Episode 13 – Inspector Kevin Cyr – RCMP ERT

Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

My guest today is Kevin Cyr. Kevin is inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and is the current commander of the RCMP Emergency Response team for British Columbia, which is the second largest tactical unit in Canada.

Kevin has been with the RCMP for 22 years and has been with the team for seven years. He has a master's in law from Osgoode Hall Law School and has published internationally in law and criminology journals. He teaches instant command for the Canadian Police College.

Kevin, thanks so much for joining me today!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Thanks for having me, Jon!

Jon Becker: Why don't we start with kind of your personal history, your background, education, when you started with RCMP.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Sure. Yeah. So I grew up on the east coast of Canada in New Brunswick, just north of Maine. I went to university. I did my undergraduate, actually in mathematics and physics. And when I was finishing my degree, I had pretty decent marks. So I had some, I had like three different job offers. One was as a actuary, which is like just crunching numbers for a financial firm, and the other one was going to do graduate level mathematics. And the other one I had done.

The other thing I'd done during my final year was apply to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police because I can't pin when it happened. But ever since I was a kid, wanted to be a cop. And not only that, but I wanted to be on a SWAT team. That's just what I wanted to do. So I turned down those other job offers, which probably wasn't the best financial decision of my life, but probably the best happiness decision of my life, and went to depot, which is our academy. Did that for six months. I then was posted up. So maybe we'll start explaining on how the RCMP works. Cause it's significantly different than how American policing works. And if I don't say to, nothing, I say will make sense.

So the RCMP is, first of all, it's a federal policing agency. So it is the American equivalent of the FBI, ATF and DEA. We only do one RCMP. So we do our international drug smuggling, we do financial crime, we do all that stuff. But the way it works is certain provinces. So the equivalent of a state can contract the RCMP to do their state policing.

So instead of having, like, imagine if a state. Instead of having, you know, their state patrol or their state troopers, they'd be like, hey, why don't we get, you know, contract the FBI to do uniform policing? We take those contracts as well. And then some cities also contract us for their city policing, so we do municipal, provincial, and federal policing all in one agency.

The result is you can transfer around to a lot of different places still in the same agency, and that's, in fact, what we see a lot of. So I started in a super small town up in northern British Columbia. There's like nine cops in the whole area. I did a few years there. I then went down to the interior, like, 30 cops, and then I went down to the big city just outside of Vancouver. Along the way, uh, got into the SWAT program, which we call emergency response team. But I always, usually just say SWAT, just because most people. It's the colloquial term.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's become the brand.

Insp. Kevin Cyr:

Exactly, exactly. So we call it ERT. It's SWAT. It's the exact same thing. I got into the SWAT program as a collateral duty officer. So a lot of our program is, you know, you just do it off the side of your desk. You train when you can, except in the big city just outside of Vancouver, where I am now, it's a full time team. And so I got onto that full time team in 2014 and stayed there for three or four years. Left. I took my commission. I had to leave to get commission, always with the intention of coming back to the team as the OIC. Finally, when that job opened, I was able to come back, and I've been back there almost three years now.

Jon Becker: So commission two, inspector.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. Yes. It's a commission rank.

Jon Becker: So give me the rank structure.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So it's paramilitary organization. In fact, the RCMP is a cavalry unit, officially, which is kind of cool. So it's constable is your base level. Then you have corporal, sergeant, staff sergeant, sergeant major, but there's only a few of those. And then you get into the commissioned ranks, which we call, you know, the white shirts, and you have inspector, superintendent, chief superintendent, assistant commissioner, deputy commissioner, and commissioner.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's very similar to, you know, American law enforcement. It's just different nomenclature.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Probably like some British influenced nomenclature to it, right?

Jon Becker: Yeah. And it strikes me as you're talking about it. The RCMP's approach to your FBI, La county sheriffs and LAPD kind of pressed into one vertically. And that's more of a European model than it is the American model because we have so many small municipalities and we're divided up so much that there's 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, that's right, and there's only 180 in Canada. So although you guys have eight times the population, you have 100 times the law enforcement agencies. And I think there's some advantages and disadvantages to either model.

The advantages to our model is, like you said, my team gets to engage in. We're doing barricade and drug warrants on a daily basis, which really helps us prepare for the armed ship boarding for the migrant vessel or the hostage taking on the ferry or the hijacked airplane or whatever we need to do.

So we get a really broad spectrum of operations, which helps. And you get a lot of reps, which helps. I always say we run about 200 to 220 calls a year. We have 200 times a year that we make mistakes and learn from them. And that's our secret sauce is just exposure.

Jon Becker: What's the population that you cover that your team covers? How big a population?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So if you think so, my area of operations is not the city of Vancouver, but all the suburbs and cities around it. In total, we cover 12,000 sq. miles. Most of that is just like mountains that you. There's no reason to go up there, but our population is about 2.3 million that we provide service for.

Jon Becker: So you've got, I mean, just to put it in perspective for, you know, us law enforcement, you've got a quarter of the population of the city of Los Angeles and about the same volume of callouts that LAPD SWAT would have.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, but it's always like, it's really hard to compare because, you know, we would probably engage on some lower threshold calls that might be handled by other units. And, like, LAPD's got, you know, I know they've got a fantastic guns and gangs unit that does a lot of high level arrest, whereas in our agency we'd be doing those, you know, they have all alternatives. So I think it's very difficult to compare because it's not apples to apples.

Jon Becker: Which is one of the things I think is most interesting. And part of the reason I wanted to sit down with you is it is, you know, it's such a unique approach. And I think there's other things we'll talk about later that I think are interesting for teams that are listening. Why don't we start with the origin story of the team? When did the team begin? Like, what was the genesis of the team?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, so the genesis of our program was back in the eighties, like late seventies, early 1980s, when you started to get, you know, the Munichs, the Iranian embassy. And for us the big seminal moment was the Armenia, sorry, the Turkish embassy.

So we had in 19, I think it was 83 or 85, some armenian terrorists took over the turkish embassy, shot and killed the guard, took the ambassador's family hostage. The ambassador was able to flee, but he was actually, he fled out the window and broke his ankle or broke his leg in the backyard. So he was not ambulatory. So he was stuck there. And it was only a four or five hour siege.

Jon Becker: Is it Ottawa?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: This was in Ottawa. Yeah, this was in Ottawa. So on the heels of when you map that incident, although it was handled quite capably by the city police force, you map that onto how bad it could have been and that there was really no solution to that. You could still find the news story from it. And they're talking about the sharpshooters have been deployed and it's some dude with a shotgun. You know, like, it's just these guys have no equipment, they've got no training.

So that's when the RCMP started the, they called it special emergency response team. So assert. And of course, now listen, at the time, they were already experimenting with, you know, emergency response teams and, you know, it's like smaller scale, part time collateral duty, SWAT teams, et cetera, et cetera. But this was the first foray into higher level of team. And so they got the SAS to come over and give them their startup training. And in fact, to this day, we still have a lot of that SAS verbiage in our operations.

So, you know, we're not the one, two, three side houses. We're white, black, red, green. You know, you still get that, you know, that old school, you know, Papa Lima Yankee, papa lima golf. And it's kind of neat. It's part of our heritage. And I think we might talk about how that heritage, though, we've had to move away from some of it because it was handcuffing us to the past in some ways. And I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later.

Jon Becker: But yeah, I think it's just about every team had its origin. I mean, Munich was really, if you go back to a single event, Munich was the seminal event that drove the development of special tactics and counterterrorism worldwide, because that was a very public, very violent, very ugly resolution. And everybody said, I don't want this to happen here.

And of course, with the 84 Olympics coming to the US in LA, that drove the development in the US, special tactics. But it's interesting because there was that kind of air quotes, golden age of terrorism where it's like, oh, we're gonna take something and take hostages and negotiate our friends getting out of prison or whatever it was. And you watched over from 72 to mid 80s when you guys developed this kind of like, we don't know what to do. We're kind of figuring it out.

And there's a distinct switch there that flips right around Prince's gate where if you are a hostage taker and you take hostages, you're gonna die, you're all gonna die and the hostages are gonna be rescued. And that tactic then stopped being used. And it's kind of, you know, Ottawa was kind of one of those events at the tail end of that where you could see like, yeah, this is, this, this. The game has changed because SAS, GSG9, Delta, DEVGRU, all these groups started to form and started to train everybody. And you saw this kind of fusion of law enforcement and military tactics, which was. It sounds like the origin story for the team.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Well, one of the interesting little footnotes buried in our origin story is that the original mandate of that special emergency response team was as a lethal force option. Like, that's how it was envisioned. You know, in the original documents, it says this team is for when all other efforts have failed and precise, lethal, you know, force is to be used. They're like, you know, a kill squad. Like, that's how they were designed. We, that is not our reality anymore.

Can you imagine if that was my mandate? Like, hey, listen, patrol guys, when, you know, when you can't do anything, you call us and we'll take care of it. Like, yeah, that's not the reality anymore. There was de-escalation, didn't exist. Les Lethal didn't exist. Like, none of these things existed. These guys were designed for a very, very narrow mission set. And I think it took a long time for us to realize that some of the leadership and operational strategies we were learning from those higher tier teams are not always applicable to the broader spectrum of operations that we're engaging on.

Jon Becker: Yeah, like, I've spent my career working with state and local, federal and DoD. And the way that DoD entities worldwide view the use of force is a switch. When we make a decision to deploy the military. We are throwing on the h*** switch. We will turn the h*** switch off. When there's a surrender. Force is viewed very binary.

Have we reached sufficient provocation to meet our rules of engagement? Okay, send the marines. And I think when you saw the evolution of first in Somalia and Afghanistan, where we're getting more into peacekeeping missions, you saw this kind of blurring where law enforcement tactics started to be used. Somalia. La sheriffs trained the marines for Somalia because it force wasn't a switch anymore. The enemy was no longer a von Clausewitz battle of two guys with tanks. It was an insurgent embedded in a civilian community.

And I think that initially, that's, if you look at NYPD, ESU had the machine gun squads, you know, like, the initial response was, oh, let's. We'll just build a, you know, a bunch of trained killers, and then they'll go deal with it. But then they quickly realized, like, no, it's not a switch. It's a rheostat.

And now it's a rheostat with media coverage that, you know, you have to not only get the dimmer switch, you know, correct at the end, you've got to start it at the right position and be able to turn it back down. And so I think that's part of what kind of drove not only your team's evolution, but everybody's evolution.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, I like that analogy a lot. That's excellent!

Jon Becker: That's the way we've always explained it when we're trying to explain to military leaders. Like, when we first, when I was doing the first briefings for Operation United Shield in Somalia, and we were doing, we did all the non lethal gear for the Marine Corps, and I ended up in a lot of conversations with people that were way above my pay grade, talking about, like, how less lethal works and how you have to reach provocation under rules of engagement.

And so that was the easiest way to explain it is the difference between an on off switch and a dimmer switch. And the dimmer switch has gotten very complicated. Now it's got about 800 settings, and if you get it wrong, we're going to charge you the crime. Okay, so Ottawa happens. There's the initial ERT teams, and then how does the team evolve from there?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So concurrent to that, there was the establishment of the collateral duty ERT teams, and it was when I joined the program, I think it's 20 years ago now. You got two days a month training. Your equipment was bare bones. We had, like, iron sights on our mp5s. Like everyone in the business knows the history. 20 years ago and we had a lot of part time teams kind of everywhere. I think we had about ten or twelve in the entire province, something like that.

Our team started as a full time team in 2006, before the 2010 Olympics. So until then, yeah, it was all this, you know, all these part time efforts and, you know, tons of ERT trained members kind of just going to calls when they could sort of thing. In 2006, it was just too expensive to run those multiple programs, so they amalgamated into a single program for all the police stations in the area. And that was. Yeah, that was in the lead up to the 2010 Olympics.

Again, 2010 Olympics, much like laden is, you can mark in our team certain turning points of when we significantly scaled up our abilities, you know, form the team in 2006, that was a turning point because now we, instead of having 20 hours a week of training, now we've got a minimum of 40 guaranteed. Plus we're going to add on top of that. Now we have better gear. Now we've got, you know, fewer guys to spend more money on.

It was a significant step up. And I'm a big fan of full time teams. I feel like full time teams, I understand the benefits of collateral duty teams, but full time teams, in my view, are the way to go. Certainly works for us in our area. 2010, our team gets the Olympics, and with that became a lot of higher end training that was made available to us because of that. Exactly like in LA. And then we can, over the last ten years, we can point to certain other events that have been very influential for us.

Jon Becker: So 2010 Olympics were in Vancouver.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. Yeah, Vancouver. And Whistler.

Jon Becker: And Whistler, yeah. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I'm assuming that much like, I mean, when LAPD went through it in 84, you know, they had a lot of training with international military units who were dealing with counterterrorism. And I'm assuming that probably as you guys are building up, that's kind of the direction you also went.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, that's one of our advantages as being a federal agency is we can avail ourselves to some of those joint training opportunities with our military as well as with international partners. So it kind of helps when you're the federal police force, you've got a bit of a bigger name and you can kind of get access to a few other units that you have a different peer and near peer group that you can access.

Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah. You're viewed as the national asset.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. That's right.

Jon Becker: I mean your national military assets? JTF2, I'm assuming. And then the national law enforcement asset is you guys.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Correct?

Jon Becker: Yeah. So talk to me about current configuration of the team. Full time team, how many operators, what's. How's it split up?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Full time team. We're funded to 63. 63 full time bodies. Of course, we don't always have that. We break it down into three teams. So we've got three teams with a sergeant, three corporals, and twelve constables. So about like 16 guys per team. So we've got three operational teams and they. They run in a three week cycle. So you do. Each team does a week of ops on your day shift, which is busy for our planned ops and our kicks, you know, our drug warrants. Then you do a week of nights, which is your primary on-call team, and then a week of training.

So a dedicated week of training every three weeks. So we've got three teams, about 16 guys each. Then we've got a full time training debt of sergeant, a couple corporals and a few constables, that's eight members. And then we've got a couple logistics guys because there's always work to be done that just doesn't get captured or is just too much to throw on the ops teams, like, you know, hey, man, can you take care of the armored vehicle? Hey, can you take care of this? Can you take care of that?

You know, it's like when it's everybody's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility. It just doesn't get done, even if everyone has the best intentions. So we focus that on a few logistics guys who actually, you know, you know, quartermaster and keep our vehicle fleet running and keep our training building going. It's a huge job for those guys.

Jon Becker: So basically you have, you have day duty for one week, you have night duty for the next week, and then you're training for a week.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah.

Jon Becker: And you're in this constant rotation, the three teams.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: That's right. So we've taken the deployment strategy of not spreading our resources out. So we have 24/7 coverage instead. Because we don't have enough people to mount a full team response 24/7 we just don't like, you know, like to follow the, you know, the patrol watch of like a four on four off schedule. We can't do it enough guys. You wouldn't meet your training hours.

So for us, we said, okay, what do we need to do? What is like the thing we cannot say no to? It's like, well, our planned calls and we know when those come in. You know, we do most of our planned warrant execution, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and that's when the investigative units are working.

Now look, there's always ones that happen anytime, but we know that that's the majority of our calls. So let's staff that, first of all. And we can do analysis on when the other calls come in. So we staff when our calls have been happening and we staff to the level. Like each team works in its entirety. So I always have twelve IRT members on. That's our shift minimum. Like, there's never less than twelve on and there's never less than twelve on call.

So the other thing is all guys have take home trucks. That's another thing we have. So regardless of the time, 24/7 they're on a 15 minutes notice to move on their, on their, on call. So if that, if they get the ping on their app, they have. And you know, it's like Sunday at three in the morning, they've got 15 minutes to be in their truck and rolling to the call. Our average response time is actually nine minutes. Of course, guys live all over the place, so you tend to get a few on scene right away and then more just kind of keep showing up.

So it's expensive, it's an expensive way to run it, but there's advantages to it. So we're not just constantly trying to make it work. Like, whoa, okay, you only have like, you know, one squad on of six members and it's not enough, but see what you can do, and then we'll call more and it's like, no, it's like we show up, we roll as a thing. It's a light switch, it's not a dimmer switch for us. Now, look, sometimes we scale things, of course, but for the most part, we treat it as a light switch, our resourcing.

Jon Becker: Yeah, no, I think that you see with a lot of the bigger teams, the full time teams, that they do begin to view it more as a switch because otherwise it becomes incremental. It's almost like you have to be able to draw a line where a response looks like this, it's this many people, or we're not coming because otherwise, like, oh, well, just send us three guys, you know, send us a sniper and a medic, and pretty soon you have this very watered down and dangerous capability where your guys don't have the resources, they don't have the support, they don't have enough people, and you start to kind of end up in a potentially dangerous situation.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: You start making trade offs, and you make. So this is one of my big things. This is a big strategy. I employ a lot on calls, and I'm gonna. If I can just, like, we'll go off road right here a little bit. I'm gonna bring it back to what you're saying. So we were chasing a guy once.

So this guy, he was at a transit station. He shot a transit officer, plainclothes transit police officer, who had approached him. You know, these two plain clothes guys. They scope this guy, kind of Acton hanky. He takes off running, runs up to the platform. They approach him, turns around, and shoots the transit officer, like, a few times. Point blanken takes it in the vest, takes one in the hand. He's able to return fire. The guy doesn't get hit. The guy takes off on foot.

They track him about a quarter. You know, all the witnesses are saying, of course, flood of officers. The witnesses are, like, quarter mile away. Like, he went that way. He went that way to a known drug house. And it's like, okay, great. He's in this drug house. So we. You know, this is actually right by our office. So we're there. Quick, solid lockdown on that place. He didn't get out. So we start doing call outs. There's no answer.

Finally, one guy comes out. Well, no, there's no one in the house. What do you know? Two other people squirt out the back door, right? No, there's no one else in the house. And then a few minutes later, you know, so we're doing some, you know, some bangers and stuff, and then another guy comes out.

Well, I was sleeping, so it's like, okay, these people are lying to us. It's a known drug house. We're a quarter mile away. Like, this dude is in there pretty sure of things, right? We sent in our drone. Too many locked doors. So it's like. It's almost like a rooming house. Everyone keeps their doors closed with a lock on it because otherwise people steal their.

Jon Becker: Cause there are a bunch of drug dealers who are stealing from.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Steal each other. So we can't clear it with our attack. There's too much crap on the floor for the robots. And the challenge was, well, how are we gonna clear this house? It's like, well, we're still gonna gas it. We're a pretty gas centric team. Seems like a solid plan. Well, what happened, though, is that all of a sudden, this is taking a bit longer. Oh. The witnesses are starting to be a little unclear on things.

Jon Becker: Oh, God!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: It's not. Well, you know, the clothing doesn't make sense. And it's like, well, that's easy to explain away. Like, when are witnesses ever reliable? Well, we want to believe they're reliable when they point to the house, but we don't want to believe they're reliable when it's like, maybe we need to go home here. The dog track was inconclusive, and the backtrack was inconclusive. Like, well, maybe it got contaminated. We're starting to get download some good video from the scene. That guy's not associated the house. So it's like, I'm not sure he's in there. Now, he could still be in there, but we're not sure.

So the question is, you know, I've got essentially, well, three choices. I could pack up and go away. We're not going to do that. We could gas the house out. Oh, and here's the other thing. The house was owned by a police officer who, like, rented it. This is like a whole area is going under. You know, it's probably going to be a great neighborhood 15 years from now. Right now, it's not – And, like, a guy running from a sudden flood of police cars is not a weird reaction in that neighborhood. So it's like, I'm not sure if that guy's in there.

So the question is, how do we get them out? Do we gas them out, or do we send the guys in with, like, dogs and long line? Well, if they find them, there's probably gonna be a shootout. But if I gas the house. Well, if he's not in there

Jon Becker: He's not in there. Just bought a house.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, that's not actually, that's not true for us, but, yeah, like, I opened the argument of someone laying, you know, some civil liability there, and I came to the conclusion there that, you know, what? If I do things, if I conflate the decision of if I want to clear that house with how I want to clear that house, if I conflate those two into a single question, I'm asking for trouble. So if I need to clear the house is a yes. I cannot leave. Right?

So once it's regard, it's irrelevant if I'm 100% sure if I need to clear it, or if I'm 40% sure I clear it. But I only needed a 35% sure sureness in order to make the decision. It's like, once I walk through that door of that decision, I'm in the room. I need to act like I belong there. And what I decide is that if I try to mitigate risk by attenuating the aggressiveness of my action, it's the worst of both worlds. People, they think it's the best of both worlds. Well, I'm still kind of doing something, but maybe I'm ameliorating the risk a little bit. It's like, no, you're taking all the risk of taking action, but you're not taking action that you know is going to be effective.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Yeah. You're jumping out of the airplane with maybe a parachute.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Exactly. So, I view that as the same as, you know, how many guys, you know, what is a full team deployment? Yeah, we could send three SWAT guys and maybe pretend we're checking the box of, you know, we've deployed SWAT, but we haven't. So we've taken all the, I've taken all the organizational risk of deploying my unit. My unit's name is now on that call. Yeah, my guys are in green, they're going to be in the media and if that. But I haven't sent enough to secure operational failure or operational success.

So I'm signing my name to something. I'm signing my unit's name to something. I'm creating organizational risk, but I'm doing it with the risk of operational failure. It's a trap, but it's so easy to come into because it feels like we're doing the right thing. I can send to three officers to all calls all day long, 24/7 but they're not actually doing anything. It's just, it's a trick. It's an illusion. It's an illusion of protection.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's giving yourself the feeling that you're making a decision and that, you know, you, you are. Yeah, we're solving the problem, but in reality you're actually increasing the danger.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Exactly, exactly. Yes. It's an illusion and it's, it's a very alluring one and it's one, I think managers fall into traps a lot on because they don't understand the difference between cheap and expensive. Right. It's like having my twelve members on shift is expensive right up until the minute it's super cheap when we really needed them.

Yeah, but you only focus on, you know, it's cheap one day out of the year it's expensive. The other 364, it's like, do you have the intestinal fortitude to ride out those 364 waiting for that one? That's tough.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I have that discussion a lot with people. It's like, you know, SWAT teams are expensive until you have a very scary hostage situation and need the expertise, and then they're free. You have to. I remember years ago, I had a friend that was a fireman, and he's like, oh, come do a ride along with us. Okay?

And we sat around and played Xbox and cook steaks and kind of standard firehouse protocol, and I said, I can't believe we're paying you to do this. Like, you're basically hanging out with your buddies and barbecuing, and he goes, you're not paying me for what I do. You're paying me for what I'm willing to do. I'm willing to run into a building that's on fire, and when you need me to do that, it's worth me sitting around and playing on my Xbox. And I said, yeah, you're right. It is. Because in the end, if you're the guy trapped in the building on fire, I need somebody to run in.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So that's the difference between effectiveness and efficiency, right? Police or fire departments are not efficient. You know, they park their fire trucks at the grocery store. They're not efficient, but they're effective. And they do a really good job of saying, hey, within x number of minutes, we will be at your house. Like, they have all that math down. If they know exactly what resources they need in what amount of time, based on the average burn rate of a residence, those metrics don't exist in policing, much to our detriment.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: But, yeah. Like, my ammo budget on our team is $400,000 a year. That is expensive. And it felt really expensive up until one of my guys had to make a hostage rescue shot with a human shield with a four inch area of target on knots. Then $400,000 was a very good deal.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Because there's no way you're going to be able to do that without catastrophic outcomes if you're not willing to pay the price.

Jon Becker: Yeah. And I think it raises the. It's kind of like insurance, right? Insurance is really expensive until your house burns down, and then you go, oh, my God, I'm so glad that I had it. And I think that things like ammo budgets, things like training, are difficult in a modern environment. It's difficult to defend spending $400,000 in ammunition when people are like, oh, my God, we need to cut the budget. Well, let's cut the ammunition budget. Right?

What we see with a lot of our teams is its ammunition budgets, its training budgets, and it's one of those things where you can attenuate that until the point that it snaps. And unfortunately, you don't get to choose when it snaps.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: These decisions are often hidden. The downsides are hidden for a long time until they're nothing. But a lot of people play that lottery and they win it all the time. Like, um, you know, one of the trainers I have a lot of respects was will petty out of centrifuge training. And he's a – He always says, you know, he's not surprised when these bad things happen. He's surprised they don't happen more often.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: And when he told me that, I was like, you know, that actually makes a ton of sense. But you look at managers who are given a large budget or sometimes even a small budget, sometimes that's even harder decisions. But if you're given, like, a large policing budget, what training do they have to map that onto decisions? Like, if you're asking me to sign a check for $400,000 for ammo, I don't spend $400,000 on anything that eclipses my family budget, which is the only money I've ever ran in my whole life by an order of magnitude. I have no frame of reference for spending this money.

And that was one of the big challenges when I took over the team washing. You know, every one of these decisions just made me sweat. I don't know if I'm just dead to it now or if I've just got more experience and I realized the value of it and have been through the wringer a few times, and. And they've. The decisions that were really hard have paid off, and now the next decisions aren't as hard anymore.

But I worry about, you know, the next boss who comes in and has been being asked to spend, you know, hey, we need a new piece of armor. Hey, we need it. We need this. We need that. Like, new sniper rifles and new optics. That's expensive up until it's cheap, and they've never seen when it's cheap, so they just think about it as expensive. It worries me.

Jon Becker: It's funny, I was having a conversation early in my career, one of the teams that I worked with was in a gunfight, and they ended up in a gunfight in the middle of the street, taking rounds, like, taking heavy fire. And two of the guys ended up basically hiding behind a curb and returning fire at this guy. And I said, like, a curb is not very big. Like, I can't imagine hiding behind a curb. And the guy that was the team leader said, when somebody's shooting at you, a curb is amazingly large. You would be amazed how much cover you get from a curb. Cause you can cover half or three quarters of your body.

And that's a lot. And I think that a lot of this technology people look at and they're like, oh, my God, it's, you know, it's $20,000 for a drone. It's $50,000 for a robot. The guy that has to stick his head in the attic is absolutely convinced it's worth the 50 grand, like, every time. And part of my day job is fighting that argument of, like, well, why are we spending so much on technology? Why? You know, and chiefs of police are always, like, looking at the SWAT team and saying, well, you know, we don't really need armor.

You know, why do we need to buy, you know, why do we need to buy a bearcat? It's like, well, when you're having to go somewhere without armor, you quickly realize how valuable the armor is. And we went through this whole demilitarization thing in the US. We're like, well, they want to take away armored vehicles.

Well, taking away armored vehicles means you're going to put somebody there without armor which creates two problems. One, you're more likely to get the operator killed, but two, everything is now instant deadly force confrontation because they're face to face with the suspect now.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, it's a really short sighted thing. I think there's another side to the coin, though, on the when to spend money. And I know, and this is something we've battled on our team as a lot, is, you know, there's not an infinite budget. Of course, the problem we have, or the trap is looking for the next newest piece of kit to solve your problem rather than going back and assessing what your current weaknesses are that are within your existing span of control.

For example, we need a new comm system right now. That's what we need right now. Okay, but what can we do right now to tidy up the way we're talking on the radio? Because sometimes we have verbal diarrhea on there and it's causing problems, or we're not using the right pro words, or there's a million things we could do to clean up our comms that has nothing to do with buying a new comm system. But buying a new comm system is easy to do because we can all focus on it. We can be like, hey, look, it seems like the solution.

If we try to fix an existing problem, we have to admit to ourselves that we're not as sharp as we need to be or could be. And that's a much harder conversation. And then you have to change humans behavior, also difficult. And then for us, we have to change it across three teams in a consistent way. For guys who've been doing it that way for 15 years, hard buying new piece of kit as long as you have the money is super easy.

Jon Becker: It's funny, because I come from both worlds. I deal with military units, law enforcement units. One of the primary differences in their thinking towards equipment is law enforcement tends to look at technologies and figure out how the technologies fit into their operations. The military looks at their requirements and then finds technologies. So it's like top down, bottom up, or however you want to look at it. If, you know, when Taser first came out, our law enforcement agencies were like, ah, we're going to buy a taser.

Yeah, it's going to work great. And like they had to sit and think like, where does that fit in our force continuum? And is that above pepper spray? Is it below pepper spray on par with the baton? And you could watch them like struggle to kind of shove this technology they wanted into their concept of ops. The military said, we don't have a requirement, but tell us what it does. And the army said, oh, yeah, no, we actually, we have a requirement that we need an intermediate force option that's less lethal, that covers from zero to 25ft.

And so from their concept, when I talk to my military program managers, they talk about this is the need that we have, this is the, this is the gap in our current capabilities. And they identify that gap and then they write a requirement around fulfilling that gap. And the result is it's usually a much more thought out plan by the time they go to acquire technology because they've thought through where does it fit in our conops and how do we use it and what does it need to be? Not, oh, it's shiny, I want to get it.

And so a lot of our, you know, my job is helping units understand, like, I know this is shiny and new, but if you don't figure out where it fits, it's useless to you. You know, if you get a dog and you're gonna, you know, your intent is to use the dog one way and the dog has different capabilities, you know, to get a bomb dog and try to use them as a bite dog, like that doesn't work.

So, think through how you're gonna use it and what you're gonna do with it first. And I think the same is true with budget. Right? When you look at the problem, you go, okay, this is what we need to do. Does this make sense for us? That also makes it easier to triage which of these things is more important to us? Which one do we care about more? Which one can we work around more easily?

So I think it's an interesting study of, like, how you spend your money has to be driven by your requirements, not by, you know, what's shiny and sexy and new.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, for sure. Now, I think one landmine we have to look out for, though, from the building, the requirement, then finding the piece of kit, is overbuilding your requirement to something that's impossible. So we actually made this mistake in our organization. I think it was about 15 years ago with our armor. So we sent out a spec.

So the way the federal government procures things is they write us back, and companies can bid on that spec of whether or not they meet it. So when they go to build, build this armored vehicle, they ask all the teams, what do you guys need in it? And the laundry list of things.

Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: It was just insane.

Jon Becker: It's like, it's got to go 100 miles an hour, but it's got to weigh 6oz. It's got to be made of gold, but be able to fly.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. What are they called? Like, unobtainium or something?

Jon Becker: Build it completely from unobtanium. 100%.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. So it's like if you overbuild your requirements, and I just have. I'm a huge fan of super simple, like, basic simple stuff that will work perfect for 80% of things, and then the other 20% you'll figure out. I find we always fall into the trap of looking for that 100% solution and never getting anything or spending too much money on it. And it doesn't work because it doesn't work. It works in 0% of the circumstances.

Jon Becker: Well, it's also, you know, I talked about this previously, but it's also what. What makes tactical decision making challenging. Right? Like, in the same way that the guy doesn't want to spin the budget and doesn't want to make decisions because he's never made a decision that big. The same applies to tactical decision making. You're like, oh, we're going to wait for perfect answer. We're going to wait till we have all the information. And in the process, you miss window. You miss an opportunity. You almost begin to use the analysis paralysis as an opportunity to not have to make a decision.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, we see that a lot with our incident commander training, where they want to keep collecting information because it feels good. It feels like they're doing something. They feel busy. It's satisfying. They're learning more. But what I always say is that they're observing the problem, they're not solving the problem. And it's like a boxer in the ring, right? You can only dance around with your back to the rope so long.

Eventually, you have to be willing to throw a punch and take a punch, and that's the only way you're going to actually win the fight. But that's hard. It's terrifying, right? It's easy. Like, I can sit back at a call, at a barricade, call collect information all day long. I feel busy. If something bad happens, I'll probably say, well, we were trying to negotiate and de-escalate the situation, so I failed my mission. But maybe that's my little get out of jail free card, is what we're trying to negotiate.

And it's really hard, especially in today's environment, to criticize someone who was trying to de-escalate a situation verbally. It's hard to criticize them or it's not. It's easy for someone who knows what they're doing and knows what the actual mission was to criticize or to identify gaps in the problem solving strategies.

But that's almost a get out of jail free card for, hey, but you actually didn't do your cop stuff. And, you know, because of that, you know, maybe the hostage was killed or, you know, a member of the public was put in danger or an officer was injured. We've created, I think, by not over focusing on de escalation because it's hugely important. But we have to be careful that we don't misuse it as an excuse not to actually do the job that we're supposed to do. And you're talking about analysis paralysis. It feels good, though, right? Like, you don't realize you're doing it cause you're busy.

Jon Becker: Yeah. Gathering information, you're weighing your alternatives. You're. You know, in the meantime, like, the house is burned down and the problem is gone. It's funny because it was recently on a podcast called coffee and change, and one of the things we talked about was, as a society, we're creating expectations of our law enforcement that are diametrically opposed and cannot coexist.

So the example I used was, we want our police officers to be golden retrievers. We want them to be warm and fuzzy and snuggly and friendly to everybody that they meet and not offend people and not hurt their feelings. But we want to take that golden retriever and we run around a K9 mission, and then we're surprised when the golden retriever doesn't bite anybody. You look at situations, Uvalde being the most recent example of where a situation happens.

And we as a society expect intervention. We expect the problem to be solved. And yet we've brought a pack of golden retrievers to the party. We've promoted the people that were not willing to take chances. We've promoted the people who didn't have any bad outcomes and haven't made mistakes in their careers and have avoided difficult assignments.

And then we hand them a school shooting. And the net effect is an hour and 17 minutes of people standing around unable to do anything. And it's like we have to decide as a society, do we want a K9 or do we want a golden retriever? And I think the correct solution to that is to have a K9 unit and let it be a canine unit and have a golden retriever unit and let it be a golden retriever unit. Don't try to merge the two into one thing. And I think as a society, we're spending too much time trying to, like, we don't, oh, we don't want militarization. We don't want, you know, tactical units. Oh, my God. Why didn't you guys do something? And I'm sure you probably see that same tension where you are.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, well, I think that's one of the benefits of having a full time SWAT program, is that you can take that K9 unit. You can, first of all, make sure they're really, really well trained, and then you're going to put it in the K9 and you're only going to take it out when you need it. Otherwise you're going to run your golden retrievers and it really constrains. So when we made our full time team, we actually reduced the number of SWAT officers in the area because we didn't have to, they didn't have other jobs.

So transitioning, I would say transitioning to a full time unit, particularly if you're doing, like, multi jurisdictional to get that economy of scale, helps you reduce that militarization footprint. The whole militarization of police footprint, it's especially in Canada. It doesn't map onto Canada, really at all. We are actually having a reduction in the number of SWAT units. We're not.

So first of all, it's all based on Kraska's studies back in the eighties and nineties on the proliferation of SWAT teams. That's where this militarization argument comes from. It's like, of course they were proliferating, they didn't exist before then, and it was a new capability when they started with one.

Jon Becker: And then they had two, they've gone up 100%.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, and this guy's alarmed by that, right? He's completely flummoxed. Now he does have an interesting position where he says, hey listen, if you go to a country where you can't tell the difference between the police and the military, that's probably the sign or a good indication of a repressive regime. I think he's right in that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I can remember as a kid going to Paris and it was when the embassies were under the eighties, and seeing soldiers outside the embassies with, you know, machine guns in military garb and thinking, oh my God, like, what is that? Because I was, that was not what policemen looked like. And in that situation it made perfect sense. But it is, you're right.

The more the military looks like the law enforcement or becomes like the law enforcement, you are more likely to see a repressive regime. However, the flip side to that is, and one of my favorite Sid Heal quotes is I interviewed Sid and he was talking to a military operator and he was asking them, la county sheriffs, like, hey, help me understand kind of how you guys conduct urban warfare. And he's like, well sir, we don't really do warfare.

And he said, well, are they shooting at you? And he goes, well, yeah. And he goes, are you guys shooting back? And he goes, yeah. He goes, well that's warfare. He's like, if they're trying to kill you and you're trying to kill them, that's warfare. And I think it's easy for us to forget that 99% of law enforcement is community service, but the 1% that you guys are tasked with dealing with is frequently very violent.

And there isn't a big line between military tactics and law enforcement tactics. And I think the war on drugs kind of conflated those two. The nomenclature, the approach. I can remember early in my career fortified drug houses and they were building crack houses and they were fortifying them in five layers of barricades.

And the only way you were going to get in was destroy the house. That created this image of domestic law enforcement destroying homes and using armor and all of those things. And I don't think we've ever escaped from that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, so I think the root authority of the police is to use state sanctioned violence to impose the will of the government. Right? Okay. Ultimately, that's why people listen to the cops. That's why police officers have guns. I am allowed by the government to shoot someone if certain conditions are met. It's an incredibly heavy obligation. And. You know what I mean? Like, if you think about it, like, that's. Oh, no, we actually have a government that sanctions the use of violence against its citizens if certain conditions are met.

Jon Becker: Well, it's terrifying. Yes, the government sanctions it, but ultimately, we sanction it. Right? Like, if you look at a constitutional form of government, we are giving the government permission to use violence against us, to protect us and use it against certain people in our society.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. No, no, you're exactly right. So you can map it back. But I feel like every new movement has a lifespan, and the militarization of police has sort of been fading into the background, at least for us, somewhat. The problem is when you have very restrictive policies that are created during the, you know, the heat of the moment of the, you know, you get some watershed incident that's a total outlier event, will never happen again. Has never happened before.

You build some piece of policy, you know, some new reporting requirements, some new limitation, you take away a tool, something like that, and now you're gonna live with that forever because no one's ever going to repeal that rule. Like, we're all great at making new rules. No one's good at canceling old policies that don't exist or that don't. Aren't relevant anymore.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I live in the state of California, where we. We legislatively boa constrictor ourselves. Every time something stupid happens, we tighten the laws and we never take them away. And we end up with this kind of complex legislative milieu where even the people who are enforcing the law don't understand the law. Because you look at California gun law, there's so much nuance and complexity to it that even the people who are tasked with enforcing it are like, I don't know.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: I was looking at your lethal force laws and the definition and has something about it has to be imminent and immediate danger. I don't know the precise wording, but I was like, that is an incredible restriction. I almost fell out of my chair reading it, and I can't imagine trying to have a mission of saving innocent people's lives with that restriction on there.

And I think that I like to believe that the people who wrote those laws, they're not bad people. They just. They don't have the real world of experience to know how that verbiage is going to. It's going to get someone innocent killed.

Jon Becker: Yeah. That law actually was a topic of discussion in a couple of our previous podcasts because it's, you know, if a guy's standing on a porch with a hostage and pointing a gun at their head and saying, I'm going to kill her, okay, that's pretty clear. It's immediate, imminent, you know, whatever. What if he shows her in the building and he doesn't have the gun in his hand, but he's got the gun in the back of his pants and he walks back into the building? Like, that's not immediate and imminent. It's not imminent.

The gun pointed at her might be 60 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes, maybe. It's going to be an hour. Like, where do you draw that line? And going back to the analysis, paralysis. And the difficulty in tactical decision making when you create this, you know, this eye needle. Needle of an eye. Eye of a needle that you have to thread as a tactical commander, where you're like, have we met this very refined standard? It becomes easy to not take action, even if it results in a bad outcome. If you take the wrong action, we're going to punish you personally.

And, you know, qualified immunity is a thing in the US that exists, and it's under attack. And the idea as well, we don't want them to make the wrong decision, but I think we don't understand that that also means we're not gonna make a decision, which is really scary.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, and they create that little get out of jail free card of wow. I was trying to de-escalate. Or I can wash my hands of this because I was trying to do A, B and C, but I failed the mission. It really bothers me that, you know, a doctor can, you know, accidentally kill a patient, and we don't call it murder. There's lots of professional things that can go on, but it happens all the time, and oftentimes nothing happens. It's like it's what it is. It's an honest mistake. It's a complex environment with a. With a human error. So doctors can do it. They don't get charged with murder.

You know, a judge can release someone on bail, and that person can go out and murder someone. Their bail decision is not reviewable. They're not going to be liable. At least where we are, the prosecutor's action is not to charge someone or to agree to bail. They're not liable. But we have all the exposure, the police, like, we are responsible for everything, but no one else in the system is just us. That strikes me as unfair, and I don't like it.

Jon Becker: So, I mean, well, first of all, doctors and lawyers practice literally, the definition of what they do is the word practice. You're practicing law, you're practicing medicine. So it's okay to make a mistake because it's practice. But I think there's a root in that, at least in the United States. The root for that is our basic contempt for government. You got to remember, the US was founded by basic hatred for government. The constitution of the United States doesn't grant rights. It doesn't say, you have the right to speak freely, you have the right to not be searched. It says the government can't. The US constitution is a restriction on government. It's not a granting of rights.

And as a result, that basic contempt for government runs through everything we do. So our tolerance for the government making a mistake is really low. And although that was 200 plus years ago, that spirit is still very much alive. We're still kind of all mildly anti government in a very strange way.

And I think that's part of what underlies that is like, oh, the doctor's a private citizen. So, like, yeah, he killed somebody, but, you know, he did his best. But this guy that works for the SWAT team, he works for the government. And the government killing somebody's not okay, and so we're gonna persecute this guy.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: So for all the similarities, like, when I come down here on courses, the similarities between how Canada runs SWAT teams and how the US runs SWAT teams is remarkably similar. But there's all these, like, these little cultural differences, and that innate distrust of government is one of them. Like, that just simply doesn't exist in Canada. That's, I think this is me guessing why we see larger police agencies or, like, a federal agency. Imagine a federal agency that also does state level work and municipal level work.

Jon Becker: We don't allow that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: No bueno. Right? No one would like to city…

Jon Becker: It doesn't trust the county, and the county doesn't trust the state. The state sure as h*** doesn't trust the federal government.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. And when you look, especially how the RCMP works, is our commissioner is actually, I believe the position is the equivalent of a deputy minister. Like, it reports to the prime minister's office. It reports to the minister of public safety. So there's not even the insulation that you would see reporting to a municipal police board that a city police agency would. We're very. We're probably a little not separated enough from government. So the end result is we actually don't get as much scrutiny, I think, as American agencies. I think we do a little. We do a little better on that.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, again, it's one of those things. You bear a legacy of your origin story and both good and bad. The good to the United States is our government is so fragmented that trying to implement a tyrannical government, like if you're the guy that's going to try to implement the totalitarianist government in the United States, good luck, because 500 million guns and it's Texas alone will attack.

The downside legacy to that is that basic distrust of 13 states coming together to form a federal government. But then none of the states, the states didn't even really like each other. And it was kind of like, we're making a deal because we need to make a deal because we got to be a country. But even you look at early papers, like the federalist papers, and you look at early conversations between Jefferson and Hamilton, they all kind of didn't trust each other. The Virginians didn't like the New Yorkers.

And so we're going to agree to this constitution. It's a little hinky, but we're going to sign it. But we're all agreeing. We're going to come back, we're going to do a bill of rights and we're going to make sure that the states have the ability to own guns and the federal government can't prohibit it from speaking. That's the origin story for the constitution. But that has led to this still kind of carrying over into us, kind of not trusting the government and our agencies bear the scars for that.

But one of the things that you and I talked about earlier was kind of how the origin story of SWAT teams and the kind of SAS and these early militarized roots of responding to terrorism are complicating modern law enforcement, modern tactical problems and how you are looking at it's all built around a coordinated attack and that's how the system was thought through. But that is complicated for warrants and other current operations.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah, we had a problem with some of our operations just being clunky and we weren't being super responsive and we were really, really slow. And the team leaders were getting super frustrated with the incident commanders. And I was like, man, why is this? So let's look back to the origin story. Let's say the Iranian embassy siege in UK or the Turkish embassy in Canada. It's like, let's say you're the SWAT team commander and you have that problem.

So you've got multiple terrorists, multiple politically relevant hostages. Maybe you're already someone dead. You've got someone making demands. Like, you know, in the armenian one, they think they wanted, like the armenian genocide of 1914 admitted, and they wanted Turkey to return some land that was stolen from Armenia.

Jon Becker: It's like, yeah, the RCMP has the authority to do that.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. Like, I could bring you a pizza. So what do you think? You can't solve that, right? So imagine all the people on the phone that are, you know, like, you've got to get government offices involved. You're going to have your negotiators, you're going to have your tactical, you're not going to have a great tactical resolution.

Like, you, as the commander, are going to have to control absolutely every aspect of that operation. What are the negotiators saying? What are the demands? What am I reporting up to government? What concessions are we able to give? Tactics? You know, how can we incrementally make this problem smaller? What are our resolution options?

The commander in that command post is going to have tons of information and they're going to be best suited to make those decisions and they're going to have to make those decisions because none of those individual elements can make those decisions on their own.

So that is your classic, you know, hostage taking. That is for ideological, political goal, right? It's a big problem. So we've got our highest level unit tasked with solving those problems. Then concurrently we've got all our local SWAT teams who are doing the regular barricades. Well, where does local SWAT teams like to get influenced by top tier military units? SF units? And here's the story. I don't. Have you ever heard the one kneepad story? This is like proof positive that SWAT teams get inappropriately influenced sometimes by top tier military agencies. I'm going to leave the teams out of it.

But one team was shooting on the range and a top tier military SF unit sent a couple guys. They're going to go shoot with them. So the two SF guys show up. One of them has forgotten his knee pads. So he says to his buddy, hey, man, can I borrow a knee pad? So they each at least have one knee padded, so they all go to the range with one knee pad. No problem. End of day, the next day, shooting range. What did the entire SWAT team show up with?

Jon Becker: One knee pad.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: One knee pad. It had nothing to do with anything. So we have to be really careful of how we're influencing those things. So the local SWAT teams are learning how to command calls based on how we do these big calls, but it's not always appropriate. And I'll give you an example. Let's say we're going to do a warrant execution at a house, the warrant service, as some people call it, and the team rolls up and I'm in the command post and they roll up and there's a surveillance camera.

The old way we would do it is like, you know, Oscar Charlie, you know, can we take out the surveillance camera? And I would say yes or no. It's like, okay, I'm in a command post. I can't see the house. I can't see where the members are. I can't see what the camera's pointing at. I can't see what the backdrop is. Like, what magical decision making formula do I have in my head that I can make a better decision than the operator on the ground who can actually see it?

But that's how we did it. Why? Because if that is at the hostage taking call, well, it matters a whole lot if they ask me if they can, you know, deploy a 40 mil to take out that camera because it's going to have follow on effects of all this other stuff that they don't even know. You know, they might not have all the intel to make that decision.

So we had those, you know, top tier units dealing with those high level, you know, golden age of hostage terrorist events that started trickling down then to, like, domestic hostage takings. So I'll give you an example. Like if you do a, you know, a bank robbery. So the guy robs a bank, comes out, the police are there, he runs back into the bank and he wants a million dollars in a helicopter on the roof. What's your strategy for that?

Well, you're going to try to de escalate his emotions. You're going to. And you're going to probably do some sort of give and take negotiation strategy because you want, you want his million dollars in a helicopter roof, which seems reasonable to him. He feels like that's a good deal based on his power. You're going to erode that to the point where him coming out and getting smoked before going to jail is a good deal.

Jon Becker: Where he gets a pizza.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: He's going to get a pizza. Here's your pizza. Now we can map the hostage taking for the political ideologist onto that functional hostage taking. The guy who wants a million dollars in a helicopter on the roof. A lot of those strategies are applicable. But when we go to a domestic hostage taking where the guy doesn't want a million dollars. He has what he wants. He has his wife, his ex wife at the end of his gun, and he's got the new boyfriend already dead. If you apply that long term give and take negotiation strategy, you are gambling with that woman's life.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: And we've been on that call. So we've learned the hard way that you cannot map that origin story directly onto your tactics or onto your command principles. So, one thing that, you know, if we wanted to boil it all down, I say that the person who should be in charge of making decisions is the person who has the appropriate training to do so and has the best situational awareness and has the appropriate amount of time to make that decision. If you're missing any one of those three things, it can quickly unravel.

So one of the worst habits I've seen on SWAT teams is that the chief's in charge of the call or the deputy chief is in charge of the call. It's like, what expertise do they have? They might not have any training at all. It's like, well, it's the highest ranking guy. He's now in charge. It's like, no, that's completely wrong. The highest ranking person in charge can support the decision maker, but they don't have to be the decision maker.

One of the most powerful decisions you can make is delegating your command authority. And that's something we do a lot of now. So we just pre brief things on, hey, man, if you run into a camera and we're on a warrant execution, just take it out. Don't ask me questions that I don't have any situational awareness to answer. Why you ask me that, it's because we didn't talk about it beforehand. We didn't debrief enough. We had a command failure.

Jon Becker: But I think that requires two things. It requires, first, that the command staff have faith in their operators, and they're enlisted, for lack of a better term, to make good decisions. And second, it requires leadership that understands delegation of authority, understands that expertise.

And I know one of the things that you're really passionate about, and we've talked about is how we're training our future tactical leaders. So kind of, as a last topic, why don't we pick that up a bit? Like, what are your thoughts on how. How we should be training our future command staff, future tactical leaders?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Well, I think, first of all, we have to train them. It sounds so silly, but honestly, I was given command of the second largest SWAT team in Canada, and I had no leadership training at all, so I had command training how to run an incident command. But that's different than actual leadership training. Hey, if you want to, you know, if you want to achieve a different mission or you want to change tactics on something or if you want to, you know, you want to change the schedule or you want.

You know, you have a new budget constraint, how are you going to deliver that out to the team? I had zero training in it, so I think we have to make, first of all, just almost any training is better than no training, but we have to do something. I think one of the biggest gaps we. We have, and we've hit on it, is. Is teaching our leaders to be courageous. I don't. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm a wimp.

But when you ask me to sign a budget of $18 million of expenditures, most of that salary, but it's like, you want to sign. You need me to spend $200,000 on new sniper rifles and optics. I'm sorry. That feels scary to me. I feel afraid of making a mistake. When we go on a call and I have to approve whether it's a go or no go, I feel the pressure, this weighing pressure that it's going to be, that maybe I'm going to make a steak, maybe I'm going to be criticized, that professional risk is just enormous.

Maybe I'm going to do something that is going to get the agency sued. I think one of the keys is we have to teach our leaders that. Just expect it. Expect that feeling of you're not going to feel sure ever. And if you're looking for sure, like, listen, if you wanted people to be 100% confident in their decisions, there's no worthwhile decisions to be made that require that. That's just process. If you're 100% sure, then you are a spreadsheet. Like, if I could just.

Jon Becker: You have made a choice.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yeah. You haven't made a choice. You filled in.

Jon Becker: It is a decision because there is an uncertainty involved.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Yes. And it sucks. Like, it sucks. Maybe I'm a wimp. I don't think so. But I find these things scary. It weighs on me heavily.

Jon Becker: Well, and it's interesting, because if I said, hey, Kevin, I want you to walk across this 2 x 4 sitting on the ground. You go, okay. And you'd walk across the two by four, and you wouldn't be scared, you wouldn't worry about it. Kevin, I want you to walk across this 2 x 4. It's a thousand feet in the air, and it's over shark infested waters with alligators and concrete blocks. It's an entirely different decision. It's really not. It's exactly the same decision, but the consequences of the decision go up so much that your ability to make the decision is compromised.

And part of the problem with the way that we are treating modern tactical leaders is you are making imperfect decisions in confusing circumstances. And don't believe and don't trust that if you make a mistake, we're gonna protect you. Right? You go back to the doctor. The doctor feels empowered to make the decision, because if he makes a mistake, even if he gets sued, he has malpractice insurance. Your malpractice insurance is unemployment or being charged with a crime.

And I think that one of the things that I try to teach when I teach culture centric leadership, is if you are a leader, you have to empower the people below you to make decisions, and they have to trust in you that you will not crucify them as long as they made a good, grounded decision. Like, yeah, it can be, you know, people make mistakes, but if it isn't a bad act, we shouldn't punish it.

The problem is we don't understand that. And so we raise that two by four up to a thousand feet, and if you make a mistake, you're going to fall off the 2 by 4, and as a result, you're no longer comfortable walking across it, which you could do a hundred out of a hundred times on the ground. But we've created this artificial pressure for you to make that decision that actually ends up making you less likely to make the right decision.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: I think we do one worse, too. I think if you – What happens next after the catastrophe or after the crisis? We all have a tendency, I think, to focus on how we manage that crisis, and we'll congratulate ourselves. So say, you know, say I'm the deputy chief, you're the chief, and we get one of our officers, you know, one of our officers gets killed on a call. We now have to manage that crisis, and we're gonna work really hard, support the rest of the team that's on. We're going to reach out to the family. We're going to do all those good things, and we're going to be very capable at it, because we got our jobs for a reason, and we're going to feel good about ourselves.

The tragedy of the event will weigh heavily on us, but we'll feel like we did a good job leading what we rarely do in policing is look back and say, wait, why was that officer on that call by themselves? What deployment policies have you and I decided on here that created that circumstance in the beginning? Why is our 2 x 4 a thousand feet in the air over shark infested waters?

So I always say, like, people think I have an exciting job. My job is to make my job boring, painfully boring. I want to mitigate as much risk. I want to walk on two by fours on the ground all day long. I don't. You're sure? It's exciting to walk on. And what people do a lot of the times is they don't mitigate their risk in advance. They successfully get across that two by 4000ft in the air and it feels exciting and exhilarating and they treat that as evidence of their great leadership and risk management skills. Hey, we survived the 2 x 4 walk of death. It feels good. No, that should feel bad to you. That should feel bad.

And then if you fall, it should not feel good to you that if you somehow survived the fall because you're a great swimmer in shark infested waters, like, no, that's bad. Why was it your two x four up there in the first place? So I think we failed in two realms simultaneously. We don't mitigate the risk in the first place.

If we survive, we congratulate ourselves on how awesome we are. And if we fail, we don't ever look, we congratulate ourselves on how we manage to survive the crisis. Look, almost no crisis is going to bring down an agency. These are government bureaucratic offices. They're incredibly robust. Almost nothing you do is going to make or break anything. It's a game of increments. It's a game of inches. And it's a game of inches to make your job super boring. I think we miss that sometimes because exciting is fun.

Jon Becker: I completely agree. Why don't we finish? I want to run you through some just kind of quick answer questions to conclude our time together. And these are off top of your head. Give me your one sentence or whatever. What do you think your most important habit is?

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Is this where I say, like, I journal every morning and take an ice cold bath and yeah.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it could be your yoga practice or, you know, or it could be trying to make your job as boring as possible.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: What is my most important habit? So my most important personal habit is getting ready the night before, getting all my stuff squared away. That sets me up for a good day. I don't have a great morning routine. I try to have a good evening routine. If I would have. If the one thing that I do well personally that sets up for success, it would be that I would say professionally, my most valuable habit is that I have a habit of taking risks, very calculated risks that are just slightly outside my comfort zone.

And the ability to do that and do that consistently results in long term growth of a team and of a program that's. That's faster than normal. Now, that's a little different than not accepting or sorry. That's a little different than trying to make my job exciting, because I try to do that to make my job boring. Yeah, like, super boring.

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

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Extreme ownership. Chocolate one.

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

Insp. Kevin Cyr: In 2015, we got called to a hostage taking. So a guy had come to his ex wife's house, shot the new boyfriend, and took the ex wife hostage at gunpoint with her two year old grandchild. The rest of the family escaped. The boyfriend was injured. She actually ends up escaping. When she convinces him to let the kid go, she runs as well, and he tries to shoot her and misses the incident commander. So I was a team leader on the call. It was my first time team leading a call. I was not experienced enough for that call. I learned a lot from it, but there probably would have been better guys on the team to do that call. But it was, for whatever reason, it was my turn that day.

So I don't profess to have any sort of tactical excellence that was displayed that day. My cup was full, for sure. But my most profound memory is, is we got called to do the IA plan, the immediate action. So the emergency rescue of the injured victim and the host. The suspect was waiting for us. He was waiting for us in a dark hallway in a crouched position with an SKS. We were able to. Two guys in front of me were able to take care of that threat. I didn't have an arc, so you never want to be the guy at the back of the bus trying to try to make the shot. That's just not a good move.

So it kind of bothers me that, you know, I was almost there. You know, I feel a little useless, but I was able to give a great witness statement that resulted in the guys getting cleared, and he shot himself almost simultaneous to us shooting him. So it was a very dynamic event. But I say that because I remember as we were approaching the house, I realized, like, I was pretty sure one of us was going to get shot. Could have been me. And I realized that it really wasn't me making the sacrifice if that were to happen. It was my family that was going to make the sacrifice, because I would be dead. I would have…

Jon Becker: Yeah, your problem is solved.

Insp. Kevin Cyr: My problem is solved. At the time, my wife was going through stage three b breast cancer, which is triple negative, which was, if you get one, that's not one you want. And my daughter was, I think, about seven years old. And so this briefly entered my brain as I was approaching that door. And I was like, well, I realized that I'm actually living my dream job because my family is taking the risk and my family is the one that are going to ultimately pay the price. It's not going to be me. And I've never been able to rationalize that. I've never been able to square that away to a point of comfort in my soul. And I don't know if there's a way to do it.

Jon Becker: I can't think of a better place for us to end in that statement. Thank you so much, Kevin! I appreciate you doing this!

Insp. Kevin Cyr: Thank you!