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!