and his experience. And so I'd be jockeying for those two. But you know what? Jordan Peterson, 12 rules for life is amazing book. Jordan Peterson is absolutely our Plato and Aristotle of our times.

Jon Becker: What's the most profound memory of your career?

Chief John Perez: I would have to say likely the feeling that we had as a command staff after occupying of the city hall and the fact that the department, everybody believed in what we were doing. The community believed that we did the right thing at a moment that I think many people wanted the opposite thing to happen, to feel good in terms of activists and so forth.

So I believe that moment, that feeling, that driving home at four in the morning with no sleep for over 24 hours, I really felt like we had done something collectively together. There are very – Almost no moments in our lives where we think about the best thing that ever happened. It was just you, it was always people around, and that was an example of just that.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite resource? Online resource, website or podcast?

Chief John Perez: I have to go back to Jocko, man. Well, the debrief, I'm going to say, is first, without a doubt. Debrief is it? That's the new learning place for us to find our leaders locally. You connect with them because of the profession. You know what they're saying. You could learn from the leadership lessons being thrown out there.

But for the last few years before the debrief, Jocko was really the place to be for me because he's taken the science of leadership from all the years before with management, and you could break it down with great guests that he has and also the principles of what's worked for him in wartime.

Jon Becker: What keeps you awake at night?

Chief John Perez: Has to be the safety of police officers. My heart goes out to every single one of them doing the best that they can. The absolute love they have for their communities. It's really undervalued by the media and people out in the community. There's so much great things going on that they don't get the credit they deserve for their love for what they do. They're sacrifices for what they do.

All the many different areas of policing, from homeless to having to take action, to working with people in need, the amount of work that's needed and all the training that comes with all that the love these people have for this profession and their communities is unbelievable. Yet I don't think they get the respect for that. I don't think there's enough there to remind our communities how lucky they are to have that one 2% of society serving as police officers.

Jon Becker: And that is a fantastic place for us to stop. John, thank you so much for doing this!

Chief John Perez: Thank you, brother! Thank you!

I hope there was something I offered for everybody out there. I appreciate it!

Episode 14 – Inside the Bataclan Hostage Rescue with a BRI Operator

Jon Becker: This episode of the debrief will have a slightly different format. My guest today is an active member of France's elite brigade for research and intervention, or BRI. Because of the nature of his current assignment and the nature of their work, it is critical that we maintain his anonymity. As a result, we will not be showing this episode on video or using my guest's real name.

Additionally, because these events resulted in the deaths of 130 people and the injury of more than 400 others, we will not be glorifying the attackers by using their names or their organizations. These details will hopefully be forgotten to history, while the memories of their innocent victims will not.

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!

On November 13th, 2015, Paris experienced a series of coordinated islamist terrorist attacks. These attacks took place over three separate areas of the city and were carried out by multiple teams of attackers. Almost 4 hours after they began, the events ended with a dramatic and successful hostage rescue. That will be the topic for todays discussion.

Jay, thank you for joining me!

Jay: Thanks, Jon. Thanks for inviting me!

Jon Becker: So why don't we first start for the American audience with just kind of an overview of the French policing structure, at least as far as tactical teams go and how they kind of relate.

Jay: Okay. Just for you to understand the structure, in France, we have two main law enforcement agencies, the national police and the national gendarmerie. National police is almost 140,000 officers who handle all the cities all around France. National gun armory is a kind of military police with civilian tasks who handle all the countryside of France.

Jon Becker: So that. So the national police cover the cities, the gendarmerie cover the areas between the cities?

Jay: Yeah. Small towns, little city, and up to 10,000 inhabitants is the police.

Jon Becker: So it's more. It's almost like a sheriff's department in the United States.

Jay: Yeah, we can compare police to police department and John Amery to sheriff departments.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so where does your unit fit in that national police and gendarmerie structure?

Jay: We are part of the national police, but because of the specifics situation of Paris, who is the capital of France. Paris has its own organization of police his own intelligence service, his own riotous control unit and also his own tactical unit. That's why we are Paris tactical unit. But we are still part of the national police.

Jon Becker: Okay, so then if my understanding is correct, the gendarmerie would be the tactical unit would be GIGN. And then you guys are obviously BRI part of the parisian law enforcement. And then where does raid fit into.

Jay: That for your understanding as an American, I try to find some instance. So let's say HRT is GIGN and red also. So GIGN will handle all the, as I said, the countryside, all the airplanes. Also if some hijack airplanes. And also if a French citizen get involved as a victim in a foreign country, GIGN with the special operation community will be involved in that.

The red as the HRT can handle any situation on the French territory. Hostage rescue, barricade people, counterterrorism. And then BRI is more like the LAPD SWAT. We are in charge of the city of Paris. But we also can work with the red if they need to. And they also can support us in Paris in case of a major event.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so then when did BRI start? Give me kind of a history and background of BRI.

Jay: BRI had been created in 1964. At that time there is a bank robberies, violent crime increase in the city of Paris. So the police commissioner create a special unit to fight this type of crime. After 1972 attacks in Munich, police think about creating a special unit in case of such attacks. A contrarism unit, because there is nothing on a tactical at that time. There is no tactical police unit. So GIGN was created on the John Armory side and on the police side. The BRI was designed to be the tactical unit of the French national police.

Jon Becker: Got it. Yeah. In a lot of the interviews that I've done, the Munich massacre was the triggering event for almost all of the counterterrorism units around the world. LAPD can trace their expansion to that. They were founded slightly before. But the expansion of SWAT can be tied back to the Munich massacre. FBI HRT. So many of these units happened because of the failures in Munich. This one little event in Munich can trigger units around the world, yours included.

Jay: It's a kind of revolution for the police community. So at that time and until 1985, where the red was created, the BRI was in charge of all the police tactical jobs in France. And also at that time they did a few operations in Netherlands. Because there were no special units also in Netherlands at that time, in the seventies.

Jon Becker: That's interesting. So then in 85 they split it and BRI retains the city of Paris, but the rest goes to the rest of the cities go to raid.

Jay: Yeah, that's it. Don't forget that we have been created to fight organized crime and violent crime. So all the guys at the BRI in the sixties, seventies, they were detectives. And we keep these specifics until now. That's what one of our DNA is, to work on violent crime. And then after 1972, we start doing the tactical job until now.

So this is very important to understand that we do both jobs and we still do that for our best understanding. It's like, for those who know how the LAPD works, but we do, like the SWAT job, the LAPD SWAT job, and also the SIS job. We are the only unit to do that in France.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's actually worldwide. It's a very unique mission set that you have because generally speaking, units will have a violent crime or organized crime unit, and then they'll have a tactical unit. And it's unusual that the two be combined the way that you guys do.

Jay: That's true, but we think that it's the best model because, I mean, in France, if you just are a full time tactical unit, you will be spend most of your time training and waiting for the call. What we do is working on a daily basis on bad guys on the streets. Keep you ready. And there is kind of for the guys, for the operators, they know how to handle the stress on real life situation. Also they know how to hold their fire, how to manage a very emotional situation. And that's what we think. It is a good model.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that I think is unique in your mission set is that you handle kidnaps. Right?

Jay: Also. Yeah, that's true, Jennifer, we, on the whole, the ransom delivery field operation, when there's a kidnapping, also like the SIS.

Jon Becker: Does, which, I mean, it's kidnapped is, you know, living in the US, kidnap is nothing. It's not a very common occurrence, and it's usually a domestic thing. But in Europe, kidnap is a business. Right.

Jay: Used to be a business until recently, but to be honest, now kidnapping comes in more bad guys for kidnappings today, most of the kidnappings today we face in France with some exception. For sure it's drug related between bad guys, you know.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Jay: Kidnapping are always very sensitive case. And we work side by side with the homicide squad, who will handle all the investigation on the kidnapping case. Our negotiator will be in charge to negotiate with the family and the perpetrators. And our perturb will be in charge of the ransom delivery operation. And it's a synergy which worked well. I cannot speak too much about our tactics in this kind of offense, but that's work. And we did it for now almost 60 years.

Jon Becker: And then you also have a counter terrorism tactical role.

Jay: Sure. Even Paris had been a target for terrorism since the 1970s. Actually, it never stops. And BR had been respond to this kind of threat for now 50 years. It could be islamic terrorism, it could be left wing terrorism. And more recently, since 2015, we faced big mass hostage situation related to terrorism.

Jon Becker: Which probably is a perfect segue for us to talk about. November 13, 2015. So, just to set the stage, if my memory serves me correctly, there are three. The event starts at 09:15, but we end up with three separate areas that are affected and multiple locations even within those areas. How many teams were there, actually, that hit the city simultaneously?

Jay: You spoke about the bad guys.

Jon Becker: Yes, bad guys.

Jay: Okay. It was a Mumbai style attack, multi location, multiple perpetrators. There were almost nine guy night attackers, all of them wearing suicide SBID, suicide vest and AK-47. Sorry, Jon. It was well coordinate. And the main task of these guys, like in Mumbai, is to create a chaos and made the police law enforcement response more difficult. And so they should be able to kill as much people as they can. That was their main task, actually.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, in the end, terrorism is about creating spectacle and creating media attention. And the more locations you can hit, the more people you injure or kill, the more chaotic the situation is, the more effective it is. So let's start with the first site. So at 09:15, three suicide bombers detonate themselves outside the Chate de France in Saint Denis.

Jay: Actually, there is three different attacks on the Stade de France. Remember that night? It was a soccer game. Stadium was full, almost 80,000 people. French president attended the game also. And at 920, we have a first explosion just in front of the entrance.

Jon Becker: So the first. Okay, so to go back and set the stage, there you have France versus Germany, a full stadium. The president of France is in attendance. And at 09:20, a guy blows himself up at one of the entrances to the stadium.

Jay: Yes, yes. Actually, I was watching the game at home at that time, and we. You can hear the explosion through the television. But at that moment, everybody was thinking about an accident or something happened in a restaurant outside the stadium. That's our first information.

Jon Becker: Then what happens?

Jay: Then very quickly, some bomb squad guys were handled, security on the stadium, went to the scene, and understand very quickly that it was not an accident, but it was an attack because they. They spot some on the scene, some elements of a suicide vest.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: So the information start coming to the authority and. But the decision was made to keep everybody in the stadium and to keep the game going and not to tell people in the stadium that something's going on. That was the best decision they can make.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because otherwise, you're gonna have, you know, what, 60, 70, 80,000 people freaking out and running out of the stadium.

Jay: And because, exactly, Jon. And you have to remember that at 09:30, there is a second explosion of the second attacker around the stadium.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: And something weird that it's. He detonates himself in the middle of nothing on a parking lot where nobody was there because everybody was inside the stadium. And he wasn't able to go inside the stadium because of the security, the private security measure. But he detonated himself at 09:30. So maybe it was his mission to just detonate himself at night 30, wherever.

Jon Becker: Things around him or the security measures were effective, he couldn't get in and decided to complete his jihad alone.

Jay: Yep.

Jon Becker: So then there was a third attacker. When did the third attacker detonate himself for that?

Jay: Kurt detonated himself at 09:33 also, five minutes from the stadium in the middle of a parking lot also.

Jon Becker: So really, only one guy effectively attacks the stadium.

Jay: Yeah. And he killed. And one killed one civilian, and one did more than 50. But the two other one, they just better than themselves. What? On my opinion, maybe they did that just because the mission was to dead end themselves of a specific time on a specific time.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so then at the same time, well, 09:25 ish, you start having a second group attacking restaurants and cafes in a different area.

Jay: Yes, Jon, the first. The first shooting start at 09:25.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: You have to understand, that stadium, it's 15 minutes driving north of Paris. And the shooting at 09:25 took place in a very popular area with restaurants, bars. And that night was a really nice night, very warm for a November day. And a lot of people were on the terrace enjoying the Friday night.

Jon Becker: Yeah, 09:25 is. I mean, you know, Americans tend to eat early, but 09:25 in Europe is like you're just moving past appetizers and into dinner.

Jay: Yeah. Specifically on Friday night.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. So you've got crowded cafes, people on the terraces, people in bars. And these guys begin by just open firing.

Jay: Yep. They use a car, park the car in front of t=Terrazze of a restaurant and a bar, and start shooting people randomly with AK-47 on full automatic.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: They know how to reload. They communicate to each other. When one reload, the other one tell him so they can coordinate their shooting.

Jon Becker: So this was a trained assault force.

Jay: Yeah. So they start shooting at 09:25, stop their car shooting, go back in their car, and go around, like, two blocks away and start shooting again.

Jon Becker: So they just basically just driving from restaurant to restaurant and open firing on the restaurants and get back in their car, drive a couple blocks, do the same thing again.

Jay: Exactly. And the bad thing for the dispatching the police organization, that they've got, like, thousands of coal of people who get shot of neighbors also report that, but because they were moving like this, everybody was calling the 911.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: And it saturates all the systems, so we don't have any good intel of what's really going on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I can imagine that. I mean, you start with the chate de France, which is 15 minutes out of the city, but now you have a terrorist attack there with the president of France, and, you know, a full stadium, and now you have a second location and a third location and a fourth location. And every one of those locations, everybody in the restaurant picks up their phone, the neighbors pick up the phone. So dispatch is getting thousands of calls.

Jay: Yeah, exactly. And all reporting different information and, yeah, sometimes it's very difficult for them to understand what's going on. We get the call for our concern, we get the call in the BRI, we get some information very quickly because of the bomb squad guy who called our aud guys and say, hey, be aware that it's not an accident. It could be an attack. So we were, I mean, ready to go. And around 09:25, 09:30, we got information that the shootings in Paris. So we called the guy. Actually, we're on call first. It was our team, and said, let's regroup to the unit.

And we've got also call from our unit boss, say, all the guides available go back to the unit. Usually we have a QRF in the unit who is ready to go directly from home to the crime scene. I mean, to the location. The location where something happens. The thing is that we don't have really the location where to go. So the tactics that night was to regroup the unit, prepare and just waiting to be sent at the right location.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it makes sense. So, basically, your leadership looks at this series of attacks and just basically raises the flag and rolls everybody to come together and be prepared for whatever location you're going to get sent to.

Jay: And when we arrived, group put the gear on, and at that time, we asked one of our big chief and say, where do you want us to go? And he said, let's check it out because we don't know where to send you. We have too many information. And a few minutes later, they get information that something is going to happen.

Five minutes later, they have information that something happens in the Bataclan. And also they have information that one of the shooter of restaurants still on the location. So they create. They send two teams of the BRI, one to the shooting location, one to the battle clan. Our unit. Our team was the one who was sent to the battle.

Jon Becker: So let's, before we get to Batalan, let's go with the – So the first unit that deploys, do they end up encountering that suspect?

Jay: No, it was a fake information. But they have to search an entire building.

Jon Becker: Yeah, this is. I mean, it's a common theme in, you know, mass killing events, active shooter events, is that the. Not only is there an overwhelming amount of information, but the information received is usually wrong. So it's – Oh, there's ten shooters, there's three shooters, there's two shooters, there's three locations. And you compound that with the fact that here there are – There are nine assailants in, you know, four separate restaurants have been. It's just, I can't imagine the chaos that it must have created for the dispatch.

Jay: Even for our team was sent to the Bataclan. We have no intel what our chiefs told us. Something happened there. Let's go and check it out.

Jon Becker: Okay, so then, talking about Battleclan. So to set the stage. Battle clan is a theater. They're having a concert. Eagles of death metal, if I remember correctly, 1500 ish people inside the venue, concert actively going on. And. And what happens.

Jay: So at 09:40, free tourism through free tourists. Sorry. Park their car just in front of the theater, the concert hall, start shooting immediately to the security. It was an unarmed security because in France, most of the security of private building like this, it's unarmed.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: So they start shooting the security and made the entry from the main gate of the theater. And so the main gate was behind all the crowd. The crowd was looking at the scene. And they made the entry by behind at the rear of the theater, actually.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: No, no.

Jon Becker: Well, the front. So if I'm understanding correctly, the front of the theater, like, when you walk in the front doors, you're looking at the stage.

Jay: Yeah, that's it.

Jon Becker: And so the crowd is facing.

Jay: The crowd is facing the scene and the main gate.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: So they made the entry from the rear of the crowd and start shooting for seven minutes nonstop.

Jon Becker: So the crowd has no idea they're watching a concert. They're in the darkest, and all of a sudden, you have three assailants behind them open firing on them.

Jay: With full auto. The only people who actually saw the tourists came in was the band, the american band Miguel of death metal. And they were. So they saw what's going on, and they left the scene. And at that first time, the crowd, people on the crowd, thank. He was like, a part of the show, and then they realized that they were just shot by three guys.

Jon Becker: Do you know at that point how many rounds are fired? What? Like, what's the – How many victims do we have? What happens in that initial engagement with the suspects in the crowd?

Jay: What we know now, it just. They kill almost 80 people at that time, and one did more than 200. How many rounds is difficult, but we.

Jon Becker: Retrieved at least 280.

Jay: We retrieve a lot of mag, empty magazine after the scene, but hundred.

Jon Becker: I mean, obviously, 280 people killed or injured. Hundreds of rounds.

Jay: Yeah. And as I said before, it was well organized between the three terrorists. So they speak to each other, communicate, reloading, start shooting. Stop shooting, moving.

Jon Becker: Is the theater just a big open room? Yeah. Is this like a theater where it has seats and people are in seats or people kind of standing on the ground in a big open room?

Jay: On the first floor just in front of the scene? It's full space without any seat. You've got seat at the second floor, actually, like in a classical theater on the balcony.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the suspects enter. They've got, you know, maybe as many as a thousand or whatever people in a big group in the dark, watching a concert. They open fire on them. What happens next?

Jay: So they shoot, shoot, shoot with Alanis for seven minutes, and two of them took position on the balcony. One of them, after the end of the shooting, and one of them stay on the scene, and then they start killing people, randomly speaking to people, kill people one by one.

Jon Becker: So they basically now have. I'm assuming some people ran.

Jay: Yeah, some people made it through the exit.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm assuming. But at some point now they've got captives on the ground, a lot of dead people.

Jay: And then you have dead people, wanted people, and people were acting like dead people because as soon as they move, they get shot. So most of the people, like, maybe 700 people stay inside. They were acting like dead people, if you know what I mean.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: One guy of the security made a great, great job also, because he crossed all the space to open one rescue door. And so people were, a lot of people were able to exit because of his action.

Jon Becker: So he ran through the crowd.

Jay: Through the crowd to open one door on the left side of the theater.

Jon Becker: Okay. And so. So two go up on the balcony. One stays on the first floor. He's engaging people. They're engaging people from the balcony.

Jay: Yep.

Jon Becker: And somewhere in here you get a call that something's going on at the battle climb.

Jay: Yeah, but without any more precision. But at that time, the twelve minutes after the shootings, after they made the entry, like 09:42, 09:45. The street police, actually, it's a street crime unit, arrived on the scene. So because they're patrolling on the car, so they are more quicker than everybody.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Jay: So they made the entry at 09:45. Two of them, especially, only wearing nine man and engage the only tourists they have on site. Actually, there's a gunfight between them. They were able to shoot the terrorists on the scene. This terrorist detonate himself. But the action, the action of the street police stopped them. The main shooting, the mass shooting.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the two that are on the balcony, so they basically engage the guy that's on the first floor.

Jay: They engage the guy who was on the scene on the first floor. It's the only one. They are on site, actually.

Jon Becker: Okay, where the two that are on the balcony, where, where have they gone?

Jay: They stay on the balcony and engage the two police officers.

Jon Becker: Okay. Okay.

Jay: So they weren't able to go further because they have the advantage because of. They're on the balcony and they have AK.

Jon Becker: Yeah. They're pinned down by the guy, the two guys on the balcony with AK-47s.

Jay: And the street police are only nine.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But they do engage the guy that the first guy they encounter, he ends up detonating a suicide vest, probably killing more people, I'm assuming.

Jay: Not sure, because what we know now, it's most of the people around him. Was he on the floor?

Jon Becker: So maybe, maybe not. We'll never know.

Jay: But they stopped the shooting.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Now the suspects turn and are engaged with them, so they're stopping killing.

Jay: It's from active shooting, active shooter situation. It became a massive hostage situation, but they stopped killing people at that time.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: So this is very important to say, and that will be the case in real life. The tactical unit will never be the first responder. The street police will be first on the scene.

Jon Becker: Always. Always. And it keeps with, you know, the theme and a lot of the active shooter training in the United States, which is to engage a suspect as quickly as possible.

Jay: Sure.

Jon Becker: Because he kill himself and at a minimum he focuses on the police. Okay, so then suspect one on the first floor is now dead. Suspect two and three are on the balcony engaging the officers. Are either the officers injured?

Jay: No, not on. No.

Jon Becker: Okay, so they managed to avoid getting shot.

Jay: Yeah. And they set up a perimeter and they regroup, try to make a signal entry. But because of the fire of the terrorists from the balcony, they weren't able to do it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well, they're outgunned. I mean, 9 mm versus 8 mm.

Jay: Ended up real shield and it was tough for them.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So they set up a perimeter and wait for the tactical unit. First team of ten operators arrive. Our team arrived around 1020 on the scene. We have a really quick brief with the street police to try to understand what's going on. It was difficult to get information. So our boss, stay with the street police and we. We reach the scene, actually, so we – Because of something very important also, it could be useful for when they set up the perimeter, the street police, most of the. They left most of their car without any driver inside.

So we weren't able as a tactical team to arrive close to the theater. We have to park our car, like two blocks and move with the shield and all the stuff by foot, so.

Jon Becker: So you're not able to bring armor up to the location. You're having to run.

Jay: Yeah, we lost some time about that because the street police left their car. Yeah, and I can understand why they did that, but you have to think about it. But it's the same thing. If you need an ambulance to go on the scene, if you set up a perimeter, you have to be able to open the perimeter when you have to be open.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You have to be able to get vehicles in and more importantly, resources in.

Jay: So we make contact. We make contact with a few guys from street police who will handle the entrance of the theater. We pass the button, take the position. And now we discovered the pit. It was full of body, more than 600, 700 people in front of us. Nobody was talking. The only thing we can hear was the complaint of the wounded people, actually, who were screaming or crying or whatever, but nobody was speaking, nobody was moving. And then we start to understand what we're going to have to do now.

Jon Becker: So you make entry into the first floor. Yeah, there are 700 people on the floor.

Jay: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Some of whom are dead, some of whom are, you know, injured or mortally wounded, and some of whom are pretending to be dead so they don't get shot.

Jay: Yeah, that's it. That's the situation. So as a tactical officer, you train to handle mass shooting, active shooter, hostage situation. This is a combination of something very weird and the worst you can face, actually. You have suicide vest, AK-47 and hostage situation. Not an active shooter anymore, but after shooting anymore, but could be.

Jon Becker: They've obviously manifested intent at that point to be an active shooter because you've got 700 people that you have no idea. You can't triage them because you don't have time. So they may have killed 700 people, for all you know. When you walk in the door.

Jay: That's our first feeling, everybody is dead. So immediately we tried to set up a kind of strategy. It took a few minutes, to be honest. We didn't make the entry. Like, we didn't make a dynamic entry for sure. We tried to get some intel of what's going on. So we tried to speak with the guys who were the victims, who were very close to us to get some information.

So some of them told us they left. They left. Come and help us. They left. There's nobody. No more terrorists in the fjara. Some of them say, no, they're still there. Second floor on the left. Second floor on the left. So what we decided to do is to go and to climb the stairs, clean up all the left side of the theater under the balcony and use the stairs and take position on the left side of the balcony. Because of the intel they gave us, we have a medic with us, actually, it's MD. And we keep it there and ask him to start the triage of the victim who were very close to him. And also he started to call all the rescue units and he was able to tell them what's going on here on a rescue point of view.

So with the team of ten guys, we asked for also we asked for backup from another team of the. But the other team of the bi was stuck, you know, in – They were not able to come very quickly to the scene because when they have to cross the street to come to us, and as soon as they try to cross the street, they get engaged by the, one of the terrorists from the second floor also. So we have to manage situations for now. We were ten guys, so we have to make a choice, and our choice was to go second floor on the balcony and see what's going on.

Jon Becker: So let me just recap that so I make sure I get it right. So you get up, you get up to the second floor to engage a suspect. There's two suspects. You don't know how many suspects there are at this point. So it's somewhere between two and a million. And the suspect is engaging your second unit through the outside windows of the building to prevent them from coming in. So you can't get your backup in immediately. So you have ten guys to clear a theater with an unknown number of suspects and 700 victims.

Jay: Yeah, that's…

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's pretty ugly.

Jay: Yeah. So we start to do that. And I heard on my radio that finally the second team made it. And also we heard that we have a backup of the red team also on their way. So we did what we tried to do. We cleaned up. We search all the left side of the first floor and then go through the stairs to reach the balcony on the second floor.

Jon Becker: And at this point, you have not seen the suspect or engaged the suspects. But the consistent theme among the victims is that the guys are on the second floor.

Jay: Yeah, got it. Our main fear was, you have to understand that we were working in the middle of the people, actually. And when they start. So they start to ask for help from us. Help my sister, help my husband. What are you doing? Help me. Can I come? And we have to keep them, you know, lay on the floor. We were afraid that if somebody stand up, everybody will stand up. And if the terrorist was hiding somewhere, it's gonna be a mass shooting again.

Jon Becker: So when you also don't know. I mean, 700 people we now know are victims of. But for you it's 700 suspects.

Jay: Yes. Because you don't know.

Jon Becker: Yeah. They can hide anywhere in. In the crowd, outside of the crowd.

Jay: From the balcony, from the beat, from whatever. So it was a difficult time because we spent like 20 minutes working in the middle of people. But dead bodies wanted people, people who grab your pants, people will ask you for help. And I remember my friend of mine was my deputy in the team. He found in the restrooms a young girl, about 16, 17 years old who get bad wounded on the left arm. And he tried to put very quickly a tourniquet on it. But when he put the tourniquet on, there was no more flesh. It was only the bone. So that's why we faced at that time.

So we were working around the bodies of people. It was a really difficult time, to be honest. It took us like 20 minutes. And we made it on the balcony, second floor, until the last door of the balcony. There was a door, a simple wooden door. And we were. We did, like, open a lot of door at that time. And it was the last one.

So, I mean, now we know. We know it's the last one, but at that time we didn't know about it. And we were to open it and someone spoke to us and say, back up, back, back up. We are the. I want to speak to a negotiator. So our first reaction is, what do you want to negotiate? Just kill so many people, really? So it's not. Yeah, I'm not supposed to say that, but it was our actions.

Jon Becker: It's a little late to negotiate.

Jay: What do you want to negotiate? But then we came down and, okay, what do you want? We want to negotiate. We have people under control. We want to negotiate. They ask one negotiator. That means they know how we work out of the process. That's very important. So we start talking to them.

And very quickly, they gave us a phone number, a cell number. I tried to forward the cell number to the negotiator who was just at the entrance of the theater. It was not easy. First they gave us a fake number. It wasn't working. So after we get. We managed to communicate. I transferred the phone number to the negotiator and negotiators called them and they start speaking directly from the negotiator to the terrorists.

The very important thing at that time, it was around 11:15, because we made contact. We tried to contain this area and our leadership asked us, is it safe? Can we start evacuating the first floor? It was difficult to say it's safe, but we say we knew at that time, we have to do something for the people. We get wounded very quickly.

So we say, we're going to contain this door. You can start the evacuation. And they start the evacuation. My team and I, we didn't really see what's going on on the first floor. But you have to imagine that they have to start the recreations first. They had the non-wanted people to camp, but they have to check each people who get out of the. Of the theater.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, because they could be suspects.

Jay: They could be suspect. They could also wear suicide vests. They could be a victim. And terrorists put them suicide vests on. So they check one by one, all the unwanted people, and then they start evacuating the wounded people.

So you have – That was under the control of our MD. You have two different MD. Also MD. From the red came another one from the BRI. And they organized the triage and they asked the street police under the protection of the red and the other team of the BRI. Who were on the first floor to organize the evacuation.

Jon Becker: So you've got the suspects, or at least you believe you have the suspects pinned in behind a door. And the second team has come in now and is providing physical security for the doctors for the triage and as well as elements of raid to evacuate the first floor, treat the wounded while you are dealing with the suspects in a second floor behind the door.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: Exactly. The thing is, now that you have two major priorities for the unit. You have to contain and to neutralize the threat, but also you have to rescue the victims. And it's, you have to find a balance between the two priorities.

Jon Becker:

Yeah. Because it's stopped the killing, stop the dying. Right? Like, who knows how many more, how many more hostages they have. But, you know, you have hundreds of victims who, if you do nothing, are going to die.

Jay: Yeah. And on the other side. If you, if you acting too quickly, you can create a chaos. More than.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You can. You can create more victims. You can.

Jay: So it's a very difficult balance to find. And a few years later, it's important also to say there is an inquiry, a commission from the parliament. We're working on the event. And they really don't understand why we don't go quicker. We wouldn't be able to go faster than what we did.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: And some of them say because you weren't faster, some people die because of you.

Jon Becker: That's horrible!

Jay: And it was very tough for us. We really don't understand this because we really did a thing the best we can at that time. And we find the balance between rescuing the victim and searching the terrorists and neutralize the threat. And you cannot just on the scene like that go through running inside and shooting everybody. That's not the way we work.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And there's no, the problem with all these situations is there's no good choice. You have. You have no good choice. Every single thing you're faced with is bad. And so it's just trying to minimize the bad with an extremely limited amount of information under fear, pressure, people grabbing you, people asking for help, all the while not knowing where the suspect is.

So it's not really fair to, you know, look at it Monday morning and say, oh, that was a man. They could have done a better job.

Jay: And it was the first time that a European tactical unit faced this kind of event.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah.

Jay: So it's easy after a few years later say, you should have done that.

Jon Becker: Or that it's easy to pick the winner of the racehorse, the winning racehorse, after the race is run.

Jay: Yeah, always.

Jon Becker: So at what point do you become aware that these guys have hostages behind this door?

Jay: So they start talking to our negotiator by phone. That night, there were, like, five phone contacts between them and each in contact. They gave information to the negotiator. They want to communicate on their actions. So they told us they were harmed with AK. They have explosives. There are multiple people under the control.

Jon Becker: So they gave us information, and just without divulging any identities, the negotiator that is negotiating. I know the negotiator, and this is not the first time that this negotiator has negotiated with a professional terrorist organization or even this particular terrorist organization.

Jay: Yeah, you're right. The negotiator in Charles that night was the same who handled all the situation of the kosher market standoff in January 2015. So that's helped a lot because he had experience of this kind of situation.

Jon Becker: And the suspects are expecting. The terrorists are expecting to negotiate.

Jay: Yeah, they negotiate. They want us to broadcast their political communication on the news channel. That was the big thing. So during that time, during the negotiation between negotiator and the terrorists for on a pact, on a tactical point of view, we use this time to prepare our action.

So we immediately set up. We immediately set up assault plan, emergency assault plan, in case they start shooting people. That was the first thing. They start to shoot people. We go. And because of what's happened in January 2015, we got the green light to make the assault in this case, very quickly, from the leadership, because of our experience. And in the meantime, we use this time to create and to build and elaborate assault plan.

Jon Becker: So just to go back, you say January 2015. What happened January 2015? That's the kosher market event?

Jay: Yeah, the kosher market.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay.

Jay: And because it was the first, I mean, on large scale attack like this, it was more difficult for the chief of the tactical units to get the green light to make the assault.

Jon Becker: The first time.

Jay: The first time in Japan.

Jon Becker: Yeah. But the second time, now we have this event from ten months ago, eleven months ago in recent memory. They're willing to make a faster decision.

Jay: Don't forget that France is a very centralized country. In this kind of event, the decision will be taken by the minister of interior. Prime minister and the president also could be involved. So the good thing. I mean, the good thing that night, we get the green light to action very quickly.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the suspects are negotiating with you, they're barricaded. What ultimately makes you make the decision to make entry?

Jay: After the negotiator told us after the second contact that there will be no surrender, based on his experience and based on what the terrorists told him, he was sure that there's gonna be any surrender.

Jon Becker: Yeah. They're there to die and take as many people as they can.

Jay: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: Just as they did like Munich before. So the decision was made to storm this. They regroup. So the two terrorists regroup in a very small corridor for you to understand the situation. The corridor is 1.5 yards large and 9 yards long.

Jon Becker: So it's 27 ft by 5 or 6 ft of – It's basically a hallway.

Jay: And you have, at the end of corridor, also a green room with a. Regroup some more people. And at the end of the corridor you have the stairs, who go through the scene, actually.

Jon Becker: Oh, down to the stage.

Jay: Down to the stage.

Jon Becker: Okay. So if I'm understanding correctly, you've got a door, closed door, a hallway that's 5 or 6ft wide and 30 ft, 27 ft long with a bunch of hostages in it. You go down, you make a turn, you're into the green room, which is where the bands would get ready for the concert. And then there's a spiral staircase that goes down to the stage.

Jay: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Becker: Okay, got it.

Jay: There is two windows in the corridor, but we were not able to get information from outside because they asked the hostage to stand close to the window and to give them information about what's going on outside. So it was not a way for us to get intel of what's going on in corridor. We were blind of what's going on inside.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: This is very important. We have no intel about it. So what we decided to do is to use a shield on wheel, a big shield on wheel. It's a class four shield, almost 180 kg.

Jon Becker: So three almost 400 pound rolling ballistic, level four ballistic shield.

Jay: Yep. So our tactics was to bridge the door, engage through the – And get through the terrorists in this particular corridor. The thing is, we understood at that time that they put some. They asked some hostage to sit. You know, we can hear that. That the hostage were closed to the door. So we went. The decision was made not to use explosive breaching because of that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Because they've placed hostages up against the door.

Jay: Up against the door.

Jon Becker: So if you use explosive breaching, you may kill those hostages.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So you have to mechanically breach the door.

Jay: That's what we did.

Jon Becker: While the suspects are engaging you.

Jay: It was the risk.

Jon Becker: With hostages between you.

Jay: So we were preparing the assault and Ayod guys come to us for a briefing and said okay, we were able to retrieve a vest who partially failed on another location. It's TATP. If you shoot TATPs that's going to detonate so what you have to do is to shoot, make headshots. So okay, headshot is good on when you playing at call of duty but when you are in real life it's not the same way.

Jon Becker: So you're getting ready to make an assault in a 6 foot wide by 27 foot hallway with 10 to 15 hostages, two suspects and a barricaded door and the EOD guys come to you and say oh by the way, don't shoot the vest, don't shoot them in the chest because you may detonate them. You have to shoot them in the head. Yeah, sure, yeah, yeah.

Jay: So that's what we were preparing for the assault. The initial the alpha team. Alpha team and the leadership of the unit prepare a second stack just behind us in case of something happened to us and we saw that and Montale was really tough. It's the first time. Usually when you prepare your assault you have some backup but you don't have another stack, another team prepared to do what you are supposed to do. So we expect the worst.

Jon Becker: Yes. You have a second team staged in case they blow themselves up and kill all of you.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: To then send in a second team.

Jay: Just behind us ready to go if.

Jon Becker: If they need to rescue you or.

Jay: Rescue or rescue the – That was the first time in – on my experience that something happened like this. So at 00:18 decision was made to storm the discover to make the assault. Okay, so we start moving with the shield in front of us. I'm not going to speak in detail about the tactics because I want any bad guys to.

Jon Becker: I'm good with that. Yeah.

Jay: So we went through the scarter trying to open the door to bridge the door. We bridge the door we immediately get caught on a fire but one of the first terrorists was maybe 4 or 5 meters from us in the corridor and start shooting I guess at us immediately.

Jon Becker: So you breached the door on this six foot wide, five foot wide hallway that's 27ft long before it ells to the side and as you breach the door, about halfway down the suspect engages you with an AK-47.

Jay: AK-47, 5 meters range, two times one guys of the team were able to fire back two or three rounds and then we receive a full magazine of 7.62 in the – On the stack. Actually 26 impact in the shield. And unfortunately when a bullet impact one guy who was in the middle of the stack, he was hit in the left hand very badly.

Jon Becker: If I remember correctly, he was the only left handed guy in the stack.

Jay: He was the only left handed guy in style.

Jon Becker: Murphy is always present.

Jay: Oh yeah. And he was a very tough guy almost with all the four gear, maybe 120 kilos. And because of the energy of the round, it was just behind me. But some guys from the stack saw him jumping like the impact made him fall down.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Violently.

Jay: Violently. And my first feeling at that time, Washington, s***, we didn't make the really the entry and we already lost one guy.

Jon Becker: Yeah, but it's good. Your position is kind of in the middle of the stack.

Jay: In the middle of the stack, yeah. Six, seven. The stack was twelve guy got it. But the guy was handled the shield after get hit 26 time continue.

Jon Becker: Continues to….

Jay: Move towards to move through other suspect. This is because of him we were able to go through the suspect.

Jon Becker: It's hard to conceive of. Had you not taken the ballistic shield, your stack would have taken 26 AK 47 rounds.

Jay: I think we had lost a half of the stack.

Jon Becker: Yeah, half the stack. I mean, 26 rounds would have been plenty to do. At least half the stack. So as you enter 26 rounds at the shield, one hits the only left handed guy in the stack. In the left hand, the guy that's controlling the shield, despite the shield being hit 26 times, continues to move towards the suspect, which then allows the remainder of the team to enter.

Jay: Yep, because of his action, we were able to pursue action.

Jon Becker: Yeah, if he had stopped. You're stuck in the doorway.

Jay: You're stuck on the doorway in a funnel. Yeah, in a funnel. And as soon as we made the entry, people start quarrying to us, the hostages in the same time. So we have the shooting, but in September of people recording to us. So you have to check also who is coming to you.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because that could be one of the suspects. That could be a suicide vest, could be anything. And you've got what, 10 or 15 hostages in this?

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So we have a. We have a six foot wide hallway with 15 people in it, a suspect 5 meters away dumping a 26 rounds of an AK-47 into your shield. While you're making entry, the hostages are crawling towards you and you're trying to engage the suspect.

Jay: Yeah, that's the situation.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's about as ugly as it gets.

Jay: And we start using flashbangs very quickly. So you, then we have smoke also smokes from the fire, the smokes from the gunfight, the gunfight, and also the smoke from the flashbangs. And remember, we have to shoot the guys in the head. In the same time, you got full of different people were crowded to us as a hostage tried to escape from this corridor, and they came to us.

But the thing is, you have to check all of them to be sure that they are not wearing eids, they are not terrorists trying to escape. So what we did, our EOD guys were at the rear of the stack, search for them very quickly and evacuate them in the same time that we went into the corridor, something we didn't notice on the plan of the theater.

After 1 meter in this corridor, there is two steps. And what's happened because of the weight of the shield, after two steps, this is just after the first shooting, the shield collapsed, and the guy who was holding the shield was not able, because of the weight, to keep it. So the shield collapsed and our guy face without any protection, the two terrorists at that time.

Jon Becker: So they fire 26 rounds into the shield. He continues to progress, as he progress, not expecting two steps, the shield just snaps away from him. And does it pull him down onto the ground too? Or is he.

SpeakerBNo, no.

Jon Becker: He's able to let go of the shield.

Jay: Yeah, it lets go to shield.

Jon Becker: And now he's face to face with two terrorists with suicide vests and AK-47, SDE, surrounded by hostages at 5 meters with no protection.

Jay: Yeah, that's the situation.

Jon Becker: That's when you were standing at the door, you were probably thinking, how can it get worse?

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And that that's how it can get worse.

Jay: And it was the only one to see what's going on, because remember, it's a corridor, so in the stack we didn't see s***.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So he holsters his sidearm and I start shooting and progress in the same times.

Jon Becker: So he continues to close on the suspects, firing at them with a handgun. Yeah, because he was expecting to only drive the shield.

Jay: Yeah, got it. And this shield, you need the two hands.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I've seen the shield, it's huge.

Jay: So it still progressed through the terrorist. What we understand, after it hit one of the tourists, we get wounded, the tourists back off at the end of the corridor at the corner, and our guy is still going through them. And one of the terrorists, the guy who gets hit, detonates himself.

At that time, we were the first of the stack were at maybe 4, 5 meters from the detonation, and all the stack was beyond them. So we were very lucky because all the fragmentation went through the wall. So what we felt. We felt the blast of the explosion, but nobody was hit by the fragmentation.

Jon Becker: So the frag went out sideways, basically, as opposed to coming towards you guys.

Jay: So we're still on going. So the first guy detonated himself when we arrived. When the first two guys of team arrived, they discovered, like him, in different pieces all over the place, the stairs. And they spot the second one, who was heavily wounded, but is still trying to detonate his vest. So they have to neutralize him.

Jon Becker: So the second you've engaged both the suspects, they've both been wounded. The first guy successfully detonates his s fast.

Jay: No, it's not exactly that.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Jay: Only one terrorist was on site. The second one was already in the….

Jon Becker: Oh, it was around the corner in the green. Got it.

Jay: So the first in the stack were able to hit the first one who detonate themselves and wanted his friends. His friend.

Jon Becker: Oh, so his s vas injures.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Suspect number two.

Jay: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: Okay, tango number two. So tango number two was every one that still trying to determine his vest. So there are no choice that to neutralize him.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So.

Jon Becker: So they shoot him, which then neutralizes that threaten.

Jay: They neutralize the suspect, but the threat still. Because the threat is the explosives.

Jon Becker: Yeah, he's still a human bomb.

Jay: Yeah. So that's why it's very – We were very lucky to have EOD guys in the stack because we have to go through him because we understand that we have some ten more people we're hiding in another green room. But for that, we have to go through the tango number two.

Jon Becker: So you have to move over the suspect.

Jay: To move over him. So we called the Yodi guys, who was a former army, the Yodi with a lot of experience, and he says, okay, as long as you not touching the vest, there is no risk. So you can go over, step over him.

Jon Becker: Just don't touch him in any way, shape or form.

Jay: So what he did.

Jon Becker: And if you do, you'll blow up. Yeah, yeah.

Jay: So what he did, he stand over the body of the tango number two, and we step and we go through using his. The body of the Yodi guys as a protection to go through. And that was.

Jon Becker: Was he in a bomb suit?

Jay: No, nothing like us. Only a ballistic protection.

Jon Becker: So he's just wearing soft armor.

Jay: Soft armor.

Jon Becker: And he places himself between. Above this. Above the tango, above the bomb. So we allow you guys to move through.

Jay: I will remember that forever.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I don't know how you'd forget that.

Jay: And then we arrived to the second green room, who was locked and stopped asking people, okay, you need to open the door. It's okay, you're free now. And those people, we understand at that time, they barricaded in this room at the beginning of the shooting. So they didn't see anything of the attack. They know that something was bad, this was going on. And maybe an hour before the tangos, they tried to make the entry in their green room and told them that they were GiGn and something interesting, they make a vote inside the room, should we open or not? And like a democracy stuff. So they say, no, it was a good, good decision.J

on Becker: So the suspects tried to lie their way into this other green room 1 hour before. An hour before when they had everybody else held hostage. And the susp. And the people in the second green room basically said, no, you're gonna have to force your way in.

Jay: But the thing is, now we're gonna ask him the same thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. Now you're standing there saying the same thing the suspect said an hour ago.

Jay: So they say, no way.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So we have to speak with them, tell them to call the 911. We also call the 911 and say, if those guys call you, tell them that we are the police.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: It took 15 minutes.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So then they opened the door and we discovered like, maybe 12, 15 people in a very small room. And you have some American citizens, British, German and French, and something interesting. We get to show you the difference of culture and relationship with police and population. So we had the room and we asked them, leave your stuff, leave your bags, put your hands up and come one by one so we can check you and start the evacuation.

So the american guys complain, braids, Germans, and then the French guys starting insulting us and say, no way. I gonna keep my belongings with me. And why does it take too long for you to come? It was funny, actually, we have in the middle of this. It was something funny. I don't know if I can say funny, but, you know.

Jon Becker: Yeah, funny.

Jay: So all those people didn't see anything about the attack, but the only way for them to evacuate the theater was go through the pit.

Jon Becker: Oh, God!

Jay: And the pit at that time, there were only the dead people, but almost 90 people.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: With really bad, bad wound. AK-47 makes you like you have a car crash. It's not only a hole, it's like they crush your bones.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So these people who didn't see anything.

Jon Becker: Are now traumatized by having to walk through and see. Walk through, literally a butchery.

Jay: Really tough for them. There were a kid also we found because after we still searching everywhere and another team of the beer I found people were hiding in the attics, you know, and there was a kid there. So I remember one Gaviri puts his hand on the eye of the kid to cross the pit to inside to avoid him, to see the.

Jon Becker: Yeah, to prevent the kid from seeing anything that happened. So just to at this point that you've cleared the hostages. No hostages killed?

Jay: No, not, no one.

Jon Becker: None of them were injured or seriously injured?

Jay: During the assault, the final assault. No.

Jon Becker: One of your guys shot in the left hand. I'm assuming he's recovered.

Jay: He's recovered, get promoted. But yes, he left the team because of his wounded.

Jon Becker: The nerve damage to his hand. What is the aftermath for this event, for your team? How does this affect the team?

Jay: Something I can. Something I want to tell you. It's after the – So we left the theater, the scene maybe around three in the morning. EOD stay on the scene to keep the search of explosives. So at 04:00 we were at our headquarters. We saw all the victims who are also witness came to the one where not wounded, were regrouping buses and came to our unit because our unit is at that time was at the same location where all the criminal investigation division was. So they want all the people who get involved to be interviewed at the time.

Jon Becker: Sure. Yeah.

Jay: So. And we saw like hundreds of people there. So for us it was the first shock, you know. And then we left the unit and we were back home around 05:00 so something very strange, weird. It's you just back home and try not to awake your family. And our wives and relatives were, they were waiting for us with no information, with no real good information. And then they ask you, so what's going on? What did you do? How are you? And you really don't know what to say.

Jon Becker: Yeah. How do you even begin to….

Jay: It's not like a soldier who's, for example, is in Afghanistan. You have a combat in Afghanistan when he's coming back. Yes. You know, he takes a plane stop in Germany and then there is a kind of saskimon, you know, a kind of decompression.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. There's an opportunity for them to separate themselves from the battlefield and their home, which is still, you know, we know, not long enough and, and, but this is….

Jay: This is directly from the battlefield to the home.

Jon Becker: You're, you're going back to work taking a shower and going to your family.

Jay: Yeah. With your suit. You know, I remember my. My shoes and my suit was full of the bloods of the tangos when we detonated them himself. You know, it was really something weird. So when I went back. I wasn't able to speak and to. To tell my wife what's. What's going on, what's happened a few years before.

Jon Becker: How do you even, I mean, I can't imagine how you even begin to articulate that night?

Jay: And because also something important, our family, during the January attack, when we stormed the kosher market, it was broadcast on the. Live, on French TV. And so some guys from our units, red and BR, get shot during this assault. And saw the family, they saw the action, you know, life.

Jon Becker: I see their family members being shot on live TV.

Jay: So this time there were no broadcasts from the inside of the theater. You have broadcast from outside, so you can hear the assault and the gunfight, but you don't see anything of what's going on inside. So for me, I wasn't able to speak or to tell anything. I tried to sleep well, maybe I sleep like 1 hour and we get a call back from the unit and they want us to go back on the field. It was like 09:00 something, for surveillance on, one of the car left by the terrorists on the day before was full of arm. And they expect that some other tangos will come and take the car and they want us to arrest them in this case.

So we were – After 2 hours of sleep, we were back to the unit, go back on the field. The surveillance didn't. After a few hours of surveillance, they decided to tow the car away. But also something important. When we lost our guy get hit in the hand, it was so much chaos that we evacuated him, but we were not able to know where he had been evacuated for hours. We didn't know about him. There were so many victims dispatching different hospitals without names, without nothing. So it took like maybe 3 hours to get the information on which hospital is he and how is he.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because you have no idea how badly he's wounded. No, they just pull him out, take him to a hospital. Nobody knows where he goes. And I mean, you know, it's 400 injured victims of – Across Paris it's 130 dead. Like, it's. You can only imagine. Every hospital in Paris is in full triage in…

Jay: And the priority was not to the name of the people and all this.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they're just treating people so.

Jay: And for him also because he was alone in the hospital, and he didn't know nothing about us.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So he doesn't know whether….

Jay: What's happened to us during the assault and after the action.

Jon Becker: Long term, how did this affect the unit? Like, the guys that were involved in this event, obviously, the guy that's injured ends up having to leave the unit because of the damage. Did it solidify the unit? Did it break it up? What happened to the guys that were involved in the event?

Jay: It solidified the unit for sure. A few of us decided to leave the unit. Some of us tried to join the red or another tactical unit, and some of us left Paris, you know, to live in the south of France, west of France, whatever. But most of the guys after the 2015 stay in the unit. And what I think is the best protection for. Against PTSD, on my opinion, was your friends, actually, because when you share experience like this with friends, you can speak about it, you can understand each other, but if you leave a unit just after a traumatic event like this, you're going to feel really alone. We cannot share this kind of event with people who weren't there.

So I think this is – This protect us. The leadership they sent us sent us some psychologists, but because it was police psychologists, nobody wants to speak to them. You're afraid of, if they detect something wrong, they will tell your leadership and you will take your position out of the unit. So nobody talked to the psychologist. We heal each other by speaking about the event and by sharing some time.

Jon Becker: You've shared with me in the past, your recollections. What are the most profound memories you have of this event?

Jay: As I told you before, when I make my way back to home, it was very tough on the scene after the first wave of recreation, when only the dead people stay in the theater. What I remember, it's the cell phone rings in all the pockets of the victim. Because at that time, people all over France know by TV that something happened. And the relatives who know that some of their family is in the concert start calling to get some news about their relatives. And you can hear the cell phone, see the light of the cell phone on the dead bodies and hear the ring ringtones. That was tough. Really.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because you realize that every single one of those cell phones is somebody who's not gonna see that person again.

Jay: No, it was a bad memory. It was a very bad memory. And also something we did two days after our leadership asked us to go back on the scene in the theater, grab the shield, who stayed in the scene to bring him back to the unit because the minister of interior wanted to see it. So our team was designed to do that.

So it was a Monday morning, I think. So we went there. It was full pitch black inside. So we used our lights and went inside. The smell was terrible. The soul was sticky about the tons of blood everywhere. And we made through this shader to get back the shield. And it was a very bad idea, actually.

Jon Becker: It was a terrible idea.

Jay: It's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea to ask us to go and grab it. Maybe if you ask another team,.

Jon Becker: Someone who hadn't experienced it.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So basically, you've been through a traumatic event and they send you back there a couple of days later for a show and tell.

Jay: Yeah.

Jon Becker: The two days later to walk back through the area where this whole traumatic event took place. Smell the smells. Feel the blood on the floor.

Jay: Yeah. This was bad. Really bad.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's a terrible idea.

Jay: The next day, so the Tuesday morning, we got a call around five in the morning for my unit bus. Say, hurry, hurry, we have to go in. Suddenly, the redhead located the terrorists and there is a big gunfight between the terrorists and the red. So go and back up the red. Now. This time was really, really tough for the family, I'm sure, because. And I called the other guy from the teams. Each team leader called the other one, you know, and I have to say. And they ask, what's going on? Don't ask questions. Just gear up and…

Jon Becker: Yeah, just show up.

Jay: Go. And so they told me that the family has. Where are you going? Are you going? It's not finished. No, it's not finished. We have to go. It was a red operation, but we just back up them. But we were on the scene, so for the family, it was really, really tough. It's a never ending situation.

Jon Becker: So when they subsequently raid, subsequently hits the house and gets the remainder of the cell. Right?

Jay: Say it again.

Jon Becker: Raid subsequently hits a location and gets the remainder of this terrorist cell, at least the ones that are still left.

Jay: They killed the element leader of the tangos.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Jay: And two accomplice.

Jon Becker: So I think to kind of work our way towards wrapping up, I would love to hear your thoughts on, you know, the specifically, like, debrief lessons learned, kind of stuff that your team took away from this that you would want other teams to know as they train or prepare for these kinds of events.

Jay: Okay. Something that, you know, in the states, because of the active shooting situation you face, it's the street. The first responder will always be the street police. So what you need to do is to train the street police to train them what to do. To train them what not to do and to train them how to prepare your action. It's as we did after 2015 with the street crime unit, with our – In France, you have three levels of police response in case of an event like this. You've got level one, it's street police. Level two is the street crime unit. They are patrolling. It's like the metro division in LAPD.

So your police station, metro division, and then the SWAT in France, it's the same thing that you have to train the street police, and you have to train also the metro division to prepare your action and to act and not to. And also teach them not to act. What, I mean, it's, they should be able to identify in an active shooting situation where they have to go, an all state situation where they have to wait for you. This is very important, in my opinion.

Also, it's something we improve after the 2015 incident. It's, you have to gain time on the evacuation of the victims and of all the people involved in this kind of crisis, especially in a massive hostage situation. That's why what we did, we trained and equipped some guys from the fire department with ballistic shield.

Jon Becker: Yep.

Jay: So now we train them with the metro division guy. So as soon as we secure one area of the situation, for example, the pit is secure. Now this fire department special team, under the protection of the metro division, the level two police will be able to evacuate people very quickly. This is very good, because if we have that at that time, maybe we can save a few people. You don't have to wait that this become a cold zone, you know? You know, there are three different zones. You know, the hot zone.

Jon Becker: Hot, warm, and cold.

Jay: Yeah. So far, until 2015, you have the rescue organization, EMT, fire department. They only work on the cold zone. What we did not did now is to train there under protection of police to be able to intervene on the warm zone. This is very important, and that can save lives.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you have to, I mean, to do that, you have to train the metro police that initially, the second level of response to secure the perimeter and protect the fire guys, and then you have to train the fire guys to be able to respond into a warm area. But you don't have to train them to the level of a SWAT team.

Jay: No.

Jon Becker: You just need to teach them how to secure a facility and protect fire so fire can go in and evacuate people. That's a really good….

Jay: Except if it's an active shooting situation, they have to go.

Jon Becker: Sure, sure.

Jay: But otherwise, they have to be able to organize themselves with us because, you know, the free zone is not. It's not.

Jon Becker: It's not a clear partition. Clear partition.

Jay: It's an ongoing situation.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's a fluid. So, for example, temperature changes.

Jay: When we arrived, the full theater was a hot zone.

Jon Becker: Right.

Jay: And then the pit was a warm zone, and then because of what we did, the pit was a cold zone. You know, this is an evolutionary…

Jon Becker:

Yeah, it's evolving.

Jay: It's evolving. So that's why you have to train with them. This is something I think really works. And also, I spoke about it later, but before. Sorry, it's the eod guy. You must. We think that you must be able to take one to have a guy in the stack, or if you cannot have a guy in the stack, train one guy of your bomb squad to be able to come with you.

Jon Becker: To move into a hot zone, and also.

Jay: Not only to defuse some explosives, but to be able to make the – Possibly the stack to go through.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Well, like in this instance, I mean, if you. If the. If the EOD guy doesn't make a call on that device, you are either risking your life stepping over it, or having to change course and move a different direction. So his expertise and his willingness to put himself in harm's way immediately moves the problem along when it would otherwise stall you. Yeah, yeah.

Jay: Otherwise, you know, you can be blocked, for example. I don't know, but the tourists left like a grenade on the floor. If you don't have the expertise.

Jon Becker: You don't know what to do.

Jay: You don't know what to do.

Jon Becker: How did this event change the way you guys train?

Jay: I used to say that before 2015, we were acting like police officer, and then we have to change our mindset a little. And in this case of situation, you're still a police officer, but you have to acting like more like a soldier. And this is something really difficult, because a few months after the events, we have a warrant for drug, you know, and we prepare ourselves, and I can see that the team prepare as they were going to war. You know what I mean?

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: And we have to say, hey, calm down. We are back to the police work now. We have to arrest him. Nobody get killed.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Jay: So it's something. You have to be able to change your mindset. In this case of type of situation, there has been no surrender, no arrests, for sure, but you're still a police officer, so you have to respect some procedure, the policy, the SOP. We are not able to kill everybody, you know, even the tangos. So it's, you have to move between the police mindset and the military mindset.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think one of the things that when we first started dealing with the US military for non lethal and they started putting the US military into riot control situations, I had a discussion with a colonel who basically said, this is, we don't, you know, this is not what we do. Force is a switch. When it's time to engage, we flip the switch and we turn on the military machine and it goes until somebody, until we reach surrender or an armistice and then we turn it off.

He said, it is very difficult for me to understand, like a police officer does, that force can go up and down at any point and can start at any point. You know, everybody you pull over could be a deadly threat to you or could be an old lady lost on her way home from the store.

And I think that line becomes finer when you get into tactical situations. And I think that there's a lot of discussion about demilitarizing police and how law enforcement militarizing is, you know, is promoting the wrong mindset. But I think that that's a naive position. When you look at a situation like Bataklan because you were in a war.

Jay: You're in the war. But yeah, to be able to be.

Jon Becker: Able to switch, yes, and that's a very difficult switch. I mean, that that requires a great deal of training and expertise. And I think that's why it is essential to have units like Brih who have the ability to engage this kind of a threat. I mean, I told you when we first did the debrief for this at Aardvark, I mean, I remember introducing you guys, briefing this and saying to the teams that were there, were there, you know, 200 guys, every single one of you has a tactical nightmare. You have a situation that you're afraid of and that haunts you and that you picture. And none of those are as bad as this situation, right?

Like you just go back to the hallway and explosive devices and AK-47s and hostages and smoke and you think about all of those things. To be able to effectively execute this hostage rescue in all of that chaos and all of that danger and all of that threat is a testament to how well your unit was trained and the kind of guys you've selected. Like there is – If you played this in a simulation game a hundred times, everybody is okay and only one guy is shot in the hand is never going to be the result of that simulation.

Jay: You're right.

Jon Becker: Yet somehow you guys managed to pull an amazing victory out of this horrific situation. What? When you look back at this, and this will be my last question, when you look back at this, what are you most proud of?

Jay: The behavior of the unit member? None of them. All of them. Sorry, all of them did the job. All of them got forward to the enemy through the theater. It was something you don't know how people will react before the situation happened. So that night, all the guys who were involved with us, with the unit, did the job, and without any hesitation. So this is something that you never forget.

Jon Becker: There are a lot of people that are alive today because of you guys that certainly would not have been alive. You know, I hope that your unit and, you know, you know how proud you should be of the actions you took that night. And, you know, I would encourage anybody that listens to this podcast to watch.

There is a three part or four part documentary series that Netflix did called November 13th, Paris, that shows the chaos and shows the events and talks to the victims and talks to the people that were there. And, you know, if it's certainly not, you know, family TV. It is violent. It is dark. Even I watched it in parts. Despite 35 years of being immersed in this. It's. It is a heavy documentary. But, you know, I would encourage any of our listeners to go back and watch that video. And, you know, buddy, I thank you so much for doing this with me. And, you know, like I said, you guys should be very proud of what you did.

Jay: Thanks, Jon! Thanks for the opportunity to share with you, and thanks again for the invitation!

Jon Becker: My pleasure! Thanks, buddy!

Episode 5 – Ed Hinchey: Surviving and Recovering After Being Shot

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Ed Hinchey. Ed is a former Forest Hills, Pennsylvania police sergeant who spent 21 years on the force working a variety of assignments. Ed retired from the department after an officer involved shooting where the suspect did not survive. And Ed, having received serious life threatening injuries, was left clinging to life, having been saved by his armor.

Since his retirement, he's dedicated his time to ensuring that police officers are properly armored and that those who are shot in the line of duty are cared for the way they should be. Ed's current role is as the armored technical specialist for Safariland and the head of the Safariland saves program.

Ed, thank you for joining me today on The Debrief!

Ed Hinchey: Jon, thanks for having me!

Jon Becker: So maybe start with just kind of your history, the beginning of your career, and kind of working the way forward.

Ed Hinchey:

Sure. I got into law enforcement early. I went to the academy when I was 19 years old, while I was working my way through college, hired on with a couple of small departments before I was lucky enough to get on with the Forest Hills Police department.

Jon Becker: So at some point in your career, you start to care about body armor. When is that?

Ed Hinchey: Well into my career, I'd been like the other officers I was issued to me. I wanted something comfortable, something soft, something I could function in. One of my best friends, Ed Limbacher, was working the state AG's office in a task force when he was shot in his chest and his body armor failed.

After coming home from the hospital and crossing our fingers that he was going to survive, I'm holding the vest in my hand with a hole in it that shouldn't be there. And I called down to the NIJ. I got through to Lance Miller, explained to him what I had going on, and I've got to tell you, the NIJ jumped in a car, drove from DC to Pittsburgh, and we were all in the crime lab 24 hours later trying to figure out what happened.

Jon Becker: So let's walk through what happened, because that was the one catastrophic failure of body armor in history. That was hit with a round that was supposed to stop, right?

Ed Hinchey: What we learned later was the vest was made of a monolithic construction. It was Zylon front to back. Zylon initially was touted as material that was stronger than Kevlar, lighter, more flexible, higher performance. And initially, as it's woven, it probably was. As it got worn and exposed to moisture and UV radiation, its degradation curve was drastic. It basically fell off a cliff.

Ed's vest was only five and a half months old, but he worked in that jump out van, so he sweated through it all day, every day, and he got shot June 23rd, 2003, and the round just blew through him. It went in, it went through his lung, his intestines, into his spine.

When I get over to him in the parking lot, and he's on his back and he's holding a picture that he always carried in his plate pocket of his family, his wife and little girls, that – I've never had an emotion go through me like that before. And he's looking at me, he says, you know, you go to go get my wife and girls. And I, you know, that day, that moment will live with me forever.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I imagine it would. What went wrong with the vest? Like, let's kind of talk about the NIJ recall, and, you know, what actually was the problem?

Ed Hinchey: Yeah, they've looked at a lot of causation factors of what degrade Zylon, and the best that they can come up with is UV radiation. And a lot of the rolls. The armor shows up in a roll, it gets pulled out on a Gerber cutting machine. It gets cut to fit. The package you're building gets sometimes stitched together, sometimes tacked together, put inside.

At that time, under that particular standard, a water resistant cover, and then issued to the officer, they anticipate a little bit of a degradation. But the UV radiation and moisture combination on Zylon was like nothing they'd ever seen before. And the long term testing, as came out later, showed that, well, at that.

Jon Becker: Point, with the NIJ standard, you also. There were a lot of flaws in the standard at that point, right?

Ed Hinchey: There was no condition testing. They really didn't look at it down the road. There was no fit audits at that point in time.

Jon Becker: Let's define those for people that don't know. So, condition testing.

Ed Hinchey: Right, condition testing is when they take the armor in its new. You submit 28 packages, and they take a grouping of those, and they put them in an industrial tumbler. Now, it's 149 degrees, 80% humidity. It tumbles 72,000 rotations for ten straight days, and then they take it out and under the current standard, they reduce the speed, but use the same rounds they test new armor with, and they shoot the armor, and it's got to perform the same as it did in its new conditions.

Jon Becker: Because we're looking at a degradation curve now.

Ed Hinchey: Correct.

Jon Becker: So, previously, under the old standard, you just had to pass on the day of the game.

Ed Hinchey: Right. The first day, in the best possible condition that vest will ever be, it passed a standard.

Jon Becker: And using potentially the hottest material the manufacturer has and…

Ed Hinchey: Produce in the largest size, there was no size limitation.

Jon Becker: So you could send a horse blanket built out of the best material you have, and even if you failed, you could resubmit the same package.

Ed Hinchey: Correct.

Jon Becker: And as long as you passed one time, you were good to go.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly.

Jon Becker: And so, in Ed's case, he gets, at that point, the thinnest, lightest vest on the market.

Ed Hinchey: Correct.

Jon Becker: That had passed the horse blanket standard.

Ed Hinchey: Yes.

Jon Becker: Probably with the hottest material possible.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Meaning. And when I say hottest material, I mean the material that shoots the best.

Ed Hinchey: They lot tested it and made sure it had the highest numbers.

Jon Becker: Yep. And then he starts wearing the vest, and five and a half months later, it falls. You know, if you think of the standard as a horizontal line, it falls below that line.

Ed Hinchey: Well below.

Jon Becker: And what was he shot with?

Ed Hinchey: What was the round 40 cal? And we don't know that the gun was filled with a couple different types of ammo. It was really a piece of crap street gun wrapped with electrical tape.

Jon Becker: 40 is not, you know, amazing bullet.

Ed Hinchey: Usually not a huge challenge for body armor. Correct. Yeah. This should have been easily defeated by the vest. The vest should.

Jon Becker: So, on the heels of ed shooting, they recalled Zylon.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: Which required that every vest currently on the street that contains Zylon be replaced.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly.

Jon Becker: And at the same time, they started to revise the standard to the new NIJ standard.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And that's. I've got to give the NIJ credit. They work directly with Ed Lembacher. They had him involved in it. They came to our buildings to figure out, was it. We're in an old building. Was it radon gas? Was it this? They looked at every possible causative factor, but they also considered what Eddie been through, the traumatic injuries that he had, what his family had to suffer, and they looked at it going forward.

So Eddie's sacrifice, what he went through, has paid it forward to law enforcement. Every officer that wears body armor today should call in Ed Lembacher and tell him. Thank you.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Unfortunately, Ed became the canary in the coal mine for the NIJ standard and for materials. And fortunately survived, correct?

Ed Hinchey: Correct.

Jon Becker: Which was amazing in and of itself.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely. And it's a testament to Eddie's being in shape and his will to live. I mean, the guy's an absolute warrior. And I can't say enough about him as a man, about him as a police officer. He was phenomenal. He's one of the guys I chose to be on my shift. He was that guy. And it was no surprise to me. He's the first guy coming out of the van for the AG's on a jump out because that's Ed Lembacher.

And, I mean, to this day, I look at what we do in the lab, and I know a lot of that. The condition testing, the waterproof versus water resistant, the lot testing, the fit audits were the NIJ comes in and what are you making on the floor today at Safariland? We're making these three packages. Great. We'll take the next grouping off the line of each. We're going to send it to one of our independent labs. It better do just as well as it did when we started it, and we're going to cut it open and make sure you build it right. It better meet the build sheet specs.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You better have the right layers of material, because prior to that, there was no inspection.

Ed Hinchey: None.

Jon Becker: As long as you're, you know, as long as the package you submitted for testing passed, that was it. You were done.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And it was never looked at again. And they didn't care what size you built it. They didn't care if the C-1 performed as well as the C-5. The horse blanket, you know, the small, the 110 pound officer who's as lean as can be wearing the smallest panel that we can build. That performance now has to be the same as the largest one we make.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And from a kinetic energy standpoint, it's a lot easier to pass with a horse blanket than it is to pass with a baby gap.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, without a doubt. Yeah. That's the analogy I like, is the horse blanket, because truly, if you take a look at some of the panels that had been submitted in the past, and we only thought about this after I started working with the NIJ after Eddie'd been shot and his vest failed. And I saw some of the. The size of the panels coming in, there was no limit you could put horse blankets in.

Jon Becker: It's ridiculous.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. So, great job on the NIJ's part. They. They reacted to it, recognized there were failures in the, the way the, the forward testing was that it didn't exist. And so they limited, they took theC-1 through C-5. You can look at the CPL today, the compliant products list, and you'll see there's still armor out there that's C-2 through C-5. C-3 through C-5 means the small and medium panels didn't pass.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which is crazy!

Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah.

Jon Becker: So it's, you know, you're going to. You're buying armor for your department. You're like, oh, well, the small people, they're not going to wear it.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's. It's. I think one of the things that frustrates me most with armor is the consumer is not particularly well educated, truly. And part of that's because that's not their job. But it has led to, over the years, there being some pretty unscrupulous practices in body armor.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely.

Jon Becker: It's a point of frustration and passion for me that literally prompted me to write an article for NTOA about plates because there were so many people playing fast and loose with the standards.

Ed Hinchey: I mean, I get asked all the time while I'm out in the field, do you have a three plus plus? I mean, that animal doesn't exist. That's not a type from the NIJ.

Jon Becker: I mean, hopefully, under the new standards, it will be.

Ed Hinchey: I believe they're addressing it and they're being very strict about it. And the NIJ stamp on it now is a game changer.

Jon Becker: So then, at this point, you've gone from a guy who's kind of marginally interested in body armor to a guy who cares passionately about armor.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, weird. And again, the process that happened with that Zylon armor, as we began to look into it, there was a whistleblower involved from the company that had built the Zylon. They knew the degradation curve was drastic. He'd written a company wide memo saying, we are going to get a phone call about an officer killed because his body armor failed.

So they knew which – You've got this young, like I said, true warrior officer who's got a wife and incredibly young family, and he's wondering, how do I provide? How do I do this? And then he finds out more and more and more that should have never happened in the first place.

And again, the NIJ's response was phenomenal. We did our best to be with him throughout the entire process as he moved forward. We knew relatively early on from doctors that he wasn't going to be able to come back to work and his preparation for the next phase of his life. And it could have gone a lot of different ways.

And again, I always say Eddie was the right guy because he never shut down. He knew that he had to step up. Regardless, he can't be his passion anymore. He can't be that police officer. What can I do to carry the day, you know? And he's presently still in public service. He's a fire chief now, you know, here's the guy you want next to you.

Jon Becker: So after Ed shooting, how long is it until your shooting occurs?

Ed Hinchey: About 19 months.

Jon Becker: So you are working on body armor because of edge shooting.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: And 19 months later, your life will literally depend on it.

Ed Hinchey: If I didn't have body armor that worked that day, somebody else is tucking in my kids and kissing my wife good night.

Jon Becker: So walk me through what happened.

Ed Hinchey: It was in between shifts. I was doing a double day before I was supposed to go on vacation. And we get a call. My dispatcher, Joe Klimko, yells up to us, hey, there's something bad going on up on the pike. Start up towards Bob's lounge, and we. We go up the hill. We're going over. We border with Wilkins Township on that side. And he's given us details as we go. It's a severe domestic woman has run into a bar, which is called the plaza. She's got a child, really young child, tucked under arms. She's screaming that her ex husband is trying to kill them. He's on his way to kill the mother. We've got a unit responding to that location. The mother actually lives in Forest hills.

I call out that I'm going to go ahead and get to the mothers and secure that location, which I do. As soon as I knocked on the door, the mother of the first two victims, I knew on her face because she saw my uniform, and her first words to me was, my baby's all right, what's happened? And so we begin to try and calm her down and get information on who we're looking for.

Wilkins Township pulls up. He has the first two victims of the ex wife and child in the car. I've never seen a baby look terrified. That was a big red flag for me, because this baby looked terrified. She was young, and it was. The look on Janelle's face was just terror. And she wanted to know if her mom was okay.

So we realized we got to get them off the X, get that area secured. They took them to get medical. I called out I'd set a command post directly across the street. In Bob's lounge, and we began to go out and try and find this guy. We had a good description of him. We had a good description of the car. I swing in, I go down the street. I'm gonna make a quick loop before I park in that parking lot. He is literally parked in the next lot down from Bob's lounge, basically, where he can see where we're at.

And I call out that I've got him located. And I fully anticipate a chase. If he goes one direction, we're going out towards the country. Other direction is right in towards the city of Pittsburgh. I'm in an unmarked car, but I'm fully lit up, and I come across, and I position myself so I can go either way. Whatever he chooses, I'll get in behind him, and we'll begin this.

And as soon as I pulled up, I watched the car go from. He's actually a floor shifter go from park. You can watch the brake lights flick. And so I knew he was in drive, and he came out. He came into the parking lot, and I'm on the radio. I'm telling him, hey, we're going to be in a pursuit here. I've got, you know, I'll let you know which way. And he never deviates from the front of my car. He comes across in a gravel lot, and he hits the front of my car, just literally dead.

And I'm looking at him, and we're looking across two hoods now, and I'm looking at him thinking, well, no one's ever done that before. Yeah, well, that's new. This is new. And I call out, you know, you know, hey, we're up here in a lot. Get me some units up here.

I just been through a class run by Brian Avery, and again, we'll talk about training as we go on here. I'd been lucky enough throughout my career to have some absolutely phenomenal training and Brian Avery's happened to have been the most recent. And it was a lot of containment, and you know, what we do in those exact type situations.

So, six weeks prior to this incident, we'd been up on the Beaver Valley racetrack practicing what happens if you've got to get a car contained? And it was a lot of that front end collision. Let's get him, you know, cornered in. Now I'm by myself. I'm one on one here, but I'm able to floor my car. I'm still up on the pavement. And get him kind of locked under. He had an old Solero and it was really kind of scooped down on the front end.

So I got up over top of his front end a little bit, hit the emergency brake, put it in park, came out of my door, went around to the passenger side, went over top. We knew he was armed with a knife. We didn't know what else he had. I will admit that I missed a complete red flag. One of the pictures, I saw him, he's in dress blues. It didn't throw the right numbers for me that I'm dealing with a military veteran who probably has combat experience. And I begin again to try and de-escalate the situation. I'm telling, shut it down. I've seen your wife and baby. They're okay. I've seen your mother in law. Everything's okay. Let's figure out what we can do here. Shut the car off.

He opens a beer, takes a drink, throws me the finger. You know, this guy's engaging me in a completely different way than I've had, you know, 23 and a half years of experience. This is, this is not the way things usually go. Second officer arrives on a scene, I have him take my post. I go back around to my pillar. I want to see inside the car. I want to know if there's anybody else in there.

When I half moon out, I get a good look in the car, and I come back and I call out that he's alone in the car. We need some more units up here right now. And he starts to go from reverse to drive. Reverse to drive with a floor shifter to break the cars free. I know I've got them contained. I make a decision at that point and I tell Bill, hey, I'm going to move up. I'm going to bust out a window and put some spray in. It's late November. It's cold out. I know his window's down on his side of the car, the driver's side window of the assailant.

I tell again the other officer who arrived on scene. Where I'm going, I move up, I break out the window with a collapsible baton. So I'm by the front wheel, front wheel drive car. He's throwing some gravel up.

Jon Becker :And you're on the driver's side, passenger side?

Ed Hinchey: I'm on the passenger side. I'm moving from my driver's side to his passenger side.

Jon Becker: So you're looking at it this way. He's sitting here. You're looking at him this way.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. I'm Caddy corner across the hoods. And he's in full postal uniformity. He was working as a mail delivery person. That's one of the ways, I think he got into the secure apartment building that his ex wife and child lived in. It's the holidays. Who's not going to hold the door for the mailman? That's an easy way for him to get in there at that point in time. I'm thinking, I've got the window broken out. I know his window's down. I want my partner. I'm going to put spray in.

The second red flag that I missed was he looked at me and said, don't spray me now. I'd taken my spray out. I shook it up behind me. I don't think there was any way for him to know that's my next step, unless he'd thought this through. And it's one of the things I've gone back to in my head several times, doing kind of debriefs. And he truly knew what I was about to do. He really did. And I wanted him not to be able to take off if he got free of the front of my car. We're on foot in a parking lot. He's gonna. He's gonna go. One of us.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ed Hinchey: He's either gonna take Billy out or myself. And so we need to get him to the point where he really can't operate a vehicle. And so I make the decision to spray. I let Billy know I'm doing it. As I step forward to get the left hand in to the window. His hand had moved from a shifter to what I didn't see, which was a Glock 23. And it's coming up. And my exact reaction was exactly that.

I see the gun coming up, and I realized I've got a handful of collapsible batons and a handful of spray, and that's not where I need to be. And they found both of those next to where the first blood splatter was. First round came in just over the top of the door sill of the car, because he's leaned across the street.

Now he's this far away, and it comes in at an upward angle. It goes into my groin all the way through. I didn't realize what it had done. Destroyed my femoral and saphenous veins, and pieces of it splattered out, and then a big portion of it went into my hip bone. It was much hotter than I was prepared for. One of the first things that went through my mind as I'm starting to try and get off the x was, oh, my God, that's hot.

Something that, you know, in all my years, I'd never heard of anyone. We'd heard the terms hot rounds before. We just assumed they're fast rounds. You know, when you're shooting, you get that one. That really gives you a little laser kick. Well, that was hot round. This was a whole new level of meaning. Hot rounds.

Jon Becker: A completely different meaning of hot round.

Ed Hinchey: This one resonates now, you know, I get it. He hit me two more times. Almost immediately, the gun's climbing up a little bit. He's shooting one handed. So I get hit through the groin. I get hit towards the bottom of my armor, again at an upward angle, and then I get hit directly against the rib cage up here. He fired a total of ten shots and hit three times. Three times out of those ten, I'm now moving back to my a pillar. I've got one hand clamped completely over where the. What I know is the worst of the three wounds I draw, and I put 14 rounds through the medium of the windshield.

At that point in time, I look over to see where my partner's at. He's moving. He had lost a sight picture, I think, in discussions and taking a look at the scene and pictures later when the bad guy. And I don't think the bad guy consciously knew he was getting behind the engine block from there. He just wanted to get to me.

Jon Becker: Yeah, he was just leaning out to shoot you, but bought himself cover.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. The ancillary side of that, getting closer to me, was putting himself behind the engine block so that the sight picture for Billy just kind of disappeared. And at that point in time, I reload. I'm looking back at him, I'm watching him reload. And I'm thinking to myself, I've got to be faster. I've got to be faster. I get another 13 rounds through the medium of the windshield.

I hear a shot come from behind me, and it was a muffled sound. That auditory exclusion thing was working strong that evening, Brian Armstrong, my K9 officer, had arrived at the scene, moved up behind, assessed the situation, got around downrange, came up, and I called to him, clear the vehicle. Clear the vehicle. I've got you covered. Clear the vehicle. Brian's a combat veteran marine again, one of those guys you want with you if it goes bad and he moves up, clears calls.

I'm already on the radio calling for two ambulances, getting supervisors, getting county homicide notified, making all the calls out there, trying to make sure everybody else is okay. And I keep checking with my hand. I can't control the bleeding. That's, you know, and I know it's bad and I'm pushing. I'm doing what I can. And I also, at that exact same moment, realize these don't burn. You know, it sucked. It felt like getting punched by someone that really knows how to throw a punch. They don't burn. I'm okay there. And I dismissed those wounds at that moment. I'm okay there. Those aren't. Those aren't bothering me at all.

Brian comes back, and there's a pause as he gets to me, and I'm like, okay. And he gets his vehicle. He's a k nine guy. Swings up beside me. He's like, we got to go now. There's some things we need to do here. We've got some stuff going on. Thank God for Brian Armstrong. He doesn't take my direct orders as his sergeant. He recognizes he needs to save my life.

And he throws me in his car, clears the front seat, throws me in, and we take off out of the parking lot. I get on the radio, hand it off to the guys who are coming in. Carl Parabola, some of the other officers I know, I can hear them on the radio. They're coming. They're my guys. And at that point in time, Brian, I've called that I'm en route to Mercy hospital with a gunshot victim. And Mercy hospital is a great hospital. I have family that are surgeons down there. That's where I know I need to get to.

We have several great hospitals in Pittsburgh, so we're kind of blessed that way. Brian immediately turns off, we have a non-trauma hospital right down the road from us. And I said to him, Brian, Brian, where are you going? He said, we're going to Braddock. I said, no, Brian. We absolutely need to be going downtown to Pittsburgh. And I'm looking at myself. I'm creating a puddle. I can't control this bleeding.

And he looks over at me and he says, get your hand inside the gun belt and get your finger in a hole now. And he's white knuckled on the wheel, and he's rolling. Maybe not the world's best driver, but we're okay with that. And we're hustling, man. We're really moving. And I said to Brian, I'm gonna give you direct order. You need to take me to Mercy. And his answer to that was, sarge, I'm gonna knock you the f*** out. Okay? I went back on the mic. I called. We're en route to Braddock hospital, and you can literally hear a pause in the radio traffic.

And Joe Klimko, who's my dispatcher, one of my dearest friends, he was the dispatcher for Eddie when Eddie got shot and handled the scene like nobody I could have ever. If you had to take every great dispatcher in the world and compile him into one and say, this is the program for police dispatcher. You get Joe Klimko.

And he'd been through the Eddie ordeal, and now he's got me. And he says, switch attack, sarge, who shot. And I look right at Brian, and Brian's got that look on his face. And I said, I am. Apparently, I'm just winged. He goes, ten four. [Crosstalk]

And so we go back off, and now we're on the wing with a femoral vein. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't want anything going on over the radio. I didn't want people hearing things that didn't hear it from me. And we get. Pull up into Braddock, jump on. He's got the back of my gumball. We walk into the first hospital. I got blessed there. I had incredibly experienced nurses. They rip everything off me.

And one of the nurses gets his fingers and gets up inside me and really controls the bleeding. But now he's in a very stationary mode. Joe Klimko again, has called. They've shut down the parkway that surrounds the city of Pittsburgh. They've shut down the line that'll take us directly to Presby Hospital, another phenomenal, you know, trauma hospital in the city. And they're part of this, you know, smaller, non-trauma center that I'm at now. And they've got an ambulance on the way to get me there. They're doing everything they can. They're getting fluids in me.

One of the things I will tell you is you can hear what everybody says. I don't think, you know, we take that into consideration as officers, that they think you're focused on combat breathing and trying to get better and, you know, survive. I can hear guys in the background, and I hear a couple of them saying things like, there's no way he makes it out of this hospital. He's gonna die right here, that kind of stuff. Who's gonna tell his wife? Who's? You hear all of that?

So if there's one thing we can talk about, you know, maybe later on the debrief, it's, you know, here's how to talk. When you're standing around a guy who's bleeding out. Here's one of the things you gotta consider. His faculties aren't down. They're heightened.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they're all.

Ed Hinchey: They are truly heightened. I. And he's picking up on everything, and so they're getting fluids into me. You know, I get on the phone, I make a phone call to one of the guys that I've known my entire adult life, one of my work partners, and again, another one of those great policemen that we're blessed to have in this industry. And he's the lieutenant for the county homicide. And I call him to let him know what's going on, because now I don't have a radio. I don't have a. Anything.

And give him a heads up and also say, hey, man, my family. And I look at the nurse. I said, where am I going? They said, you're going to Presby. I said, I'll be at Presby. And so he'd already been given an indication he'd already had the calls from dispatchers and everything that runs through while a critical incident goes on. So he kind of had a heads up that he's got a lot of work in front of him. And at that point in time, they roll me out and they get me down to Presby.

So I'm on my back in the ambulance. The nurse is over top of me, and he's a young, experienced, incredible trauma nurse. His fingers are up inside me. Brian is over top of him with his arm around his waist and his hand on the top of the ambulance, keeping him steady. And I've got those two faces above me, and you can kind of hear what's going on. I wear St. Michael's medal. I have a ring that never comes off that, it's got a claw on it.

And, you know, my wife put that on my hand. I know I'm going into surgery, and I don't want those getting lost. And so I kind of work it, and Brian's helping me do it. And I've mentioned Brian's a marine combat veteran. It's one of those guys. You give them. You give him a suggestion, it's. It's going to get done. So it comes off me. It's covered in blood. My rings covered in blood. And I reach.

I said, you need these. You need to get these to tam my wife. You've got to make that happen. And he says, sergeants, I've got them. And he locks them up in his fist. And, you know, we get down to Presby, doors open. Dr. Tishman's waiting for me, and they saved my life.

Jon Becker: So when they roll you into the hospital, kind of walk me through what happens next.

Ed Hinchey: Again, I had. While I'm on the gurney at the first hospital, and they're getting lines into me. They're doing everything. I grab my phone and I flip it open, and I call Chris. I know somebody needs to tell my wife. I want it to be somebody she knows. I live a fair distance outside of forest hills. I know they don't have time to get anybody out there, and I know they're busy up at the crime scene.

So I call Chris again. You talk about a friend you've had your entire adult life, entire career. You've hashed every incident with somebody, and he happens to live four doors down the street. And I call him. I said, listen, here's what's going on. You need to get your best team up to Bob's lounge. I've been in a shooting. I'm pretty sure I killed the guy. I'm hit. I said, you need to grab Tam and the kids. My daughter was eight. My son was six at that time. You need to get him down to Presby hospital.

And so he says, all right. He says, I'm going to take care of everything here. He said, you're going to call Tam, let her know I'm coming, right? I said, absolutely. They'd gotten a line into my left arm. Brian's behind me. Nurse has his fingers in my hip. I flipped the phone back open.

Another nurse takes that phone right out of my hand. She's got to get a second line in my arm because I'm crashing. They need to pump fluids me in because I'm pumping them out. Like I said, my femoral and saphenous vein were destroyed. They were gone. My leg was beginning a compartment syndrome.

I didn't know any of this at the time. I just knew there was a lot of blood. And I was practicing combat breathing. I was trying to get, you know, a whole lot of things done. The administrator side, have all the right people been notified? Do we have people at the scene? How are the initial victims? You're going through that whole side of it.

And I said, hey, listen, I need the phone back. And she says, sarge, you need to quit moving. So I never get to notify my wife. So I'm in there. They roll me in. Dr. Tishman starts to work on me. They get the first clamps inside me to start trying to control the bleeding. Chris comes through the door, my friend.

And I know when I see Chris, that means my family's there. I didn't find out until later. He had brought my wife down. He had brought his wife up to keep an eye on my kids, because he knew that hospital atmosphere and surgery and everything else was not the right, again, ultimate professional.

I'm surrounded by some of the best people in the world. I was absolutely blessed. And I said to him, hey, man, I said, bring my family. I really need to see him right now. And Dr. Tishman intervenes, and he says, sarge, he says, we can save you. You can see your family. It's not going to be both.

And so I had to make a decision right there. Knowing my family's on the exact opposite side of those doors, knowing I might not come out of this to take a shot at living. And probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever made, because there was nothing more in my core being that I wanted than to see my wife and kids. That's all I wanted.

And so I knew that when I went upstairs, they're going to knock me out. And I don't know what's after that. I have no idea. But Dr. Tishman, ultimate professional, said, sarge, we have to go right now. And Chris looks at me and says, I will take care of everybody. And off I went.

Jon Becker: Well, and you were really fortunate as far as Tischman being there.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, my goodness! One of the most incredible experienced trauma surgeons, especially for gunshot wounds, with his background in existence, let alone in Pittsburgh, let alone there. That night, he was there checking up on some other patients. Just happened to be on his way out when they called him, said, hey, they're bringing an officer in, gunshot victim.

And so he stood by the ambulance, had gotten to the crime scene. They did transport the shooter down to the exact same hospital. Dr. Tishman had another team waiting for him. I think they probably had information that. That there wasn't anything they were gonna be able to do. He was pronounced there, and Dr. Tishman had his best team waiting as I came out of the ambulance. Worked on me several times.

Originally, we thought we were gonna have to take my leg off. I'd signed all the paperwork for that. They assigned a nurse to sit at the bottom of my bed. So in between surgeries, she had a set of headphones on, and she was looking for any kind of pulse in my foot. And I knew that if they didn't find it, and they were, they'd explained to me they were going to try and take it below the knee, but there was no guarantee. It may have to be above the knee.

And I told him, I said, listen, I said, the light comes off. As long as I wake up and I see that family, we're all good here. Do whatever you've got to do. And about 2 hours before the actual surgery, she told me to hit my. My call button, and I didn't understand what was going on, and I hit the call button.

Another nurse comes in. They whisper back and forth. That nurse goes back out. Doctor comes in, lifts the headphones off. They work the foot, and he says, we've got a pulse. Can't guarantee that's going to be later today into the tomorrow, you know, in the future, but for right now, you're going to go ahead and keep the leg.

Jon Becker: So you were 2 hours from having your leg amputated?

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. Yep. And like I said, I had a five point fasciotomy done on it. They. They cut all the way through the calf.

Jon Becker: Why don't you explain what a fascia is?

Ed Hinchey: Fasciotomy is where they have to take the internal pressure off your legs, killing itself by the pressure that's built up inside it.

Jon Becker: By the fluids that are leaking.

Ed Hinchey: All the blood could get into the leg. It had no way to get back out. The veins that deliver the vein back out are gone. Luckily for me, somewhere along the way there, my femoral artery allowed sympathetic flow. The doctors explained to me later, there's no way to induce that. Your body either does it or doesn't do it.

Jon Becker: When you say sympathetic flow, what do you mean?

Ed Hinchey: My femoral artery delivers blood into my leg and back out. I got lucky. I have a good femoral artery. I got sympathetic flow in there. And they. I said, did you make that happen? What did you do? And I said, no, we can't make that happen. We can't induce that.

Jon Becker: So your body just makes a decision.

Ed Hinchey: Either happens, it's a defense mechanism. It either happens or it doesn't. The pressure was so bad on the leg, the leg was killing itself. It was. It was so big. It was just. I've never seen, I couldn't imagine that was a human leg, let alone my human leg. Black, just blood ridden. I mean, it was truly, there were, there were SWAT guys that couldn't go on that side of the bed. It just wasn't going to happen.

And introduced my eight year old daughter, Caitlin, who has locked her fingers to the side of the gurney on my side of the bed, and she has refused to leave my hospital room. She stayed the first 72 hours. And Dr. Tishman was like, sergeant, if you don't mind her staying. I don't mind her staying because trying to get her out of here is not going to be a good thing.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ed Hinchey: You know, so here she is. I should have known that I had my hands full, because at eight years old, she's staring down a surgeon saying, I am not leaving my daddy.

Jon Becker: I love that!

Ed Hinchey: I am not leaving my daddy. That's not going to happen. And my son's out playing football in the hallway with the other SWAT guys, which was good. It was a good place for him. And, you know, my wife was trying to balance the two of them. Me life with me laid up there, you know? So at that point in time.

Jon Becker: So they fillet your leg open.

Ed Hinchey: They fillet the leg open from the knee to the hip on top, from the knee to the groin on the inside, from the knee to the hip on the outside, and then through the calf from behind the knee down to the achilles.

Jon Becker: Just open it completely open to give the tissue room to expand.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: So it turns your leg into a chinese lantern.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. So it's up on a thing. And they've got to change the wound dressings every couple hours. So you've got wound dressings inside there that literally have to be peeled out. You've got a fresh batch of them that need to be pushed back in. It was open for five days.

Jon Becker: That sounds like a barrel.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And we had. It's a training hospital, teaching hospital. And we had groups of interns coming in, and I looked at him, I said, you never seen a knee before like that? And he goes, not anyone that was alive. So that's a great thing to hear from the intern sitting next to your bed, you know, glad I hear for you. But again, the nurses. My mom was a nurse. Her grandmother on my wife's side was a nurse. It's kind of in the family. My sister's a nurse. They literally gowned her up, gave her a set of gloves, and she would stand there and hold the tray of the packing material.

Jon Becker: Oh, my God!

Ed Hinchey: And she's on this side going, daddy, we're doing really good. Are you okay? And she's literally a giant brown eye staring up at me.

Jon Becker: Your daughter's a badass.

Ed Hinchey: And, oh, she's just incredible. And my wife's like, hey, we got to get Connor out of here for a little bit. I'm going to be gone for a little bit. And Caitlin was like, I've got this. Like, I'm here. And just. Just amazing. And so she stayed for. She did not leave the hospital. Slept in a chair next to me. Surprisingly, the right side of my body was 100% fine. There was nothing wrong with it.

And truly, I mean, she's an angel, absolute angel. But she is her mother's daughter. Day three, she's still there, and we've got things calmed down a little bit. There's probably no more surgeries on the horizon. They are rolling in a cauterization cartae on a daily basis, because as they unpack it and there's still little tiny bleeds inside there. They cauterize those. Good times. Great smell.

Jon Becker: That sounds like fun.

Ed Hinchey: Good times. There's some things you learn.

Jon Becker: So we got your leg turned into a chinese lantern, and just for fun, we're gonna go through and light it on fire.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. Exactly. Let's introduce this.

Jon Becker: Can you feel that?

Ed Hinchey: Yes, I can.

Jon Becker: And Caitlin is there for that.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Just smelling dad cooking.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely on top of it. So we get a little break. There's a couple, you know, incredible nurses taking care of us. They're bringing her some drinks and everything. And I look around, I realize these are the good nurses. These are no doctors in the room. These are. I said, hey, Caitlin, come on up. She goes, really? Come on up here. I need to hold my little girl.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ed Hinchey: You know? She climbs up, she gets cuddly. Now, like I said, she is her mother's daughter, okay? She looks up at me with the biggest brown eyes you're ever gonna see, and she says, daddy, are you gonna be okay? And, I mean, I'm like, baby, I said, I'm gonna be just fine. I'm absolutely gonna be just fine. Don't you worry about a thing. But my thoughts are, are you gonna be okay? She gives it a full dramatic pause, nails me with the big bronze, and she says, I'd be better if I had a puppy.

Jon Becker: Wow! My God, what a fantastic time! Deliver a dog.

Ed Hinchey: She'd been waiting for probably 71 hours to nail me with that one.

Jon Becker: Well played.

Ed Hinchey: Kept it. Kept it right in the back pocket till it was time. Yeah, yeah, she's good. She's good. Yep, yep, yep. The puppy's name was Bailey. Yeah. Carrie blue terrier, you know, absolutely positive. We drove out together when I was okay to drive a car. Again, crutches in the backseat. Picking up the. Picking up the puppy. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Well, and just, I mean, this kind of fast forwards a little bit, but, like, that permanently impacted Caitlin. Arguably, in a very positive way, absolutely.

Ed Hinchey: If you think it doesn't affect your family. And I'd love to go in depth with that throughout the interview today. Again, my wife is in the medical field, she's a pharmacist. Her grandmother was a nurse. My mom was a nurse. Caitlin had nursed me through the worst time of my life right there. And fast forward to when she graduates high school, begins nursing school, and becomes a trauma nurse at the same hospital.

Fast forward another two years. My son graduates, goes off to WVU for a little bit, enlists in the military, does a deployment to Jordan. He got sworn in four weeks ago in the Dormont police department. Yeah, the whole family, it's, yeah, no, that's, it resonates and it becomes a part of their lives as much as it becomes an incident for us.

Jon Becker: Well, I think that's, I think that's something we should discuss in more depth as we go on today, because I think that it's, I don't think people understand necessarily the impact that it has not only on the officer, but everybody around them.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely.

Jon Becker: Coworkers, family like. It's a much broader reach. Why don't we, let's kind of finish out your career and then we'll come back and talk in that. So how long is it till you get out of the hospital?

Ed Hinchey: I'm in the hospital in ICU for eleven days. It's a little bit disruptive. They've got police in the hallway. You have to be code worded in to get in. I'm taking up a lot of their space time and it's one of those, I need to get home. I want to get a good night's sleep. Dr. Tishman has a talk with my family again. My wife's a pharmacist, neighbors are nurses. We've got doctors on the street, we've got a court, we've got, again, family that are surgeons.

My road department goes over, literally installs railings in my home because they explain I'm not going to be ambulatory. They get everything set up for me. They get a bed, a recliner that lays flat. My agency, my guys from my department had laid out cash for things that they needed immediately and didn't have time to go through a po. The ambulance came and I got to ride back to my home in the ambulance that was originally sent to take me from the crime scene where I got shot to the hospital. Every one of those paramedics chewed me out for not waiting for them.

So I caught a lot of heat from Rob and the crew. I said, hey, I'm here now, you know, take me home. And he said, you have no idea how mad we were. And I said, sorry, guys. Brian Armstrong. You ever try to say no to Brian Armstrong when he's made up his mind?

Jon Becker: Well, there's a funny story about Brian, too, when he goes to put you in the car, right?

Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah.

Jon Becker: You're refusing?

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. He's not taking no for an answer. And I still want to get a couple things done. And the marine, and let's get it now, because he knows how bad I'm hurt. He's seen this in the field. I don't. But he absolutely knows time is the one thing that's against us here. And I had a bruise right here from the common perennial strike that drove me into the car.

Jon Becker: So he planted a knee in you.

Ed Hinchey: Brian, picked you up by the seat of your pants and threw you. There was no discussion. There was no longer a sergeant patrolman relationship. There was a Brian Armstrong is going to save my life relationship going on. And no matter what it took. And even if he had to throw.

Jon Becker: You in the car?

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. And almost carry me into the hospital, all of those things. And that was, again, I'm surrounded by the right people at the right time. They talk about it being, you're on the job because of the guy next to you, and never more.

Jon Becker: True.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: So how long is it before life begins to get a normal cadence?

Ed Hinchey: Well, I get home, my wife's been given time off from work. Her employer was great about it, but now it's been two weeks. They need the pharmacist back. She's like, honey, I got to go. And I will tell you that part of me had been the alpha male. I take care of everything. The kids need something, I'll take care of it. My wife needs something, I'll take care of it. She's an incredibly independent woman.

But again, I'm a police officer. Let's take care of business here. All of a sudden, I can't even get myself a drink of water. I can't stand up without both hands locked onto a walker. I can barely. Barely get the words out to the folks like, hey, everyone needs to leave the room for a minute because I've got to go to the bathroom. That's who I am now. I've got my kids bringing me a snack, bringing me a glass of water. Six years and eight years old, they're taking care of me.

My wife sitting next to me, holding my hand like, honey, I actually have to leave. I have to go to work. And it's breaking her heart that she's got a. She's got to step up and do that. And I'm like, I got caitlin. We're good. Like, everything's going to be okay. And the neighbors had all chipped in. They were all waiting again. It's wintertime. The whole neighborhood's waiting.

When I come home, they've cleared everything that needed done so the ambulance could come and get everything in. They moved furniture, I mean, you name it, everything had been taken care of. And so she goes to work shortly after, a couple of days goes by, life does begin a little bit to return to normal. We're counting on some other people to help get our kids places.

One of those places is actually Sunday school. And so it's time for, you know, Caitlin to go back to Sunday school. And, you know, I'm gonna have a little quiet time in the house there. Phone rings and it's Sunday school calling, telling me my daughter is being disruptive and I need to come get her.

You know, again, you mentioned what can happen to the families, things that never get discussed. The lesson plan that day was the Ten Commandments, and they got to thou shalt not kill. And she tells the nuns, hey, my daddy had to kill somebody. And their answer to that was, well, your daddy's going to h***, and she loses it. And so we had a way to go get her.

Jon Becker: And that's when Ed slapped a nun.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah, well, we've never. Let's say we've never been back there. Yeah, yeah. And luckily, Father Lou Valone was around, a good friend of mine who rides motorcycles and is a priest. And it kind of explained that there's a big difference between thou shalt not commit murder and thou shalt not kill, and that God still loves daddy and everything.

But my wife's at work. She's got co-workers who she thought were her friends who aren't speaking to her because I killed somebody and I don't find out about this right away. They don't want me to have to deal with that. While I'm dealing with some of that, the kids at school are saying different things to my kids. The news stories. There's still reporters showing up, pounding on the door of the house, trying to get, you know, an interview and answer.

We also had some great reporters, you know, guys like Mike Clark, who called, went through channels, through the agency, went through, you know, my family to make sure everything was okay and to assure me that it was going to be respectful and, you know, we discussed what. What we were okay discussing.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ed Hinchey: And so there was some incredible reporting being done, but there was the other side of it, as well. Articles in the paper weren't correct. Everybody's racing to get the story out first rather than correctly. So we suffered through some bad reporting, but we also had some great stuff. Folks came out to the house and actually showed what we were going through. Medical devices on the floor, a restructured home, walkers port a potties. I had to live on the first floor of my house for months. My bedroom is upstairs.

Jon Becker: I imagine it's probably a challenge to try to remain positive and try to focus on the good things that are happening when there is this negative stuff that's going on, you know, the Sunday school and the reporters and, like, how did you manage that? How did you keep yourself focused on surviving and getting healthy and not allow yourself to get mired down?

Ed Hinchey: My wife, Tammy, she sat next to me every moment she could and would not tolerate me being down. Just wouldn't put up with it, you know, and she'd say, you're alive. We love you. We have the best kids there are. What else do you want? Focus. Get focused. Look what you have. You know, and I'm, you know, I'm worried, I'm not going to be the man I was. I don't know if my leg is going to come back. I've got rehabilitation folks telling me I'll never walk correctly again, let alone be able to go back on the job.

And in the end, part of that was. Right? I was not able to go back to work. I was medically retired. I couldn't pass the independent medical exam. I could pass the physical agility test, but I couldn't pass the independent medical exam.

Jon Becker: Blood flow issues.

Ed Hinchey: Right. I was device dependent. I had to use a lymphedema press to get the swelling down. Every day I wear compression stockings. They took me in. They done ascending venograms, trying to figure out what the mapping was inside there. Good times. That's really exciting stuff. That's where they plug the needle into your foot. They put you on an inversion board. They push all the fluid backwards and map it with chemicals.

Jon Becker: That sounds.

Ed Hinchey: That's exciting.

Jon Becker: This one, they actually give you a bite stick. Oh, yeah. Good times. And they don't talk about that part, you know, if you're watching the TV, The Hour TV show, he got shot. He's back, he's fine. Yeah, yeah.

Jon Becker: No, that's the part we miss all that stuff.

Ed Hinchey: No, we don't. We don't get the, you know, eight, eight season documentary of your life is now completely different, which is, again, I'm blessed, surrounded by all the right people, my wife leading the way. You know, from the time we came home, from the time we got to the hospital and she was allowed in the room the first time she took charge, you know, just, you know, she is. Her dad was a Pennsylvania state trooper, so she grew up in a law enforcement family.

I think that aspect of it played into it. You know, she came from a very strong, well structured. Her grandmother, the nurse, her mom. Everything along that way was, was solid. And so she just wasn't taking no for an answer. She's honey. She goes, if we have to move on. If we have to leave law enforcement behind, you're still at Hinchey. You're still going to get the job done. We will figure this out.

Jon Becker: So how far after the shooting did you make the decision that you were going to retire?

Ed Hinchey: Actually, it was like I said, it was a doctor they brought in, the independent medical examiner. They had me on the table. He's listening to me. He's working me through. And he said, sergeant, stay here for a minute.

So I'm there with the nurse. He goes back out and he came and he says, get dressed and meet me in my office. And he was actually a little bit upset with me. He says, I just spent the last 30 minutes looking for your femoral and saphenous veins, and I couldn't figure out where they were. He said, you don't have any. They ligated them out from below your aorta to your knee as well. The bullet helped that along.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they didn't ligate them. They stopped the bleeding.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah, they went below to where there was actually a structure and kind of tied down, to be fair.

Jon Becker: The suspect ligated, right?

Ed Hinchey: Yeah, yeah, instantaneously. First shot of the gunfight. What I found out later, again from Dr. Tishman, was good news, bad news. Had it hit the femoral artery? I don't make it. I flat out don't make it. Even with Brian's incredible work, I don't make it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, just that limit, that limited reduction in pressure was like your life literally hung in that battle.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah. And they X where the hit was. I mean, they were that close. A couple millimeters the other direction, it's lights out of the hit up here. If you look at the angle you work, the trajectory of the round to me, my aorta is on the other side of the hit. My armor flat out saved my life. Either one of these rounds hits my intestines, my lungs and my heart, and all they did was put leave a little burn on my chest behind it.

But back to the doctor explaining things to me. He explains that there's no way to put a new vein in that technology doesn't exist yet. The best they can do is make this leg compromised by cutting the saphenous vein in my ankle, fishing it out of this leg, fishing it across my groin, trying to reestablish it in this leg. And there's only about a 40% chance it'll take.

Jon Becker: And if it doesn't, then you've lost this.

Ed Hinchey: There's 100% chance I've now diminished function in this leg. So this is explained to me by the doctors, by the independent medical examiner. He said, if I'd have known, if I'd have seen in your file those veins were ligated out, we'd have never gone in there to look and begin your exam. He said, sergeant, your leg isn't going to work. And he said, you're going to retire out.

So they retired me out at the end of the year, about a year and a few months after it had happened. In the meantime, before I get retired out and before I go see this independent medical examiner, I get a phone call from armor holdings, what is now Safariland. A guy by the name of Steve Samek calls me. He runs a couple of their programs there. Incredible lieutenant from Pueblo, Colorado.

And he says, hey, we do a thing here with saves, and you're a save, and your story's kind of out there. We'd like to bring you down to South beach to the IACP conference so you can meet the folks that built your armor. And I'm like, I need to tell a whole lot of people. Thank you. And that was something that kind of dawned on me. Like, I knew the armor saved my life and kept me in the fight. I knew my training kept me in the fight and saved my life. I knew how to thank my trainers.

Brian Avery was in the hospital room, and that was the first person besides Brian and Chris that my wife wanted to speak to. And she wanted assurance that I'd done my job right because she knew I'd be a bear to live with if I hadn't.

So once she had that, she said she felt a lot better, that part of it, for me to go thank the folks that actually built my body armor was kind of the first time I realized there's more out there I need to go say thank you to, because I thanked the medical people. I thanked the nurses at the first hospital. I thanked everybody. Joe Klimko. I couldn't see the guy without giving him a hug. His voice on the radio carried the day. But now I knew there was a whole nother level to that.

There are a lot of people I'd never heard of that helped bring me home. And so I said, listen, I'd love to come do that. I said, the problem with that is my family has stood by my side for the last year and a half. I can't jump on a plane and come down to South beach and leave them back here in Pittsburgh. And Steve Simmons, this apparently I wasn't clear. We'd like to have you and your family come to South beach so you can meet the folks that built your armor. That was my introduction to the Saves club.

And so I went down. We did all that. There was another event shortly thereafter called November to remember. I got to go to and be the save and meet more people. These were people from Dupont and Honeywell, and they had built Tajon that built the material that was inside my armor. So going a whole nother layer beyond the folks that designed and built it. Here's the folks that created the material that they designed and built into armor.

And I knew about these folks from working with the NIJ on the limb walker part of it. And now it's all coming together. All the pieces are falling into place to make me understand the industry a little better. And at that point in time, I explained to John Gaucher and a couple guys that worked for us that, hey, it looks like they're going to retire me out. That second visit. I'm like, because they wanted me to come to shot show.

And John got a smile on his face. Rod Dornsife got a smile. They went off and had a talk. They came back and they said, if they retire you, when do you think it'll be? I said, end of the year. They said, great. If that happens, we'd like you to get on a plane to come to Florida. And sure enough, they created a position for me.

Steve Sammick was moving on. They needed somebody to pull a three different groupings of saves clubs because armor holdings was a holding group. We had an ABA camp. We had a second chance camp. They purchased second chance off the auction block after it went bankrupt. Because of what went on was Zilon and Eddie Limbacher's fest. You had Safariland. You had Bianchi.

There was a lot of different moving parts. And Scott O'Brien sat me down and said, I want you to pull it all together. You understand this. You are safe. You know what your family's been through. Cause we'd had these same kind of discussions one on one. Cause Scott was a hands on boss. We're blessed to have him. He's still with us. He's just moved up the chain a little tiny bit. And so he sat me down and he said, you know, the directive is this.

Once they become a save at Safariland, they should want for nothing. They should get their armor when they're ready for it, their replacement armor. They should get what support we can give them. If we make it and they need it, it's theirs. He said, I want them to know we care. And, you know, he said, you know, this is a together thing. This is. He says, nobody rents a chair at Safariland. You own a chair. He said, I want the people inside Safariland to know that's what they did. They saved a hero. And I want that hero to know they've got a family right behind them.

Everybody with a Safariland on their shirt is part of this. He said, whether it's the person that carried that role into the building and secured it behind a curtain, because now nothing's allowed to see UV radiation. If it's the person who cut it on the gerber, if it's the stitcher, if it's any of this, that's all part of it. Your job is to make it all come together.

And of course, being Scott, he said, if there's anything in your way, you don't work your way to me, you call me. And I said, yes, sir. And there was career number two.

Jon Becker: And that began your career with the saves program?

Ed Hinchey: It sure did. Yeah. And I couldn't ask for a better second career. I went from catching bad guys to taking care of the good guys. I'm blessed. I couldn't be in a better place.

Jon Becker: I love it. So, Ed, how long have you run the saves program at Safari?

Ed Hinchey: Over 16 years now.

Jon Becker: And in that time, how many saves has Safariland had in the last 16 years?

Ed Hinchey: Right now, we've announced 2128 officers saved in a line of duty.

Jon Becker: And how many of those 2100 do you think you've personally interacted with?

Ed Hinchey: I am saved, 941. I came in a few saves after me as they were kind of pulling the Saves club together. And in my time with Safariland, I have inducted over 1100 saves into the club. But all the guys who were still active duty that were saved prior to me, I got to interact with. I've worked with over 1000 officers shot in the line of duty.

Jon Becker: I don't know that there's anybody else maybe in the world that has interacted with as many officers shot in the line of duty you have. So what I would love to do is dig into the lessons learned.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely. And this is where the Safariland umbrella really gets some teeth in it. Most of the other groupings out there. And any save, I don't care whose brands on the front of your armor is a great save. If the armor helps bring you home. If the duty gear helps bring you home, the helmet, the shield, the plate helps bring you home and makes you a save regardless of brand, and keeps your name off the wall. In Judiciary Square in Washington, DC. It's a great day for law enforcement.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So let's say for the industry, too.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly. Let's get right out in front of that. But I'm blessed to have a position with Safariland who has two out of every three saves, so. And we were able to include duty gear. We've got an officer by the name of Janine Triolo who was beat to the ground on a snowbank on a side of a road by an assailant who was doing everything he could to kill her. He pulled a gun out that he just didn't know how to use. Tried to kill her with that. He used it to beat her. You know, he broke bones in her face. He put her on the ground, and then he grabbed her gun and tried to get it out to use it.

The holster was a retention holster. It was a Safariland holster. He could not get that gun out of the holster. He was literally lifting off the ground by it, and he couldn't get the gun out of the holster. Janine, absolute warrior, kicks him backwards. Her gum functions perfectly, even after the assault from….

Jon Becker: Because she knew.

Ed Hinchey: She knew how to use the retention and had been taught how to use a retention holster, and she was able to end that assailant. So she's here because of her gear. We've got plate saves. We've got, you know, Kevin Malone, who took a round in a helmet. Buddy Brown, that took a round in a helmet. We've got Dorian desantis. That was part of that navy yard shooting in Washington, DC, where his plate took a center punch.

Jon Becker: Sean Harris, who took a….

Ed Hinchey: Oh, gosh! Sean Harris down in Texas. The list goes on. Jared Reston, Katie Lawson, who won the Presidential medal of Valor. You know, I get to work with heroes. So again, I don't know who's watching over me up there, but I have the best job on the planet being a motor sergeant in Forest hills surrounded by the best group of guys on the planet.

And now I get Scott O'Brien tapping me on the shoulder, saying, there's a whole crew of heroes out there that need you. Go take care of them, groundhog. Yeah, and it's, you know, I've been to Australia to take care of saves. We've worked with guys in Portugal and Italy, and anywhere Safariland touches, there's most likely going to be a save.

Jon Becker: In the time that you've worked with these guys and girls. Let's walk through what you think from a surviving a shooting standpoint. What have you seen as a common pattern?

Ed Hinchey: Training would be absolute number one. And let's go back a step further than that. Selection process. You've got to have the right clay to mold into a professional police officer. So selection process, I truly believe that we're failing the communities, the nation a little bit at the moment today because we're looking for officers who are really nice and community oriented, and we need them. That should be part of every officer. That officer also may be called upon to have to visit incredible violence on somebody or take their life. They've got to be prepared for all of that.

Again, my son just graduated the academy. A huge percentage of his training is community oriented policing. It's, you know, how to apply the law fairly equally, and I'm a huge believer in all of that. But the preparedness for the physical side of this, again, when there becomes no choice, you've got to save somebody else's life or your own or your partner's.

You know, it's that civilian first you've got your community, you've got your partner, and then that priority of life becomes the person trying to end all that around you, and you give them every chance you can to survive. But sometimes it takes incredible violence to stop that threat.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting! I recently read a book called when violence is the answer and which we'll link to in the show notes. The whole premise of the book is, yeah, you should avoid violence whenever you can.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: But in those percentage of cases like yours, like Buddy Brown's, where the person is going to kill you, violence is the only answer.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: And being more violent more quickly than they are is the only way to win the fight. What do you think is wrong with our selection process? Are we trying to find you know, people that are really nice but not, not, I don't want to use the word hardened enough, but don't have that warrior ethos in them.

Ed Hinchey: I truly believe, and I've sat in through all type of selection process, they're trying to avoid that warrior ethos. They're staying away from the person who can flip the switch when they need to. They're more worried about civil liability if they have that guy on who may go the distance. And that's atrocious. It's atrocious to the community when someone calls 911. They need the true professional who has the whole playbook with them. And they may be calling, want 911 because their baby's choking. He needs to come in there and know how to provide the immediate treatment to save the child.

It's a great day for the family. It's a great day for the community. It's a great day for law enforcement. He needs to be the one that can console somebody when you have to knock on the door and say, hey, you're your child. That it was away at college, isn't coming home. You know, those are tough days. You have to be sympathetic to what information you're about to deliver. It's going to change their world forever. It may just be the lonely widow who calls because she hears something up back, but she's just that. She's a lonely widow. She wants to see a human, that's all.

You know, shovel the wok on your way up. Make sure she has groceries in the fridge. Check in with her. Put a little note on your notepad. If I'm going by, I see you're in the window, I'm gonna stop and say, hi, you gotta be that guy. But if the call is, hey, you know, we just had two victims run into a bar covered in blood. Her ex husband's gonna go try and kill her mom. You gotta be that guy, too.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Ed Hinchey: And, you know, where we're failing is we're not preparing the officer in the academy at that level to come out and be ready to flip a switch.

Jon Becker: I think it's an interesting theme. Like, you know, in a lot of the interviews that I've done, there is a recurring theme, and in my brain, it's that we. We've become too safe.

Ed Hinchey: Yes.

Jon Becker: We've become too comfortable. And we've moved so far up the Maslow triangle that we're starting to think, well, I mean, we don't really want to see policemen. We don't really want to think about violence. And the problem is that, yeah, violence is relatively rare in the United States, and really, truly sociopathic violence is extremely rare relative to other cultures, but it still happens.

Ed Hinchey: True.

Jon Becker: And when it does, the only solution is having people on the street to deal with that situation who have that capability. Doesn't mean we want psychopaths running around. It doesn't mean we want people that enjoy killing people.

Ed Hinchey: No, but there's no enjoyment.

Jon Becker: We do a disservice to the community and to the officer, because I'm sure in your career you've seen a lot of people who probably shouldn't be on the job that end up getting shot and it destroys them.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely. It's heartbreaking for me. And there's a failing again, begins with a selection process. Maybe this person should have never been placed out there. Number two, no one ever sat them down and explained to them, you may have to take a life. Do you assume that the person knows that when they're getting sworn in, you're a policeman, you've watched tv shows, you know what police work is.

But if you ever sat them down and explained to them, you may have to go home to your family and say, hey, I killed somebody tonight. Have they ever prepared the officer for the aftermath of a lethal incident? Is he gonna bottle it up and not discuss it? Is he gonna start to eat his lunch?

You know, there's for the saves that I've been blessed enough to work with, who came out of it strong and better, and paying it forward, and doing after action debriefs and showing, hey, here's a red flag I missed. Here's this. Let's not make. Let's make sure that doesn't happen to anybody going forward. Building the playbook better based on real life experience.

The ones that came out of it strong, they had great training, continual training, well above and beyond the mandatory minimum, you know, in service hours. These are guys that took time out of their own lives, money out of their own pocket often, and went to extra training. I literally, I took Brian Avery's training on my time. I worked shifts, drove to the raceway, went back and worked shifts. I knew how important that training was. I wanted to come home to my family. I knew bad things could happen, and I knew training would make me better when that event took place.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Recurring theme in my interviews is being a student of the game. Absolutely, it is. Being a student of the profession and understanding far beyond what you're going to get in the academy.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. Professor McIntyre up at IUP, who was a retired DC officer, one of the best guys I ever met, took a class from, referred to himself, and it always resonated with me as the eternal rookie. He said, I'm the eternal worker. I want to learn something every single day that makes me better.

Jon Becker: And the thing is, I think even apart from the profession, it's good life philosophy. Every year, I'll pick something up that I don't know how to do. It might be playing the piano, it might be a foreign language, it might be whatever. But it's like, take yourself out of your comfort zone, because especially in this line of work, being comfortable is a very dangerous place.

Ed Hinchey: It's stoicism. The obstacle is the way. Yeah, that's what it is.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting. I remember years ago, I was working on a demo, and we had LAPD's bomb squad there, and Sid Heal and I were rigging an explosive. And I looked over and all the LAPD bomb squad guys are behind their suburbans, said, stop. I said, why? Bomb squads hiding behind their cars? So walked over to Joe Powell at the. As a sergeant. I said, why are you hiding behind your car?

He goes, you guys are going to blow yourself up. And I said, why are we going to blow ourselves up? He goes, you are way too comfortable with explosives. He said, if you ever find yourself comfortable with something that can kill you, it's about to kill you. Oh, yeah, and those words, that was really early in my career, and those words stuck with me. And he said, the thing is, you have to remember. And then I had a firearms instructor that said the same thing. You have to remember the difference between an operational act and administrative act.

Putting together an explosive device is an administrative thing. It's not an operational thing. It's kind of like loading and unloading a gun.

Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah, right.

Jon Becker: It's an administrative act. You can take as long as you want, be as careful as you want. Reloading a gun, operational act, got to be a little faster, got to be a little looser. It feels to me that we are seeing a point in time where society is becoming too comfortable and the profession is becoming too comfortable.

And there's this tension between, well, we want you to be trained in these 25 different IT devices, and we want you to understand community oriented policing, all of which matters. But if we're gonna continue to add things, we need to expand the amount of time we take to prepare a police officer. And it feels like a mindset, and training has got to be part of that.

Ed Hinchey: Training is absolutely. Mindset comes from training. It's got to be there. And I think we're failing the officers out there with it right now. I think we need to do a better job. And as much as it's comfortable, they're becoming comfortable in their profession, I think they're also becoming a little too cautious in their approach to use of force. They're worried. It's actually, I've had saves who were shot in the line of duty, who didn't draw a gun because they were worried about civil liability, which is horrifying. Yeah, they are – They are – Someone is actively trying to kill them, and they would not.

Someone else had to come in and expose their lives and end it, rather than you have the moment, you have the ability, you have the sworn oath to do, and you chose not to because you were worried about the report afterwards.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, I don't want you to fire a gun until you are constitutionally permitted to do so. I don't want the government to use violence against people unless they have to. But I also don't want that thought to inhibit a police officer from protecting him or herself.

Ed Hinchey: And that is happening. And it's on a supervisory level, too. I've seen active shooters, hostage situations, or truly a non barricaded suspect who's waving a gun at police officers who were there. And an administrator says, somebody go get a beanbag shotgun or somebody get a taser. We're going to try that first. We have incidents, reported incidences in law enforcement where officers were killed trying to deploy less lethal force in a lethal force situation. California supervisory issue.

Jon Becker: California just amended the penal code to require that it's not only that the person has the ability to kill somebody, but that it's, it's imminent. So, you know, I've got a hostage. I come out on the porch, I tell you I'm going to kill him. I come out on the porch, you have a shot at me. You can't take that shot because I'm not imminently killing them like this is the thing. And I think that there is a recurring theme also in the interviews that I'm doing of we're not doing enough to educate the public about what actually has to happen in law enforcement.

Ed Hinchey: Right. And I think part of that is the public perception has been skewed. I can't tell you how often I watch an interview about an active shooting involving law enforcement. You've got an officer, they'll be reporting, three officers were shot in an incident. And the first thing asked of the public information officer who's reporting on how these, if they're going to live, if these officers are even going to live, is why did the officer stop the vehicle? The officer was just shot. May die. Your first question is why did he stop the vehicle? That was your concern. You're looking for the story. You want that next?

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's man bites dog. Right? Like, it's. This is, this is part of it is the problem with our news cycle where we have just, we are so driven by our evolutionary biology to look for, for negative news that, that that's what we consume. Right? We don't want to hear that.

You know, Officer Smith, you know, helped a kid, you know, helped a kitty out of a tree. We don't want to hear that. We want to hear that he shot the cat and that cat fell out of the tree because that's what our dopamine system wants to hear, so. Oh, that's really bad. Oh, I'll pay attention to that. I mean, you look at what happens on social media and we'll talk, you know, in a minute about, about the effect of social media on officers.

What if Ed Hinchey is the czar of the universe in law enforcement training and selection? What does that look like?

Ed Hinchey: I'm going to surround myself with a lot smarter people than me, and we're Going to start building…

Jon Becker: For either of us. Either of us. That's an easy thing to do.

Ed Hinchey: We're going to start building that playbook. But we take the lesson learned. We go back to the Ron McCarthy's, the people that have lived through a cycle like we're in now, and we find out, what did you find? Worked with interaction with the public. What did you find work with training. What did you find work. Because the circumstances haven't changed. It's the speed at which we're aware of them that has social media cameras at a scene from 80 different angles while you're trying to take somebody into custody. All that's changed. So perceptions have changed.

We are starting to pick up on the fact that this camera angle may show this and it may look bad, but this camera angle shows what the officer saw, which is a whole different, which we've just seen a couple guys cleared recently who were crucified in the media. And then when the entire story came out, we find out they had no other choice.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. Initially, I was not a fan of body worn cameras because I thought it was going to create a situation where, you know, everybody's going to second chat. You know, we're all going to. We're going to Monday morning court. Realistically, we're going to Monday morning quarterback. Anyways, let's at least have the game highlight film.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: And it does seem that the way that it is working now, more often than not, is, you know, people go, oh, you know, he wasn't armed and the police officer shot him and he was running away and it's like, no, that's him pointing a gun at the officer, you know, pulling the trigger and the round going over the officer's shoulder. Oh, yeah. So I agree with you. I think that there's benefit there.

Ed Hinchey: There's huge benefit. Yeah. And it's, you know, there's been studies done. There's a couple famous ones out there and we'll link to them, I hope, later, where public funding. Funding was given grant money to show that there is an unequal application of use of force in law enforcement today. And these studies were done by incredibly smart people who admitted, I truly thought I'd discover that, yes, in fact, there's racially motivated, there's worse stuff going on. And that's not what turned out.

The study showed, in fact, the exact opposite, which is great for us. And the body cameras support all that. So good cops have no problems recording good police work. That's what we do. We didn't have body cameras when I got shot, but we had car cameras.

And honestly, I think that made it easier for the shooter's family because they knew we did try and give every chance we could. And when they brought some lawyers in to see if there was going to be any civil side to it, they said, we might want to see this tape first. So my family didn't have to go through civil actions or anything else to defend my actions.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Or threats of criminal prosecution. I mean, this is kind of the new thing in a lot of bigger states is, you know, we're not only going to look at it civilly, we're going to look at it criminally. We're going to have a, you know, the LA County DA's office. That's become kind of a project for them too. We're no longer putting crooks in jail, but let's see how many cops we can put in jail.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: Because that's somehow going to help. But, you know, it's, you see this kind of movement towards that and, you know, what you see is an officer that's involved in a shooting and it's a year before the DA's office clears them.

Ed Hinchey: That's so criminal.

Jon Becker: These things are hanging over their heads, you got threats of civil. I mean, I honestly look at a lot of these situations go, I don't know why anybody would want to do.

Ed Hinchey: This anymore now, because we have people that we need who know doing the right thing for a living is an honorable career.

Jon Becker: Yeah, thank God. I mean, because it is becoming less and less a job where you're thanked and appreciated and more and more a job where you're under threat kind of constantly, you know, it almost drives a siege mentality.

Ed Hinchey: I look at my son, Conor, and I kind of knew this is the direction he was always going to go. But a lot of things happened between when he graduated high school, when he went to college and enlisted and served, a lot of media attention, the George Floyd stuff, everything that went on.

And he came to us and say, I'm going to get Air Force money now. I'm going to go to the academy. I'm like, sure about this? He got a big smile on his face. He's like, dad. He goes, yeah, I'll sure this. I was never more proud. I knew what he was going to do and he knew what he's going to do, and it's for all the right reasons. He's that guy. He's the guy you want at the end of the 911 line.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which that's the thing, is ultimately doing what I've done for 35 years, the number of those people that I've been exposed to, and a lot of the motivation for this podcast is there are amazing stories like yours that no one ever hears, right. That no one ever sees, that don't see the light of day. And it's just the more you dig into these things.

And honestly, my motivation every day is those are the guys I work for, right? Ultimately, my job is to protect those guys. I had somebody ask me, why do you do what you do? I said, I protect people who place themselves in harm's way for people they don't even know.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: Like you're willing to run into, you know, to a burning building or take on an assailant to protect your family. That's a different thing than doing it to protect somebody else's family.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: When you've never even met them and you may not even meet them afterwards, right? It is, you know, it's unfortunate how from your perspective, talk to me about armor and the relationship between the police officers in armor.

Ed Hinchey: It's interesting that even today, even after the Zylon debacle and everything that Eddie had to pay the price for, and then we've had the response. We have the NIJ having a much more vigorous standard to test to. I had a save last week. I called him for the first time, talked to him. He's home from the hospital.

Armor changes the game. If you're only hit on armor, your average stay in the hospital is 2 hours. You're home. You know, they go, they check you out. They make sure you're okay. You have what we call back, face signatures. So the round gets stopped on the armor. You've got kinetic energy turning heat. There's friction against your body that happens incredibly fast. You get – You're treated for a burn behind the armor. So nines, forties. In the hospital, you get to the higher calibers or shotguns hitting soft armor. You can crack ribs, you can collapse lungs. You can get that kind of thing. You've got the gyaradosite cases. You've got the Jason brown cases. So you've got some stuff out there that is a game changer. Yeah.

Jon Becker: All of which, I mean, I will take. I will take burn and broken ribs over shotgun slug through the chest.

Ed Hinchey: All day long.

Jon Becker: Yeah, all day long. That is a…

Ed Hinchey: You know, you're still coming home.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah.

Ed Hinchey: Okay.

Jon Becker: Maybe it's the next day.

Ed Hinchey: Right. I'll take that. But I called to save, and I said, hey, were you wearing level two or three a and his answer was the same as mine. When I first had to call the NIJ and look at Eddie's vest and answer what that label meant. He goes, I had what the department issued me. I have no idea what it is. I don't know what it is.

He goes, I will tell you, it was really comfortable. Turned out to be an SX02. He said, it's a really, really comfortable vest. I said, well, you're in our house performance vest. You're in a good place. I said, we're going to get you a brand new one. Do you like what you're wearing? He goes, I won't wear anything else. And that's another regular thing. I hear. I want the same vest back.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. That saved my life. That's what I want. He trusts it now, and so that part of it's. But the feedback we get, they're so incredibly honest. They are our best t and e group, because they'll tell you, hey, that vest saved my life.

But, man, this carrier rubbed me here. It was too high up. I know you may be trying to give me more coverage, but I couldn't move in that. I had to really tack it down. I had to change some things up. And we have an incredible, incredibly wonderful R&D department. Guys like David Pittman who, can you give him a call and say, hey, is there something new? Because. Absolutely. And sometimes it's a little sizing issue. The officer gained some weight. He's out of the academy now.

Jon Becker: He's eating McDonald's. It's fitting four days a week, twice as gym.

Ed Hinchey: You went from morning and evening pt to 8 hours in a patrol car with literally a bag of Wendy's next to you. And that's changed the game a little bit of then you find out that it's not really a carrier issue. It's actually a fit issue based on the officer's body composition has changed.

Jon Becker: It's one of the things that has always frustrated me, and I've had exactly the same experiences we've had people call holsters. What kind of gun do you have? It's black. I'm not sure. One of the things that has always frustrated me is that we as an industry have done a bad job of educating our consumers.

Consumer and law enforcement as an industry has done a terrible job of educating police officers about armor, about how it works, why it works. You know, you and I have done classes together for groups to kind of explain, like, this is how your armor works, and this is what happens, and this is why it happens, and this is why you need to care. Right?

And it's like, it's funny because you'll see guys that will spend 14, 16 hours picking out wheels for their car or which gym equipment they're going to buy or what cell phone they're going to buy. And then you ask them, what kind of arm are they going? That's kind of bluish.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And that's something they dawn every single time they go to work for a minimum 8 hours a day, it's going to be against your body. And it may be the one difference between you coming home and not coming home, and you give no thought to it whatsoever.

Jon Becker: And the thing is, you're also placing your safety into the hands of the industry. And there are certainly very reputable companies in the industry, like Safariland, who are doing the testing, who have fantastic ballistic engineers who really care about the end user.

Ed Hinchey: We have our own lab.

Jon Becker: There are also the opposite. And I think part of what I would love to see happen is at least give them the ability. The article that I wrote for ntoa was entitled caveat mtor. Right. Buyer beware.

Ed Hinchey: Exactly.

Jon Becker: And it's, you just realize, like, we've got to do a better job of educating cops in the academy. What it is, how it works, why you need to care.

Ed Hinchey: Behind the armor class that you helped me build originally, I'm showing some pictures of Todd Mackler, my boss, and, you know, he says, you need to sit down with Ron McCarthy. I said, I'll sit down with Ron McCarthy anytime. And I show Ron the pictures that I have from saves. And he said, are you teaching this to every person that you can show it to? And I said, not at the moment. He said, well, you failed, but let's get to work on it.

Jon Becker: I'm disappointed in you.

Ed Hinchey: You can redeem yourself, but let's get to work here. And I've had those moments. Oh, yeah. That's why you love Ron McCarthy, man. He put it right out there, man. And so we began to build the behind the armor class. And the first group I taught it to was actually a group of cadets at the Michigan State Police. And I taught it, and the cadre staff there stopped me, and they're like, you need to do it again.

To our cadre, I was like, okay, like, we've got something here. And so we did that. I've taught that class all over the world now, but I now also teach medics, doctors, guys that run with SWAT teams, because they've never seen the pictures. They may be incredible trauma surgeons, but unless they were also military, you're not going to get the gunshot wounds or if they work in Detroit or somewhere like that.

So I just worked with a group of doctors up at Massachusetts State police that run with their tactical teams to teach the behind the armor class. These are what the wounds look like. Yeah, this is. And these saves share it all with us. We're working with Dr. Cindy Burr, who's on a DOJ grant, to go ahead and study backface and what happens to the trauma on the body, because the only litmus test we have at this point was the group of goats during the Vietnam war that Neil Perkins, our founder, helped design to figure out what's an acceptable backface.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And, I mean, you know, it's interesting because, like, I've worked with numerous agencies, with competitors, armor, where they've come to us and they've said, we had a shooting and the vest failed. One in particular comes to mind where they said, the vest failed, the officer's badly injured, and we're going to sue him.

And I said, well, okay, can I see the vest? Like, what? Can you. Oh, yeah, you can come see the vest. Open the vest, said, okay, show me where it failed. Oh, you know, he's big, he's got a hole in his skin, and, you know, the bullet went through him. Okay, where's the bullet? Like, well, they didn't find it. It's. Okay. Well, is there an exit wound? No. Well, where do you think the bullet is? I mean, I know where the bullet is, but where do you think the bullet is?

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: We think it must have, like, gone through his skin and come back out the same hole. Or we're going to cut the carrier open and it's going to be in the carrier. And you owe this manufacturer an apology. It was not one of my favorite manufacturers, if I'm being honest. It was one of those like, oh, God, here we go. Right? But it's like, yeah, I think you need to send them a thank you card because the bullet's in. Like they didn't even understand and hadn't educated themselves, having had a shooting and a save, that it was a save.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker:

And it just feels like there's gotta be a better way for us to train people.

Ed Hinchey: There's gotta be. There's gotta be an industry wide educational push on armor. I would love to see that. Make them truly understand what its capabilities are. You know, we probably can't pick up a severe edge shot at an angle going towards the outward edge. If it's coming towards the inwards, you've got a little better chance. Does a perimeter stitch help or hurt? Let's take a look at the package itself. What's its composition? Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.

Again, those are things that go to guys like Frank Smith, Dave Pittman, guys that really are on the interior design of that package. Oh, gosh! On hard armor, he's genius. Absolutely positive. We get into it. We haven't even really touched hard armor. And what it's done to save one good shield, save can save five guys. You got a stack behind there, and it takes multiple hits. You've saved five guys with the technology in that shield we took.

In Raton, New Mexico, a twelve gauge shotgun hit from about five and a half feet away on a viewport. Our viewports are supported because guys like Mark Cardett decide they have to be. Does the NIJ test them that way? Do they look for that? No. Do we look for that internally?

Absolutely. And we brought guys home on that because we over. We built to not just what the minimum spec, minimum standard was. We built to address what could happen in the field. And a lot of information is what we've gleaned from saves prior. So we are paying it forward. Those saves have made us build better armor. And now that's what's saving the next guy.

Jon Becker: So let's talk about what happens after a shooting, the aftermath, and the effect on the officer that's been shot.

Ed Hinchey: And this is where I feel that I need to do a much better job. I'm actually in a position now where I know what happens. So many people are unprepared of what their family is about to go through. I truly didn't understand. Even though I'd been through it with Eddie Limbacher and his family, the light had never clicked on. Hey, I should prep my family in case that happens to me. That was a failing on my part.

So I'm doing everything I can right now to let folks know from the training part four. When you're doing the academy class, you need to sit that officer down and explain to him that you're not the only one going through this critical incident. Your family is going to get a knock on the door or a phone call.

And now they're going through the critical incident. They're going to leave your presence in the hospital and they're going to be in the hallways and the waiting rooms and they're going to hear people talk. They are going to go to their work. They're going to go to their schools. They're going to go to CCD, and they're going to hear things or be told things. They're going to force your family to question your actions. If your family asks you a question, you've got to give them an honest answer.

You know, when my little girl looked up at me and I mean, again, eight years old, old soul, eight years old. And she says, daddy, what happened to the other guy? And I've got to tell her I killed him, you know, that's, that's one of those moments. It's pivotal and it's got to be handled right, but it doesn't, it's not over. You don't close the chapter, wake up the next day and everything's back to normal. It is an ongoing process. And you watch the evolution of your children because you've changed that evolution. You've redirected it because you chose this as a career. And this was the outcome of a critical incident.

So they truly, I think they've, the ones I see survive it really well, were prepared beforehand. They knew it could happen. They had trained as hard as they could to handle it professionally and they had talked to their families about, you know what I do for a living. We may have to have a hard talk one day because I'm going to come home from work and I – Things went truly critical, went fatally critical.

Jon Becker: Well, it strikes me, too, that one recurring theme is social media and community reaction.

Ed Hinchey: Social media is truly the viper in the room for law enforcement. You can have the best trainers in the world tell you you did the absolute best job on the planet. You go home and you open up that social media feed and you start looking at the comments and you find strangers, usually absolute lumps in the basement of their mother's houses, firing off. I wish he would have died. We could have gotten rid of another one.

Why is this monster still in our community? How is he not in jail? And you're laying there with a wound vac in your body, hoping you'll be able to walk again. And now you've got people wishing you dead, wishing your family ill, threatening, threatening your families, you know, your family having to be protected as they get driven back and forth to the hospital. Social media is an absolute viper. It can ruin your psyche if you let it.

Jon Becker: Well, we were, you know, you and I were with save last night, and that was the big comment was, you know, I made the mistake of going in and looking at social media. You know, all I could see was, you know, oh, he should have died.

Ed Hinchey: Yeah, we had one of those heroes and absolute heroes. The incident is known. They did everything they could have done, and yet, and they sacrificed their bodies and almost died. And what's eating their lunch? The one young hero said, he goes, I'll scroll through 100 comments going, great job. Prayers are with you, officer. You know, thank you for being there for us. And I get to the one comment with, I hope you're dead and I'm not going to sleep the rest of the night.

Now, you know, that's, that's atrocious. It's a failing in our society. It's a failing to give social media that much credit. And we've got to be better. We've got to understand that's not the litmus test of did we do the job right or wrong?

Jon Becker: Well, and I think, I think it's, it is one of those things where when you have this kind of an event, you need to stay away from it.

Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Resist the siren's call to go and see how everybody, you know, because a thousand people saying, hey, this is great, is not going to offset the one guy that says, I hope he died.

Ed Hinchey: Right, right. Cause your, your blood, just cause you know what you've been through, you realize you are mortal. The mortality is there. It's. You're conscious of it now. You may have been, you know, hey, I'm out there. I'm a warrior. I'm going to get this all done. I know I'm coming home. But all of a sudden, it's mortal. And you realize somebody else could be tucking in your family.

Jon Becker: And that's how all of a sudden, that resonates that quarter inch that it misses the femoral artery with is what separates you from.

Ed Hinchey: Thank goodness I had my armor. You're 14 times more likely to survive a critical event if you're wearing your armor. And yet I'll see officers out there with no armor on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I think that that bears repeating. If you are wearing body armor.

Ed Hinchey: Right.

Jon Becker: You are 14 times more likely to survive.

Ed Hinchey: Right. And that's. That's not just your. Your assailant deciding he's gonna end your life with a gun. That's the DUI crossing the centerline. We just lost two Pennsylvania state troopers who were helping an individual in a car by a DUI running them over on the street. You know, you're 14 times more likely to survive that DUI. Cross on a centerline, hitting your patrol vehicle. If you've got your armor on, it doesn't have to be a shooting. You know, most of the ones we count and look at and compute are.

Jon Becker: So talk to me about the actual shooting and what you have seen from a pattern of who survives a gunfight.

Ed Hinchey: Again, as we discussed earlier, I've gotten to work so many of these cases. I actually have gone in on cases where officers took hits on the armor but also off the armor and didn't survive. And I've looked at that offer armor to see what it did. Right. And, you know, had he only taken the hit on the armor, the officer lives.

So it's more than just our saves. You know, it's officers that have made the ultimate sacrifice and their duty gear or their armor still played a part in that. The Boston terrorist bombing from the marathon, the officer at the MIT who was on the perimeter protecting students and was executed so they could get to his gun, they couldn't figure out how to get the gun out of the holster.

So even though that officer made the ultimate sacrifice to protect his community and the students in the school, the absolute, ultimate sacrifice, the holster stayed in the fight, and they weren't able to use it to visit more violence upon the community. You take a look at all those sides of things, and it goes back to training, selection, making sure the officer has the right gear when it's there.

And mindset the officers who truly come out of it solid and better even are the officers who check all the boxes. Their selection process was they were the right guy to begin with, the right female officer to begin with, the right individual. They then were given the training that they needed above and beyond minimum compliance standards. They were given a selection of the exactly the right gears they could perform optimally in every role they needed. Run fast, climb fences, perform CPR, sit in a car, direct traffic, you name it.

But that's the same gear that picks up a twelve gauge 1 oz slot shotgun slug to the chest and that officer continues to stay in the fight. And I think that's where we really, really need to look at it, is there is no time out in a critical incident. Unfortunately, we're seeing some of the selection process fail us or training fail us. And officers get shot and they don't take an action from that point forward.

Jon Becker: So they just get shot and fall down.

Ed Hinchey: They're basically calling a timeout and that's not how it works. Those are some of the officers we lose. They don't engage to survive the critical incident. You've got to have the mindset beforehand. And when, when somebody tries to take my life or the life of somebody I'm sworn to protect, I'm going to flip the switch, I'm going to visit the violence that's necessary upon them to end the threat.

You've got to have that mind. You have to have thought about it before the incident or you're not going to have it when you need it. It's got to be in your toolbox. You've got to survive the incident, but you've also got to survive afterwards, the aftermath of the incident. You've got to stay off social media, you've got to get the help. You've got to talk to your officers, your team, your trainers, because you need to know in your heart and mind that you did everything you could not to have to take a life.

But once you have that, you did it by the book. And you need to hear that from people you respect and people that have the knowledge to tell you, yes, you did the right thing and you could have done nothing else. And that has to also be shared with your family. So it's not really just about surviving the critical incident itself. That's primary, but you've got to survive after the incident as well. You've got to be prepared for the aftermath.

Jon Becker: I can't think of a better place to end than that. Ed, thank you so much for doing this with me. I really appreciate everything!

Ed Hinchey: Jon, I can't thank you enough for having us here, giving us a platform to get this out there!

Jon Becker: Thanks!

Episode 22 – Lessons Learned From A Legendary Tier 1 Operator – CSM Tom Satterly (Ret.)

Jon Becker: My guest today is Tom Satterly. Tom is a highly decorated combat veteran having served in the army for 25 years with the last 20 spent in the US Army's most elite tier one unit, Delta Force. During his career, Tom was involved in and led some of our nation's most important military campaigns, including the battle for Mogadishu portrayed in the film Black Hawk down, the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Tom is the recipient of numerous medals, including a silver star and four bronze stars, one for valorous axe. He was also the first American to ever attend Germany's ranger school. Tom retired from Delta in 2010 as a command sergeant major.

Tom's willingness to speak openly and honestly about his mental and emotional struggles have saved the lives of countless other warriors who believed they had to suffer in silence or make it alone or not at all.

Today, Tom and his wife and partner Jen are the co-founders and co-CEOs of the All Secure Foundation, a nonprofit organization serving special operation warriors and their families to help reconnect and to heal.

Tom's best selling book, All Secure, is available at all major bookstores. I'm excited to have Tom on the debrief, not only because of his extensive leadership experience in one of the world's most elite units, but for the amazing work he has done since leaving Delta.

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!

Tom, thanks so much for joining me today on The Debrief! It's great to have you!

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, thanks, Jon! I appreciate you having me on!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start just for those that are not that familiar with a quick Satterly bio so that everybody kind of is brought up to speed with who you are.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I think I hate to date myself. Back in 85, I graduated high school and it was a John Cougar moment. A friend of mine had just got out of basic training from the army and he was on his way to Germany and he was telling me all about it on the way up to this concerte.

By the time I got up to that concert, about an hour and a half drive, I decided to join the military just to get college money. Yeah, I'll go for four years and get out. And ended up going to Germany, was there for three years and had one more year to get out.

But during those three years, I went to french commando school, german ranger school, tuned confidence training, and the swiss march. It was like 40 miles a day for five days. And it just felt good. It felt different, you know, and it felt more than just motor pool Mondays, where you sit in the motor pool and you do s*** and you're never gonna go anywhere. You're never gonna do anything, and you know it. You're in the regular army, you train a little bit.

But once I got a little taste of more of a special operations environment, I guess I just wanted more. And a friend of mine used to showed me a picture of him as a baby, and his dad's holding him in his arm, wearing his dad's green beret. And I kind of adopted that dream right then and said, that's what I want to do, you know. So I kind of enlisted. Re-enrolled for jump school.

So I get to Fort Bragg, get a green Beret, you know. And as soon as I got to Fort Bragg, I started hunting down the green Beret recruiter. But come to find out about two years ago that that was a stolen valor picture. His dad really wasn't SF, so, you know, my career started out with a stolen valor moment, which was fine. I took that valorous moment, made it my own, and then I went to become a green beret.

And then when I was in language school, I got approached by a couple of guys that were in the unit, you know, and they're like, hey, we saw you in the cue Corps. I think you have what it takes. You should go try this out. I'm like, okay, sounds cool. So I put in first selection date and got accepted and made that in 91. And I stayed there for 20 years.

Jon Becker: Through 20 of the most probably tumultuous years in special operations. And if you're going to pick 20 years, 91 to 11 would probably be the 20 busiest years in special operations history.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, it was a fun time, I'll tell you. It was, you know, after a year and a half, you know, thrust right into Somalia as my first combat, you know, engagement. That was. I remember thinking, holy s***, that's not any idea what I thought this would be. You know? I mean, you don't think about it, right? You train and you. You're the heroes and you're the winners, and you're the good guys. But when your friends start dying, you realize, oh, okay, this s*** goes two different ways. It comes back at you, too.

Jon Becker: Well, and, like, why don't we put context on Somalia? Because I think there were a lot of things that happened in Somalia that were bad. The operation you were involved in was so historic, and, for lack of a better term, so rough that we made a movie called Black Hawk down about it. Why don't you give us kind of a quick thumbnail sketch?

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, that was a quick day of a time sensitive target where a guy on the ground had done the signal, you know, of, hey, the guys are here. We're looking for some people on the ground. And he had done what he was supposed to do, pull up with his car, open the hood, shut the hood, and drive away. And that tells us, oh, he's there, and it's this house, you know, the guy did the wrong house. They're all idiots. But still, we figured it out.

So we loaded up while the team leaders were getting a quick debrief, we all loaded up, you know, after the pagers went off and sit on our helicopters and wait for the team leader to come up and scream at you with a piece of paper pointing, and you're just nodding your head going, sure, I got it. But you don't know what the h*** you're doing, right? I mean, you can't hear him.

The helicopters are cranked up, and he's screaming and pointing, and you're like, whatever, we'll do that. Infiltrated and realized immediately we're already under fire. You know, it was in the heart of the beast. It was in the Bakar market. So that's where all their weapons were and just bad guy territory, of course. We thought, in and out, right? In and out before they even know we're there.

And, you know, you shoot one helicopter down, and then they shot another helicopter down. And I remember watching it fly overhead off to the northeast and then crashing. And I knew that's when I knew during that mission that it had changed. It was going to be a lot longer. You know, up to that point, I was still joking about, we're going to make a home for dinner. I wonder what they're going to have for dinner tonight, you know, and we're still kind of cracking jokes like we did.

And then people started getting shot, and five ton trucks started blowing up, and helicopters were shot down, and we had to fight our way up the street to the crash site, and then basically were pinned down to that crash site for 18 hours. It was like the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam at the time. And it may still be. I don't know.

But it was the night that I watched friends die. I thought I was going to die. I kind of gave in. We ran out of ammo, and my team leader came in, and I asked him a question, because you could hear the convoy trying to make it to us, but had been going on for hours, just hours of raging gunfight going off in the city as they tried to fight their way to us. There's a gunfight at our house as they pick our house apart with rocket propelled grenades and, you know, AK-47 fire.

But thank God we had the little birds to keep them at bay. And we were kind of, in the Alamo situation, the best we could be at that crash site, but they just kept picking us apart. And when my team leader came in, I asked him, do you think they're going to make it? And he looked at me, and I was, like, waiting for that motivational speech, you know, like, hey, you know, f*** up young camper. And he just looked at me, goes, I don't know. And he turned to left, and I thought, well, s***, you know, s***, this sucks.

And I kind of, at that moment, like a calm, you know, washed over me versus the harried, like, what's going on? What's going on? And looking everywhere. And it was kind of like, here we are. Right? Here we are. I'm going to break as much s*** as I can tonight, kill as many people as I can, and help as many of my guys as I can, because I didn't figure I was going to make it. And it just kind of gave me that courage and strength to keep going.

And then when we got back the next morning, that run out, I'll tell you the run out. When the two vehicles finally showed up, maybe at dawn, right before dawn, and they hooked up chains and pulled the helicopter frame off of the pilots that were stuck underneath, which is why we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't leave and then fought our way back. You know, we put all the dead on top. We put all the wounded inside those vehicles.

And then when I went to get in and pull the door shut, it was like, there's no room inside, you know? And it's like, all right, we hashed out a new plan. We'll run alongside the vehicles. They'll use this cover, and we'll work our way that mile back to where everyone else was. And as soon as the first shots fired again, they took off. Those vehicles just took off. We're sitting there like, all right, new plan, we're just going to run back, you know, so we just ended up fighting our way back until we ran into the tanks and Bradleys and Humvees that we climbed into and made our way back.

And when I pulled back into the two Humvees I was in got lost. I went the wrong way. Everybody else went to the Pakistani stadium. Our two Humvees got lost. And I didn't find that out until about three years ago when I made a post and somebody wrote back, that's my vehicle from the 10th mountain. And I'm like, hey, what happened, man? And he told me, we got lost. All right, good enough, you know, good enough. Now I know 30 years later that we got lost, but we made it to the back gate of the airfield. I waited a little bit. Nobody else came. I'm like, well, s***, let's drive all the way around to where our hangar was.

And when I did, I noticed, like, twelve bodies laying on the street, covered in poncho liners and whatnot. And I started looking. I could see the boots, and you see desert boots, then you see black Adidas boots and then some more deserts and more black Adidas. And I knew ours were the black Adidas. And that was the first hint that I had of how bad the night was, how really bad it was, how many lives we had lost, you know?

And then I just went inside and started rearming and cleaning up, charging my radios and getting ready to go back out. And then everybody started flying back in from the Pakistani stadium. And then we started getting word that Gary and Randy were missing. There were live people out there missing. And it just anger. Anger washes over you. Everybody packed up, rearmed, and got ready to go back out, and they just wouldn't let us do it. They wouldn't let us go back out. I think they knew, like, don't let them out. Don't let these angry people out. It'll be bad.

And then I, but I think they also knew that we were decimated. We just didn't realize it. That had never happened to us. We were just angry and probably wanting to go back out. But they had decided they're going to bring another squadron over and replace us. And all we got to do after that day was train with the other squadron, show them what we knew, talked about what we knew before we packed up and left. We had. I think I'll screw these numbers up. I know it was 19 Kia, and I want to say 98, probably wounded.

Out of all of us being a little over 100, you know, I'll screw those numbers up this much later, but there's very, very few left that were unscathed. But a lot of the walking wounded made it out and then finally evac back to the rear. And it was kind of more of a decimation than I realized up front how many people were injured and couldn't go back out.

Jon Becker: That was a pretty violent way to start your career at Delta, too, wasn't it?

CSM Tom Satterly: My first trip was to Jackson hole, Wyoming, skiing. I was like, this is the life, man. I've never been skiing before. Paid by the government. And then you go out and crawl over a mountain at two in the morning, make it all worth it, and sleep overnight in a snow cave. But, you know, the skiing was fun. I thought, this is a pretty cool place to be, you know?

And then I went, did a trip down south and early 93, and then, boom, Somalia pops up. You know, we rehearsed for Somalia before they called us up to go in August, I think. And I remember. I remember landing on the ground, like, ready to roll as a kid. I was a kid, you know, and I remember how hot it was. Just how hot. And then the rainy season kicked in, and then, you know, your hanger's full of holes, right?

So it's just raining on you all the time. And then you're on the ocean, you're like, well, let's go swimming. And then some tigers eat a couple of 10th mountain guys. You're like, all right, no more swimming. You know? So everything that you can do, they kind of take away from you over there. This is a horrible place to be.

Jon Becker: Does it? How did Somalia – So at that point, you're young in your army career. How did that inform your leadership later as you got older and got responsibility, how did that impact you?

CSM Tom Satterly: I relied upon that a lot, and I screwed that up, too. It had been such a long time. 20 years before I'm back, and now I'm in charge, and I'm calling Black Hawk down, and I'm like, we don't have enough water. I did it again. It was one of those things that we learned so much. Then we rewrote how we do mount training and urban warfare. I think the whole military changed how they did it. And I had one of those feelings like, this will never happen again. We're just going to keep training until this never happens again. I just put my head down, and for the next 30, 20 years was like, this will never happen again. Just keep training, keep training, keep training.

And it kind of drove my leadership into the arena of, I know what the most horrible things are, and that's what we need to prepare for because we're so highly trained that we don't need to keep being so highly trained. We need to maintain that. But the things we had never done. The downed Hilo, the occupying of a four way intersection properly, was a small element. We don't operate in large elements. Understanding that that was not our real mission. Our real mission is in and out in small elements, you know, and.

And then fast forwarding to 20 years of war in the Middle east again, and we're doing the same things. We start doing the same things again because we've lost a lot of knowledge. So I started instilling a little bit of that back into our people as much as I could. Like, hey, we can't have our helicopters hovering over the target. It tells everybody where you're at, and then they get shot down.

Then you have another issue. So that started to repeat itself, you know, and what caught me was that mission we went on where I said I had to call Black Hawk down over the radio. Cause right up on infill, a helicopter got hit with an RPG and had to do a hard landing, like about 150 meters away in a field.

So I had to send all the rangers over to protect that and surround that crash site while our guys were taken down. The target, which was, by the way, not a wedding party, as they told us, was a weapons training area. So they had all their weapons ready to go, and they were training and just Starburst everywhere. So that night ended up being ac 130 gunships. I mean, just everything went wrong that night. Nobody. Nobody killed one person injured that night with a suicide vest in our house. But other than that, man, we found a huge cachet in the carport of 155 rounds, setting up huge IED. So once we left, we blew that house up.

But that was another all nighter that wasn't as violent. And it kind of gave me that feeling that maybe we handled it better this time, you know? But it wasn't an urban area as much as Somalia was. It was still a little bit of an open area where we had some advantage. Plus, we had our night vision. You know, we had everything we were supposed to take with us.

So I tried to instill that along the way of people like, don't think that your plan will be executed the way you think it'll be executed. Right? You bring everything that you think you might need to stay overnight, 24 hours at a minimum, no matter where you go. Instead of cutting out things like, well, we'll back in there. I don't need a lot of extra water. It's a daytime. I don't need my nods. You know, all the things that we did back then that the newer guys were starting to think of again, like, let's lighten our load. I'm like, hmm, no, why don't you go work out and carry that load, right? Do extra workout with that load in your back, because you need that s***, you know?

And when you need it, it's better to have it, right? So that's kind of what I went with Washington was that deep thinking of beyond our training, beyond the plan, when it all goes to s***, that's what we need to worry about.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting! In your book, one of the things that really stuck me was you described the second event and the helicopter going down and calling Black Hawk down. And it instantly struck me that the contrast of now being in a leadership position and having what appears to be the beginning of a very similar event, it starts in a very similar way. Had to be kind of a profound emotional event for you, where it was like, oh, God, now it's going to happen. On my watch!

CSM Tom Satterly: I was. And when I get emotional or when I get scared or when I feel shameful or when my wife calls me out on something, I get Madden. I go straight to rage. I used to. I used to, I don't. Now I just get mad like normal people. But I would go, because I was living at a seven, right? Most people live at one or two. I was. I was living at a seven. That was my normal day. So when you made me mad, I go to ten right away. It's not very far to ten, you know, or eleven even. I go all the way to eleven.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

CSM Tom Satterly: And it was one of those. I had to break that process of the rage that came up. And that night when that happened again, and it came over me, my boss was a new officer, and he was like, on the roof. And I was telling him, we need to do this, we need to do that. And he was kind of timid about putting it in because it was one of his first hits, you know, that was like that.

And he kept telling me, hey, the command wants us to go chase these squirters. And I'd tell him no, and I'd go about doing more business, say, hey, hey, they kept hitting me up again. They really want us to send a team after those squirters. I go tell them no, you know, and I'm over there doing my job again.

He goes, hey Tom grabs me, and he goes, listen, we're on the roof of this building. He's like, they really want us to either take a helicopter, fly over with a team, and chase the squirters that ran into this house about, you know, half a mile away by now. And I looked at him. I go, let me show you how to do this. And I grabbed the radio from him, and I got on there, and I called back to headquarters, and I said, we've got a downed hilo. I've got rangers surrounding it. I've got my assaulters scattered about this target area, trying to figure out we're still under fire, we're still chasing people. We're not chasing squirters out. And I threw it back at them and go, that's how you f****** do it, you know?

And I turn around so freaked out and so mad that I. Since then, I've learned to operate. I was operating out of fear back then, right? Since then, I've learned to operate out of love and get the same thing done, but on target, there's no time to mess around. And I was just overwhelmed with those emotions from Somalia and being in charge and thinking, this can't happen. I can't let this develop into this.

So they were trying to make us still go and do things while I'm trying to secure something now, right? I just couldn't. I couldn't do it. And I'm glad I didn't separate our men more, you know, I'm glad I did, because I already had a guy missing, and he was out there in the field, just messed up on ambience.

So once I found him in, then I could use the ac 130 to suppress the site. So that moment of Somalia, I was just a kid breaking s***, you know, and shooting people, and it was just me two. You're in charge of all these people was a great difference. And it was worse to be in charge, even though you might not be in as much danger entering the door first, you know?

Jon Becker: But I think it's – You raise an interesting point, and maybe it is a lesson that we learn out of trauma and pain and mistakes, but as a leader, we've got to have moral courage. We have to have a willingness to stand up even to those above you when there is peril.

And I think that one of the things that came through to me in reading that story was that you had come to this point where it's like, I have responsibility for these guys and I'm willing to put myself, you know, I'll call it in political harm's way to make sure that we're not going to repeat the mistakes of the past.

CSM Tom Satterly: I just, I felt it was my job. That's what I get paid to do. That's what my men expect me to do. I think they might have been using the timidity of the new commander, or they're sitting back in the back and they got an overall picture at the top and they think they know what's going on, but they don't know what's going on under the trees, in the building, and running around as much as we do on the ground.

My point to him was, you're the ground commander. You're number one. You make the decisions. You deal with it in the rear when you get back. Don't let them bark in your ear about, go do this, go do that. I mean, they're sitting in the backseat driving right now.

You know, they can shut up, put some socks in the kids mouths, let's go get this target secure. Then we can call them up and tell them what's going on and ask them what else they want us to do. But they don't drive the target from afar. And that's what I was trying to teach.

Jon Becker: I think it's easy if you are not managing up, right, if you are not as the ground commander, if you're not delivering ground truth to those above you, it's very easy for them to go, oh, well, let's go do this, and let's go do that. And I think that one of the things that came through to me in the book was that kind of realization, probably born from the fires of Somalia, that in the end, the ground truth is really the only one that matters, because that is where the guys are in contact.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. Cause the same thing happened in Somalia. They were passing information from above. They were trying to drive the convoy, but by the time they radioed down, it was too late. The delay and the radios turn right and they missed that and then turned right at the next one. Now they're lost again, and they had to keep doing it, trying to guide them to where instead of just telling them where to go and letting them navigate there. They were trying to help them through the burning tires and the roadblocks, but the system wasn't in place, so they were trying to drive it from the top down. And it just made it very difficult on the ground.

Jon Becker: When you raised one other point, kind of in passing. But in the 20 years that you're in the unit, are certainly 20 of the most tumultuous years in American military history. And I think that you were on the front end of the great American experiment of how hard can we drive our special operations forces and not kill them? How many times can we deploy them? How many times can we. How much can we feed them Ambien and energy drinks and see if they go psychotic?

And I think one of your lasting contributions, not only from the book, but the work that you've done since, is this realization that we were doing it wrong. I look at how many of our best and brightest, right? The assumption is that the guys that are in the unit, the guys that are in DEVGRU, the guys that are in our SOF units, are the best and brightest our country has.

And I think the lasting consequence of the war on terror is that we ground up hundreds of our best and brightest through, you know, overworking them in attention imbalance and everything else. I would love to hear kind of your thoughts, you know, as. As the canary in the coal mine, Tom, I would love to kind of hear your thoughts on our approach to that.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think our leadership has found out that it's cheaper and faster to send special operations in repeatedly and then pull them out, versus sending a large organization and that they've never really trained well. You zero your weapon once a year. You work on your vehicles. Tankers do their tanker s***. I get it. You know, they've just. We used to call it 1% does 99% of the work. We just keep deploying over and over again.

And it got so bad that they added another unit to every special operations organization. We're going to add another SF company, we're going to add another ranger. Whatever company. We're going to add another squadron over here to the organization. Probably added another SEAL team group. It's one of those. We'll make four instead of three of everything. Change the whole cycle. Guys will get an extra 90 days off. Never happened. What it did was allow them to deploy to two different locations with two different elements while one was on alert and while one was training to go again.

So you're still training all the time. That whole bullshit about, oh, there's an extra squad or an extra element, you can get an extra whatever off. Never happened. Leaders just took that because, honestly, again, we're humans. And leaders chase promotions. Leaders chase. You know, it's their job. They want to show off. Right? It's where we show everybody what we can do and how we impress people.

So the leaders want everyone to do other jobs that aren't their legacy tasks, like hostage rescue or taking out foreign leaders. And now we're out running around chasing everybody. The Rangers are running out chasing everybody. The SF guys running around chasing everybody. They all got out of the legacy tasks until near the end of the war, when I think General Sokolik started pushing everybody back to your legacy tasks. We need that. We brought these people up for a reason. SF, you're nation builders, right? You shouldn't be running around killing people all the time. It's time to start training and building the nation. Rangers, you know, you're designed to do this. Oregon Delta, you're designed to do this.

So pulling people back, there was a start of that. I don't know how far it got. Didn't get too far. Special ops organizations are still doing the 99% of the work around the world in places we don't even know about. It's never ending. And they abuse. I say abuse, but it's abuse on the body. They abuse the operators. I know in the unit we were never fully manned. It might be now, but I doubt it. We're never up to our full tone. It's always just a six man team.

Well, I've had four, you know, so we're always short anyway. And you're barring people from here and here. So this guy might be off around training. Okay, we need four. Horse of hands go up. You know, you have four guys now. Now there's four wives with no husband again for another 90 days. And it's such a high competitive place that no one's going to back down.

I mean, I'm talking to my friends now, some people that are still in the organization, I get some help. When you're healthier, you'll be a better warrior. It's not like, you know, and it's not like you're going to hide behind a car and say, please don't shoot at me when you go get help, right? And you deal with this stuff where you get a stellit shot which turns down your fight flight or free, so you're not an a****** at home.

And they're like, well, when I go back, I want to be aggressive. I go, oh, you'll be straight aggressive, right? This just calms you down while you're here. But it takes these guys. It took me a good. I've been working on it for a good ten years now to get past that a****** phase that I'm in the military still phase, you know, where you talk like a pirate when you want to be mean and angry, but I – You got to give up your past or it develops you and destroys you, especially when it's a past like this. Because the things that we had to do were not natural.

Those aren't natural things to do, and it affects everybody. I don't care who you are. I don't care the story you try to tell me, it will affect you, the s*** that we've done, and it will take you a long time to get back to feeling good.

Jon Becker: Do you think it's possible to do that job and not be that way? Is it possible to have that balance now retrospectively? Is it possible to do, you know, to be in the unit, to be in one of these units and have a normal balance? Or is it just going to be an unbalanced state for the whole time you're there?

CSM Tom Satterly: I think it's an unbalanced state while you're there. But I think if leadership took an active role in making you do things right, they don't want to make you do that. It's an extra thing for them. It costs more for them, you know, on up. But I think if we came back as a squadron, they made us go and have two sessions with a counselor that was really had our interests at heart, and you weren't going to get fired, and you weren't going to have somebody say, well, this dude's crazy. Because we're all crazy, right? We're all crazy. That's who they pick, crazy people.

But if you come back and you have a class on, this is how it affects you, here are some tools to work on it. When you go home, you're going to be angry with your spouse, you're going to scream at your kids, you're going to get mad about everything, and you don't want to. You're going to have that Homer Simpson syndrome where all this s***'s going on in your head and you're going to say it, don't say it, don't say it. And you say it because you just can't help it because we've been inbred to win everything we do, so everything we take on, like dishes in the sink, I'm going to win that argument. I don't care if you're 16 or 15 and you got all these excuses.

To me that's bullshit. Back in the day, that would be bullshit, and I don't want to hear it. There were no excuses because my mind was operating under the aspect that if it's chaotic, you could die. So it takes over, you get hijacked and you start behaving like everything needs done right now, or we're going to die. To include the ditches in the sink.

So I had to get past the fact that I was programmed to be that way. I've been given awards and rewarded for being violent. It got me through all the h*** on earth I'd been through, you know, hate and anger and just lack of love for mankind. But it's time to let all that go because I no longer need it to keep me alive, right? I don't need to act that way anymore.

And I think a lot of it is guys can't let go. It's your identity, it's who you are. It's the last best thing you did, right? Some people talk about college all the time. You see them flying their college flags. They're like 55 flying a college flag, wearing their college shirt and going to the college games all the time and having college parties.

And I'm like, is that the last great thing you did? You didn't do anything since college or that last high school touchdown pass you through. That's your story for life. Move on, make something else happen. Just like the same guys at the organization or any special ops unit, when you get out, no one gives a s*** what you did. No one gives a s*** what you did for a living. Generals get out, they go to Home Depot like, get out of my way, old man. They don't give a s***. You know what I did? I don't give a f***. Get out my way, right? They don't care. And it hurts and it will affect you. So you have to go get some professional help. Not even help. You need to retrain. You need to retrain how you act in your relationship. You need to retrain how you behave around normal humans. You just don't need the help, you just need retraining.

Jon Becker: It's an interesting point because we, you know, human beings have a wide range of sensitivity to stimulus. We have a wide range of how we respond to that. And in normal life, it's very easy. Somebody bumps you in the store, it's no big deal. A group of military age males are standing around with their hands in their jackets. That doesn't mean anything other than their hands are cold sometimes.

And I see it especially when my friends come back, they're at eleven because they've had to be at eleven because everything is life threatening. And I think there is this kind of balance that we have to strike as warriors. That is a really difficult balance, and it becomes more and more difficult as the assignment and the op tempo increases.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, we definitely have a lack of trust issues of our own. You end up only trusting those that are around you and that know what you're going to do and what you do, and then you forget that you've gone out to do it for those people that you're running around and bumping into. Right? I mean, people that are burning a flag or something, I don't like it, but I fought for the right for you to do that. Right?

So I think that a lot of guys need to understand the job that they're doing is what they're doing. And then deep down, think about the job that you're doing. You know, you're protecting and defending the constitution of the United States, which states you can protest and burn a flag. Right now, it's very emotional for others, but it's not emotional to some who are doing it right. To them, it's a protest, which we fought for the right for them to do that.

So we have to be real careful what we try to shut down because then someone else is going to shut us down. But we've been at war too long. We're probably going to beat another one soon. Right? And it's just, it's one of those things where people are going to get more and more screwed up. Society's going to change because of it, and it's going to be another divisive line between us all.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The thing that I find we're seeing more and more of is we are training our rank and file, like, you know, TTC, law enforcement. We're training our rank and file less, we're putting them in more missions, making their lives more complicated, which then, you know, elevates the need for special units. I look at that, it elevates the need for SWAT teams and for soft units. And the whole point of a special unit is it's doing something special. Right?

The point of a Delta is, like you said, hostage rescue and very difficult small team insertion kind of stuff. And they were like, no, actually what we want you to do is go do these normal missions because you're just better at it. And it doesn't strike me as a particularly intelligent plan.

CSM Tom Satterly: Take Fallujah, you guys, you 15 guys. Go take Fallujah over. It's like the marines couldn't do it. 80 seconds, can't do it. I don't think we're going to do it. It's hard, but we're going to try and even law enforcement. This comparison thing, I call comparison a thief, right? It's a thief of healing. It's a thief of joy when we compare and when we judge versus being curious about people, and we've. I've spoken to law enforcement often, and sometimes they're the worst.

You know, I look at the regular law enforcement like the regular army. They get very little training. They're expected to do so much, but there's no time to train because they're always out doing so much police more. Police are more doing their job on a daily basis versus training. The regular army doesn't do their job and train.

So do they rely on your SWAT guys more to do more than what they're supposed to be doing? They call the SWAT guys out or, and they, they use them even more and more and more. Right? And then those guys get burnout, and they're the ones that do the comparison. Well, I don't mind. I don't have combat time or, you know, the s*** I go through is nothing like yours. I mean, how do you know? You live in your own combat zone, your family lives with you in your combat zone, and you never leave it. You can bump into the enemy that you fought recently at a store. Right?

So consider that when you sit there and judge that, well, mine's not like yours. Mine's not like yours. I got to come home from my combat zone. I got to relax.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's one of the guys that I interviewed last season, beginning of this season, was one of the guys that made the entry in Batta Klon as the team leader for the Bau Declan rescue. And he made a really interesting point that I'd never thought about. He talked about when the operation was over, they went back to their headquarters. They'd had two suicide bombers blow themselves up. They're covered in suicide bomber and all kinds of stuff.

And he said, we took a shower and then we went home. He said, it's the first time it ever struck me that in a military deployment, which was very similar to, there's processing time. You get to fly home. You're going to transition back. And he goes, I got home and my family said, well, what happened? He's like, I just needed to go to bed. You can't say those things.

CSM Tom Satterly: You can't. I mean, when I got back from Somalia, I didn't talk to my wife, took her to the house, and then she said, how was it? I mean, literally, how was it start bawling. I didn't know what to say. I just broke down. It was too much to even try to make someone understand because, you know, they can't. They'll never understand it, right? So why even try? And I literally could feel his feelings in that, you know, I just want to go to bed. Just let me just don't talk to me.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Just kind of let it. Let it work its way out of you. How do you know now, retrospectively, how do we find that balance between what we do and who we are? Right? Like, what struck me, as you were saying that is, you know, Delta was what you did. It wasn't who you were, right? The two get conflated, and at some point, like you said, you move on.

And I think that the guys, like, I see it in my law enforcement friends, the guys who police work is what they do, retire pretty well and go on, and they find meaning in being a Walmart greeter or being a soccer coach or just being a good dad or moving on to some other thing. The guys that being a cop is who they are are the ones that struggle. How now, retrospectively, how do we better strike that balance?

CSM Tom Satterly: You know, you need a hobby. You need something that you do other than work. I never had hobby. I don't think I still have a hobby now, other than cleaning. I literally. People are like, what are you doing? You're offtown, I think. I don't really have off time. I'm still always helping people. I'm still always waiting around to help somebody or the phone call or to talk somebody down off of something, but I don't have a hobby.

I mean, my wife and I, we drive our convertible at the end of the day when we're just wiped out from talking to people or hearing people's s*** problems in their lives, and it just weighs you down. You have to have a thing, and I would suggest it being in nature, you know, where we go out and get grounded again, and you just. My wife and I'll get in the car at the end of the day and just start driving out towards the Ozarks, hitting those hilly roads and just staring at nature, not even talking, just wind in our hair, just driving. Drive about 45 minutes in one direction on this nice, straight, beautiful highway. We turn around, drive back.

We get back, and then we might start talking about things we've done that day. But you need to decompress. Like, really decompress. And I don't mean go get drunk, you know, I don't mean start taking pills and getting drunk. Because that's what most people do to decompress. That's just another depressant. Right? Added to it. I'm not saying don't drink. I'm not a teetotaler. Everybody's like, I didn't know you drank, tom. I go, I don't drink at all anymore. Okay? I just have a couple. I've set limits and rules, which is how I think people can learn to manage that at work.

People don't tend to have problems, right? They're showing off. They're shining, they're doing their thing, and they can prove who they are. They can climb up and get rewarded for it. And, you know, it's happiness. It's kind of like, hey, you're my bros. I feel good here.

We're torn between going home. Guys are torn between having second lives. You know, you're gone so much. It just happens a lot. That adds more stress, the stress of getting caught, the stress that you're doing wrong. You know that, right? You have this feeling that one day you're going to get caught, you know, the shoes going to drop. And that's a horrible feeling to have every day of just waiting for an email, a phone call, knowing you're doing wrong.

But if we set rules and abide by them, like with our spouses, how we fight, making rules for fighting. I ask people who has rules for how you fight, and they're like, stupid. Like, we have the law of land warfare. We make rules for war. We have signs everywhere posted, don't jump in the tiger bin. Because people have done it before, right? So they post a rule, don't eat the gum off the railing underneath the f****** seats or something.

You know, you make rules. And when I see a rule, I'm like, that's because somebody did it and they had to write it down, you know, or a bunch of people did it. So if you make rules about how you fight, you know, you make rules about, you know, your wife's got you up against the ropes and you feel bad. You're like, you cussing her out? She's cussing you out and she's winning. You pull out the nuclear option like, oh, yeah. Acting like your mother, knowing that that's going to freak her out, right? You're both just trying to be right, right? I know I'm going to win and be right. And I've told her that before.

If she started talking to me about something and got a little elevated, I've looked at her before and I'm like, you know you're going to lose. You know, I will do anything to win. You know, I will tear you down. I will say the dumbest s***. You'll walk away crying, and I'll feel like I won, and then I'll feel bad, and I'll come say I'm sorry.

Or we can follow the rules of we, you know, we only take it so far. If it gets emotional, we back off. Because emotions are s***, right? You go back to logic. You talk about those things. If it gets emotional, you back off. Because when we get emotional, we start arguing and fighting. And when we do that, our relationship starts to tank. The kids start to know, and they start to tank.

And then you have this stressful home life, which carries over to your work life. People can't have take one out of the other. You bring your work life home. You bring your home life to work. And so with that, I tell leaders, you need to know your people more than just at work. So if he starts having an issue at work and he's fine at work, you can determine, oh, are you having a trouble at home? You know, your wife have cancer, your kid dying? Are you just arguing a lot? Is it you?

I think we could do a lot better with that. Be open and honest about it. And that will help people nothing, trash their home lives as much, because you can get it under control. You can control it while you're doing it. If you have the awareness that you're doing it. And most of us don't think we're doing it. We don't realize. I would prove that. I would prove it all the time. Those are facts. You can't tell me those aren't facts. You know?

And my wife would say, it's not what you're saying, it's how you're saying it. I'm like, oh, I don't need to scream that. I don't need to scream at you when I talk, you know, so the awareness of how we behave and that it's not needed here in the civilian world, they don't want it.

Jon Becker: I think you raise a really interesting point, which is I teach a block on culture centric leadership. And one of the things I talk about early in that block is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. For those that are not familiar, Abraham Maslow is a psychologist who determined, came up with a framework to explain that people have a hierarchy of needs that starts, picture it like a pyramid. The bottom of the pyramid is physical security and safety and the ability to eat and all those things.

And, you know, when you get up to the top of the pyramid, you're into self actualization and concern for others and everything else. One of the things that I talk about in that class is you have to understand that people you're interacting with people who are in a variety of positions on that hierarchy of needs.

And as a leader, you better know where your people are because, you know, if somebody's life is well grounded, and things are great, and they're happily married and their kids are wonderful, then, then they're going to be thinking different thoughts than a guy that has a wife and a girlfriend and, you know, a side job and a drug problem and a drinking problem, and is way down at the bottom of that triangle trying to survive every day. And I think that one of the points you make is as a leader, we need to know that.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I mean, just to fully know what's going on more than just at work, because that's a human. You get to know the human, then you can help that human be better. And if that human's better, that makes you look better.

So it's easy, it's, you know, I call it choosing your hard. It's hard to train people, it's hard to corral those stallions that work for you, you know, I mean, they're not mules you gotta whip, they're stallions you gotta steer them and hold them back a little bit, and that's great. But they're humans. And if you don't get to know them as humans, you won't know what's bothering them. And if they're not operating fully, then you're not gonna get all you can get out of them.

So not hate and anger gets you through, but love and respect will get you through. Hate and anger can make you feel better, like you don't have any emotions. But I think a lot of us try to hide our emotions and keep the emotions at bay because we think they'll make us do our jobs differently versus actually helping us heal by venting out those emotions and releasing it.

Jon Becker: Well. And it's interesting, as you're saying, that I'm thinking back to earlier in our discussion, when we take a group of people and we place them in a harm's way for an extended period of time, and we turn them up to eleven, and we're putting them to sleep with Ambien, and we're waking them up with energy drinks, and we're sending them out on 4, 5, 6, 7 hits a night, and we are pushing them so far down the Maslow triangle that there isn't anything else.

After 20 years of war, I'm not sure that anybody comes out, quote unquote, normal or healthy. And I think that it's something that we really need to think about as leaders, what we're doing to the people that work for us.

CSM Tom Satterly: It's our job to care for them, not work them to death. Right? They always say humans before equipment, you know, blah, blah, blah. But they don't do that in their actions. They don't behave that way in their actions. They've taken all the money for the preservation of the force and family funds. So military organizations that used to bring us in to talk to people like, we don't have any money.

All of it went to COVID vaccinations, this and that. They pulled money. They don't have money to help families anymore, even though they save, you know, people before equipment, families before this. And that great motto, you can shove it up your b***, doesn't work. You know, it's – They don't. They don't behave that way. They behave as if you're another number, right? It's a big organization. You're another number. They'll replace you. They're already working on replacing you, right? So if you're just not working out fully for them, then you can be gone.

Jon Becker: Which, I mean, organizationally, it has to be that way. Right? Like, organizationally, the trains have to run on time, et cetera. And I think that one of the difficult balances to strike is between the organization and the individual. And there's always a tension between the organization and the individual.

If Tom is having problems, somebody has to move into Tom's spot because we need to go capture, you know, Saddam Hussein. In your case, literally, we need to go capture Saddam Hussein. And so we do need to have that organizational readiness. I just question whether we run these organizations. And I see this with SWAT teams. I do it all the time. Are we running them too lean to be able to effectively protect the personnel?

It's like you said, we added a fourth team, and the net effect was that now we have two missions and nobody gets any more rest. Like, is the right answer here for us to say no? Let's have six teams. Let's have six squadrons in Delta, and two of those at any given point are at summer camp and are running five ks on the weekend for fun and tour training and tour operation. How do we do that, you think?

CSM Tom Satterly: Logistically, it's a nightmare, but there's so much money out there, right? There's so much. There's obviously trillions. We give it away all the time. You know, we print it, we f****** borrow it, but we give it to things that, well, I don't know. We should be giving it to other things, like the mental health, the care of our warriors.

And then again, old people are going to go, what about the old people? What about this? The money's there. I don't think that they sit back and honestly care about the humans part of this. You know, I think they want the numbers. They got to fill the slots. They got to get a job done. And that's what they'll tell you is our job.

When we spoke at Congress and we were talking to the Department of Defense and the VA, we were speaking to the VA about biomarkers, right? Picking up on biomarkers that will determine if you have post traumatic stress early on so you can go get help. That way you can't, you know, somebody can't say, oh, you're just saying it. You don't want to go somewhere, right? There's actually biomarkers in your body that tell you things are wrong with you, and you probably should go get help.

And the VA was saying, I love this. I love this. And then John McCain at the time, he sent his staff over to listen in, and they came up and they said, look, John McCain wants to move this into the DoD, too. Help the warfighters while they're fighting. Maybe they don't need to help them as much when they get out.

And I said, that would be perfect if you could give them the help while they're in. You probably won't spend as much when they get out. You probably won't have as many problems. Just like you used to teach us in the army, you know, preventive maintenance checks and services. They always have these little cartoon books. They hand out this little dude with big muscles and a wrench in his hand, keep it running. Right?

You know, take care of your equipment, because if it breaks, it costs more and takes longer to get it back. We need to do pmcs with our humans. We need to do that with our relationships, right? We need to do that with ourselves. Why wait till we're so broken that it takes so long to fix us? Why not keep maintaining?

I'll sit there, and it goes to the same thing with relationships. I have a stadium full of couples I'm talking to, and I'll say, show of hands. How many people have a perfect marriage? Zero hands ever go up, right? Zero. Okay. How many people here see a therapist? Couples therapist? A couple hands go up, I go. Why aren't all of you seeing someone every now and then? You just said, it's not perfect, which means you could work on it. If you work on it, it'll stay perfect. If you let it fall off and trash and die and you rock bottom and you're all the way down, it's going to take so much more to come back.

We apply that to everything, keep our operators healthy and maintain them and still train them. But as part of that training, they get the training on mental health and how to take care of themselves. They'll be better all along the way, and I know it. You'll get a better warrior. I won't have to worry if this guy to my right or left has got an alcohol problem or he's taking pills or he's on Ambien because he's hooked to him or his kids are hate him and his wife's leaving him and is his head in the game.

I'll know that I have healthy people with happy families at home that they're not worried about and that they know how to take care of themselves as well, versus only knowing how to kill other people.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think it's very challenging as a type personality and as a man, especially a man in the kinds of units that we're talking about. They have a hard enough time admitting when they're physically damaged, much less emotionally damaged. We've created such a disincentive to look at our mental health, and I've had conversations with friends where it's like, you need to go to a therapist. I gotta be a therapist. If your knee was damaged, you'd go to an orthopedist.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. You break your arm. Imagine breaking your arm and just going to work and saying, f*** it, I'm fine. And it heals at an angle. It's all screwed up now. It's worse now. If you want to fix it, you got to re break that sucker. Right? It's biological. I know. You can get a brain scan and a doctor can tell you what you do day to day by looking at your brain scan without even knowing you at a doctor in LA, look at my brain scan and called me. So I had to call you because this was such a difference between when I got a Stella shot before and after.

He said, before you have the brain of a 35 year pro football player. He goes from the colors of your brain. From the scan, I can tell what's firing wrong. Do you do this, this, this? And this and this, and I was like, oh, my God. You know me perfectly dang, over the counter pills, hyperbaric oxygen, tenta, other things along the way. Not one prescription met, and I had a stellate ganglion block shot. And he said it overnight, that my brain looks so much different.

So I try to tell people, and I felt different immediately, which is not the end all, be all that. Put me in a space where I could go get more help to change my behavior. Right? Because people don't like our poor behavior. So you have to do behavioral change. No matter what you do along the way, you have to change your behavior. And that's muscle memory developed. I got rewarded for being aggressive. I got awards for it.

So I have to change that muscle memory of being aggressive to be thanked. I got to behave differently, and that takes a lot of work. It's like when you try and teach somebody how to shoot, and they have anticipation recall, right? You're like, I got to break that before we can go anywhere. So I have to back up, stop this one thing, and then start again and start working on shooting.

So I have to back up with people, stop what they're doing, and then start piling on top of that with the new stuff. And that takes time. It takes a lot of time, and I honestly just don't think people have the time for it. You got to be persistent and diligent, and you can't quit. You just can't quit. It takes time.

Jon Becker: But I think we've got to. We've got to. As a society and as leaders, we have to prioritize it. Right? Like, people do what. What they have to do. Right? We, most of us do what we have to do and a little bit of what we want to do. Yeah. If we want to spit out healthy warriors, we need to require that they stay healthy.

CSM Tom Satterly: Mandatory, like sexual harassment, whatever. Sharks, whatever they call it. I mean, we have to take computer classes in the army, we had to take them. I got to check the block. You know, sexual harassment. Everybody did that. Okay. Drug and alcohol. Yep, yep, yep. Checking the block. Nobody's even tried to check the block on mental health, even if it's s***** and doesn't work. No one's even done that yet. How about check the block?

Jon Becker: No. If anything, in this realm, in the tactical realm, it's actually the exact opposite because we've weaponized mental health. Like, oh, Tom isn't right. We need to take Tom out of service here. He's not right. And we're focusing on using mental health as an elimination tool.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Rather than as a maintenance tool. And it strikes me, you know, you see it in shootings all the time with, with police officers. You know, they'll get involved in a shooting and they don't want to talk to the therapist because the therapist is going to say, oh, he's not. Right? He's got to come off duty. There isn't this, you know, it's become. Mental health has become a hurdle. It's become a means of us taking you out of service in much the same way in specialized units, you know, like yours, physical ailment becomes like, oh, well, he's not, he's not fit for duty.

His, you know, his knees blown, man. His brain is blown. He's not fit for duty. And it feels like we have to turn that around. We have to get out of a mindset of using it as a means of pulling you out of duty and get into a mindset of using it as a means of keeping you fit for duty.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think we need to get out of the mindset that if you can't see it, it's not real. Right? I bet people if you break your leg, they'll give you light duty and you sit at a desk for six, eight weeks, right? Heal up, bro. You got a broken leg, you had a cast on it. But if the same guy said, hey, I'm an alcoholic and I can't stop drinking, I need six or eight weeks to dry up, they'll fire you. Mental health.

Hey, I'm having trouble at home. I need to speak with my wife more. I need to get some help because of the things I've gone through have made me behave poorly at home. They'll get rid of you whether you break your d*** leg, get a bone sticking out of your head. They're like, oh, poor you. They want to take care of you and then throw you right back in the game. Right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think one of the things that made me initially want to talk to you that I loved about your book is, you know, there's so many instances in mental health where, you know, people perceive the attention to mental health is weakness. Where we go, yeah, that guy, he's a big sissy. He's emotional. He's whatever. I read your book, and my reaction is telling one of my friends that he should read the book. And he's like, why?

And I said, it's very easy in a mental health context to attack and make an ad hominem argument. Oh, that guy is this. I said, I will challenge you to invalidate Tom Satterly's man card. Like, if you can. If you can invalidate Satterly's man card, then we're all f*****, right? 20 years in the unit doing the things that he did. What I loved about the book was that it is difficult to impugn your man card because of what you did.

And yet the book is so raw. It is not. There is no candy coating at all in the book. It is absolutely raw emotion. This is what's going through my brain, and it feels to me like, that's really what we need to be doing, is we need to be telling those stories.

CSM Tom Satterly: It was cathartic. Very, very cathartic. Difficult to do. Still difficult to do, but not as difficult. But writing that book got a lot out of me. It terrified me. I mean, it literally terrified me. But we got to the end. I started thinking, maybe we should take may – I don't know. You know, everybody's going to think I'm this, and then my friends are going to, you know, and I started thinking of all this crap.

Then I talked to my wife again, and the final answer was, we wrote this book for a reason. You know, not to brag about anything I'd done, but to help others understand and see that it affects you and you can get better. You know, my wife wrote arsenal of hope right after that and published it, and it's a continuation of that story.

And it's an add on at the end of when I met her, how horrible it was for us and how we fought to get through because we chose each other versus the easy part. You know, it's hard. It's hard. Marriage is hard. Divorce is hard. It's what hard do you want to choose? Right? So I chose being married hard versus the divorce hard. And. And it turned out. Right? It just – It works out. If you put the effort in, things really work out. And that was hard to throw everything out there, right, and worry about being.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah, no, it is raw and naked. Like, it's, you know, standing in a room naked with 40 your friends and bright lights on. Like, there. There is no. There's no hiding in the book. You know, there are a number of things that struck me. The description of you sitting in your truck, contemplating killing yourself, being literally seconds from doing it and deciding not to because of Jen was. Was, to me, kind of the pivotal moment of the book and may have been a pivotal moment. What was a pivotal moment in your life? It strikes me that she was kind of your spirit animal for a while there in a way that you say in the book that she saved you. But it strikes me that that's very much how you feel about it

CSM Tom Satterly: To this day, her wisdom, her calmness and demeanor, and I've made her tough. I made her real tough. Tougher than she was. She thanks me for some of it. We've duked it out. She's pretty hardcore. And it's. I mean, she literally did save me. And she'll say, I didn't save anyone. You did the work, but I wouldn't have done the work, and I wouldn't have done the work if I didn't have somebody to do the work for.

And I certainly didn't love myself at the time, and it made it very difficult to love anyone else. But she was lovable and taught me how to start liking myself, and so that made it doable. And then I got to a point where, okay, I appreciate me and respect me again, and I don't hate me, because when I hated me, I hated everybody. You know, you can't love anybody unless you at least love yourself first. And I just couldn't. She helped me see that, pulled me out of that s*** and then stayed strong the whole time when I fought it the whole way.

So, yeah, I credit her with saving me and to this day, over and over again. And she'll deny it, but without her, I wouldn't be here.

Jon Becker: Well, I think sometimes we can be catalytic in other people's lives, though, right? Like, it, you know, she was. She was the spark. Obviously, you had to do the work. But I think that, especially from a leadership standpoint, it is important to realize that frequently we are having an asymmetric relationship with somebody and we need to pay attention to it. Right?

Like the things that she said to you that day that, you know, led to you going and meeting her at a bar rather than blowing your brains out in a car, probably were not that significant to her.

CSM Tom Satterly: No.

Jon Becker: But they had a very large asymmetric effect on you. And I think that it's important for us to realize the effect that we have on other people.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, she dug in and grabbed the one thing she knew I hated because she didn't know what I was doing. She knew something was up and she took the one thing I hated, and that's being late, and threw that at me, and that snapped me out of it. And it was that easy. And that's when I started to realize after we talked about it down the road, because that's how easy it is to interrupt that process for somebody. Right?

Everybody's terrified. I think about killing myself. I don't know what to do, right? And they call us. I'm like, I don't either, man. Just talk to them. Talk to him as a human. Don't tell them not to do stuff. Talk to them. Say, don't. Say, don't do it for your kids. Right? Their kids might be the reason they feel like they're f****** up. Right? So just listen. Just listen. And then offer love. Because you can change somebody in a second. All they need to do is feel worthy again or needed, and it goes away pretty quick.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think that, you know, we can. We can walk this balance. You know, you and I talked before we went on the air about this balance between work and family, and it is an achievable balance. It's never, you know, it's kind of like riding a bike. Right? You're never, like, just balanced.

CSM Tom Satterly: Right.

Jon Becker: You're actively, constantly balancing. And I think that it's a difficult message for a type personalities who want to win everything that we have to work at it. But it strikes me that we do, and we need to do a better job in leading people, of helping them to achieve that.

CSM Tom Satterly: I think we could learn to swallow our ego, you know, would all do a little better.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. Ego and pride are definitely not the way to go. Why don't we? I'd love to pivot and kind of get your thoughts on some things. So there's been a lot of overlap since the global war on terror and the rise of SOF.

There's been a lot of overspill from the SOF community into the law enforcement tactical community. You've got everybody doing training all over the place, and we see law enforcement units equipping themselves and training more and more like military units, and we see this kind of rise of the warrior. Copy the arguments against militarization.

I think that there are, from my seat, dealing with both sides, the law enforcement and military side of the house, it seems like a lot of times we're actually taking the wrong message rather than taking tactics and moving the tactics from SOF units to law enforcement. I think what's missing is the amazing levels of proficiency and the leadership skills in SOF units, and that could be what is carrying over. What are your thoughts on that?

CSM Tom Satterly: I had to be careful. Teaching law enforcement was one of those things that I had to think about, you know, when I first started. Oh, just teach them how to shoot, right? CQB, blah, blah, blah, blah, just like we do. And then you have that realization of, well, they don't have the powers that I have when I'm at war. Right?

You guys, you do a shooting, it's a big, big, big deal. And so the whole. When I would teach them, I would say, listen, you have a certain thing that you have to do. You have to call out, you have to announce yourself. Whatever those things are that you have to do, that's on you. My training for you will be this teaching, marksmanship training, and anything after that moment that you decide that you need to protect yourself or someone else. That's what I'm teaching. You don't hold me accountable for anything else. You're supposed to know up to that point where you have to make that decision.

I'm just giving you the skill, once you've made that decision, to engage a target properly, you know, and I've tried to help law enforcement with the leadership aspect of it and the training aspect of it, but the budgets are different, the jobs are different. So I think a lot of these soft guys that get out and do the training really need to be careful. It's a lot more than just marksmanship and CQB and dominating the room.

There's a lot more in law enforcement that comes before that happens that they need to understand as they instruct. It's a lesson I learned. You know, we don't come in and say, drop it, drop it. If you have a threat, you're dead, right? I mean, your rules could be different about that and individualized and politicized and s***.

So I would wish the soft guys, I hope that what they're doing is that method of, you have a certain job to do, up to a point. I can't teach you that. I don't want to. I was afraid to even think about becoming a cop when I got out, because if I saw somebody with a gun, I'm afraid that my instincts would be to shoot them immediately.

Any threat in your hand, a knife, whatever, my instincts are to kill you. So very difficult to get out and do that job, and it's very difficult, I think, to get out and teach that job unless you're thoughtful about telling them what you're teaching them after the point of they made that decision.

Jon Becker: I do think that there are things that carry over from the unit very well to law enforcement. I think that, for instance, selection, I don't think anybody pays more attention to selection than Delta does.

And I think that there are messages in the way Delta selects that are very valuable for state and local teams. And looking for the right people from the outset and paying attention to how you're selecting, I think, actually really matters. And as a guy who's dealing with the top units all over the world, the one common theme in the really good units is they start off with a really good modeling clay.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah. You have to start off with decent physical fitness. Obviously, that just keeps you more mentally healthy and things. But I tell you that what they look for is individuality. That can work on a team, but you can be an individual people that can take a lack of information and create something from that.

And then the psychological evaluations, you know, whatever they pick out of that, I don't know. You know, they could looking for the crazy ones or the ones that have a little propensity to be more loose and free, maybe, but they're looking for a specific person that can go do those things. It's the foundation of what we do. Right?

It's the foundation of everything. If you select somebody before you allow them to come in versus if you meet a certain minimum requirement, you can start our training. And if you fell out of that training, then, okay, sorry, we'll recycle you.

But if you make it all the way through, because it's not too difficult, then you have someone, you really don't know what they're doing that you've given equipment to to go out and do a job, versus getting a good foundation of who you let in first, you know, and I think organizations change their selections to meet quotas, and then they can't change it back. So they drop their standards to meet a quota. And then when that trickles off, they drop their standards again to meet another quota.

Next thing you know, every cop used to be in jail and every soldier, you know, used to do something that they would never do. It's one of those, we've never dropped our standard. We've only changed two things since I've been there, and that's because it didn't matter. You know, not everybody saw the one thing, so they had to remove that to make it even. And the other one was like the swim test. They moved it from selection to the training portion because it'll give you more time to learn to swim, and then they'll cut you.

I don't know. You know, I think they're banking on the fact that, okay, in six months I can teach you to swim, and then we'll keep you, you know, but that's the only thing that they've ever really changed. Even though they've been pressured to change other things to increase numbers, they just won't. They say, look, it works. We get good people, we rarely fire people, right? Our guys rarely make real s***** decisions.

Now, when they do, they're real big and s***** decisions, but that rarely happens. So they've done a good job of selecting the maturity type of person with the minimum age limits and things that they're looking for. But I think if everybody could afford to do a selection like that, an evaluation before they hire, one, they wouldn't have enough numbers. Two, it cost a lot of money, but three, that have a wonderful element of people that they could trust and work, you know, and work for them well.

Jon Becker: Well. And it's, there is a lot of pressure to change standards and to drop standards. And, you know, one of my favorite sayings is that your standards are what you told, I, not what you, not what you say. And, you know, we've seen, I had a friend that for years ran buds, and when, when the global war on terror took off, you know, they were trying to increase the number of seals, and so they started feeding them more and more at the top of the funnel, and the same number kept coming out the bottom of the funnel.

CSM Tom Satterly: Isn't that funny?

Jon Becker: And, yeah, and he said, you know, he's, he's arguing with Congress about it. Like, no, like, you can send me a million people. There's, you know, there's, there's 40 guys a quarter. That's, that's what it is. And so I think that one of the things we have to do is, is realize that we may need to create additional units.

We may need to create different standards for different jobs, but we can't take, you know, every single person, you know, in, if you look at, you look at, you know, Delta as a specific unit, like, there may only be, at any given point in the United States, a few hundred guys that would be capable of serving in that unit. And we just need to accept that and not try to stuff the top of the funnel because I think the more we stuff the top of the funnel, the more noise we have and the less signal we have.

CSM Tom Satterly: And it's ruined forever. It's ruined forever. Once you change it like that, you know, it's.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

CSM Tom Satterly: Are you going to take freedoms back? I mean, even though they're trying, but, I mean, it's hard to give somebody something and do a certain thing and then retract it because the next group's going to go, hey, wait a minute, you know, so it's got to hold hard and fast on those things that, you know, you know, works for you, brings in leadership. You know, I'm not saying don't ever change. I'm not that guy.

But if something's working well, and it's always worked well, changing it to meet a number, like you said, you're only going to get the same amount coming out the other end anyway, right? If you're, if you're looking for the same things, you can let as many people in as you want, but you're really just wasting airfare and food money on those guys because you're going to send them back home anyway.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And one of the things that has always struck me with the unit is each of the operators. One of the things, one of the most misconceptions is people think that the unit operators are operating in large teams all the time. And you even talk about it in the book, there are circumstances where it might be one or two guys, you know, it's not going to be the, you know, the entire squadron lands and off we go.

You know, it's a unit that requires a very high level of individual responsibility and also an extremely high level of individual proficiency across a very broad range of skills. What is it about the units approach, you think, that allows, you know, a guy who's dumb enough to go to a John Cougar concerte to develop extremely high levels of proficiency and then maintain those for that many years?

CSM Tom Satterly: What was the question about that?

Jon Becker: What is it about their system that allows them to maintain these high levels of proficiency across broad spectrums of knowledge?

CSM Tom Satterly: I think it's who they select through selection. They know that those people have a propensity to fit into those jobs. Well, I mean, we recruit separately for support and direct support. So those guys do their own thing over here, operators do their own thing over here, and then they bring them all together in the end and they work out great.

But I think they're looking for a certain personality type or whatever it is. I don't know. There's not a lot of people that know the magic of a selection, you know, just a few at any one time, and they're just looking for that individual that can meet those time standards because they know that those certain time standards says something about somebody, you know, here's a distance, here's elevation, here's the weather.

I mean, everything we did up there was kind of analytical. Everybody at every RV took the weather, you know, the temperature and the weather at every RV. So you could calculate the different times for what that does to humans and how cold it is and. And the elevation. So it's real analytical to determine, in the end, that individual that's going to be able to do those things that, you know, you want them to do now, how they built that over the years.

And it's a lot of bigger brains than me that put that together, figured out what worked, and stuck with it. But there's a ton of psychological evaluations before and after and during selection that I know what they're looking for is an individual that will be able to do those things, which lends itself to keeping them healthy. Right? Because you're sending a dude on a mission by himself or maybe with two, and it happens all the time, all around the world.

If he's not mentally stable because of other things he's done, the chances of him making a poor decision are greater. And when you're going out with one or two, the backlash, if you're screwing up, can be greater. And so that's where they need to determine and decide that, yeah, we brought him in. We selected the right guy. Now we got to keep him right. We got to keep him doing that way the way we picked him, because he's going to get worse along the way.

So if you don't maintain it, you've selected a guy that you're beating down and he's getting worse versus maintaining it again. Again, that preventive maintenance checks and services, you know, keep him up and running. Right? And keep him healthy, he'll be able to do those jobs.

But once selection grabs a hold of the right guy and the training gets him trained with what you want, and then you get to the squadron, and two years later, you almost worked your way up to where they think you're worthy and can run with them properly, you're already starting to break down. Just the stress of trying to keep up. Every day you're telling yourself, you're not good enough, do more. All your brain hears is, you're not good enough.

So you start to break down, even with the competition. Every day of trying to fit in, trying to keep up, wears you down, makes you feel like s***. You start putting yourself down, and then you believe it. Your brain doesn't know the difference between perception and reality. So the more you put yourself down, the more you feel bad. And it's just tanks over the years, you know.

Jon Becker: If you were advising law enforcement, especially law enforcement, tactical teams on training and, and how to maintain high levels of skills. What would your counsel be?

CSM Tom Satterly: Know your basics very, very well. Everybody wants to come in and get the magic shooting. Show me the magic shooting. I'll go, yeah, I'll show you the magic shooting. Five rounds, slow, slow fire, 20 minutes. Give me your five best rounds. Guys will fire off in 3 seconds. I'm done. You got like four and the, you know, zeros and you got 110, maybe one nine. I want five in the X, right? I want five in the X. And I want you to do the basics right?

And then I'm going to have you run a mile or run a half a mile carrying cinder blocks and drop them. Then you're going to shoot the same s***. Because now I'm simulating you being hyped up and jacked up and your blood's flowing and you're angry as s***. Because I need you to be an exact marksman within your craft, right? Because the worst thing is shooting a civilian, shooting a non-hostile.

But it's all basics. You know the basics of human contact, right? How to talk with an individual, how to de-escalate. Because cops need to de-escalate, then they need to de-escalate themselves. I know if I get in a high speed chasing somebody for about five or 10 miles, and he's run over s*** and I've almost wrecked, when I get there, I'm ready to beat some a**, right? I am jacked up. What that law enforcement individual needs to think about is, okay, we've crashed, we're here now, count to ten or whatever. Breathe deep, but don't run up there jacked up because you're hijacked emotionally.

So I would tell them to. Excellent marksmanship, learning how to deal with people and de escalation. Because if you can de-escalate those fights, you won't need your gun, you won't need this or that. I mean, now I don't work in that world. And I see the news and it looks a lot sheer than it used to be. And nobody listens to cops anymore. And I've seen a lot less cops on the road and I'm like, I wouldn't be either.

If I was gonna get fired for pulling somebody over, you know, I'd be f******, I want my paycheck and go home at night, screw it. But if our leaders aren't covering and protecting, you know, our law enforcement officers, then they're not going to do their jobs, they're not going to go out and get in trouble. So, yeah, that needs to clean itself up, too. But, yeah, I would say marksmanship, de-escalation and pretty high up there.

Jon Becker: So why don't we talk about the foundation? Because I think it's important to kind of get the message out. Started by you and Jen.

CSM Tom Satterly: Mostly Jen. I kept working so we could eat food because we were working together, doing realistic military training exercises when we met, and we helped co-found an organization. And then during that time when Jen was working, we were working together, getting to know each other.

People were dying, people were going overseas and getting killed and not coming back on the next iteration and would be doing it, working with the SEAL team four or whatever. And she'd be like, hey, where's Bob? Oh, Bob got killed, you know, or, where's Jimmy? Well, Jimmy got killed, too, so it started breaking her down, you know, once teal got killed on a training exercise we were on, and she freaked out, and we just kept training. She's like, are we gonna. No, we gotta keep going, man. People die all the time. She's like, what? Yeah, people die. She's like, I don't get this.

So one day she said, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to train people to go to war. I want to train people to come home. She used to sit around on target and talk to all these guys about their issues, and they ended up talking about their families. Now they want to be better at home.

And so she decided, and I kept working for a couple years, a year and a half, and she started working on it. I helped along the way, but my job was to make money, and she was researching what to do. Finally got it going. Start in 2016. 2017 went official and started really pushing donations to help. And what we do is we became a resource library up front.

Things that we would research, that I did, I would go do it, video, send it out there and tell everybody this works or this doesn't work. And I tried this, and I trust them. It was easier for people to come to us to find everything they needed, versus what I had to do was go find it myself. And it was very difficult, so we wanted to bring it all into one spot.

Then we got more money, and we hired licensed clinical social workers to be coaches, and we started doing coaching over the phone to people who needed it all along the way. We were the first to start up to help spouses as well, the whole entire family. So we were the first to start that up. And if the warrior doesn't want help, we help the spouse. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We're trying to fix the family.

So we travel around as well and teach about post traumatic stress and relationship issues. And now we've just changed our programs to where we used to run four to six marriage retreats a year with eight to twelve couples, which got to be very expensive because we paid for them to come in, we paid to stay and we paid for their date nights and we. Very effective, very effective. But now we've morphed into a program that we have coming up in October at Fort Bragg, well, southern Pines, to where we're bringing in 150 people.

And instead of doing the real close marriage counseling stuff, we're going to give them a showcase of sleep experts. You know, hey, you guys have trouble sleeping, so here's how you sleep up on stage. Oh, here's a relationship expert, here's a psychedelic expert talking about all the things that helped us, all the information that they may need from the mouths of the people who have done it. And all these guys are special operators as well.

Plus I we're going to throw out music and games and we have 25 glamping tents, you know, 25 couples can sign up for to camp out overnight two day event. So we can dump as much information into them and then offer them the coaching that we offer. Because every time we do a retreat, phone lines start ringing. Hey, that was great. I want more help. More help. So we give everyone up to twelve counseling sessions, unless they need more. But up to twelve counseling sessions for couples all throughout the year.

Jon Becker: I love it! How can people find out more about the foundation?

CSM Tom Satterly: Well, has everything on there. It has the request a coach button, it has a camp home front button on there. It has a donation button on there which I beg people not to pass up because nothing that we do is free and everything that the veterans do and the spouses do that we bring in is free to them.

So it obviously takes donations, anything that you see on the website. Actually, there's a podcast button on there too, for all secure podcasts, which is part of our programs. Because on the podcast you have the listen up series to where we have experts talking in a short form about here's what you need to do, here's what you got to do to this, this, this and this. And then we're done.

And then we have the longer format to where we get to know people and talk about different special things that people can understand. But we consider those programs because they're all learning events for people.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's important for people to understand that nothing that you're doing is government funded. Everything that's happening is happening because of private donations. And I would encourage our listeners to go and support the foundation and support your work.

Tom, I'd love to finish with – We do five rapid fire questions. Short answer. Yeah, short answer. Sentence. Thoughts. Something quick. What is your most important habit?

CSM Tom Satterly: Cold plunge. I started cold plunge in the morning, and that changed my life.

Jon Becker: Give me more.

CSM Tom Satterly: What's that? Give me more about the cold plunge. Yeah, man. You know, I started reading about it, and I'm like, I don't want it. I don't want it. I don't want it. It's stupid because I hot tubbed every morning, and then I finally bought one, threw some ice in it, got in the hot tub, jumped in that thing and about died.

And then I got to where I could do three or four minutes just sitting in it, chilling, and I would get out and have more energy. I feel better. All my sore bones have been, you know, the inflammation that I have so much of from the multiple surgeries feels better. I'm more alert all day, and then if I get in the afternoon, I'm feeling a little down. I just jump in it real quick and get out of. But I got sick of all the ice, so I bought a water chiller, and it's supposed to keep it down pretty cold. And I've got it set at like 39 right now, but it's 105 outside.

So I got out of the hot tub this morning, got in and I went, nah, nope, not even worth it. You can't keep something that cold out there. But that's changed me a lot. It's made me feel a lot better. I have a lot of pain from all the surgeries I've had and all the arthritis from those surgeries. So that really helps out with that pain, and it really helps me sleep at night.

Jon Becker: Love it! What's the most important thing, in your opinion, for building an effective team?

CSM Tom Satterly: Trust. You have to trust the people that you work with in order to expect them to trust you and to work together.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite current online resource? Website or podcast?

CSM Tom Satterly: You know what? I just started, and this is funny, I just started the story of Jesus. I don't know why. I had a feeling the other day I was watching a YouTube video, and it was something about. It was a religious thing, obviously, and it was something about, you know, if you want to go to heaven or you want to feel this way or a certain way, you have to know Jesus. And I was like, whoa, okay.

I mean, I'm not a religious person. I'm spiritual and I believe in it all and everything, but I don't go to church. I do my own thing. I thought, okay. So I started a podcast about the story of Jesus. And a lot of it so far I knew about, but a lot of it was, like, very new to me. And I was like, okay. And I just got into it and I just started liking it.

So I've been listening to it over and over again, different stories. Like, it keeps going on. Not over and over again, but there's like ten minute stories, and I just pop them in and it's like the life of Jesus on up. And I'm like, all right. A lot of understanding out of that. A lot of good lessons.

Jon Becker: What's your most important? What do you think the most important characteristic of an effective leader is?

CSM Tom Satterly: Courageous and not courage to do anything but moral courage. You know, the courage to do what's right, even when everyone else is trying to talk in and doing wrong. And even doing the wrong thing is easy. Right? But choosing the proper, hard through courage.

Jon Becker: A final question. What's the most profound memory of your career?

CSM Tom Satterly: Sitting on a bed in Somalia, pulling guard out of a window with bars on it and hearing a dragging noise coming up. It was dark. I looked out the window, and there's a dude with an ak on the ground crawling towards me in my window between the two buildings about 3ft apart. I just happened to look, and there he was, his little man dress or whatever, and I couldn't get my m four at that angle.

So I had pulled out a grenade, and I was like, oh, my God, I've never done this before. I just pulled the pin and dropped it on his head out the window. And I remember him looking up as I did it, laying on his neck. And I just laid on the bed, and that thing blew up, sprayed the ceiling and broke glass out and everywhere.

And I was like, I sat up and I was like, holy s***. And somebody kept running in the room goes, what was that? And I go, it was a flashbang because I thought I was in trouble. And the guy in the room with me goes, he's lying. That was a grenade. And I go, you're right. It was a grenade. Look at this dead f***** down here. I mean, I'll never forget that. It was almost comedic and gross, obviously. But, yeah.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic! Tom, I can't thank you enough for doing this, man. Thank you, first of all, for your service to the country. You sacrificed a lot for the blanket of freedom we sleep under, and I think it's very easy for us to go. Oh, yeah, these guys did a lot for us. I think everybody should read your book and understand that the price that our soft warriors pay for the freedom we enjoy is very high. And it's easy for us to say thank a veteran and clap at a baseball stadium. It is a different thing to look somebody in the eye and say thank you. Thank you!

CSM Tom Satterly: Thank you! I appreciate that!

Jon Becker: And thank you for everything that you're doing to continue to keep our warriors safe, man. It's the work you're doing now matters more than the work you did previously. So thank you for doing it.

CSM Tom Satterly: Yeah, I feel the same way! I appreciate that!

Episode 28 – Nationwide Issues in Special Tactics: A Panel Discussion with the State Associations from the NTOA Conference

Jon Becker: Today's episode of the debrief has a different format. This episode was recorded live at the National Tactical Officers association annual conference in Aurora, Colorado. At the conference, I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel discussion that included the presidents of five separate tactical associations.

This included:

Brent Straton from the California association of Tactical Officers.

Chris Eklund from the Florida SWAT Association.

Thor Eells from the National Tactical Officers Association.

Nick Sprague from the RMTTA or Rocky Mountain Tactical Team association.

And Dan Colasanto from the Texas Tactical Police Officers association.

This was a wide ranging discussion that covered a number of current topics and special tactics, including constitutional policing, militarization of law enforcement, SWAT standards, no knock warrants, and the use of dynamic tactics in search warrants. The contrast between the different regional and national perspectives on these issues made for a great conversation.

I'd like to thank the NTOA, CATO, Florida SWAT, RMTTA, and TTPOA for their willingness to share this discussion with our audience. One note about audio quality, because this episode was recorded live in a large group classroom at the conference, there's more background noise than a typical episode. We've done our best to remove this noise, but we appreciate your patience and understanding about the recording issues that remain.

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!

The goal of this discussion is to give you kind of national perspective, not just from the NTOA, but from the presidents of five of the larger, more powerful state associations and to kind of talk through what we're seeing in issues and where we're going to go.

So with that, let me introduce our panel. Our first guest is Dan Colosanto, Dan's lieutenant with the Garland, Texas Police Department, where he's been on the job for 28 years, 30 years, 28 on the tactical unit. Dan is a graduate of the US Military Academy and is the current president of the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association, TTPOA, which has 3000 members. Dan is the NTUA section chair for intelligence and Terrorism.

Our next guest is Chris Eklund. Chris is the president of Florida Swat association. He's also a sergeant with the Orange County, Florida SWAT office where he's been on the job for 24 years, 21 and a half of those have been spent on their team. Chris was a member of the NTOA Tactical Response and Operations Standards Committee for both the 2018 and 2023 revisions and is a graduate of the NTOA's command college in 2020.

Our next guest is Thor Eells. Those of you who probably know Thor, Thor is a retired commander from Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he served for 30 years, the majority of which was in tactical response, including serving as a SWAT operator, a team leader, and a team commander, or as the current executive director for NTOA after serving many years as a board member and a trainer.

Our next panelist is Nick Sprague. Nick is a commander with Broomfield, Colorado, where he's been on the job for 20 years, with 8 of those years spent on the team. Nick is the president of the Rocky Mountain Tactical Team association, or RMTTA, which was founded in 1987, covers the state of Colorado. Nick is our host for the conference on behalf of our MTTA.

Our final panelist is Brent Stratton. Brent is an assistant chief in the Bakersfield Police Department, where he served for 19 years, about twelve of those on SWAT as an operator, a leader, and a team commander. Brent is currently the president of the California association of Tactical officers and is a graduate of the CATO Strategic Leadership program. Please join me in welcoming our panel.

So just from a format standpoint, we're going to pitch the question to somebody. Then we will kind of just take turns feeling free to step in and kind of offer opinions. The goal is to pick up each topic, talk about it from a couple of different varieties, a couple of different viewpoints, with an eye on just getting you guys thinking about where we're going, what current issues are.

So we're going to start with constitutional policing and tactical teams. It's long been said that the government, in this case the police, govern at the consent of the people. This phrase roots back to the Declaration of Independence and implies that community's satisfaction with the government is crucial for the continuance of our country.

Recently, there's been a great deal of scrutiny placed on tactical units by the media, the federal government, by civil rights organizations. Those who criticize the use of special tactics teams argue that the units are militarized, violent, and use oppressive time, oppressive tactics which violate the rights of the people.

I'd like to start our time together by talking about several topics in this area and some proposed solutions. We're going to start with the issue of the day, which is militarization. Since Radley Balko's book rise the Warrior Cops. Critics have argued that police have become an occupying military force in many communities. As evidence, they cite a armor, camouflage uniforms, and the technology, like night visions and drones.

So, first question, gentlemen, have police become too militarized? Dan, why don't we start with you?

Dan Colasanto: So, full disclosure, I started reading the Balko guys book and I had to stop. So anyway, I started reading the Balko guys book and I had to stop because it made me sick to my stomach. I think the guy's a jackass, but I totally disagree, and here's why.

So when I started back in 95, we were part of the 1033 program. And I think what people don't understand is it's more of a financial thing. We were able to get uniforms. Our team was 28 guys. I don't know if anybody out there has had to outfit 28 guys, but it gets pretty expensive. So if I came to you and I said, hey, I can outfit your guys for free, all you got to do is go to Fort Hood, pick up this box of uniforms, and you can have it. I don't know anybody's going to turn that down.

Same thing with helmets. At that time, helmets. Helmets really weren't a thing. There were a lot of teams wearing helmets. In 1998, I was shot on a drug raid chest and helmet chest plate. And the helmet was one of the helmets from the 1033 program. So if we weren't in that, we wouldn't have that. Bearcats.

Now, my chief has me teach a class to our citizens police academy about this very topic, and one of the questions I get is, well, why do we have that? And they usually call it a tank. And I tell them it's not a tank and it's not a military vehicle, it's a bearcat. And it is the only thing that we have that stops bullets. Squad cars don't stop bullets.

You know, bearcats do. And if you were getting shot at, would you want me to come in that squad car? Would you want me to come in the bearcat? Everybody says, oh, gee, I didn't really realize that. So I think there's a – Some of it is a lack of understanding. As many of you know, there was probably some guys with the 1033 program abusing it, doing things they shouldn't do, which, as many of you in this room know, you have general orders in your departments, and it could usually be named after somebody because they did something wrong.

Same thing here. I think the system was abused in certain spots, and they took the pieces that they wanted to and made it into something that is not, you know, the bottom line is this equipment. These things cost money. A lot of these departments don't have the same budgets that everybody else does. And if they're gonna give you free stuff that you can use, I think you'd be stupid not to take it. But I think we need to educate people as to, hey, why are we doing this? Well, we're doing it because we don't have enough money.

So you can give us some more money, and then maybe we wouldn't have to do it. But the program is there, and I think it's very valuable. I think, for our part, we need to do a better job of explaining, hey, why are we getting this stuff? And in some cases, you know, you may end up getting the money, but I think it's more of an education piece, and it's certainly a financial piece that a lot of people don't understand. They just think you're getting it to look cool. And, I mean, that is part of it, obviously, but it is important to have this equipment.

Jon Becker: Anybody else want to weigh in on?

Thor Eells: I just want to emphasize the latter part of what Dan mentioned. NQA had, I guess, the privilege, if you will, to represent all of you at various congressional subcommittee hearings when the 1033 first came under attack. And I'll tell you, the most difficult task I had was explaining to various congressional members why a 30 officer agency needed 10,000 bayonets. True example.

We can be our own worst enemies at times. And so when we talk about just being cognizant every day, of being really professional and mindful about what you're going to do and how you're going to go about doing things, we've got to do that. And so I just echo that in that we will always be fighting a little bit of an uphill battle with some folks, I spent 3 hours explaining to congressional people why l rads were not a weapon because they had been told that l rads are being used by law enforcement to blow people's eardrums out of their heads.

And then once I asked them, well, do you want us to use time and distance as a means of having less force options? They were all, absolutely. And I said, well, you're going to take Elrads away. So that means I got to be close enough to yell at this guy or talk to this person. So it is an educational thing.

But just my ask of all of you, you're each ambassadors within your own respective communities, and politics dictates tactics. If you take nothing else away, as you walk here, remember that politics will dictate tactics. You can do some things in Florida that if you talk about doing in Colorado now, you'll go to prison for.

So it's a reality that we have to, I guess, adapt with. But each of you can play a role in providing factual information, in educating decision makers about where, when, and why we do certain things. It'll be frustrating at times, but nonetheless, it is an absolute necessity because there is an abundance of misinformation floating out there, particularly with this whole militarization issue and how we use things, etcetera.

Jon Becker: So, Nick, what's the perspective of the state of Colorado?

Nick Sprague: So I think part of the issue that we have also is as state presidents, I feel probably one to two calls a week from somebody who's just returned from overseas. They've gotten out of the military and they start their own training company. They want to come teach. We haven't really, in the past, have a good system for vetting that now with the state of presidents, we've kind of are meeting quarterly so we can vet some of those things because we can't deny there's going to be some influence of military and law enforcement, because when guys get out of law enforcement, they're drawn, or, I'm sorry, military, they're drawn to law enforcement.

So they bring some of that influence. And we got to be careful what we're teaching some of our guys on social media nowadays. You know, they see they have access to all that, and they'll come to training and say, hey, I saw this cool tactic, but they can't explain why. And then the team starts instituting it, or they find somebody who is one of their buddies that comes over and has their own program and they're not vetting it. The rules of engagement are different in law enforcement than they are in the military. And you really have to find those instructors who understand that balance.

We've had really good success with ex-military who are law enforcement, that start those training companies in Colorado, I can tell you the 1033 program is starting to die down. We had a lot of mraps, but now that, depending on how you read the new regulations on 1033, that you can't use mraps on anything drug related, a lot of those are just now sitting and they're trying to get rid of them.

I can tell you from doing the inventory at our police department, I'm trying to get out of it just because of the process in the inventory and how long it takes. So I think our biggest influence in Colorado is just what we get internally from the guys who are used to be in the military, and then they're starting to teach some of their teams, and hopefully the teams are betting those tactics and understanding the reason behind it instead of blindly adopting methods of entry. Or one of the big things I can tell you that I see, and if it works for you, it works for you, but you gotta.

However you are training on the range. I'm sorry, however you're deploying on missions, you should be training on the range. I can tell you, I see a lot of guys that when they enter a room from different teams, will…

Jon Becker: Shorten their rifle.

Nick Sprague: They'll shorten their rifles as they pull it back, and then they push it out as they go in the room. That's a very, that's from the military tactic, from the military. Not a lot of people understand the reasoning behind that. And whenever I see that, I always ask, are you shooting like that on the range? Because if you're not shooting like that on the range, you shouldn't be doing it on an operation. So that's kind of the biggest influence I see in Colorado is just some of that internal from the military guys.

Jon Becker: I think also, there was a big, you know, we went through 20 years of war as a country, and a lot of that was special operations based. Right. So a lot of the popular media is talking about special operations units. There were a lot of books and stories and a lot of heroic things that were done overseas that came back.

And I think that, one, that is attractive as an alpha male, that is an attractive persona. And two, we had an industry that was transitioning from the global war on terror and honestly grew quite a bit that saw an opportunity to remarket their products. And so there was an intentional conflation of the two by the industry trying to pull the LRAD is a perfect example. I mean, the reason that people think LRAD is a weapon is because Elrod was advertised as a weapon. And so I think as an industry, we shot ourselves in the foot.

Chris, what are your thoughts on kind of this as we're transitioning away from global war on terror? There is a lot of crossover, and obviously, there were a lot of lessons learned in theater that came back. How do we separate our military from our law enforcement in a way that is, we still get the lessons learned, but we don't create the secondary problem.

Chris Eklund: Well, and I'll say that before I hit the nail on the head, I believe that we are our own worst enemy in this profession. The topic of militarization although it's a national topic of conversation, I think it's also very regional as it applies to individual teams. I do know that we have an awful lot of opportunities now that exist to get training for military personnel.

My team in particular is very fortunate. We'll send guys up to Virginia beach or wherever and train with all these groups and things like that, which it's very important that we look at the things that we're taking away from them and glean what we can, but also the understanding of they're in a different world altogether. I've had people come to me and say, hey, and I'm sure we'll get to this topic about how we serve search warrants.

Hey, these guys do only surrounding call outs on their missions when they're in theater. And I say, okay, well, what happens if nobody comes out? Oh, well, they drop a bomb on the place. Well, that's a little outside our constitution. But I do think that there's definitely a pattern where we see sometimes that teams take these things, and I don't like to use the word enamored, but I will because it is attractive to think about, you know, the seals or CAG or whoever we're talking about.

And again, it's important that we all kind of take a look at that, glean what we can, but not try to replicate what they're doing all day, every day. Because what we need to recognize as SWAT teams is that we all, most cases have another job to do. We have families to go home to. We got our own sets of problems and we're not shooting 5000 rounds a day on the range. We don't have those budgets and we don't have that time just in life. So I think we really have to kind of take a step back and take a look at the differences between the two parties.

Jon Becker: You know, one of the things that I think has been a popular topic is the gear. You know, it's interesting because the easy thing to latch onto is the equipment, right? It's like, oh, well, they're wearing camouflage. They're military or, you know, they have armored vehicles. I come from the People's Republic of California. We're not as a state particularly proactively pro law enforcement, but we have seen regulation starting initially at gear because gear is easy to regulate.

And so one of the things that we've seen recently is this movement towards regulating the kinds of equipment that law enforcement is using. They're not outright banning it. They're making city councils report it. But we have seen two recent movements to ban the use of chemical agents and to ban the use of apprehension dogs.

Brent, as my fellow left coast brethren, give us a thought. You know, give us your perspective on what's happening in California, because we do have a tendency to export both good things that happen in SWAT in California and some of the bad things, and we are seeing a movement nationwide for that. So what are your thoughts?

Brent Straton: Sure. Some of the challenges that we face have really come legislatively. There was an assembly bill that came through. It came into effect last year that changed the definition of what military equipment is. Rifles, bearcats, drones, things that are used normally in law enforcement. That the definition has become, this is military equipment. It doesn't matter where you obtain it or how you obtain it. It requires each law enforcement agency throughout the entirety of the state to be able to articulate everything that they have, all the way down to the pieces of ammunition, debt cord, blasting caps, whatever it is that you have.

And to be able to, essentially, you have to go to your oversight body, which in county is a board of supervisors or in cities is city council, to be able to articulate everything that you have and to be able to outline the purchase request process, how much you've spent, what the lifespan is of that equipment, and your oversight body has to give approval for you to be able to have that piece of equipment.

I don't know what's happening throughout the rest of the country. It's a great opportunity, and I'd like to thank the NTOA for having me here so I can listen in and learn and hear what you guys all are facing. But I don't know if that's something that is going to start to come everywhere else in the country. But it's certainly something that we've seen here throughout our state.

So I think a big portion of it comes from a little bit of our own failures to engage, to be able to properly explain and to be able to put things in context as to what equipment we have, a little bit about what Dan was talking about, what we have, why we have it, how we're using it, and being able to educate, because when we take those opportunities and have the ability to have those conversations in a one on one setting, I've found that we've been successful in helping be able to educate some of our legislators.

But getting them to engage with us has certainly been, has certainly been a challenge. And like John said, when we're seeing legislative challenges to the use of chemical munitions, to the use of police dogs and military equipment, the changing of and the restricting of deadly force applications. My concern is that it's – if it's not something we can fix within our state, that it'll be something that will. That will spread.

Jon Becker: Nick, what are you seeing coming out of Colorado as far as regulation and moves like that?

Nick Sprague: So generally, it's either California does it first or Colorado. It's kind of like a race on who's going to implement the most restrictive policies. Right now, we're not seeing much traction. I think most of our legislators are waiting to see what happens in California, especially with a k nine and the regulations on that.

Fortunately, we haven't had anybody present any bills that we know of as far as regulating drones, bearcats. But we've been very intentional as RMTTA, pushing out to our association the importance of getting out to national night out, getting out to community events, because we can't control where legislation comes from.

So, for instance, we have a neighboring city that we work with that does not have a bearcat, and they ask for ours at a community event. For us, that's an opportunity to take our bearcat to that community, which doesn't have one, and show them that it's not a military vehicle and educate them, because legislation could come from that city. They don't have a bearcat and they're not knowledgeable about it. Legislation can come from anywhere.

So we've really tried to push that piece of RMTA, of that education and getting out there in front of your community and showing them to prevent kind of what's happening in California. We've been very successful with drones in our state. There's been no legislation that I know of coming down the pipe to ban those.

The biggest issue that we have is just that I get phone calls about DJI all the time and the status of DJI. And should we be buying DJI because of their bands with the government and the regulations that the government's putting on, that's the most that we're seeing is just that really the questions about what types of drones and is it safe to go to DJI?

Jon Becker: Yeah, the DJI, I think, is actually an interesting point because one of the things that I don't think everybody realizes is there are a number of interests here. Right? Law enforcement has an interest. Law enforcement is the most disorganized body when it comes to having an interest in representing it compared to everybody else.

A lot of the things you're seeing with DJI, there's certainly security concerns with Chinese technology built into American law enforcement and especially in the American military. But there's also a lobbying campaign that's taking place to bandaiden Chinese drums. Right? Which hit the state of Florida hard.

Chris, talk to me about what you guys are seeing from a legislation and movement in Florida.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, so we were hit by it pretty hard. We started really seeing the use of drones in Florida probably around 2017, that kind of timeframe to where we started using them. And I can tell you that even from my own team, that came from guys who were just flying them on their own, on their own personal time, and it was a fun toy and that kind of thing, and it made sense to push that thing forward. What we ended up starting to do is having to put verbiage in our search warrants to get the request to utilize the drone, much like we would with the k nine and things like that.

So people who are now authoring an affiance of these warrants and those sort of things had that verbiage that was established within our agency. When the list started to come out, there was a lot of panic because everybody had djIs, because it was a good product that was pretty inexpensive. I think we paid $1,000 for our first one, which is a credit card purchase for us. So that's pretty easy.

But as the technology started to come on and we've got better capabilities, we started to see limitations for me, and from what I'm kind of seeing in general, is that sort of started to back off a little bit. I think that lobbying portion actually came from an american drone manufacturer, if I'm not mistaken.

So there was some ulterior motives, and I actually spoke to the guy on the phone about the use of DJI's and things like that. And then all of a sudden, it became a big political issue. I think there's a lot of lack of education still at our state level and probably at the national level as far as what we're using these for. But we have definitely seen kind of a swing back to more availability to it and things like that.

Jon Becker: Dan, from a perspective of – I didn't realize it, but we inadvertently set up our panel left to right. I apologize for that. But starting at California and ending in Texas, draw your own math. Dan, from a perspective of Texas, what are you seeing? Because if you're going to look at the spectrum in the United States of kind of anti and pro law enforcement, California, Oregon, Washington, that's a pretty decent fight. I would say Texas is the opposite end of that spectrum. Are you seeing movements towards legislation, towards passing stupid laws? What do you see?

Dan Colasanto: In Texas, also known as America, we don't have some of the problems that these guys have, and we're fortunate. However, they are kind of creeping over legislative wise. No, but what I have seen from our perspective in our department is like restrictions on grant stuff. Now, especially with the drones, you know, it can't be chinese manufacturer. There's those little things. It's harder to get stuff up. You can still get it. Like bearcat. I use bearcats as an example. You can still get them. It's a little more difficult than it used to be. Same thing with like RIOT equipment, things that you used to be able to get easier, you can't get.

One of the restrictions that I found out about was you can't get gunships anymore. I wish I would have known that before because I would have really tried to be like the first PD in Texas to have a gunship. But, you know, some of the stuff that they actually restricted was actually ridiculous. If you read it, it was like gun boats and, you know, gunships and armed aircraft. I'm like, what?

So, but for the most part, it's more – It's harder to get. They're making it harder to get, but you can still be done. I think some of it, it's kind of like those of you that have ever tried to fill out NFA paperwork, they make it really difficult for you just to see if you're going to fill out all the stuff and do follow all the rules to get it. And I think that's what it is. It becomes, hey, this is so hard. We're just not going to do it. And I think, I don't know that they're wanting to do that, but that could be an end.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, it's important to understand that the opposition to law enforcement is organized. It is, I mean, there are lawyers who are sitting around with the lawsuit written waiting for the case to make bad law. If any of you want to ever understand this, there was a discovery special made about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the supreme Court justice at her time at the ACLU, and they talked about waiting for cases to make supreme court law.

This is very clearly what's happening on the left. This is, you know, we see it in California all the time. They are waiting for a bad dog bite to then go, oh, my God!!!!!

Dogs!!!

And don't let the truth stand in the way. As a guy who deals with law enforcement and military since I was 17 years old, I will tell you that the only thing on the militarized equipment list in California that is military equipment is a rifle. Everything else was created for law enforcement. Bearcats were created for law enforcement.

Law enforcement were using armor before we had up armored Humvees. Individual body armor was being born by police departments. You remember the first Gulf war? The big fight was nobody had body armor. So they're not worried about the truth here. And I think probably the best place to talk about that. Thor, what are you seeing on a nationwide basis and at a federal level that's concerning you?

Thor Eells: Well, it goes back to what I commented on a little bit earlier. It is ignorance, and I'm not saying that maliciously, although in some cases it probably does apply in that context. But it's a lack of understanding. It's a lack of knowledge of which I accept blame for. I can tell you when I was still on the job, I probably wasn't as proactive in sharing information and really encouraging people to understand what we do, why we do, when we do it.

And so I'll give you a quick example of a very recent event that was shared with me. But many of you saw the other day in Pittsburgh, national news, a sovereign citizen engaged in a pretty significant firefight with Pittsburgh SWAT. Pittsburgh SWAT ran out of ammunition. Pittsburgh SWAT, as a result of a prior incident, had already put thousands more ammo in their bearcat, and they still ran. Been out this time over. I mean, it's going to be tens of thousands of rounds that were fired in that incident.

But my example here has to do with drones. Many of you may have heard four drones were shot down. And Pittsburgh SWAT, by the way, Pittsburgh police is prohibited from having drones by a. These are my words, a woke mayor and new regime. They're prohibited because they want the cops out there spying on people with drones and using facial recognition, et cetera.

So all of those drones were shot down were from neighboring agencies, who are really thrilled to bring their equipment now to support Pittsburgh SWAT. But my point with this is at the debrief where the SWAT commander from Pittsburgh was brought into the mayor's office to answer to the actions of the SWAT team that day.

One of the things that was brought up was, well, we need more, more drones. And the commander from Pittsburgh SWAT shared with them. We don't have drones. Well, you had four shot down. They weren't ours. Why weren't they ours? Because you prohibited them.

The other thing I'll tell you is the drones that were shot down, three of them didn't function well because they were DJI, non militarized, non ruggedized equipment that everyone thought works fine until they get shot at or they land in water and they get wet and then they short out.

So if you're buying that equipment, you can't just go out and buy civilian off the shelf stuff because it's a $1000. You can use a credit card. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but there has to be a method to the madness. And the greatest challenge that I find when I'm in the beltway and try is this education is they are able to counter so many things that I don't have a good answer for.

So again, my plea is I can't defend the indefensible. You have to have a really good reason for what you're doing and why you're doing it, and you need to be able to explain it. If I were to ask people, why do you wear certain color BT use? Many of you aren't going to be able to answer that. Why do you wear or not wear balaclavas? Can you answer that? Why do you put on the back of a bearcat? Don't make us come back. I can't answer that. Those are the types of challenges that we have.

So on a national level, make no mistake, John is 100% correct. There is a segment out there that has a very orchestrated agenda against this profession. The vast majority support us, but they're that, quote unquote, silent majority. They're not the ones that are sitting in front of city council, county commissioners, lobbying state legislators for laws mandates to affect us.

The other thing I'll just wrap up with is keep this in mind. And John alluded to it, but I don't know if many of you really kind of caught on to what he was suggesting. There are over 21,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. 18,000 plus police departments, 3000 plus sheriff's departments. Then we have the states. And I'm not even going to get into the whole federal thing, but there are 21,000 ways of doing policing because of that.

There is one subspecialty in law enforcement where it's all done the same. Can anybody call it out? Only one. Bomb techs. Correct. Otherwise, everyone does it a little bit different. That's a challenge. Neighboring agencies do it differently. That causes confusion, misunderstanding, and that's the challenges that we're facing. So please just be mindful of that, that this is a full time job for all of you in educating and disseminating information.

Brent Straton: From my experience, what I see is that our officers are doing an exceptional job every day, that our officers are dedicated to the whole idea and the concept of constitutional policing, that this isn't a new buzzword, that we've dedicated our lives and our careers and our professional careers towards this, but there is an organized group of opposition that's out there.

And where we've failed is to try to engage intellectually, educationally, and from a leadership standpoint, I think there's a real vacuum in being able to have data. Now, I recognize that I really am running the risk of sounding like even more of an admin nerd than I already am at an NTOA conference to start talking to you about data and statistics. Right?

But when you start talking about that, there's 21,000 law enforcement agencies out there. That's great information. How many call outs are we having, on average? How many of these call outs are we having suspects that are engaging us? What are they engaging us with? There is no national database for these type of things. It's something that we're trying to build and be a repository for that data in California. Haven't been able to get there yet, but we want to have that type of information to really get to where we are telling our story and countering narratives.

When you realize that only 1% of your contacts are going to result in deadly force and 1% of those are going to be inappropriate uses of force, we've got to be able to talk about these types of things. And what is it that you're up against? This is why we need the equipment that we have. This is the exceptional rate that our officers are performing in, which is higher than a medical association rates in any other profession.

Good work is being done every day. We've got to be better at how we tell our story and getting this type of information out and then being able to educate our legislators to be able to talk with media. I think we still have a little bit of a turtle shell mentality that when interview requests come in, that we're not going to want to talk about these type of things, take those opportunities to really be able to inform and engage, and I think that's something that we can really, really do, and it's a gap that we can fill.

Thor Eells: If I can just share one quick example. If you're being asked to defend the utilization of bearcats mraps, you know, having rescue vehicles that are armored up, and you have legislators that are proposing new definitions that would prohibit you having that or requiring additional steps that you have to take, almost making it so difficult that you just give up on it. Ask your city council person, your county commissioners, your state legislators, when all the bank armored vehicles are going to be pulled from the streets.

I use that when I was in DC and they all looked at me like, oh, crap, we didn't think of that. I said, I can paint it and put brinks on it if it'll make you feel better and use the bearcat that way. That's the type of misunderstanding that exists. And to some extent, I'm not suggesting you use my sarcasm to be successful, because it won't work, but you got to be a little bit creative in getting people to sort of think and recognize what we're talking about, have that wherewithal to sort of flip the argument on them a little bit.

Jon Becker: But Thor, you raise it on the point there are hundreds of millions of contacts every year between law enforcement and tactical units. A minute percentage of those results in any force. A minute percentage of those results in deadly force. And yet law enforcement, despite how many good things you do, one bad case builds legislation.

You know, you look at the Rodney King case, the Breonna Taylor case, George Floyd case, these things have a tendency to resonate nationwide, even though they're a very small percentage. They're used to undermine public trust in law enforcement, to create bad law and cause the public to lose faith in law enforcement.

My first question, this is, what can we do to counter that? How do we counter that narrative with, you know, with facts, with, with information? Dan, you want to take the first swing at that?

Dan Colasanto: So I think it's important, again, it's education. And we're, sometimes we're not really good at that. I think in many of these cases, if we don't get our side out, somebody else is going to create a side, and then anything you put out after that, they're gonna think that you're lying. One of the good things that we've had success with is educating our council people, educating our citizens on, hey, this is why we have that.

And if in certain of these cases, if the information is false, we tell them, hey, listen, this isn't correct, but at the same time, if they did do something wrong, we don't try to. I think it's important you don't try to minimize that. I mean, if they mess it up, they mess it up, right? You can put as much lipstick on the pig as you want to, but it's still a pig. And if you try to trick them or make them think, hey, you know, hey, those guys didn't really do that bad of a job.

Well, I mean, we're all in here. If you're honest, in certain situations, yeah, they did do something wrong. However, in some of these cases, things are blown out of proportion. Not all the information is there. And I think it's our job to educate. Hey, listen, this is how we do it. This is why we do it this way. This is why we have these things. And, you know, in that case, are there bad apples? Yes, there are bad apples. There's bad cops, like there's bad lawyers, like there's bad carpenters and bad electricians. But what happens is they paint the bad apple brush across everybody, and that's what hurts us.

I think it's our job to educate. I mean, if it is a bad apple and it's really bad, hey, we just need to say it, hey, yeah, that's bad. Nothing we can really do about that. You know, hopefully we don't have that happen here and move on down the road. At the same point, if there's bad information out there, then we need to make sure that we're giving them the right information so that this bad information doesn't perpetuate into something that it's not.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you raise a really good point, which is you actually has two points. One is transparency. So let's start there. Chris, from your perspective, how can agencies utilize transparency to more effectively deal with the situation?

Chris Eklund: I know in Florida, and I don't know if any teams here are wearing body worn cameras for their teams and things like that. And we started that some time ago. And initially it was kind of a rough topic of discussion. There was a lot of, we need to redact this, we need to take that out if we're talking tactics and things like that. And the agencies have certainly come out and used these body cameras, I think, to our advantage.

For us, there was a big kind of a concern with us putting tactics and conversation out there in front of the news and letting people see what we're talking about. And we came to a period of time where we realized that there's no place you can't go. I can go onto any website that teaches CQB or anything like that and find something very similar to what we're all doing on a day to day basis.

So it's important for us to get out front of these things, show what we're, what we're actually doing and the events that transpired, and again, then be able to educate people on things that they may have questions about from what they're seeing.

Jon Becker: Nick, what are your thoughts on that?

Nick Sprague: So, Dan, hit it on the head is the information. But I would add to that, it's got to be timely information. You guys get involved in an officer involved shooting or something happens to the clock, starts with social media access to the Internet, there's going to be a narrative that gets put out there. And it depends on how fast you can get ahead of that narrative and whether or not you can control it. Because if you don't, you'll never get it back. And if you're behind it, you still won't get it back. No matter how much you put out there, you're going to be behind that narrative.

So the transparency piece is, I think we need to start turning that way because as Brent said, a little bit, we kind of turtle shell and keep that of no comment. It's under investigation. But the sooner we can get out in front of that narrative is with body worn cameras. It's coming out. You're not going to hide your mistakes. If there was a mistake or an error, they're going to see it all through the records act.

So the faster we can get in front of that narrative and not protect that information, it's only going to help us as law enforcement. And when we screw up, we screw up. You gotta. You're gonna have to own it as an agency.

And then the second piece of that is, we have screwed up. But here's what we're gonna do to correct that. So no longer can we just take the no comment stance. It just doesn't work with the social media nowadays. It's a matter of probably hours before that narrative gets out there, and it may not be the narrative you want.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I have a friend who's a chief of police, and his agency had a bad shooting. Like, it was. It was nothing. It was not a pretty shooting. And he immediately released everything. And I said, what made you do that? And he goes, you know, these situations are like horror movies. They're only scary when you don't see the monster and the music is playing.

Once you see the monster, it stops being scary. And so he put it out there and said, here's the video. And it died almost immediately. Because when you could see the monster and you understood what the officer did, it was much harder to defend. Brent, what are your thoughts?

Brent Straton: I think that SWAT teams and SWAT operators in their agencies are very well positioned to be leaders throughout their agencies. You're already leaders in tacticians, you're leaders in how you train. And the whole concept of after action report and taking a look at what you do and being introspective about that is something that's already built into the culture of your team. What I've seen in other agencies is that is not always spread throughout the entirety of the agency. Oftentimes it's a SWAT team that does that, but it doesn't happen anywhere else.

I think that as you start to take the long look at your career and where you are, being a SWAT operator is going to be one of the best portions of your career. But when you can start to look and take the principles that you've learned in SWAT and export them throughout the entirety of your agency, I think you're going to be putting yourself, your agency, and the profession in a much better position because it's taking the principles of after action reports applying to what Nick said in a PIO related setting.

How soon are we going to get this information out? How soon are you going to be able to disclose what exactly it is that you did? Because I'm absolutely convinced in seeing cases all across this country that our people are doing the right thing for the right reasons all the time. And when something bad happens, that's actually, it's actually an anomaly.

So being able to, again, talk about it, this may have been what happened. Your attorneys aren't going to like it, but they're going to find out about it anyways. Plaintiff experts are going to find out about it anyways because it's not something you're going to be able to ultimately cover up. So again, what happened? What do we do about it? How are we going to correct it? And I think these are the things that are going to help us in a public setting. I think they'll help you in a civil setting as well.

Jon Becker: I think one of the things that undermines public confidence, and, Thor, you touched on it, is when an indefensible act occurs, when bad behavior occurs, law enforcement is quiet, which gives the impression that at a minimum, they're complicit, and at a maximum, they support it. Thor, talk to me about defending the undefendable and how we can work around that.

Thor Eells: Perception is reality. So other than politics dictates tactics, this is your other takeaway. Perception is there is people's reality. And sometimes we can be defensive in what we do because we think and often know the reasoning behind it, but people don't. And so when they see something that we understand as being defensible, it comes across as being indefensible.

One, you discern that, but it's already been stated. If it's indefensible, don't make an attempt to defend it, you lose all the credibility that you have. Likewise. And here's my biggest problem, and some of you may be command staff in here. I was, I have the lobotomy. You can throw rocks and things at me. We have failed the profession. Right now, leadership in law enforcement across the country, the silence in defending the defensible has been deafening.

So if we're not defending when we do right, what is the assumption we did wrong? We have to find and commit to owning our mistakes when appropriate so you gain credibility, but you also have to be willing to have the courage within the leadership to defend what is right. We have abdicated that to a large extent, which has created a lot of the momentum behind the legislation, behind the criticism, behind the fabric of trust between communities and law enforcement that has been formed.

So I implore you, if you're in the leadership role, step up or step out, because we have to have a voice that stands behind the men and women that are practicing the constitutional policing that brendan spoken about as well as the others, or it really does us little or no good because the perception is still their reality and that's what they're going to walk away with.

Jon Becker: I think it's also, it's an interesting question as to whether this is a role that the state and local tactical associations should be stepping into. Right. Is this a role that the National Tactical Officers association should be in and I know is in? Dan, talk to me like, what are your thoughts? GDPOA is one of the strongest associations in the United States and is, I think, more prone to public speech through their members than a lot of the other associations.

Is this a role that the state association should be when it, when, and, you know, when is good behavior? Should, should it be incumbent upon the state associations to offer up an expert to say, yeah, this was good behavior? Because.

Dan Colasanto: You know, that's a good question. From, from our perspective, from TTPOA, we view our organization as a training organization. We supply the training. We bring in instructors, subject matter experts. And our stance has always been, hey, we're going to provide you the training, but we're not going to tell you how to use it. It's been that way. It's that way now. It's hard for us to do that.

I think we can guide our people, though, our members. And what I like to tell them is it goes back to the education, hey, you need to educate your citizens. You need to educate your city council people, do some demos. We don't really like to do that, right? We need to educate. You need to educate your bosses too, because a lot of them are sitting behind desks and they don't know what the heck is involved in what it is that you're doing and the equipment that you're using. I think when you do that, it makes your job easier. It's kind of like, you know, you have like the trust bank account. You focus on some of the good things you do and you put it out there.

And those things sometimes will help you later if you're doing these demos for your counsel and you're, and you're educating them that when something bad or close to bad happens, they may be a little more supportive. As far as getting super involved, it's a little difficult. I mean, we have over 3000 members from agencies from all over, so it's kind of hard. I don't see that as our place necessarily to kind of go that route, but we do get questions.

Jon Becker: Chris, what are your thoughts?

Chris Eklund: We're very similar in Florida to TTPOA in that we do consider ourselves a training association in Florida. I can go literally down the street and see different tactics that are being used from my own team in Florida. There's a huge difference in what operators are doing, what teams are doing, what their methodologies are, just like we see across the United States. And I've been approached by several people to try to establish a standard in the state and kind of be that mouthpiece to establish a standard across the state of Florida. That in and of itself is probably a ten or 15 or 20 year project just in and of itself.

So we don't consider ourselves a certifying agency, just like Dan. We bring in instructors from the outside. If we're going to host, say, a less lethal instructor course, we'll bring in the NCOA who has those standards and backing and things like that. I do get a lot of phone calls about questions and thoughts on different things as far as tactics go, and I'm happy to have those conversations, but we're not really putting ourselves in a position to try to mandate things for the state or teams within the state.

Dan Colasanto: I just want to add something, what Chris just said. We've had the same thing. I have people call me, what is the TTPOA? CQB. What is the TTPOA? Explosive breaching. What is the TTPOA? You know, barricade. Okay, we don't have that. It's like Chris said, we don't have that. We provide multiple options for you and you choose which one fits. You can either adopt it, adapt it, or just get rid of it completely.

And it's impossible. It's impossible. I think it's impossible to dictate. Hey, you're going to have, this is the TTPOA official CQB method that is well on president . That's not happening because I've been asked about it before and it just doesn't make sense to me. It can't be something that we regulate because there's too many agencies, there's too many different tactics and techniques, and what works for us may not work for them, may not work for you. And that's why it's important that you take those training opportunities, adapt them, adopt them or get rid of them or make it your own. So I just want to throw that in there.

Jon Becker: So Brent, California has standards, guidelines. What, what are your thoughts on this?

Brent Straton: I think that's one area we've been fortunate with the legislature to have a police officer standardization and training section. And we were fortunate enough for our association to be engaged in that and helping to try to write the standards. And I completely agree with Dan and Chris and where they are.

The standards have not been to try to go into tactics and dictating tactics at all, but really outlining the philosophies, how much training should come, what some of the ultimate standards are. And it's really just been a proactive attempt on our part to try to be able to outline what the philosophies and the general acceptance standards are to help be able to not only raise the overall competency of our officers, but to be the first ones to establish the standard and not have legislators push it on our officers.

So it's our hope that if we can, if we can be proactive in coming up with those standards, not every agency is. They're not mandated to be able to do these things. We don't want to put these certain standards out there, especially when there's not funding associated with being able to be in compliance with them. But we have made guidelines and recommendations throughout the state that we think it's in the best interest of our officers to help be able to push that forward.

Jon Becker: Nick, talk to me about Colorado.

Nick Sprague: So we've been fortunate enough to have a partnership with Brent and meeting him a couple of years ago that we have just over the past year worked on our own state standards, state recommendations. And we went to the route that CATO did is we put the recommendations out. We adopted it. This is a philosophy. It's not a mandate again and put the onus back on the team. The commander of the team knows what the capability, if you're engaged, should know what your capabilities are of your team.

So if you have any litigation, it's on you as the commander to justify why you're doing a deliberate hostage rescue, why you only need two snipers on this operation may work out for you. It may not. But again, there's so many different teams in Colorado. We're not as big as the other three panels up here, but they do things differently. We still have. I know this team's doing dynamic entries in this state. That's their choice.

If something bad happens, they're gonna have to face the consequences of that and justify that as a commander. But we will not mandate a certain type of movement. We won't mandate. You have to have these things. In a basic school, we make recommendations. We looked at CATO standards. We look at NTOA. I was on the trust committee this year with Chris, and we said, if you're gonna go to a basic, here's the recommendation from RMTTA.

What should be covered in a basic? If it doesn't meet that level? RMTA says, you're probably not getting the quality training that you need for your operators. But just like everybody else up here, we will not get involved in legislation. We're a training organization. We'll try and provide as much information when legislation comes out, if it – We can get the answers to it. I can tell you because of our close proximity, that was, with everything that was happening with George Floyd, we were the first state to have a police liability law, and we tried to get answers. We worked with our attorney general, we worked with our district attorneys, and no one would give us answers.

So as a state president, I was fielding phone calls and trying to do my due diligence, and we just couldn't get any answers from it. So sometimes that makes it a little tricky for us as presidents and the state association to be able to provide that information when these laws are getting forced on us and no one has answers for us.

Jon Becker: You know, it's an interesting role. So when you look at other professions, lawyers, doctors, they self regulate. They create a trade association that sets standards. And the reason that they do that is it prevents them from being regulated by legislation. So the American Medical association sets standards for doctors. The American bar association sets standards for lawyers. And you can certainly make an argument that practicing law or practicing medicine from state to state varies. Certainly practicing law varies from state to state, but the idea is, by regulating ourselves, we prevent, as an attorney, by regulating ourselves, we prevent somebody else from doing it.

So theoretically, the people that are setting the standards are the people that understand the profession. The NTOA and the state of California have established national standards and revised them. Many of the men that wrote those standards, Phil Hanson being one of them, are in the room. I think that one of the things that needs to happen is there's got to be some proactive work.

The NTOA took a proactive stance against no knock warrants and dynamic entry, which was met in some areas with a shrug like whatever, in others, not so much. I think one of the first things I would like to dissect is there's been a conflation of the term no knock and dynamic entry. So I think. Dan, can you talk to me about that? We had a conversation about this. Talk to me about separating the concept of a no knock warrant as a legal concept from dynamic tactics.

Dan Colasanto: So when the NTOA came out, put out their paper, my phone absolutely exploded. And I think part of the problem that resulted is they're not separating the two things. I'm not gonna try to insult anybody in here. Everybody should know, like, no knock is a judicial exception, right? I go to the judge and I say, judge, I want to dispense with knocking and announcing because of whatever these reasons are. I list the reasons in the warrant and I give it to the judge. The judge either looks at it and goes, okay, yeah, or no. But it's like being pregnant. You either are or you're not.

So it's not like once you put that information in there, you go, okay, wait a minute, judge, I'll be right back. I forgot to put something in there. You got what you got. You put it in there and the judge either gives it to you or they don't. That, to me, is separate from the dynamic portion. And I think what happened is, at least from my perspective, and teach Poa because I got a million phone calls, is it was misunderstood.

So now what it turned into was no knock. Dynamic is all one thing now. And no knock is a tactic, which it is not. But that was how it was interpreted, which then morphed into, okay, we can't go in anymore at all. So now we have to do surround and call out for everything. And there was this aversion to going in, and there people were trying to do whatever they could not to. And then, you know, my perspective was, well, eventually somebody's going to have to go in there if they don't come out or even if they do. You still have to go in there.

But I think it was somehow they were combined as to, as one thing, as a tactic, and they're not. And that, I think that caused an issue with people who don't understand. And then it goes back to the education piece. You have to educate people. Hey. Because now chiefs and other people are like, hey, you can't do that anymore because it's a bad thing. But they don't, they don't understand it. They just know what they read, how they interpreted it, which in some cases was not correct.

Jon Becker: So, Chris, the state of Florida doesn't have no knock exception. Right? Talk to me about that. And talk to me about how the NTOAs edict, Ngo's guidelines were received with a position paper.

Chris Eklund: So we were the state that basically did the shoulder shrug when the NCAA standards came out about no knox because they've been illegal for just about 30 years now in the state. Although I would argue that they probably became very prevalent in the earlier portions of, prior to that legal case that came out that banned them. I probably would say that because of the cocaine cowboys and all those things that were happening with Miami, we probably developed a large portion of those no knocks that were happening.

It's interesting to me that, again, we keep coming back to this education piece to where there are people who were upset about this position paper that came out. And having had the opportunity to go and talk to some people around the country, it's because they don't even understand what it looks like to knock on the door and announce your presence. It just doesn't exist in the world.

There is a huge confusion, like Dan said, with the separation of the no knock search warrant, which I've seen one in my career, it was federal, and we still did business the way we do business. It just gives us the opportunity to practice those exceptions that are listed in there, but we still do business the way we do it. The no knock is a piece of paper. And when you join that with probably the misuse of the term dynamic, because we've done that, too, as a profession, we've taken this word dynamic that really means continuing to move, essentially, and turned it into hair on fire.

My team was a dynamic team until 2014. It was the best twelve years of my career. I loved it, like, and just left right. And it took some real hard looking at the team and understanding what people's capabilities are. People are not really processing what they're seeing when they're moving at a dynamic misuse term speed. And when you prove that to them, all of a sudden you start to see teams slowing down.

So I don't have a problem with the exceptions of the no knock search warrant whatsoever and that they existed, I think the big concern, what the NTOA was trying to say is that no knock search warrant, combined with that misused term of dynamic, essentially illegal home invasion, is probably not best practices. And again, just coming from a perspective where I've never even seen one.

Jon Becker: So, Nick, the rationale for dynamic tactics is always that surprise provides opportunity to provide the tactical advantage, which, combined with a no knock, makes sense because, you know, the guy's in your living room before you know what's going on. But when, you know, you look at the Breonna Taylor case, which was presented as a no knock case and was not served as a no knock. They knocked on the door for a minute, which is how they had time to get out of bed, go get in the hall, and arm themselves.

If we're going to stand and knock and announce, it certainly would seem that the surprise aspect of dynamic, you know, dynamic entry, goes away. So help me understand that a little bit.

Nick Sprague: So, in Colorado, we just had legislation passed banning no knocks, with the exception of a judge can approve a no knock, which is what a no knock is. So it's kind of, the legislation contradicts itself, but within that, the very last paragraph, it says, oh, and by the way, you can only serve search warrants in the state of Colorado from 07:00 a.m. to 07:00 p.m. outside of that time frame, you have to get a judicial exemption from the judge.

And if they don't feel that you have that, you don't serve outside. 07:00 a.m. to 07:00 p.m. Our argument was, okay, patrol has been out for an hour. They're hailing this guy. They had their red and blue lights on. He knows it's the police. You call out the team on a barricade at 02:00 in the morning. Do we now have to wait until 07:00 in the morning to serve that warrant? And the answer was yes, unless a judge authorizes you to go in.

Our argument was what John had just talked about. The whole point of a no knock is to get in there, protect whatever you're protecting, the evidence, make your arrest quickly, whatever you're trying to do, the goal of your mission set, and have the surprise, the surprise is gone.

If you've been out there for an hour with your red and blues on and you're hailing the guy, so that really defeats the purpose of the no knock in banning the no knock, again, no one can give us any direction on that. In the state of Colorado so far, I know of. I don't know of any call outs where the judge has said no, they will not sign it. I do know judges in certain jurisdictions have come out and said, if I am presented with it, we will not sign it, even if you are on a barricade.

So that's going to be problematic. I have been involved at a 05:00 a.m. service that was the first one in the state that got the exemption. So some of the judges, and it's interesting too, because some of the das and judges don't even know that this is in effect right now. We've taken it to them and talked to them and they said, what are you talking about? We haven't heard anything about this.

So there's not even that education piece on that side. So that's what we're kind of fighting through on the no knock piece of it is we're having that barricade. They know that we're there, so why do we still need to get an exemption from the judge, which it just defeats the whole purpose of a no knock anyway? And we're trying to abide by and work through that and see what that, what looks like, because that's probably coming to California next would be my guess, after they've seen it happen here.

Jon Becker: Brent, talk to me about California.

Brent Straton: I think it's a rare set of circumstances where it would apply. And I think that it was something that the. When you said in some places it was kind of met with a shrug, this was one of the places where it was kind of met with the shrug because it's not something that is utilized very well. And I think the guys have done an excellent job of being able to articulate how some of these things have been kind of conflated, but it's not. It's not something that's utilized very often in our state.

Jon Becker: So you guys saw Chris mention something to me. We all agreed last night we were not going to step into the trap. Well, I was not going to step into the trap of dynamic entry, dynamic tactics and conflating the two. And part of the problem here is the terminology is very problematic. You know, 18,000 police departments, 3000 sheriff's departments, 10,000 SWAT teams, 9000 SWAT teams.

You know, you tell me, if you ask what a dynamic entry is, every one of those teams will have a different definition, ranging from your hair's on fire to, you know, smooth, controlled entry. And I think that this is a legacy of hostage rescue. You know, SWAT teams were born of hostage rescue.

And so, you know, that's where the style of movement came from. Several of the guests that I've talked to, who are the, you know, the OGs in this, talked about the 84 Olympics and the evolution of tactics and how that led to drug tactics.

So one of the challenges of not having a national standard is there isn't a national vocabulary. Years ago, I worked on a program with the Air Force to write a terms and definitions for non lethal weapons. And the whole job was we're going to get 15 experts together and have a conversation, and we're going to agree what non lethal means. We're going to agree what less lethal means. In this case, that hasn't happened.

And, you know, somebody who deals with teams all over the United States, it varies. I will tell you that the best example I heard somebody described is I have a driver's license. My 17 year old daughter has a driver's license, and Mario Andretti has a driver's license. We are all drivers, right? Nationally, if you own a pair of pride pants, you are a SWAT team. And so part of the challenge is defining what sets that level and those roles.

Now, Thor, the NTOA did take the lead here with standards, and the NTOA took the lead on the question of no Knox and on the question of dynamic entry. You've said in the past that safety priorities is what should drive tactics. Talk to me about that.

Thor Eells: Well, I'm going to back up just a moment. You heard from four different state associations, all of which I've had a very personal relationship for a number of years, particularly Florida and TTPOA, as I had difficulty hearing in the beginning, you can see looking at my old gray hair, I'm the old man here. I go way back when TTPOA was really new, Florida SWAT was really new.

So I've seen a lot of this evolution. And early on when I came into the NQA, one of the things I started to notice, and because I had relationships with friends in Texas, Florida, I had friends in California, with CATO, things were kind of done differently. We'd get around, we start talking. And that inconsistency, it troubled me a little bit. I was, I'm a little bit of a closet nerd.

But here's the problem with the, shall we say, it's not a divide, it's a philosophical difference. You heard from forest state associations say that they don't feel a responsibility. And those are my words, not theirs, in pushing standards, if you will.

But I ask you this. Do you think that the general public, on a national level, can make a discernment between Broomfield PD doing something tactically in what happens in Orlando or Bryan, Texas? Should all SWAT operators be able to shoot a gnat's a** at 500 yards while jumping over buildings in single bounds and catch bullet in their teeth? They don't make any discernment. A SWAT officer is a SWAT officer is a SWAT officer, no matter where they are in the United States. I don't care what color your uniform is, or I don't care how big your agency is, if you identify yourself as a SWAT officer, the general public is that you. You wear a cape and you can fly.

And so when you have different agencies doing things different, and then things go bad, who is affected by that? Nick touched on it. The state of Colorado was the very first state in the entire country to pass police reform legislation which eliminated police immunity, governmental immunity. It did restrict the use of less lethal munitions in certain circumstances and everything as a result of what happened in Minneapolis. Bromfield PD wasn't responsible for that. Minneapolis PD was.

And so we can lament the fact that we shouldn't be doing this, but I will offer this, and this isn't in the defense of the n two a, so to speak, because I'm happy to have the conversation all day long, but if we don't have some degree of standard in methodology of how we're all applying and performing, we're going to struggle. The reason the bomb community can do what they do is because it's all the same. You talk to any bomb tech, whether it's in Taos, New Mexico, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they'll talk the same language.

So our motivation in doing what we did was we felt there has to be a common language, whether it's dynamic, whether it's what's no knock mean, what is a minimum number of people to safely do things. From the very beginning, the mission of the n two a was to save lives. And very early on, for those of you that have been around a while, you know, we used to be referred to as the priority of life. We changed that to safety priorities. In understanding what should dictate how we make decisions based on what is safest. For our mission set, that became the cornerstone.

And so with that, we developed minimum numbers, minimum training hours. And you notice I keep using the word minimum. You can always go above and beyond, but if you're going to engage in some of these things. There are minimum necessities in order to be able to do that safely. And it isn't because Thor said it. It's because the NQA went out and extended invitations to all the state associations to be participatory in this, to identify subject matter experts from small, medium, and large agencies, full time agencies, part time agencies, etcetera, etcetera, and then compile that and say, given these mission taskings, what is the minimum necessary to achieve that?

So that folks go home in one piece. No guarantees in our profession. We get that, but that was our mission and our goal. Tying that with a glossary. Now, several of the gentlemen were actively participants of the most recent troves. It's our most robust glossary, so that the terminology is beginning to become common and that there's a distinction between some of the more confusing components.

But I do get asked on the national level answer to actions that are happening at state and local levels. And that's why I'm passionate about us wanting to have some means of a minimum capability that we can present and then articulate and defend without the uninformed challenging us. Because if we don't write our own story, someone else is going to do it. And when it's done, we may not like it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's like a reputation, right? Everybody has one, and if you're not paying attention to it, it's probably not good. As we get close to the end of our time together, I'd like to leave some time for questions. Does anybody have questions, comments, suggestions, anything we want to discuss that we haven't covered? All right, gentlemen, why don't we go concluding thought. Brent, you want to start us?

Brent Straton: No, it's just a great opportunity to be here. Thank you, Jon, for putting it together and Thor for bringing everybody together here. It's just a great opportunity to continue to learn from each and every one of you. So thank you for, for the work that you do every day.

Nick Sprague: Yeah, I would echo that with what Brent said. The profession's in great hands. We do have a small percentage we have to be careful of. If you guys need anything while you're in town, look for one of my guys. We can help you with restaurant recommendations. Rockies are playing tonight. Whatever we can do to help. Our booth is over there. We'd love to have you out at our conference. It'll be out next year in August. We've got training classes out. So thanks to Thor, John, Chris, Dan, Brent, for being on this. It's a great opportunity.

Thor Eells: Well, I want to thank the panel members for being here, Jon, for facilitating this. I want to thank all of you for being here. It's, as you've heard, critical for us to be educating ourselves and finding ways that we can help ourselves and one another in doing this. One thing I want to share with everyone is this. There's a perception out there that I'm the busiest man in the world and not reachable or otherwise. If you ask me for my business card, my personal cell phone is on.

If any of you have any questions, concerns, criticisms, critiques, or otherwise heartburn, call me. You can email me. I'm slow getting back to you because my dear friend Max, who's known me for a while, I'm an old fart. My kids don't think I should own a smartphone because I don't know how to use 90% of the functions on it.

I much rather talk to you on a phone so there's less room for misunderstanding and where I don't put the right punctuation in a sentence or otherwise, so it's construed differently. But if you call me and I don't answer, it's because I'm in a meeting or otherwise, I promise you I will always call any one of you back personally and have a conversation on any topic that you want to discuss. It's what we're here for.

What I'm here for is to advocate for all of you and to hopefully leave our profession a little safer and a little better when I fade off into the sunset here someday. So thank you all for what you do. Thank you for your service, particularly in this day and age, and just please be safe and take care of yourselves and one another.

Chris Eklund: I want to say thank you for the opportunity to sit up here with these guys, very well represented, and I'm proud to be up here with them. Thanks, Jon, for putting this together. It's very good to see everybody in here continuing to try to educate yourself. I think that's really what we need to do. And, you know, we all come into this profession and we try to do as good as we can and, you know, amp up our skills, be the best operators, be the best, whatever profession, part of the SWAT team that we want to be. And oftentimes that education piece gets missed.

So it's really good to see all these people in here, and I'm glad I had the opportunity. I know Dan's going to talk about Texas being America. They do not have a Ron DeSantis. So sorry for that. And we're hiring.

Jon Becker: Just like that. The right turns on itself.

Dan Colasanto: We're building a new wall to keep the California people up. No, I'm just kidding. You're welcome to come to Texas. Just bring your guns with you. I want to thank you all for coming here. I was kind of worried, like, nobody'd show up. I want to thank my panel guys that were up here and John for putting this together and Thor for coming out. I can't stress enough, the education thing.

I know it's something we don't like to do. But educate your citizens and your council people, you'll be very surprised. Just from my experience, we did that. Do some demos for those people. Show them what you have and what you need, because they don't understand. One thing I learned a long time ago, we needed Pec 15 lasers. I took the city manager out. I showed him what this is. I let him shoot it. Took him to the range. He shot with nods. He's like, oh, wow, this is really cool. We don't know, but on paper, those people see that, they don't know what that is.

But when they see it and you show them how it works and how it makes your job easier and how you might be able to save their life someday, it makes things easier. Same thing with the bearcat. We call it the jungle gym for kids. We take it everywhere we go. The kids love it. We take it to schools, which is different from other people, but it desensitizes people to it.

And when they see it, they're like, oh, yeah, it's just the SWAT guys with the armored jungle gym, and city council bought us another one, so. But that's because they were educated and they drove in it. We used to have an old bank armored car with no air conditioning, so I used to take them all on a ride with that, and they go, why don't we have air conditioning? I go, well, because we don't have a bearcat. But this is what it looks like.

So please, please, educate your folks. And last thing, know the reason why you do the things you do and be able to explain it to somebody. Because especially to people who have no idea, don't think that they know what you do or why you do it, because they don't. And if you don't tell them and you don't explain it, they're going to make up their own reason why they think you do it. So protect yourselves because it pays off.

Jon Becker: So, gentlemen, it's very easy for you to get beaten down and to think that people don't care. What you do matters. You matter. Please be safe. Thank you!

Episode 31 – July 22 Norway Terrorist Attacks – Delta Norge Response

Jon Becker: On July 22nd, 2011, Norway experienced two terrorist attacks, a bombing at a government building in Oslo and a mass shooter event at a youth camp on nearby Utoya island. These were perpetrated by a lone right wing extremist. These attacks were unprecedented for the peaceful country of Norway and stretched the Norwegian first responders to their limits.

My guest today is an active member of Norway's most elite tactical and counterterrorism police unit, Berridge Skapstruppen, also known by its call sign Delta, and internationally as Delta Norris. Because of the nature of his current assignment and the nature of their work, it is critical that we maintain his anonymity.

As a result, we will not be showing his face on video or using his real name. Additionally, because these events resulted in the death of 77 people, most of whom were children, and the injury of more than 300 others will not be glorifying the attacker by using his name. It is our hope that the memory of the attacker will be forgotten, but the memory of his innocent victims will not.

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!

Hey, thanks so much for being here with me today!

I really appreciate you coming out and spending the time with me!

Guest: Thanks for having me on your podcast! I'm really grateful for being there!

Jon Becker: So why don't we start with. Because we have kind of an international audience in Norway. For context, Norway is about the population of the city of Los Angeles, about the size of the state of New Mexico, stretched in a long line. Biggest city being Oslo is roughly the size of Las Vegas. So help me understand the structure of Norwegian policing.

Guest: Yeah, we have several police districts. So at the moment, we have twelve different police districts, which each have their own chief of police, and they're more or less the same structure. So you got the police chief on the top, and then with the different policing sections underneath.

So, for instance, in Oslo, where my unit is located, you have the normal police, just kind of like the patrolling police officer that you see out in the street in the police car, and then you have something that is kind of like a SWAT team. It's like a more tactical, more trained police. And then you have my unit, which is like the HRT or counterterrorist unit. So that's pretty much it.

Jon Becker: And the unit is at the national police level?

Guest: That's correct, yeah. So we have a compound which consists of other different national units, and we're on call for the whole country. So if the police chief in the northern police district needs help with a mission, he will call, and then his call will be approved, and then we will set off to assist that police district.

Jon Becker: So is the – Are the police districts still national level police?

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Or are they individual organizations? So the whole thing is national police. It's just split up into twelve different districts.

Guest: Yeah, so. That's correct. And. And you have something called the police directorate, which is kind of like a supervising level of the police, which is in charge of the national policing, more or less. It's close attachment to the politicians and justice department, and they have different sections, so they cooperate with the different kind of police districts in order to how the policing in Norway will be conducted in.

Jon Becker: So your unit starts in 76, I'm assuming. It probably has its roots in Munich, like every other counterterrorism unit in the world.

Guest: Yeah, that's correct. It was a Munich incident and spurred the start of the unit. And it was going under a different name up until 76 or 75, I think. And then officially it changed name to be in 1976.

Jon Becker: And talk to me about the unit, like, how big, what's the mission set?

Guest: Yeah. At the moment, our unit is approximately 120 to 150 people altogether. The exact number of the operators are. It's like a secret thing, so we won't disclose that. But we have grown throughout the years and we are four different divisions, so we. Which have a team, like two teams on each. Division. So there's eight teams altogether. And on each division you have more or less all the specialties that we have on the teams.

So you have specialty teams divided into all of the four divisions. At the time of 22nd July, we had a different structure in my unit, where you had two special teams altogether, which made out one division. So we have swap. Yeah. So we mixed up the teams. So every team now is like a multifaceted assault team. Would you like.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, so breaching capability, maritime capability. CQB capability.

Guest: Rope entry, everything and sniping. So all of those capabilities are on one team or each team now of those eight teams?

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it's difficult, I think, for a lot of people, maybe in the northern part of Canada, but it's difficult for people to understand how much the environment can be a participant in your operations. You have a very angry ocean, you have periods of very long periods of darkness and strong weather and cold temperatures.

So I'm going to guess there's a pretty significant maritime capability to the unit and pretty significant nordic capability to the unit.

Guest: Yeah, that's definitely true. And it's all depending on what time of year it is. Late autumn and winter. First part of the winter is definitely the hardest, hardest time of the year to move around. In Norway. A lot of the mountain passes, they close up during the wintertime. That can happen within just half an hour time. And when it does that, obviously you can't fly helicopter, and you also experience sometimes difficulties taking off and landing the airplanes on the commercial routes going here in Norway.

And like you said, we have a huge. There's a small country, small, long, thin country, but we have a lot of coastline and there's a lot of small islands and communities living on all scattered along that coastline, all the way from the south, all the way up to the north.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I was surprised in doing my homework, I was surprised about more than 70% of Norway is just uninhabited.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: It's just barren tundra, basically.

Guest: And the further north you go into the country, then the less roads you have as well. So you're more or less confined to one specific driving road..

Jon Becker: Which makes – Definitely makes it a real problem.

Guest: Yeah, it makes it a real problem. And sometimes the distance isn't that far, but you need to drive all the way around a big lake, for instance, because you don't have any bridge across it. And it's the same thing with the mountains. Not every mountain has a tunnel through it. So, like you said, logistics becomes challenging at times.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Which is going to be relevant to today's discussion, for sure.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: 22nd July 2011. How's your day start?

Guest: Well, for me and my units, or my team, then we started out pretty much as we did every day back then, I was working the day shift, so we just met at work, sat around the sofa, had a coffee and planned the day. And what we do is more or less, in the morning we do the physical training, so we did that. And then we had planned to do tactical training all throughout the rest of the day. And, like coincidence with habit, that day we were training for exactly the mission that happened, more or less at Utoya, where you had small terrorist units attacking soft targets.

Yeah. So we were doing that and just having a good day, had a nice, really good training. And then afterwards, my team, we were planning on going climbing in an indoor climbing center. So we did that when we were let off at work at 03:00 p.m. in the afternoon. So, yeah, and we hadn't been climbing at the center for very long because all of a sudden all the phones rang and we were on call that week as well.

So it's never a good sign when all the phones calls at the same time when you're together. So we knew that something had happened and that we were probably gonna have to drive into work. So, yeah, so I was just quickly let down from the wall and took my phone. And the guy from my unit that called, he just said, you need to get to work really quick. A bomb has gone off in Oslo.

So I told the rest of my guys in my team, because I was team leader at the time, what had happened and what the call had been. And we just held up all the gear and went to the wardrobe to get our stuff. And the phone called a second time. And then same guy, he said, well, you definitely need to hurry up. A second bomb has gone off.

So then we were like, two bombs going off and we were already on the first call. We were like, well, this isn't an accident. There's a terrorist attack. So we're just already planning ahead in our head and getting ready for. Bob was waiting for us. And when we had gotten our shoes on and we were about to leave the climbing center, the phone rang for the third time. And it was basically the same message that another bomb.

So the third bomb had gone off in Oslo. So that was our start of the afternoon. So we just drove off from the climbing center really quick and back to our job and went inside, geared up and just went straight ahead out, drove off and then over to the place where the bomb had gone off and started working there.

Jon Becker: So let's talk about the bomb, and we'll kind of talk about, you know, we have a standard practice of never mentioning the suspect's name, so we'll just call him the suspect. Yeah, I have a variety of other adjectives that I could use, but we'll avoid those. Yeah, so this.

Guest: Exactly.

Jon Becker: At least try. So the suspect. Talk to me about the bomb. Where was it placed, how big? All that?

Guest: Yeah, you asked me about my day and I. I told you about it. So from his perspective, his day started way differently than ours. So his bomb was placed inside. I think it was a volkswagen crafter. So that's kind of like a big van. And it was an anfo bomb. I think it was about 950 AMFO that he had put inside there.

Jon Becker: So he drove off close to a ton of AMFO.

Guest: Yeah, a big bomb. Yeah. And he drove that one off and he parked it outside. There's a. There's more or less a block which consists of governmental buildings there at the time. And he parked. He drove it right up to the main entrance of the high building where the prime minister office is at the top floor, and went back, lighted the fuse because he had a fuse to the bomb and walked off from the car.

So I think according to the timeline that was drawn up afterwards, that one happened about a 03:15..

Jon Becker: So quarter pastor. What day was it?

Guest: It was on a Friday. So it was just a typical summer vacation had kicked in in all of Norway. And it was like, it was a slow Friday and the weather was bad, it was gray. It had rained a lot, which was kind of, like, fortunate given that there wasn't that many people out in the city. So, yeah, like I said, the most Norway during the summertime and the vacation time is. Yeah, there's not much going on. So there weren't that many employees inside the high building, which was fortunate as well.

So, yeah, like I said, a 03:15 p.m. and after we had gotten the call from the climbing center, one of the guys, he had ridden his bike to the climbing center from his home, and he said that he thought he had heard thunder on his way because of the rain. But he realized afterwards that he probably heard the detonation of the banda.

Jon Becker: Oh, wow!

Guest: Yeah. Because it made….

Jon Becker: How far away for you, how far away from the site were you guys?

Guest: We were indoor as well, but we were about, I would guess more or less like 2 little less.

Jon Becker: That's a long way for that sound to go.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of buildings in between, so the sound would have been distorted anyway. So, yeah.

Jon Becker: So he lights the fuse. It's a mechanical fuse. It's an actual burning fuse that he lights.

Guest: Yeah, I think it was a black powder fuse that he used. Interesting. Yeah, it is kind of interesting. And of course, he had been working on that bomb for a long time, which the investigation disclosed afterwards.

Jon Becker: Yeah, this guy had been planning this event for a really long time. Right. And had done a great deal of research and homework.

Guest: Definitely. And I think shortly, about an hour before he parked the cardinal, he published his manifesto online as well. And then he drove off. He had a second car parked nearby, which he also placed out in advance.

So after having parked his crafter with the bomb inside. He walked off from that one and to his second car, got inside and then drove off to – what. We didn't know, at least at the time, though, what was to be his second attack, which was Utoya. So he left Oslo about the time when the bomb went off.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So he sets the bomb and leaves.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And moves on to the second step of his path. Now there was – Was there – Did it end up that there was only one device in Oslo? Because I know you got reports of multiple bombs.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: But was it a single device, right.

Guest: It was a single device and we learned that afterwards. But because of all the damages because of the blast wave in downtown, people had heard the sound ricocheting and there were several. Several buildings that got shooken up during the blast. So I think it's just one of those things when. When things become that chaotic. You know, people calls in from the place, they experience whatever happens. And you can't really. It's a hard puzzle to sort out at the time that it's all connected.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You see it in every. Every incident we debrief, you know, a single shooter is always reported as three or four shooters. A single bomb is reported as multiple devices. Yeah, I think it's just people, you know, people have different perceptions and they see things and, you know, you get multiple reports and the reports give different information. And that noise is always problematic in all of these events.

Guest: Yeah, it's like you said, it's problematic at an early stage, definitely. And I think it's really hard to sort out as well. I mean, if you were to analyze it and put it together, it would require a lot of manpower, I think, or some sort of computer. I don't know.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you have to have some kind of intel center that could confuse the data. Even then, what you're getting is not that accurate.

Guest: No, it's not. It's chaos just coming through like a pipeline to the police. So, yeah, that was it. So I get told when we arrived, we knew. We got to know where the bomb island had gone off and we packed gear, so we took our assault, like tactical assault gear, and we also packed for my team, we packed climbing gear, rescue gear, like, for any kind of use, our urban search and rescuer, because we were expecting collapsing buildings and holes in all sorts of situations. And then we just drove to the place.

And I remember driving there, you could see like big heaps of glass in the streets. So it was difficult getting from the outside area and into the last site because of all the glass. And we were thinking, we don't want to drive over the glass because it's going to create punctures and the car will more or less be useless. But we couldn't find a clean route in, so eventually we just had to risk it and drive off and drive through the street that we thought had the least amount of glass in it.

And then eventually we came close enough and unloaded from the car and ran off and had a quick briefing with my assault leader at the time, and then he was together with the on scene commander, because at that time there were already a lot of police and civilians in the area and first responders unit. And the fire, it was next to the main fire station in Oslo as well. So they responded.

And getting there, I can remember there were all sorts of sirens going off and visually arriving there. There were, I don't know, several hundreds, maybe thousands of documents flying through the air, burning. There was smoke, fire, distorted, all sorts of distorted materials thrown around.

It was a huge car wreck lying in a fountain a bit far, and you could see just a huge crater. Weather car had stood and the whole building and the main entrance was unrecognizable to us. And it was a really hard time finding the way in to the building. There were a small team from us that had already been inside the building. Like I said, there weren't that many people in the building.

So when we were going in, the plan was just to quickly search through it roughly after survivors. We weren't expecting any attackers inside because of the damages and because of the normal mo, but we couldn't be 100% sure. So we were all on alert for that one as well.

And yeah, it was difficult moving on from the ground floor and up to the middle floor of the building simply because of all the collapsed building materials. There were holes in the floors. I remember the elevator shaft were just completely knocked inside. There were windows knocked inside, doors thrown around, electrical wires hanging from the ceiling, making sparks, water pipes throwing water in. So complete chaos. And you just had to scramble through every hallway, every room of the building, searching for any survivors or traces of survivors inside.

So we did that for a while, went from the bottom all the way to the top, and we didn't find any. My team didn't find any because at the time they had already been evacuated from the building. So, yeah, I can remember going inside. We were definitely running across someone at the time. They were just. You could see that there were human remainings on the street there. So we knew immediately that there were probably several. You expected to see several dead and injured inside the building. But we didn't.

Jon Becker: And it was what? Eight people? Nine people were killed with the initial blast and a couple hundred injured. Is that?

Guest: Yeah, that's true. Only eight people killed in the blast. And then there were several people nearby being injured from shrapnel and the blast wave and glass falling glass into the streets.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you guys search the building?

Guest: Yep.

Jon Becker: Obviously, you know, every first responder in Oslo and probably the surrounding areas is descending on the problem. The suspect, in the meantime, has snuck out in his other car and driven away.Guest:

Yeah. So he's on his way to Utrea. So I think on the normal condition, that's about what would it be a good hour drive from Oslo under normal conditions. But it was in the afternoon and I think there were actually a car accident that had happened on the way out from Oslo, which slowed him down a bit. So he was stuck in traffic for a while. But eventually he arrived Utah with his second car. And then his plans for attacking the youth camp that was going on there.

Jon Becker: So let's kind of set that up. So everybody, every police, fire, medical resource available is descending on Oslo. The meantime, the suspect is heading an hour, you know, out of town to the island. Now the island is how far off the coast?

Guest: It's actually based in inland. So it's on Fjord island. It's based inside a Fjord.

Jon Becker: Oh, really? Okay.

Guest: Like a huge lake. Yeah. So. And it's fresh water, obviously.

Jon Becker: So it's how far off the shore is. You know, what's the boat transit time?

Guest: I think the shortest line to shore is where the local ferry is coming and going. And that's approximately 600 meters. It's not that far.

Jon Becker: Okay. Yeah. So it's relatively close, which will make other things make sense in a minute.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So. Okay, so the island is. Is a summer camp that is occupied, if I remember correctly, by kids from one from the political party that he opposes. Like political leaders. Kids, right?

Guest: Yeah, that's more or less true. They have, they have. It was the youth Labor Party. So they have this summer camp every summer on that island. And they had had it for quite a few years. So it's more. It's a traditional event happening every summer. And it's like you said, it's a political camp. So they do debating and all sorts of political stuff there. And then they have concerts and obviously more like youth related activities as well.

Jon Becker: And how many kids are on the island? Like, give me. Give me some sense of the size of the island, how many kids?

Guest: It was more than, I think it was around 550, 560. So just below 600 persons of the gather on the island on that day.

Jon Becker: And these are primarily teenagers, right? 13 to 19 or 20?

Guest: Yeah, there's. Yeah, well, at the time I didn't know this. I knew that the event was going on, but I didn't know exactly what dates and what time of summer. But there was a small staff of adults there, sure, as well. But for the most there's young adults and teenagers, so.

Jon Becker: Yeah, got it. So the suspect, while everybody's tied up, the suspect goes over to catch the ferry out to the island.

Guest: Yeah. Because there's – Then there was a local and there still is a local ferry leaving or driving from the land side over to the island on the fjord, which is the ferry. His name is Ms. Torbjorn. So he drove his car down there. And then ever since Oslo, he was wearing a fake police uniform which he had made on his own. And he also wore fake police credentials hanging from his neck.

And that was a piece of information that we were actually given from the on scene commander when we came out from the building after searching there. But yeah, so he, he arrived the ferry and said that he's a police officer and he used the incident in Oslo to talk his way and said that he needed to go to Utoya.

And I don't remember exactly his words, but he was tricking his way. And the guy that drove, the captain that drove the ferry, he had no reasons to not believe the guy, obviously. And he drove him over from the land side and to, with his car, and inside his car he had all sorts of stuff and supplies for his attack.

Jon Becker: Oh, so he put his car onto a ferry.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Oh, okay. I'd always gotten the impression he walked on the ferry. So he takes his car, drives onto the ferry and then the ferry takes him out to Otoya.

Guest: Yeah, that's true. So as soon as he arrived, and this is his words afterwards. We didn't know that at the time, obviously. But as soon as he arrives there, he obviously has plans to conduct his attack there as soon as possible. But he is met by One of the adults, which is a female, so she was called Mother Eutoya because she was always there for the youth camp.

And then another, actually a civilian policeman, he was off duty, but he was working there as security. So they met him because the captain that drove the ferry, he talks to and comes to them and they arrived.

And what the perpetrator has said afterwards, during the trial is that he was afraid that he was being made by the police officer because he started asking, I guess you would call them, confronting questions because the outfit that the suspect had made wouldn't fool any police officer. He had his black spandex shirt, so he did his best to copy and imitate Norwegian, like a standard Norwegian police uniform.

Jon Becker: But it was. But a real police officer immediately would recognize that it was not a real cop.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And just for context, I kind of forgot to pull this up front. But Norwegian police don't normally carry guns during the day. Right. Like the street police are not. They're not armed, if I remember correctly, they have weapons, but the weapons are secured.

Guest: Yeah, that's true. We only carry arms under special conditions. So we will need to have a permission. Or we could also arm ourselves if we find that necessary, given the mission that we're on, if we don't have time to get the formal permission.

Jon Becker: But this is not. You're not. You're not wearing a holster with a gun in it. You're physically going and taking a gun out of a locked case.

Guest: Yeah. Inside the police car. So if you leave them, the further away from the police car you are, the further away from your weapon you are.

Jon Becker: And as a result, I'm also assuming that no Norwegian police are carrying guns off duty.

Guest: No, that's true. We're not.

Jon Becker: So this police officer, although it's a police officer on the island, he's unarmed.

Guest: Yeah, he's on what we call private overtime. So he's being paid by. I wouldn't know for sure, but I guess the organization. And then he's there. Assets, a will in person, first and foremost. Not as an formal police officer at the time. I understand if that becomes confusing, but. Yeah, but that was. That was kind of like the arrangement that he had. So he didn't. He wasn't there wearing a police uniform. He wasn't there wearing any kind of tactical police care and no weapons within reach. So that's pretty much summed up.

Jon Becker: Got it. So they start to engage the suspect, ask questions. The suspect thinks he's mad. What does he do next?

Guest: Yeah, what he does is, like I said, he starts getting nervous. And then I think what he said is he pulled up his. Because obviously he was armed and he pulled his pistol and then he shot both of them in the head. And then that started off the attack.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So he executes the two adults and now the kids. As far as the actual island goes, the kids are. They're kind of scattered all over the island. Right. It's kind of like different bunk houses or boarding.

Guest: Yeah. So it's not a big island, and it's like a roundly shaped island and more like a. Yeah, I would guess kind of like a not so round pancake information. So there were different pineal areas on the island that the kids were doing, I think, at the time. Some of them were up in. There's a cafe building, which is.

So there's a small knoll coming from the dockside of the island, which is east side. And then immediately you step up and there's a lawn, and then you have a white main building, which. Where the two adults were executed. And then behind that main building, there's a hill, and on top of that hill, you got a cafe building.

And then all the way, almost on the northern tip, you have something that they call the pump house, which is, I guess, a water pump house or a water supply on the island. And then if you go continue to the south, you will have a red cottage based in an open area. And there were tents nearby that cottage as well, set up by something which is a volunteer organization that they help out doing search and rescue missions in Norway and doing first aid. So they had kind of like a first aid station there set up next to that red cottage. And that cottage they were calling that one school building.

And then that's pretty much the buildings. And then you have like a grassy hill with a scene at the bottom, which were there, and debating area and concert area. So at the time, the kids would be on those places?

Jon Becker: Yes, the kids are kind of scattered all over the island.

Guest: Yeah, they're definitely scattered all over the island at the time. And there's also. Yeah, there's a huge tent area where they had pitch all their tents as well. And there's a huge building behind that one as well. So I think it was. Yeah, I don't remember exactly how many buildings there are, but there's definitely four big buildings and then lots of tents on the area at the time. So they were just all around those places.

Jon Becker: And the island, like, just to give me some sense of. What do you think the size of the island is? Like? What do you think the diameter across it is?

Guest: That's just going to be a. I wouldn't even call it a qualified guess, maybe. But if. If I were to guess, it's no more than maybe 500 meters across. So that would be half a kilometers maybe, across in. If you take the cardinal direction, like north to southeast and east to west. That would be my best estimate, yeah.

Jon Becker: So the whole area is only a couple of square kilometers, you know, so it's small and compact.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So he executes the two adults, and then what does he do?

Guest: Well, he just gets on and with his attack, and he is armed with a pistol. I think that one was a glock, actually. And then he has a Ruger semi automatic rifle with plenty of rounds. So he just starts walking around seeking up the people on the island. And I don't. I don't remember afterwards exactly where he met the first group of people. But eventually what the kids had told afterwards done was that they heard something making sound, but they thought it was fireworks going off. So that would be the shooting initially.

And then someone runs and says that there's someone walking around in police uniform shooting and killing people. And then obviously, you had a full blown panic spreading out through all the kids at the time.

So his plan was basically just to hunt down whoever was on the island and kill them. And he also had with him in his car, he had different kind of stuff to ignite the buildings on the island as well, to smoke whoever was inside out and then shoot them when they were coming out from the building. That was more or less his plan in bullet points.

So when he started his attack, my unit is still back in Oslo, finishing up the search and rescue inside the buildings and the bomb site there. And like I mentioned earlier, coming up from the building, the on scene commander, I remember that he was on the call when I arrived there to give my brief strap, and he just hung up.

And then he said that he just was told that someone had seen a police officer walking off from the bomb site before the bomb went off. And he was wearing a bulletproof helmet with a visor down and walking with the pistol in his hand. And that is just really strange because it wasn't.

There weren't any missions ongoing in the area at the time where any police officers would behave that way. So that was just like a strange piece of information that got stuck in my head. And then we went back to our car and started preparing for what we really believed were to be the next second wave of attack air. So we were just quickly going through our head at this time on a Friday, where you have a lot of people, obviously, shopping centers, the airport. Airport. And, yeah, that was it. So we were just getting ready and talking through whatever comes next, you know, to be prepared.

And then initially, we had the initial call, which actually was happening through another police officer, he was inside the police chief's staff in Oslo working there along with our unit leader. And his daughter was actually on the island and she was calling her dad inside of the police chief staff, telling him that someone is on the island walking around shooting people and asking for help.

So that was immediately relayed to our units and we were basically just eventually told to drive off. And then some were still held back in Oslo just in case something else was popping up on the radar. So we just said, yeah.

Jon Becker: The first notification you guys get is actually a police officer's daughter on the island.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Calls to say there's an active shooter on the island.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: That has got to be horrific for him.

Guest: Yeah, definitely. That's something I've been thinking about afterwards. I mean, it has to be. Has to be the worst kind of call to get as a parent.

Jon Becker: Do you know if she ends up surviving?

Guest: She ends up surviving, yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay, good. Yeah, so, okay, so he has, from the time that you guys clear the building, you're freed up, basically starting to prepare, thinking through if this is a multi site attack, where the next one can happen.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: How long? So bomb went off at 03:15, 30:50?

Guest: Yep, about 03:50.

Jon Becker: Okay, so then how long after what time does he land on the island and execute the two adults?

Guest: I think that is – it's slightly past 05:00 p.m. that he's arriving island.

Jon Becker: Okay. And so he gets there. And, I mean, as far as the response time goes, the response time starts when I. Police officer's daughter calls her dad.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Which is presumably, you know, 05:15 or, you know, ten after five or something like that, when he has already begun to hunt kids on the island because he's basically just walking around the Highland hunting children.

Guest: Yeah, that is true. I think it was. I can't remember exactly. I think it was. It was a bit later than like, 05:15 p.m. that we got the initial call. And then eventually that initial call would be reinforced by several calls to that specific police district where Utah is located. Because there's no. At the time, there weren't any national call center. Each police district had it on as it owns own central, where the calls get in, like the 911 calls get in.

So, yeah, we got that one. And we deployed more or less immediately afterwards, like I said. So we arrived, I think it was about 05:30 p.m. that we were deployed and drove off from Oslo. And like I said, it was raining, so it's super slippery. And we were more or less just driving whatever the cars could take and still staying on the roads, not driving off. And I think we arrived like a couple of minutes past four. We were arriving at pre decision meeting area for us on the local police.

Jon Becker: You said a couple of minutes past four. You mean a couple of minutes past six.

Guest: Yeah, sorry, six, yeah. So that would be it.

Jon Becker: So at that point, has anybody else gone onto the island? Are you guys the first responders to this thing?

Guest: Yeah, I think initially there were two police officers from the local police district. They deployed and they arrived shortly before 06:00 but they couldn't get to the island and so they were just stuck on the land side. And the police district, they also had a boat, which they started to launch because it wasn't already on the water. They had to put it up on the water and then they had to drive it from the setup point to the pickup point where we had planned to meet them.

So all of that was going on as we were driving from Oslo, and we had communications off and on with the police district. There was one guy in my unit, he called the – What would you call it? The police central in the district where all the calls come in, trying to get information through, because we had difficulties with the comms, obviously, and we also asked for a helicopter, but there was a huge local fog bank, which made the flying difficulty because the choppers don't have any instruments that could help them see through the fog. And there's cables going across the fjord there as well. So it's really sketchy area to fly.

Jon Becker: Helicopters at that point. The helicopter. You guys do not have air assets at that point. Right?

Guest: And back then. No, that's true. So we were relying on army helicopters, which we were having an agreement with them that they could assist us on missions. So we would need to call and ask for their helicopters to come and assist us, which we did.

So initially, the plan was to link up with that helicopter on top, driving over the hill from Oslo to the local police district where Utoya is placed. But they weren't able to take off and land because of the fog. And, well.

Jon Becker: You guys basically drive to the harbor. Is it like a harbor that's across from the island or what is.

Guest: Yeah, there's where we actually met the local police. That's a place called Stura. Yeah. Translated, it will mean the big island, which is. There's a pier on the land side there, so there's lots of leisure boats, and then you have a bridge going up over to the island and stood there. But I think that's about 2 km off north from Utaya. So from that place to there's a boat drive, which is more than 600 meters because there was chaos.

And I remember eventually, when we started getting closer, obviously, there's lots of stuff going on inside the car there where we plan ahead, we are given seat reps on the way. So the initial report is several perpetrators dressed as police officers walking around on the island and killing people with automatic rifles and firearms. And then from that initial message, you know, that it just grows in details.

So by the time you actually meet up with the local police, kind of like the final situation awareness of the whole mission is that you have five or four to five at a time, perpetrators armed with automatic rifles, firearms. There's IADs placed out in the trees on the island. So it's starting to get to the same kind of scenario that we trained on earlier that day. So we have an instant recognition of the mission and know what to do.

Yeah, so, no, no. Also at the time, there were no information at the time which were stating that there were only one solo attacker, non information whatsoever, because all the calls that came to the police were saying several attackers with police uniforms and automatic rifles.

Jon Becker: It's amazing how much that happens. You know, I mean, it's extremely unusual to have an active shooter with more than one perpetrator. Like, extremely unusual. It's kind of columbine. Yeah. You know, and so it's. But, but yet it seems in every single one of these things. Yeah, the reports are multiple perpetrators.

Guest: Yeah. And I can get to that later, but I, you know, it's, – that's part of the job. You get an initial message and for the most of the time, you don't have either the time or the tools to kind of, like, dive into the message and dissect it and go through the information and like, well, this is true. This isn't true. So you have what you have until you arrive the scene, and then you start making your own assessments of the situation. And then you kind of hold that up to your initial message. And then eventually a more. What do you say? That a more precise take on the situation starts happening.

But obviously, there's heaps of information that you don't have at the time. And we knew at the time, I guess I was a team leader, so I was in charge of the team. But you know that if you wait, taking your decision, if you wait for three, four minutes, you will most likely have more information, but you don't have that luxury. So you have to make real time decisions on the information that you have all the time, and then you have to plan and like, analyze it.

Okay, what does it mean? Where can they take the mission? So you can project it into three, maybe two, three, four different kind of mission, futures or scenarios that can come from the information that you have.

Jon Becker: That's a really interesting point though, because you want to make the right decision. And certainly there's a feeling that the more information you have, the more accurate your decision will be. But that is competing with the fact that while you are waiting to make a decision, children are being killed.

Guest: Exactly. So that's it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you have this pressure in both directions to not make an error, but at the same time you have to make a decision right now. Yeah, I think that's one of the more difficult aspects of all these scenarios, is this kind of competing pressure of you have to act right now, you've got to do something right now, but you don't have enough information to make a good decision. And you know that if you wait just a few minutes, you may have more information.

Guest: Yeah, that is so true. But at the same time, at least the way that we train at the time and train now is just like you said, you know, it's – There's really no point in waiting for that information because first of all, you might not get it, so that wasted time. And second, all you have what you have and you have the training you have, and you have whatever intuition you have of the mission. And that's what you base your decision making on at the time.

And then you adjust it to whatever information comes from your may decision. And then you form your decision if you get the second information. So yeah, so you have to start somewhere. And like you said, with this mission, it is pretty simple.

I mean, the plan is pretty simple. You have to stop the killing. You can only do that by arriving on the island and facing the perpetrators, which is, you know, it's that simple. What becomes complicated is the logistics of the part because we knew that we would need boats, which we didn't bring with us because our boats are too big and we don't really, within that time, having a really good system to bring them along with us. And also that would have taken way time as well.

So we depend on some local resources as well. So we need to cooperate with the local police districts, solve those kind of missions. So, yeah, so we were doing our stuff from our side driving and linking up with the police and they were doing whatever they could on their side to accommodate us and cooperate with us in solving the mission as quick and seamlessly as possible. Really?

Jon Becker: That had to be the longest hour of your life.

Guest: Yeah, actually, it took less than an hour driving from also, but, yeah, like you said, you know, it all speeds up. And like I started saying, when we were getting close to the. To the area, we first of all, the traffic started queuing up, so we weren't really sure what was happening. There were some traffic accidents along the road there. So we were thinking, well, that that explains the cues, but we were squeezing by slowly there.

And then eventually we saw a big sign pointing to the left saying, and there was a police officer standing there as well. So we stopped. Ask the police officer if this is the place that we were supposed to meet the local police. But I think it was chaos at the time and we. We didn't have the local information and we were in a hurry as well, so we couldn't just start working from there.

And there was, the first car from us was also down there because that was where the ferry were leaving from the land side, but we didn't really know that time, and no one told us either. And GPS at the time, this equipment that we had, we had one installed our car, but it was like, super slow lagging. And the smartphone that I had at the time was also lagging, which has to do with the capacity of the cell towers in the area at the time. So you couldn't really get any really good visual information on the area as well either.

So anyway, the police officer waved us on and we called on Comstat. We said that while we're not that far away from the meeting point. And then eventually we got there. And the police car, no, the police boat was already there waiting for us. We just took whatever gear we planned on taking along with us and then ran over to the police boat, linked up with a police boat driver, asked him, how many of us guys can you take in your boat? And he gave us a number. And there was another guy from my team. He was already in the boat. And we just said, well, two teams. You're a team leader on one team, I'm the team leader of the other team.

And then eventually we filled the boat off. So obviously we wanted to bring certain kind of equipment with us. So what we really needed in both teams was medic, medical gear because we knew that we would face multiple casualties and injured, and we also wanted to have a ballistic chill in each team so that we had extra protection. In addition to our ballistic pests and bulletproof helmets. So, yeah, so that was the shift from the cars and into the boat.

Jon Becker: What time do you guys get on the boat?

Guest: I think at it was about 06:15 so we arrived five or. Yeah, five, six past minutes past six. We are arriving. So we used more or less, less than half an hour from Oslo. And then we were loaded up in the boat about 06:15 and then there was some difficulty getting the boat off because it had. Most of the boat was standing on to, like, a rock, what do you call that? Rock pier. So it had to be pushed off the rock pier.

And, yeah, so with animation, you have stuff going wrong. So one of the things that happened pushing the boat off was that the boat driver, he sped the boat up in reverse, which made the rear of the boat sink down into the water, because it was still stuck on the rock pier. And that flooded the boat somewhat. I was sitting all the way to the left of the boat driver on the rear there. So we got soaked in water and then told him that he needed to slow down the engine.

And then we floated up again and eventually got the boat pushed off and we drove off. But what happened there was that the water had managed to get inside the petrol tank, which was strapped on the floor on the police boat there, because the lid was open. I think that was because of vacuum or having air flowing through the tank. But eventually water came in there.

So after leaving the rock pier and setting course for the island, we had engine troubles. So the engine started to stutter, and then eventually it would stop. First time we got the engine going again, but you could clearly hear that it wasn't running properly, because it was just constantly stuttering, not giving full power. And that was definitely frustrating.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Can only imagine.

Guest: Yeah. And I remember I had my phone on, downloading a map, and it would just, like, go, like, almost download, pixel by pixel. So at the time where I took my phone up, I had, like, a small picture of Uttaya, where I could see a main building, I could see some dirt roads going on the island.

I could see a red cabin. And the red cabin was facing on the south end of the island. And there was a pier going from the island out in the fjord. And that was about it. That was what the phone gave me at the time. And I just put it back into my pocket and we started dealing with the engine again, and we got it going a second time, and then it went on and we made some distance. Not that fast, because it was still stuttering.

And then eventually it stopped the third time and then it was just dead. We couldn't restart it, so we just told the guys up ahead in the front of the boat to start waving all the boats over to us because there were some civilian boats that we could see in the distance. And then eventually one of the boats there were coming towards us. So we just recommended that boat and loaded the two teams over to that boat and made up distance and speed in that boat.

And then we met a second boat which had a couple inside the boat, and that was a faster speedboat kind of type. And the team one team unloaded from onto that boat and then they drove off and just disappeared into the distance towards the island. And our boat couldn't drive that fast, so we were just holding speed. So we had the first team on the island. I think that was. I need to check mine notes, but what was that? That was about four minutes or 8, 26 minutes past six.

Jon Becker: So it took you about 15 minutes to get out there.

Guest: Yeah. With the boat troubles and everything.

Jon Becker: After two boat changes and a motor failure and a….

Guest: Yeah, yeah. So it took about 15 minutes and like I said, it was a couple of kilometers at least to drive on the lake there, or a fjord. And then my team, we arrived. So the first team that came there, they were just let off from the couple in the boat, and then the couple insisted on having the boat and because they were driving around picking up kids in the water that had just swam off from the island, so they arrived on the island, they were given some directions where to go by the other kids on the island that were just fleeing around in panic and crying.

So, and keep in mind, at the time, they didn't have any information that said otherwise. So they were just going with witness statement that they had on the time, and they were heading off on the northeast side of the island along the shore there. And shortly before we were arriving, the first message that they relayed back to us on the comms was that they had found a huge pile with about, I think it was ten to twelve dead teenagers that had been shot dead.

So that just that piece of information just goes into all the other pieces of information that we had at the time. And I remember that one of the last updates that we had before going on shore was that it was about then it was five to six perpetrators or shooters and there might be a sniper inside a white house on the island.

And I remember thinking that, well, s***, that might be the White House that I managed to see on my phone. And by the time we started getting closer, so we saw the White House. And for us, we started hearing rapid single shots, which our first team, they didn't hear any shots because he wasn't shooting at the time.

So we had sounds or shots. And we also saw a lot of people on the eastern shore of the island, which were facing towards us. They were on the shoreline. They were in the water, and you can see them being shot at. We saw the impact in the water, and we also had stray bullets flying by us in the boat. So we had shield up in front and just were trying to stay behind it, obviously, just hearing the bullets sizing by.

And I'm pretty sure that it wasn't any direct shots because there weren't that many. But we could see, like I said, people in the water, people swimming off, people falling on the shorelines. We knew that they were shot, either killed or seriously injured. And just on the ridge line behind the shoreline, there's just heavy forest, like, dense forest.

So we couldn't see any shooters. We only heard shots. And that was also a frustrating thing because we were just, like, constantly thinking, you know, let us see some of the attackers because then we can engage and shoot back at them. But anyway, that didn't happen.

So eventually we got close to the shoreline, and the plan was within my team. So we just jumped from the boat, run through the water onto the pier that we had seen on the map, and eventually up a staircase, like a stone staircase, and got just high enough to see that there were two people lying on the lawn up there.

And then we changed direction and followed, like, a forest line outside the lawn over to a shed. Did a quick reassessment of the team. Just giving a couple of orders and quickly crossing the lawn because it was big open space. And we just wanted to confront the perpetrators as quick as possible.

So we just yelled, armed police every now and then just to give ahead that we were coming in order to maybe provoke or scare the perpetrators or provoke them in engaging us instead of the teenagers. And eventually we picked up on the dirt road that I'd seen on the map as well. And we had shots just giving us directions all the time, rapid fires, and we're just heading off.

Eventually, we came to the red building, which I told you about, which was that little cottage that they call school cottage. And you could see the tent area there. I just remember this. It was just like an area that had been stumped by elephants. So you could clearly see signs of just huge crowds of people running in all kinds of directions. So, like, the panic was really visual to us there.

And then the firing stopped and we just huddled up and kind of sat there listening, trying to figure out the sounds and trying to get some sort of direction in wherever to go there. And then we heard one single shot that we heard really close.

And after that it was silent again. And then all of a sudden we picked up a person coming up and into the forest. And what we could see is on the norwegian police uniform, you have, like, reflectant pattern at the bottom, bottom end of all the old trousers. So we could see that the trouser that the person had had those reflective patterns.

But then again, it could also be a training trouser because we didn't see anything of the upper body. We didn't see any weapons. So we just yelled at the person saying, armed police, freeze. And immediately the person stopped. And then he started running off to the left of us.

And then we just immediately ran off to intercept again the person. So we did that. And that was inside. He was inside the forest. And we were coming from an open area in there, just the whole team running down there. And while maintaining safety to the area around us, like a 360.

And then eventually the person, he disappeared really quick behind the knoll. And then he reappeared again to us. And immediately we could see that it was one of the perpetrators. No weapons in his hands. He was just walking with his hands like a walking cross, palms of his hands facing towards us. What was – What we could see, and like I said, it was dense forest. It was a bit dark, clouded.

So we didn't have the best visual outline of him. But what we could see that he was wearing some sort of vest and we saw some square objects in the – In that west. And he was just saying something mumbling all the time, walking towards us. We were giving orders, freeze. Or else he will be shot. Because we were. Immediately when we identified his west, we were thinking, maybe that's a suicide west. And he's kind of like walking towards us, getting closer and closer and then eventually detonating in the west.

So we felt pretty safe where we were standing. I was standing behind, like a huge tree trunk. And my colleague to my right, he was standing behind a tree trunk and with the ballistic shield and my colleagues to my left were doing the same. So we felt pretty safe, given that we had some sort of protection.

And then we had the ballistic protection and we were out in the open as well, given that if it had been a suicide vest. But he was just walking towards us with like a. Like we were reading him. It was like he's clearly giving up. But then all of a sudden, he came close enough for us to see that there was a light, like a white wire going from his west, from the pockets in his west up into his left arm. And I'll on his arm there somewhere. And that added up to maybe that one being a suicide west. So we just kept on doing what we do with the standard procedure for that. But he didn't stop walking.

So eventually what happened was that I was having him in my sights all the time, giving all of him orders. And then eventually he would start getting to that imaginary line where we found, like where I had drawn, saying, well, any closer than that, it will start getting dangerous to us.

So I shifted and then moved my sights from his chest and then immediately onto his face or a straight pin between. Underneath his nose, preparing to doing a headshot. But then I think it was in his last step, his vest became clear to us and we saw that it was rifle magazines and not a bomb vest. And no shots were fired because given the firearms directive that we have to work by, he's not any threat to us and he's no threat to any other persons either.

So his actions before has nothing to do with the moment we're handling him. So we would just basically threatening him. If he didn't stop, we would need to shoot him. And then eventually he stopped. And then he were arrested quickly and put to ground and put handcuffs on.

Jon Becker: That was fire discipline.

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. It is really interesting, that part, because it's definitely a tense moment of the mission, but at the same time, it feels kind of comfortable, but at the same time, not so comfortable because, you know, that he might propose a threat to us.

But I remember, especially with my rifle, I mean, it's made a really distinct sound just before the trigger went off. And I got to that point where I felt, you know, I felt that response in my trigger finger, and I heard a sound. And then immediately, just nanoseconds before the trigger is actually firing the bullets off, we immediately see that it is net bomb west. And then the finger goes off the trigger, and you just reassess the guy again.

So I've never been that close firing my gun in any missions without actually firing it. I wish I was that day. So, yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think you could have been forgiven for killing the guy, but it is obviously a tremendous amount of discipline to not kill him and to have that patience.

Guest: Yeah. That's one of the things I've been thinking about, because I know that, like you said, you would be forgiven shooting him, given our first impression of the situation with it might being a bombast and everything. But then again, it's something I stand by afterwards, at least.

I mean, I would have felt it unprofessional if I'd shot him and then later found out that they had a bomb west, if, you know, because I was still feeling safe, giving the distance and everything, but because that he was maybe one step more, and he would definitely have got shot, and then he would have been killed, and then there's lots of stuff we wouldn't have known in Norway, you know.

Jon Becker: That's fair. So, okay, so he gives up, and at this point, you still think you have multiple suspects, right? Like, it's. The problem isn't over. You've solved part of it. What happens next?

Guest: So what's happened next is that we take complete control of him. And from the way that we have oriented ourselves on the island, we know that behind that knoll, which actually what we found behind that Knoll was his rifle. So he ran behind that knoll and threw away his rifle. I'll get back to him what I think about why he did that. But we knew that behind that knoll, there was the shoreline that we had seen arriving, the island.

So we knew that there had to be multiple casualties and injured people there. So we were just doing a quick reassessment. And like I said, it was just eerie quiet afterwards. And we were still giving that, you know, one down, five to six more to go. So we got the message through to the rest of the teams and to our central in Oslo that we had apprehended one perpetrator and that we weren't hearing any more shots, so we didn't have any kind of directions to go through.

So I just made a call that, you know, well, no one is being shot at the moment. There weren't anyone screaming either. So whatever. The only thing that we had was that we knew that there were people needing help just behind that mall. So I just said, well, I'll stay here with a guy, and I'll pump in for information.

And then my medicinal. I told him to just take the rest of the team with him and take all the medical gear that we had and then go down starting to help out the people that we knew were by the shoreline there. And he was also told that as soon as we hear any more firing or people screaming, you need to stop what you're doing. Come back here and we'll head towards that area where the sound is coming from. And he went off with the rest of the team there.

So they immediately afterwards, I got a quick seat trap, and he just said, you know, there were people everywhere. Serious gun injuries and people killed all over the place. And they did an amazing effort, rescuing several people, running out of the medical equipment and coming back for more. I emptied my pockets, so we had actually used up all our personal kits as well. And they started making improvised sorts of 20 ks and stuff.

Yeah. And the number just grew by the time we did that. And it was still quiet on the whole island. No sounds whatsoever. You only heard the rain falling on leaves in the forest. And then eventually one team of our that had been searching along the shoreline, they came and we linked up and had a quick hand over all the information.

And then they continued doing a shore search from along the eastern shoreline all the way to the south point and further on. So by this time, there were several teams working more or less on the whole of the island, clearing the island, going through the buildings. And we had comms problems, so we couldn't, you know, there were some messages that were cut off and some messages that wasn't even heard by us that were further away from the messages.

So we had difficulties communicating on the island. But eventually we heard stuff. And one of the messages that kept on being relayed was that we found a large amount of dead people. We found a large amount of dead people. And that just grew in numbers. So we were just conveying the information from the island via our mission leader and further on to the police, local police district. And they were writing out the numbers pretty quick, which just quickly grew.

So we were just searching and then doing that for hours. And eventually we started setting up evacuation security, evacuation routes. And then we started emptying the different kind of buildings. And, yeah, people were just, you know, peeping out from every hiding place you could think of and not think of.

So inside the red cottage that I told you about, which were one of the last buildings that we had made, like, a quick padlock and reassessment next to, there were bullet holes in the doors there, but inside there were. I don't remember exact number, but there were several people that had just hid inside the building. And there was staying dead quiet because they didn't want to make any sounds.

And the perpetrator, he had actually tried to ignite that cottage as well, but he didn't manage to create any fire, so he didn't catch fire, but they were super scared because we were wearing police uniforms. We were saying that we were police and we had armor guns. So they were thinking that we were there to kill them, not to rescue them. And I was just like, it was just not going through their heads, obviously, because they were in complete panic.

So we had to say several times that we're the real police, we're here to help you and you don't need to worry. But they were panicking. And I remember one of the things that my medic told me afterwards was that he came to one of the survivors which just immediately said, you know, I can't take it anymore. Just kill me now. Kill me now and get over with it. I'm tired of running. Which obviously made a huge impression to him when he said, you know, we're not here to kill you. We're the real police and we are here to rescue you.

So, yeah, so that was kind of going through the next hour and we didn't find any more perpetrators. There were someone that we kind of like, suspected of maybe being perpetrators because, like I said, there weren't any more shooting. There was a miscommunication because one of the guys, he used his shotgun to open a door and we heard, obviously two shots being fired. We heard it was. We reckon it was a shotgun because it sounded like a shotgun being fired off and not a rifle. Ammunition.

But, yeah, we got on the comms that someone had used a shotgun to open a door and then that was it. Silence ever after. So we were thinking, well, they're either mixed in so they're part of the crowd on the island, or they have gone into hiding on the island or they managed to escape the island, you know, using boats or whatever.

Jon Becker: Everybody you encounter is a threat.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Every single living person is a threat.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Every tree you pass, every. Every section of the forest. Like, there could be another shooter anywhere on the island.

Guest: Yeah, exactly. So we were still, like, conducting searches and keeping our guard up high. And like you said, every person that we met, unless you immediately knew we were treating them accordingly. Until then, we were absolutely certain that they weren't the perpetrators.

Jon Becker: What did the suspect say when you, when you interrogated the suspect? What did he say? Did he admit that he was a soul shooter or…

Guest: No, that's the thing. He didn't do that. So he was obviously, he was, he was, he was pretty triggered. He was high up. He wasn't violent or anything. So it was a pretty straightforward arrest. And, yeah, I remember some of the stuff I said, but he was basically preaching about his ideology. And he definitely had a huge need to explain why he had done what he had done that day.

But the thing is, just a couple of meters to our right where we upper handed it, there were two young people lying in the grass there, which were obviously then been shot in the head and, like, really young teenagers. And he showed no remorse, no sympathy, no empathy, nothing whatsoever. He was just set on explaining to me why he had done it.

And one thing that I really remember, and I don't think I'll ever forget it, because it's a, I mean, it's such an absurd logic, but he said, you know, there will come a day where you will see me as a hero for what I've done here today.

Jon Becker: Yeah, well, we're not even f****** close to that day, so.

Guest: No, no. And I remember my reply. It was like just a straightforward replied saying, well, I'm pretty sure that that day will never come. There's no one in Norway that will ever see you as a hero, that's for sure. But he was non cooperative in the beginning. He were complaining about the tiny wound on his finger, that it hurt, and he needed medical assistance for that. Obviously didn't get it. There were no time for doing that. And he really didn't want to.

First of all, he didn't want to. He was. He was turning away every time I tried to take his picture and didn't really want to answer any questions. He definitely gave the impressions that there were more terrorist cells that were hiding and that were planning on conducting more attacks. He did not want to confess whether or not if he was alone or there were more perpetrators on the island.

And, yeah, so what I eventually ended up doing is I just stopped talking to him. And then eventually he would stop talking as well. And then I said his name, and then he would turn around, and I was standing there ready with my camera, and I took his picture. And then we had a picture of him with his whole outfit.

And I conveyed that to our command central, and they conveyed it further on to the police. Yeah, because, yeah, yeah, he had all the equipment on him. So that was kind of like the quick interrogation out there in the field. And then from also, there were two special interrogators coming onto the island as well. So eventually he would be taken back to the White House or the main building on the island for preliminary interrogation there by those two police officers.

Jon Becker: How long was it until the next wave of support arrived on the island? So you guys are kind of by yourself for a while there. But how long is it till you start to get some more medical support and more police support and more boats and all of that?

Guest: Yeah, well, you kind of, like, touched into it already because of the threat level. We couldn't take that one down immediately. So what we did, we were evacuating the people that needed evacuation from the island, using the boats, and then driving them with the boats onto the mainland.

And by that time, it had just piled up with medical resources on the land side. And there were also by then, I. We've also gotten helicopters. So it was just a huge pool of resources standing by, both in a resource area that the police had predetermined and also where the ferry comes and goes. And also there's lots of civilian people with civilian boats. They've been picking up kids before our arrival as well from the water and just let them off on the land.

Jon Becker: Side because the kids were running into the. I mean, the water's freezing cold, right? I'm assuming the water, it's a fjord. It's not, you know, it's what, the fifties? Forties?

Guest: Yeah. No, more. I mean, nothing much more. I would say maybe about 20 degrees celsius.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Guest: So it's like 70. Yeah, it's typical Norwegians water temperatures in the summer.

Jon Becker: So kids are trying to swim off the island. He's shooting at kids that are trying to swim off the island.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Kids are hiding along the shoreline. Like, it's just. It is such a horrific thing to imagine a guy walking around for an hour and 15 minutes killing children on an island who are trapped on the island and have nowhere to go. It's, you know, and then to have to roll into that, I can only imagine the lasting effects it had on everybody involved in the operation.

Guest: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could definitely relate to that part, both as a human being and also as a parent yourself, obviously. And like you said, I mean, I think you have to take this with a pinch of salt, but I think only one person actually drowned. There were 69 people that were killed on the island, and one of those persons drowned.

And I think one person also fell down from a cliff and died from the fall. But obviously, both of those incidents are related to the perpetrator. So he's responsible because. For both of those depths. But, yeah, like you said, he was just basically walking around shooting fish in a barrel from his perspective.

And what we learned during his trial as well was because of the testimonies from the kids and some of these testimonies we got already during that evening when we started the evacuation, you know, that he had been walking around, he had been faking a police officer's officer, and then he would call people out from their hiding places, line them up, saying that, you know, I'm here, there's a bomb gone off in Oslo, and I'm here to protect you and help you, but I will need to write down your name and information, so you will need to stand in line.

And then he would just instantly take his rifle and kill them at the spot. And when we were doing the clearance of the rest of the islands, we obviously saw those spots where you could just see people just basically lying there. And some of them had piled up as well because they've just huddled together out of panic and fear.

And so, yeah, that's the kind of human that was killing the teenagers on that island. And he said something in the course of, you know, he didn't want to go through with that. He wanted to stop killing them several times. And he called in to the police before we got there as well, saying that he had some really strange demands, by the way. He would just, he wouldn't talk to any normal police. He would only talk to a certain level of police officers, like really grandiose thinking from his perspective.

But, yeah, so he would just say, you know, I want to. I want to surrender. And then he would hang up the call and start killing again. So, yeah, I judge him from his actions, and there's nothing in his actions that indicates that he really wanted to surrender and stop killing those teenagers.

Jon Becker: For sure. So how long was it until you guys had totally cleared the island? So this is, you know, now we're what, 06:30 p.m?

Guest: Yeah, he was. Yeah, we made, I think we arrived shortly before 06:30 then we touched down on the island. And then we just quickly ran towards the direction of the shots that we heard. And he was arrested. I think it was four or five minutes afterwards. So yeah. And then.

Jon Becker: And how long is it till you have cleared the whole island and are confident that he is the only suspect?

Guest: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, we. That took several hours, like I said, because all the dog and the, there was darkness creeping in as well. So we had to, sorry, we had to get our night vision goggles in order to go through the island. So the first way was. Search was just like a really rough one, clearing the areas really quickly, every hooks and corners of the buildings and the island.

And then we would reassess and then make sure that we had covered all the area, and then we would go through a second time, like fine cooling it. And then you said something about the other resources, but they were just on the island. We got local police coming in as well eventually, and several teams from us. I don't remember exactly how many people or police officers that was on the island at the time, but there were a lot eventually assisting with the search and homing on the island.

So I think about must have been closer to 10:30 or eleven in the evening. We had made sure of the number of dead, which we relate to the local police officer, local police district, and our command center. And by that, we weren't 100% sure if – Or if not, you know, was it only one or was it more? We couldn't be 100% sure, but we were having an intuition that it's a bit strange they must have run off if there were more.

And also because no one was sticking out from the crowd that we had been evacuating, and everyone that was evacuated, that didn't need medical care, they were just driven to a hotel and taken care of by the local police, going through, interrogating and making sure that the story added up and that they weren't any suspects. So we were.

Jon Becker: By the time we're done, we end up with 69 kids, you know? 69 people killed on the island.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Was it eight or nine killed in Oslo?

Guest: Eight killed in Oslo. So by that time, 77 altogether. And then I think you had. There were just under 60 people that were badly injured on the Uteya. They were evacuated into the hospitals. And so, you know, some of those people weren't certain to survive either. So it was kind of like touch and go widows, but eventually they ended up surviving. There was only. I think it was only one person that died. He'd been shot badly in the head when we evacuated him, but he was alive at the hospital, but in. Obviously not conscious and in coma, but, yeah, so, yeah, it was 69 altogether that died on it.

Jon Becker: So let's walk through kind of lessons learned. You know, obviously, this is. This is why your unit existed. Not this specific scenario, but this kind of incident. What changed in the aftermath of the event and research and report and after action reports? What changed in the team? What did you do differently on the heels of this event?

Guest: Well, obviously, we evaluated everything, and what we found is that for the most, our focus for our training had been correct, because several of us said that we had immediately recognized their mission and we knew what to do, and we were confident in our skills and equipment and everything. I think what really changed was, you know, definitely our mission of protecting the citizens of Norway.

And also that was kind of like the day where the terror actually hit Norway as well. So you – We definitely got, like a re certification that it is real and it can happen anytime. You know, we also got lots of information about our equipment. What changed is that we invested in better communication gear.

And we also, obviously, you gotta look into, like you said, you know, for the most, those kind of shooting incidents are done by a single perpetrator. Like, it's just. And we knew, knew that from, like you said, like Columbine and other school shootings that had been up until then. But we had it.

Yeah. I don't know if it's kind of like understanding, but what we did, it, what we actually did was we just really, really galvanized the focus on our training. And because the way that we train is that we see the trends and we are given intention by our chief, and that intention is anchored in intelligence report, and then we break that down into how to conduct our training.

So, yeah, what really changed is that we'd always been on call, like I said, because that's part of our main mission, that we need to be available to whoever needs us. But that became even clearer after that day.

So, like I said, it just galvanized a lot of routines that we already had in place, and we improved them in whatever way we could. You know, having the gear ever slightly more ready, packing the car ever slightly more ready than before, having an even more focused way of conducting the training on suicide bombers, obviously, which we, we hadn't actually trained that procedure for that long when we actually had the mission. But it's definitely helped.

So it made it realer, simply because we had thought that it might be a suicide vest in the beginning. And then that's only for my unit, if that's what you're really interested for. Obviously, it's changed the whole of Norway from a police perspective.

Like I said, it was summertime, and it's quite common to cut down on staff during summer vacation. So in the local police districts, I think it was. I think it initially was only one person working on the receive center there from the 911 calls. And obviously that person was quickly overworked and just flooded with telephones and different tasks to do.

But eventually they became two, so they were on demand. And I guess that's kind of like, always calculated risk that you take. And some of the things that changed was also the agreement that we had with army choppers, they improved the release of the chopper. So, like, the decision making levels of the request were improved. And, yeah, basically what was really improved was every way that resources can be deployed quicker, better and faster.

Jon Becker: Norway, as a country, has a kind of curious relationship with violence. Right? It's not a country that loves violence and not all that enthusiastic about having guns and law enforcement, all those kinds of things. How did this change public support for the unit?

Guest: Yeah, well, that's an interesting question, because, I mean, first of all, it's always been a really black and white debate in Norway. Should the police wear guns or not? It's like you said, we as a nation prefer unarmed police. That's what's kind of like the official version.

And to some extent, I think it's kind of like, it's nice, but still, the police have certain kind of tasks, and one of them is to protect their citizens. And, yes, like you said, I don't think Norway is definitely not the most violent country in the world.

Jon Becker: Oh, no!

Guest: But every now and then, we do have a lot of guns because there's a lot of hunters in this country, so we definitely do have a lot of guns around, and there's a lot of illegal guns on the market as well, among the criminals. So we do have the firearms. All you need is the person, and every now and then, you have crazy people as well that have guns or manage to get their hands on guns. So we do have all the ingredients, but our culture is kind of peaceful.

And I think that is what gives us this peaceful view and also makes it a peaceful country, which is, to some extent, Norway is kind of like, also probably a safe haven to a lot of criminals as well, just because of those things. But we do have, we do have, you know, there are some drug gangs, other criminals, like robbers, which are quite violent and use a lot of firepowers, power when they do or commit their crimes. But, yeah, for the most, compared to us, we are in the other end of the scale by far.

Jon Becker: It's actually really interesting. I mean, the guy only got 21 years in prison.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Like, in the US, we would have locked. I mean, we probably would have executed him. Probably, certainly would have locked him up and hit him with, you know.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: 70 different life sentences. Your judicial system gave him 21 years in prison.

Guest: Yeah. And it's. It's, yeah, it's, it's seeing from your perspective, it has to be strange. And it's. That's the thing, you know, he survived. So it's Norway did some changes simply because of him surviving, because it challenged our legal system. So for one, he was in the – At one point he were found to be unfit for prison. So because the psychiatrist, that assassin made that conclusion and that was challenged and then it was turned around.

So he was actually found few to serve in prison. And we only have a maximum of 21 years. But what has happened with his, we also have an additional something that is called, again, you are put on, I think it's a ten year period, and then every ten year you are reassessed if you are fit to be released. And he hasn't been found fit to be released, obviously, so he's too dangerous.

So it's kind of like a strange. I'm not an expert on those matters either, though. But he has those 21 years and then he has ten years. Ten years and ten years. And that can eventually end up being his life sentence because he will need to be cleared by psychiatrists. And I don't think at this point no psychiatrist been willing to take the chance to say that, you know, he has been, he's learned his lesson, he's fit to be let free into the society again because he keeps on doing stuff.

Every now and then there's stuff sparking up here in Norway, which he has initiated. But for the most, people are, unlike, forgotten him and they don't want to. Like you said, you know, we won't mention his name. And I think that that is a good thing. He should really just be forgotten about in jail.

And, yeah, what you asked about earlier was with the weapons debate and the police, obviously that one sparked up, you know, so, yeah, and it was debated once again, and once again the conclusion was made that for the most, you know, the police don't need to be armed all the time. But like I said, we also did some changes which has to do with what kind of equipment we are allowed to have inside our cars. So, yeah, like I said, it has to be with preparedness.

You know, we have made the path of getting stuff as a police officer easier. That's one of the outcomes from 22nd July, because obviously you need certain kind of equipment to function as a police officer if your job is to rescue other people when they need to be rescued.

But it's a funny thing, it's something that is going on today as well. And you have the whole political side of Norway engaging in the whole thing. And for the most, the middle part isn't really discussed and that's where it should really be discussed, because that's where all the answers and the good solution is. But it's a black and white, it's really for all rounds.

Jon Becker: Don't feel bad. It's not just you.

Guest: No, I don't feel bad. Obviously, like I said, we have the weapons directory, firearms directive that we have and as a police officer, it gives me lots of freedom. I am allowed to arm myself and I see that fit and I make that call. So, yeah, it gets.

Jon Becker: So to conclude our time together, let's talk about what kind of your personal, the fallout to the team. Did any of the guys, did you lose any of the guys on the team after this because of the effect of the event on them?

Guest: No, we did. And to my understanding today, none of the guys have really had any bad fallouts coming from participating in that mission. We did. The day afterwards I had a quick diffusing with my team because my unit is really good on having that, you know, that human focus and taking care of us operators after having gone through serious missions.

Yeah, so that was on the Saturday when things were really fresh. None of the guys expressed any kind of issues to me. And from my point of view as well, they were functioning the way I knew that they were functioning normally. And then on the Monday afterwards.

So after the weekend, we had a huge unity briefing with every unit or team and operator involved in the mission. And I – We were, yeah, we have. We have a psychologist that we can use if we want to, and obviously we have colleagues that we talk with. So we have all these sorts of different arenas to vent out if we need to vent out. And my understanding is that everyone was talking about it, everyone that wasn't taking part of the mission was also coming and asking. So you had a good work through. Obviously you saw stuff that's, I wouldn't say haunt you, but you're going to remember them for the rest of your life.

One thing, when we're doing the sweep afterwards, in the evening there, you saw the cell phones. So the teenagers, some of them went out in the water because they had been undressing for preparing for the sport swim. And they pile their clothes together and phones were lying on top of the clothes and the display would light up. Even when the phones in the water and you could see mom, dad, you know, obviously it's easy to put yourself in that situation, being that parent in the other end. You have heard about what's happening, you know that your kid is on the island and you can't get hold of them.

So that's something that I think, for my part, I'm always going to remember that because I can identify with that. But, yeah, my impression is that we were taking really good care of Bama units and the guys took care of themselves and we looked after each other in time afterwards. You mentioned lesson learned.

One of the lessons that we learned was media, you know, and the public's expectations to policing in general and especially those kinds of missions. So first of all, the expectations, you can never, ever live up to the expectations because they're unrealistic. You know, if I were a criminal, I can at any given time take my weapons, put them in a bag, walk onto a train station, whatever public place in Norway, pull that one out and kill tens of people before the police catch the smith.

That's the vulnerability in the society, and that's the vulnerability of being a democracy. So that was it. And the media is just, they're out for blood and they're out to criticize, and it just goes on and on and on and on. And that was another experience. You know, you need to be, someone in the police need to be ahead of the media and giving educational information because obviously there's a lot that you can't say simply because of you're not allowed to say them. It's confidential information.

But you can say something about, you know, how did the police solve those kind of missions? What are the challenges? Like you and I've been talking about, you know, the information, you know, that the information you, you are given haven't been, you know, it hasn't been checked out.

And also, you know, that you are going to be, every step, every decision that you have made is going to be looked upon. And people make the mistake of looking upon them with the eyes of all the information that I received afterwards when every stone has been turned. And so that is the media part and lesson learned from media. And eventually it went on.

So for that, it started on, you know, it started creating frustration along with the guys as well. Because if you look on the timeline and if you look on when the mission was or the initial message was given to the police and then when the guy was perpetrated, it doesn't take a lot of time, and you have to account for driving, you have to account for the issues with the boat, and you have to account for the, what would you say, the lack of proper police material? Because this wasn't, it wasn't like a black swan incident happening, sadly. It had been something that we had been training for, for quite a while. And it had happened in other parts of the world as well.

So there was stuff that could have been made ready in advance that sadly wasn't there. And afterwards things started getting in place, obviously, because then the incident had happened and things had been made real.

So I think the lesson learned is that, you know, it's, listen to the qualified police officers within the police and make sure that you take the right steps in order to having the right amount of training in place. You have to have, like I said, you have to train with other police districts as well, you know, because we will need to work together on the incidents.

And all of that has improved by quantum leaps afterwards, which is really nice, but with the media thing, it's really hard to handle, but you can't stay silent because they will just flow over you with whatever they have.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's very easy to, after you have all the information, to retrospectively look at the situation and solve it.

Guest: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So last question. What are you most proud of in the event, your response, what are you most proud of?

Guest: You know, I am most proud of the guys in my team that actually did the medical assistance to all the people that needed it. They saved a bunch of lives, that's for sure, because that's came back to my unit from the hospitals that got the injured people on their operation tables. So I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the way that my unit has taken all the experiences and put them into training, like you said, even though I recognize that it might not sound like we have changed that much in our training, which sometimes our mission is giving you confirmation that you are on the route right path. This one did that for my unit.

And I'm also proud of the civilians that they didn't have any special training that day and they were basically out on the, on the Fjord, enjoying the afternoon in their boats. And then all of a sudden they just, you know, reached out and started helping those kids. They, for sure as well, they are, yeah. I always seen them as unlike forgotten heroes and they have their own traumas from that day. They've been in the media here in Norway.

And I'm proud of Norway as a society that you have those kind of people stepping up, risking their life and in helping others. Yeah, I guess that would be the ones, really.

Jon Becker: You should also be very proud of the professionalism you guys displayed because it would have been very easy to kill that guy. It would have been very easily to beat him to death. The restraint the unit showed in light of that horrific circumstance is very impressive.

So, hey, man, thank you! I appreciate your time! I appreciate coming on and talking about it. And like I said, you guys should be very proud of yourselves.

Guest: Yeah, thank you, Jon, for saying, and I'll be sure to relay that one to the guys. We appreciate that! And thanks for having me on your podcast!

Jon Becker: My pleasure!

Episode 15 – Chief Phil Hansen

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is a legend in the US tactical community, Chief Phil Hansen. Phil recently retired after serving as the chief of police for the Santa Maria, California Police Department. But prior to Santa Maria, Phil served as a captain for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, where he served for more than 36 years. During his tenure at LASD, he spent more than 24 years in full time tactical and emergency management positions, including nearly 20 years at the elite Special Enforcement Bureau, or SEB.

Phil has served as a board member for the National Tactical Officers association since 1991, including serving as the chairman of the board. He is a member of the executive committee for the California Post SWAT guidelines and has served as a board of inquiry member for LAPD and Oakland PD following high profile shootings.

Phil, thanks so much for being here today! I'm really excited to interview!

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, thank you, Jon! I'm really pleased to be here. It's an honor.

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with your early career? Like, let's go chronologically. Talk to me about when did you first become a deputy sheriff and why?

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, golly, we'll make it real quick here because it's trivia, but I was going to business school, Cal State Northridge at the time and wondering what I was going to do with my life. And I was working in a hardware store and lumberyard, and we hired off duty LAPD officers and I had some customers that were sheriff's deputies and we'd get talking and I was drawn to them.

I loved the camaraderie that they seemed to display, the sense of humor, the sense of composure and whatnot that they seemed to display. And there was something about it that really kind of drew me to it.

So I decided to become a reserve, actually, because my wife, bless her heart, and I'm still married 48 years later here. My wife said if I ever became a cop, she'd leave me. But that was obviously a bluff. Yeah, I talked her into the reserve thing anyway, so I decided to become reserve deputy sheriff, and I fell in love with it right away. I was reserved at West Hollywood sheriff station back before West Hollywood was a city, county strip down there in Hollywood. And I absolutely fell in love with it. And so I decided to go full time.

And so I went through the sheriff's academy again. I went through the reserve academy, of course, first time, and then the regular academy, and that was in 1978, February of 1978. And after graduating the sheriff's academy, went to men's central jail and La sheriff's department. You always start out with a custody assignment, and so I did a couple years at the men's central jail there and eventually went out to patrol.

Ended up being a field training officer at West Hollywood station again, and then promoted and became a patrol sergeant. Went to Lennox Sheriff's station, which was no longer exists, but it was down in the south central Los Angeles there, and very busy station. First year I worked there, we had 56 murders in one calendar year at that one station. So it was a busy place and at a busy time, too. And the late seventies, early eighties, apparently did a good job there and was recommended for a position at SCB.

And I ended up going to a SWAT school at SCB in 1986 and becoming a SWAT team leader at SCB, and had the good fortune to land there at a time where we had this incredible talent that was there to mentor us and had incredible peers like Sid Heal. Sid was one of my fellow team leaders, and he was actually my mentor sergeant. When I first got there, Sid had been there for a couple years before I got there.

And so that started out the whole direction on the tactical part of my career, if you will, spent 13 years as a team leader at SCB, 16 years as a sergeant, total. Cause I love being a sergeant. I love being a team leader there. I remember one time there were six team leaders there at SCB. The one with the least tenure at the bureau had eight years there. And there was a lieutenant's test being offered, and we all decided in unison not to take it, which really irritated the brass there. But we were also happy doing what we were doing.

And there was great balance at the unit at the time because of the level of experience that we had. But I did eventually take the lieutenant's exam, promote, went and worked emergency operations Bureau, patrol and then emergency operations Bureau, and then was transferred back to SCB as a lieutenant. I was the SWAT lieutenant there, the team commander for another six years. So just over 19 years at SCB.

Jon Becker: Phil, let's dig into your first stint at SCB. You got there as a sergeant.

Chief Phil Hansen: Correct.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about what's going on in the world. And what's going on at SCB at the time?

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, as far as SCB was concerned, we were just past the 84 Olympics or, you know, still gotta been the glow, the afterglow of that, if you will. There was a tremendous focus still on, I believe, with our team and, and across the street at LAPD as well.

I think there was a tremendous focus on HRT, on hostage rescue issues at that time, because that's what we focused on so much leading up to the 1984 Olympics. They were, you know, naturally, everybody was in fear that we'd have something along the lines of a Munich hostage takeover or something like that.

So hostage rescue was king at that time, and that drove tactics. And naturally that meant, usually, speed, you know, trying to get to the hostages and either eliminate the hostage takers or separate them from the hostages before they can be harmed, the hostages can be harmed. And so speed is at a premium, obviously, in hostage rescue.

Now, you mentioned what's going on. You ask what's going on in the outside world. We're now ramping up into, really, the height of the war on drugs at the same time, and, uh, the rock house era. So you had all these fortified locations selling drugs, tons of narco work out there, a lot of warrants being done, and a lot of people getting killed, a lot of officers getting killed on warrant services.

And I think we did what came natural at first. We tried to apply what we had learned in hostage rescue tactics to another theater, the war on drugs. So speed was at a premium, and I think it remains that way a lot of places today where it's all about speed, surprise, and overwhelming force, that kind of thing. And for lack of better, everybody wants to coin a new term for everything every couple of years, but I'll call it dynamic entry.

And by that, I mean rapid movement through a house to permit destruction of evidence or take people into custody, and hopefully take them by surprise, if you will. And we tried to apply that to drug warrants, and I think that was done on a broad basis across the country and resulted in many, many, many bad shootings and officer deaths. And by bad shootings, I mean sometimes shooting people that didn't need to be shot, shooting non compartment combatants, you know, that kind of thing. And it still manifests itself to this day where that's practiced.

And that's one of those things that the debate rages on, on that in some places. But I'm a firm believer in slowing things down, and I'm very slowing things down whenever you can. If you have a mission profile that demands speed, like a hostage rescue, then you should be proficient at speed. And you. You can apply that because, uh, because of what it is you're trying to achieve, and a hostage rescue, you're trying to save another human life.

And so in doing that, I am willing to take on more risk than I am to save a bag of dope. We've seen too many fine young officers, deputy sheriffs, agents killed chasing dope through a house or thinking that they have some tactical advantage because they're moving quickly.

The bottom line is you need for surprise. I mean, for speed to be effective, you need surprise. They go hand in hand. Speed's only really effective and safe if you have total surprise on the thing. Well, if you are complying in any way, shape, or form with knock and notice requirements, or even if you're just stymied at the front door for a little bit, you know, lots of times it takes a couple of shots with that Ramdez to get in the front door.

By the time you get to that back bedroom, somebody's had time to arm themselves. And it's phenomenal to me how many people don't seem to recognize that fact. And when I taught warrant service extensively, I'd usually ask the class, if I came banging on your door at 03:00 in the morning or 04:00 in the morning, how long would it take you to have a gun in your hand?

Jon Becker: Seconds.

Chief Phil Hansen: And, yeah, you're talking to a bunch of police. Usually it's a matter of seconds. And that's not even the paranoid ones. Right? So it doesn't take that long to get that. And you're cutting your – If you're moving quickly, it's harder to assess target areas. You're cutting your decision making time down along with the decision making time of your adversary, and that leads to bad decisions often.

And we found it was, I'm very proud to say that to get back to SCB history, we were among the first, I think, in the countries, certainly amongst the large teams, highly recognized teams, to really start to put the brakes on dynamics on warrant service. And we did much more. There's a whole menu of options. It's not just dynamic entry as opposed to contain and call out. You can do breach and hold, you know, breach the door, hold up there, or breach, and then back off to a good position to cover and call people out.

So you've got a breach force. You can do what we used to call limited penetration or movement to contact where you. You breach that door and then you take some of that room or some of that house until you feel that, okay, we've lost that element of surprise now.

And then you lock it down and call people to you from there, or you can survey a place and take them down when he goes away, perhaps, you know, but there are so many options out there, and I think it's very narrow minded to get locked into that dynamics all the time. And I can point to case after case after case where I believe officers were needlessly killed because they tried to fit. They tried to fit a dynamic movement style into something where they had no element of surprise.

Jon Becker: Well, I think it's important to put context on it, too. Right? Special tactics, law enforcement. Special tactics is 50 years old. And in the first ten years of it, twelve years of it, early seventies, LAPD 71. In the first ten years of it, it was really kind of a counterinsurgent mindset. And the early incidents were Texas Tower and counter sniper. Then you have Munich in 72. And that starts the evolution of modern hostage rescue and hostage taking as a strategy for terrorists. And so that brings in the 84 Olympics to the US. It brings a massive expansion of special tactics, but it also brings the evolution of hostage rescue as a discipline.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. And it was, as you know, Jon Post Munich, and you had military special operations team stand up with a primary focus on hostage rescue, GSG9, GIG, everything, Delta and all wonderful people, patriots, outstanding tacticians. You can't say enough about any of them. But I'll tell you what they don't do on a daily basis. They don't serve warrants, and they don't deal with the Constitution that we deal with. They don't deal with the Los Angeles Times the next morning. You know, it's a different theater of operations.

And if it's hostage rescue you're looking at, it's a different mission priority. The saving of a life versus the saving of evidence or, you know, a destructive, destructible, or non-destructible, you know, narcotics or guns or just taking somebody into custody. You know, simply taking somebody into custody is not the same as trying to save of the human life that's in immediate jeopardy. And so why apply the same movement styles in all those cases?

Jon Becker: Yeah, I think, though, when you guys first inherited the problem, right? So you get there in 86, SCB is still developing special tactics, is still developing to some degree. It's the golden age of special tactics. It's the founding of the NTOA. It's all of the things that kind of drive modern thinking but you were all still figuring out tactics.

Chief Phil Hansen: Oh, absolutely.

Jon Becker: There was no – I interviewed Mike Hillman, and we talked about, you know, preparation, preparation for the 84 summer games and how they were. They were literally figuring out how, you know, how do we take down a bus and what happens if they go in an apartment, and how do we do that? And so I think it's easy to look back and go, well, in 86, you know, everything was dynamic, but you guys were constantly evolving. And I imagine between you being a sergeant and you being a lieutenant, even coming back to SCB, it changed.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. Well, as you know, at SCB, we have six teams within the team, within the weapons team detail. At SCB, there are six subteams, if you will, by colors, red team, blue team, that kind of thing. And obviously, we interact with one another. We back each other up when we send out a duty team for a barricaded suspect incident or something like that. It's usually a combination of two or three teams going out there to handle that thing, but there's one lead team, if you will, one handling team.

And so where I'm going with this is within the SCP community. There. There wasn't a unanimous decision to make a change on this, you know, going from dynamics to alternative methods of service. There was a big, make it, call it a lively discussion amongst us there at the time, and some not always good natured ribbing between the teams that wanted to go fast and the teams that wanted to go slow, you know, kind of thing.

But I'm proud to say I think the smart way, the more tactically sound way won out over time. And by the time I came back, and I was only gone three years, really, before I left as a sergeant. I was there as a team leader for 13 years.

By the time I, even before I left the bureau, had pretty much transitioned into this. Hey, we have a menu of options to choose from here. Let's pick what's safest, look at the overall mission objective, look at the physical characteristics of the target location, the building, and decide from a menu of options what's the safest way to achieve that mission while ensuring the safety of our personnel and non participants on the thing. And so it's an analytical process. You go through and you plan this thing. It's not just, okay, it's a warrant service.

So up the middle on three, it's something that you look at closely and you say, what do we think is going to ensure our safety and get the mission done at the same time? And that was being done before I left as a sergeant, really. Everybody had bought into it by that time. And then. So by the time I came back as a lieutenant, which was only three years later, it was very comfortable in that regard. And I think they're a premier. The bureau is a premier warrant service team because of the intelligent way that they look at that particular problem, which is your bread and butter.

You know, in terms of weapons teams, hostage rescues, even in a busy place like Los Angeles, you might get one a year, one or two, maybe. Maybe go a couple of years without one. Barricades are regular events, but they're much less frequent than high risk warrant service. You know, we do a couple hundred of those a year.

And so I think it's – They do an outstanding job of looking at each one individually and weighing all the options and saying what's the best way, given the suspects profile, weapons, known target location, fortifications, you know, all the above. What are we trying to achieve here? And then come up with the, you know, the safest way to get it done.

Jon Becker: Well, it's, you know, I think implicit in that. You know, the, one of my favorite Maslow sayings is the only tool you have is a hammer. Tend to view all your problems as nails, which, like I've always said, there's a corollary to that, which is if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: Because you don't have another tool.

Chief Phil Hansen: That's right.

Jon Becker: And I think that as you look at the evolution of the bureau and you look at the evolution of special tactics and, and the role that the NTOA played in that, really, a lot of what you guys were doing was buying a saw and a screwdriver. And, you know, you speak of it as a menu because you had a number of items on the menu.

Chief Phil Hansen: Right.

Jon Becker: And you guys were never satisfied with, you know, as somebody who's dealt with the team since 80, I mean, I've been related to SCB since 87.

Chief Phil Hansen: Right.

Jon Becker: The team is never satisfied with what it has. And it's constantly, how can we do this better? How can we improve this? And it's constantly, what else can we put on the menu?

Chief Phil Hansen: And that's, honestly, Jon, you just hit on something that makes it so much fun to work there. It's why people like me went there and spend 19 plus years there or more. In some cases, people spent up to 30 years there at that unit. It's invigorating to be in an environment where people are thinking and always looking for a better way to do things. And really, it's funny. I'm going to digress just for a second here, but I was interviewed one time by a writer, a journalist that was doing a piece on SCP for some magazine. It was like, I forget which one. It was one of the tactical magazines out there.

And I think they mostly went to military special operations teams, but they also did law enforcement. And I remember him asking me what the most important qualities. What did I look for in a SWAT candidate? And I said, well, that's easy. Character and intelligence. And he actually looked at me kind of funny, like he thought I was going to say, well, you got to be able to run a sub 4000, 10K, and then come back and push 400 pounds and then be able to shoot the certainty score or whatever.

And I, you know, I explained to him, I said, with respect to intelligence, we're problem solvers. Policemen, by nature are problem solvers. They're going out solving problems for the public at large out there. And when those patrol assets or detective assets get in a problem, they call the SWAT team to help them get out of a problem. And we go out there and we analyze things and we solve a problem. And so you've got to be a thinker. Is the one thing, the most important piece of equipment you have sits on top of your shoulders there.

And then the other thing I said was character, because I can teach you to move through a house. I can teach you to shoot and give me a little time. We can even get you in shape, you know? But I can't teach you to do the right thing when no one's looking.

So that's the culture you want, is you want a culture of thinkers and people that believe in the mission and want to go out there and do it right?

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's funny. I have the good fortune of working with a lot of the top units in the world, and I also have, because of the debrief, the ability to interview a lot of guys like you. And the one recurring theme in selection worldwide, I want smart guys. It's not, it's like you said, it's like you think, oh, you know, I want the guy that can bench, you know, 400 pounds. It is in talking to tactical leaders, especially leaders who are leading, you know, top tier units.

Chief Phil Hansen: Right.

Jon Becker: Give me smart guys.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: You know, I interviewed Lee Macmillan from, from LAPD, interviewed Mike Hillman. Like everybody said, hail give me smart guys. Because ultimately that is the challenge, right? You are putting them into a very complicated situation in a very short time frame. They better have a good processor.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. And I'll say this, Jon, real quick. Since we were discussing a certain period of time at SEB, like the mid eighties, those of us that were fortunate enough to come in at that time, you mentioned Lee McMillian. I would consider him a peer of my same kind of a timeframe. We overlapped quite a bit in our careers. I know Lee is still over there working, but our generation, if you will, this Sid Heal, Jack Ewell, myself that came in there as youngsters, we were able to be mentored by John Coleman and Ron McCarthy and Mike Hillman and people like that.

And you walked away from working with them with this desire to learn more and to teach it, too. They taught you that you had a responsibility to pass on what you would learn to the next generation, too. And, you know, Lee is a good example of that. It's just we were very fortunate to be privy to the insights of that group that were the real pioneers and SWAT, and had that tremendous passion about it.

I remember getting on an airplane. This would have been in the nineties, at the end of a long conference, I think was an NTOA conference on the east coast. And I've been teaching all week, and as you know very well, that's a tiring endeavor.

You know, I'm hammered at the end of a week of teaching out there, and I get on the plane and I'm sitting next to Ron McCarthy and who's a dear friend, and Ron starts going through the newspaper right away looking for articles about SWAT, police shootings and stuff. And he couldn't quit talking about it the whole way back. And it made me laugh, you know, I thought, you know, you got it in your blood. You know, even if you're just bone tired of, you have that desire to learn more and become better and then to share that with other people. And that's a huge part of leadership within that industry.

Jon Becker: I think it's a good opportunity for us to take a quick segue here, digression, and talk about NTOA, because, as you said, John Coleman was one of the guys that mentored you. I was also fortunate enough to spend time with John and, and be mentored by John. And I think it's important to put context on the founding of NTOA and kind of because you've had a very active role in NTOA kind of from the beginning.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes.

Jon Becker: And so talk to me about that. Talk to me about, like, the founding of it and that.

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, it's a wonderful story, really. Jon, I hope he, you know, he's been. He's advancing in age now or, you know, he's been out of the business for a while. And you and I talked about this before. People forget, unless it's memorialized and that we really give credit where credit it's due. And that's a name that should come up in every SWAT school, really.

John wrote the first textbook on SWAT, a guide to the development of special weapons and tactics teams by John Coleman. It was 1992. No, 1982. Yeah, I was gonna say 1982. Yes, I'm sorry. 1982. He wrote that textbook. And so you're, you know, you're talking very early on.

Jon Becker: SWAT’s ten years old.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yeah, SWAT’s ten years old. And so John writes this book, a hardcover book on this. And a year later, 1983, he starts the NTOA. And what John did and for our, for our listeners, you know, these are obviously the days of mass communication. You can write an email and send it out to 500 departments and people, and it's a ten minute exercise or something like that. John wrote letters because there was no computers back then, no personal computers or phones or even. He wrote letters to, like, 200 police agencies in this country. He wrote a letter to every agency could think of that could be large enough to have, potentially have a tactical team.

And he asked a question of them. Do you see the need for some association that could serve as a means of training and information exchange amongst tactical officers? And if so, would you be willing to join that organization and be a part of it? He did his own national survey on this out of his house.

Jon Becker: By mail.

Chief Phil Hansen: By mail.

Jon Becker: Handwritten.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep. Snail mail, handwritten. And he got an overwhelming response positively that, yes, this is something that needs to be done. And John formed the NTOA, and he was the sole director, founder director. His wife, Janice, who's a wonderful woman and a tremendous writer in her own right, was the editor of the magazine.

And John basically ran that association, John and Janice, for ten years and gave a national voice to tactical officers and gave us an opportunity to have a medium. These days, you can listen to a podcast, you can read magazines. You can find out what other people are doing. You can see an incident happen somewhere. Just bring it up on your computer and find out what was done in the early 1980s that just didn't exist. You needed a publication. You needed a hard publication, something to share.

Here's what's going on. Here's some incidents to read about. Here's some debriefs. Oh, wow! Here's what's training. John would put a training calendar not for NTOA, because at that time, NTOA didn't offer its own training other than the once a year annual conference. But he would ask, he would look a canvas for who's putting on classes in this country, and he would have a publisher training calendar in that magazine so that the people that were interested could, you know, could get out there and attend training.

So he was a tremendous driving force, and his earliest members, and he called them consultants, if you look at the first page of the magazine or like, people like Ron McCarthy and Mike Hillman and some of the old SCB team leaders, Charlie Araujo, some of these folks. And John really got that thing rolling. And then about ten years later, you got to remember, now John's a retired captain from the sheriff's department. He's running this big organization on his own, and it's getting bigger and more robust, and he's getting a little older and tired, and, you know, it's time to hand it off. It's like, I don't need another full time job doing this.

And so he handed it off to another gentleman that did some very good things in his own right, but it basically started to take on a different look, expanded to regional training courses. I think our first NTOA regional training course was in 1994, and I was one of the instructors at that. And as you know, it's grown today now to where NTOA is doing hundreds of courses every year and has a national presence in terms of policy formulation and things like that.

And it's important to mention here because, for instance, CATO is a wonderful state association for California, California association of Tactical Officers. NTOA was never meant to compete with state associations. We work in conjunction with one another. CATO does a fabulous job.

But at the time, there was no CATO. There were no state associations. And then as the state associations have become more robust, regional and state associations, NTOA, there's no reason to do local training in those areas because CATO can provide their own or whatever, Rocky Mountain tactical or Texas tactical or, you know, there's a number of Florida SWAT association. There's some very large, robust, first rate status state and regional associations.

So NTUA in those areas, they can focus on things of national interest and be a voice for the state associations. They try to have a very close relationship with the state associations and be a voice at the national level on things. And, you know, and one example is something like the national SWAT standards and things like that.

Jon Becker: Obviously, when NTOA starts, like there's only one interest nationwide in special tactics. That's the development of special tactics. And I learning what everybody's doing and what's working and not working. And I remember early, like, the n two ways magazine was almost like an intelligence report early on, right? Like, there were candid, open debriefs of, you know, we tried this and it didn't work.

And then we tried this, and, you know, it's, every article was groundbreaking, right? It was. I remember in 90, early nineties, I wrote a two part series for NTO on flashbangs. And it was the first thing that I'm aware of that had ever been published in a magazine. Talking about the legal aspects of using flashbacks. Like, it was just, it was insane how raw and new everything was.

And I credit John Coleman with the development of special tactics nationwide, because had he not formed the NTOA, you would have never had this kind of development that occurred. It would have been 30 years instead of ten. And so, yeah, I mean, Jon, when you look at the history of special tactics, John is an icon in that evolution.

And I think initially when it starts out, obviously, that's a single interest. As it develops, you start to notice there are regional interests, but the way Texas police is different than the way California police. And so their special tactics are different. I still to this day, do not understand why somebody would not be an NTOA member and also belong to their local association or even, even others. Like if you said, hey, what should I belong to?

As a young SWAT cop in California, what should I belong to? You should belong to CATO, you should belong to the NTOA. You should probably belong to TTPOA, the organizations that are publishing, that are teaching, that are advocating, you need to belong to, and you need to understand how other people are doing things.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. You hit it right on the head, Jon, because there are regional interests that can be handled by that regional association, regional training needs. As you rightly pointed out, Texas doesn't necessarily work the same way as we do in California. So it's completely appropriate that each state have their own association where they focus on those regional needs at the same time. We spent some time talking about this earlier already, how important it is to see what other people are doing and learn from each other.

And so that's where the NTOA can provide that national perspective, too. You know, you can be working in California and go, whoa, did you see this incident that they had in West Virginia here or something, and how this was handled? So I think it's important to be a member of both. Absolutely. And that's part of being, certainly if you're a leader, certainly because part of being a leader is a continuing educational process and you have to stay up on what's going on for the sake of your people and the sake of your mission.

Jon Becker: Completely agree. And I think to go back to one of the things you touched on with the NTOA NGO was the first one to develop national SWAT standards.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes. Let me address that real quick. The first state to have state SWAT guidelines was California, and I happen to have been on the executive committee on SWAT for post that promulgated those, along with Ken Hubbs from CATO.

Jon Becker: And Ken Hubbs, the founder of CATO.

Chief Phil Hansen: The founder of CATO, said Hale was sometimes in and out of that committee in different areas. John Coleman had a part in it. It was a fascinating experience because it was, it pitted us, the subject matter experts in some cases, against representatives on the committee from Cal chiefs of police and Cal sheriffs, whose, a lot of them, their primary interest was budgetary as opposed to, you know, pure SWot efficiency or tactical excellence, if you will.

Let's just put it like that. And as you can imagine, there were arguments about how much training time and what constitutes a team. And we forged some very good compromises on that to come up with the first iteration of the California SWAT guidelines.

And the reason they're called guidelines is because the guidelines post doesn't have to pay for if they make it a standard, there's some reimbursement that goes on between California post and the local agencies. So they make it a guideline, which is basically a standard that they don't have to pay for.

Jon Becker: Here, beat this standard. And if you don't, we're going to hold you to it, but we're not going to give you the money.

Chief Phil Hansen: What you're going to do is you're going to get sued in court and they'll say, why didn't you meet this post guideline? You know, so it's, it's really enforced by the civil courts and whatnot. But we, but we did the first guidelines and, and then a year later, NTOA promulgated the first national SWAT standards document, and I was on that committee that, that was involved in that as well and wrote those. And it was largely based on California's model because that was the first one in the country and there was a lot of great ideas in it.

And I tell you what, both of those documents were incredibly important, John, and a lot of people questioned at the time, well, who are you? NTOA to put out a standard that we're supposed to be meeting in West Virginia or whatever these other states. Our concern at the time, we debated this on the NTOA board for quite some time. Our concern was that, but if we didn't do it, somebody else was going to. That the federal government was going to require standards of some kind.

And we didn't want some graduate students from National Institute of Justice, NIJ, or somebody writing these things. We wanted actual SWAT practitioners to write these things. And so we felt it was our obligation to do that and get a reasonable thing on the books. And it has been largely accepted. A lot of states have actually adopted it as their standard, and the federal government recognizes it in a lot of ways. And it's – it was the right thing to do at the right time. It was important. And the, the California guidelines were super critical, too.

And like I said, a lot of chiefs were not happy with that. I took a lot of heat on a couple of panel discussions from some chiefs because they saw it just costing them money. Yeah, but, but what you had, John, before that was literally any chief of police in California could pick his half a dozen best buddies on the department, get them some bdus and some AR-15s, and say, that's my SWAT team.

And we were having horrific shootings. You know, you have a super high level of performance and pursuit of excellence by some teams, and then you could have teams like that that would just go in and we had some horrific shootings. And that's what the public's perception of SWAT, of course, is going to be what happens on those negative ones as often as not, you know, and it needed to be done. It really, we need to continually raise the bar in this endeavor.

Jon Becker: It's interesting because, you know, California has a history of making bad law. It's what we do.

Chief Phil Hansen: Exactly.

Jon Becker: We have a bad incident and then we go past stupid laws that we then can't enforce because they're too complicated. And we usually just make the situation worse. But you see, right now in law enforcement, California's past several standards, many of which have been drafted actually by anti law enforcement organizations.

So the AB-481 is a perfect example of where we're trying to regulate the use of military equipment by law enforcement. And one of the things that I really appreciated about the early post guidelines, early NTOA movements is it was proactive. It was, let's go establish, you even said it, let's go establish standards before somebody imposes them on us.

Chief Phil Hansen: Exactly.

Jon Becker: And I think that one of the mindsets that has changed over years is we've kind of moved away from, let's make proactive rules to, okay, we're not going to talk about it. We're not going to do anything. And I think what happens is you end up with rules. AB-481, which grew out of an ACLU report, which grew out of Radley Balco's book, it's bad law. Things are being called military equipment that aren't military equipment. They're trying to regulate things that are in no way, you know, dangerous. Bearcat being a perfect example. But I think that what you guys did early on with the SWAT guidelines and the NTOA by being proactive was prevent a lot of that bad legislation.

Chief Phil Hansen: I wholeheartedly agree. And it raised the professional bar. It really did. You know, one of the things it did, John, both documents, documents encouraged originalization, too, so that there were all these, prior to those documents, there were so many small standalone teams with half a dozen people on them calling themselves a SWAT team, and that really, they were ineffectual and they gave the whole discipline a bad look, you know, I mean, because of somebody reading the newspaper when they seed I six guys from a little town in the Central Valley of California or whatever, dressed in BDus with AR-15s and whatnot. And it says SWAT team, you know, does this or that or has bad shooting. That reflects on all of us. And what these documents did was raise the bar in terms of some training minimums, in terms of what constitutes a team, what kind of numbers that you need.

And we had some pretty good compromises on that. And it really encouraged regionalization, too. The public gets a better product out of it. You get a more professional product. And the other thing it's important to note is that the California guidelines were recently updated, revised.

I happen to be on that committee again that did those, along with Jack Yule from SCB and then NTOA, I think, is now on their fourth iteration of the guidelines. And we wrote from the get go, I happen to be the chairman of the board, I think, of NTOA at that time. When we wrote those, the original ones, was that this is going to be a living document. I know I was the chairman because I took a lot of heat for it.

Jon Becker: You remember people yelling at you?

Chief Phil Hansen: I remember writing an article explaining why we did it. But it's in its fourth iteration and it was designed from the get go to be a living document. We said, look, everybody calm down. If you didn't get input this time around, we're going to have another shot at this in two years or three years. And they've been very good about keeping up on that and revising it. Times change. Equipment changes so quickly.

You know, it's funny, the latest iteration of the California guidelines, when we were putting that together, we were talking about things we never would have dreamed of during the first one, like drones. You know, how we implement the use of drones and things like that. So it has to be updated regularly to be relevant. But the basic product is still there, and it's really quite good.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it's one of my favorite sayings. A friend of mine, Todd Mackler, says, I have a driver's license. My 17 year old daughter has a driver's license, and Mario Andretti has a driver's license. We're all drivers, but we don't all drive the same. And I think it is very seductive in special tactics to equate SWAT teams as SWAT teams. It's one thing, it's a monolith, and it isn't regionally. It isn't. You have full time teams. You have part time teams. You have completely different mission sets. You have very different skill sets. And without some kind of guidelines, some kind of regulation, everything's a SWAT team.

Chief Phil Hansen: That's a topic all in and of itself. You said something a little while ago about California, which any of us that are. I'm a native californian. I love the state, but we do. We're the goofiest state in the country. There's no two ways about it. But we also do some things right. Jon, and one thing I learned, I think I've taught SWAT schools in 31 states in this country and a few. A few other countries. And once I got out of this state, started teaching other places the importance of having a post and a good one, something like that, that had some minimal standards on things. And training became very apparent to me.

And I'll tell you a quick story. I was on a range one time. I won't say what state or whatever, but this young man had a gun. It was the biggest gun I've ever seen in my life. It was like a big double action 45 Smith thing or something. He needed a wheel on the thing to carry it around, and he kept. When the. I was just helping watch the line for safety purposes. And when the rangemaster would call for a double tap or whatever, he'd put him right in the ground, right in front of himself. Usually, you know, never hit. The target was bounce, and the rangemaster was going out of his mind.

So I said, let me talk to him. I'll take him aside. And this young man had. I looked. The first thing I noticed, he was wearing apparel. The gun was huge. It didn't look like it really fit his hand. But he also had gloves on that were taped, leather gloves that were taped with duct tape or electrical tape to his wrist. It just struck me as odd. I said, is that the gun that you carry normally in patrol? He goes, no, sir, it's my SWAT gun.

Then I said, okay, have you ever, do you shoot with those gloves, or do you wear those gloves? They're my SWAT gloves. And it started to dawn on me. Oh, boy, bless his heart. He was just doing what the guys at work did or whatever. But it was obvious to me that there was no real guidance for some people and that there was a time when they just picked people.

Like I said, a chief has a lot of autonomy in a city, even in place like California, and they could just pick their buddies and throw some bdus on them and have some rifles and say, and back in the day, that's my SWAT team with little or no training. And all of these things, these regulations that we have or guidelines at this point were really raised the bar. They were much needed. And a lot of that started with John Coleman and NTOA and starting to gel this thing together, you know, and exchange information.

Jon Becker: Yeah, 100%. I think John's role and the NTOAs role is easy to overlook and easy to forget to as that centralized source of information, especially now that information is ubiquitous. It's very easy to share things. But for the first 15 years of my career, if you didn't go to a debrief personally, the NTOA was the.

Chief Phil Hansen: The only source you were only way.

Jon Becker: Going to hear about an event that happened and what they're doing now.

Chief Phil Hansen: And I'm still a, what's called a director emeritus, which means I'm an old guy that gives occasional advice, but they have done a wonderful job of putting themselves in a position of recognition with the politicos in Washington and whatnot, so that when there is legislation coming out on a federal level that might affect SWAT teams and stuff, we're actually the go to resource for them where they want to have subject matter, expert input, and things like that. And that's important to have. If that's not there, then you're just left, you know, kind of left to float downstream and see what they come up with.

Jon Becker: So, and with politicians in the United States currently, it's going to be stupid. Oh, let's just call it what it is. Like they're not going to get it right.

Chief Phil Hansen: I won't argue.

Jon Becker: They're going to screw it up. Like, it's, that's, that's the thing that people forget. It's like, well, you know, let's not talk to the media. Well, if you don't talk to the media, only the other side is talking to the medieval, and the result is stupid law and bad policy.

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, no matter who's in charge, you know what, and you just hit on something if you don't, that's another place. The NTOA fills an important role is we'll get one of these high profile shootings sometimes, and they'll, they'll, the media will get a hold of NTOA, perhaps for a statement on that kind of thing.

And now you get a reasonable statement. You know, somebody's putting out something reasonable because if they're going to find somebody to talk to and if you shine them on, who knows who's going to be pontificating about what it is you did out there.

So I would rather trust my fate to some people that have a demonstrated understanding of what we do for a living and have experience in it. I think the NTOA fills a very vital role. And don't forget, there are many states that don't have a CATO or don't have a Florida SWAT association, and they're still very dependent on NTOA for a lot of their training. So it's a, you know, it's a very viable, strong organization that had not only an important historical role, but presently an important role as well.

Jon Becker: Yeah, there are, you know, there are, I would say, probably the majority of states that do not have a strong, right regional association. They might have a regional association. They may get together and train. They may share information, but they're not necessarily able to command national level instructors and bring the latest doctrine back to teams.

Chief Phil Hansen: Right. You know, just one quick example of a crossover I mentioned, I was on the revision committee for the California guidelines about three years ago now, and one of the things that the California Post wanted to include in the guidelines, the new ones, was a glossary, if you will. And we could have argued for two years about this word, that word, you know, what should be in there in terms of a tactical glossary, if you will. And I volunteered the NTOAs glossary, which was pretty dug unsubstantial. And it was funny because the coordinator from post says, will they let us use that?

And I said, that's what it's about. That's what we're here for, is to exchange it for. I said, I guarantee you can use it, but I will get the current chairman to sign off on it. NTOA Glossary now with one or two very superficial changes is contained in the California guidelines. Now, that's important because the more we work together, you know, we're all dependent on one another, and we need to speak the same language.

You know, it's one thing that the fire department's always, I'm not a big fan of the, I now make fun of firemen all the time, but that's one thing they do outshine us on, is interoperability between, you know, states, cities, companies. They speak a very common language and they work well together, and that's something we need to work on, too, in this industry.

Jon Becker: Well, and I think one thing that's important to understand is that information flows downward. And the, you know, from early in my career till now, the information has flown from those who have the most access. So those that have the most trained personnel, the most operations, the most access to information. La sheriffs, LAPD, share that information regionally. Right? They share it with all the agencies around. The La county sheriff trains the large majority of SWAT teams, not only in La county, but a lot of the surrounding counties.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely right.

Jon Becker: SCB is, is, you know, the primary training source for most SWAT teams in, in southern California. And so that information flows downward. And if you are in a major metropolitan area. Right. So if you're adjacent to, if you're in the county of Los Angeles, you have a full time SWAT team. You have two full time SWAT teams, LAPD and La Sheriff, who have 200 operations plus a piece and have an international profile that brings them access to all of the tactical units worldwide. So they have an amazing access of information. And if you're in La county, you are a beneficiary of that information.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: But if you are in a small county in Wisconsin, you're never going to have access to that information without the NTOA and without an association.

Chief Phil Hansen: You're right. And as an aside, as you know, NTOA does regional training, the national conference, but also hundreds of regional training courses, and many of those are taught, and certainly at the national conference by La sheriff, LAPD personnel. So that it does, it's another method to get some of those things that are happening here out to some of those places that wouldn't otherwise see it.

I mean, I taught, I couldn't tell you how many warrant service classes and things like that for NTUA over the years and different places. And it was like, wow, you know, you, when I would start talking about slowing it down, you'd think I was speaking in another language. But usually by the end of the week, they could see the thought process and the wisdom in it.

And so it's a great way to – It's still, as I said, the state associations are robust, and they're fabulous, and they're the best at what they do. Cato is a wonderful organization. They should work together as a team. You know, they're not in competition with one another. They just do different, slightly different things. But we're all trying to achieve the same goals, which in the end is.

Jon Becker: Is operator safety?

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jon Becker: In the end, that, and that's, that's always been like, I, you know, going back early in my career, a lot of the knowledge that I gained early on was going to debriefs and, and it was sitting down and listening to teams talking about their ops and what went wrong. And, you know, so it created a culture for the business, and it instilled a culture in me that you have. You are a steward of information.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes.

Jon Becker: You have an obligation to share information when you have it. And the root of the debrief, it's the root of the lecture series that we've done. But it's easy to forget that, and it's easy to become focused on. It's my information and trying to monetize it or trying to control it, or I'm the only one that can teach it. And the net effect of that is usually somewhere downstream from that information flow. The river runs dry, and a small team in a small region doesn't get information that would have saved somebody's life, which to me is really a moral problem.

Chief Phil Hansen: I would agree wholeheartedly. I'm glad you used the word moral. That's once again, going back to the earlier days. That's something a lot of us learned from John and from Mike Hillman and Ron, people like that. That was our obligation as men, as SWAT officers to pass this on to others peers and those that come behind us.

And look at Sid, 160, some odd articles he wrote that were published in the tactical edge over the years, not to mention, and of course, his other articles in Cato magazines and other publications. Three books or four books. I've written over 40 articles on tactics and leadership and different subjects for the tactical edge. And sometimes Cato published some of my stuff, and that's to try to share with people and to try and share what people shared with me. You know, I don't think any of us have an original thought, you know?

Jon Becker: Yeah, I'm not convinced there is original thought anywhere, and I'm not convinced that anybody ever invents anything.

Chief Phil Hansen: We all got it from somebody. So I always, to tell you the truth, I find it offensive. And you put it right when people want to monetize it, or they say, well, I want to put my copyright on this and nobody else can. I think that's kind of sad, to tell you the truth. It shouldn't be.

Jon Becker:

That's funny, because I tell the story. I was really early in my career, I was probably 20, started 17. I'm probably 22, 23. And Sid, we hosted a flashbang class that Sid taught. And we get to the end, and Sid and I had been friends at that point a couple of years. We get the end of the class, and this is one is overheads, right? You had, you had actual overheads, right?

Chief Phil Hansen: I used to use them all. Yeah.

Jon Becker: Overhead projectors.

Chief Phil Hansen: And by the way, we used to make fun of Rob McCarthy when he showed up with his carousel, his slide carousel, you know, and we were using high tech stuff like overheads and then the first iterations of PowerPoint. But you get left in the dust pretty quick. At my age, I'm feeling pretty ancient.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's fair, but. So Sid's teaching this class, and we get to the end of the class, and a guy walks up and he says, hey, lieutenant. He says, yeah. He says, is there any way I copy your slides? Sid says, what do you mean? He gives your overheads? Is there any way to copy those? And, you know, I could buy the book from NTOA.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because at that point, Sid had literally written the only flashbang manual that everybody was using nationwide. But he said, can I copy your slides? So he hands them to the guy, goes, yeah, go copy and bring it back. I looked at Sid and said, you know, you don't let the guy copy your information. He said, yeah, so, like, you put a lot into that. There's a lot of work. And I'm still young and, like, you know, naive, and I'm thinking, man, that guy's gonna go teach your class.

And which, of course, with Sid, nobody could ever do, but so he goes back, copies him, comes back, he says, thanks so much, you know, no problem. And I said, Sid, I don't understand why you'd let that guy copy the class. Like, he could just go teach the class and said, good. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, you never hoard information.

Chief Phil Hansen: No.

Jon Becker: Information keeps people alive. Don't ever hoard information. And it was such a profound moment for me because he was kind of moderately condescending when he said it. Like, I can't believe you would try to mod, you know, like you would even think that way.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And it impacted me and forever has driven my view of information. Like you were, you were a steward of information that someone else gave you, right? You don't, you don't get to keep it. So let's, let's jump back just real quick because I want to pick up something else in your history. So you're at a CB as a lieutenant.

Chief Phil Hansen: So you're there a total of 19 years plus. I didn't quite make that 20 year plaque. I was about 19 and a half years when I transferred out.

Jon Becker: And then where'd you go from there?

Chief Phil Hansen: I went back to emergency operations bureau for a while. I spent about a total of four years there doing critical incident management on a county wide scale where SCB, it's a tactical scale and a single incident kind of thing. And at Eobden we were doing fires, floods, earthquakes, civil disturbance on a countywide scale, countywide mutual aid, large event planning like the Rose parade, terminal roses parade, or actually, I hate to say this, but probably the most poignant but also most valuable things I did, I planned for line of death funerals for deputy sheriffs, which there's a lot of planning that goes into that. You usually got about 5000 people that attend those.

So there's a lot that goes into something like that. And it has to be done in about three days usually. So. And you're there on that day of the event from 05:00 a.m., setting up the parking, you know, pattern and everything till I literally at the end of the day, stayed until the, you know, till the hole was filled in the ground. And I picked up water bottles and stuff out of the graveyard stuff before we left.

So difficult days, but very satisfying in terms of you felt like you did something for, for a family and for your department and the people that cared about this individual. And unlike a lot of that emergency management stuff, which is a lot of planning, but it never happens sometimes too, you know. So that was something that you really saw start to finish. And all those years, 20 years nearly of experience serving warrants and things like that, that comes into play and that sort of thing too, because you know how to put an operation together in short time and make it run, you know.

So anyway, I went there for a little bit. And then I, I was actually finishing up my master's degree at that time over at USC, and then I got promoted to captain and I spent a couple of years as a captain on the department.

Jon Becker: Oh, so you left SCB as a lieutenant?

Chief Phil Hansen: I left as a lieutenant.

Jon Becker: I thought you promoted and left.

Chief Phil Hansen: No, no, I left as lieutenant and then I was. I don't want to go into it, but I was. It was a rough time in my career has had. It was a time when there was some favoritism, some things going on in the department. People wanted to put friends places and stuff like that.

So without getting into that, it was a real, I will say this, it's probably one of the best articles I think I've written. It was called leading through career adversity. That's what I wrote and I'm proud to say, and I still have the email to this day. I saved it. I got a wonderful email from Siddhartha that said, phil, this is one of the best articles on leadership I've ever seen. This needs to be printed in the Marine Corps Gazette or whatever, but we all in the course of a career are going to have years that challenge us and that make us very upset.

And, you know, where you question your department, you question your happiness, it makes it hard to be a leader and to do your job. And what I found was that by refocusing on some other things like school and focusing on my people and getting my focus off myself and what I was not happy with on the part, you know, because it's funny, a lot of it had to do with when I was not happy worrying about myself.

And I said I figured out what the basic problem was. I need to be worried about my people more, not about myself. Here I worry about the mission, worry about your people. Find something else to consume your interest. And so I went back to school and everything, and it worked out real well. And I think people noticed that because a little leadership tip here, people know when you took a punch and they're going to watch you to see how you react. And I took a punch and I took it in stride and I just tried to better myself by going back to school and doing different things.

And then they really surprised me. They turned around, made me a captain and promoted me. So it was a tough couple of years in my career because I left a place SCB that I loved dearly and I would have wasn't forced, but it was an uncomfortable time because of some upper management leadership, things that were going on at the time, and I felt it was time to move on.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's, you know, one of the things I tell my kids is you only know how deep the well is when you go to the bottom of the well.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And those moments of adversity, those moments of darkness, those moments of looking inside are where you really find out what you're made of.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: And, and, you know, do you, do you, you know, take a punch, get on the ground, don't get back up and cry?

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: Or do you take a punch, move on in stride.

Chief Phil Hansen: And demonstrate leadership or blame everybody or be angry or be a non participant or say, I hate this place and all that? No, take the punch. Take it. Take it. Like I said, non gender specific. Take it like a man and, and, you know, go out and do your job and take care of your people and focus on the things that are most important. And real quick along those lines, define your, or redefine what winning is to you. We've all been taught since we were kids, John, that the good guys win in the end.

Well, I like to think that's true, and it's possible, but it's not going to manifest itself always in promotion or things like that. In other words, I've known a lot more, many more fine, fine men and women that retired, say, at the rank of lieutenant, that should have been captains, should have been commanders, but they never got that chance.

And you can be an exceptional administrator, exceptional tactical person, everything, but you won't always get the nod because sometimes you get confronted with people above you that your ethics don't line up and you're going to lose that battle because they outrank you and this kind of thing.

So, but the question is, so you're not going to win in terms of promotion, but here's where you win. You can look at yourself at the end of your career and say, I did the very best I could. I think I did what was right. And you're also going to win because once you retire, for all you guys out there that haven't retired yet, that nobody cares if you were a chief or a deputy or a lieutenant, that doesn't matter.

What matters is, were you a good person? You know, were you a contributor? Did you take care of your people? And the thing is, do you have a place of honor at that table amongst them? When you have a. When you're retired and you go in and there's a lot of honorable people that worked hard their career, and they say, hey, come on, over. Sit over.

You know, do you have a place, a welcome place at that table, or are you one of those guys? They look the other direction, you know, that's winning to me. Winning to me is looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, I did everything I could for my folks and knowing that wonderful people, I'm welcome amongst their company. So it doesn't always manifest itself in terms of promotion, though.

Jon Becker: So when you left, did you retire out of ub or…

Chief Phil Hansen: No, I got made captain, like I said. Much to my surprise, they promoted me to captain then, and they handed me a real interesting thing. I was kind of a sheriff. Baca actually said something to me that I was kind of proud of. He called me a mechanic on time because they would send me places where, when I went back to SCB, they were having problems as a lieutenant. They were having problems at the lieutenant level. They'd made a couple promotions that were sketchy and they needed to do some stuff.

And then I went to – When they promoted me to captain, they sent me to reserve forces Bureau, which the department had like 400. At first I thought, oh, they're putting me out to pasture here. Well, there's – Geez, what do we have? 800 reserves? 800 plus reserves on the department. 400 explorers, 36 community. What did they call them?

They're basically community groups, advisory councils, the Chinese Advisory Council, the korean advisory. You know, there was 36 of those, and that was all fell under my – Those 400 explorers. It was 800 reserves that all fell under my privy. And there was a scandal. What they didn't tell me was that there was a scandal about how some reserves, some friends of the sheriff type reserves were being trained and that kind of stuff, and post was about ready to drop the hammer on them.

So they gave me this thing to fix, basically. And honestly, Jon, this kind of leads almost into the Santa Maria experience. I'd rather, as a leader, I'd rather be handed a smoking hole in the ground than a highly oiled, perfectly operating machine.

Jon Becker: Give me the jalopy clunker. Don't hand me the new Ferrari.

Chief Phil Hansen: Exactly. You know, because a smoking hole in the ground, I can fix that. There's only one way I can take that, you know, but. And so they gave me this mess, and I cleaned it up as best I could, and it was flying pretty well there when I left. And so I eventually retired and was retired literally one year to the day. I did 36 years on the sheriff's department, retired one year to the day, and got a phone call asking if I wanted to come to Santa Maria and help rebuild that department. They'd gone through some crisis times themselves.

So once again, the smoking hole in the ground. And it actually, I told them I'd give them two years in Santa Maria, and I spent almost eight. It turned to out to be one of the greatest portions of my career, actually.

Jon Becker: So you, like, you do. You know, mechanic is a good term. You have a career history of being involved, being on review committees for shootings, helping to establish guidelines. You're in a unique position because you worked for a large agency with a full time, top tier tactical team, one of the top teams in the world, and led that unit, and then went to a smaller agency and had to rebuild a part time tactical team. I would love to talk through some of the kind of modern issues and special tactics with you.

Chief Phil Hansen: Oh, wonderful!

Jon Becker: And see what your thoughts are. Why don't we start with interagency relationships?

Chief Phil Hansen: You betcha. That's one of these things I harp on quite a bit. I actually did an article about it at one point. The importance of it. There's just not enough of us in this business, Jon. I mean, you've got. There's just not enough highly trained tactical personnel to go around if we have serious problems. And you're going to have serious problems. And I'll use LAPD and La sheriff as an example. Between the two units, you've got two basically hundred person SWAT teams there right across the street.

So you got a couple of hundred highly trained tactical operators. We rely on each other, those two teams, every few years. Every couple years, we get something where we, we need to look at our brothers and sisters across the street and say, hey, can you lend us a hand here?

When I was a lieutenant at SCB, Randy Simmons was killed over at D-Platoon. And I got a call in the middle of the night. I was the team commander. I get a call from Rich Rapoli, who was a deputy chief at LAPD. He wasn't a good friend of mine like Mike Hillman is. So I knew him. And I just, all I knew is, if I'm getting a phone call at three in the morning from Rich Repoli, this is not good news. My first thought was some deputy had gone barricade or something. They wanted us to handle it instead of them. And he gave me the heartbreaking news that Randy had been killed.

And I said, is this an ongoing event? He goes, yeah, it's done. And what he was asking is for us to take SWAT responsibility for the city of Los Angeles, for further notice while they kind of regrouped. And I said, absolutely, sir. That's one of the things I loved about my department, is I didn't have to ask any permission on that. I knew that it was going to be a go and I could make that decision. I said, you betcha. And I got the address of the thing and I said, I'll be there in 45 minutes or so. And I drove down there.

Tom, John Domenico, who, you know, grabbed a team from SCB and brought them over there. And we played a very small tactical backup role for them on the resolution of that incident. But more importantly, John, was the fact that we were there for him and they knew it. And that was February 7. This will be the ten year anniversary, I believe, coming up every February 7, I get a call from Ruben Lopez. Reuben's a lieutenant at D-Platoon. He's the Lee Macmillan's counterpart there. Every February 7, I get a call from Ruben thanking us for being there that day. I mean, it meant that much.

And then we took SWAT responsibility. During the subsequent funeral, we had a deputy killed, not a SWAT deputy, but a patrol deputy out in Lake Los Angeles area, in the north end of the county there in the desert, Steve Sorenson. And it was a horrible case where the suspect killed Steve and tied him to his truck and drug him for a ways, and then was out there hiding. He had holes dug out there. He was kind of a survivalist. And it was about several days of searching for this guy in a very large area out in the desert, rural.

And Mike Hillman was out there. We had not only our own air resources out there, but we had an LAPD, a star out there helping out whenever they could. And we ended up having something like 70 metro guys out there, too, helping with the larger containment from LAPD. Here's what I'm getting to here, and it's pretty simple. Point, though, is that I don't care how big your team is, you can always use help from, you know, there's always going to be something come, comes up that's going to require you to look for help from somewhere else.

And those that don't have a relationship, a pre existing relationship, they're just courting disaster. And I can point to several. I can point to several cases. I don't like the out people more or less, or out departments, but that ended in tragedy or could have ended in a much better fashion for victims or whatever, or had they just had some more resources out there. I will mention one the good guys shooting up in Sacramento, the electronic store that you might remember that shooting with the hostages up front.

I would just say, imagine how much. The SWAT officers there did a wonderful job. They did a wonderful job. They were brave. They did everything they could do with what they had. But imagine how that might have gone with additional long rifle teams and maybe a crisis entry team near the front of that location, not just coming from the back. You know, if you could hit that from a couple of sides.

And I spoke to the team leader after that, within a couple of days, and I said, did you ever consider calling the other big agency up near you there? And says, to tell you the truth, Phil, we never do anything with those guys. And I could give a dozen instances like that. You need to have people you can rely on, and you can't wait until the incident happens.

So the relationship we have with our, our friends across the street at LAPD now, you know, if we need them or them need they need us, or even if we haven't called them, we'll show up and it's. You don't have to say, hi, my name is Phil Hansen. I'm here for, you know, can I help you? Phil, how you doing? They know what our capabilities are, what we can do for them, and it'll either be, hey, can you do this for us or can you just stand by? We don't need you right now, but I'll get back to you here in a minute, you know, but to know that you've got people that you work with on a regular basis and have that relationship, that's huge.

And there's just not enough people in this business. I know you usually talk about significant tactical events over the course of your career. Mumbai, India. When you start looking at coordinated, simultaneous attacks, things like that, you're going to have to rely on other agencies to help in so many ways, and so you have to have those relationships built beforehand.

Jon Becker: Well, it's funny because I was raised by those two teams, right? It was D-Platoon and SCP were the two teams that I really got all my training from.

Chief Phil Hansen:

And in some things we do, like, night and day, night and day.

Jon Becker: And so it's. It's over the 37 years that I've worked with both teams, they do. They literally do things differently. They are Ford Chevy. Their movement patterns are completely different and not compatible. Like, you couldn't take three D-Platoon guys and stick them in a stack with SCP and have it make any sense at all. But when people ask, you know, what are the two teams, like, I always say it's like two brothers.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yeah.

Jon Becker: They're constantly making fun of each other. They're constantly striving to be better, but in the process, they're making each other better.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: D-Platoon is a much better team because of SCB's relationship with deep lieutenant. And vice versa.

Chief Phil Hansen: Vice versa.

Jon Becker: They challenge each other. And over the years, I've watched them evolve. One team would evolve a tactic and then the other team would. And again, totally different.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: But like brothers, you know? Yes, they'll make fun of each other and, yes, they. You know, they'll rib each other and.

Chief Phil Hansen: Like stepbrothers, the movie.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But no drum set. But at the same time, you know, if you hit one of them.

Chief Phil Hansen: Oh, yeah.

Jon Becker: Gotta help.

Chief Phil Hansen: You. Better stand by. Yeah.

Jon Becker: And I saw that with Sid's funeral.

Chief Phil Hansen: Right.

Jon Becker: Because, you know, I had the honor of planning Sid's funeral, and. And you talked about EOB earlier and EOB. I cannot say enough good things about EOB.

Chief Phil Hansen: Oh, that's wonderful!

Jon Becker: Like, both SCB and EOB, when the family asked me to plan the services, basically sat me down and said, what do you need? We'll make it happen. And deep Latoon, same thing. They're like, said, hey, we're putting together honor guard. They said, we will be there. And when they said, we will be there, they were all there with armor. It's just, you know, it is that. That bond, common bond, that not only makes them better, but. But when something catastrophic happens, they're there for each other.

Chief Phil Hansen: Absolutely. And, you know, for those that are considering that kind of relationship with another team, it doesn't. You brought up an important point. You don't have to change all your tactics. You don't have to. You know, we would not integrate each with each other on an entry team unless it was some. It would have to be a really strange deal, a huge hostage rescue thing of some kind. But in terms of. But you can give them a mission. You know, I'd be happy to give them a mission of any kind. I'll give you an example. A North Hollywood. The North Hollywood bank shootout. You know, we a team. Jack rolled a team out from SCB on that one to Lapden.

And remember, they thought there was another outstanding suspect. And a couple blocks, several blocks had to be searched. And so it was a bureau guys. SCB, can you take that side of the street? And we'll take this side of the street. You know, I mean, so you can mission task like that and be a tremendous help to one another or, Geez. At the end of the incident I told you about in Lake Los Angeles, we. We had ordered our bear. We hadn't got it yet. LAPD had their bear. This is before Bearcats.

And this guy was capping rounds at our people, and LAPD shows up with their bear. Roger Blackwell, one of their sergeants, drove the bear while our guys addressed the suspect and ended up killing him through the portholes and on the, on the bear. So, I mean, I don't care how big you are, you can use the help of a brother sometimes, you know, and that's. I have seen so many agencies. There was a tragedy in another state, and a couple officers were killed. And I was one of the people from NTOA that went back there to do some training for their team in the aftermath of it.

And what I had come to learn was that that particular team, they had a team commander that thought he knew it all, didn't want them interacting with any other teams. And basically, some of the stuff that was very basic that we were showing them, they go, is this new? Is this something brand new? I go, no, this has been around for a while. And they were not allowed to intermix with other teams and stuff, so they were really ignorant of some things that could have kept them alive. And that's sad. You see a lot of that, though. You really do.

Jon Becker: No, it is. I mean, ultimately, and again, going back to associations, that's the role they play, right? Is it gives you exposure to outside thinking and prevents isolationism? And, you know, I don't think it can be overstated, the importance of the teams knowing each other ahead of time.

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, like I said, from a command perspective, if you're the team commander, and I'll tell you, we had a shooting down in Hawaiian Gardens. Jesse Ortiz, one of our deputies, was killed. He was a gang deputy, and he was doing an investigation and was killed. And so we're down there searching this thing. It's 05:00 at night. It's the border of Orange county and Los Angeles county. There are a million police agencies. And I had all these Orange county agencies. There's probably ten agencies at least that came up and offered their help, which was much appreciated.

But if I don't know who they are and I don't know what their capabilities are, I'll tell you who I'm looking for. I'm looking for my guys at LAPD who I know what, what their. I know their level of discipline what their capabilities are. And that's who you're going to mission task out there.

Jon Becker: You know, hundred percent it is that. You know, it's like you said.

Chief Phil Hansen: It's not the time to introduce yourself.

Jon Becker: No. And the thing is like it's a known quantity.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: It's know the capabilities of the teams around you and, and have personal relationships. So when they show up, it's not, oh, hey, sir. Hey, sir. It's Phil and Lee.

Chief Phil Hansen: Exactly.

Jon Becker: Who've known each other a long time and know, okay, I can give you this whole part of this problem and I don't need to worry about it. Let's talk about kind of the justification, because there's a lot of pressure right now, one about militarization of law enforcement, which I also want to talk about. But there's a lot of pressure to get rid of SWAT teams. And SWAT teams are expensive, very expensive and complicated. So what are your thoughts on the ways to justify.

Chief Phil Hansen: This is something that I talked extensively with my team in Santa Maria about, because when I went up to Santa Maria, they didn't really have, have much of a team. They had a few handpicked friends with the old chief or whatever, and not really a selection process per se. And it was kind of an up the middle on three kind of a deal. And so we formed a new team. I wanted to have a team and I wanted it to be a top flight team.

And so we started out with the selection process, developed a PT test, developed a good selection process, and then got everybody through good qualified SWAT schools. But one of the first things I told them, and I would remind them of this about every six months at a training day, is that there's not enough work in that town. There's SWAT work to be done up there. It's a busy town. It's about 140,000 people now and 200 man department.

But there's not enough SWAT work to really justify the expense just based on barricades and warrants and that kind of thing. We could get the sheriff's department to do a lot of that stuff. And I told them, you've got to earn your, you've got to earn this team and you've got to earn it every day. In other words, I told them, I want, if you're going to be our SWAT team, you're going to have the best uniform appearance on the department. You're going to be leaders at briefing. You're going to take charge of incidents. You're going to go at briefing and teach, you know, other people, you're going to be the officers that when new officers come in and work at this department, they look at you and say, that guy or that gal squared away.

And that's what I want to make out of myself someday. I want to be like them. And they took that to heart. I had to get rid of one or two, you know, that weren't really willing to maintain that level of professionalism. You know, every now and again, one would get in trouble doing something off duty and make a kind of make an embarrassment or something, and they'd get let go so that they knew you were serious about it and.

But that's the team, John. It has to be more than just barricades and warrants. You know, it's not about just having the epaulet or the bureau pin or whatever little insignia that you have. So to me, it's about clearly demonstrating to others that you're a cut above, that you're a leader, you know, and that's a leadership factory. You know, what's nice, like with the sheriff's department in Los Angeles, finally, it took many years, but they finally recognized SCB for the leadership factory that it really is. And they promote.

Anytime those guys take a test, as long as they pass it, they're going to get promoted, usually because they know that's somebody that's going to go out there and take charge, train people, show these young guys some enthusiasm, you know, that kind of thing. And that's what you want. You want that team to be 30 leaders, if it's a 30 man team or whatever, and the people that you can depend on to do the job right, to treat other people right?

And that's a big part of it there, too, is treating other people right. You're not some SWAT that's too cool for your peers and everything else, you know, you treat people with dignity, including your fellow employees. And I expect a lot out of them. Otherwise, why have it? Like I said, I could, I could have the sheriff's department, I contract with them to come send a team, you know, I wouldn't be as happy with the results necessarily up there. You know, it takes longer for them to get there and all that kind of thing. They're a good team, but I'd like to have my own and know what I'm, you know, know what I have up there, you know, the unknown quantity, as you put it earlier. But they have to earn it on a day to day basis and be the best, you know.

Jon Becker: Well, when that's your view of the team, the team becomes kind of a cultural center of excellence for the agency.

Chief Phil Hansen: That's a great way to put it. Yes.

Jon Becker: Like, those are the guys who are going to implement new policy and are going to do training. And I think a lot of agencies miss that. The teams put themselves on an island because they become almost like an exclusive club. And so you have, like, you, you know, probably statistically speaking, an agency of a couple hundred people, the most knowledgeable person on firearms is probably on the SWAT team.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yep.

Jon Becker: The most knowledgeable tactical person is probably on the SWAT team. And if the team puts themselves on an island as a leader, you completely lose the ability to harness that knowledge.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes. I would go to briefings, Jon, I mentioned this, I think, in another segment that it's something that I felt I needed to do to let my personnel see me and hear from me personally, not just on email, and I'd go to briefings regularly and talk to them. And it pumped me up to do that. And I loved when I walked into a briefing room and I look, and here's one of the SWAT officers up there teaching a class.

We're doing a debrief, doing something to train his peers or her peers out there. And that's where the value is. And like I said, the best uniform appearance, you know, one year, this goes way back. Back at SCB, we used to. They're pretty much full time. It's all SWAT stuff now. But back in the day of the eighties, we used to do saturation patrol a day or two a week. You know, we'd go out to an area of the county where they were having a lot of shootings or whatever, and. And we'd throw folks in jail and as a team.

And my team was headed out to saturation patrol one night. And we stopped at a restaurant because one of Sid Heal's officers was promoting and leaving the unit, or one of his deputies. And so we just stopped by to wish him well on our way out to patrol. So we're dressed to go out and search cars and throw crooks in jail, but we stopped by this restaurant to say goodbye to this peer of ours, this fellow teammate that was on Sid's team. As luck would have it, there was a retirement, a sheriff's department of retirement going on that night at the same restaurant.

So there were a few hundred sheriff's employees there and a crowded room. So we're walking through to find Sid and his table back there. And I heard out the corner of my corner of my ear there, I heard somebody go, man, those guys look sharp. And somebody else said, oh, they must be sebast be. And I was – So that made me so proud. And I repeated that back at the bureau. That's what I expect out of your SWAT personnel, you know, because when you walk in and you look the part, you're physically fit, your uniform is tight, and you treat people with respect and treat them well and act in a professional manner.

Then paying all that money for the Bearcats and the vests and the MP-5s and the M-4s. And so everything else that's involved, then it pays for itself. When you have that kind of a response from culture, from your personnel.

Jon Becker: That's fantastic! So, Phil, to conclude our time together, I'd like to run you through some just kind of rapid fire questions, okay. And short answer, whatever comes to mind. Top of your head. What do you think your most important habit is?

Chief Phil Hansen: My most important habit? Prayer. Yeah, I say my prayers all the time. It's funny, there's an Alan Jackson song, the older I get, and one of the lines is, the older I get, the longer I pray. I don't know why. It's just I got more to say or something. I guess I just got more to say. I say my prayers. It helps me order my life a little bit.

It helps me prioritize things, reminds me who I am in a relationship to what's around me. And it also was a way of, I trained hard. I trained my people hard. I did everything I could to get them ready for work and provide for them the equipment and the training they needed. And the way I could sleep at night is feeling that I did everything I could. It's in God's hands now, and he's not going to give us anything to do that we can't deal with. So. Yeah. Long answer to your short little no.

Jon Becker: That'S a good answer. What's the best book you've read on leadership?

Chief Phil Hansen: Ooh, that's hard to pick one. I'll tell you what, I'll give you a couple. I'll make it real fast for you because I know we probably have a time crunch here. There's a short book that I love. It's called the Contrarian's Guide to leadership. It's by a guy named Steven Sample. He was the president of USC for a long time. And it's a really good. It's a really good book on basic leadership traits and things like that.

For instance, there's a wonderful, wonderful chapter in it on active listening. The importance of listening and being a good listener, and listening to really listen to the problem and try and do something about it. And the reason it's called the Contrarians Guide. As he points out, it's kind of the leadership paradox thing I talked to you about once before. Leaders tend to think it's their job to send information all the time and not listen. But it's really even more important that you be able to listen to people so that you know what their problems are.

And, you know, you get different perspectives on how to solve these things, too. So listening is so contrarians guide to leadership by Stephen Sample. If you're more of an academic, there's one called leading change by James O'Toole. It's called leading change, an argument for values based leadership. It's really an excellent book about why leading for a cause, a noble cause, and having values in how you lead. It's not just about getting things done. It's about doing it for the right reasons in the right way, and stuff like that. That's an excellent book as well.

Jon Becker: We'll put those. We have a thing called the list.

Chief Phil Hansen: On our website, and there's one that's probably on there already. It's by a marine colonel or lieutenant colonel. The passion of command. I can't remember the….

Jon Becker: I think it is, but I'll make sure.

Chief Phil Hansen: It's probably on the list. But it's an excellent book as well.

Jon Becker: Got it. What's the most important thing for building an effective team?

Chief Phil Hansen: Trust. And I think trust is. And culture. I mean, building a culture, team culture. But a lot of that is based on trust with the leader. You keep breaking it down into the smaller pieces. You know, you develop that trust by listening, by being honest, you know, by taking care of your people and caring about them.

And, but, yeah, it's developing the culture of the team so that when the leader isn't standing over them, they're still going to do the right thing for the right reasons and try and achieve the mission, you know? And you build that as a leader by building trust with them. And, you know, honesty is the cornerstone of building those relationships and listening and to a degree, humility, and realizing that obligation that you owe to your team as well.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite online resource? Website? Podcast?

Chief Phil Hansen: I'm not a great guy to ask that one about because I'm still a guy that loves reading magazines.

Jon Becker: What's your favorite magazine?

Chief Phil Hansen: No, I love the tactical edge. I still look at Kato. I listen to, I listen to your podcast or watch them. And I listen to Marcus and the Cato broadcast. I read the Wall Street Journal, actually. It's funny, but it's so hard to find mass media with any news credibility and stuff. So I feel that that's a paper that still has some journalistic integrity. So I read that. Then I follow it up online and things. If it's something that I have an interest in.

Jon Becker: No, I completely agree with you. The thing with the Wall Street Journal is ultimately, they have a bias.

Chief Phil Hansen: Oh, yes.

Jon Becker: But their bias is all financial.

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes.

Jon Becker: And so, you know, that that's the angle. It's not, it's not. It's not political in the traditional sense of it.

Chief Phil Hansen: Well, they don't. I don't think they don't. They still have a degree of journalistic integrity. They will flavor it, but they won't lie about it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, exactly. They'll flavor it, but they won't change the ingredients. What's the most profound memory of your career?

Chief Phil Hansen: You know, I knew you were going to ask that one, and I had a real hard time. I still do. I'm going to say it's the same thing that happened many times, and that was the death of a police officer. Deputy Sheriff Jack Miller was a deputy sheriff. That was a narcotics deputy, and he was killed. War on drugs. We were talking about that before. Killed down in the Lenox area on a warrant service.

And his team had done a pick and ram on a barred front door, went in and Jack passed an open door going after a runner back when they would chase dope. And he got back shot from a suspect in the first bedroom there. I was on the entry team from SCB that went down then and cleared the house looking for the suspect. What they did, the team grabbed Jack, did an extraction, backed off, locked it down and called us.

So I'm on the team now that goes in. And you could see from the physical evidence what had occurred. We found the suspect dead around the corner in the room. An unfortunate part of a wonderful career that I've had is I've been at the scene of way too many. I've never counted them up. But deputies and officers that were killed in the line of duty at SCB, you know, we're the ones they called out when that happened, looking for the suspect. And that was another. Jack's thing, was another thing of why are we chasing through this house? You know, we talked about slowing down at length.

There's just time I could tell you a dozen stories or more easily about that, and went to too many of those. And then even as a. Even as an EOB lieutenant, I was usually out there at the scene handling the command post area, you know, when, when somebody was killed and then planning the funeral. So that's on the negative end of it. I've got wonderful, happy memories, too, but those are profound, and they stick with you.

And you and I were talking offline here a little while ago, and I'll repeat something that we said, and I think we both agree on. It's a tragedy. Anytime we lose a police officer, deputy sheriff, or agent in the line of duty, it magnifies that tragedy exponentially. If we fail to learn something from it and pass those lessons on to other people.

Jon Becker: I think that's a great place for us to stop. Phil, where can people get a hold of you if they want to?

Chief Phil Hansen: You know, I'm always. I'll throw out a couple numbers at you here.

Jon Becker: I could put it in the show notes, but you like, is it – Are you still publishing for NTOA? You still wrote for NTOA?

Chief Phil Hansen: Yes. I'm a director emeritus, and, you know, I quit teaching. I think I could still go out, teach warrant service class, but who wants to warrant service class from a 68 year old guy? You know, I like leadership stuff. I write on leadership. I write on the occasional tactical topic. I recently did a piece that talked extensively about slowing down a little bit when NTOA published an opinion on no knock warrants and that kind of thing. And I wrote a piece about the importance of looking at warrants from a different paradigm.

So I still write and stay involved with the NTOA. I would be happy to talk to anybody, help anybody about any time, if that's how you want to do it, put it in the notes or something.

Jon Becker: Yeah. What we can do is we'll put all your contact information that you want to share in the show notes.

Chief Phil Hansen: Sure, you bet.

Jon Becker: As well as your book recommendations. And as always, Phil, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here!

Chief Phil Hansen: It's an honor to be here, Jon, and anybody that's listening out there, I wish you all the best in your career. I hope you have a wonderful career like I did, and that you have. Enjoy a long and happy retirement.

Jon Becker: Thanks, buddy!

Chief Phil Hansen: Thank you!

Episode 8 – Toby Darby & Josh Wofford: Using Tactical Decision-Making Exercises to Improve Leadership

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guests today are Lieutenants Toby Darby and Josh Wofford. Toby and Josh are both lieutenants in a Southern California police department.

Toby is a 27 year veteran of law enforcement with 20 years of tactical experience as an operator, a sergeant, and a lieutenant. He's also a board member for the California association of Tactical Officers.

Josh is an 18 year veteran of law enforcement with experience in patrol, homicide, street level crime, K9, and SWAT. Josh has a doctorate in applied leadership learning and organizational theory from Vanderbilt University. Josh is a black belt in brazilian jiu jitsu and a current SWAT commander.

Josh and Toby are responsible for creating the CATO decision making exercise, or DME program. And guys, I appreciate you being with me today on The Debrief to talk about it!

Toby Darby: Thanks for having us, Jon!

Josh Wofford: Thank you, Jon!

Jon Becker: So, Toby, why don't we start with you. Talk to me about your involvement with CATO. You're a board member with CATO. How did you first get involved with CATO?

Toby Darby: So through my career has been a lot with narcotics and SWAT, SWAT pretty much my whole career. And it wasn't until we were doing a SWAT competition, I think actually with Aardvark at RTAC and CATO had a booth. And at the time I was reading a lot of stuff from sit Heel field command, sound doctrine.

And I walked up to the booth and they were all like the founders of SWAT. There was Sid there, Tim Anderson, I think RK Miller was there, a bunch of people that were very influential at the time. And I'm like, hey, this is some good stuff, except someone needs to break this down for layman's terms, for stupid guys like me. And I would love to do that.

Now, with that, I was approached and then invited to be part of the strategic leadership program for CATO, which was a one and a half year program. Not realizing that going through this program, I thought it was just going to be something. I get some leadership training, but at the end of it, they're like, hey, welcome to CATO. And by the way, you now have all of these duties as well.

One of which they said, we have a board member position coming open, and we would like for you to apply for that and test for. And which I did. And ultimately, here I sit as a board member. So with that, you know, we now. I now facilitate a year and a half long program with CATO, with SLP.

I'm involved with CATO doing critical incident management training, and then now with this decision making exercise program that my partner and I, Josh, work with to take it and bring it, not only for people in California, but pretty much across the country and eventually, hopefully across the world.

Jon Becker: So give me the origin story for the DMEs first. Like, how did it start?

Toby Darby: So it started specifically for me. Like I told you, I was a sergeant at the time when I went into SLP, I was sitting in one of the class or the presentations in the strategic leisure program taught by Sid Heal. And Sid presented us with a problem, and that was a decision making exercise where he said, hey, this has just happened in your city. What are you guys going to do now? I was in a room with eight other sergeants and lieutenants and deputies, all of which have a lot of tactical experience, all of which I thought I did, too, until I was presented with this problem.

And I was told to make a decision on how I'm going to prioritize what I was going to do, what I was going to do, what was my thinking about doing it? And I was just thinking, hey, man, I'm just a SWAT cop. I know which door to kick and go downrange. And it's a surrounding call out, or it's a dynamic entry. And when I was presented with that, I realized, hey, there's a deficiency in my own expertise that I need to work on. So how can I start getting more of this experience by doing things like this?

Now, fast forward, I got that. Probably in 2017 or 18, COVID comes around. We have the George Floyd protest, we have the COVID incidents going on. And I'm brought on a CATO as a board member, and we're looking at ways to continue our training for our members.

And I remember walking into Josh's office one day, and I can tell something was wrong. And I go, hey, what's going on, partner? And he said, hey, I'm getting my doctorate degree now, and I need to find an organization or a corporation to do my doctorate capstone on. And I'm having a hard time doing that now.

At the time, I'm like, hey, this is a great opportunity to not only take a deep dive into CATO, but also this decision making exercise idea that we had at the time, and that got the ball rolling with Josh and I.

Jon Becker: So your perspective on it was a tactical one. Josh, you're in the process of doing a doctorate in organizational theory. Talk to me about that and how this kind of evolved.

Josh Wofford: I think the whole purpose behind the decision making exercises for me was to use them as a form to learn from. The decision making exercises allowed us to take a real event, a critical incident, but embed people in it in a way where it's ripe with the ambiguity. It's got all the uncertainty and the dilemmas that are present in a real incident.

We always grounded them in something real, not telling the participants that up front, but allowing them to walk through the incident, learn from each other, collaborate, and ultimately come to a resolution of how they would address it, and hopefully taking advantage of all that, that learning that was going on in the room through those conversations, through that collaboration, and setting them up that way.

Jon Becker: So, Toby, why don't you walk me through, like, how does a DME work? Give me the whole format. How many people, you know, what do you do?

Toby Darby: Yeah. And so this is great. And this is always still in the workings. I take a lot of the stuff as we do one DME, and it would be a, we say, DME class or session, we will assess whether it was successful or not and kind of bounce everything up. And he'll use all his research and say, hey, we might want to tweak it a little bit, but typically, we would have a tragic event that would occur, one that we think that a lot of leadership lessons or a lot of decision making ideas should be implemented and taught, and we will take that incident.

Now, it could be an incident like San Bernardino or borderline, or maybe it's just as simple as an incident that happened with patrol the night before that we can go back and get axon video body cam footage and play it out for the officers, for everybody, learn from.

So we'll get the incident and find out what is it we want to share or teach to our officers or sergeants or lieutenants. And with that concept not getting too far in the weeds, we typically just want to keep it simple, where, for instance, if we want to take one elements of the five characteristic of a crisis, say, hey, today we're going to learn about uncertainty.

And in uncertainty, we're going to play this out, and this is what's going to happen. You guys just had this incident happen. As you guys are briefing back to us, let us know where these elements of uncertainty is or anything such as, you know, the principles of war. Or maybe it is a policy issue that your department is having. And you can say, hey, we want to focus on this policy that we implemented five years ago, or our policy about pursuits. Let's talk about it as we're going through this.

So with that, we will usually break it up to two to three questions, two to three segments, so to speak, and then give them the first initial part of it. You know, you're on patrol when you see a suspicious individual standing at the corner of walk and don't walk. The suspect or the suspicious person appears to be a parolee. It's. We've been having a lot of burglaries in that area. What are you going to do?

And then typically, they'll break out into little sessions, discuss what their. Their plan of attack is, so to speak, come back and then share out. Now, at the very end of it, as they're going through all this, and they're all answering, by the way, and sometimes we'll get one group to disagree with another group and state why they did it, what they did.

We'll bring everybody back at the very end and say, well, you guys just played cognitively into a scenario which we now say it just happened, or it happened in Ventura county or it happened in San Bernardino, or it happened in Dallas. And with us today is this person who was there, and it's going to share out. So they got to play what they actually did with the actual scenario that occurred to see if their ideas worked or didn't work.

Jon Becker: So if I understand correctly, you're going to take a group of people. How many? Like, what's a good class size for DME?

Toby Darby: Say 15 to 20?

Josh Wofford: About 15 people.

Jon Becker: So we take the 15 people, we split them up into three groups of 5?

Josh Wofford: Usually about groups of 3. And that's only because we want participation from everybody involved. So we're hoping to rotate those share outs amongst the group so that each person gets an opportunity to speak, but that also provides buy in for the class, because they know if I'm going to address this DME, I'm going to be the one that's going to have the opportunity to speak.

And so I'm going to be engaged with my partners while I'm in that group, making sure that I understand what's going on, how I want to share this out. So it puts a little bit of social pressure on people to participate.

Jon Becker: Got it. So the three of us are in a group we get handed a set of facts. We break out into a breakout room. If it's online or physical room, we have a little discussion and then we come back and go, this is what I want. Or this is my. Depending on the question. We come back with our answer. We brief the group. Everybody briefs. There's a discussion about, well, Toby wanted to go to walk and don't walk, and Josh wanted to go to, you know, Main & Main. And then we play that out. And then now there's a. We get now a second evolution with more information. Is that.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, because you're trying. What you're trying to do is you're trying to explore the problem both individually and as a group. That way you come in with it, with all your assumptions about how you should deal with this incident. And then you talk to your partners about it. And either there's a conflict there or maybe it just adds to your thinking that's already on it. That way you come out now you can integrate those ideas, bring those out to the larger group and go through that process again.

And hopefully you're taking what you knew and adding that to what you just learned and then applying that to the problem. That way we're not getting stuck in a rut as far as our own thinking, our own assumptions, and applying to the same problem over and over again. It goes back to the corporate intellect.

So you have this room full of people. I may be in a group with a person that has 1000 call outs. If we're talking about a SWAT incident, maybe I only have five, but I get to get in a group with that person and come in with my own understanding of this event, but also balance those ideas off somebody that has a lot more experience than me.

So you have that idea of, I get that master apprentice relationship. But also, even though the split may not be equal as far as who's learning what he's still gonna learn, he or she's still gonna learn something from me. Right? Even if it's a small, small amount of knowledge, as opposed to the 80% that I'm learning from him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I see. Where – if the group gets too big, then the most knowledgeable guy in the room is going to be the one that takes control of the group. By keeping the group size small, you force this interaction. And it isn't just, you know, Toby gets in and tells us, hey, no, you guys are wrong. It's this way. We actually have a discussion. How many times are we going to run that iteration before concluding and briefing the actual incident is that, like three iterations?

Toby Darby: I would say we've been successful with three. When you start getting past that, you start losing the audience and, you know, you want to actually, at that point, I'm like a kid at Christmas. I want to present the actual person who was there and say, this incident happened, and check out. Now we're going to be doing a debrief of what happened so that they can do it.

So three is about right. It's, you know, sometimes even with time constraints, too, they'll start getting in discussions. And if we have three, you know, written out, but we only get to two because of time constraints, we're good with that.

Because ultimately, when we see success in this DME is when, you know, for instance, on an active shooter, there's one group that says, I'm going to make an entry, and there's one group that says, we're not going to make an entry, we're to contain because we're not hearing these things. And then we get into topics such as priority of life, and we get into probability of success, and we start talking down the road on that stuff. And ultimately, at the end of the day, people walk away with those concepts. If we only did two, but if we got to three, great.

Jon Becker: What I like about this concept is it's so much of tactical decision making is paradigm based decision making, right? It's looking at a situation and applying your prior experiences and drawing inferences. So it strikes me that this is a way to share paradigms and for people to live through the event without having to live through the event. Josh, talk to me about the science of this. Like, how does this actually, from a learning theory standpoint, how does it work?

Josh Wofford: So it's a constructivist learning theory, which means that a lot of the learning is embedded in the social environment. And so we try to create a social environment where people are willing to talk, willing to address conflict, willing to challenge each other, but willing to build upon ideas. And the science behind it is first with that cognitive presence, which is part of the theory as far as giving them that triggering event that says, here's this event that happened, and here's the first portion of it. And this event's ripe with ambiguity. It has dilemmas embedded in it. Break out into your groups and let's talk about this.

And we do it in a way where they have to explore that they can't just come to the most time. They're not going to come to the table and be like, oh, I have the answer. Here's the perfect answer. For this, because with tactics, you're never going to have a perfect answer because it's too complex. There's no perfect answer.

So it's so complex. But that's what we want to happen because we want them to first come in, they're going to explore by themselves. When they first hear it, right? They're going to run it through their brain and go, okay, this is my understanding of how I would address this event.

But then they're going to have to bounce those ideas off their partners when they do that. That's when the learning takes place. That's when they're able to either challenge their own assumptions on it. They came in with this idea of how to address it. But now I have this 30 year vet, a SWAT over here, and he's saying, I've done these a lot. And my experience with this type of event is we do this and this is why now it's updated his thinking or her thinking on how to approach this event. And now they can take that and they can apply it to the rest of the room.

And hopefully that iteration occurs again where they're going through that, we're addressing them with a problem, that triggering event ripe with ambiguity. They're exploring it individually and as a group, they're taking those ideas and they're integrating that new thinking and applying it to the resolution to that problem.

Toby Darby: Right.

Josh Wofford: And that's the process that we're trying to get them to go through. And that's the definition as we used it in this problem. For the critical thinking aspect, you wrote.

Jon Becker: Your capstone project, which is, for all intents and purposes, a dissertation on the science of this, basically, right?

Josh Wofford: Yes.

Jon Becker: And like, I see a lot of. A lot of upsides here, being able to experience things and all that. How does, Toby, how does this help an agency to retain corporate knowledge, to share experiences with. With people that are maybe not ever had those experiences?

Toby Darby: So we see it in our agency right now. I think a lot of agencies see it across the country, and that is attrition, you know, with retirements or people either promoting out of a certain rank and then young officers promoting up the rank to, you know, whether it be field training officer, sergeant, lieutenant, captains. We see a lot of young supervisors, a lot of young managers. I remember I came on my field training officer was some 50 year old officer that was teaching me how police work was done.

Now we're doing it with officers who may have four to five years on the department because we're such a young agency with most agencies having the same problem. So I think with the DME thing, we have some certain agencies that have a lot of work and then certain agencies that don't – And that being said, if there are something we refer to as low frequency and high risk events, which tend to happen when Murphy pops his head up on a weekend graveyard where these officers or sergeants are going to be more likely working with very little seniority, you're able to now have that corporate knowledge taught to those officers.

So when you ask somebody to a sergeant, hey, how many officer involved shooting investigations have you been a part of? Or how many have you been in? And some may say, I've never even done one. But if you've done a decision making exercise cognitively, you've already done one. You've already experienced that.

So now you know what to do in the event, and you're actually used. You're able to take a modeling of what happened that was given during the DME and use it with your thought process. And we do this in our critical incident management class where we give them decision making exercises, but we also give them resources and tools that they can refer back to in the event they had that low frequency, high risk event to kind of trigger some of those things and anchor some of those things.

So, but the good thing about it also that we see is we're bringing in officers, sergeants, maybe even a watch commander into these DMEs. So you're going to have different levels of experience. You're going to have different levels of, obviously, roles and responsibilities. And when they're into that role and they're into that, the decision making group, and they're told to brief out on what their decision was.

The lieutenants can have a different perspective than the officer, but now they're also going to understand which each person's role is, so that when a sergeant or a lieutenant gets on the radio and says, you know, break, break, break, you know, one Lincoln 95, I have command of this incident. The officer is going to be like, oh, he's slowing things down right now.

So now I know what his role is, his or her role. So that's how they can get that corporate knowledge, share that corporate knowledge. But then again, this contemporary issues is not just in your specific agency. You could take it across the country or even across the world with incidents that make newsworthy events that have those tactical concepts that we can learn from.

Jon Becker: It's interesting as you talk through it. I played ice hockey as a kid through most of my childhood, and I had a coach that liked to create weird situations. Five on three scrimmages, you know, four on four. And he put us into these all. You know, we're pulling the goalie.

We're doing this during practices, and you didn't understand why he did it until you got to the game. And you're like, oh, we've seen this before. This strikes me as a way that we can scrimmage complicated multi thread events and let people experience that. Josh, like, is there like, an experiential learning theory or situational learning theory here that's in play while you're going through this?

Josh Wofford: Yeah, there is situational learning theory. It's that whole master apprentice perspective. It gives people the opportunity to see how the more experienced people do it. But there's also that learning going back and forth, even though it's gonna be weighted towards the apprentice.

The new officer watching, the more experienced officer, the more experienced officer still going to get a benefit from it. They're still going to learn, because there might be some kind of innovative idea that the less experienced officer has that the officer that's been around for a long time with the same assumptions.

Again, we're trying to challenge our own assumptions. We're trying to challenge our own truth by incorporating more perspectives into what we're doing. And just going back to what Toby said about that common operational perspective, again, when you've gone through these incidents as a management team, as a SWAT team, as a patrol group, again, you're starting to build that trust that comes with knowing what your partners are going to do and what they're capable of.

And when it comes to delegating tasks, when it comes to confronting these critical incidents, those are the things that you want to know. I want to know that Jon is capable of this because I'm going to delegate that task to him, and I'm going to trust him to do it.

I know Toby's good at this. I'm going to delegate that task to him because I've already been through this incident. Even though it was a decision making exercise, I've been through it. I know his expertise. I know what he's capable of. And so in the organizational context, that's what it builds.

Now, that doesn't really necessarily carry over to the classroom context where you have different agencies, but with the organizational context, you get that added benefit of that common ground, that operation.

Jon Becker: And it does in a mutual aid. Right? So if I'm working, you and I are working for adjacent cities. We both go through a DME together. We show up at the same scene. We now have a shared experience, even though it was a classroom experience, it's a real emotive experience where I can say, hey, this is just like the DME on. So you create a linguistic shorthand that allows you to communicate within your agency, outside of your agency that didn't exist.

Josh Wofford: Previously because we scrimmaged already. We had a scrimmage game.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I can say, hey, this is like that practice last week when we were five on three. Right. It allows us to communicate, and it allows me to know that you know what I'm talking about. Right. The one thing you see with very experienced teams, and I don't care whether it's in a tactical environment, in a work environment, what makes an experienced team effective frequently is the shorthands. Right? It's the linguistic shorthands. The fact that I know where he's going to go before he goes there. The problem is, there's no formal mechanism for us to teach that.

One of the things that I like about DMEs is you're creating an environment where we can take this exercise and put everybody in the agency through it. And they all have a common framework. As you said, they have a common operating picture.

Talk to me about the differences between. I could see doing this with a homogeneous group, you know, three guys, same agency, same team, but I can also see doing this with a heterogeneous or, you know, a diverse group. What's the differences and benefits with those two?

Josh Wofford: The difference is you have to focus a lot on the social presence aspect of this. So the social presence is just creating that environment where people are willing to communicate, where people are willing to challenge each other's ideas. And that's where Toby comes in, because he's usually the facilitator. I'm a facilitator also.

But Toby takes that lead, and we role, and his job is to make people feel comfortable talking, make people feel comfortable challenging each other's ideas. And, you know, acknowledging when somebody has a well thought out point or acknowledging conflict in the room and getting that cross conversation to happen, that's a big component of it. And that's where the theory works. Right?

You have the teaching presence, which is the facilitating, creating that environment, that social presence, which is necessary for that cognitive presence. The critical thinking aspect. Because with no talking, with no comfort, if people aren't challenging each other or if people aren't building on each other's ideas, you're not going to have that critical thinking aspect. And that's what Toby does a really good job at of embedding. Both online and in the classroom.

Jon Becker: So it's really this moment where it sounds like a lot of the benefit here is not only you're handing me your paradigms and I'm handing you mine, we're disagreeing about who you know which paradigm is correct. And it's admittedly an ambiguous situation. There is no, you know, there's no right answer to it. But it's this moment where I'm saying, you know, I use the analogy of, you know, the first guy that found a rattlesnake probably picked it up and got bit. If he doesn't share that information with the second guy that finds a rattlesnake, he also gets bit.

And if you look at, you know, tactical situations and you go to as many debriefs as we've all gone to, there is a recurring, there are recurring themes in those things, and the themes seem to pop up at every one. This strikes me as a way to wargame, picking up the snake, being able to. It's a rattlesnake, okay? We both know it's a rattlesnake.

I can now take a junior officer and put him through the rattlesnake exercise, and he knows not to pick it up. And he also knows what it is and can articulate to somebody else, say, don't touch the snake.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, and it goes a little bit further than that too, in the sense that, you know, we deal with confirmation bias and that's that cognitive limiting state where you, you're only going to gravitate towards information that already helps already is evidence of your current assumptions of how you would deal with something.

Jon Becker: You can see that in what we watch on the news.

Josh Wofford: What you watch on the news, right. So we gravitate towards things that are like us. Oh, that like minded people, this and that. And the only thing to do with that sometimes is to present your yourself with people that challenge you. So if I talk to you and say, hey, this is my idea on this, and you challenge me and go, hmm, I've been in business for a long time. I don't think I would do it that way. And this is why, right?

That's that metaphorical mirror to my thinking that I need so that I can bounce out of that cognitive limiting state of confirmation bias. If I don't have that in an environment, I'm just going to proceed down the same path. I'm going to keep on picking up the rattlesnake and getting bit and wondering.

Jon Becker: Every time why you got Bitde. Because that's part of you see it in society now where everybody watches their news channel, they listen to, they have their Facebook group, and they become so insular and isolated that then something happens and you look back and you're like, God, that was really stupid. How did that make sense? And what I like about this is it's transplatform, right? Like, you can do this online, you can do it in person, you can do it across the country. It gives you the ability to share that information and that critical thinking.

And although each group is going to be different, each group, you're going to get something. I mean, if you sat down in the same DME with two different groups, you'd walk away with different learning each time. But there'd probably be a base of similarity between the exercises, you know, interesting.

Toby Darby: Interesting with that is we don't repeat bad behavior. So we learn from incidents that went bad, and we come back and say, hey, I went through the DME and this was identified as probably not the best way to do it. I probably don't want to do it that way. Doesn't mean you probably will. You could do it that way. Another incident, but I probably won't do it that way.

So in one of our decision making exercises, we were challenging in each group and doing it in a safe environment and doing it very respectfully. One of the individuals was disagreeing about making an entry or containment. And we broke for lunch before we actually gave the actual debrief that happened.

And I asked, kind of like the guy who was overseeing everything for CATO in the class, and I said, hey, what are you thinking so far on how the class is going? And he says, this is really good stuff. I just hoped on the surveys, it doesn't say that fistfights broke out because people were disagreeing with each other. And I go, that's what we want. Not to the point where. Point where fistfights are breaking out, but we want them to disrespectfully disagree with each other so that they can kind of argue their points.

And we're seeing that with problems across the country. You know, if you interview or you do a team that's here in California and then compare it with the team back east is probably gonna have a different culture, different mindset, different tactic. But to bring those two groups in and give them that same problem, because it's all going to be the same problem. If it's a Texas tower or Vegas, if it's the incident, New Orleans or Christopher Dorner say, hey, this incident happened. How would you guys deal with it?

Ultimately we want to take it across the world and ask how other countries would deal with that same problem to learn different ideas. But also so with our giving climate, with the media, with our giving climate with the courts to look and say, hey, we keep doing things like this is because we've always done it that way. How can we improve upon that? And that's going to be done by, you know, not going dynamic on something that should be done as a surround, a call out of, but getting that message across the country by doing DMEs and sharing that type of stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we deal with countries all over, teams all over the world. And the way that a team in Florida versus a team in Texas versus a team in New York, team in California, a team in Paris, France would solve problems is dramatically different. The way they talk about the problems is dramatically different.

Part of the reason that when Bataklon happened, we brought in Brih was to let our local teams see this is how a European team solves a problem. I mean, they're wearing way more armor. They're carrying way more armor. They're moving much more deliberately, which in that case worked because as you remember, they got shot a lot and only one guy got it in the hand.

But it is, we tend to be insular, we tend to, as you said, surround ourselves with like minded thinkers. And I think the combination of that with the fact that we punish pioneers now, right, if you deviate from the status quo in your thinking and it's wrong, we're going to prosecute you, we're going to persecute you, we're going to punish you and you're going to lose your job.

Whereas if you do what the status quo is, even if it's wrong, you're safer. I, and what I like here is it allows kind of explorational thinking where it's a safe environment to make a stupid statement or to ask a stupid question. Is that from a learning theory standpoint, is that kind of what you've seen play out?

Josh Wofford:Yeah, you're safe until you fall on the wrong side of history. So you continue with a tactic that maybe you've never been challenged on. So nobody's asked you why. So a lot of learning, right? We start out where we memorize things. Like, so I can give you Phil command or some other book and you can memorize.

The question is, have you comprehended it? Because that's the next step. Do you comprehend what the book is saying? After that, it's like, well, can you apply it. Can you apply the concepts that we find in sound doctrine and other books to a scenario, to a tactical engagement? And after you apply it, can you analyze it? Can you look at, okay, why did we do it that way? Can you explain to me why you do a certain tactic? This has come up with dynamic entries in the past and people will say, every warrant we do is dynamic.

And when you ask them why, a lot of times the answer is, that's the way we've always done it. It's safe, right? That's the way we've always done it. You hear that all the time. Until you're on the wrong side of history, where you're doing dynamic warrants and it doesn't fit the context, which is.

Jon Becker: Where we are now. I mean, it's – That is a current nationwide debate.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do with this is get people to the point where here's the incident, and yes, it's ambiguous, and yes, it's uncertain, and yes, you don't have all the information and that problem's embedded in. And then when they come out and they do that exploration again, that thinking both individually and as a group to go, okay, why do I want to do it this way? Why do I want to use this tactic?

And hopefully there's people there to sharpen that blade and say, I agree with you and give them the confidence that, yeah, that's the appropriate tactic. We would use this and that's why. Or, whoa, okay, we have a lot of experience with this. We wouldn't use that tactic. Let's talk through this. Let's challenge each other. Because it's one thing if you have two ideas and they're very close together. It's another thing if you're this far apart. That's when the dynamic.

Jon Becker: Non dynamic.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, that's when the discussion needs to happen. Like if me and Toby, a lot of times me and Toby will have a discussion and we'll be really close. I don't care what the final answer is because we're so close, probability wise, it's going to be a good decision. But when we're this far apart, that's when we need to stop and have that discussion. That's when that learning actually takes place. That's that critical thinking element that's really going to help you address the problem and learn in the process.

Toby Darby: Also in our profession, when we're going through that, if that sergeant or lieutenant or even officer never had that experience, in other words, never took part of a DME or never actually responded to an active shooter, they now have that tool that they can go back. And if they make a decision or they're, you know, let's just say we say indecisiveness is one of the biggest problems when it comes to critical incident management.

We all face it, right, because of people being uncertain about their outcomes or their circumstances in the situation. If we have that knowledge, they can go back and say, hey, the reason why I made this decision to go or not is because we went through this in a DME, and I saw that LAPD did the same thing and it worked for them in that one.

So they're able to go back and grab those experiences and share out and then have it when they get called on the carpet on why they made a certain decision. That's the reason why is because I have experience in a DME.

Jon Becker: So, Toby, it strikes me that a lot of what people are getting from the DME is the why to make a decision. And what gets lost in an environment where we are trying to pound 100 classes a year into guys heads is we teach them the technique. We don't teach them the why. And especially in your line of work, the why matters. Shooting somebody is either legal and constitutional or a crime. And the only thing that separates those two is the why. So, Josh, why does this teach the why?

Josh Wofford: Well, I think it teaches the why behind it, because it makes you articulate why you're doing something. You're not just taking the training and saying, I learned this in a class one day, or I read it in a book, and now I'm going to apply it. It gets down to why are you applying that specific tactic? That specific strategy, what is that embedded in? What's it grounded in? Why are you doing this versus something else? Where did you come to that conclusion? That's the best technique to use, and it's not only using the why, but it's using the when.

Like, what is the circumstance that dictates whether or not you use this tactic? And that's what we're trying to do with them when we embed them in the DME is, yes, you have this tactic, but that tactic also has to be applied in the correct circumstance. All circumstances are different and unique.

So making them go through that process of we use it over here, but now we've changed the circumstance. It's a different DME. What would you use now and why?

Jon Becker: You're shifting the problem slightly..

Toby Darby: And that's life. And that is a tactical incident. You have to be constantly shifting. You know, if the suspect comes out and gives up or it gives up the hostage, are you going to switch? You know, are you going to shift from getting ready to do a dynamic entry or now we have a barricade because we now have the hostage. You're constantly shifting.

And the challenge of doing that, I mean, with the concepts of principles before procedures and something we talk about, you know, explaining why you're going to do it, defining that end state to know what that is. And then from there you'll get to the when, the what, the where, the why, the I'm sorry, the how, how you're going to do it all. That's important by having that why.

In other words, if you are asked, you know, I'm going to send five officers in on a barricaded suspect who is, you know, armed with this gun. And we're talking about probability of success or priority of life. Why is it you're going to do that? Do we have at least a 51% chance of succeeding?

All that stuff is, it surfaces in that class, in that discussion. And you'll get some people in that class that start talking about tactics, you know, and they're sitting there talking and you'll see their hand go up in certain classrooms and you're like, oh, no, let's get away from the tactics. They're not about going left or right, but what are we going to do and why are we going to do it? I think that's a real.

Jon Becker: So it's really more at a strategic and operational level than at a tactical and technique level.

Josh Wofford:Yeah. It's critical incident management. This is not critical incident tactics and strategy. Right? We want people to look globally at the incident and say how they would apply things. And just going back to the why, when you establish a good why now you can delegate authority to different groups as you have command of the operation. Because they know the decisions I'm making are based on the why that the commander is giving me. So they have to know the why embedded in that. I think that's very important when you're talking about addressing a critical incident.

Jon Becker: One of the things I try to do leading an organization is when I make a decision, when I set a course to explain the reason behind my decision, right? To provide a commander's intent, but also to provide, you know, a clear logic to that intent, because there is that point. You know, I always use the analogy of teaching your kids, right? You can tell your kids, like, oh, in this circumstance, no, you have to tell the truth and saying, well, you know, they gave you too much change. You give it back. You teach your kid that lesson.

If you then follow that with give it back because you shouldn't take things that don't belong to you. You've now given that kid a lifetime paradigm that they can apply to other situations. Right? And that's kind of the difference between learning a technique and learning a tactic, is this is how you open the door? This is why you open the door.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. When you have, so, I mean, it doesn't matter if it's business, it doesn't matter if it's critical incident management. You start with a plan, right? No matter if it's a hasty plan or it's a plan that you thought about for a year, you start with that plan. But as soon as you make a decision, you're acting on that event, you're changing it, you're bringing complexity to it.

So now you're going to have to improvise because your plan maybe doesn't line up to what you had when you first started. And you go through that process of improvising those iterations, improvising again, changing, so that by the end of the whole incident, it looks nothing like the plan that you started out with.

But if you have that, why behind it? Everybody knows, like, where do we want to be with that end state? Doesn't matter if the things change, if circumstances change, we still know where we're going. So you can delegate that authority to your different people in the organization because they know the why behind what you're doing. They're going to get you to that end state.

Jon Becker: So talk to me like, let's go through the mechanics of it, of actually facilitating a DME. How do you pick an event? How do you pick a good event for a DME? What types of incidents are good?

Toby Darby: I think what we like to do is look for incidents that have some sort of conflict in our profession, maybe something that is getting some negativity in the news, something that recently happened where it's fresh in everybody's mind, so that when, you know, ultimately, if they see this, this on the news, they're going to say, hey, if that were to happen in our city or county, this is kind of how we would do it, and then you present them with that problem.

So once we have that, that issue that is presented, and it may be something too, we don't want to be going back and talking about incidents that happened in World War 2, World War 1, or whatever. Maybe we do, but we want to have stuff that's contemporary stuff that is applicable, because what happens is they're going to be able to see what their decisions are play out with the actual incident.

And maybe it's still in litigation. Maybe it's still being broadcasted on the news. Maybe it, you know, it affected somebody emotionally, psychologically from that agency because it was a neighboring agency. Or maybe, again, it just might be something that's in house and you were dealing with an increase of problems of people going fast during pursuits, or you're dealing with a problem of not reporting. Right?

So you can look at that and say, hey, we're gonna use a DME based on really hitting home with this policy to make sure that everybody understands that if we're gonna use a pit maneuver, this is the reasons why. So it depends on what the given climate is that we can decide to use those. And then again, too, sometimes it is also about availability of the presenters. And do we have that video, or do we have someone to come in and talk into our classes and say, we were there, this is what we experienced, and it becomes more real that way.

Jon Becker: What I think is interesting just to that regard is this is so inherently scalable that if we can get to the point that you've recorded these things, at least, that afterward debrief, this is something that you could write up, teach someone to facilitate, and now scale. Is that an accurate way to read that, Josh?

Josh Wofford: Yeah, because you can bring anything to the table. You can teach the facilitation, which we're already doing with some of our partners at CATO, because you bring them an event and you just explain them. We're looking for events that are uncertain, that have an element of chance to them, that are ambiguous, that create dilemmas for people. And we embed these in the decision making exercise, and we don't give all the information up front because we want people to have to go through that process. Just like if you were a critical incident manager of I don't have all the information.

I'm going to have to make a risky decision here because I don't know, probability wise, if this is going to work out, because I don't have all the information. And so we're taking them through that circle of, again, that triggering event, that ambiguous situation, that exploration, that integration of knowledge, and applying it to a problem. We can teach people to do that.

Again, this is not the old sage on the stage type format, where Toby gets up there and he just pontificates everything about tactics that everybody needs to know, and then they go out in the world and they apply it perfectly. No, we know we're all limited by our own understanding.

We're all limited by our resources and everything else. And so it's even better if you have a facilitator that is not Toby or me applying it, because they're going to come out with their own perspective, their own paradigm, and they're going to be able to take that into a new arena with new perspectives.

Jon Becker: Well, it's almost socratic, right? It's almost a socratic learning method where it's like, here's a problem. How do you figure out the problem? Rather than one of the things that I like about this versus just a straight debrief is a debrief. You hear how somebody else solved the problem, and if you take the lessons from the debrief and you go home and you discuss them in your team, with your circumstances, you can extend that learning.

This forces you to solve the problem first. You know, this is. This is. Here's the jigsaw puzzle. Put it together. Okay. Now, here's the picture, which. Which I think, from a learning theory standpoint, would be a much more effective way to learn.

Josh Wofford: And it puts you on the hot seat and not as bad as, like, you know, I know a lot of law schools, they teach the socratic method, where it's like, it's your day, you're on the hot seat. You're gonna be the one getting all the questions asked that day and asked to solve the problem.

Jon Becker: Been there, done that.

Josh Wofford: Yeah. It's you. Right? Right. It's you. This is a little bit safer where you have that safety of those three people so you can rely on your partners to go, hey, this is how I would approach this incident. What do you think? You're getting people to reach out, and Toby's going to say, no, that's a good idea, but I would also do this, or that's a bad idea. I think we should do this.

And you're hoping you have that kind of conflict, that disagreement, that conversation, and it allows people to do it in the safety of that three. But then you can't hide. You got to come out and you got to explain that to the group.

Jon Becker: Well, and what's interesting, I see where, like, one, you're going to start to develop, you know, a love language for the agency, where we establish a way to critique each other's events and. And challenge each other's thinking without it turning into a fistfight in the parking lot. You're also going to stress test the entire chain of command. If you do this right, because everybody that's involved in this problem now is going to have to come up with a solution.

And you're going to see, wow, you know, lieutenants Wofford and Darby really can't get along and they probably shouldn't be running incident together, or you're going to see, oh, my God, Toby and Josh are fantastic together. They're yin and yang for our agency. Those are the guys we want running the problem.

Josh Wofford: Yeah, that goes back to, if you're playing football right, when we, you know, whether it's the Buccaneers, the Rams, there's that common ground, that common operational perspective that those teams have where if you put a team of Pro bowlers against them, the pro Bowlers are probably going to lose.

Because Tom Brady knows his running back. He knows his receivers, he knows what receivers work well together. He knows what running backs can do, what you know, so that he has that common ground, that understanding. You bring that to the table in a management meeting, on a SWAT team, in a patrol group, that changes the dynamic of how you address these critical incidents.

All of a sudden you have trust in people, and it goes deeper than just that common ground because you need trust to delegate. And if you're not delegating, you're not addressing the incident in the most efficient way possible.

Jon Becker: That's interesting! It brings back a memory for me. I helped facilitate a command and control exercise with Sid, probably 20 years ago. And the agency brought it in. Their chief brought it in, said, hey, we want to run this. We want a real operation. We took a timeline that was an actual firestone event and ran it, and their command staff came apart. I mean, shouting matches in the room, this is ridiculous. This would never happen.

And the captain that was the incident commander walked out and had a tantrum and ended up being relieved by the chief at the exercise. And I remember saying to Sid, like, my God, that was horrible. He goes, that wasn't anywhere near as bad as it would have been if it had been an operation.

Toby Darby: Correct. And people's lives at risk as well.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it does create that, that kind of stress test where you really see the mettle of people in a very friendly environment. As far as the roles in the DME, what are the essential, who are the essential players here? Explain to me. We talked about the small group format. You have a facilitator. What's the facilitator's role? Kind of break that down for me.

Josh Wofford: So part of the theory, and again, is the community of inquiry theory. That's the theory that we're working with. And again, that's a theory that, based on talking to CATO, their leadership, and working with the virtual environment at the time, and Zoom was the best theory to apply to this.

So all theory is just a general way of approaching something, because we understand, like, this is how people learn in this context. With that comes an element called teaching presence, and that's the facilitator portion of it, where that's the job of, we're going to focus the discussion on this. In this case, it's a DME, right?

Once we focus that discussion, we're going to point out where people agree. Where people disagree, trying to keep that dialogue going both within the groups and the larger format. So we're trying to get that interactive, collaborative environment going so that the knowledge that's in people's heads is getting out into the open, so that everybody understands and learns.

It's not trying to win an argument or anything else. It's more about, we have a lot of experts in the room. That's the difference between adulthood and adult. When you're educating adults versus children, there's expertise in the room, right? Children, they're learning whatever you're giving to them. But we want to get that expertise that's in the room, out in the open, apply it to a problem and understand it. The facilitator's role is key to that, because without a good facilitator, you're not going to have that interaction, that social presence that leads to that cognitive presence, that critical thinking element.

Jon Becker: It's interesting! Years ago, we worked with a Sof unit, and their commander gave me kind of a. It was a tier one unit, and their commander kind of gave me a breakdown of what their planning cycle looked like, and it was a rank off. Planning. Everybody has a seat at the table. There is no rank. There is no, you know, you might have more experience than I do. Everybody has a voice.

And the rationale from that was, you harness all of the brain at the table. We don't allow rank structure or experience to override the one guy that raises his hand and goes, hey, did you ever think about this? I immediately implemented that in my business life and have a very specific example. I take our marketing materials and hand it to people that have nothing to do with sales.

One of our warehouse guys came walking in very sheepishly, and he handed me back to catalog, and he's like, did you intentionally misspell the company name? You're kidding, right? No. Right there on the COVID We'd misspelled our own name. It had gone through 20 sets of hands. And here's the one guy that's not in the forest that can go, hey, that tree looks wrong. And it feels like this is going to kind of create that environment almost unintentionally in the agency. Because if we've sat through DMEs together and we've challenged each other's thinking, it's going to affect our culture, isn't it? Yeah.

Josh Wofford: Because you want that deference to expertise, right? You don't want to. Just because you're an expert in one realm doesn't mean you're going to be an expert in another realm. So it's humbling, but you got to show deference to the people in the room that have the most expertise. Now, that could be a tactical guy or girl, or it could be a manager, right? Depending on what circumstance you find that in, you've got to gravitate towards the person with expertise in that realm.

The other part of it is, we've talked about this before, innovative ideas usually come from the outside. Outside can be whatever your perspective is. It can be outside command staff or it could be outside the organization. But those innovative ideas are usually going to come out of your core little element because a lot of times now you're just with your like minded people sharing the same ideas over and over again with no elements coming in that are going to challenge your ideas and have that metaphorical mirror again to your thinking that you need, or else you're just going to be subject to that confirmation bias, that cognitive limiting state.

Jon Becker: Well, you talk about cognitive limiting states. We've all had the experience of, you know, there's the gun guy, right? Every agency has the gun guy, and everybody marginalizes the gun guy as the gun kook. And what you do in the process of marginalizing the gun guy is literally take the most knowledgeable person on that subject and push them out of the tribe.

And it's easy to do because Toby knows way more about it than I do. And so I don't want Toby to challenge my thinking too much. So we're going to marginalize Toby. The problem is Toby's the guy we need at that incident. So it almost feels like it's going to kind of counter that. What, what have you seen in implementing this? What have you seen? The effect on the culture has been.

Toby Darby: So I saw specifically on one DME that we did for our SWAT team, we made it known. And the facilitator, the biggest part, I think, for the facilitator is to make sure it's a safe environment and to encourage the younger officers or whoever may be the less ranking officer or deputy to be the one to speak out and be the first one to kind of brief out to the group so they get them involved to break that. Hey, I'm just gonna sit in the back and let this person with the most experience do the whole job for me.

We saw that as we started having our younger SWAT guys or SWAT pups briefing back. We both looked at each other and we were like, oh, my gosh, this guy's got so much knowledge and experience. I didn't even know he was smart. And it identified that, and it actually boosted that person's ego, too, because we're like, I didn't know you were smart. And we went up and kind of talked to this guy, but the whole team saw that, so we were able to draw that out.

So then now everybody in the room got to see what that person's expertise is. And I don't want to get in the weeds and talking about highly reliable organizations, but we got to see what everybody's talents were, what their. And maybe it was a gun guy, maybe it was somebody who was really good, smart wise.

As you're saying these things reminds me of the Osama bin Laden raid when they took the rank off. We take rank off and planning and take the rank off and the debriefing in our teams. And we said, at the Osama bin Laden raid, they said, well, what next? And it was the youngest seal in the room, I think, is when I heard it said, we can crash a helicopter in the front yard. So they came up with a contingency plan for that. But it was that Seal who said that. And if they would have had just the admirals and then the, you know, the team leaders making the plan, they would have missed a lot of things.

So we saw a lot of benefit from that. I mean, there are times when you'll have people in a group, maybe, like you mentioned, with the command staff having that melting down, they disagree. Or you'll have. Sometimes everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. I'll go with it. The facilitator needs to see that, identify that as they're walking around and listening to the different groups and then say, hey, listen, this is getting a little too easy, right?

So everyone's kind of agreeing with each other too much. So let's argue. We have a little form, and we have a form that we're going to provide to also that we'll give access to from our CATO website on how you can fill out, you know, your problem, but also say, hey, listen, have your visual aids.

So I'll put a picture up of where the problem is. Maybe it's a map, or maybe it's the front door of a house. Maybe it's like a big group area of, like a protest, but we'll have the visual aids. But then I'll have this little section on the side that says chaos. And when I start to see that, I'm like, let me throw some chaos in there. Oh, guys, by the way, this just happened.

And so now it's like, okay, well, let's see if I can get. Because I kind of see what these two are agreeing on, but I see a little hesitancy here. Let me see if I can find a little chaos section to throw it in there without getting too far into it to get some more discussion happening.

Josh Wofford: And on that organizational leadership side. Right? So, you know, when you find out that somebody's good at something, it builds trust, especially when it's in these repeated acts when you're doing a decision making exercise. I've noticed that Jon is good at this five times, because five times in this decision making exercise, he's articulated why he would do something.

My SWAT team leaders, I trust them. Why? I've worked with them for 15 years. I've seen them perform over and over again and perform well. We don't always get the opportunity to see that in our organization, with our people. But these decision making exercises expose us to people that maybe we never saw before.

So operationally, I can trust them. That means I can delegate to them. I can delegate authority to them and allow them to go off and do something, because I've seen, okay, this is not just based on. I'm not being risky here probability wise. I know that they're going to be able to go out and perform this and perform it well, because I've already seen it in a context within a classroom.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting because people are so multidimensional that I've had experiences in my own organization where I'll assign something to somebody or we'll sit down and have a group discussion, and all of a sudden you realize, wow, Toby is a savant when it comes to picking shoes. And all of a sudden, now we've got a shoe problem. We got to find Toby.

And I would say my job as a CEO is to harness 100% of the processing power in the building, not to be the guy with the right answer, we got to get the right answer. It's not my job to have the right answer. It's my job to get the right answer. And the most likely way for me to get there is by harnessing all of the processing power. But if you don't even know it's there.

I mean, I've had so many experiences in my career where I've had a conversation with somebody in a meeting and thought, my God, that person's really good at that. And literally have transformed the organization. I mean, I've created jobs around skill sets that were revealed in kind of casual discussion where this person's like, oh, yeah, no, I know a lot about this. I always think back to the story of tactical diagramming. Sid creating tactical diagramming. That happened because of an argument with a scout on an operation where he's like, the kitchen's right here.

And Sid said, no, it's not. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, no, that's not the kitchen. The kitchen's over there. He's like, how do you know that? Well, because that's a gas supplying event. Well, how do you know it's a gas appliance? Well, I'm a contractor. That changed the way they scouted houses forever.

Toby Darby: We were having this discussion this morning about our team leaders and our team members, and the conversation came up, and it's like, you know, we have guys in our SWAT team that are 240 pounds of straight, you know, straight muscle. You know, purple belts, brown belts, and jiu jitsu. Shoot really well, teach post approved SWAT schools.

And then we look at other people who we recently started bringing on that have other great talents, and it may be we're looking for thinkers. That's what we want on our teams is the thinker part. But it may be something, too. With technology and the implementation of technology.

First of all, explosive breaching school is not easy to get through. You got to get that Cal Osha approval. That's not easy to go through. And if you get a guy that's really good at lifting weights and not saying that they're going to be the ones that couldn't complete this, but that's not a mongo joke. We have some talented, very smart guys, too, but you have those ones that are thinkers. We have drones now, right?

And the ones that maybe when you think about a person racing drones or an RC car, you're not thinking about the 280 pound muscle guy. You're thinking about somebody that just graduated high school and, you know, games all day long, they may be our great drone guy or our robot guy, or it may be somebody, too, with the explosive breaching, that they can do the mathematics and say, no, you're completely wrong on that. But that discussion came up this morning, and it's interesting that it gets brought up again.

Josh Wofford: And it goes back to, again, what we're talking about here. It's that critical thinking aspect. Why? Why are you picking this person for the SWAT team? I know they're big. I know they're strong. I know they're fast. And we have a lot of guys on our team that fit that, that mold, but they're also smart. We had the why behind it. We picked them for a reason.

And whenever you're putting people through a school or anything else, you want people to get past the surface and start telling me again, why? Why are you picking that person? What do they bring to the table that somebody else doesn't organizationally, whether it's a SWAT team, a business, or anything else that helps you to manage towards people's strengths? Because people ask me all the time, why did you put that person in that spot over there? Because he's the best person for it.

I know, but over here, he doesn't get along with this group. I know, but over here, that doesn't affect it. He's the most productive person in this role over here at this time, with the circumstances that we're facing right now, and that makes it for a better, more optimized organization. Doesn't matter if it's SWAT, doesn't matter if it's dispatched. Doesn't matter if it's a business.

Jon Becker: Yes, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's. I always say, like, you know, thoroughbred horses frequently bite their trainers. I run an organization of thoroughbred horses. A large part of my job is to keep them from biting each other because they're passionate, they're smart. They've thought through their side of the equation, the accounting and logistics argument. They're both very passionate about it.

And my job is to ultimately be the one that makes the decision, but also to give them both voice, because the minute I shut down one, I eliminate that. And it strikes me here that this is something that could be run throughout your organization. And the decision making might be tactical, but it might not. It could be a fire. Like, what kinds of, where do you find inspiration for DMEs? What are the kinds of things that you would look to?

Toby Darby: I would say that any incident that can potentially help us as a profession prevent being, you know, tragic event on the evening news prevent the loss of life of an officer or maybe somebody that's innocent, learning from past incidents and say, this happened and officers died because a decision wasn't made here because they were indecisive, or the wrong decision was made because they were shooting from the hip and not really using any of the why behind it.

And I know right now that we're. We're currently talking about with our other entities in our city, with the fire department and public works, and dealing with a large scale, citywide incident and sitting down and having those discussions where I'm able to go to public works a couple things, too. And kind of going back to what you're saying earlier, is now I have that face to face with that public works guy. He knows who I am, and I know who he or she is.

So if I need something, I can get that from him at that given time. Fire department two, they understand the roles and responsibilities. I'm now learning about what they're all about, what their talents are, what their capabilities are, having that discussion, breaking out into a group and then being able to solve a problem or give that insight to it. But any incident that could potentially affect our citizens, our profession, our officers innocent lives, anything.

And I kind of, when I start the class off, I explain how personally I was impacted by an incident that happened, that I looked. An emotional attachment, so to speak, is that I got a debrief of an incident that occurred at an agency where the incident commander on scene didn't really do what he or she should have been doing, and it ultimately led to the death of two additional officers because a decision wasn't made, and it impacted me.

And when I explain stuff to, like, how to facilitate this type of thing, look for those instances where there's an emotional attachment to somebody so they won't forget it. You know, I mean, we walk around, and we see, like, an outlet right there. And babies walk around, and they're thinking, okay, it's just an outlet. But it's not until you touch that outlet and get shocked that you realize, oh, crap, I'm not gonna touch that outlet again. What's the incidents that are happening in your city or county or across the world that are creating an emotional response in your agency or in our profession in a whole?

Jon Becker: Well, and you use the analogy of having kids, and I think anybody that has kids has had the baby proofing expedition of locking every cabinet and take, you know, oh, man, I didn't know I had, you know, poisoned that glow on the ground. And I think the same is true here. Like, this doesn't have to be a catastrophic event. This could be a close call. This could be body worn camera that an officer says, man, that almost went sideways on me. Great, let's take the body worn camera and instead of doing a 1 hour, two hour DME, let's do a ten minute DME with just the motor officers and watch this body worn camera and talk through. How could we do this differently?

Josh Wofford: It's just a way of thinking. It doesn't even have to be something that's big as a critical incident. I mean, think about a tactic on a SWAT team. You know, something, you traverse a hallway and somebody gets shot with sims. Okay, well, what happened? Or what's our problem? Well, somebody got shot in the hallway. Okay, let's talk about it. Let's first get in groups and explore. Like, why do you think this person got shot? Okay, let's integrate our ideas as far as, like, how could we prevent this in the future? It avoids the solutionitis too, that whole idea of, like, coming up with a solution before you've even explored the problem. Right?

Somebody will be like, gotta use a shield. Well, yeah, maybe that might be the tactic that you use, but that's something you should come to a conclusion on after you've done that problem exploration. Otherwise, the solution might not fit the problem. So it can be used in everyday life, whether it's a small group dealing with a business problem or a critical incident that we want to do a decision making exercise on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it strikes me, when we went through ISO certification, which is quality control standard, the auditor sat down with me and said, are your customers happy to? Yeah, they are. Well, how do you know that? Well, because they tell us. Well, do you think they would tell you if they were unhappy? How do you measure it? And everything that we asked, it was like, how do you know? How do you know? How do you know?

And I finally said, like, God, we just like, what's the deal? What's with all the, how do you know? And he said, if you're not measuring it, you don't know it's happening. If you're not stress testing it, you don't know it exists.

And so it's interesting that this is a way to constantly, they say people do what's inspected, not what's expected. This is a way to force that process in ten minutes in a briefing, or over two and a half hours over a large critical incident. It's a way of thinking that I think, you know, is part of the reason that I wanted to have you guys on was I really, there's something here.

Josh Wofford: And it challenges the way you measure things, too. Like your measurement has to be aligned with what your goal is. So again, I don't have a problem with dynamic entries on warrants, but if there's been classes where it's a, you know, we do dynamic warrants on everything. Well, how are you measuring success? Well, we've never failed. Well, what does that mean? Well, we've taken the suspect into custody every single time. Have they shot back? No. So how are you measuring success? I don't care if someone does dynamic warrants, we use them. Right?Depending on the circumstance.

But it's, again, if you're measuring success because it worked every single time, well, you just haven't. You haven't experienced a failure yet. I think it was Matt Hughes, one of the UFC fighters, that said, if you're undefeated, you're just fighting the wrong people. Right. So you're always trying to challenge yourself, like, you know, am I really measuring, am I using the right measurement for the goal that I'm trying to reach?

Jon Becker: Well, and we do tend to default to measuring things that are directly measurable. Right. So we look at it and, you know, well, the SWAT team is qualified because they can all shoot a qualifying course that doesn't always pan out. The measurable is not always, you know, the directly measurable is not always the critical thing.

Josh Wofford: And define a great shooter. Is a great shooter somebody that's on a stagnant line, you know, on a range with nobody shooting back at them, or is a great shooter somebody that can address an adversary and win that conflict? So it's, again, how are we measuring success? How are we measuring failure? How are you measuring aptitude? That's really got to be a conversation also.

Jon Becker: I love that! So, guys, where can people learn more about DMEs and kind of how to do this?

Toby Darby: So a couple ways. One is that we do currently teach a critical incident management, critical incident leadership class where we give a lot of DMEs in the class, and we teach the people in the class on how they can facilitate a DME. Secondly is maybe there can be a link on this, on this show about where we can go to. Go to our CATO website where we'll have a section in there specifically on DMEs.

And then that it's going to have a format, a couple examples on, you know, DMEs that we've done in the past that shows the actual incident, the questions you can ask, the chaos points, the visual learning aids, I mean, if you're going to be using other things, have that stuff in the back of your presentation as you're putting it on to give you ideas on how you can make it best for your, for your DME.

But through that, read through some of those and then even have, I'll have a folder in there with different examples of real small patrol ones, maybe SWAT ones that you can use. But what I encourage you to do is if you do use this model, is to make it your own. Find an incident that happened that has impacted you or your agency or the country in our profession and implement that into your style.

Jon Becker: Josh, if we want to learn more about the learning theory here and the science behind this, what's the best vehicle to do that?

Josh Wofford: Simplest way. Go on Google scholar. Look up designing virtual learning environments for the California association of Tactical Officers. That'll give you the capstone. The capstone is about 72 pages, single space. It outlines exactly what me and Toby did on, on this project, how we did the DMEs, the theory behind it, all the literature, interviews with, with people that were, that took part in it, and that will give you a really robust understanding of how to approach the DMEs and what the value of them are.

Jon Becker: So we'll link to all of that in the show notes, including the CATO side. And if you guys can give us, you know, any, any other ideas you have as far as suggestions for reading all that, it'd be great. We'll just build it all out in the show notes and share it.

Guys, I can't thank you enough for being here. It was fantastic, and I learned a lot!

Toby Darby: Thanks so much for having us!

Josh Wofford: Yes, thank you!

Episode 18 – Inside the Breonna Taylor Case – Critical Incident Review with Sgt. John Mattingly

Jon Becker: Today's episode of the debrief will discuss the Breonna Taylor case, which has become a flashpoint in the movement to defund and reform law enforcement. There's obviously a great deal of press that has already occurred about this incident. Our goal is not to rehash everything that has been published. Rather, we're going to try to look at the case from the perspective of an individual officer whose life and career were destroyed by this case.

In preparation for this conversation, I read everything I could find about the case. I read the official reports, the news accounts, looked at every picture and video I could get my hands on, and talked to numerous people about the incident. Several things became clear during my investigation.

One, the media reports about the incident were wildly inaccurate initially, and although they have gradually become more accurate, they left most of us with a very inaccurate perception about what happened that night.

Two, that like any tragedy, it was not a single action or actor that created this situation. Rather, it was a complex chain of acts that resulted in the situation spiraling out of control.

Three, that although there were several specific things in Louisville that laid the foundation for this, it is not difficult to see how this could have happened to any police department in the United States in a similar situation.

As a result, our goal today is to try to gather lessons learned that may help other agencies and their officers to prevent this from happening to them, and to hopefully set the record straight on several misconceptions about the case.

My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is John Mattingly. John is a retired sergeant from the Louisville Police Department who led the search warrant service at the home of Breonna Taylor on March 13th, 2020, and was shot in the leg by her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, before returning fire with another officer, resulting in the death of Miss Taylor.

This event, of course, became a huge catalyst for protests, riots, lawsuits, death threats against the officers, and tragically, the shooting of two more officers while responding to the multi day civil unrest that followed. It has also led to three of the officers involved in obtaining the search warrant, as well as one of the officers involved in the raid being charged with federal crimes. John has recently written a book called 12 Seconds in the Dark that documents the facts of this case from his perspective and discuss the numerous issues that have not been discussed in the media. Jhon, thanks for being here.

I really appreciate you joining me today, man!

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm glad to be here!

Jon Becker: So why don't we start with kind of your background and career, like, walk me through, you know, John's evolution as a cop.

Sgt. John Mattingly: All right. So I came on in June of 2000, and when I came on, I went naturally. Most cops to late watch or graveyard shift, midnight to eight, did that until 2005, September 2005. I went to what's called a flex unit. It's kind of like a narcotics unit inside of each of our, one of our eight divisions. And I did that until 2009, September 2009, so, right at four years.

And that's when I got promoted to sergeant. Wasn't going to take the test, but my boss at the time looked at me and she said, man, are you seeing all these people that are getting promoted? And I was like, yeah. She said, a bunch of idiots, aren't they? I'm like, heck, yeah, they are. She said, do you want to work for them or do you want to work with them? I went, good point. I guess I'll take the test. So I took it. I got promoted on September 11 of 2009 and went back to late watch for a year. And my body couldn't stand it because at that time, I was a little bit older. I didn't come on till I was 27.

So, you know, here I am, nine years in at this point, and kids running around the house, couldn't get any sleep. So I did that for a year. And then in 20, I guess, 2010, I went to detective sergeant position. Did that for a year and a half. We took everything except business, robberies and homicides. Everything else we did. Enjoyed it. Got to learn a lot, but at the same time, just wasn't my speed. I missed the adrenaline, missed the jump out on people, all that.

So I went back to the flex unit as a sergeant. That only lasted about six months. And the crime in Louisville just kept going up and up and up. And so they put together with a violent crime unit called Viper. And the guy who was starting that unit called me and said, hey, will you come be one of my sergeants?

And I liked the guy, but I didn't want to work for him. One of those guys. Yeah, super smart, but always let you know how smart he was, all that stuff. Yeah, great cop, but I was like, no, I'm good. He cussed me out, hung up the phone, had some of the guys that were gonna go to that unit that he'd kind of handpicked, kind of work on me, work on me, work on me.

So, a couple weeks later, he called me back. I said, okay, fine, I'll do it. So, went to do that, and from 2012 to the end of 2015, I did that. And best time of my career. It was the busiest, the hardest I've ever worked, but most fun I have had and just had more positive results. You know, it wasn't just dope. It was getting guns and murders and carjackers and all that stuff off the street almost in real time, because the guys that worked for me were.

I mean, they're much better detective than I ever was, and. And they knew how to round people up on social media. And within hours of shootings and homicides, we were grabbing these guys up. And so it was a good time. And then new command came in. The department kind of changed everything up in that unit wasn't what it was before. Turned into some kind of pr thing for the city. I said, this ain't me. I'm out. And I bounced from that unit, went back to a flex unit as a sergeant for about a year, and then I went to our major narcotics unit in 2017 and was there until the time of the incident in 2020.

Jon Becker: So, over the course of your career, how many, you know, you worked narcotics for quite a few years. How many warrants you think you served?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, around 2000.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So, I mean, this is an active narco unit that's doing a lot of warrants.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, I mean, there were days. There were days we were doing three and four warrants. You know, we just piggyback one off the other onto the next. Onto the next, and work, you know, 14, 16 hours. So very busy, very proactive. Good time.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about the, you know, the incident. First, let's start with the warrant. Why did Louisville PD seek a warrant for Breonna Taylor's apartment?

Sgt. John Mattingly: All right, well, a new unit had been formed in January of 2020. It was called the place based investigation. It was from a pilot program out of Cincinnati that specifically targeted individuals within the city. Like, you would take somebody who had a bunch of complaints, there was a repeat offender who was a nuisance, and they would pinpoint that person, and that was going to be their only target until they wrapped up a good case on them and prosecuted. Then they would move to the next, unlike most units that have, you know, 10, 12 things going at one time, they were all the. The entire unit was going to focus on these one problems and just kind of knock them off one by one.

Jon Becker: Were those problems people based or place based would imply its location?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Mainly community based. Now, come to find out, we think it was the mayor's way of gentrifying this community, because on Elliott Avenue, which is where the main target and where the two of the warrants were served that night, there were two residences left on this street that the city had not retained control over.

Jon Becker: So were they, like, imminent domain in the houses?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, no, they were going in some of them imminent domain, but a lot of them they were using where you would go in. If you had more than three citations on that location, within six months, the city could actually come in and take your property, or at least they could shut it down until you went through court. They had bought most of the properties for about a dollar apiece, was what they were doing from these people. So they basically were strong armor them because it was in a lower income in community, and so you had a lot of poor people.

So these houses were 95% rental houses. So you had these landlords just renting to people, and. And the city would come in and go, oh, you had these violations, whether it be the gutters down, dope sold from the house, all these different things they could use to obtain these properties, we'll come to find out in 2018 or 2017. The city had had drawings already written up and done for this area where they were going to put in a fountain and new buildings and a walking area and all this stuff.

Jon Becker: All the standard gentrified yoga shop.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Exactly.

Jon Becker: You know, place that sells fancy ice cream.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Just totally changed this part of the communities. It was the goal, but they couldn't get rid of these two houses. They were pain in their side. And I've actually got a map that was given to me by somebody from the inside that showed all the X out houses they had in the two they needed, and it was the two that they happened to be doing these warrants on.

Jon Becker: Interesting!

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, very, very big coincidence. So the main target, Jamarcus Glover, he's a guy from Mississippi, had several felonies down there. At the time of this warrant, he had five or six open pending felony cases in Jefferson county, which is Louisville, all for drugs and guns. So he's a repeat offender? Repeat offender. Kept letting him out.

Well, in January of 2020, he got locked up. Some buddies of mine from another unit had done a warrant on the same house on Elliott. Got Jamarcus Glover. I think it was seven guns. Four of them were rifles, three pistols, some heroin, cocaine, different things like that. Breonna Taylor bailed him out of jail, and she used her address as his – When they pulled all the records for the Jamarcus Glover, everything came back to Breonna's house. His car was registered there, his phone was registered there. His bank account was at her house. She bailed him out and used that address as his. So everything pointed to Breonna Taylor's apartment.

Jon Becker: As maybe where he's living, or at least, you know, right adjacent to him, so to speak.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. And during the course of this, this three month investigation, they have videos of him going in empty handed, coming out with packages, going straight to the track trap house on Elliot from her house on Springfield. They had po cams up on Elliot. They had trackers on his car, pings on his phone. So they knew that occasionally he was going to Breonna Taylor's house and then leaving.

There's a couple of times she actually drove him down to the trap house, and they have her on video down there. So that tied her to them. The whole purpose of going to her apartment that night wasn't for Jamarcus Glover. Like, like everybody says on the news, we. They knew where he was.

And again, this was originally signed as a no knock because of Jamarcus, because of his criminal history. And once they figured out he was not going to be at that location, due to the surveillance, when we were at the briefing that night, they said it signed as a no knock, but we're going to do a knock and announce because it no longer fits the parameters.

So in that case, they were doing the right thing because what they had presented to the judge no longer met those parameters anymore. And so they bumped it back to a knock and an ounce.

Jon Becker: So the idea of the no knock is basically, if in fact, it's the location where he is, he's probably armed.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. He's run from the police before.

Jon Becker: Yeah. You're gonna go in quick and take him into custody.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay, let's go back for 1 second, though. So she, Breonna Taylor is his girlfriend at that at this point or?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not in 2020. At this point, yeah. Off and on for about seven years, they've been boyfriend and girlfriend, broken up, gotten together. Broken up, gotten together.

Jon Becker: But there's, I mean, there's a relationship between the two of them that is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well documented, still current. Yes.

Jon Becker: And he's using her address to, you know, to receive things and using it almost as a home address.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Yeah. And that's typical in the drug trade. And, you know, a lot of your listeners will understand that, that these guys don't put things in their name. They put it in girlfriends, baby mamas, whoever's grandma's name. It doesn't matter. They use their location to spread out their drugs and money, because if the police hits one place, hopefully they'll miss the other spot.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And later, we found out from jail phone calls that Brianna was, in fact, holding Jamarcus Glover's

money that night and other drug dealers in their little organization. And JaMarcus Glover's girlfriend got mad at him. It's all on jail phone calls of, you know, why is she holding your money? He's like, well, she's holding everybody's money. It's just what she does.

So she was definitely tied into it. I don't think. I don't think she was out there slinging the dope herself, but I. But she knew of the organization. She knew what was going on.Jon Becker:

Yeah. I mean, like, best case scenario, she's just dirtbag adjacent.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And there was something about a rental car, too, right? Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: In 2017, she rented a car. A few days later, there was a body found in the trunk that had been shot. That case has never been solved. That person was tied to the organization of Jamarcus Glover, somebody they knew. When the police asked her about it, she just simply said, I don't know what happened to the car got stolen or so.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you can see where if you're a judge and you're presented with this, with a warrant for her house, you know, with supporting affidavits, you're going to grant a search warrant to go search the house. Because worst case scenario, Jamarcus Glover's there. Best case scenario, you may find drugs, money, property. Etcetera. Okay. So it's a different unit that does the workup on this. It's the place based investigations unit that does the workup on this. When do you first get word of the warrant?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So this is kind of the tricky part. So in January, when they first began this case, at this point, I'd move from our major case division over to our parcel interdiction unit, where we took packages from UPS, FedEx. The lead detective came to me and said, hey, can you look up this address, 3003 Springfield, number four, and see if Jamarcus Glover has any packages coming there? Well, I knew from experience that even if he were having packages sent there, it's not going to be in his name. They always use some crazy fake names so they can have, you know, plausible deniability.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And if it shows up and the girl has it, she can go, this ain't mine. Look at the name on it. You have no idea whose it is. This happens all the time. And we've done several reverses that way where we've locked people up, or we've delivered the package and gone and done the warrant. So he comes to me and he says, hey, can you look up this address? I said, who's it through? He says, through the postal service.

I said, well, josh, we have zero connection with the postal service, because a couple years before I came to this unit, the postal inspector and LMPD got into a big, you know, p****** contest, to say it nicely, and I. And they took their ball and went home, and we no longer dealt with them. I didn't have any connections with them. Didn't even know him, never met him.

So when he came to me and said that, I said, I don't know who. I don't know anything about that, but I know who does. I knew the. The smaller department, Shively police department, which is one of the small ancillary departments around there. They had picked up with postal because they also had a little unit that went out and did this stuff.

So I reached out to him, text him right there while he's standing next to me, and I said, hey, do you have anything on Springfield in Jamarcus Glover's name? He said, man, I don't know about Springfield, but we do have a Jay Glover. I can't remember the first name that we just got a package off of. He said, I'll get back with you. I showed Josh the text, exchanged their phone numbers, thought I was done with it.

A couple weeks later, I'm at UPS pulling packages, and I see one of the detectives from Shively, and I said, hey, man, did you all ever figure out that. That thing I text you about last week about Glover, or a couple weeks ago? And he said, yeah, me and Kelly Goodlett, who was the other, the co lead on this case, he said, she called me.

We were talking about it. We were comparing vehicles of the two glovers, figured out it's a different glover. Theirs is like a Jason Glover, and this was JaMarcus Glover. So just kind of a weird coincidence, but a different glover. They knew that at that point. I said, cool, no problem. Not my case. Don't really care. Didn't mean that in a bad way, but we're so busy, don't have time to keep track of other people's cases.

The next day, I'm in the office. Josh is walking by me, and I stop him and say, hey, man, did you hear? They've got. It's a different glover. There's no packages. He said, yeah, man. Kelly told me. I was hoping to just do a rip reversal. Now we gotta write all these warrants. Sorry, dude. Went on our way. That's the last I thought I was gonna hear of it.

In March, 1 week of March, we get an email sent to all of narcotics saying, we've got a. A multi warrant, simultaneous that's coming up, that we. That we need bodies on manpower intensive. They sent out the addresses. Elliott Avenue. Elliott Avenue. Muhammad Ali. Another address down in our urban area, west end, where it's super ghetto. And then. Then they had the one on Springfield. What? This point, I had erased Springfield from my mind. And it also didn't have JaMarcus Glover's name on it, had Breonna Taylor's.

So I'm not putting two to two and two together at this point, because in parcel interdiction, we're doing 40, 50 warrants a week that I've got to go through and approve. And if it's not a case we're actively working, you just flush that info and you move to the next one. I'm not that smart, or I'd do something different. Be a cop. So when they send that out, I look at the addresses, and I'm like, man, I can help that night because it's overtime. Who doesn't like overtime?

But I don't want to be down the ghetto. I've done this for years. I've been down there so much. I don't want to dig through a nasty trap house. I don't want to deal with the crowds. I said, give me the. If you give me the apartment, I'll help out. And so their sergeant sent back and said, fine, you got it. So two weeks later, we come in for the brief, and that's when we go. And I see the no knock, no knock, and then knock and announce on the board for Springfield.

Jon Becker: So how many warrants were being simultaneously served that night?

Sgt. John Mattingly: They had five signed. They were going to do three at the same time as long as they had him in custody and then go to the next two, because one was, I think, mom's house and one or girlfriend's house, and then the actual baby mama's house.

Jon Becker: So. And this is arrest warrants and search warrants?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, simple search warrants.

Jon Becker: Simple search.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay, so the three locations that they decide they're gonna hit, two of them are on Elliott Elliot Avenue, and the other one is Breonna Taylor's apartment.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you get tasked with Taylor's apartment.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: So your warrant is a no knock.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Warrant signed that way. Yes.

Jon Becker: Signed as a no knock, which was done so that if Jamarcus Glover was there, you had the capability to go in and execute it. No knock. Correct. But at the point that you get handed the warrant, they've already determined that he's on Elliot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And that's where his phone is pinging, and, like, you know, everything's pointing to. That's where he is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. The phrase they used, I specifically remember this was, we're going after this house for documents and money. Possible dope. We don't think there's any there, but possible. They said she's a heavyset black female. Give her extra time to come to the door, because generally, on a knock and announce you're 10 seconds at the door, then you're going through.

So they asked us to give her extra time initially to keep the neighbors out of it because they were hoping she'd jump on the team. And I, you know, because she wasn't the target. You know, they were going after documents to tie Glover into this different organization where he had about five guys working for him.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The target of the investigation is Jamarcus Glover.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: She's just, you know, an acquaintance, peripheral. Yeah. Okay, so then you get. You get the warrant. They decide it's not gonna be a no knock. Who's serving the other two warrants?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT. Serving both of those.

Jon Becker: Okay, so you SWAT hitting two locations simultaneously, and you guys are doing the third location.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. We were on swatch frequency, so when they said, we're unmounting here and heading in, that's when we were moving in.

Jon Becker: Got it. Simultaneous, just to, you know, provide element a surprise and make sure somebody doesn't make a phone call, and evidence gets destroyed and all that. But your primary objective is simply evidence against Jamarcus?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. The goal was not even to lock her up. That was never relayed to us. That was never – Hey, we're getting her. She's going downtown. That's it. It was simply, get in there, let's find some evidence against Jamarcus, then we can tie her in and maybe get her to flip.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so talk to me about the team. You are assigned to execute this warrant.

Sgt. John Mattingly: There were seven of us. I know all the guys, obviously because they work in some facet in narcotics. One of the guys actually worked for me in parcel interdiction, so I'd serve, and he was with me in Viper. So we had served multiple, multiple warrants over the years together. There was another guy that used to work with me, but he was in the highway interdiction. We served some warrants together, not a lot.

And then I had a guy from a street platoon that I didn't serve many warrants with. I had occasionally, you know, here and there, because we were always plugging in bodies when you needed them. Had a guy from the play space unit that I'm not sure I've ever served a warrant with him. Maybe one, but I'm not even sure on that. Then we had a lieutenant who, you know, generally just doesn't come out for warrants, but with bodies needed, we had a lieutenant on scene.

Jon Becker: So seven guys, six different units. As a unit, these guys had never worked together.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Like you worked with a couple of guys and a couple of guys in the unit might have worked with each other, but as a unit you are – this is the first time you are together.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. This isn't a team that normally went out and hit doors.

Jon Becker: Got it. And like, what's the experience level in this seven guys, you've got a couple thousand more. And you've been working a long time in narcotics. Is it a real wide variance in skillset?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It depends on how you put that there, because there's guys that have had many years on, but. And even some of them in narcotics, but they hadn't done a lot of dynamic entry warrants. So you still had, I think between the seven of us, there was probably about 140 years of experience out there, but in different areas. Like one guy had been a beat guy his first 21 years, and he'd only been in a specialty unit for a couple year and a half. Only done, man, one or two warrants that I know of.

So you had some guys that were pretty fresh to this. Not fresh to be in police officers, but fresh to being in this type of unit. And then other guys that had been in these units, but again, just hadn't worked. Hadn't worked together.

Jon Becker: Yeah, they had the experience, but they just hadn't had been. Had played the same team, so to speak. So in narcotics at this point in Louisville PD. And I suspect that this has changed now, but I mean, I hope it is. What is when you come into an arc unit? What kind of training are you getting?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, I mean, this has been a complaint for years. I don't care if you're going to homicide, narcotics division, detective. There's not a lot of, you know, you go to the old guys like it used. When I first came on, the department was so old or filled with older guys, middle guys and young guys that you had all that experience to lean on. And even if you weren't leaning on them, if you did something wrong, they were reaching out to you, smacking you upside the head, telling you what you're doing wrong.

Well, as the department grew or not grew, as the department actually shrunk, but as time went on, the department got a lot younger, and as those old guys matriculated out, there wasn't a changing of the guard as far as, hey, we're bringing new guys in because we know these guys are, they're gone in six months.

So let's transfer this knowledge to the new guys. And every time a new crew came in, it was like recreating the wheel. So then you're, it's back to the basics, starting all over, re digging in. And the training just wasn't very good. I mean, you'd have, you know, send a guy to a week or two week narcotic school and that would be it.

Jon Becker: And in that school, he may do two days of high risk entries.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah, it was. It's so much information in a week or two that you can't. You're not proficient at it.

Jon Becker: Well, and you and I talked about this earlier, but like, it's, you know, narcotics as you're working, it is, you know, 95% detective work.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And then there's this search warrant component.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. So you've got to be good at handling informants, surveillance on following people, and then you've got this facet at the end that the carrot at the end of the stick of doing your entry and doing your search warrant, collecting your evidence.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So you go to briefing the decisions made that it's not going to be a dynamic warrant. You're going to do a knock and announce. When do you first see the location?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So when we went to our second secondary location to meet up after the main brief, everybody goes to their different areas where they're going to be meeting up, met up with EMS, met up with the guys. And I said, hey, I'm going to go buy this location. Because the six of us that were out there, there was one guy on the eye who was watching the apartment that guy was part of the play space unit, so he knew what he was looking at. He knew what the investigation detail entailed. But us six over here knew nothing about it.

Jon Becker: And he's not leading the warrant you're leading.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm leading the warrant. He's simply the eye on it. Just tell us what's coming and going. You know, he knows what they look like in case they come in or out. So I'm like, man, I've got to go by and see this. You know, we don't have a true VO or verification officer, so I've got to at least go by and know what I'm going to, I don't want to hit the wrong door. You know, you don't want to do something stupid. So I go by and I'm on the phone with him, and he. He directs me into the location of where it's at.

So at least I got a vision of it. And these are eight plex apartments. You've got. They're actually 16 plex, but you've got in, they're split in two, and you've got four units on the bottom, four units on the top. If you're looking directly at the apartment, it's a breezeway inset with a metal staircase on the right. You've got two doors on the back wall and then a door on the right and a door on the left that are kind of looking at each other.

Jon Becker: So all four apartments on the bottom open into the same common breezeway area.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: And two doors are facing you as you're walking up. And two doors are on the sides.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And her door was the one on the right as you're walking up underneath the staircase.

Jon Becker: Okay. So you have to go around the staircase.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, it's kind of offset to the right. So the middle of the walkway kind of leads you to the left of it. You don't really have to go around it. You're walking right by.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you walk right past it. But when you. When you go to her door, it's kind of overhanging.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And it's overhung by the staircase.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay, so you. You go drive by and have a look. And to go back. Are you given any maps of the location, any floor plans, any data in your briefing?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, it was pretty generic. It was like, you know, the main emphasis was on Jamarcus, Glover and Elliott on those locations. And then this was almost like a, like a secondary, like a side piece, if you would say. Yeah, it's like okay. We're also doing this, so go do it and see what you get.

Jon Becker: So SWAT had not scouted it. No place based investigation.

Sgt. John Mattingly: They didn't even know we were doing it.

Jon Becker: Interesting. Okay. And they were in a different briefing, I take it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. So SWAT briefs at their office. We briefed it together because they've got, I don't know, 35 guys. They were using 40 guys. We had 40 on our end. And there's conflicting reports. The guys in the unit say no. When we went with SWAT a couple weeks earlier to start this ball rolling, we told them about the location, tell them what was going on.

Apparently, that wasn't related to their commanders, so they're saying it wasn't told. So it was miscommunication from the start. That kind of started to snowball. And as we talk, you'll see there's just been. It was mistake after mistake.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Well, it's one of the things I said in the intro is, like, you know, the problem with all these kinds of things is never one big blunder.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Right. It's a chain of events of sometimes seemingly inconsequential decisions. And sometimes, you know, people taking bad action, sometimes people doing what they think is the right thing. But. But all of those little things add up to lay the groundwork. That's why I want to kind of, as we're walking through this, I want to talk through, like, okay, what about this? What about this?

So you go, you look at the location, drive by, figure out where the apartment is. The guy on the eye from the place. Place investigations, I'm assuming, is telling you like that, you know, that's the apartment.Sgt. John Mattingly:

Yeah. There was a heating cooling air van right in front of the breezeway. He said, when you get to that van, it's right there to the right. Bottom door on the right. So when I got there, I tapped my brakes. He said, that's it. So at least I knew what it looked like where we were going to.

Jon Becker: Got it. Is the apartment marked? Like, is there, like, an apartment number on it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Number four.

Jon Becker: Okay. And did you notice anything else when you did your drive by?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I noticed the first time I noticed the bedroom light or the bedroom TV. You could see it flickering through her shades.

Jon Becker: So as you're looking at the front of the building, her apartment is on the front of the building.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. And to the right of the breezeway.

Jon Becker: To the right of the breezeway. And you're looking at the outside of the building. What do you see as far as windows and doors and stuff?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So if we start at the breezeway. To the right of it there's a sliding glass door and there's a little small wooden type fence blocking that off or going around it.

Jon Becker: So like a little courtyard or a little garden kind of area?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Little bitty area.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And to the right of that is the secondary bedroom window. And then to the right of that is the main bedroom where the TV was on.

Jon Becker: Do you know that or do you know that now?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I know it now when I saw the TV flickering. And most apartments are laid out fairly similar. So in my mind I kind of put two and two together and thought, well, that's probably the master bedroom where they're watching TV.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Or where she is. Cause we were told no kids, no dogs, no boyfriends. That's the intel we had. Just her.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And you and I joked about that earlier. No house ever has kids, dogs or guns. But they all seem to have kids, dogs and guns. So to go back to the apartment, if. If you're looking at the front, you've got the secondary bedroom, primary bedroom, little courtyard kind of gardening area with the sliding glass doors. Just big windows. Like. Like sliding windows or normal windows on the two bedrooms?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, they're normal windows. Just that kind of go up.

Jon Becker: Got it. And those are covered with blinds, if I remember correctly.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: So you can't see in. You can just see that the TV's on.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. You knew the TV was on. You could see it flickering through the shades.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So then just to get one more detail about the layout of the apartment, when the front door opens to the apartment, you're looking straight down a hallway, if I remember correctly.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct. Yeah. About 30 ft down a hallway, you've got a. If you're looking through the door, the living room is on the right, the kitchenette is on the left. There's like a small dining room that leads into a small kitchen. Then there's a hallway right down the middle, a bathroom to the left, and then an insert inset to the right in that inset or the opening to both bedroom doors.

So the hallway is only about 3 ft wide, very narrow. And then at that first bedroom, the wall actually cuts inside, so it can give you concealment but not covered.

Jon Becker: Got it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: If that makes sense.

Jon Becker: But the two bedrooms are opening off of a common alcove like it's a wall until it dents in. And the two bedrooms both open off that common space.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay. So when you're looking down the hallway of the apartment, you know, we're standing at the front door, we look all the way down the hallway to the right and back is where her bedroom is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay. All right. So then I – You do your scout. You have a quick look, go back stage. Then what happens?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT calls and says they're in route. And then as they get close, we, you know, we line our cars up. We. We start down. And as we're pulling into the parking lot and circling around to unmount from our vehicles. I see a white Toyota sequoia sitting parked right behind the van. But it's nothing parallel to it is perpendicular, so it wasn't in a parking space. It's like somebody pulled up and jumped out.

And in my mind, I'm thinking, why don't I know this? You know, where was the eye on this? Did he fall asleep? Did he just miss it? Did he see where they went? And it was across the street? Inconsequential. I don't know. We weren't told. So I was a little upset, you know, a little ticked off about it. And I'll be. I'll be honest, I was a little. Not complacent. But when you do so many of these, it's kind of procedure. You know, you're just going through the motions. But when I saw that, the radar went up a little bit. Because I'm like, man, I don't know where if. Is this a threat?

Jon Becker: Yeah, that could be Jamarcus Glover, for all you know.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Where did they go? What apartment they go into? Because they're parked right in front of ours. So as I tell the guys, I'm gonna pull up to it and get out. They stayed back. They unmounted back, did the normal approach from, you know, 20, 30 ft back, whatever it was. I pulled up behind the car that was concealed by the van, my car washing. I get out, I look through the car.

I remember seeing a pink baby seat in the back and a bunch of trash. But nobody was in the vehicle. I circle around the front. I make my way through the breezeway. They come up behind me. I'm underneath the staircase at this point. And we've all in a stack as best we can. It's a very small area. So I've got one guy behind me. And then we're kind of split. I'm to the left of the door. Because the door swung from right to left as it opened up. So from the living room toward the kitchen.

Jon Becker: So the door swings into the left side. Right doorknob's on the right hand side.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As you approach it, and I'm on the left. And then we got the breacher on the right. And it was so small, the rest of the guys were on the right, kind of wrapped around the staircase.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. And just to this will probably become relevant in a second, but the car that's parked in front, I'm assuming that's the guy that's in the apartment upstairs picking up his kid.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: Okay, so we've got a guy who has pulled up and is going to pick up his daughter. Daughter?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I think it was a daughter. Yeah.

Jon Becker: The baby at the apartment up above.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Directly above Breonna Taylor.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, right above where you are, which will come into play in a second here.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. All right, so your stage at the door, what happens next?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So the initial thought was, let's just knock normal, like we're delivering a pizza or something, see if she can come to the door. Because they didn't want the neighbors involved. We'll do this discreetly. We'll get inside the apartment. We'll do our thing. We'll get out of.

Jon Becker: And you're in a neighborhood where the police hitting a house is going to be like neighborhood entertainment, I'm assuming. Yeah. And have a look.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes, but it's not as common as the area they're in down on Elliott. Okay, so this wasn't a predominantly black community. This wasn't a predominantly poor community. It was kind of. Kind of middle of the road. What, middle class?

Jon Becker: Lower middle class working families.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And you had a mix of hispanic, black, white, all kind of interlaced in here. So the idea that, you know, the police were there isn't abnormal, but it's not as frequent as they're gonna see down on Elliott.

Jon Becker: Got it. Okay. So you decide you're gonna knock, see what happens.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we knock a couple times. I knocked a couple times, got no response. So at that point, I did the open hand. Police knock loud. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Police. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Come to the door. After the first knock, all of a sudden, I hear my lieutenant and Detective Hankinson address somebody tell them to get back in the apartment. Get back in the apartment. Well, I can't see what's above me because there's a concrete landing and I'm right below it.

But I know they're addressing somebody because I glance out of the corner of my eye, on my peripheral, and I see them engaging someone up top. This goes on. I just ignored in the beginning as they're conversing back and forth. This guy's arguing with him. For whatever reason, he didn't want to go back inside.

And so I knock a second time. Well, they're still going at it, and this has probably been 10 seconds at this point, which seems an eternity when you're at a door. And so I simply said, brett, let it go. Relax. And that wasn't anything on Brett. That was just simply saying. That was just the terminology that came out of my mouth.

Jon Becker: Relax.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Because I needed focus on the door and away from that was distracting people.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And so the guy went back in the apartment. We focused back on the door, continued knocking. About six cadences total of knock and announce. On the one right before the last one, the breacher nobles said, hold on, I think I heard something inside. So I stopped listening for a second, didn't hear anything. Yelled again, police. Search warrant. Didn't hear anything. Knocked one more time, yelled, police, search warrant. Looked back at my lieutenant, and he gave the nod to go ahead. And at this time, we've been at the door at least a minute, probably 45 seconds, but probably about a minute.

Jon Becker: Well, long enough for them to get out of bed, get dressed, and be in the hallway.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. With the gun.

Jon Becker: With a gun, yeah. That's about to come into play here, so. Okay, then what do you do?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So, Mike hits the door the first time, and he hit right on the deadboat, and. Which, you know, is a no no. And it didn't do anything. It dented the door a little bit, but that was it. And I remember somebody. Somebody in the background yelling, hey, my daughter hits harder than that. So everybody kind of laughed, as, you know. As you do.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Second time, he hit it. Hit it flush and almost knocked it open. I could see through to the living room. I could see the dead boat was bent. And I said, here we go. And he hit it a third time, and it flew open. With that time. I can see from right to left, I can see the couch. I can see the curtains on the window. I can see the wall. There was a picture on the wall. And I – From right to left, I'm slicing the pie. And I get to where the door frame on the left side of the door and the. The wall for the hall meet, I can no longer see anymore. Can't see down the hall. Can't see in the kitchen to the left. All I can see is the living room.

Everybody at this point, please. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Police. Search warrant. Now, this is pretty quick. You know, the. The cutting and slicing the pies, maybe 2 seconds.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Boom, boom, boom, boom. At that point, as soon as I step from left to right into the door frame and my gun light goes from right to left, I come up on the. I can see the end of this gun. I could see it was silver, and. But the first thing my mind did, as I'm turning right to left, I'm seeing two people, but they're overlapping. It's like one big blob at the end of this long hall. Long, dark hall. And you got the ambient light from the tv coming out of the room. Now you've got the. The law. The light from the hallway kind of coming in, giving a weird look. And then you've got our, you know, mounted our gun lights.

So as I'm going right to left, I'm going, man, something's not right here. My brain, even though this is super quick, my brain's thinking all these weird things, like, this is weird. Normally, people run, they hide, they try to escape, they give up, or they fight. But I've never had two people waiting at the end of a hallway just standing there.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's weird.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So. And I knew in my mind, I assumed one was a guy and one was a girl because one was taller, one was shorter. But I couldn't make their face out. I couldn't have picked them out of a lineup, because my focus went right on that gun that was extended out. So if you're looking down the hall, Kenneth Walker's to the right, Breonna's to the left.

Jon Becker: So he's closer to the bedroom, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: He's. He's at that little insert, that little in cut that goes to both bedroom doors. As soon as I see the gun, I think, oh, crap. I mean, it was so quick. As soon as I saw the gun, the flash, the bang, the smack in the leg, I felt it. I returned four shots. It felt like it was simultaneous. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But evidently, there was enough of a gap in there for him to dive out of the way in this doorway.

When that happened, I went behind the door frame, and I came back out and shot where I thought he dove into. And what we didn't know at the time, and we know now, looking at the pictures, was Breonna Taylor tried to follow him into that door. And her feet where she was on the left side of the hall. If you're looking down the hall, her feet ended up on the right, actually past the threshold of where he ran into that little indention. And then she fell back against the wall.

So after I got shot, I felt my leg. After I got out of the way, I said, man, I've been hit. And I knew it was bad, because, you know, on the street, I've seen hundreds of people shot, and if it's just a through and through leg wound, there's a little blood, but it's not catastrophic, you know, it's not a lot. And as soon as I put my hand out of my leg, my palm was just soaked, and I thought, oh, man, this hit my femoral artery. So I yelled that out, man. I've been hitting my femoral.

And at that time, I go down, and miles kind of steps over me and a little bit on me, and he's returning fire down the hallway. And all this, again, is so quick, man. We can explain it, but unless you're there, the speed at which these things go is just tremendous.

Jon Becker: That's 12 seconds, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. From the time that door opened and he shot till it was complete silence was 12 seconds. And that's with three, four, four different people firing, people moving. You know, all this stuff happening. So, as I go down, miles steps up and shoots. I kind of zone out for just a half a second. Then I come to him, like, I can't sit here. I'm gonna get shot with crossfire.

So I get up, and I hobble out, and I go behind miles as he's firing. I go to the curb, and as I'm stepping off the curb, I forget about my leg, and I step down, and I fall between the cars. Well, simultaneously, miles is done shooting, and there's, like, maybe a half second, three quarter of a second, real quick break. And then I hear gunfire again, but it sounds different because it's no longer in this. In this inset, you know, down here.

Jon Becker: Where all the metal alcove, and.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, you're not getting the echo. You're not getting all that stuff. There was a different sound, and it was multiple guns, shots. I mean, just quick. And I thought. My mind, I thought, holy crap, they're still shooting at each other, you know, even though it's quick. That seemed like a lot of shots and come to find out, that was Brett moving to a secondary location, thinking we were getting assassinate the doorway. And, you know, he's firing through the. Through the windows, trying to get them to stop shooting.

So I instantly said, man, I need a tourniquet. Need a tourniquet. My lieutenant comes over, drags me back behind the sequoia, and he doesn't have a tourniquet on him. It's a lieutenant. Lucky they have guns on him. So he pulled his belt off. He tried to put it on. Mike nobles, the guy that was the breacher, had come out at this point, because when I came out, he was kind of stuck behind the stair between the stairway and the shots being fired, so he couldn't exit. He was kind of stuck up against the wall.

So at this point, he had arrived about the same time I got pulled out, and they stuck that leather belt on me and. And pulled it, and it wasn't working. You know, he was stepping on my leg, pulling. But the blood was just. It was just slipping off the leather. So that's a myth, guys. Don't try that. It does not work.

Jon Becker: You need a winless for a tourniquet to work.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. And so right at that time, Tony James comes around the corner, and he has a tourniquet in his hand. The lieutenant takes it, puts it on, and, you know, thank God, at least he paid attention in tourniquet class, because that saved my life.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because it hits your femoral artery.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah. Rip through it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So you end up having to have an entire section of about a five.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And a half hour surgery that took, I think, about six inches of the artery out. Took a vein out of my leg, replaced it with that. And I don't know what they call it. Not fusing. They call it something grafting. Yeah, grafted the vein in.

Jon Becker: Okay, so, at this point, Breonna Taylor's in the hallway. She's been shot six times, if I remember correctly. Five or six times.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was five. They think the fifth one ricocheted off something and came out a different hole. So they said probably five, but they counted six since there was an extra hole.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Sgt. John Mattingly: They didn't have an entry.

Jon Becker: Do we know of those five rounds? It was.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Some of them were yours, one was mine. I think a leg, or I think was a leg, and the rest were miles. And they think his was the one that pierced her heart and killed her.

Jon Becker: Okay, so Kenneth Walker dives back into the bedroom. He fires a total of one shot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it.

Jon Becker: And if I remember correctly, I mean, obviously, one of the inaccuracies in the reporting that has bothered me since I dug into this and read all the files is you hear it described as that he fired a warning shot, which, I mean, shooting you in the thigh is a pretty strenuous warning, but I guess you could qualify it if you really stretched it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. He said he shot at the ground.

Jon Becker: His aim is very bad. Because he hit you very effectively in the thighs.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So he fires the shot and retreats into the bedroom. She's in the hallway, mortally wounded, attempts.

Sgt. John Mattingly: To follow, catches the rounds. Yeah.

Jon Becker: So, yeah, she probably steps into the rounds as you guys are engaging. Right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: At least the first one, probably. And took her down if it was a leg shot.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So then you have Brett Hankinson goes to the side. He fires ten rounds through two different sets of windows.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It'll be in three total. Two sets of windows and the sliding door.

Jon Becker: Okay, so he starts at the sliding door, is basically putting rounds.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As he's walked, as he's moving down the building.

Jon Becker: Got it. Which is currently the subject of a federal indictment for wanton reckless endangerment. Right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And civil rights violation, which, if convicted, is a life sentence.

Jon Becker: So the wanton reckless endangerment that underlies that, is that he was not presented with a target, but was simply firing through blinded windows.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Correct.

Jon Becker: Okay. And I mean, I think that, you know, obviously that one's going to play out, you know, in federal court.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And, yeah, the only positive hope that he has, I think, is that it already went through state court. The same. Basically the same charges, but on state level, and he was acquitted. And in Jefferson County, I thought there was no way, because we're a super liberal city.

And the amount of, naturally, the amount of coverage with the protests and everything that happened in the city, Washington, it was. It was nonstop for months and months and months, every day, every newscast. So everybody in the city knew about it. So it's hard to get an impartial jury on that. But thankfully, once they heard the evidence in court, they were within 2 hours acquitted him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, that's very fortunate. I mean, obviously, this is. And we'll touch on this. This ends up being the biggest case probably in the world for an extended period of time, because it becomes a cause celeb that literally LeBron James. And there's a long litany of people that felt the need to comment on it. And I think that the accuracy. I would encourage our listeners to go look at the official report, look at all the photographs are online.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: The information is literally out there. You can read everything. You can read the statements. The New York Times did a kind of real time reenactment that shows positions. And I think that for a listener to this podcast, it's a good idea to go watch that, because if nothing else, it visualizes it for you. It's not, from what I'm seeing and what we've talked about, totally accurate, but it's close, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: All the facts leading up to and some of wrong, but the actual depictment of where the placement was of the bullets and everything's accurate.

Jon Becker: And so just to go back to the door. So there's, you know, your left side of the door, that a guy to your right side, which is Miles.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. Well, the guy to the right was the ram.

Jon Becker: The ram.

Sgt. John Mattingly: The breacher was Mike.

Jon Becker: Mike.

Sgt. John Mattingly: As soon as he hit, he naturally backed out.

Jon Becker: So he breaches, and then Miles steps up next to you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, he came up over my right shoulder. He was also on the right side. And he kind of, you know, can. How you kind of zipper in.

Jon Becker: Sure.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So as I turned left, he kind of was coming right, and he saw the flash. And Brett happened to be over his shoulder, you know, eager to get up there, trying to get their way in. And he saw the flash too. And when he did, that's when Brett realized, I can't get in the doorway. I knew John was shot, but I can't get in the doorway because Miles is there. So I'm going around the front.

Jon Becker: So he peels off.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Okay. So you get hit, turn, run, basically, in between two cars where you fall.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Miles continues to engage, and Brett runs around to the side and engages through the blinds. Then at some point, the shooting stops.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Then what happens?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So while they're working on me, I hear them yelling inside and on the radio and different things. I even remember at one point, Brett getting on the radio, saying, they got a long rifle, and I'm on my back, and they're doing the tourniquet.

And I remember yelling at him, going, no, it wasn't a rifle. It was a. It was a silver handgun. Because my mind. I mean, I just focused on it. There could have been a rifle there too. But I never even made it to Breonna Taylor. You know, once I hit that gun, my. I stopped. Yeah, because everything just happened.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because, well, he shot you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. And so.

Jon Becker: Which has a whiff. Picking. You pay attention.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, it got my attention real quick. So while they're doing all that, Jamar or Kenneth Walker is inside. He doesn't call 911. You see on the news, all this. Oh, man. He called when he heard somebody banging his door. He called 911. And you hear him, somebody shot my girlfriend. All that. He didn't do make that call until six minutes after the shooting. He called his mom first.

Then there was a gap. Then he called 911, and then he called Breonna Taylor's mom. He didn't come out of the apartment for almost 17 minutes, even though he knew the police were out there, just refused to come out for whatever reason, scared, whatever. Whatever you want to label.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At that point, it's probably reasonable for him to be afraid. He just shot a police officer.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. So the only fact that throws all that into maybe a contentious point for those that said he didn't know it was the police and for what he said on that recorded call to 911 is the fact we know he called his mom first. And then we also had a courtesy officer that lived in that apartment that. That went to middle school and high school with Kenneth, knew – Knows Kenneth's mom. And when he heard the shots, he turned his radio on, heard an officer was down, put his uniform on, and came down to the scene.

By the time he got down there, Kenneth Walker's mom had shown up because he had called her. And she came up to this guy she knew naturally, and said, I don't know what's going on. Kenny called me and said, they're at the door. I said, who's at the door, baby? He said, it's the police. I gotta go, and hung up. So we don't know if that call was made prior to the incident or if that was the first call made after. But he was on the phone with her for, like, two and a half minutes.

So we know that wasn't if that was the second call made or the call after the shooting. That wasn't the extent of the conversation. So there was a third phone on scene that we don't have access to. The FBI has, for whatever reason, they won't give us to us. But I. It was on the bed. It was on the side of the bed on the table. And we don't know if that original call when we were banging at the door was made from there or if he told his mom that after the shooting. Not really sure.

Jon Becker: Got it. But he, you know, obviously after the fact, these things have a way of taking on kind of their own explanations. But best case scenario, from. From Kenneth Walker standpoint, he doesn't know it's the police and thinks that somebody is breaking down the door, which could be her ex boyfriend, could be whoever.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. I mean, evidently, a couple months prior to this, him and the ex or the ex boyfriend had come to the apartment asking if he was there. I guess he knew he was seeing him as well, and she was kind of seeing both guys, and so it was kind of a mess in that area. And Kenneth Walker, he wasn't the saint that the news paints him out to be when they downloaded his phone. He's selling pills and weed and holding up all these different guns, which guns by themselves aren't illegal, but if you're selling drugs, you can't have a gun.

Jon Becker: But he's legally. He's legally carrying.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right, right. Even though before legal carry. Even though before open carry was legal in Kentucky, you had to have a CCW to have a gun concealed. He was caught with one. They charged him. It was lowered to some. Some misdemeanor in court. And so that was never. That charge never stuck on his record, even though he had been caught with one illegally prior to this.

Jon Becker: Got it. But he has a CCW. He did at the time. I mean, not that it matters because he's in an apartment and could legally possess a gun in an apartment. Okay. So then they. It's one of the things that is troubling when you watch the video is like, you guys had EMS staged with you, but it doesn't seem like they were with you because you were down on the ground.Sgt. John Mattingly:

Yeah, I'm not a long time. We still don't know what happened there. When I first pulled up to ems, I pulled up, and I looked up, and two very young EmS workers, and I thought, oh, crap, man. My kid. I mean, look, he's young as my kids. And the driver was a black guy. The passenger is a white guy. The driver, when I pulled up, had headphones on, and I honked my horn. They didn't hear me. I got my light out, shined. It finally got their attention. He rode the window down. He couldn't get his headphones off. They were stuck in his braids. The white kid's over there watching something on his phone. Totally zoned out.

And I said, man, you guys here for us? And he said, yeah. And I said, hopefully, we won't be long. You'll be on your way. And I left and went over to Mike nobles and said, man, I hope them guys ain't got to save our life, because I don't know if they know what they're doing. And it's just kind of the odds of it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. One of those ironic moments that seem to always exist in these situations. So at the point that. That they put the tourniquet on you, is the video of that public, like, that was released, the body worn camera.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: That is released, which I think I would encourage people to watch because it. It is certainly. And we'll talk about training and preparation, but it is. It's troubling. The. The level of medical care that you are receiving with a femoral artery. I watched it several times. I'm deeply troubled on your behalf. When the guy that's putting a bandage on you says, I don't know what to do with this. I can only imagine what was going through your brain at that point.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Because, well, the main thing going through my brain was, okay, they got the tourniquet on. I'm good. I care less about a bandage. You know, whatever. It's blood, it's already there. Putting that bandage on ain't going to change much. But my concern was, I thought I'd been either shot twice or the bulletin ricocheted off. Something went up, because the pain wasn't where I was shot. It was up in my groin, in my lower back. So I was like, man, check. Check this out. Because by the time the camera starts, the tourniquet was already on.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we'd been out there for a few minutes, and I remember saying, get a knife cut higher to make sure you got high enough. Yeah, that's what I kept saying. Just make sure you're high enough. You're over the. If there's two wounds, make sure you're above the second one.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And so they cut it, and he said, man, I can't find anything. Well, I guess it was just the nerve endings that had been damaged when the. When it went through, because, again, where the. Where it went in and came out, there wasn't much pain. It was. It was the different area. So it was really weird. But, yeah, even the tourniquet thing, man, if there's cops that are listening to this, again, complacency. And it wasn't on purpose on this one, on my behalf. When I came out from the brief, had two flat tires on my car. The car behind me had a couple flat tires. So somebody come to our parking lot and pop some tires.

Jon Becker: Police cars.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So I went in, found a pool cardinal while I was transferring all my stuff. I mean, it is just pouring rain, so I'm in a hurry. Moving. Moving gear, moving equipment. And when my vest wasn't on, I always took my tourniquet out and threw it in my glove box because I thought, well, if I'm going down the road or whatever reason, at least I can get it quick instead of my vest in the trunk or backseat. Well, when I moved stuff, I totally forgot to get my tourniquet. I was in a hurry and just messed up, so I couldn't save my own life if somebody else didn't have a tourniquet.

Jon Becker: Which fortunately, somebody did.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation. Okay, so then they transport you to the hospital, right? You get kind of basic medical. They, you know, what do you end up having to have as far as surgeries go? And what happens then?

Sgt. John Mattingly: What was like I said, a five hour surgery. I went in at 230 or two, woke up at 730 in the morning. I remember, open my eyes and was like, the first thing came to my mind. I don't know why. I looked at the nurse and said, what blood type am I? Because I wouldn't have known what to tell them on that either. You know, we didn't have the patches on us. We didn't have any of that stuff. So she told me.

And then when my wife came in, I didn't know if anybody else had been shot. The bad guys, I knew none of the good guys had been. And I looked her and said, man, was anybody else shot? And she said, yeah. I went, who? And she said, a female. And, man, my heart just sank because I knew the female didn't fire the shot. I know the taller of the two did, and it was probably the male, so. And, you know, it's every cop's worst nightmare. You don't want to. You don't want to put a bullet where it's not, where it doesn't belong. You don't want to shoot an innocent person.

And in this case, she was innocent. You know, as far as she didn't shoot the police. You know, maybe her lifestyle wasn't pure, but that's most people. So she didn't deserve to get shot. She didn't deserve to die. But, you know, the situation was just a total tragic, tragic event.

Jon Becker: I think one of the things that made me want to sit down with you was when I first started to investigate this and started reading all the files and everything else, you know, it's portrayed that, you know, it's seven racist cops, you know, shooting some, shooting an unarmed black female in her home, you know, in her bed. And, you know, these situations are never as bad as they are presented, and they're never as good as they're presented.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: It's always – The truth is always gray.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And as I started to dig into this, there were several things that. That made me want to sit down and talk to you. And one of them was the fact that you've said kind of from the beginning that she didn't have to die and she shouldn't have died. And this is, this is a tragedy.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, I think kind of her whole life was kind of, you know, we get on people saying, quit being a victim. Quit being a victim. But she was kind of a victim her whole life. Dad's been in prison her whole life. Mom didn't raise her. Grandma did. Grandma died. She kind of got reunited with her mom, it seems like, at the end.

But these girls are the typical targets for these guys to take advantage of, to use. They can sniff them out somehow, and they just, these girls are attracted to the bad boys that are going to, quote, take care of them and love them and do all this stuff. And it appears that she was stuck in that kind of, that cycle because that's how she was raised. And so victim on that end and then victim on the end where instead of this boyfriend saying, stay in here and call 911, I think somebody's kicking our door down. No, come out with me in the hall.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You know, and then instead of rendering medical aid or letting the police come in and render medical aid, didn't do it. You know, one of his statements on, I think, good morning America, he was like, oh, as she went down, I held her in my arms and held her as she passed away. He didn't have any blood on him.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. That's clearly not true.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And then when he comes out, he blames her for shooting. No, she shot. So, you know, this guy is not a guy of integrity or somebody that we want to believe or hang your hat on yet. That's what's happened here.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it's just unfortunate timing. Right? Like this. This is, I said to several people, like, as I investigated this, certainly there's blame to go around all over the place here. Right. And like, all these things there, there are numerous people that made catastrophically bad decisions that led to this whole thing, and they were seemingly insignificant decisions at the time. Right?

But what I think is worth noting here is, from the beginning of this thing, it took on a life of its own. It was, it went from a news story that Louisville police killed an unarmed black woman in her home to LeBron James is talking about it. And it is the top story in every newscast. And it just began to accelerate and accelerate and accelerate.

And you could see that at some point, the facts weren't going to matter anymore. Like, it was just, you know, you had, you had plaintiff's attorneys show up that were immense, you know, immediately shaking the city down. And then you have all the civil unrest that breaks out. And, and in the process, you know, the facts. I'm not gonna say the facts don't matter, but the facts, you know, I said in the intro, like, the initial reporting is very inaccurate. It becomes more accurate over time.

By the time you get to the New York Times recreation and some of those things, like, you've gotten a pretty accurate. Like, you hear the reports and they're pretty accurate. The problem is that the initial story is what sticks. And the initial story is, you know, seven racist white cops.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, man.

Jon Becker: Shoot a poor, unwarrant black.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, yeah. The big tragedy in this was that, that a lot of the unrest could have been avoided, I think, had the truth just been put out. Because look at the four. Four of the things. There was more, but the four main things initially put out by Kamala Harris, by LeBron James, by Cardi B, like one of Cardi B's post had over 17 million views or likes on it about us that were full lies. They said we had the wrong address, which isn't true. Everything on the warrant had her address on it. Her social, her car, her description. They said she was asleep in bed. She was not asleep in bed. She may have been asleep before we got there, but the incident didn't occur. They made it sound like we walked in and assassinated her.

Jon Becker: That's exactly what I thought when I first.

Sgt. John Mattingly: People still believe that. I get. People hit me up online all the time with crazy stuff.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And how could you sneak into this person's house and kill him in bed? I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, they said we didn't knock. It announced. Well, that's been disproven as well. They said Jamarcus Glover had been in custody for 10 hours, so there was no need for us to even go there because we were looking. It was an arrest warrant for him. Well, neither of those things are true. He wasn't in custody yet, and it wasn't an arrest warrant.

So once all those facts got put out and nobody rebutted them, that had a position of authority, you know, naturally people think, oh, well, the news ain't lying to me, though. Must be true.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. And I think. I think that that kind of transition us, like, I would encourage anybody that listens to this podcast to actually go and look at the report and do the homework. Like, before you make a decision on anything that's happened here, read your book, which I think is, you know, is pretty right down the middle. I actually expected it to be more partisan since it's your book and this. You know, you were one of the victims of this thing, right?

Like, obviously, Breonna Taylor lost her life, and that's terrible. And I'm not gonna minimize that in any way, shape, or form because, you know, as you said, she didn't deserve that. But this thing wrecked everybody's lives. And I think that, you know, if you read your book and you understand how many times you moved your family and how many times your kids were threatened and, you know, all of the things that happened, I think what made me initially want to sit down with you is like, this guy is every narc sergeant I've ever known.

There was nothing in the execution of this search warrant that was any different than you would see anywhere in the United States a narcotics team doing. Right? And so, like, I. The big thing that I want our listeners to take away is the lessons learned here. Right? It is the kind of cautionary tale of this situation.

And I would encourage people to look at the press coverage, look at your book, look at the official reports, and understand the fallout that occurred because this thing took on its own life and managed to just destroy everybody in its path in the process.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. And if I could add, you know, we as police officers, we get pretty calloused. You know, 20 years of people saying they're gonna kill you or fighting you or hating you, spitting on you, whatever, you get kind of used to it. You don't like it, but you're used to people saying ugly, nasty, mean things, but your family isn't.

When you've got, you know, young adults as your kids and one that's still in elementary and then a wife and parents and everybody that's getting all these threats and then having the FBI come to you and say, yes, there's been a hit taken out on you and your family, get out of town.

You know, that kind of rattles everybody's world because even if you're seasoned in it, when that happens, you go, man, this is like a movie. Are you kidding me? Now we've got in the middle of the night, get up and move. You know what's happening here.

And then at the same time, when fortunately, I had a guy in our department, Tom Chardine, who's retired now, but he was over our dignitary protection team, and he fought so hard for us to get a security detail because the department didn't want to do that, knowing there was an active hit placed out on us, knowing the FBI said, it's good we're investigating. They were like, we don't really have the manpower. We don't want to do it.

And fortunately, he fought and, you know, there's still some good people, you know, in command, but. And he was one of them. And so I'll forever be indebted to him for that.

Jon Becker: Yeah, because, I mean, the city washes their hands of this thing instantly, as quickly as they possibly can. You have the chief of police and the mayor running from it.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I talked to the mayor the day after I got shot. He came in. I talked to the police chief the night of, and then the day after he came and saw me, and I talked to one other person on the command staff after that. And other than that, nobody from the chief's office I've talked to this entire time.

Jon Becker: So you're laying in a hospital bed with a gunshot wound and that was the support you received?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, it wasn't one of those, you know, when you leave, you got the guys lined up cheering out of that. Nah, it was me and my wife and two buddies from work.

Jon Becker: That's horrifying. Let's talk about. So you, you ultimately heal. How long does it take you to get kind of back to normal from the gunshot wound?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Man, I got back fairly quick. I rehabbed hard.

Jon Becker: Leg didn't break right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, no. Fortunately, I had a wallet in my pocket that kind of deflected it because it was right at the femur bone. It was right at the hoe is. And the doctor said, that's good. It still hits your femoral artery, but if the bone had shattered and then hit it, it would have drawn up in your pelvis and, you know, there's nothing you could have done about it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I just recently interviewed Jordan Robison, who was shot in San Bernardino, and that was exactly what happened. His femur shattered and I didn't realize. Your femur is constantly under tension and it slammed it up.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Into, you know, pelvic area. Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: So I guess I was fortunate in that area.

Jon Becker: Yes. So ballistic wallet paid off?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes. So my legs still numb, but overall things are pretty good. I held fairly quickly, you know, pushed it, pushed it, pushed it. Because I want to go back. I told my wife in the hospital, so I'm going back. I'm going to do a warrant. First thing I'm going to do when I get back, it's like falling off a bike. I'm getting back off.

Yeah. Unfortunately, you know, with the circumstances, that was impossible. They didn't, they didn't want me to come back. So when I rehabbed and came back. And the day I came back, they were like, oh, you're transferred to the property room. And I, you know, as a form of, quote, punishment since they couldn't legally do anything to me.

Jon Becker: Well, and so you guys are all in legal jeopardy initially. Right? Like the DA is going to, the attorney general's looking at it. Potentially everybody's going to have charges filed against him.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Ultimately, it's only Brett Hankerson that gets state charges filed.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right, correct.

Jon Becker: Which is reckless, you know, want endangerment charges.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: But the day the district attorney. Yeah. Doesn't file on ondemand, either of you.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. Yeah. The attorney general didn't. And people were in an uproar. Uproar over that because they don't understand the system. You know, you only file charges where there's probable cause, you know, where a crime has been committed. And when they looked at the statute, looked at the circumstances, they were like, well, we didn't charge Kenneth Walker, and we're not charging them for self defense. You know, do we have Castle doctrine for him? Do we have self defense for them since they're police officers? So people were mad about that.

But, you know, I am grateful for the attorney general, who's a black man in Kentucky who stood his ground. And, you know, you had Beyonce writing him saying, oh, you got to do this, or we're going to do something about it. You had 50, I think, 56 members of Congress in Senate writing, saying, we need to get locked up and all that. And he stood his ground. And, you know, for a politician to do that, it's rare these days.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure. Well, none of the other politicians in town did, so.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not at all.

Jon Becker: Bonus credit the AG. So then at what point did you realize this thing is spiraling out of control?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. So when it first happened, you know, like I said, I asked my wife, and I'll crap here. A white cop shoots an unarmed black female, this ain't gonna be good.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: But then it was. It was March 13th. And again, I forgot to say this. When we served the warrant, it was a Friday night or Friday morning, early full moon, Friday 13th. And I'm like, oh, man.

Jon Becker: Yeah, here we go.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. All the stars were aligned. So, Covid, the shutdown for the nation was on the 13 march. That's when the president came in and said, you know, we're shutting a lot of things down. The state did as well. So I thought, in the back of my mind, I thought, maybe we'll go without much press coverage on this because they're so consumed with this Covid thing. And that was the case for at least a month. Then Ahmaud Arbery got shot.

Well, Ben Crump went down on the Ahmaud Arbery case. Well, when he did, the attorney for Breonna Taylor's family, a female there, had gone when she went through law school, had done her internship for him. And so she reached out to him and said, hey, our clients not getting any national attention. And this is her words, our clients not getting any national attention. Can you do something for us? Well, he went, what circumstances? Told him, oh, ding, ding, ding, money. Sure I can. No problem.

So his big statement was, if you run for Ahmaud, run for Bree. Cause they were doing some two mile run or whatever it was in his remembrance. And so things started picking up then, because before that, it was her family and a few people, maybe 15, 20 people, you know, a couple times a week, making a fuss, but not a big deal.

Then after a mod happened and it started getting national news because of that, then you could feel the tension in the city start to pick up. Then it went from 20 people to 50 people to 100 people to 200 people. And as time went on, the crowd grew each day for this little protest.

Now, Louisville's always had the reputation of not being. Didn't really have the heart to do big protests. You know, we'd hear, oh, it's coming in three percenters, and these people or whoever come in and be a handful of people. You're like, I was kind of let down. So I was thinking, well, maybe this won't really catch on, because this is Louisville. You know, we're a liberal city, but things. These things just don't happen here.

And when it started building up, though, and more and more people started happening, and then the death threats just started coming in like crazy. I reached out to our president of our city council, who's a retired cop, who trained me in the academy, who trained me how to do these warrants, who taught the narcotics class I went through. I reached out to him and said, man, can you do something about this? Here's what they're saying. And I laid out all the. All the lies, and I said, here's the truths. And I laid all those out.

And I said, the mayor's too big of a coward to say anything. He said, he is. I'll do a press conference next week and get the facts out. Perfect. I got a black city council president who's got some clout in the community, who's a former cop, who's gonna help me out here, right? That's what I thought. So that never came through. Matter of fact, he end up getting on tv a few weeks later talking about, we served a no knock warrant. We did it all wrong. And all this stuff, I'm like, that's not even the case. We did not serve a no knock warrant.

So that fell through and things kept building. And then you had, you know, the pinnacle. George Floyd. So you had this horrible trifecta. Breonna Taylor in March, Maude Aubrey in April, George Floyd in May. And once that happened, the city just exploded.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Then it just, you know, and I think everybody knows the story from there. It takes off. So, like, let's talk about the cautionary tale here. Let's talk about lessons learned. And there are several things that stick out to me, and I just want to kind of walk through with you. Let's start with training, right? So we've got. We have an ad hoc team of seven guys that have never served a warrant as a team together. Your. Your narcotics training, that there's no formal. Like, nobody's been through a SWAT school.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: When was the last time before this event that you had received any kind of entry training? Formal entry training?

Sgt. John Mattingly: 2017.

Jon Becker: So three years.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, almost three years.

Jon Becker: Almost three years. And. And who was that training from?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was from SWAT.

Jon Becker: Is that – Is the culture in the organization that there's a positive relationship between narcotics and SWAT, or is it a tense relationship or. What's that?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I would say it's neutral. It's not tense. It's not, you know, there's no. There's no animosity. We had some SWAT guys in narcotics, and we would call them if we needed something to go, hey, can you reach out and, you know, get this done for us? And they would, but, yeah, there was no tension there. It's just. SWAT's just different. That's the only way I can describe it. You know, they're a different alpha breed than the rest of cops, usually, and so they do their training. They kind of keep things almost to themselves, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's kind of secretive.

And so if they had to train us, they probably didn't want to, but they did. But, you know, and some of that falls on us as leaders. We could have done our own training, and we didn't because we figured, man, if we're doing three or four warrants a week, why do we need to train if we're doing live action training?

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're good. We're doing it all the time.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. I've done 2000 nothing. I mean, I've been shot at, but nobody's died, nobody's gotten hurt. You know, here we go. And ultimately, that complacency or that lack of being proactive in training, you know, put us where we're at today.

Jon Becker: Well, I just. One thing I should have hit early in, but, like, prior to this, you've had in your career no force complaints filed against you, right. You never shot anybody.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: You've never been shot.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And if I remember correctly, I think your only sustained discipline was a late report or something.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yep. That was it.

Jon Becker: You got a letter in your personnel file.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it.

Jon Becker: So, you know. There's not. You don't have a long history of. Of negative discipline that, you know, this often in these situations, you know, you look back over the history of somebody and it's like, oh, this guy had 15 force complaints.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Like, how did his bosses not see this guy?

Jon Becker: Yeah, exactly. You, like, you watch. You watch the train wreck develop over the course of ten years. One of the things with this that struck me is how. How that's not the case here.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. No, I mean, and this ain't. This isn't me being cocky, but people wanted me to work for him because I did what they asked. You know, we worked hard, we got results, and. And the guys enjoyed working for me. It seemed like. So there wasn't any issues. Like, I didn't have any tension with upper command. You know, there was none of that. It was just. I came to work, did my job, went home.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Until this day. And then, you know, that's that. So how regularly, while you're in narcotics, does your team train? Just 2017, and then that's kind of it. Do you have a regular training day?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Well, what they started, I'm trying to think when they started it, and it went on for about six months and it kind of fizzled out. Was once a month they wanted to do some type of training. So I think one month we had the district attorneys come in and talk about how they wanted warrants done. One month we had maybe a vehicle takedown training, but most of it was classroom stuff, not hands on. This is what we're doing. And that wasn't a tack house. It wasn't stuff like that.

Jon Becker: And then there's no formal process for anybody to go through SWAT training or.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, no. Yeah, you can't. If you're not in SWAT, you can't submit and go to SWAT training.

Jon Becker: How often do you guys do you shoot? How often do you qualify?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Twice a year.

Jon Becker: Is that the only time you shoot?

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's it, yeah. As a team or as. Yeah. Unless you do it on your own. Are unfortunately our. At least at the time. I don't know if it's changed. Our range wasn't available to us because when they weren't doing recruits or doing regular qualifications, they were written it out to other people.

Jon Becker: So if you wanted to shoot, you had to go to, like, a public range, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. No ammo. Wouldn't give that up because it's too expensive. So it was. It was either you did it on your own or you didn't do it.

Jon Becker: Got it. Did you do it on your own or you didn't do it?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not much.

Jon Becker: Got it. So let's talk about equipment. So you've got only handguns, right? Everybody's in soft armor, I'm assuming.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I had plates.

Jon Becker: You had plates. You said guns. Gun lights?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: No optics on your weapons.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not allowed.

Jon Becker: Not allowed. And no long guns.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Not allowed either. Used to be able to have a long gun. We used to have one long gun, one shotgun, and then pistols on every entry. And without explanation. They wouldn't tell us why. I think. My personal opinion, I think SWAT didn't want them so they could. This is when they were pushing their full time team so they could say, no, we need to come in and do all the warrants. Not positive on that because nobody would give us an answer. You know, it's kind of like a kid when you tell them no.

Why? Well, because I said, yeah, well, sometimes you need to know the why. And I think this was one. We're risking our life. Give. At least give me the why. Help me understand so I can relate to my guys. But that was never the case.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And so you took a shield with you. Well, you didn't. One of your guys took a shield.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, that was a mistake on my part. As I'm out messing with my car in the lot in the rain, one of the guys who had worked. I've worked with him off and on for years. He was a canine guy most of the time. But now he's doing this, he says, hey, sergeant, I got a shield. Do you want to bring it? I was like, sure.

And then I went on and did my thing. We, none of us that made entry at night have been trained on a shield. I don't know where he got the shield. I don't know if somebody left in his car, if he borrowed it from. So I have no idea. But I said, sure, bring the shield. So then by the time all these other things go on and we get on scene, I'm the first one up. He comes at some point in behind me. I forgot about the shield. Totally forgot about it because in 2000, warrants, I think I've used a shield twice. And that was for, to keep pit bulls back.

So unless you're in SWAT, you don't get trained on the shield either. And so it's, it was a mistake. I would love to have had it and hopefully would hit the shield, not me, but again, not trained on it. So I'm not sure how effective that would have been either.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's a fair point. Let's talk about tactics for a minute. So at this point in time, it's 2019…

Sgt. John Mattingly: 2020.

Jon Becker: So 2020, March 2020, a lot of teams have begun to move to a contain and call out approach, research warrants, at least on the coasts, including ours. So your SWAT team had moved to that approach.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, they implemented that.

Jon Becker: And did they use that on the other warrants that they served?

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm not sure. I think some people said they did. Yeah, I know they didn't go through the door.

Jon Becker: Yeah. The video looks like…

Sgt. John Mattingly: I'm not sure if they banged the door or knocked the door and banged first sometime they did that. I know. But I don't know if on that one in particular. I think when they pulled up, some people ran in and so they knew the police were there and they called them out. That's what I think happened.

Jon Becker: So the SWAT is using contain and call out, but narcotics is.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, not at all.

Jon Becker: So everything you do is dynamic, either….

Sgt. John Mattingly: Dynamic or taking people off at other locations. Welcome back.

Jon Becker: Yeah, taking vehicles down and those kinds of things. Was there any discussion? Did you remember at that point about containing call out?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. It was never even a suggestion to us. It was never, hey, SWAT's doing this, maybe you ought to think about it. Or SWAT never came to us and said, hey, now, I do know. The retired SWAT commander reached out at one point after this event and said, man, I told the chief in 2019 or 18 or whatever it was, it was somewhere close to that. Before he retired, he said, I told the chief that we had to have you all in, do training, get you all up to date on what we're doing. And he said, no, the budget and time don't allow for it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Penny smart. Tele dumb.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: So I mean, and at that point it had been two years plus since you guys had trained with the SWAT team. So even if they're doing it, that, that tactic, there's no organizational, institutional knowledge being passed back and forth, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: There's no, there's no sop on it. There's no nothing.

Jon Becker: Is, is there a culture in the organization of debrief and paying attention to mistakes and lessons learned?

Sgt. John Mattingly: SWAT’s great at it. But the narc units, the impact units, no.

Jon Becker: So when you guys did a warrant, did you have like you normally would do a warrant? Was there, you know, sit down kind of after action? Hey, we shouldn't do this. We should think about doing this.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, in the early days, I'm talking years ago, it was brought up, it's mentioned, or maybe they said we should or you need to. But it's never been a practice. If somebody royally screwed up on something, you talked about it. But, but like you said, it's, there's always something. No, no, n op is perfect and we should have been addressing those. And maybe if we've been addressing those all along we would have come to the point. We looked at each other and said maybe we need to do this containment and call out because you, you know, we keep messing up here and there and eventually it's going to catch up to us. And it did well.

Jon Becker: And, but in the 2000 that you did, you know, prior to that you hadn't had that many close calls, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, just one, one shooting that I was going through the door on, that.

Jon Becker: Was it that those around that would pass you past your head if I remember correctly? Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty close call.

Sgt. John Mattingly: It was. I got cut up from it.

Jon Becker: But, but other than that you have 2000 repetitions of this working?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Like, yeah, the only thing, only issues we ever had were dogs that we had to put down. Other than that humans usually complied, ran, did something. Yeah, we were just, you know, fortunate.

Jon Becker: Now let's talk about knock and announce. You're banging on the door. Do you have any kind of PA system?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No.

Jon Becker: No loudspeakers? No. You know, nothing that would wake up the neighborhood and make sure everybody's paying attention?

Sgt. John Mattingly: No. And I think I talked to you about this earlier mistake, another mistake we made that we had just let fall by the wayside. I can't remember honestly the last time we did it. It used to be common practice that every time we served a warrant because we were in plain clothes. Now obviously our vest said police big on them. We were probably more recognizable than a guy in a dark blue suit with one little badge. You know, it said, police. We had guns. You know, you knew who we were.

But we used to always have a marked car pull up out front, and as we were knocking, they would hit their lights and sirens, minimum lights every once in a while, tooth or siren a couple of times, just to let the neighborhood know also that these bangs are here, these yells, you're here. Don't worry, it's all right. It's the police. But to also inform the people inside. And we had let that slip, and I think it could have made a big difference here.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I think that as I read through the facts of this, obviously, we'll never know what was in Kenneth Walker's mind. Right. And unless we can somehow get access to whatever exchange happened between him and his family, we'll never know whether he believed it was the police before he fired. His behavior, to me, does not look like a guy who was there to shoot it out with the police. Usually if the guy's going to shoot out with the police, he stands at the door and there's a gunfight, he fires one around and runs away.

So in the back of my brain, there is always this kind of. Maybe he legitimately thought it was her ex boyfriend or something like that. Obviously, once he fires the round and gets fired back, he realizes he's engaged the police at a minimum. At that point, he knows whether he knew before that. But the fact that there wasn't a PA system, there wasn't any kind of, you know, there weren't – there wasn't a marked unit out front. Certainly weakened the knock and notice aspect.

And I think one of the lessons learned is, you know, what we see a lot of teams out here do is they will use a really loud loudspeaker. And actually, when they do a containing call out, they will record the audio on the opposite side of the house and demonstrate. Yeah, no, I hear the audio and, you know, again, any of these things, any one of these things may not have changed the situation.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: The question is, if you're looking at this going forward, how many of these things can you, can you do.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: To just decrease likelihood.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Or at the very least that way, if it gets out any negative way, all the lies you can go. No, man. Here's, here's, like you said, here's a recording of them saying police. You know, we didn't have any of that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And in this case, there were. There was. The guy upstairs knew the police were there and said that he heard the knocking notice.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: There's one other that, like, I think if I remember correctly, one other that said they did and then kind of recounted that as time went on.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. So the guy downstairs, I think his last name is nagby or nether be something like that. The one that when. When Hankinson shot it went through. Through Breonna Taylor's apartment and into the apartment where this other couple lived. And what he told the first investigator on scene that took statements was, I heard you all knocking at the door and yelling, I thought you were there for me. As I was coming to the door. That's when the shots started ringing out, and that's when it came through my wall and we just dove on the ground.

So he knew. He heard us yelling. I'm not sure if he could verify police because he wouldn't go that far because, you know, a week later they sued us. And then he totally shut down.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Cause Hankison's rounds, just to put this story, if you picture the apartment running down sideways, there's another apartment that's basically right behind that one.

Sgt. John Mattingly: The kitchen wall. The kitchen wall connects them.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Common kitchen wall. Hankison's rounds go through the kitchen, through Breonna Taylor's kitchen, into the neighboring kitchen.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And through their sliding glass door.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So if you look at the pictures online, you'll see that the shattered sliding glass door, you'll see pictures of rounds in clocks and chairs and all kinds of stuff. So, yeah, you can see where he would not necessarily be all that friendly after taking rounds in his apartment. But there were no other people that came forward and said that they heard that it was the police.

Sgt. John Mattingly: No, matter of fact, their main witness, she's a protester, got on. She's been on a couple of the different documentaries saying, oh, I didn't hear the police. Not, they didn't knock it, they didn't announce, they didn't do all this stuff. And she's the one that their attorney propped up as their. Their prime witness.

And I've got a recording of her on her Facebook where she was live on there talking. And she said, all you people mad at me? She said, I couldn't even heard the police if I wanted to. I was two buildings away. And I'm thinking, yet she was the prime witness, you know, saying that we didn't announce. So that's what you're dealing with.

Jon Becker: Yeah, for sure. So then from a obviously medical response is. Is troubling. I mean, fortunately, you know, they saved your life. We're thankful for that. But there was, EMS was staged at a point that they. What does it take them ten minutes to get there?

Sgt. John Mattingly: It should have taken. It took him about ten. It should take him like less than a minute.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So they're playing video games quarter mile away. Yeah, playing video games, watching TV.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And then your teammates. And I'm using air quotes when I say the word teammates, your coworkers. Nice. Are not obviously trained. One of them is trained in how to put a tourniquet on. But when you see the video, you can see that the guys, they don't even know what to do with the compression bandage. Was there a policy in the agency of teaching any kind of TCCC?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So we had CPR and first aid training every two years. And it's – I don't want to say it's a joke, but it's not taken real serious. You come to class, you do your 8 hours, you go home, and if you're paying attention, you're kind of paying attention. If you're not, you're not, which is on you. If you're not, because it's your life at stake. But that's just the reality of it. You know, tape gets played or video gets started. The instructor walks out of the room. You watch the first date thing. They come back in. You practice on somebody once or twice, you're done. It's kind of. It's pretty lame.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And obviously was necessary.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: You know, unfortunately didn't have a worse outcome for you, but that was not for lack of trying. What about in the agency? Talk to me about the role of the narcotics units versus the SWAT team. It's full time SWAT team. And then you have more than one narcotics unit, right?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, we had. Let's see, you have your major case unit. You've got your interdiction unit. And then at one point, we had three street squads. I think at this time we only had two. And then you had the place based investigation unit, which really wasn't narcotics, but it fell under the guise of how they had reorganized some things. So basically four narcotics units.

Jon Becker: But narco, from a chain of command standpoint, is on a completely different chain of command from SWAT.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yes.

Jon Becker: And there's not a regular engagement taking place for culture swap or like, hey, we're doing this and try this. Got it. One more topic for gear. Talk to me about body worn cameras because it was a very controversial subject. What was the agency's policy at this point on bodyborne cameras?

Sgt. John Mattingly: So if you were in the narcotics unit, and you didn't work off duty, you didn't have to have them. That was mainly for protection of some of the detectives that may have worked semi undercover stuff or plain clothes.

But mainly it was for informant reasons, because the cameras are open records, and to get a civilian to be able to retract them correctly or, you know, block out certain parts, it was. It hadn't been fine tuned, and they didn't want defense attorneys getting a hold of these cameras and diamond out the other informants that were rattin their clients out.

A couple of the guys had them. The. The guy on the highway, he had it, didn't have it on. And then a couple guys that worked off duty had it, but they weren't. Again, they weren't required to have him on at this time. So they may have had him, but they weren't required to be operating them.

Jon Becker: At this time retrospectively.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Oh, wish we'd had it. I would. I would do anything to have that footage.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I think it's funny because you and I talked about this, and, like, when body worn cameras first came out, I was not a fan. Not me. I'm like, you know, this is just going to be used to put cops in jail and, you know, everybody's going to Monday morning quarterback the event and all that. You know, over the last ten years, as they become more in vogue, you quickly realize in situations like this that it's never as bad as the plaintiff's attorney makes it out to be.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And no matter what the video is, it's. It's better.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Yeah, no, I wish. You know, if there's departments out there, they're on the fence, man. Go for it, because I think. I think there's some stat out there. This is like 90% of the complaints that come in when guys are wearing body worn cameras are debunked because you know the truths right here on your shoulder. You can't change the footage. And people just lie or in there, in their tense situations dealing with the police, maybe they construed a death, something totally different, kind of like, you know, the different statements of that night that people saw through their lens, different things than what actually happened.

Jon Becker: One, even the guys involved in the event, I mean, you guys all had kind of slightly different.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. However your body reacts physiologically, you know, is going to be different than the guy next to you.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. You may have audio auditory exclusion, you may have visual exclusion. You may. You know, it certainly have tunnel vision.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah.

Jon Becker: Because, you know, it's terrifying. Let's. For a last topic, let's talk about the agency's response publicly. So there's a lot of kind of debate about transparency in law enforcement. And, you know, I've had several friends that are chiefs that have implemented very aggressive release policies where the body worn camera is released almost immediately.

Mostly big agencies, LAPD, La Sheriff have gone to that, where it's like, here's what happened. Here's the body wearing camera. Here's all the data we have. It seemed to me that the approach taken by Louisville PD was to circle the wagons and hide. There was not a lot of public comment. There was very little disclosure of information initially.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah. Even to. Even to Breonna Taylor's family. They were frustrated because they could not get any answers either. And I understand that. I'd have been ticked off if I were them, too, because they kept requesting the same stuff and maybe had. Had they been given the information or they could have diffused some of this because still they'd have been mad. You know, they'd have been sad, they've been tragic, all that stuff.

But at the same time, maybe that. That deep anger that was put out and the emotions that kicked in with everybody and I believe a lot of the people were. Thought they were doing the right thing, you know, as far as. As pushing back against the police, because again, at this point, nothing had been debunked. And. And just a couple months in the defense attorney or the defense civil attorney had deposed the mayor and instead of him going under oath and tell him what happened, we are. We were all deposed man. They grilled us for days.

But then when it was his turn, they turn around, settle the case. You know, two days after they said they were going to depose him and settles it for $12 million. Did not get the approval of city council. Anything over a million was supposed to get their approval. Did it on a Sunday night when nobody knew what was going on.

So I can see from the outside looking in that we look guilty. You know, city gives them $12 million, they never say no. It was the right house. They never said no. She wasn't in her bed. They never say no. He was already. He wasn't in custody. All these things. They never said any of this stuff. Instead, they let these rumors fly. Things were leaked from inside the department on one of the guys from a. A sexual abuse complaint from twelve, 10, 12 years earlier that was found. He was cleared on and it was supposed to been destroyed and those after those records, after two or three years and somebody leaked it to the press.

And so that put mud on the case as well. That was never come out by the department. Go, oh ho ho. That he was cleared on that. There was nothing there. So all these little things kind of just, they just kept compounding and building up to the point where anybody from the outside looking in, even other police officers, even people in our own department didn't know the truth. And months later, and, you know, they're out there facing all these protesters and stuff, not knowing what they're fighting for.

And so that was very frustrating and made you want to beat your head on a wall because you knew the truth, you knew they had the truth. And for whatever reason we talked earlier that, you know, they distanced themselves because they don't want to take responsibility for it. If they can pawn it off on somebody down on a lower level, why not? And I think that's what took place here because the mayor had already had her on his platform saying, we need justice for Breonna Taylor and if I could fire the police, I would, but they're protected under law and, you know, all these things.

So he had already dug his heels in the sand on what side he was going to be on and just was not going to put the truth out. And our chief at the time, and probably now I'm sure it's hadn't changed. He didn't run the department. Everything went through the mayor's office. Every string that was pulled was by the deputy mayor. And just a yes man period.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And at some point, you know, it's like we were talking about earlier, at some point it is easier for the politicians to burn everybody in the incident.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You're just a number. No matter, no matter what kind of work you've done over your career, no matter, no negativity, all that. It doesn't matter if you're a liability to them at this point, whether it's legit liability or just this made up, you know, thing that happened, they'll just cut you loose, they'll let you hang out to drive.

Jon Becker: Yeah. So if you were and you are now teaching, you know, fortunately you went out, wrote a book, put your own story out there because it wasn't going to get out otherwise. But when you are interacting with young narcotics units and young cops, what, what is your counsel to them as to how not to end up?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Man, it's a lot of things, like for years and this was just kind of common practice and we talke dearlier about what common practice will get you, right? You know, if things you get in this rut and things don't change, we don't develop, we don't, we don't continue to learn and make, evolve, then we're going to be in trouble. And that's kind of what happened here. We stuck to all the old plans of here. You walk in, I know nothing about the case, here's this warrant, go serve it.

So instead of sitting here and me going, hold on, pump the brakes, give me some background on this, give me some more information on, let me dig into it myself a little bit. Didn't take place. And if you're putting your name on it, and maybe not on the warrant, but our names on the, on the catch sheet for, you know, for everything else after that warrant sign, then maybe you want to put a little bit of your own blood, sweat and tears into it beforehand and not after the fact, because it's much easier to divert and avoid stuff than it is to try to fix it.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I mean, it's challenging because the, you know, you're working with people, you have to trust them. But in this case, I mean, we have federal charges filed against the three officers that got the warrant.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And part of the federal charges are that they falsified their affidavit.

Sgt. John Mattingly: And it was so unnecessary too, because the wording in the warrant said that the postal inspector said that he, Jamarcus Clover, was getting packages in his name. They didn't need that. They've got him on video going in empty handed, coming out with those boxes, going straight to the trap house. All they had to do was take a little bit of extra time and explain how this works in the narcotics world.

And it's the same probable cause, if not even stronger, because who's to say he's not getting shoes through the mail there? Yeah, you know, we don't know. And they don't know what he got to that day, but at least that puts him in a category of, this is the typical way narcotics dealers do things, and this is what he did. That with all the other information would have been, would have been strong enough.

And I don't know if lack of experience, because again, you had these guys who, one guy in that whole unit had done warrants, the rest of them had been jump out people in a different platoon that, when they, when they created this unit, pulled them over. And now you've got them doing a three month investigation with five warrants and pole cams and trackers, man, they're probably barely keeping their head above water, to be honest. I mean, this is all new to them, and you're throwing this on them.

And then at the same time, you've got the mayor's office coming in every week with three of the people from the chief's office getting updates on this case. There's a little pressure to get something done. So then you've got these younger detectives going. Well, let's make this warrant sound really good, because what's it going to matter, right? Who's going to know or what's going to hurt?

Well, it's one of those things that, you know, when the veils uncovered and you got this lie, it makes everything look bad. And, and between, between that and the shots coming in from outside and the. And the statements from the, the ten year old sexual assault, all those things put together, they spun it in a way that made us look like the most corrupt copse, you know, in America.

Jon Becker: Well, and you're falling into a time, you know, between Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, where we're looking for that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right. White people are the devil. Hunting down black people.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And cops. Right. Like, it's. It's. We. We obviously, at that point, defund police is a thing, and we are right.

Sgt. John Mattingly: In the middle of an election cycle.

Jon Becker: Yeah, absolutely.

Sgt. John Mattingly: There's zero politician on either side that's gonna stand up for you.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Sgt. John Mattingly: You know, I reached out to both of my senators, both Republicans. Both of them were like, nope, sorry, good luck. You're on your own.

Jon Becker: Yeah. At some point, you're so toxic that they can't touch. It's just, it isn't worth the political risk to them. Is there anything else you think that. That guys listening. I mean, obviously, we talked about training. We talked about kind of prep. Is there anything else that you think that guys need?

Sgt. John Mattingly: Yeah, just complacency. It's so easy, man. When you. When you do this repeatedly. And this is anything in life, I don't care what it is, you get just somewhat complacent. And you've got to be your own barometer and self check. Or your buddies, you know, we talk about checking on your buddies for mental health, and if you see them drinking or you see them going astray, whatever, check them. It's no different here.

And that's why probably debriefs are so important because that does kind of refocus you every time you do an op instead of coming in and. All right, good. Let's go have dinner. You know, and then we move on to the next one and then we may repeat the same mistake over and over and over. It never gets corrected. But then when things do go right 2000 times, you don't expect them to go wrong on this easy one and they just do. Because you do let your guard down some. You can't. It's human nature.

Jon Becker: When in the end there is no easy one.

Sgt. John Mattingly: That's true. Just like there's no. There's no routine call.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. In the same way there's no routine call. There is no easy one. I think, you know, I'm so appreciative. You came and sat down with me and I think, you know, I wrote an article a while back on a police shooting and I said, you know, just because a tragedy occurs doesn't mean an injustice does.

Sgt. John Mattingly: Right.

Jon Becker: And in this case, certainly Breonna Taylor deserved better than she got. And we'll see what the federal court system has to say about, you know, the warrant and what took place afterwards. But I was talking to somebody recently about this and I said, the great irony of the Breonna Taylor case is that the two guys that shot Breonna Taylor were the only ones that were acting constitutionally right. And to me that is the tragedy of this is in the end, you're an arc sergeant doing your job and you got run over by a national train. And I'm sorry for that.

Sgt. John Mattingly: I appreciate it! Real quick. One of the other things that I tell these guys when I talk is you've got to be your own voice. You got to fight for yourself harder than anybody else because nobody's going to fight for you like you will because so many times here on the street, what are we willing to do? You hear the gunfire, you run toward it. You're willing to fight people for your partner, you're willing to take a bullet for a stranger. But then when you're off the job and they come at you like they did us, what do most cops do? They just cower down. They don't know what to do, you know, they just, they just go into turtle mode and, and you just take that beating.

And at some point and, and preferably early on, even if you've got the gag order on you like we did, there's ways to get stuff out. You got to be creative and think outside the box and get it out there because the city's not going to do it for you. Your department may not do it for you. Some will, some won't. Your upper chain of command probably really won't because they got to worry about their own jobs.

So you've got to figure out ways to fight for yourself and get. Get the truth out. And it's not easy, and people will. Riddick. I've taken so much ridicule and hate, and. And people have told me, look, man, just. Just disappear. Just go away. I'm like, no, it's not about me anymore. My stuff's done. You know, Kenneth Walker's not getting charged. I'm not getting any money. This, you know, I've had to move. I've lost money. I've downgraded everything. Whatever, I'm over that. That's in the past. But now there's all these cops coming after me.

That, like you said, could be me next week. It doesn't matter if you're patrol, if you're SWAT, if you're narcotics. We're all making runs that could potentially, in a brief second, flip into something that could be national news, and you're not prepared for it. I don't care how much you think you're prepared for it. You're just not. And so, you know, get out there and just fight for yourself.

Jon Becker: Love that! I think that's a great place for us to stop. John, thank you so much for doing this, buddy, man!

Sgt. John Mattingly: Thanks, Jon! Appreciate it!