Episode 28 – Nationwide Issues in Special Tactics: A Panel Discussion with the State Associations from the NTOA Conference

Jon Becker: Today's episode of the debrief has a different format. This episode was recorded live at the National Tactical Officers association annual conference in Aurora, Colorado. At the conference, I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel discussion that included the presidents of five separate tactical associations.

This included:

Brent Straton from the California association of Tactical Officers.

Chris Eklund from the Florida SWAT Association.

Thor Eells from the National Tactical Officers Association.

Nick Sprague from the RMTTA or Rocky Mountain Tactical Team association.

And Dan Colasanto from the Texas Tactical Police Officers association.

This was a wide ranging discussion that covered a number of current topics and special tactics, including constitutional policing, militarization of law enforcement, SWAT standards, no knock warrants, and the use of dynamic tactics in search warrants. The contrast between the different regional and national perspectives on these issues made for a great conversation.

I'd like to thank the NTOA, CATO, Florida SWAT, RMTTA, and TTPOA for their willingness to share this discussion with our audience. One note about audio quality, because this episode was recorded live in a large group classroom at the conference, there's more background noise than a typical episode. We've done our best to remove this noise, but we appreciate your patience and understanding about the recording issues that remain.

My name is Jon Becker.

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

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

Welcome to The Debrief!

The goal of this discussion is to give you kind of national perspective, not just from the NTOA, but from the presidents of five of the larger, more powerful state associations and to kind of talk through what we're seeing in issues and where we're going to go.

So with that, let me introduce our panel. Our first guest is Dan Colosanto, Dan's lieutenant with the Garland, Texas Police Department, where he's been on the job for 28 years, 30 years, 28 on the tactical unit. Dan is a graduate of the US Military Academy and is the current president of the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association, TTPOA, which has 3000 members. Dan is the NTUA section chair for intelligence and Terrorism.

Our next guest is Chris Eklund. Chris is the president of Florida Swat association. He's also a sergeant with the Orange County, Florida SWAT office where he's been on the job for 24 years, 21 and a half of those have been spent on their team. Chris was a member of the NTOA Tactical Response and Operations Standards Committee for both the 2018 and 2023 revisions and is a graduate of the NTOA's command college in 2020.

Our next guest is Thor Eells. Those of you who probably know Thor, Thor is a retired commander from Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he served for 30 years, the majority of which was in tactical response, including serving as a SWAT operator, a team leader, and a team commander, or as the current executive director for NTOA after serving many years as a board member and a trainer.

Our next panelist is Nick Sprague. Nick is a commander with Broomfield, Colorado, where he's been on the job for 20 years, with 8 of those years spent on the team. Nick is the president of the Rocky Mountain Tactical Team association, or RMTTA, which was founded in 1987, covers the state of Colorado. Nick is our host for the conference on behalf of our MTTA.

Our final panelist is Brent Stratton. Brent is an assistant chief in the Bakersfield Police Department, where he served for 19 years, about twelve of those on SWAT as an operator, a leader, and a team commander. Brent is currently the president of the California association of Tactical officers and is a graduate of the CATO Strategic Leadership program. Please join me in welcoming our panel.

So just from a format standpoint, we're going to pitch the question to somebody. Then we will kind of just take turns feeling free to step in and kind of offer opinions. The goal is to pick up each topic, talk about it from a couple of different varieties, a couple of different viewpoints, with an eye on just getting you guys thinking about where we're going, what current issues are.

So we're going to start with constitutional policing and tactical teams. It's long been said that the government, in this case the police, govern at the consent of the people. This phrase roots back to the Declaration of Independence and implies that community's satisfaction with the government is crucial for the continuance of our country.

Recently, there's been a great deal of scrutiny placed on tactical units by the media, the federal government, by civil rights organizations. Those who criticize the use of special tactics teams argue that the units are militarized, violent, and use oppressive time, oppressive tactics which violate the rights of the people.

I'd like to start our time together by talking about several topics in this area and some proposed solutions. We're going to start with the issue of the day, which is militarization. Since Radley Balko's book rise the Warrior Cops. Critics have argued that police have become an occupying military force in many communities. As evidence, they cite a armor, camouflage uniforms, and the technology, like night visions and drones.

So, first question, gentlemen, have police become too militarized? Dan, why don't we start with you?

Dan Colasanto: So, full disclosure, I started reading the Balko guys book and I had to stop. So anyway, I started reading the Balko guys book and I had to stop because it made me sick to my stomach. I think the guy's a jackass, but I totally disagree, and here's why.

So when I started back in 95, we were part of the 1033 program. And I think what people don't understand is it's more of a financial thing. We were able to get uniforms. Our team was 28 guys. I don't know if anybody out there has had to outfit 28 guys, but it gets pretty expensive. So if I came to you and I said, hey, I can outfit your guys for free, all you got to do is go to Fort Hood, pick up this box of uniforms, and you can have it. I don't know anybody's going to turn that down.

Same thing with helmets. At that time, helmets. Helmets really weren't a thing. There were a lot of teams wearing helmets. In 1998, I was shot on a drug raid chest and helmet chest plate. And the helmet was one of the helmets from the 1033 program. So if we weren't in that, we wouldn't have that. Bearcats.

Now, my chief has me teach a class to our citizens police academy about this very topic, and one of the questions I get is, well, why do we have that? And they usually call it a tank. And I tell them it's not a tank and it's not a military vehicle, it's a bearcat. And it is the only thing that we have that stops bullets. Squad cars don't stop bullets.

You know, bearcats do. And if you were getting shot at, would you want me to come in that squad car? Would you want me to come in the bearcat? Everybody says, oh, gee, I didn't really realize that. So I think there's a – Some of it is a lack of understanding. As many of you know, there was probably some guys with the 1033 program abusing it, doing things they shouldn't do, which, as many of you in this room know, you have general orders in your departments, and it could usually be named after somebody because they did something wrong.

Same thing here. I think the system was abused in certain spots, and they took the pieces that they wanted to and made it into something that is not, you know, the bottom line is this equipment. These things cost money. A lot of these departments don't have the same budgets that everybody else does. And if they're gonna give you free stuff that you can use, I think you'd be stupid not to take it. But I think we need to educate people as to, hey, why are we doing this? Well, we're doing it because we don't have enough money.

So you can give us some more money, and then maybe we wouldn't have to do it. But the program is there, and I think it's very valuable. I think, for our part, we need to do a better job of explaining, hey, why are we getting this stuff? And in some cases, you know, you may end up getting the money, but I think it's more of an education piece, and it's certainly a financial piece that a lot of people don't understand. They just think you're getting it to look cool. And, I mean, that is part of it, obviously, but it is important to have this equipment.

Jon Becker: Anybody else want to weigh in on?

Thor Eells: I just want to emphasize the latter part of what Dan mentioned. NQA had, I guess, the privilege, if you will, to represent all of you at various congressional subcommittee hearings when the 1033 first came under attack. And I'll tell you, the most difficult task I had was explaining to various congressional members why a 30 officer agency needed 10,000 bayonets. True example.

We can be our own worst enemies at times. And so when we talk about just being cognizant every day, of being really professional and mindful about what you're going to do and how you're going to go about doing things, we've got to do that. And so I just echo that in that we will always be fighting a little bit of an uphill battle with some folks, I spent 3 hours explaining to congressional people why l rads were not a weapon because they had been told that l rads are being used by law enforcement to blow people's eardrums out of their heads.

And then once I asked them, well, do you want us to use time and distance as a means of having less force options? They were all, absolutely. And I said, well, you're going to take Elrads away. So that means I got to be close enough to yell at this guy or talk to this person. So it is an educational thing.

But just my ask of all of you, you're each ambassadors within your own respective communities, and politics dictates tactics. If you take nothing else away, as you walk here, remember that politics will dictate tactics. You can do some things in Florida that if you talk about doing in Colorado now, you'll go to prison for.

So it's a reality that we have to, I guess, adapt with. But each of you can play a role in providing factual information, in educating decision makers about where, when, and why we do certain things. It'll be frustrating at times, but nonetheless, it is an absolute necessity because there is an abundance of misinformation floating out there, particularly with this whole militarization issue and how we use things, etcetera.

Jon Becker: So, Nick, what's the perspective of the state of Colorado?

Nick Sprague: So I think part of the issue that we have also is as state presidents, I feel probably one to two calls a week from somebody who's just returned from overseas. They've gotten out of the military and they start their own training company. They want to come teach. We haven't really, in the past, have a good system for vetting that now with the state of presidents, we've kind of are meeting quarterly so we can vet some of those things because we can't deny there's going to be some influence of military and law enforcement, because when guys get out of law enforcement, they're drawn, or, I'm sorry, military, they're drawn to law enforcement.

So they bring some of that influence. And we got to be careful what we're teaching some of our guys on social media nowadays. You know, they see they have access to all that, and they'll come to training and say, hey, I saw this cool tactic, but they can't explain why. And then the team starts instituting it, or they find somebody who is one of their buddies that comes over and has their own program and they're not vetting it. The rules of engagement are different in law enforcement than they are in the military. And you really have to find those instructors who understand that balance.

We've had really good success with ex-military who are law enforcement, that start those training companies in Colorado, I can tell you the 1033 program is starting to die down. We had a lot of mraps, but now that, depending on how you read the new regulations on 1033, that you can't use mraps on anything drug related, a lot of those are just now sitting and they're trying to get rid of them.

I can tell you from doing the inventory at our police department, I'm trying to get out of it just because of the process in the inventory and how long it takes. So I think our biggest influence in Colorado is just what we get internally from the guys who are used to be in the military, and then they're starting to teach some of their teams, and hopefully the teams are betting those tactics and understanding the reason behind it instead of blindly adopting methods of entry. Or one of the big things I can tell you that I see, and if it works for you, it works for you, but you gotta.

However you are training on the range. I'm sorry, however you're deploying on missions, you should be training on the range. I can tell you, I see a lot of guys that when they enter a room from different teams, will…

Jon Becker: Shorten their rifle.

Nick Sprague: They'll shorten their rifles as they pull it back, and then they push it out as they go in the room. That's a very, that's from the military tactic, from the military. Not a lot of people understand the reasoning behind that. And whenever I see that, I always ask, are you shooting like that on the range? Because if you're not shooting like that on the range, you shouldn't be doing it on an operation. So that's kind of the biggest influence I see in Colorado is just some of that internal from the military guys.

Jon Becker: I think also, there was a big, you know, we went through 20 years of war as a country, and a lot of that was special operations based. Right. So a lot of the popular media is talking about special operations units. There were a lot of books and stories and a lot of heroic things that were done overseas that came back.

And I think that, one, that is attractive as an alpha male, that is an attractive persona. And two, we had an industry that was transitioning from the global war on terror and honestly grew quite a bit that saw an opportunity to remarket their products. And so there was an intentional conflation of the two by the industry trying to pull the LRAD is a perfect example. I mean, the reason that people think LRAD is a weapon is because Elrod was advertised as a weapon. And so I think as an industry, we shot ourselves in the foot.

Chris, what are your thoughts on kind of this as we're transitioning away from global war on terror? There is a lot of crossover, and obviously, there were a lot of lessons learned in theater that came back. How do we separate our military from our law enforcement in a way that is, we still get the lessons learned, but we don't create the secondary problem.

Chris Eklund: Well, and I'll say that before I hit the nail on the head, I believe that we are our own worst enemy in this profession. The topic of militarization although it's a national topic of conversation, I think it's also very regional as it applies to individual teams. I do know that we have an awful lot of opportunities now that exist to get training for military personnel.

My team in particular is very fortunate. We'll send guys up to Virginia beach or wherever and train with all these groups and things like that, which it's very important that we look at the things that we're taking away from them and glean what we can, but also the understanding of they're in a different world altogether. I've had people come to me and say, hey, and I'm sure we'll get to this topic about how we serve search warrants.

Hey, these guys do only surrounding call outs on their missions when they're in theater. And I say, okay, well, what happens if nobody comes out? Oh, well, they drop a bomb on the place. Well, that's a little outside our constitution. But I do think that there's definitely a pattern where we see sometimes that teams take these things, and I don't like to use the word enamored, but I will because it is attractive to think about, you know, the seals or CAG or whoever we're talking about.

And again, it's important that we all kind of take a look at that, glean what we can, but not try to replicate what they're doing all day, every day. Because what we need to recognize as SWAT teams is that we all, most cases have another job to do. We have families to go home to. We got our own sets of problems and we're not shooting 5000 rounds a day on the range. We don't have those budgets and we don't have that time just in life. So I think we really have to kind of take a step back and take a look at the differences between the two parties.

Jon Becker: You know, one of the things that I think has been a popular topic is the gear. You know, it's interesting because the easy thing to latch onto is the equipment, right? It's like, oh, well, they're wearing camouflage. They're military or, you know, they have armored vehicles. I come from the People's Republic of California. We're not as a state particularly proactively pro law enforcement, but we have seen regulation starting initially at gear because gear is easy to regulate.

And so one of the things that we've seen recently is this movement towards regulating the kinds of equipment that law enforcement is using. They're not outright banning it. They're making city councils report it. But we have seen two recent movements to ban the use of chemical agents and to ban the use of apprehension dogs.

Brent, as my fellow left coast brethren, give us a thought. You know, give us your perspective on what's happening in California, because we do have a tendency to export both good things that happen in SWAT in California and some of the bad things, and we are seeing a movement nationwide for that. So what are your thoughts?

Brent Straton: Sure. Some of the challenges that we face have really come legislatively. There was an assembly bill that came through. It came into effect last year that changed the definition of what military equipment is. Rifles, bearcats, drones, things that are used normally in law enforcement. That the definition has become, this is military equipment. It doesn't matter where you obtain it or how you obtain it. It requires each law enforcement agency throughout the entirety of the state to be able to articulate everything that they have, all the way down to the pieces of ammunition, debt cord, blasting caps, whatever it is that you have.

And to be able to, essentially, you have to go to your oversight body, which in county is a board of supervisors or in cities is city council, to be able to articulate everything that you have and to be able to outline the purchase request process, how much you've spent, what the lifespan is of that equipment, and your oversight body has to give approval for you to be able to have that piece of equipment.

I don't know what's happening throughout the rest of the country. It's a great opportunity, and I'd like to thank the NTOA for having me here so I can listen in and learn and hear what you guys all are facing. But I don't know if that's something that is going to start to come everywhere else in the country. But it's certainly something that we've seen here throughout our state.

So I think a big portion of it comes from a little bit of our own failures to engage, to be able to properly explain and to be able to put things in context as to what equipment we have, a little bit about what Dan was talking about, what we have, why we have it, how we're using it, and being able to educate, because when we take those opportunities and have the ability to have those conversations in a one on one setting, I've found that we've been successful in helping be able to educate some of our legislators.

But getting them to engage with us has certainly been, has certainly been a challenge. And like John said, when we're seeing legislative challenges to the use of chemical munitions, to the use of police dogs and military equipment, the changing of and the restricting of deadly force applications. My concern is that it's – if it's not something we can fix within our state, that it'll be something that will. That will spread.

Jon Becker: Nick, what are you seeing coming out of Colorado as far as regulation and moves like that?

Nick Sprague: So generally, it's either California does it first or Colorado. It's kind of like a race on who's going to implement the most restrictive policies. Right now, we're not seeing much traction. I think most of our legislators are waiting to see what happens in California, especially with a k nine and the regulations on that.

Fortunately, we haven't had anybody present any bills that we know of as far as regulating drones, bearcats. But we've been very intentional as RMTTA, pushing out to our association the importance of getting out to national night out, getting out to community events, because we can't control where legislation comes from.

So, for instance, we have a neighboring city that we work with that does not have a bearcat, and they ask for ours at a community event. For us, that's an opportunity to take our bearcat to that community, which doesn't have one, and show them that it's not a military vehicle and educate them, because legislation could come from that city. They don't have a bearcat and they're not knowledgeable about it. Legislation can come from anywhere.

So we've really tried to push that piece of RMTA, of that education and getting out there in front of your community and showing them to prevent kind of what's happening in California. We've been very successful with drones in our state. There's been no legislation that I know of coming down the pipe to ban those.

The biggest issue that we have is just that I get phone calls about DJI all the time and the status of DJI. And should we be buying DJI because of their bands with the government and the regulations that the government's putting on, that's the most that we're seeing is just that really the questions about what types of drones and is it safe to go to DJI?

Jon Becker: Yeah, the DJI, I think, is actually an interesting point because one of the things that I don't think everybody realizes is there are a number of interests here. Right? Law enforcement has an interest. Law enforcement is the most disorganized body when it comes to having an interest in representing it compared to everybody else.

A lot of the things you're seeing with DJI, there's certainly security concerns with Chinese technology built into American law enforcement and especially in the American military. But there's also a lobbying campaign that's taking place to bandaiden Chinese drums. Right? Which hit the state of Florida hard.

Chris, talk to me about what you guys are seeing from a legislation and movement in Florida.

Chris Eklund: Yeah, so we were hit by it pretty hard. We started really seeing the use of drones in Florida probably around 2017, that kind of timeframe to where we started using them. And I can tell you that even from my own team, that came from guys who were just flying them on their own, on their own personal time, and it was a fun toy and that kind of thing, and it made sense to push that thing forward. What we ended up starting to do is having to put verbiage in our search warrants to get the request to utilize the drone, much like we would with the k nine and things like that.

So people who are now authoring an affiance of these warrants and those sort of things had that verbiage that was established within our agency. When the list started to come out, there was a lot of panic because everybody had djIs, because it was a good product that was pretty inexpensive. I think we paid $1,000 for our first one, which is a credit card purchase for us. So that's pretty easy.

But as the technology started to come on and we've got better capabilities, we started to see limitations for me, and from what I'm kind of seeing in general, is that sort of started to back off a little bit. I think that lobbying portion actually came from an american drone manufacturer, if I'm not mistaken.

So there was some ulterior motives, and I actually spoke to the guy on the phone about the use of DJI's and things like that. And then all of a sudden, it became a big political issue. I think there's a lot of lack of education still at our state level and probably at the national level as far as what we're using these for. But we have definitely seen kind of a swing back to more availability to it and things like that.

Jon Becker: Dan, from a perspective of – I didn't realize it, but we inadvertently set up our panel left to right. I apologize for that. But starting at California and ending in Texas, draw your own math. Dan, from a perspective of Texas, what are you seeing? Because if you're going to look at the spectrum in the United States of kind of anti and pro law enforcement, California, Oregon, Washington, that's a pretty decent fight. I would say Texas is the opposite end of that spectrum. Are you seeing movements towards legislation, towards passing stupid laws? What do you see?

Dan Colasanto: In Texas, also known as America, we don't have some of the problems that these guys have, and we're fortunate. However, they are kind of creeping over legislative wise. No, but what I have seen from our perspective in our department is like restrictions on grant stuff. Now, especially with the drones, you know, it can't be chinese manufacturer. There's those little things. It's harder to get stuff up. You can still get it. Like bearcat. I use bearcats as an example. You can still get them. It's a little more difficult than it used to be. Same thing with like RIOT equipment, things that you used to be able to get easier, you can't get.

One of the restrictions that I found out about was you can't get gunships anymore. I wish I would have known that before because I would have really tried to be like the first PD in Texas to have a gunship. But, you know, some of the stuff that they actually restricted was actually ridiculous. If you read it, it was like gun boats and, you know, gunships and armed aircraft. I'm like, what?

So, but for the most part, it's more – It's harder to get. They're making it harder to get, but you can still be done. I think some of it, it's kind of like those of you that have ever tried to fill out NFA paperwork, they make it really difficult for you just to see if you're going to fill out all the stuff and do follow all the rules to get it. And I think that's what it is. It becomes, hey, this is so hard. We're just not going to do it. And I think, I don't know that they're wanting to do that, but that could be an end.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, it's important to understand that the opposition to law enforcement is organized. It is, I mean, there are lawyers who are sitting around with the lawsuit written waiting for the case to make bad law. If any of you want to ever understand this, there was a discovery special made about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the supreme Court justice at her time at the ACLU, and they talked about waiting for cases to make supreme court law.

This is very clearly what's happening on the left. This is, you know, we see it in California all the time. They are waiting for a bad dog bite to then go, oh, my God!!!!!

Dogs!!!

And don't let the truth stand in the way. As a guy who deals with law enforcement and military since I was 17 years old, I will tell you that the only thing on the militarized equipment list in California that is military equipment is a rifle. Everything else was created for law enforcement. Bearcats were created for law enforcement.

Law enforcement were using armor before we had up armored Humvees. Individual body armor was being born by police departments. You remember the first Gulf war? The big fight was nobody had body armor. So they're not worried about the truth here. And I think probably the best place to talk about that. Thor, what are you seeing on a nationwide basis and at a federal level that's concerning you?

Thor Eells: Well, it goes back to what I commented on a little bit earlier. It is ignorance, and I'm not saying that maliciously, although in some cases it probably does apply in that context. But it's a lack of understanding. It's a lack of knowledge of which I accept blame for. I can tell you when I was still on the job, I probably wasn't as proactive in sharing information and really encouraging people to understand what we do, why we do, when we do it.

And so I'll give you a quick example of a very recent event that was shared with me. But many of you saw the other day in Pittsburgh, national news, a sovereign citizen engaged in a pretty significant firefight with Pittsburgh SWAT. Pittsburgh SWAT ran out of ammunition. Pittsburgh SWAT, as a result of a prior incident, had already put thousands more ammo in their bearcat, and they still ran. Been out this time over. I mean, it's going to be tens of thousands of rounds that were fired in that incident.

But my example here has to do with drones. Many of you may have heard four drones were shot down. And Pittsburgh SWAT, by the way, Pittsburgh police is prohibited from having drones by a. These are my words, a woke mayor and new regime. They're prohibited because they want the cops out there spying on people with drones and using facial recognition, et cetera.

So all of those drones were shot down were from neighboring agencies, who are really thrilled to bring their equipment now to support Pittsburgh SWAT. But my point with this is at the debrief where the SWAT commander from Pittsburgh was brought into the mayor's office to answer to the actions of the SWAT team that day.

One of the things that was brought up was, well, we need more, more drones. And the commander from Pittsburgh SWAT shared with them. We don't have drones. Well, you had four shot down. They weren't ours. Why weren't they ours? Because you prohibited them.

The other thing I'll tell you is the drones that were shot down, three of them didn't function well because they were DJI, non militarized, non ruggedized equipment that everyone thought works fine until they get shot at or they land in water and they get wet and then they short out.

So if you're buying that equipment, you can't just go out and buy civilian off the shelf stuff because it's a $1000. You can use a credit card. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but there has to be a method to the madness. And the greatest challenge that I find when I'm in the beltway and try is this education is they are able to counter so many things that I don't have a good answer for.

So again, my plea is I can't defend the indefensible. You have to have a really good reason for what you're doing and why you're doing it, and you need to be able to explain it. If I were to ask people, why do you wear certain color BT use? Many of you aren't going to be able to answer that. Why do you wear or not wear balaclavas? Can you answer that? Why do you put on the back of a bearcat? Don't make us come back. I can't answer that. Those are the types of challenges that we have.

So on a national level, make no mistake, John is 100% correct. There is a segment out there that has a very orchestrated agenda against this profession. The vast majority support us, but they're that, quote unquote, silent majority. They're not the ones that are sitting in front of city council, county commissioners, lobbying state legislators for laws mandates to affect us.

The other thing I'll just wrap up with is keep this in mind. And John alluded to it, but I don't know if many of you really kind of caught on to what he was suggesting. There are over 21,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. 18,000 plus police departments, 3000 plus sheriff's departments. Then we have the states. And I'm not even going to get into the whole federal thing, but there are 21,000 ways of doing policing because of that.

There is one subspecialty in law enforcement where it's all done the same. Can anybody call it out? Only one. Bomb techs. Correct. Otherwise, everyone does it a little bit different. That's a challenge. Neighboring agencies do it differently. That causes confusion, misunderstanding, and that's the challenges that we're facing. So please just be mindful of that, that this is a full time job for all of you in educating and disseminating information.

Brent Straton: From my experience, what I see is that our officers are doing an exceptional job every day, that our officers are dedicated to the whole idea and the concept of constitutional policing, that this isn't a new buzzword, that we've dedicated our lives and our careers and our professional careers towards this, but there is an organized group of opposition that's out there.

And where we've failed is to try to engage intellectually, educationally, and from a leadership standpoint, I think there's a real vacuum in being able to have data. Now, I recognize that I really am running the risk of sounding like even more of an admin nerd than I already am at an NTOA conference to start talking to you about data and statistics. Right?

But when you start talking about that, there's 21,000 law enforcement agencies out there. That's great information. How many call outs are we having, on average? How many of these call outs are we having suspects that are engaging us? What are they engaging us with? There is no national database for these type of things. It's something that we're trying to build and be a repository for that data in California. Haven't been able to get there yet, but we want to have that type of information to really get to where we are telling our story and countering narratives.

When you realize that only 1% of your contacts are going to result in deadly force and 1% of those are going to be inappropriate uses of force, we've got to be able to talk about these types of things. And what is it that you're up against? This is why we need the equipment that we have. This is the exceptional rate that our officers are performing in, which is higher than a medical association rates in any other profession.

Good work is being done every day. We've got to be better at how we tell our story and getting this type of information out and then being able to educate our legislators to be able to talk with media. I think we still have a little bit of a turtle shell mentality that when interview requests come in, that we're not going to want to talk about these type of things, take those opportunities to really be able to inform and engage, and I think that's something that we can really, really do, and it's a gap that we can fill.

Thor Eells: If I can just share one quick example. If you're being asked to defend the utilization of bearcats mraps, you know, having rescue vehicles that are armored up, and you have legislators that are proposing new definitions that would prohibit you having that or requiring additional steps that you have to take, almost making it so difficult that you just give up on it. Ask your city council person, your county commissioners, your state legislators, when all the bank armored vehicles are going to be pulled from the streets.

I use that when I was in DC and they all looked at me like, oh, crap, we didn't think of that. I said, I can paint it and put brinks on it if it'll make you feel better and use the bearcat that way. That's the type of misunderstanding that exists. And to some extent, I'm not suggesting you use my sarcasm to be successful, because it won't work, but you got to be a little bit creative in getting people to sort of think and recognize what we're talking about, have that wherewithal to sort of flip the argument on them a little bit.

Jon Becker: But Thor, you raise it on the point there are hundreds of millions of contacts every year between law enforcement and tactical units. A minute percentage of those results in any force. A minute percentage of those results in deadly force. And yet law enforcement, despite how many good things you do, one bad case builds legislation.

You know, you look at the Rodney King case, the Breonna Taylor case, George Floyd case, these things have a tendency to resonate nationwide, even though they're a very small percentage. They're used to undermine public trust in law enforcement, to create bad law and cause the public to lose faith in law enforcement.

My first question, this is, what can we do to counter that? How do we counter that narrative with, you know, with facts, with, with information? Dan, you want to take the first swing at that?

Dan Colasanto: So I think it's important, again, it's education. And we're, sometimes we're not really good at that. I think in many of these cases, if we don't get our side out, somebody else is going to create a side, and then anything you put out after that, they're gonna think that you're lying. One of the good things that we've had success with is educating our council people, educating our citizens on, hey, this is why we have that.

And if in certain of these cases, if the information is false, we tell them, hey, listen, this isn't correct, but at the same time, if they did do something wrong, we don't try to. I think it's important you don't try to minimize that. I mean, if they mess it up, they mess it up, right? You can put as much lipstick on the pig as you want to, but it's still a pig. And if you try to trick them or make them think, hey, you know, hey, those guys didn't really do that bad of a job.

Well, I mean, we're all in here. If you're honest, in certain situations, yeah, they did do something wrong. However, in some of these cases, things are blown out of proportion. Not all the information is there. And I think it's our job to educate. Hey, listen, this is how we do it. This is why we do it this way. This is why we have these things. And, you know, in that case, are there bad apples? Yes, there are bad apples. There's bad cops, like there's bad lawyers, like there's bad carpenters and bad electricians. But what happens is they paint the bad apple brush across everybody, and that's what hurts us.

I think it's our job to educate. I mean, if it is a bad apple and it's really bad, hey, we just need to say it, hey, yeah, that's bad. Nothing we can really do about that. You know, hopefully we don't have that happen here and move on down the road. At the same point, if there's bad information out there, then we need to make sure that we're giving them the right information so that this bad information doesn't perpetuate into something that it's not.

Jon Becker: Yeah, you raise a really good point, which is you actually has two points. One is transparency. So let's start there. Chris, from your perspective, how can agencies utilize transparency to more effectively deal with the situation?

Chris Eklund: I know in Florida, and I don't know if any teams here are wearing body worn cameras for their teams and things like that. And we started that some time ago. And initially it was kind of a rough topic of discussion. There was a lot of, we need to redact this, we need to take that out if we're talking tactics and things like that. And the agencies have certainly come out and used these body cameras, I think, to our advantage.

For us, there was a big kind of a concern with us putting tactics and conversation out there in front of the news and letting people see what we're talking about. And we came to a period of time where we realized that there's no place you can't go. I can go onto any website that teaches CQB or anything like that and find something very similar to what we're all doing on a day to day basis.

So it's important for us to get out front of these things, show what we're, what we're actually doing and the events that transpired, and again, then be able to educate people on things that they may have questions about from what they're seeing.

Jon Becker: Nick, what are your thoughts on that?

Nick Sprague: So, Dan, hit it on the head is the information. But I would add to that, it's got to be timely information. You guys get involved in an officer involved shooting or something happens to the clock, starts with social media access to the Internet, there's going to be a narrative that gets put out there. And it depends on how fast you can get ahead of that narrative and whether or not you can control it. Because if you don't, you'll never get it back. And if you're behind it, you still won't get it back. No matter how much you put out there, you're going to be behind that narrative.

So the transparency piece is, I think we need to start turning that way because as Brent said, a little bit, we kind of turtle shell and keep that of no comment. It's under investigation. But the sooner we can get out in front of that narrative is with body worn cameras. It's coming out. You're not going to hide your mistakes. If there was a mistake or an error, they're going to see it all through the records act.

So the faster we can get in front of that narrative and not protect that information, it's only going to help us as law enforcement. And when we screw up, we screw up. You gotta. You're gonna have to own it as an agency.

And then the second piece of that is, we have screwed up. But here's what we're gonna do to correct that. So no longer can we just take the no comment stance. It just doesn't work with the social media nowadays. It's a matter of probably hours before that narrative gets out there, and it may not be the narrative you want.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I have a friend who's a chief of police, and his agency had a bad shooting. Like, it was. It was nothing. It was not a pretty shooting. And he immediately released everything. And I said, what made you do that? And he goes, you know, these situations are like horror movies. They're only scary when you don't see the monster and the music is playing.

Once you see the monster, it stops being scary. And so he put it out there and said, here's the video. And it died almost immediately. Because when you could see the monster and you understood what the officer did, it was much harder to defend. Brent, what are your thoughts?

Brent Straton: I think that SWAT teams and SWAT operators in their agencies are very well positioned to be leaders throughout their agencies. You're already leaders in tacticians, you're leaders in how you train. And the whole concept of after action report and taking a look at what you do and being introspective about that is something that's already built into the culture of your team. What I've seen in other agencies is that is not always spread throughout the entirety of the agency. Oftentimes it's a SWAT team that does that, but it doesn't happen anywhere else.

I think that as you start to take the long look at your career and where you are, being a SWAT operator is going to be one of the best portions of your career. But when you can start to look and take the principles that you've learned in SWAT and export them throughout the entirety of your agency, I think you're going to be putting yourself, your agency, and the profession in a much better position because it's taking the principles of after action reports applying to what Nick said in a PIO related setting.

How soon are we going to get this information out? How soon are you going to be able to disclose what exactly it is that you did? Because I'm absolutely convinced in seeing cases all across this country that our people are doing the right thing for the right reasons all the time. And when something bad happens, that's actually, it's actually an anomaly.

So being able to, again, talk about it, this may have been what happened. Your attorneys aren't going to like it, but they're going to find out about it anyways. Plaintiff experts are going to find out about it anyways because it's not something you're going to be able to ultimately cover up. So again, what happened? What do we do about it? How are we going to correct it? And I think these are the things that are going to help us in a public setting. I think they'll help you in a civil setting as well.

Jon Becker: I think one of the things that undermines public confidence, and, Thor, you touched on it, is when an indefensible act occurs, when bad behavior occurs, law enforcement is quiet, which gives the impression that at a minimum, they're complicit, and at a maximum, they support it. Thor, talk to me about defending the undefendable and how we can work around that.

Thor Eells: Perception is reality. So other than politics dictates tactics, this is your other takeaway. Perception is there is people's reality. And sometimes we can be defensive in what we do because we think and often know the reasoning behind it, but people don't. And so when they see something that we understand as being defensible, it comes across as being indefensible.

One, you discern that, but it's already been stated. If it's indefensible, don't make an attempt to defend it, you lose all the credibility that you have. Likewise. And here's my biggest problem, and some of you may be command staff in here. I was, I have the lobotomy. You can throw rocks and things at me. We have failed the profession. Right now, leadership in law enforcement across the country, the silence in defending the defensible has been deafening.

So if we're not defending when we do right, what is the assumption we did wrong? We have to find and commit to owning our mistakes when appropriate so you gain credibility, but you also have to be willing to have the courage within the leadership to defend what is right. We have abdicated that to a large extent, which has created a lot of the momentum behind the legislation, behind the criticism, behind the fabric of trust between communities and law enforcement that has been formed.

So I implore you, if you're in the leadership role, step up or step out, because we have to have a voice that stands behind the men and women that are practicing the constitutional policing that brendan spoken about as well as the others, or it really does us little or no good because the perception is still their reality and that's what they're going to walk away with.

Jon Becker: I think it's also, it's an interesting question as to whether this is a role that the state and local tactical associations should be stepping into. Right. Is this a role that the National Tactical Officers association should be in and I know is in? Dan, talk to me like, what are your thoughts? GDPOA is one of the strongest associations in the United States and is, I think, more prone to public speech through their members than a lot of the other associations.

Is this a role that the state association should be when it, when, and, you know, when is good behavior? Should, should it be incumbent upon the state associations to offer up an expert to say, yeah, this was good behavior? Because.

Dan Colasanto: You know, that's a good question. From, from our perspective, from TTPOA, we view our organization as a training organization. We supply the training. We bring in instructors, subject matter experts. And our stance has always been, hey, we're going to provide you the training, but we're not going to tell you how to use it. It's been that way. It's that way now. It's hard for us to do that.

I think we can guide our people, though, our members. And what I like to tell them is it goes back to the education, hey, you need to educate your citizens. You need to educate your city council people, do some demos. We don't really like to do that, right? We need to educate. You need to educate your bosses too, because a lot of them are sitting behind desks and they don't know what the heck is involved in what it is that you're doing and the equipment that you're using. I think when you do that, it makes your job easier. It's kind of like, you know, you have like the trust bank account. You focus on some of the good things you do and you put it out there.

And those things sometimes will help you later if you're doing these demos for your counsel and you're, and you're educating them that when something bad or close to bad happens, they may be a little more supportive. As far as getting super involved, it's a little difficult. I mean, we have over 3000 members from agencies from all over, so it's kind of hard. I don't see that as our place necessarily to kind of go that route, but we do get questions.

Jon Becker: Chris, what are your thoughts?

Chris Eklund: We're very similar in Florida to TTPOA in that we do consider ourselves a training association in Florida. I can go literally down the street and see different tactics that are being used from my own team in Florida. There's a huge difference in what operators are doing, what teams are doing, what their methodologies are, just like we see across the United States. And I've been approached by several people to try to establish a standard in the state and kind of be that mouthpiece to establish a standard across the state of Florida. That in and of itself is probably a ten or 15 or 20 year project just in and of itself.

So we don't consider ourselves a certifying agency, just like Dan. We bring in instructors from the outside. If we're going to host, say, a less lethal instructor course, we'll bring in the NCOA who has those standards and backing and things like that. I do get a lot of phone calls about questions and thoughts on different things as far as tactics go, and I'm happy to have those conversations, but we're not really putting ourselves in a position to try to mandate things for the state or teams within the state.

Dan Colasanto: I just want to add something, what Chris just said. We've had the same thing. I have people call me, what is the TTPOA? CQB. What is the TTPOA? Explosive breaching. What is the TTPOA? You know, barricade. Okay, we don't have that. It's like Chris said, we don't have that. We provide multiple options for you and you choose which one fits. You can either adopt it, adapt it, or just get rid of it completely.

And it's impossible. It's impossible. I think it's impossible to dictate. Hey, you're going to have, this is the TTPOA official CQB method that is well on president . That's not happening because I've been asked about it before and it just doesn't make sense to me. It can't be something that we regulate because there's too many agencies, there's too many different tactics and techniques, and what works for us may not work for them, may not work for you. And that's why it's important that you take those training opportunities, adapt them, adopt them or get rid of them or make it your own. So I just want to throw that in there.

Jon Becker: So Brent, California has standards, guidelines. What, what are your thoughts on this?

Brent Straton: I think that's one area we've been fortunate with the legislature to have a police officer standardization and training section. And we were fortunate enough for our association to be engaged in that and helping to try to write the standards. And I completely agree with Dan and Chris and where they are.

The standards have not been to try to go into tactics and dictating tactics at all, but really outlining the philosophies, how much training should come, what some of the ultimate standards are. And it's really just been a proactive attempt on our part to try to be able to outline what the philosophies and the general acceptance standards are to help be able to not only raise the overall competency of our officers, but to be the first ones to establish the standard and not have legislators push it on our officers.

So it's our hope that if we can, if we can be proactive in coming up with those standards, not every agency is. They're not mandated to be able to do these things. We don't want to put these certain standards out there, especially when there's not funding associated with being able to be in compliance with them. But we have made guidelines and recommendations throughout the state that we think it's in the best interest of our officers to help be able to push that forward.

Jon Becker: Nick, talk to me about Colorado.

Nick Sprague: So we've been fortunate enough to have a partnership with Brent and meeting him a couple of years ago that we have just over the past year worked on our own state standards, state recommendations. And we went to the route that CATO did is we put the recommendations out. We adopted it. This is a philosophy. It's not a mandate again and put the onus back on the team. The commander of the team knows what the capability, if you're engaged, should know what your capabilities are of your team.

So if you have any litigation, it's on you as the commander to justify why you're doing a deliberate hostage rescue, why you only need two snipers on this operation may work out for you. It may not. But again, there's so many different teams in Colorado. We're not as big as the other three panels up here, but they do things differently. We still have. I know this team's doing dynamic entries in this state. That's their choice.

If something bad happens, they're gonna have to face the consequences of that and justify that as a commander. But we will not mandate a certain type of movement. We won't mandate. You have to have these things. In a basic school, we make recommendations. We looked at CATO standards. We look at NTOA. I was on the trust committee this year with Chris, and we said, if you're gonna go to a basic, here's the recommendation from RMTTA.

What should be covered in a basic? If it doesn't meet that level? RMTA says, you're probably not getting the quality training that you need for your operators. But just like everybody else up here, we will not get involved in legislation. We're a training organization. We'll try and provide as much information when legislation comes out, if it – We can get the answers to it. I can tell you because of our close proximity, that was, with everything that was happening with George Floyd, we were the first state to have a police liability law, and we tried to get answers. We worked with our attorney general, we worked with our district attorneys, and no one would give us answers.

So as a state president, I was fielding phone calls and trying to do my due diligence, and we just couldn't get any answers from it. So sometimes that makes it a little tricky for us as presidents and the state association to be able to provide that information when these laws are getting forced on us and no one has answers for us.

Jon Becker: You know, it's an interesting role. So when you look at other professions, lawyers, doctors, they self regulate. They create a trade association that sets standards. And the reason that they do that is it prevents them from being regulated by legislation. So the American Medical association sets standards for doctors. The American bar association sets standards for lawyers. And you can certainly make an argument that practicing law or practicing medicine from state to state varies. Certainly practicing law varies from state to state, but the idea is, by regulating ourselves, we prevent, as an attorney, by regulating ourselves, we prevent somebody else from doing it.

So theoretically, the people that are setting the standards are the people that understand the profession. The NTOA and the state of California have established national standards and revised them. Many of the men that wrote those standards, Phil Hanson being one of them, are in the room. I think that one of the things that needs to happen is there's got to be some proactive work.

The NTOA took a proactive stance against no knock warrants and dynamic entry, which was met in some areas with a shrug like whatever, in others, not so much. I think one of the first things I would like to dissect is there's been a conflation of the term no knock and dynamic entry. So I think. Dan, can you talk to me about that? We had a conversation about this. Talk to me about separating the concept of a no knock warrant as a legal concept from dynamic tactics.

Dan Colasanto: So when the NTOA came out, put out their paper, my phone absolutely exploded. And I think part of the problem that resulted is they're not separating the two things. I'm not gonna try to insult anybody in here. Everybody should know, like, no knock is a judicial exception, right? I go to the judge and I say, judge, I want to dispense with knocking and announcing because of whatever these reasons are. I list the reasons in the warrant and I give it to the judge. The judge either looks at it and goes, okay, yeah, or no. But it's like being pregnant. You either are or you're not.

So it's not like once you put that information in there, you go, okay, wait a minute, judge, I'll be right back. I forgot to put something in there. You got what you got. You put it in there and the judge either gives it to you or they don't. That, to me, is separate from the dynamic portion. And I think what happened is, at least from my perspective, and teach Poa because I got a million phone calls, is it was misunderstood.

So now what it turned into was no knock. Dynamic is all one thing now. And no knock is a tactic, which it is not. But that was how it was interpreted, which then morphed into, okay, we can't go in anymore at all. So now we have to do surround and call out for everything. And there was this aversion to going in, and there people were trying to do whatever they could not to. And then, you know, my perspective was, well, eventually somebody's going to have to go in there if they don't come out or even if they do. You still have to go in there.

But I think it was somehow they were combined as to, as one thing, as a tactic, and they're not. And that, I think that caused an issue with people who don't understand. And then it goes back to the education piece. You have to educate people. Hey. Because now chiefs and other people are like, hey, you can't do that anymore because it's a bad thing. But they don't, they don't understand it. They just know what they read, how they interpreted it, which in some cases was not correct.

Jon Becker: So, Chris, the state of Florida doesn't have no knock exception. Right? Talk to me about that. And talk to me about how the NTOAs edict, Ngo's guidelines were received with a position paper.

Chris Eklund: So we were the state that basically did the shoulder shrug when the NCAA standards came out about no knox because they've been illegal for just about 30 years now in the state. Although I would argue that they probably became very prevalent in the earlier portions of, prior to that legal case that came out that banned them. I probably would say that because of the cocaine cowboys and all those things that were happening with Miami, we probably developed a large portion of those no knocks that were happening.

It's interesting to me that, again, we keep coming back to this education piece to where there are people who were upset about this position paper that came out. And having had the opportunity to go and talk to some people around the country, it's because they don't even understand what it looks like to knock on the door and announce your presence. It just doesn't exist in the world.

There is a huge confusion, like Dan said, with the separation of the no knock search warrant, which I've seen one in my career, it was federal, and we still did business the way we do business. It just gives us the opportunity to practice those exceptions that are listed in there, but we still do business the way we do it. The no knock is a piece of paper. And when you join that with probably the misuse of the term dynamic, because we've done that, too, as a profession, we've taken this word dynamic that really means continuing to move, essentially, and turned it into hair on fire.

My team was a dynamic team until 2014. It was the best twelve years of my career. I loved it, like, and just left right. And it took some real hard looking at the team and understanding what people's capabilities are. People are not really processing what they're seeing when they're moving at a dynamic misuse term speed. And when you prove that to them, all of a sudden you start to see teams slowing down.

So I don't have a problem with the exceptions of the no knock search warrant whatsoever and that they existed, I think the big concern, what the NTOA was trying to say is that no knock search warrant, combined with that misused term of dynamic, essentially illegal home invasion, is probably not best practices. And again, just coming from a perspective where I've never even seen one.

Jon Becker: So, Nick, the rationale for dynamic tactics is always that surprise provides opportunity to provide the tactical advantage, which, combined with a no knock, makes sense because, you know, the guy's in your living room before you know what's going on. But when, you know, you look at the Breonna Taylor case, which was presented as a no knock case and was not served as a no knock. They knocked on the door for a minute, which is how they had time to get out of bed, go get in the hall, and arm themselves.

If we're going to stand and knock and announce, it certainly would seem that the surprise aspect of dynamic, you know, dynamic entry, goes away. So help me understand that a little bit.

Nick Sprague: So, in Colorado, we just had legislation passed banning no knocks, with the exception of a judge can approve a no knock, which is what a no knock is. So it's kind of, the legislation contradicts itself, but within that, the very last paragraph, it says, oh, and by the way, you can only serve search warrants in the state of Colorado from 07:00 a.m. to 07:00 p.m. outside of that time frame, you have to get a judicial exemption from the judge.

And if they don't feel that you have that, you don't serve outside. 07:00 a.m. to 07:00 p.m. Our argument was, okay, patrol has been out for an hour. They're hailing this guy. They had their red and blue lights on. He knows it's the police. You call out the team on a barricade at 02:00 in the morning. Do we now have to wait until 07:00 in the morning to serve that warrant? And the answer was yes, unless a judge authorizes you to go in.

Our argument was what John had just talked about. The whole point of a no knock is to get in there, protect whatever you're protecting, the evidence, make your arrest quickly, whatever you're trying to do, the goal of your mission set, and have the surprise, the surprise is gone.

If you've been out there for an hour with your red and blues on and you're hailing the guy, so that really defeats the purpose of the no knock in banning the no knock, again, no one can give us any direction on that. In the state of Colorado so far, I know of. I don't know of any call outs where the judge has said no, they will not sign it. I do know judges in certain jurisdictions have come out and said, if I am presented with it, we will not sign it, even if you are on a barricade.

So that's going to be problematic. I have been involved at a 05:00 a.m. service that was the first one in the state that got the exemption. So some of the judges, and it's interesting too, because some of the das and judges don't even know that this is in effect right now. We've taken it to them and talked to them and they said, what are you talking about? We haven't heard anything about this.

So there's not even that education piece on that side. So that's what we're kind of fighting through on the no knock piece of it is we're having that barricade. They know that we're there, so why do we still need to get an exemption from the judge, which it just defeats the whole purpose of a no knock anyway? And we're trying to abide by and work through that and see what that, what looks like, because that's probably coming to California next would be my guess, after they've seen it happen here.

Jon Becker: Brent, talk to me about California.

Brent Straton: I think it's a rare set of circumstances where it would apply. And I think that it was something that the. When you said in some places it was kind of met with a shrug, this was one of the places where it was kind of met with the shrug because it's not something that is utilized very well. And I think the guys have done an excellent job of being able to articulate how some of these things have been kind of conflated, but it's not. It's not something that's utilized very often in our state.

Jon Becker: So you guys saw Chris mention something to me. We all agreed last night we were not going to step into the trap. Well, I was not going to step into the trap of dynamic entry, dynamic tactics and conflating the two. And part of the problem here is the terminology is very problematic. You know, 18,000 police departments, 3000 sheriff's departments, 10,000 SWAT teams, 9000 SWAT teams.

You know, you tell me, if you ask what a dynamic entry is, every one of those teams will have a different definition, ranging from your hair's on fire to, you know, smooth, controlled entry. And I think that this is a legacy of hostage rescue. You know, SWAT teams were born of hostage rescue.

And so, you know, that's where the style of movement came from. Several of the guests that I've talked to, who are the, you know, the OGs in this, talked about the 84 Olympics and the evolution of tactics and how that led to drug tactics.

So one of the challenges of not having a national standard is there isn't a national vocabulary. Years ago, I worked on a program with the Air Force to write a terms and definitions for non lethal weapons. And the whole job was we're going to get 15 experts together and have a conversation, and we're going to agree what non lethal means. We're going to agree what less lethal means. In this case, that hasn't happened.

And, you know, somebody who deals with teams all over the United States, it varies. I will tell you that the best example I heard somebody described is I have a driver's license. My 17 year old daughter has a driver's license, and Mario Andretti has a driver's license. We are all drivers, right? Nationally, if you own a pair of pride pants, you are a SWAT team. And so part of the challenge is defining what sets that level and those roles.

Now, Thor, the NTOA did take the lead here with standards, and the NTOA took the lead on the question of no Knox and on the question of dynamic entry. You've said in the past that safety priorities is what should drive tactics. Talk to me about that.

Thor Eells: Well, I'm going to back up just a moment. You heard from four different state associations, all of which I've had a very personal relationship for a number of years, particularly Florida and TTPOA, as I had difficulty hearing in the beginning, you can see looking at my old gray hair, I'm the old man here. I go way back when TTPOA was really new, Florida SWAT was really new.

So I've seen a lot of this evolution. And early on when I came into the NQA, one of the things I started to notice, and because I had relationships with friends in Texas, Florida, I had friends in California, with CATO, things were kind of done differently. We'd get around, we start talking. And that inconsistency, it troubled me a little bit. I was, I'm a little bit of a closet nerd.

But here's the problem with the, shall we say, it's not a divide, it's a philosophical difference. You heard from forest state associations say that they don't feel a responsibility. And those are my words, not theirs, in pushing standards, if you will.

But I ask you this. Do you think that the general public, on a national level, can make a discernment between Broomfield PD doing something tactically in what happens in Orlando or Bryan, Texas? Should all SWAT operators be able to shoot a gnat's a** at 500 yards while jumping over buildings in single bounds and catch bullet in their teeth? They don't make any discernment. A SWAT officer is a SWAT officer is a SWAT officer, no matter where they are in the United States. I don't care what color your uniform is, or I don't care how big your agency is, if you identify yourself as a SWAT officer, the general public is that you. You wear a cape and you can fly.

And so when you have different agencies doing things different, and then things go bad, who is affected by that? Nick touched on it. The state of Colorado was the very first state in the entire country to pass police reform legislation which eliminated police immunity, governmental immunity. It did restrict the use of less lethal munitions in certain circumstances and everything as a result of what happened in Minneapolis. Bromfield PD wasn't responsible for that. Minneapolis PD was.

And so we can lament the fact that we shouldn't be doing this, but I will offer this, and this isn't in the defense of the n two a, so to speak, because I'm happy to have the conversation all day long, but if we don't have some degree of standard in methodology of how we're all applying and performing, we're going to struggle. The reason the bomb community can do what they do is because it's all the same. You talk to any bomb tech, whether it's in Taos, New Mexico, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, they'll talk the same language.

So our motivation in doing what we did was we felt there has to be a common language, whether it's dynamic, whether it's what's no knock mean, what is a minimum number of people to safely do things. From the very beginning, the mission of the n two a was to save lives. And very early on, for those of you that have been around a while, you know, we used to be referred to as the priority of life. We changed that to safety priorities. In understanding what should dictate how we make decisions based on what is safest. For our mission set, that became the cornerstone.

And so with that, we developed minimum numbers, minimum training hours. And you notice I keep using the word minimum. You can always go above and beyond, but if you're going to engage in some of these things. There are minimum necessities in order to be able to do that safely. And it isn't because Thor said it. It's because the NQA went out and extended invitations to all the state associations to be participatory in this, to identify subject matter experts from small, medium, and large agencies, full time agencies, part time agencies, etcetera, etcetera, and then compile that and say, given these mission taskings, what is the minimum necessary to achieve that?

So that folks go home in one piece. No guarantees in our profession. We get that, but that was our mission and our goal. Tying that with a glossary. Now, several of the gentlemen were actively participants of the most recent troves. It's our most robust glossary, so that the terminology is beginning to become common and that there's a distinction between some of the more confusing components.

But I do get asked on the national level answer to actions that are happening at state and local levels. And that's why I'm passionate about us wanting to have some means of a minimum capability that we can present and then articulate and defend without the uninformed challenging us. Because if we don't write our own story, someone else is going to do it. And when it's done, we may not like it.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's like a reputation, right? Everybody has one, and if you're not paying attention to it, it's probably not good. As we get close to the end of our time together, I'd like to leave some time for questions. Does anybody have questions, comments, suggestions, anything we want to discuss that we haven't covered? All right, gentlemen, why don't we go concluding thought. Brent, you want to start us?

Brent Straton: No, it's just a great opportunity to be here. Thank you, Jon, for putting it together and Thor for bringing everybody together here. It's just a great opportunity to continue to learn from each and every one of you. So thank you for, for the work that you do every day.

Nick Sprague: Yeah, I would echo that with what Brent said. The profession's in great hands. We do have a small percentage we have to be careful of. If you guys need anything while you're in town, look for one of my guys. We can help you with restaurant recommendations. Rockies are playing tonight. Whatever we can do to help. Our booth is over there. We'd love to have you out at our conference. It'll be out next year in August. We've got training classes out. So thanks to Thor, John, Chris, Dan, Brent, for being on this. It's a great opportunity.

Thor Eells: Well, I want to thank the panel members for being here, Jon, for facilitating this. I want to thank all of you for being here. It's, as you've heard, critical for us to be educating ourselves and finding ways that we can help ourselves and one another in doing this. One thing I want to share with everyone is this. There's a perception out there that I'm the busiest man in the world and not reachable or otherwise. If you ask me for my business card, my personal cell phone is on.

If any of you have any questions, concerns, criticisms, critiques, or otherwise heartburn, call me. You can email me. I'm slow getting back to you because my dear friend Max, who's known me for a while, I'm an old fart. My kids don't think I should own a smartphone because I don't know how to use 90% of the functions on it.

I much rather talk to you on a phone so there's less room for misunderstanding and where I don't put the right punctuation in a sentence or otherwise, so it's construed differently. But if you call me and I don't answer, it's because I'm in a meeting or otherwise, I promise you I will always call any one of you back personally and have a conversation on any topic that you want to discuss. It's what we're here for.

What I'm here for is to advocate for all of you and to hopefully leave our profession a little safer and a little better when I fade off into the sunset here someday. So thank you all for what you do. Thank you for your service, particularly in this day and age, and just please be safe and take care of yourselves and one another.

Chris Eklund: I want to say thank you for the opportunity to sit up here with these guys, very well represented, and I'm proud to be up here with them. Thanks, Jon, for putting this together. It's very good to see everybody in here continuing to try to educate yourself. I think that's really what we need to do. And, you know, we all come into this profession and we try to do as good as we can and, you know, amp up our skills, be the best operators, be the best, whatever profession, part of the SWAT team that we want to be. And oftentimes that education piece gets missed.

So it's really good to see all these people in here, and I'm glad I had the opportunity. I know Dan's going to talk about Texas being America. They do not have a Ron DeSantis. So sorry for that. And we're hiring.

Jon Becker: Just like that. The right turns on itself.

Dan Colasanto: We're building a new wall to keep the California people up. No, I'm just kidding. You're welcome to come to Texas. Just bring your guns with you. I want to thank you all for coming here. I was kind of worried, like, nobody'd show up. I want to thank my panel guys that were up here and John for putting this together and Thor for coming out. I can't stress enough, the education thing.

I know it's something we don't like to do. But educate your citizens and your council people, you'll be very surprised. Just from my experience, we did that. Do some demos for those people. Show them what you have and what you need, because they don't understand. One thing I learned a long time ago, we needed Pec 15 lasers. I took the city manager out. I showed him what this is. I let him shoot it. Took him to the range. He shot with nods. He's like, oh, wow, this is really cool. We don't know, but on paper, those people see that, they don't know what that is.

But when they see it and you show them how it works and how it makes your job easier and how you might be able to save their life someday, it makes things easier. Same thing with the bearcat. We call it the jungle gym for kids. We take it everywhere we go. The kids love it. We take it to schools, which is different from other people, but it desensitizes people to it.

And when they see it, they're like, oh, yeah, it's just the SWAT guys with the armored jungle gym, and city council bought us another one, so. But that's because they were educated and they drove in it. We used to have an old bank armored car with no air conditioning, so I used to take them all on a ride with that, and they go, why don't we have air conditioning? I go, well, because we don't have a bearcat. But this is what it looks like.

So please, please, educate your folks. And last thing, know the reason why you do the things you do and be able to explain it to somebody. Because especially to people who have no idea, don't think that they know what you do or why you do it, because they don't. And if you don't tell them and you don't explain it, they're going to make up their own reason why they think you do it. So protect yourselves because it pays off.

Jon Becker: So, gentlemen, it's very easy for you to get beaten down and to think that people don't care. What you do matters. You matter. Please be safe. Thank you!